OF WARP AND WEFT

Many of you may have noticed the shop ‘Warp and Weft’ in Marine Lines just before the train approaches Churchgate. Yes, today’s tale has been inspired by this name and, I am sure, by now my readers must have guessed that it will go the whole six yards …so gentlemen, if you so desire, you may refrain from reading this any further.

My tryst with the sari goes back to the time when I was a mere four year old.  My aunt still tells me that she had never before seen a little girl jump and clap with joy to see her mom go for a matinee show while she was busy draping a red silk sari in her own style in front of the dresser. Yes! That was the little girl’s pact with her mother - you can go for the movie but you must give me one of your saris from that big teak almirah. I remember spending many such afternoons playing with my ayah didi’s daughters - they were my best buddies since, being older than me, they would let me have my way in everything and even help in draping the sari so I could play mommy.

My next memory of wearing a sari goes back to a cousin’s wedding when I insisted on wearing one of my aunt’s wedding sari-a pink Benarasi with thread and zari work. The poor lady tried so hard to coax me into wearing a lighter Murshidabadi printed silk but the imp that I was, I refused to budge. The rest of the evening I spent sitting next to the bride looking like silver and gold spangled candy floss!

Being in a Salesian Sisters’ Convent for the major part of school-life, I did not get much opportunity to wear saris except for school plays or cultural programmes but weddings in the family gave lots of opportunities and my mother’s wedding sari was always my first choice-a deep magenta with a narrow gold border and very tiny gold zari flowers all over. Growing up in Calcutta means that some days are marked as sari days for us Bongs- Saraswati Puja, Ashtami during the five-day Durga Puja festival and Bhai Phonta!

In our youth, the dress code transition was very simple – from frocks and skirts to salwar or churidar kameez and then graduating directly to the sari with short interludes of bell-bottoms, maxis, midis and jeans- kurtas. So in college, too, any occasion be it the Freshers’ Welcome, the Farewell, or the College Fests saw us resplendent in our bandhnis and block-prints in mulmuls, kotas, silks and chiffons. Of course, my all-time favourite has always been the crisp cotton tangails. I still have in my possession my first Bangalore silk bought from the EXPO at the Calcutta Maidan.

There are always those very anxious moments when you first step out in a sari that it will all become undone or you might trip and the pleats will start falling apart but honestly the sari does not come off all that easily unless something is intrinsically wrong with the draping or the material. In fact the six yards give you enough indication that something, somewhere is going wrong and you always manage to save yourself a Draupadi moment. When draped well, a sari can exude an elegance and confidence in a woman that very few attires can. As someone in an ode to the six yards wrote,

“Saree my love, you’re the most beautiful attire

a timeless fashion, which refuses to retire..”

While working in the Public Sector there was little choice other than making the sari my official attire especially in Calcutta and Delhi. In fact, Delhi did full justice to the entire collection- you could devote six months of summer to all your cottons and another six months of winter to the silks.

 It was with the transfer to Mumbai that the tables turned. Many of my friends and colleagues in Delhi instilled such a fear of the local train rides in me that on the very first day itself I took their advice to turn up in a salwar-kameez, which, till then, had always been the informal attire for me.  One colleague had been particularly vivid in her picturization of the scene, “If you get into a Mumbai local in your sari, you will get off it holding the sari in your hand!” Anyway, when I saw the ladies in Mumbai negotiating a perfect jump into a moving train without a single pleat moving from its place, I started venturing more and more often in saris. But in Mumbai there are other constraints to wearing a sari-to iron the simplest of saris the presswala will charge you a bomb and that too without being able to distinguish the right side from the reverse side of a Bengal cotton, space constraint makes it impossible to starch and dry cotton saris at home, the laundry charges you exorbitant rates and if that was not enough, you will not find a tailor who can stitch a decent blouse. So in Mumbai saris are left for occasions only, unless you are ready to give up your silks and cottons and settle for the synthetics.

However, I cannot help remembering an incident in a packed Mumbai local during the peak office hour rush that brings out the camaraderie that exists among the daily commuters. One young Punjabi girl from Chandigarh, who had been travelling with us for the past couple of years ,had boarded the 9.02 fast local wearing a sari which she declared had taken her an hour to drape. She was excited, it being her last day in office, because she was going back home to get married. Everybody was very appreciative. She was a beautiful girl and in the bright sari looked truly gorgeous. Suddenly, one of the seniors in group told her to get up as she had got it all wrong. That is when we noticed that the pleats which should have been facing her left were in the opposite direction and the pallu instead of draping over her left shoulder had crossed over to the right. Immediately, window shutters were downed, the grilled partition between the two compartments covered with two dupattas, a group of women formed a circle round her and the matriarch took charge to drape the sari on the girl properly. All this was completed even as the train slowly crept in to the next station. I am sure the girl sitting in Le Corbusier’s city will never ever forget her lesson in sari draping!

Now, I am in an altogether different predicament. With no office to go to, I have a wardrobe full of saris, and I guess I too will have to embark on a ‘One-a week’ pact to prevent them from completely disintegrating, taking inspiration from the ‘100-saree pact’ started by Ally Matthan and Anju Maudgal Kadam. Undoubtedly, a brilliant idea for the revival of the sari.

 Another solemn resolution I have made this New Year is not to buy any more saris. Yes, I intend to abide by it, come what may.

To be very honest, just before making this New Year resolution, while sauntering down Baba Kharak Singh Marg in Connaught Place, one winter morning, I could not resist picking up two saris which were on display in one of the State Emporiums. It’s an indescribable itch- you cannot help buying a good sari, even though you know perfectly well you do not need any more. I still miss some of my favourite sari haunts in Kolkata and I also have this sudden urge to catch a plane to Chennai and Coimbatore one of these days to just pay a visit to the original Nalli, Kumaran’s and also take a look at the Coimbatore collections. In the bucket list of course is a Dhakai Jaamdani from Dhaka… someday.

Once we had gone for a two-day workshop to Varanasi from office. Two memories of the trip remain etched on my mind- the first is the Ganga Aarti, which we had seen from a boat, an unforgettable experience. The second, a visit into the narrow by-lanes of Varanasi , arranged by our local colleagues, for the sole purpose of buying the famed Benarasi saris. All my friends and colleagues bought one or two but I, reeling under the effect of one such New Year resolution(the month being still January), had refrained from buying any. When I see the exorbitantly priced saris in Mumbai, I still kick myself for not having picked up one that day.

On a more serious note, I lament sincerely the loss of a good taste for saris. The saris you get to see nowadays are truly not saris to me. They are a type of patchwork. Many a time I have entered a popular shop and have almost convinced myself into buying one of them but just then some inner voice has stopped me- is this truly a sari? The pleats are in netlike material, the borders in velvet, the pallu in shimmer and the rest of the sari in georgette! And what are those stars, sequins, flowers, beads, tassels doing - all stitched or stuck on the sari like a beautiful piece of craftwork? Where is the wonder and magic of the six yards of warp and weft? Where is the grace and fluidity of the seamlessness that is the hallmark of a sari? Will those masterpieces in weaves, created by brilliant artistes with their looms, hands and imagination, be lost forever? It makes one sad to even think that, may be, a day will come when these weavers and their looms may no longer be there to tell their woven tales.

That brings me back to my New Year resolution. Not even a month has passed and just the other day got an invite to a mid- February wedding. The first thing that pops up in the mind-what shall I wear? I have still not been able to make up my mind. For some reason or the other, whichever sari I think of does not seem to be the right choice- there is some ‘technical’ snag in each of them. Why is it that no matter how many saris you have, whenever you have to go somewhere, you are always at a loss. Does that mean the resolution once again goes for a toss?

No wonder the Bard wrote, Frailty, thy name is woman…

DS

A Lie, A Sin & A Savior

A Lie

This is a story of lie and deceit from mythology and  is known to everyone but still wish to repeat. There is a slight twist with today’s context in the end.

Guru Dronacharya in the Mahabharata was a teacher to both the Kauravas and the Pandavas. He had become the Commander of the Kaurava army after Bhishma. Drona was causing much destruction to the Pandavas and it became apparent that he had to be beaten if the five brothers were to win the war. But beating Drona in warfare was almost impossible with him being a foremost exponent of almost all weapons and strategies of war. Drona had just one weakness, his son Ashwathama who was also a great warrior. Bhima meanwhile killed an elephant named Ashwathama and the word went around the battlefield…Ashwathama is Dead. 

Guru Drona was in his prayers unarmed when this news reached about the death of Ashwathama. He however refused to believe the news and asked Yudisthir, the eldest of the Pandavas who was also known never to lie, 

“Is it true that Ashwathama is dead?”

“Yes”, says Yudhisthir and trails off inaudibly, “Ashwathama the elephant is dead”. 

Drona did not catch the trailing inaudible words and laid down his weapons and bowed his head in grief. Just at that moment, Drishtidyumna who was Yudhisthir’s brother-in-law chops off an unarmed Drona’s head.

Now coming to 1993 how a lie can be useful in today’s Mahabharata as well.

There were 11 bomb explosions in different parts of Mumbai and almost all were in Hindu dominated areas. Sharad Pawar, the then Chief Minister of Maharashtra went on to the television and the people by announcing that there had been 12 blasts including one at Masjid Bundar, an area dominated by Muslims. This was a master stroke of a ploy where he wanted to stall a Hindu retaliation by telling the people that this was not a communal situation but a law and order situation. He even lied when he told the public that the evidence found at Air India Building pointed to terrorist organization based in Southern India hinting at possible handiwork of LTTE.

A Sin

In 1842, Charles Napier, a Major General in the British Indian forces, was asked to quell Afghan tribal rebels in the province of Sindh post the First Angle-Afghan War. In his over enthusiasm, General Napier overran the province in the Battle of Mianee and Battle of Hyderabad and annexed Sindh  much against the agreement the British government had with the local ruler of the place.  

Napier was to have dispatched a message to his superiors wherein it is said that he wrote just one word…Peccavi which in Latin means I Have Sinned which was a pun for “I have Sindh”.

The pun that was attributed to Charles Napier was actually written by an English woman Catherine Winkworth who submitted it to Punch Magazine in 1844, which then printed it as a factual report.

A Savior

Russian Czarina Maria Fyodorovna reportedly once saved the life of a man by transposing a single comma in a warrant signed by her husband, Alexander III (1845-1884), exiling a man to death in Siberia. 

On the bottom of the warrant, the czar had written: “Pardon impossible, to be sent to Siberia.” 

The Czarina changed the punctuation so that the instructions read instead as follows: “Pardon, impossible to be sent to Siberia.” The man was set free. 

THE COMMANDO

My father, seeing my carefree spirit and interest in sports, felt that I was a suitable boy to join the army. A sad day, indeed, for any Bengali father whose child was becoming anything but a doctor. Anyway when the time came, I did give my examination for NDA and finally when the results came out, my scores in math and science were pathetic and the door to becoming General Sen was quashed very early in life.  Now when I became a parent, I tried to see that my child fulfilled my failed ambitions and dreams and thankfully she is now training to become a Commando.

When the word commando comes to mind, I instantly remember Sylvester Stallone as Rambo or Sean Connery in ‘The Rock’ who could survive in almost impossible situations .Surely it must be in their trainings. Here is what the Commando Training weekly program of Royal Marines looks like and these tests are done in full fighting order of 32 lb (14.5 kg) of equipment.

The Commando tests are taken on consecutive days and all four tests must be successfully completed within a seven-day period; they include;

·      A nine mile (14.5 km) speed march carrying full fighting order, to be completed in 90 minutes. 

·  The Endurance course is a six-mile (9.65 km) course across rough moorland and woodland terrain which includes tunnels, pipes, wading pools, and an underwater culvert. The course ends with a four-mile (6 km) run followed by a marksmanship test.

·   The Tarzan Assault Course. It starts with a death slide and ends with a rope climb up a thirty-foot near-vertical wall. It must be completed with full fighting order in 13 minutes

·  The 30 miler. This is a 30-mile (48-km) march across upland wearing full fighting order, and additional safety equipment carried by the recruit in a daysack. It must be completed in eight hours. 

Normally the seven- to eight-day schedule for the Commando Tests is as follows:

·         Saturday - Endurance Course

·         Sunday - Rest

·         Monday - Nine Mile Speed March

·         Tuesday - Tarzan Assault Course

·         Wednesday - 30 Miler

·         Thursday - Failed test re-runs

·         Friday - Failed test re-runs

·         Saturday - 30 Miler re-run if required

The chart implies that there is a Sunday rest and on Thursdays and Fridays only those who fail the earlier tests repeat.  And here is what they get to eat:

Day 1 :Breakfast 3 eggs;  Lunch 3 eggs; Dinner 3 eggs

Day 2: 1 egg or grapefruit; Fresh fruit salad; Steak, Tomatoes, Celery and cottage cheese

Day 3: 1 egg or grapefruit; Fish, Tomatoes, spinach and Salad; Lean Lamb chops, tomatoes and salad

Day 4: 1 egg or grapefruit; Green salad and tomatoes; 3 eggs and dried toast

Day 5: 1 egg or grapefruit; Fish, Tomatoes, and Salad; Lean ham salad, tomatoes and spinach

Day 6: 1 egg or grapefruit; 3 eggs dried toast; Steak Celery, tomatoes and cottage cheese

Day 7: 1 egg or grapefruit; Fresh fruit salad; Lean lamb chops, salad and tomatoes

Where no volume or amount of food is quoted, you can eat as much as you like, within reason. So on the last day a large fruit salad for lunch can be eaten, followed by big juicy lamb chops with a large salad. 

Here’s a day in a life of what a Junior Resident Doctor in a premier medical college in India does.

It’s 6.15 am and an alarmstarts ringing and then within a minute you can hear “Wake up it’s a Beautiful Day”, it’s the jingle in the mobile. One arm to the right and the other to the left, the sounds are silenced.  A few more minutes of lying under the quilt and the blanket in Delhi’s cold is all the toy soldier desires but then a violent rrrrrrrrrrrrrrring of the Twister, as the maid is fondly called ,forces her to open the door. Before the storm arrives into her room, the first reaction is to remove all the phone and medical equipments lying in the room atop the table to avoid the catastrophic loss.

It’s 7.00am and the soldier leaves her termite ridden tent to move to the field duty of the hospital. First of course is breakfast. Monday- Aloo Parantha…Tuesday- Aloo Parantha…Friday- Aloo Parantha. Our most friendly cook can make anda (egg) and toast but they fry the bread instead of toasting it and the soldier does not like it.

It’s 7.30am and the little one enters the wards. She goes through the daily chores of doing the workups, presenting the cases, examining 100s of patients in the Casualty, OPD and the Clinics, assisting in the operation theatres, community service, filling up various forms, charts and files to list a few. In a country where the doctor to people ratio which WHO prescribes at 1:1000 is 1:11,000; where there is 1 bed for 8800 patients the days can be arduous, to say the least. Their exposure to ailments, like TB and Hepatitis, is another stalking killer lurking in the corridors.

You must be wondering what happened to lunch. Of course they do have lunch, once in a while, which again is: Monday- rice with dal & aloo ki sabzi. The friendly man is a perfectionist and the menu also never alters. Yes, on a few special days, the soldier is treated to mushrooms…wow..delicious! On days when the soldier is assigned Operation Theatre duty, the lunch is either a luxury or had at 5-6 pm.

Then there are the famous dinners. Monday- Roti and sabzi which is usually cauliflower and aloo. Here again our Man Friday is a perfectionist…it is the same for all days and on special day it’s again the Utterly Butterly Delicious Mushroom! On some day the soldier’s other troops lay their hands on their ultimate delight of a Domino’s pizza…after all they need to take care of their health to survive such regimen. On days when the work gets over after 11 pm, our Man Friday locks up his canteen and goes for his well earned sleep, my Li’l Soldier goes home to pour some hot water over Cuppa Noodles. The Cuppa Noodles must be terribly good, after all they have Manchester United’s team picture on the body, and Man U is a great team. Surely if Rooney can, my Soldier too can!

The work goes on and on and on, never to stop again. At last it is time to go home which is about 20 minutes walk from the college as no hostel is provided…what irony in calling them Residents while they are truly Non Residents. This moment that they long to go could be anywhere earliest 11pm to 3.45 am. She’s not alone. There are some other soldiers, in some other fields, who get to go home sometimes after 48 hours!

This walk home is the most peaceful as even the dogs and monkeys in the campus have gone to sleep. It is that time when there is no traffic on the road…maybe the Delhi CM could do away with Odd-Even Rule and implement the Midnight Working Rule where half the working class works during the day and the other at night and mind it there should be no exemptions for working women….awake at home parents have become very religious as they pray each night for a safe transit every night. Mind it 3am in Delhi’s winter, walking alone on the streets of the so called R capital of the World…my Ll’l Soldier truly must be very brave. No wonder she is becoming a Commando.

This is the same routine on all seven days of the week including Sundays, National Holidays and Festivals. They also have to manage the home matters of washing clothes, getting water, paying for rent and finding the electrician or plumber when the lights go off or the tap leaks.

Sometime ago a hapless father, who himself happened to be a doctor, wrote a blog “Why I will never allow my child to be a Doctor in India”. It went viral and here is the last para of the same blog:

"You will have every opportunity to choose whether you want to retain your religion or change it ...you will have every opportunity to choose the love of your life irrespective of caste, creed or even gender...you can be a wildlife photographer trekking through the Amazons or dance the poles at Las Vegas. But I will never allow you to become a doctor in India. Because I did not raise my child for two decades just to watch her lose her sense of right and wrong, of humanity or worse, watch her die. And I don't mean just physically."

Not that I wish my Little Soldier, My Commando to become a pole dancer but there are a few requests. She may have grown but she is still my daughter and my ‘noor’ and all I wish is that she gets some sleep, a little more than mere 3-4 hours a day …is it too much to ask? I wish her to get some healthy food at periodic intervals…is it again too much to ask? I wish her to stay within the college campus for her safety…is it too much to ask?  I wish her to get at least a day off in a week on Sundays which even God had decreed to be the holy day of rest.

One night when she returned home, I asked her to go late to work and come back early leaving the work for others. She said,” Baba, don’t say that. After all it’s my work and my life and I have to do it!”

My Commando is getting ready for many more battles and wars. She may not get the Green Beret of the Royal Marine Commando but I will still give her my bear hug every day. Godspeed My Daring Darling.

One happy man of course must be my father up there seeing his granddaughter becoming both a Doctor and a Commando at the same time. As they say in Filmfare Awards and Oscars, I too will raise my hands and say aloud, “Dad, This One’s For You!”

SS

Sorcerer’s Stone

It was one of the most important days in the life of the young boy. He had been dreaming about it ever since the tournament had started. His rag tag team had surprised many fancied opponents and reached the finals of the football tournament. He himself had played a stellar role in the matches preceding that day scoring a number of goals. It was quite certain to the organizers that no matter which team won the finals but the man of the tournament will be this young lad.

The night before he hardly slept…his heart was beating fast. He was visualizing the game next day. He didn’t remember when he finally fell asleep but woke up early that Sunday morning to the radio blaring aloud with Mahalaya or the homecoming of the Goddess Durga which no Bengali would ever miss. His father, as usual would on this day each year, get up very early and tune into the station on an old Murphy radio set. His father made the early morning tea and shaking the boy said, “wake up….Shibu otho….” Just as he was about to dip the Marie Biscuit in the tea, he heard his mother shout…..”Don’t eat anything today till I tell you to.” And we all know mothers; they always have it their way.

The boy was asked to take an early morning bath and wear a fresh set of clothes as he was ushered to the place where innumerable gods and goddesses were either seated on a platform or hung from the frames above. It was quite a secular picture with Hindu Gods seated and Guru Nanak, Jesus Christ and others watching down. The mother was rubbing the sandal wood on a special stone after dipping the wood in water. With the ring finger on her right hand she put a Chandan tilak on the forehead of the lad…..this had nothing to do with his football match although he had heard from his dad that whenever the famed East Bengal and Mohun Bagan would meet in any football tournament, both the teams would go to Kalighat Mandir at Kolkata for divine help to ensure victory. The mother was, on the contrary, seeking divine assistance to make sure the boy, henceforth, would distance himself from the daily routine of football from morning till evening and find more time for school books.

With tilak on his forehead, the boy was reminded of the magnum opus Mughal-e-Azam where Jodha Bai hands over the sword to Emperor Akbar as he went into the battle with his defiant son Jahangir.  But today, instead of the sword, the mother smilingly picked up a plate whereon lay a small blue stone and a piece of cloth. “I don’t need this Ma.” The boy protested but the mother quickly wrapped the stone in the cloth and tied the same to the boy’s arm resembling the band captains wear on football fields today.

The parents had been trying their level best for days, months and years to see their only son take an interest in studies like he did with sports. They had tried everything….love, care, attention, tutors, shouting, caning, belting….but nothing seemed to work. In fact the boy’s scores were going from bad to worse. He was barely managing to cross over into the next class each year. The parents were very worried.  While the father was ever so optimistic that his son one day will become good in studies and make him proud, the mother refused to wait till eternity to see such a day. She was determined to change his fortunes and do it quickly.

The mother knew of a Kala Pandit who was also working in the government office with her. Kala Pandit was someone a lot of office goers had great faith in. There were stories, no less than the miracles of angels,of how he had changed the lives of many and taken people from despair to great happiness. The gravest of illness and the most difficult of times had beaten a hasty retreat at the timely intervention of the Kala Pandit. The mother took Panditji’s appointment and dragged the boy to his residence at  Sarojini Nagar. No sooner Panditji appeared in his white dhoti and kurta, the mother bent down in complete respect and surrender and touched his feet. She then pushed the boy to do the same.

“This is my son Panditji. He is very intelligent  and passes his exams without studying at all. Please do something that he come first in his class.” The boy for once felt happy…intelligent beta mera…ha ha. Taking to serious studies was one thing but suddenly his mother’s expectation of him coming first in class was definitely too much. He felt like asking, “yeh PC Sorcar hai kya?” He looked at the white haired man carefully and said, when all the caning of the Irish Brothers at school failed, what magic is our man going to perform on me…let us see and have some fun.

The old man took the boy’s palm in his hand and starting saying things like he will live for long…he will have many cars around him always and become a famous man BUT there is a problem with one line which is currently preventing success and glory to come his way.

“Panditji please do something…I am begging you Panditji.”

“He needs to wear ‘neelam’ blue stone always. You can come and collect the Neelam next week because they come in various sizes and have different powers. We have to calculate the potency of the stone that will work for your son.”

“Neelam! Panditji, I have heard is very strong. If it suits you then it can do you a world of good but if it doesn’t and you keep wearing it, your fortunes will take a dive for the worse.”

“Yes, you are right.” said the old man. “We will make your son wear the neelam with a thread or cloth for about 10 days for testing and if nothing bad happens during that phase, we will have the stone affixed on a gold ring for him to wear on his finger forever. I am very certain, what I will give him will work and you will then be happy that you came to me.”

The mother happily gave Kala Pandit his dakshina of Rs 200 which was quite a sum in those days. The boy kept on protesting that he did not want any stone on his finger and all this was mumbo-jumbo but all his reasoning fell on deaf ears. The mother already had sparks in her eyes…going to school auditorium and seeing her intelligent son get prizes in front of all and the thunderous applause in her ears drowned all other voices and shouts of our budding footballer. After a week the sorcerer’s stone came home.

And today on Mahalaya day, the mother was tying the Neelam on the son’s arm. She then said a small prayer as she put her hand over his head. This was an auspicious day and Ma Durga and Neelam will work beautifully to make sure the next 10 days will pass by without any incident. With schools closed for many of these days plus the fun of Durga Puja will all ensure the boy would soon become the Lord of the Ring and a ring of halo would soon glow behind him. The very thought of this itself happening made the mother happy beyond words.

The boy packed his football kit and left for Chittaranjan Park with his team mates for the annual Vijayadashami Football Tournament Final where they faced the local team, Bengal Tigers. The locals there were all rooting for the local team even before the match commenced. The boy’s father who had sown seeds of the game in the boy by taking him after school to DCM and Durand Cup matches at Ambedkar Stadium, Delhi reached the venue and wished the boy luck as he stood quietly in the crowd.

The match got off to a rapturous start with the golden boy hitting the wood work within the first 30 seconds which almost silenced the home fans. The Bengal Tigers settled down and then started waves of attacks on the boy’s team. The goal keeper was a brave lad. Despite the ground being quite barren with no trace of grass, he dived from one side to another to deny the other team from scoring. The score remained zero-zero at lemon break.

After the half time, the boy’s team started playing spirited football and were all over the locals. The boy found his touch but not the goal. Three times he kicked into the goal but almost every time the goalkeeper or the woodwork came in the way. The opponents realized the danger and started playing rough. Every time the boy touched the ball, they would tackle him badly and the referee, who was a local Bong, would not even whistle for a foul. Around the end of normal time, the referee, for what was no more than a firm nudge by a visiting defender, pointed to the dreaded spot in favour of the Bengal Tigers.  A firm kick and the ball found its way to the back of the net. The crowd erupted in sheer ecstasy and hardly waited for the referee’s last whistle for the game to formally close.

The match was lost. The boy won his individual prize, a small miniature of a man with a ball on his feet on a wooden stand. Disappointed of course but not humiliated, their team was cheered aloud as they went up to receive their runner’s up trophy by the well informed but partisan crowd.

Next day despite his mother’s protests, the boy went to Kala Pandit. No bowing down, no touching of feet this time. No sooner the man came out to open the door, the boy stretched out his hand giving away the stone back.

 "It did not suit me”. 

“Why? What happened?”

The boy simply turned around and walked away. The Sorcerer’s Stone had lost to Soccer Ball.

The father smiled. The boy had just turned a strong man. The stone had actually worked. 

SS

JOTTINGS OF AN IDLE MIND

“For last year's words belong to last year’s language

And next year’s words await another voice”-T.S.Eliot

In a few hours, we will be bidding goodbye to one year and welcoming another. It is that time of the year when we all like to look back, review the days gone by , make ‘resolutions’ for a new beginning and look forward to something better. But honestly, will there be much of a change?

 I feel I will be spending another evening before the idiot box surfing through the channels…but I doubt whether Mr Arnab Goswami or Ms Barkha Dutt will give us much peace or food for thought. There was a time when I remember spending a quiet 31^st evening watching the world events being covered in a programme called the “The Year That Was” and later following up with a New Year’s Eve special telecast.  But those days are gone. Peace has been completely erased from our drawing rooms ever since Ms Dutt and Mr Goswami have taken over our lives. I simply marvel their infinite knowledge – from Medicine to Literature, Law to Economics, Politics to Poetry, Environment to Entertainment, Terrorism to Gay Rights, IPC to Psephology, Computers to Climate Change, Free Basics to Human Rights. There is no end to how much they know, how much or how loudly they can talk, hear only what they wish to hear, not take into cognizance what they don’t wish to. They are like Gods sitting in judgement. They can never be wrong. In channels like the BBC you find each person covering a particular area of news, a specialized field that they cover. Here they are omniscient. Their favourite panelists are equally erudite and omnipresent- they make sure that they are shown in every channel on a particular day. Once I heard the great Ms Shobha De making a statement in one channel and then doing a complete u-turn in another in the span of an hour. Do they take us to be complete idiots sitting in front of the idiot box?

So I will surf again and probably end up watching reality shows in which little girls and boys are made to shed tears in front of the entire country for making a small mistake in a particular note or for missing a beat or step. We are, however, very careful to see that children are not graded in their exams, their marks must not be declared, their merit must not be proclaimed. The reason- children might be psychologically bruised. But what happens, I wonder, to young children who participate in reality shows, pressurized by their parents and mentors to perform well, and are rejected for not being good enough. They are shown crying on national television.  I wonder who takes care of their scars. When we were kids, no one spared us- not even the Oxford-Cambridge educated relatives, with their ultra sensitized minds. I remember their favourite question was how much did you get in English and Math? I still remember blurting out the marks for the umpteenth time in front of a huge crowd at a wedding or even at a restaurant while enjoying one of those rare ‘eating out’ moments. School education cannot be graded but talent, which is more subjective, can be. Good to see that people are more sensitive to children’s issues nowadays but why so selectively?

Then I surf again and, may be, end up watching serials….even if you watch one, after a gap of two weeks, the story would not have moved by a millimetre. The scene would still be the same. While Pakistani serials, which follow a storyline, get over in 25-30 episodes, our ‘mega’ serials continue to go beyond 25000 episodes. My only appeal to the makers of these serials is please have mercy on us…please spare us those monster mothers-in-law, those scheming sisters-in-law, those utterly moronic heroes and the super-bleached, white-washed heroines who have to look fair, even if the story is that of a dark girl struggling to stand on her own feet without succumbing to the  pressures of social stigma or dowry, on all occasions. I am sure the world over great writers, litterateurs and playwrights must have left behind some good short stories, novels or plays. Can't they be adapted to make better serials?

Sometimes, I feel our culture and our languages have been reduced to the three ‘A’s- Awesome, Amazing and Anyways. If you just know these three words in English you can make your way through today’s society like Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle. You ask a youngster in any city in India any question the reaction is always ‘amazing’. Their answer to almost anything is always ‘awesome’. If you follow a conversation (you cannot avoid it since all around you, be it the bus, the train, the road, the restaurant, or what I call the modern Temple of Athena, The Mall, people are perennially talking on their cell phones) you will hear at least 25 Awesomes, 50 Amazings, and finally almost all conversation will end with ‘Anyways let’s meet up some day’.

And if it is a young Non-resident Indian you are talking to, there is only one response you will be able to elicit. Whatever you ask, the answer is always ‘Good’. Perhaps they think we are incapable of grasping more than that. So I guess it is best to bid such a person ‘Goodbye’!

On the subject of vocabulary, I was once asked by a senior relative, who had spent some years in Great Britain, what I was wearing. In standard II, with my limited vocabulary and completely in awe of ‘phoren’ returned relatives, I had replied that it was a checked skirt in cotswool. The gentleman had pronounced that my knowledge of English was indeed very poor, and was told to remember that it was called a plaid skirt. Later, I was advised to converse and interact more often with my peers in English. I nodded, wondering whom did he mean by my peers? You see, unlike today’s kids, we did not have the smartphones.

Smartphones remind me of an interesting conversation I was witness to in the elevator the other day. A young mother, armed with her smartphone, was asking her five -year old boy, what he had written on MJ. The boy, whom not too long ago I had seen crawling in the foyer and learning to take his first unsteady steps, had recently been admitted to an ‘International’ school. In response to his mother’s query the boy gave the most indifferent look. He made it clear that he had no clue to what she was talking about. The mother started lecturing him on how he should not resort to rote learning but he should have, at least, remembered what his teacher had made him write on MJ. All the time the smart mother was checking her smartphone and asking him if he had written that MJ was the King of Pop and that he owned a house called Neverland. Smart education is indeed going a long way –all the way to break-dance!!! Then the smart mother drove away in a smart car with her ‘not so smart kiddo’ sitting next to her in the front seat but even as she pressed her feet on the clutch and accelerator, her smart phone remained glued to her ears!!

I know my article reeks of intolerance, impatience and cynicism so, like everybody else on New Year’s eve, I, too, must make some resolutions to reform myself. Till then wish you all an awesome New Year party, an amazing 2016 and, anyways, the New Year always holds the promise of a better tomorrow.

“What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning”-T.S. Eliot

DS