Three open letters and a video

Open letter # 1

A letter to PM Modi from 'Anti-National Sickular Presstitute' Barkha Dutt

Open letter # 2

Open letter to Barkha Dutt from a Social Media Sanghi communal troll by Unsubtledesi

Open letter # 3

A Letter to Barkha Dutt from a Nationalist by Rahul Sharma

And the video

The famous slap scene from vedam pudhidhu (non-Tamil speakers excuse but watch from 2:37)

The return journey: My bags travel first class, I blog from economy class and religious intolerance

Here is the final part of my jottings from my trip to Israel. You can now heave a sigh of relief that this torture by prose comes to a grinding halt. Regular service should resume soon. Parts one, two and three of this series go before this post. 

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There are late meetings at office on the day of departure. Which works perfectly with my routine: check out of the hotel in the morning, finish up the late meetings, grab a bite near the office around 7:00pm and head out to the airport for my late night flight back home departing at a little past 11:00 PM. This time I don’t have to deal with returning a rental car (which calls for special skills at Ben Gurion) and so I can relax as the taxi drops me bang in front of the terminal.

The security check – with or without a clearance letter from work – takes about the same time in my experience so far. And this time is no exception either. But this time I’m held up in the line for getting my boarding pass. I believe that when it comes to serendipity in the small and mundane jobs in everyday life, lady luck flashes a toothless grin at me. For instance, the person ahead of me in the line, any line, anywhere, while at the counter, is always conducting the most complicated transaction without the required papers. Or, the service person at the counter always has to step out – hunger, thirst, family emergency, full bladder - when it is exactly my turn. This time the people in my line, I suspect, are all on the US no-fly list for past indiscretions but are nonetheless trying to board the flight. Either that or they are trying, one person at a time, to work out the business aspects of a merger of United Airlines with Delta. Long story short, my boarding group is 5. In English, it means that you will hunt for a space for your bag while the United crew members helpfully stand in a group and laugh derisively, pointing at you.

Sure enough, as most of the passengers are settling in with their books/e-readers, I’m standing there with my luggage, having been spaced out of the overhead bins by the rest. I try to flag a passing flight attendant. One of them walked right past me saying “They will help you”. They. Who are they? And who are you? Why aren’t you a part of “they”? And why won’t you help me? But it is against our culture to argue with elderly ladies keeping fragile health. Finally one of them (from the original “they”), makes me roll my luggage to the very front of the plane, past the business class and into the first class cabin and points to an overhead bin there with room. As I hoist the bag into the bin, she tells me, rather curtly, that I cannot access it anytime during the flight. If this were a movie, this would be the scene where the poor dad, on a very rainy night, gives up his crying new born son (the future hero) for adoption by a childless and conveniently rich family so that he may have a better life (not before insulting his biological parents while attending a residential school in the hills, wearing a jacket) and goes back to his humble tenement. As I’m about to be walked out of the first class cabin, I turn around and give one more longing look and quickly leave, crying copious tears into a towel even as a firm hand to my elbow guides me away. But on the bright side, I can now say that at least my bags fly first class.

As I make my way back to the cattle class cabin where I belong, an orthodox Jewish man near my seat is requesting a seat change so that he may not be seated next to a lady not related to him. Read more about this interesting conflict here. But make sure you finish this post first. The airhostess, the same one that had just made me do the march of shame, approaches me with this request. Would I give up an class aisle seat for the sake of an obscure religious requirement of a random stranger? That too, on a 11-plus hour flight? Especially after being treated, what’s the word, brusquely, merely a few minutes back? I’m sure that United’s Israel specific training requires her to do this but how I wish she had used her judgment. Tsk tsk.

“I can't give you this case. Besides, I've already been through too much shit this morning over this case to hand it over to your dumb ass” – Jules Winnfield, played by Samuel Jackson, in Pulp Fiction. 

(Funny how I seem to turn to the same few sources – Seinfeld, Pulp Fiction, etc – to get the perfect set of words for just about any situation.)

But this is real life, I’m inside a plane that, barring any last minute glitches, is about to take off and as much as I would like to, I can’t afford to be as hyper articulate as Jules. Nevertheless, I tell her, not in those words, that there is no way on God’s earth or His skies, for that matter, that I’m giving up my seat. Payback, they say, can be a bitch, but instant payback is a wounded, hungry one. I face many hurdles on a daily basis because of my belief in vegetarianism. But I don’t go around kicking up a storm at restaurants or airplanes. And I’m supposed to vacate seats now? Sorry.

Onward to the entertainment section and its time to play the travel trivia jeopardy.

Alex: This airline, which worships and pampers even economy class passengers, refreshes its inflight entertainment content monthly.

Me: What is Singapore airlines?

Alex: Indeed!

Me: I’ll choose United economy class torture for $800 please.

Alex: Answer, that’s your daily trouble from hell, sucker.

My trip saddles January and February and I was hoping to see a different selection of movies – specifically, without The Intern – this time. But no such luck on United. And since I have exhausted the TV content on the onward journey, I’m left with slim pickings. But on the bright side, most of this post came into being on a dark winter night, 33,900 feet over the Atlantic.

The turbulence and also both the landings send sharp jolts of pain through my entire ear canal. With the facial plumbing blocked every which way (remember, I have acute karaoke-iasis) my ears threaten to burst spectacularly any moment. I almost reach for the barf bag to hang over both my ears just in case. Chewing, swallowing and yawning have no effect. I sit there with clenched teeth and my hands over my ears. Fun times.

As the plane makes the approach, the earth beneath, green from the recent rains, is sighted, the bay – cloaked in grey – reveals itself, the bridges are identified and the 101 snakes by the edge of the bay: familiar sights signaling the last stretch of the week long race. I used to be this excited about landing in Chennai, when Chennai was home, craning my neck to catch a glimpse of landmarks, familiar buildings, movie banners, trying to spot our house (OK who am I kidding, our locality) etc. Wherever your travels may have taken you to, whatever be the comforts offered by a fine hotel, returning home to family is truly the best part of traveling.

The taxi ride home was interesting too but that will have to be a post by itself for another day. 

In Israel: fundamental questions, karaoke horrors and secret office parties

Giving out the the standard disclaimer. This is part three of the series. Parts one and two go before this. OK, this is not the Bourne series and you can skip one or two or both. But I'm just putting this out here to give you the big picture. And mutual fund investments are subject to market risks. 

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The training session, my main reason for this trip, is actually really useful. Over the course of three days, the mild fog hanging over a few disparate topics begins to lift. It is one thing to learn the old school way - seek out the right people, schedule and reschedule meetings, think of intelligent questions to ask, get the answers - the whole nine yards. But it is quite another to have a seat and have the teachers come in and present while you get to ask questions. But what is really special is doing it with the sales team. They hold the ultimate license – the one to ask “fundamental” questions. Pro tip 1: Stick around with them and you can safely get the answers to nearly all the questions you are too embarrassed to ask yourself.

Sales person: “Hey I have a fundamental question. How does this copier work: do I first put the paper in and press this button or is it the other way around?”

Average Joe: “Excellent question Mr. Sidebottom, but that’s the shredder. The copier is over there. Here why don’t I make a copy of that purchase order for you?”

One of them, a pretty senior one, asked a really, terribly fundamental question that could have gotten people to do a double take had it been posed by an engineer or marketer with similar experience. But from a sales guy? People are only too glad to clarify. After calling it a good question first. Pro tip 2: They know to throw a good party and show everyone, including themselves, a good time. In most companies, the sales guy is the go-to man for all questions concerning fine dining establishments, the best golfing venues, nice hotels, resorts and all things good in life. As a result, there is some reception, dinner or other after hours activities planned for most evenings. Compare this with engineering or other training sessions where an evening after a brutal day of lectures and activities would include scarfing down a late and lonely dinner and hitting the sack exhausted. One such night includes hitting a karaoke bar. It has been almost 10 years since I had set foot in a karaoke bar in the karaoke capital of the world: Tokyo. After a tepid start, the party comes to life. Nothing quite warms the hearts of middle aged Asian gentlemen like the sight of a karaoke microphone and a captive audience. Especially after they have been primed with strong beverages. And they gustily start channelizing their respective inner Elvis-Sinatra-Beatles (and now Psy) through an uninhibited, all-out aural attack. Oh and as the night progresses, they put on some dance moves too. Over the next few hours you understand what the phrase “sing like no one is listening” truly means. Passersby that night could be forgiven for assuming that some sort of a primitive ritual involving painful animal sacrifices to a hard-to-please deity was going on within the confines of karaoke hall number 12.

And it is at this karaoke bar, I suspect, that I pick up my infection from hell. Granted, there were sniffles and sneezes during the training sessions. But finger food, shared microphones and inebriated sick people in a confined space is a deadly combination that overwhelms my immune system. I’m running a mild fever, coughing up what I hope are not chunks of my lungs (There goes your appetite!), my chest is weighing a ton and I’m sounding like Frankenstein but less cheery. And as it usually happens in these circumstances, the next days are packed with meetings where I must actually talk. When it rains, as they say, it pours. From my nose, in this case. (Pro travel trip: Never fall sick in a foreign country. You’re welcome.) I want to push out the first meeting in the morning in favor of sleeping a bit longer but the call of duty trumps my body’s loud requests. But guess what? At the very last minute, as I haul my beaten-up self all the way to the room, the meeting gets pushed out to late evening. I must have pissed off many Gods in many ways, I’m sure. But just when I think things are falling apart, a random colleague pours out two glasses of champagne, hands one each to me and a colleague I’m discussing something with, and simply walks away, not even giving us a chance to thank him or ask about the occasion. Glug, glug, glug: gotta love buzz-rael! I mean Israel.

To wrap up this piece, I’d like to share a few interesting things I notice about our office here. Number 1: There are email announcements sent out whenever a colleague loses a family member. They are somber looking emails entirely in Hebrew. Google translation reveals that the email says this: XYZ employee has lost this member of his family and the funeral is to be held at a certain cemetery. I’m familiar with the emails from HR announcing weddings and baby arrivals. But this is the first time I’m coming across official bereavement emails. Interesting. Number 2: Every morning, at about 10:00 AM, there is fresh fruit and vegetables – cucumbers, carrots, baby tomatoes on the vine and some seasonal fruits – placed in baskets in the lobbies on each floor. You get off the lift or stairs and you are face to face with a basket of fine produce. They are even washed. Vegetable peelers are hanging on hooks in the pantries nearby. The crunching sound of carrots and cucumbers can be heard along the corridors. The previous company that I worked for tried this for a very short time in their Singapore office before quickly discontinuing it for reasons unknown. And there is a stall set up on most Thursdays in the front lobby with different vendors, in turns, selling an assortment of interesting things: dry fruits, raisins and nuts (the most popular guy), a florist, homemade pastries and cookies and sometimes linens and bed sheets. But the most amusing thing has got to be the display of empty whiskey bottles that many colleagues have put up on their office shelves. Going by the sheer quantity of the bottles, there must be wild parties going on somewhere unbeknownst to me. 

In Israel: Sleeping in Ikea, missing sunsets and doing the tango with jet lag

Part one of this multi-part series is here, if you are interested. Reading it is not a pre-requisite for this post to make sense: rest assured that this is going to make little sense no matter what you read before or after. But I will still plug it simply because I wrote that one too and since you have decided to waste your precious time in this untrampled corner of the internet, you might as well get more quantity of prose for your efforts.

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It is a very pleasant 14 degrees Celsius when the Boeing 777 touches down at Ben Gurion. It had been raining the previous week but the evening sun is golden bright as I walk out of the terminal. The taxi driver, Mrs. M – a lady that speaks near flawless, if accented, English and accepts credit cards – engages in casual chit chat. I enquire about the “situation” in Tel Aviv. My intention here is not to do an Anderson Cooper but only to see if it is safe enough to step out for dinner – because last month a couple of stabbings happened not far from where I usually go out to grab a bite. “The situation these days is calm. But the leaders are not taking any initiatives for peace”, she says in a resigned tone that comes from being a lady, a mother of three and trying to make a living in a troubled place. In parallel, we have been warned at work to not venture out on our own and also to avoid a bunch of “mixed” cities including Jerusalem and Jaffa. In other words, business as usual in Israel. Outside of actual research and meeting people, taxi drivers provide the most insight into everyday life in any country. Some of them are just chatty for the sake of being so, but there are others that can give you a delectable slice of life during a ride into town and Mrs. M is one such.

My stay this time is arranged at a different hotel than the usual one I love. The idea is to avail of better rates negotiated for the bigger training group. This hotel is relatively new and is just up the street from the apartment we were staying in last year. The supposedly “chic” design is, how do I put this…terrible. Imagine sharp edged, white, boxy furniture, grey net-like curtains, a downright cheap looking, white table and a about five-foot tall pink lamp (yes, pink) hanging from the ceiling in one corner just behind a contemporary fabric swing chair. And the hidden shelves? It takes me 5 minutes of searching to locate the hair dryer. And the room is done in a shade of white so bright that I’m half expecting Morgan Freeman in whites from Bruce Almighty to walk out through the walls and start playing God. The answer to the question, “What does it feel like to sleep in an Ikea showroom,” is this: right in this room. There is also a picture hanging by the TV of what certainly looks like two heaps in the Manila garbage dump. Remember, chic design. The room itself is oddly shaped. The wall on the far side makes a sharp angle to allow a view of the sea instead of the opposite building. Which brings us to just about the only redeeming feature in the room: a sea facing balcony. But even that comes with handicaps – the glass walls are grimy perhaps from the rains last week, the plastic furniture dirty, an ashtray in a non-smoking room and you can see into (and be seen from) the adjacent room’s balcony. But, one look at the sunset – a fiery ball reluctantly relenting and allowing the sea to swallow it – and you can easily be transported to a different world. But here is the catch: every evening when this elaborately made cosmic drama is staged, I will be inside some conference room in our office, 27 kms away, with not so much as a window, much less a view worth taking in. I know I’m whining but allow me one more rant: the breakfast spread – the one meal that I rely on most for my daily nourishment – is not as good as the usual hotel either. When I’m on business travel, I rate hotels on three aspects: cleanliness, the quality of the breakfast (read vegetarian options: smoked Norwegian salmon? Baby hippopotamus ribs smeared with caviar? Mean nothing!) and the amount of free water they provide in the room (read: 500ml is not enough). This hotel scores 1 out of 3.

This is beginning to sound like an old man’s medical maladies chronicle but I learn that Melatonin is a prescription-only drug in Israel. The elderly pharmacist at SuperPharm, a local pharmacy chain, helpfully offers an equivalent medicine. But here is the problem: the description on the carton is in Hebrew and the pharmacist speaks but a smattering of English. The only thing I understand on that carton is the bright yellow flower – which I assume means to say that I would wake up like one the morning after. So I opt for a drug-free recovery from jet lag instead. What is a few sleepless nights and droopy days compared to popping in pills of questionable ingredients? But on the flip side, that means playing with my sleeping times and going down on my knees and pleading with my mind and body to bail me out one more time. The first two nights are not too terrible – restless and filled with weird dreams, of course -- but at least I get a few straight hours of shut eye. But very soon I experience both extremes: of falling asleep early and waking up way too early and also falling asleep very late and scrambling to board the bus in the morning. However, no matter what happens the night before, the 3pm wave of sleepiness hits me like a ton of bricks leaving me nodding away during the late evening sessions. Luckily I’m part of a group all of who landed with me so I don’t stick out too much. And as it happens with these one-week trips, I will get adjusted to the Tel Aviv clock just in time for my return flight.

I no longer forage for food. I now know enough places including their regular and Shabbat timings, most of them within a 10 minute walk from the hotel district. Two of the restaurants that I like, actually local street/casual food joints, are the Market and Miznon, both located on King George Street – a busy street lined by shops, cafes and restaurants on both sides. They have enough vegetarian and even vegan options for me to skip the longer walk to Jaffa in pursuit of a falafel sandwich for dinner. Although, I must admit that the walk to Jaffa is much, much nicer, taking one along the winding path by the beach. As they say, you win some and you lose some.

Walking around in Tel Aviv is an interesting experience. Many of the streets strongly remind me of India. They are loud, busy, narrow, lined with a mixture of shops, eateries and showrooms, bus stops filled with waiting people and the stains and stench of human and pet urine punctuating the side walk. The streets passing through residential neighborhoods are lined with the characteristic Bauhaus style apartments of varying vintages. This is definitely a city of apartments - there are hardly any independent homes around. The streets are all part of a massive one-way network and they have cars parked on both sides leaving very little room for cars to pass through. Parking spaces are scarce, forcing people to get creative and conjure up nooks and crannies to shoehorn their ride in. But the pavements are wide enough and not bad for walking. There are also wide, tree lined avenues – some with a central footpath, big open public spaces and much greenery by the Yarkon river running to the north. The beach along the warm Mediterranean is a beautiful presence, framing the coast to the West while city space gives way to desert as one travels to the east and south. The young(ish) people at work that are trying to buy a home don’t consider living outside Tel Aviv as an option. Culturally speaking, the city is divided into the classier North and the working class South – the exact opposite of Chennai’s respective halves. Restaurants of all sorts abound and one can have a sumptuous meal without burning a hole in the wallet or, of course, choose to indulge in expensive meals. The staple street food in Israel is, ironically, the decidedly middle-eastern falafel. With a few minor inconveniences aside, it is a bustling metropolis with something to do for everyone as long as there are no active conflicts that is.

I have never been to Turkey but people that have, always talk about how Asia meets Europe there. But I would like to think Israel must be no different. The European cars (many of them hatchback), al fresco dining, people’s sense of dressing, (conflict-rich) history per square mile, the style of graffiti (the best one I saw was “The revolution has been postponed because of the rain”) – all remind one of Europe. The dirty streets, slightly unruly traffic, drab buildings, storefronts with thick steel shutters, cables of all sorts running overhead, on the other hand, serve up the Asian, particularly Indian, flavor. This perhaps explains the pull of India on Israeli tourists, particularly the young, fresh-out-of-army segment. Tel Avivites also seem to possess a rather strong passion for pet dogs. Every other person on the street is walking one. But there is also a distinct lack of cleaning up after their pets. Remind you of India? Oh and there are the cats too. Of all colors, sizes, shapes and in varying states of health – some fit, some not so fit, some maimed – lurking around everywhere in search of their next meal.  

Israel trip diary Jan-Feb 2016

I usually do bite sized nuggets from my trips like the one here or here. But this time around, call it a mix of boredom and lack of enough good movies to watch, I decided to king-size my jottings on the return flight. So I unleash upon you, the unsuspecting reader, the details of my recent trip to Israel.

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The onward journey: The good taxi, the bad flight and the ugly movie

The day of departure dawns. I drop off my son at his school in the morning after assuring him for the hundredth that I will be back in only a week. He promises to take care of his mom and be a good boy. Of course, he doesn’t like me traveling, is saddened at the very sight of the packed bag and he has made that clear over the past few days. He doesn’t want to understand but knows he has to relent. I can’t pin it on his age for this is not very different from my own state of mind in many situations. I hope his friends at school can distract him enough to make it easy on his mom to deal with him for a week while I vanish from home.

I have to fly out in the middle of the day for the first leg of the journey. I don’t know about you but for my trips, I prefer slinking out under the cover of darkness, especially for the ones abroad. As a Chennaiite, nearly all of the foreign travels of friends and family started at an ungodly hour in the night and I suspect that my mind has been subconsciously conditioned to that routine. SQ528 to Singapore that left Chennai at 11:45pm was my default flight. But there is certainly something about finishing dinner at home -- topping it off with curd rice and homemade pickle -- before leaving on your travels. The family staying back goes to bed right away, you doze off as the airplane lifts off and the morning after you call them from wherever. Talk about a comforting routine. Leaving in the middle of the day seems disruptive in many ways. I’m leaving a dad-sized gap for my kid to deal with in the afternoon and evening, not to mention the wife having to deal with it all by herself. And I’m cooped up in an airplane when I can be doing so many other things on land instead. I do have the option to leave at night but that would be one night before and I certainly wouldn’t take that.

The ride to the airport is uneventful. The driver was, as usual, a Punjabi who preferred conducting all his chit chat with me in a 80:20 mixture of Hindi and Punjabi. My tentative responses in very bad Hindi didn’t seem to put him off one bit. For a change, the taxi – a yellow Prius instead of a beat up Chevy Caprice or a Ford Crown Vic. -- didn’t smell like a barn. Two air fresheners – green, tree-shaped ones – hung from the handles above the rear windows on both sides, giving off a strong scent. I don’t know which chemicals were used in the concoction but they gave me a terrible headache. In hindsight, the barn smell – a heady cocktail of sweat, body odor, spicy aromas from a long ago lunch consumed in the cab and unwashed seat fabric -- would have been tolerable. At least the contents would have been organic. 

After spending many months cloaked in plastic sheets, the sprucing up of Terminal 3 in SFO International has been completed sometime after my previous trip. And I must admit, the end result seems to take a baby step towards nice and swanky instead of the SFO default of drab and utilitarian. My frequent flyer membership, about to expire in a few months from lack of frequent enough travels, allows me lounge access. But the lady manning the entrance seems to differ in opinion. After a few minutes of remonstrations and explanations, she relents and lets me pass. United should reconsider their friendly skies© tagline. Friendly skies; grumpy earth ©which would be 50% true. You’re welcome. This just goes to reinforce my belief that friendly service in the airline industry – both on land and in the air – is owned by just two companies: Singapore and ANA.

Planes are taking off under grey skies as if being catapulted from a giant sling from the end of the runway as I slide into a sofa seat by the window that looks out to the runway. There is some time before my flight will be called and I can watch a few take offs as I help myself to hot oatmeal and strawberries. I’ve done a fair bit of flying around but even today I’m awed by the sight of a plane taking off: the bigger the plane, bigger this awe. I instinctively compare the takeoff -- plane taxiing out to the end of the runway, turning around, pausing a moment or two before thundering down the tarmac and lifting off smoothly -- to a Curtly Ambrose or a Courtney Walsh delivery in cricket. It really doesn’t take too much imagination for the similarities are so strong. There is the stylish sauntering up to the end of the run up with perhaps that nonchalant wiping of the sweat against the sleeve, the casual, one-handed collection of the ball passed by either mid-on or mid-off after it has been shined with the sweat and spittle of the fieldsmen, a couple more involuntary rubs against their trousers, the turning around – the defining moment, that slight crouch of their frame as they start the most elegant of run ups, the stylish pre-delivery slide as that wrist-banded right arm telescopes to a scary height and whoosh, the release. Call me crazy but may be Messrs. Wilbur and Orville were reincarnated as Walsh and Ambrose? My love for cricket in general and the two gentlemen fast bowlers in particular will ensure that no number of years of flying shall diminish my fascination for planes lifting off. Planes landing? Not so much.

Time to take off. I have forgotten to carry my melatonin tablets – I did the packing myself this time -- and I don’t find them in the few shops by the gates. I must hunt down a few in either Newark or Tel Aviv. Much against my preference, I opt for a window seat as it is in the slightly roomier economy plus section – small rewards earned for my travels – rather than choose an aisle seat in economy class. I prefer to be the one disturbed rather than the one disturbing. I have had a brunch in the lounge on top of steaming idlies polished off at home and no meals shall be served on this flight. So I doze away in an attempt to sync up with Jerusalem time. No use.

I land in Newark for the ninety-minute layover for the Tel Aviv flight. Snow on the ground serves as a reminder of last week’s storm “Jonas”. I have the usual dinner at the gate-side restaurant before I board the second flight. And I don’t find any melatonin in tablet form, only dissolvable tablets in cherry flavor. I dread jetlag alright but there are certain things that I don’t consume no matter what.

This time I’m in an aisle seat towards the very end of the plane. It is a Chuck Lorre buffet for entertainment: 3 episodes of Big Bang Theory and 2 episodes of Two and a half men (with Charlie Sheen). And much against better judgment, the Robert DeNiro fan in me forced me to watch The Intern also starring Anne Hathaway. Terrible. Mistake. Here is the synopsis: a vanilla wafer, dipped in caramel, topped with chocolate syrup and rainbow sprinkles served with a glass of Martin Scorsese’s tears to wash it all down with. Ack! The next time a new DeNiro movie comes out which, going by the rate, should be sometime next week, I’ll watch The Casino or The Goodfellas on DVD instead. A sincere request to Mr. DeNiro: You had a dream run with Martin Scorsese. As difficult as it must be to you and even to us, let’s face it: it is over. There is a fine line between riding away into a glorious sunset and groping about in the night that follows after and I’m afraid that you may have crossed it. Please leave us with good memories instead of sleepwalking through crap like The Intern.

Robert DeNiro (looking into my eyes, arms apart and with that signature downward curl of the edge of his mouth): Are you talking to me?

Me: Yes I am, grandpa.

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My scribblings are really bulky and I'm thinking of splitting up it into 2 or 3 pieces after I polish up the rest a bit. Soon with installment #2.

The Revenant experience

Watched The Revenant (a person who has returned, especially supposedly from the dead. You're welcome.) by Senor Alejandro G.I. A ruthlessly violent, insanely brutal and chillingly intense period revenge drama set in the forbidding yet breathtaking American frontier. One can, I suppose, call it a Western revenge story -- it is exactly that at the heart of it -- for purposes of categorization. But that would be like calling the Porsche Carrera a 4-wheel automobile: factually correct but descriptively inadequate.

As with any revenge story, you are comforted by the knowledge that good will ultimately triumph over evil. Yet what keeps one riveted is the narration. And in the hands of Alejandro, this story comes alive and holds you tight in a slobbery bear hug (pun intended). (*Spoiler) The good in this movie - Leonardo Di Caprio - suffers serious carnage through most of the 156 minute-length to triumph over evil - played by Tom Hardy. He comes back, quite literally crawling out from a shallow grave, from the dead to mete out justice in the good old fashioned way. (*End spoiler) There are other characters too - the noble captain, the unwilling accomplice, the Indian Chief looking for his daughter, the soulless French captain, etc but they hardly register for this one is about Leo DC and his travails in pursuit of revenge.

The Revenant goes for the jugular from early on with a fantastically choreographed attack scene (if you liked the Normandy beach landing in Saving Private Ryan, this one will leave you with goosebumps) drags you through the frozen frontiers (shot in Alberta and Argentina), plunges the viewers into frigid rapids and leaves you exhausted on the bloody snow. But the piece de resistance (I have always fancied using this phrase) has to be the bear attack scene. The animal tries to make a meal out of Leonardo and even comes back for second servings. My wife had to actually turn her head away from the mauling going on the screen. Even after reading about it's making, the magic of the scene hasn't worn off. There is no shortage of blood and gore throughout the movie yet this was the most visceral of them all. No bears were harmed in the making of this scene but many viewers may now be permanently scarred. Chilling.

The landscape is forbidding and frozen. Men -- when they are not soaked in blood or coated in grime -- are wearing hides, consuming raw meat, cauterizing their gaping wounds and being brutes. The weather is unforgiving and makes living difficult and survival nearly impossible. And animals - dead, alive, cooked, uncooked, carved out - play a role throughout the movie. There is an unmistakable tone of rawness about the whole movie, perhaps as a vehicle to reflect on the times this is set in. And this helped lure me into the narration and set up an intimacy with the characters and their situations.

It must have been hell making this movie in the locales and the weather. And on the strength of this performance, this is perhaps Leo's best shot at taking home the best actor award at this years Academy Awards. Instead of a gift hamper, give him a piece of soap and run him a hot bath please. He needs it.

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In a strange coincidence, I happened to visit a museum of History of the American Southwest, the day after I watched The Revenant. The visit served up yet another reminder of the decline of the native American culture at the hands of more powerful invaders. Once free and proud to near extinction: a sad story. The visit added to the residual effects of the movie that were still gripping me strongly. I also happen to be reading The Masque of Africa - Glimpses of African Belief by V. S. Naipaul, my first VSN experience, by the way, that explores the effect of imported faiths - usurping, subverting and wiping out - on native religions and belief systems. Talk about coincidence!

The commute - The Jeppiaar years contd.

Now to my commute portion of the story. My assigned bus, as I mentioned earlier, was Route 43 serving T Nagar. It made a stop near the IIT-M campus - which was the last on the route - before turning right on OMR and all the way to Sholinganallur, which in those days was little more than a sleepy suburb with not much going on besides the few colleges that had begun sprouting along the road. Once you crossed Tidel park, there was nothing to suggest that IT was going to flip this area upside down in a few short years. The swathes of swamp land were still swampy. I'm going to sound like my father here but there were actually mango and coconut orchards on the west side of the OMR -- Rajiv Gandhi hadn't lent his name then -- giving way to the occasional house here or a small factory there, including the Aavin dairy at Thoraipakkam that announced its presence with a strong stench. Barring TCS, which had a facility further south of Sholinganallur, the other IT giants hadn’t opened shop yet. And the numerous high-end, luxury, deluxe, state of the art, 10-minutes-from-the-airport apartment monsters were not even a concept.

It was a short walk from our house to the bus stop. I would walk out of our campus, turn around to wave to my mom who would, without fail, stand there till I went out of her line of sight, cross Sardar Patel Road and walk along the CLRI campus wall past an Aavin milk booth to the bus stop. The tea stalls would be open for business and so would the restaurant Vasantha Bhavan. Even as I crossed the road, I could tell what lay ahead. If I could spot my classmate V and a bunch of others standing there, I knew I was OK. In the very early days of my first year, when I was running late, I would hurry, break into a half-run with every intention of boarding that bus. And on those days the bus was leaving just as I reached the bus stop, I would wave and signal for the bus driver's mercy. It worked on a few days and not on the others. Then the teenager in me began to notice that my actions had an audience: members of the opposite sex that had a fantastic view of my mendicancy through the big windscreen. Here is stating a matter of fact. Not all the girls in our bus were exceptionally good looking. But they were girls! (Yes, I hear the shouts of a misogynistic MCP directed at me.) And pleading with the driver in front of girls, no matter how they looked, was not cool on first principles. Period. Not cool at all. Mm hmm...

So I instinctively stopped doing it. Right away. Instead, as the bus passed me, I would turn around and walk casually to the Madhya Kailash traffic signal which was just a short hop from there. The cycles were long and at every red light at that time of the morning, a handful of our college buses would stop. All of a sudden, I could actually pick and choose less crowded buses with available seats and arrive in style. Of course, over the months, you start having a cup of tea with the drivers here, strike up conversations on the sly there and you build a rapport. And lo! No more leaving me behind. No more frantic waving. A look and the driver would actually stop and let me board. It was not bad at all. And in the evenings, I would get off when the bus slowed down at the Madhya Kailash junction rather than go all the way to the bus stop. 

The activities on the bus itself were pretty dull during the entire semester. Most of the students that were doing the long haul would be asleep. The ones awake would either be discussing girls, cricket or movies in no particular order. Sometimes in turns, over and over again. After all it was the 90s: Sachin and Sourav were playing like Gods, Kamal and Rajini hadn't gone haywire and could still turn out good movies, AR Rahman was still making music for Tamilians and Indians, and girls were, well, girls. My good friend R, from T Nagar, maintained a live database of the girl students across two colleges, ranking them, revising their ranks on a daily/weekly basis and documenting the reasons for the ranking changes. And they hire Pricewaterhouse Coopers for the Oscars. Good guy, good times. He did this on all days except those days after an India cricket match when all talk between us would be a critical, statistical analysis of the feats that had been performed the night before. Mind you, this was the 90s when Sachin was at his best. You can imagine the buzz around the key events - the twin centuries by Sachin in Sharjah - desert storm innings and the final of that tournament, the 10/10 by Kumble at the Kotla, the Chennai test defeat against Pakistan, the '99 World Cup fiasco. And then the usual academic stuff too: borrowing lab coats, calculators and set squares for engineering drawing. 

During the semester exams, the bus would transform into a frenetic, throbbing study room on wheels. Notes would be passed down the aisle, the last hour cramming into temporary memory and hurried revisions and the works. The study material was divided into five units for each course. Invariably, revising the fifth unit would be allocated to the 45 minute commute in my case. But I always got motion sickness which, in hindsight, explains my scores.

So four years and may be 4000 miles kms later, my bus commute came to an end. It was time to move on. And move out. Out of Chennai. Out of India. 

The commute - The Jeppiaar years

The gangly teen that had just entered college, yet to even have his first shave in life, crossed the empty road to the other side. Even as he was walking towards the bus stand less than a hundred meters further down the road, he could see that the bus he was supposed to take was just leaving from the bus stop, having collected the few students that had assembled there. He was late by less than a minute, 45 seconds at the most. He took the bag from his shoulder and started waving his hands, perhaps a bit frantically, for the driver to stop. He had established eye contact with the driver. Yet, the driver kept going on. As the rickety bus thundered by, it stung him. Not the driver's pushing on, but the glances from the girls seated in the front. Something changed that day. No, he didn't start arriving earlier. He never plead with the driver again. Ever. 


Commuting to college, if Tamil films are to be believed, is more fun or at least as fun as attending an institution itself. In most of these films, made much before air pollution was a lesser evil than today, the hero and the heroine would always take public transport. And the leading lady - right from the days of Aradhana's Ms.Tagore - would always be seated conveniently by the window to get a ringside view of the hero's amorous antics. And would, at some point before the intermission, fall for the hero. Never mind that much of his actions can be called, if you are in a particularly charitable mood, eve teasing.

Into this scheme of things strode Jeppiaar like a colossus. After having already sanitized his group of Alcatraz engineering colleges to such an extent that they started looking more like middle schools, he proceeded to grab the idea of commuting to college as it existed by its horns, turned it upside down, pummeled it with his bare hands, spat on it and spat on it again. Still not done, he then burned it down and then peed all over the ashes for good measure. All the while being cheered on rather boisterously by the parents of his students.

For a sum of Rs. 3,000 per year per student - that financed the many luxury cars that he and his family were seen riding around in and the fancy bungalow that had cropped up along OMR - he offered to scoop up the boys and girls from the bosoms of their parents every morning right into the outstretched arms of the eager faculty, standing in front of the cells classrooms eager to impart engineering knowledge. This he did by running a fleet of buses that crisscrossed the entire city and its far flung suburbs like Manali or Thirunindravur, ferrying sleepy, future engineers to and from the college's campus on OMR.

Now, the idea was not bad. Mind you, it was much easier to take a college bus rather than be at the mercy of public transport especially if you had a monster commute. But as the saying goes, the devil resides in the details. Many good ideas bite the dust because of poor execution. And sadly, this idea was no exception either.  First off was the price itself: rather steep. As a marketing professional, I understand value pricing and also the pains that it can inflict in consumers. The second point that irritated me was this: at Rs 3,000, one would expect at a minimum to get a seat on the goddamned bus. This was not exactly the case. Especially for me and the others that boarded at our bus stop. Ours was the last stop on the route and on nine days out of ten, we would end up standing all the way to college or share the seat with friends. And on the return journey in the evening, we would have to race from the labs to the bus and reserve seats with the help of notebooks, textbooks, lab coats and other paraphernalia. This, we could have done on a Pallavan bus for a fraction of the cost. We had spoken to the man himself on a couple of occasions but to no avail. And finally, the separation of the boys and girls. A few seats from behind the driver's seat was the Lakshman Rekha - a length of insulated electrical cord was intimidatingly tied between two metal poles. Although there was no written warning posted, the way the cord was tied around with pliers spoke many threatening words, leaving no doubt that there would be consequences. The girls sat towards the front side and the boys to the rear. At some point in the past, a lady had crossed a forbidden line resulting in an epic. Mercifully, in the four years that I was a student, no such error in judgement happened and we collected our degrees without event.

Time now to give credit where it is due. But for the above points of inconvenience, the bus enterprise was so well run that had he decided to float a private bus business in Chennai, Jeppiaar would have driven Pallavan Transport Corp into bankruptcy in a matter of a few months. There were at least 30 buses that were all maintained really well, excepting, of course, mine - Route 43 servicing T Nagar which somehow resembled a wounded, rabid dog on a wet, rainy day. The drivers must have been ambulance/fire engine drivers in the recent past for once they got behind the wheels, drove like maniacs with the sole aim of reaching the campus by 8:00. To their credit, there were definitely no fatalities nor any serious casualties throughout the time I was there. Partly because all the burning of the rubber happened before the real peak hour started.

India ranks higher than the developed countries on which index?

minji-dil kenji-dum konja varivani-yAn Van-jiyA daruL-enai arunAchalA

I am a fool who prays only when overwhelmed (by misery), yet disappoint me not, O Arunachala!

Verse 78, Sri aksharamaNamAlai by Sri Ramana Maharishi

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While I was browsing the net the other day, I chanced upon an interesting article titled "Two charts show how economic prosperity brings a decline in religiosity" on scroll.in. 

Not the most tantalizingly crafted click baiting titles you might agree. (Two charts show economic prosperity and religiosity do what? or You will not believe what economic prosperity does to religiosity. Call me old fashioned but click baiting has the exact opposite effect on me: I make it a point to avoid a piece if its title isn't a well crafted synopsis of its contents. Or in other words, I'm an old hag. But enough pointless digression, back to the pointless post.)

True to its title, the article had two charts, the second of which I display here. Looking at it, I was reminded of an old story of how a man, not familiar with the skills of climbing trees, gets stuck atop a tall one and starts off by fervently promising God that he would provide a big feast upon his safe return to ground. And with every foot that he descends, starts reducing the size of his offering.

Source: scroll.in

The only data points that came as a surprise was the USA - I didn't expect to see it so high on the religiosity axis - and China. But I live in California and there exists a whole "other" USA between the coasts and while I don't know much about China, I know enough to always take data coming from there with a grain of salt. The rest of the countries seem to fall at just about the right places that you expect them to. I'm assuming it would be a pointless exercise, but if more countries in the middle east had been polled, they would make the roof of this plot. 

The article makes a passing reference to the declining religiosity across the world. But I'm not sure that economic prosperity, just by itself, is the reason behind waning religiosity. The bottom right of the plot - the rich and less religious zone - seems mostly European, white and old Christian countries. And the top left - the poor and the religious group - seems mostly Asian/African colonies with Islam and imported Christianity. Are the old Christians - who happen to be rich - losing faith faster than the newer believers? And it would also help to understand if there exists a correlation between race and religiosity as the white folks seem to be losing faith faster than the rest. 

India is definitely not rich, definitely corrupt and is a mixture of multiple religions. And one look at the crowds at Tirupathi on any day will be like looking at the typical cross section of Indian society - the poor and the rich, healthy and the sick, able bodied and the disabled and of course the corrupt and the not-so-corrupt although that is not perceptible visually - jostling with one another in the hope of appropriating the hilltop deity's blessings. And this would play out not very differently at holy sites of the other faiths, I imagine.  This being the case, I was expecting a much higher score than 80%. 

What would be an interesting follow up exercise would be to label these countries with their respective ranks on the corruption scale. I'm thinking there would be a strong correlation between lack of religiosity and lack of corruption. 

My lazy, armchair theory floated with nothing more than instincts to rely upon? A mind free of wants and sins (and hence fears) leans less on religion as a source of strength and support. 

Pongal, oh pongal!

Happy Pongal! Today is India's thanksgiving. Actually, I'll quickly take that back with an apology. Thanksgiving is America's version of Pongal. There! That sounds so much better :)

As a city bred kid, with exposure to a closer-to-the-earth lifestyle limited to only during our spirituality-soaked pilgrimages vacations spent hopping through temple towns (Amma and appa, to reiterate a point that I have made many times, visiting Thirupparankundram, waking up early to take our place in a snaking line that never moved was N.O.T my idea of vacations!), Pongal meant little besides a cluster of holidays at the beginning of the calendar year. A day that started with shouting, upon being strongly coaxed, Pongalo pongal and consuming loads of ghee laden pongal and sakkarai pongal.

My idea of celebrating farmers and their profession was marked by consuming a more than usual quantity of their produce, then allowing ourselves to be assaulted by special patti mandrams (well intentioned literary debates in the days of Doordarshan that, with the proliferation of channels and a dearth of quality debaters, soon ran out of good topics and started pandering to the masses by debating just about any topic under the sun accompanied by off key renditions of cinema songs and thus spoiled it for everybody, but I digress. Sigh.) on TV and complaining the day after about crowds yet again trashing the Marina beach on kaanum pongal.

It was our mother, by virtue of her having done a fair bit of growing up in villages, who was the lone torch bearer when it came to infusing life into Pongal celebrations in our household. Between us two kids and to some extent our father, we favored urban, muted and toned down means of offering our gratitude to the sun and the farmers.

Although at its own sweet pace, time changes everything. Age, experience, growing up - all play a hand in changing one's perceptions. One such testimony is here. Today, Pongal isn't a day off where I live, yet I'm truly thankful to the powers that be for granting bountiful, even if erratic, harvests around the world. There are no groups of people trashing the city to complain about but I'm genuinely thankful to the farmers toiling in farms all over God's earth for their produce that nourishes us. And today the silence is broken not by noisy debates on TV but as the whistle blows on the pressure cooker, I'm thankful that I have been blessed with the means to gather the ingredients, a wife to make them into yummy pongal (both varieties), a son to share it with and a place to call home to keep us warm from the winter. The top 1% club? I'm in.

Big bang theory (not the TV show, but that too), pulsating universe, expanding, shrinking, creation theory - whatever your ideological leanings may be, one must take the time today, or any other day assigned by your culture, to pause and appreciate that the most important things in life - that the sun will rise in the east, that day shall follow night and photosynthesis - that we take for granted can indeed be taken for granted. At least for the foreseeable future. And also that you and me can neither control nor meddle too much with the important stuff.

An everyday lesson, if you are listening, showing us our rightful place in the universe - cosmic dust.