Peeping at life

His chin holds the vest, while he tightens the strings of his drawers. One eye towards the standing bus, the other towards the small group sitting cross-legged on the earth, wet by the leaked water from the tanker. A bunch of used utensils on a half-broken rack, a bundle of clothing, pot being stirred on the fire burning in the middle. Life on the move under the flyover. I lock eyes with him, look at his exposed emaciated body. The light turns green, and the bus moves away from the flyover crossing. The image of the child standing with his back against the makeshift railing again comes back to me. He was gazing intently at us, curious at the flood of traffic surrounding, or rather, going past his home, constructed of the used tin sheds by the roadside near the faux Greco-Roman structures of Powai. I was sitting in the air-conditioned car, stuck for the last quarter of an hour, and irritated by his curious, impish, smile. What is he doing here? Does he realize the absurdity of the situation?

Covering up anything personal, life, emotions, opinions, from the public gaze and scrutiny is a lifelong project for most of us middle-class Indians. We live in large well-secured apartment complexes, take up higher floors to avoid peeping toms, erect safety doors beyond the already formidable locks, draw dark curtains on the windows, and build thick walls around our homes and ourselves. We long for that personal space we call home, where we get transformed from engineers, doctors, managers, brokers, into mighty kings whose every wish is a command.

I sometimes wonder what desperation compels these men and women to abandon their safe havens in far-off villages to come to Mumbai and live like this. To open their life for everybody to see, comment, get amused with, trample. While India keeps shining, Sensex keeps touching new heights, the life stories of these men remain untold and un-addressed. An old doggerel (or, is it a hindi movie dialogue?)says nobody sleeps hungry in Mumbai. May be. But a lot of them do sleep shamed, humiliated, insulted.

Ashis Nandy once commented that the personal and the public, the village and the city, are always close, ready to converge, in India. He could have added that they remain separated by visible and invisible boundaries.

Engineers lost

The below reminiscences owe not a little to the movie '3 Idiots'...
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It is the story of three friends - N, B and M. Engineering came to them without choice. Quite like Religion. Coming from middle class families, they were automatically marked as 'engineer material' for their capability to get good marks in exams. They were fed specially prepared milk, suitably mixed with almond paste, given extra pocket money hidden from their envious siblings, and paraded proudly as the eighty-percenters before the relatives and family friends. They were not particularly gifted with any obvious talent and convinced themselves of their calling as Engineers. To be fair to them, they did not see it as anything more than a few advanced Physics-Chemistry-Maths lessons for four years, with some additional cars and motors thrown in for good effect, which will give a well-paying job.

All three of them passed out as mechanical engineers from a fairly reputed state engineering college, lesser than IITs, better than most others. While B was amongst the branch toppers, N and M also managed distinctions throughout their tenure. B diligently triangulated information from his seniors, batchmates and self to develop notes that were in three different colours and best-in-class. N worked by himself and concentrated more on calligraphy then content to write his A's and G's with the pride of a schoolboy who has recently learned writing. M did nothing semester after semester and just shamelessly let his head hang low in front of B while he berated him with 'Saale, you could also develop these notes, if you don't be so lazy...' B, of course, always rewarded him for his humility with select notes to copy and make the grade.

They were best friends though and through. Even when some bitterness crept towards the end between B and N, they crosschecked all their answers before submitting their papers. Their different marks, B usually got 90 percent to N's 75, remained a mystery though. B was one step ahead even in the workshops. While N usually broke three models before finishing one, B got his models finished finely by his roommate. By the end of second year, B had dispensed with that courtesy as well, and simply stole all the previous models from the workshop to reproduce as his own. M was a little more diligent, even if equally un-endowed with any talent in his hands. He managed to get one of his fingers crushed, while he purported to count the number of gears of his colleague's machine lathe. Later, he redeemed the pain by entering his 50-member class with a middle finger that was heavily bandaged and unable to look anywhere but at the god almighty.

It is not that their engineering knowledge, or the lack thereof, took some time in coming out. Early in the second year, M discovered the use of a starter when his considerate friends simply made it vanish from his tube light. For three days, M slipped his chair a little more towards his roommate's desk to get a little more light. He did not go beyond the plug-and-switch routine in his investigations over the lost light of his life until given a physical demonstration by his incredulous friends. N was inclined to show his talent more in Mechanical drawing when he managed to become the only mechanical engineering student to get an ‘ordinance’ (pronounced 'audi' and implying failure marks) in the first year itself. Later, he was to enhance this reputation further when he made a two-dimensional drawing for a perspective figure, and considered it absolutely ok even later with a shrug 'I mean it looks 'perspective' from certain perspectives'. B, on the other hand, developed a reputation for being exceptionally diligent and getting things done for himself. He got hold of all the right notes, studied hard, had all his drawings glass-traced by juniors, and his room sound-proofed with thermacol by his friends.

By the third year, having brutally lost the case for 'mechanical engineering', they strove for and got jobs in 'Software Programming' and 'Sales'. Couple of years down the line, they convinced themselves of their new calling in 'Management' and went on to do post graduation from various reputed colleges. Now, they lecture their teams on how to stay focused, align their goals with their organization's, and derive happiness from their jobs. And they earn fat pay packages for doing this.
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Ransa: dead or tamed?

N. was of my age. He weight-trained, ate 'Rajdarbar' Gutka keeping at least five packs in reserve, smoked hash, drank beer with abandon, did petty thievery when occasions arose, was quick to anger, and made lewd passes at girls he considered available because of their short dresses. He said No to every possible convention, and did all these things before he had finished school. He was a great friend of mine. Apart from a great love for Chicken Biriyani and Tandoori Chicken from a certain Punjabi Dhaba in Govindpuri that I shared with this Brahmin boy, we had little in common. I was a cold, dry as dust, conventional, puritan.

I sometimes wonder now what drew me to him. Perhaps his irrational loyalty and die-for-you kind of senttimental friendship, which works well in a certain age with certain kinds of romantics. I also prized him as a good-at-heart vagrant, who I was going to reform with my conventional goodness. But what really drew me to him was a sense of power that emanated out of his physicality, his half-invented sexual exploits, his reputed links with some notorious Gujjar politicians from Gadhi and a capacity for raw, physical violence. He walked with a swagger and was everything I could never be. He was, seemingly, the 'Ransa' of my school days. Ransa or Rananjay Singh, who, apart from Piyush Mishra, really made Anurag Kashyap's Gulaal work for me.

But there was an important difference between Ransa and N. Unlike Ransa, my hero could never revolt against his father, and was subservient to him even at the height of his seeming debauchery. His father imposed his will over the whole family, and ran the home like a regular tyrant. In due time, N. shed his old habit, friends and love like a snake skin, and entered into a new, conventional life which his father desired and imposed. Perhaps, most rebellions are not the rebellions in the way we see them but only a desire to age faster and show off. But, why does it sadden and anger me more to see a rebel getting tamed rather then be killed or destroyed? And is it right to feel that?

Miseries of Heart

Why do all songs have to end? Not only literally, but also in terms of what they have to say. Some of the rare ones prefer not to conclude though, particularly when it concerns the matters of heart. They achieve and retain a difficult balance with ambiguity and uncertainty that characterizes any great work of art till the end.

'Dil to bachcha hai jee' is one such song. I am currently drooling and tripping over this 'Ishqiya' ditty. Very overtly, it has the feel and melody of a classic 50's Raj Kapoor melody, mixed with a melancholic Western acoustic strain. It starts off innocuously enough on a low flute-like (is it flute?) sound, to which slow strumming of Guitar is added steadily in the background. Then, Rahat Fateh Ali Khan lends his melodious voice to articulate the confusion and angst of an old man falling in love. Falling irresistibly in love, experiencing feelings which he thought were long dead.

The lyrics are playful and profound, in the fluid, conversational style of Gulzar, who, by the way, is in top form here. In spite of a superlative composition by Vishal and excellent singing by Rahat, slightly reminiscent of Rafi, this really is a Gulzar song.

Consider this gem which I fear will get killed in translation:
'kisko pata tha pehlu mein rakha dil aisa paaji bhi hoga
hum to hamesha samjhte they koi hum jaisa haaji hee hoga'

I was not taken in much by Kaminey's soundtrack, which seemed a little disappointing to me, apart from a couple of tracks, after Maqbool and Omkara. But this is a true gem. In as much as it is about a malady that neither gets cured by the passage of time, nor controlled by the bounds of religion or propriety, it sears the heart as much as it gives extreme pleasure.

Going home

Crossing Majiwada, my beady eyes begin to open by habit. As we move beyond Manpada, the air is getting rarer. Traffic sparser. With a little tilt of my head, I can view the Western Ghats to my left beyond the newly constructed apartment blocks. I open the window little more and cool my lungs with deep intakes of fresh air. I feel a chill on my back, with my sweat drenched shirt getting dried in a huff. The road is well-lit, better than most in Mumbai in fact, but everytime I come home, I feel I am going back to my village. My wilderness. My space for life.

I get down the bus at Vijay Garden, and walk the road to home. The atmosphere is that of a well-developed small town evening. Alive with the night chatter and selling, it is quite unlike the deathly silence of dark nights in my actual, native village. My apartment complex is also humming with activity, with night work going on to build the next tower. I move beyond the derelict, half-built buildings to my quarter, and move straight to the play area. Seeing me, my kid is forcibly taken off the swing, which he has occupied majestically for the last one hour. Giving my laptop bag to wifey, as I pull him towards myself, he has still not had his full and wants to break free. I persist shamelessly in smothering him with kisses, while he bares his teeth to attack me. I take him towards lift by which time he has started screaming a little. We go up, I put him down to open the locks, he looks around. We go in, he immediately spots his drum stick and moves towards it happily. He has forgotten the swings, and realizes he is back to his kingdom. I enter my home, my hearth.

Brief Notes on Orhan Pamuk

I picked up 'My Name is Red' more than three years back on the basis of blurbs promising something along the lines of Umberto Eco like literary medieval mystery. I read it after the book had graced my shelves for more than a year. By this time, he had grabbed the headlines for bemoaning the lack of discussion and self-criticism on Armenian genocide in Nationalist Turkey. He seemed a modern hero to me, and I picked up the book with great anticipation.

The book did deliver on the expected pleasures of Eco like intellectual-philosophical mystery, and still more on solid, emotional punch. The novel is set in the world of medieval miniaturists of Turkey's Ottoman empire, slowly getting exposed to Europeans and their new techniques. It doubles up as an investigation into a series of heinous murders committed by one possibly disgruntled miniaturist, and the subtle impact of European intrusions into indigenous life and arts. In some sense, it is also a masterpiece in 'perspectival' technique where you view the world from the representations of a ferocious dog to the murdering and murdered miniaturists.

It is a set of partial, half-understood stories of half-aware people, where there is always something getting added, and something missed from the narration. The novel also powerfully illustrates how unhappiness or grief is often caused by the asymetry between what we believe and what we end up doing. How instinct and passion can give lie to your most cherished values. The irony and humour are never lost on the situation - whether it is the soft-spoken, guarded lover behaving overtly sexually with his widowed, childhood love, or the tyrant master illustrator waxing eloquent on creativity to buy time from would-be murderer.

However, this often brilliant novel gets undone when Pamuk's authorial voice becomes too strong and disrupts the flow. Then, he moves from the specific to the general too soon, and leaves too little for the reader to chew on. Also, the medieval city life, with its bylanes and smells and coffeehouses, becomes banal at times with description that is too often and too ornate. To me, these intrusion made both 'My Name is Red' and 'Snow', which I picked up later and will talk about some other time, a little under-whelming.