Tagged

As you can see here, I did ask for it. So no complaints, here I go. The usual stuff about 'ask me another day, I will give you another list' applies to this tag.

Total number of books I own

Around 400 here in Chicago - quite a few of them in boxes that shall be unpacked as soon as I move into an apartment with a little more space, a fast diminishing 300 back home that my mom keeps donating away, another 20 - 30 in other people's bookshelves. I guess I should be including Bill's too but what if he counts mine when he does a similar exercise? Na, we will leave it at that.

Last book(s) I bought

Arun Kolatkar - Jejuri. How can I not own this one?

Rucha Humnabadkar - Dance of the Fireflies [Public service announcement / supporting a friend. This also qualifies as my good deed of the day.]

The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman

No, No, I am not into poetry. Pure coincidence.

Last books(s) I read

Malcolm Gladwell - Blink. I have to explain this one, I know. I read this one yesternight so that I can get a free lunch at today's book club at work. I swear.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment. Re-read it this week. At 18, I thought it was funny; at 21, I found it too depressing; now, I find it too optimistic. What should one do with moi?

Illango Atikal - The Cilappatikaram. Translation by R Parthasarathy. Can't help thinking that its slightly lost in translation.

Books I am currently reading

Amartya Sen - The Argumentative Indian. Two more essays to go.

Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore

Roald Dahl - The Collected Stories. Picked this one up for a mere 100 rupees in College Street, Cal. Can you believe that?

Five books that I have really enjoyed or influenced me

Five? Who are we kidding? Let me do this - since I am all into 'Blink'ing now that I have read the book, I will try a little experiment. I will write down the first ten books that come to my mind.

William Golding - Lord of the Flies

Oscar Wilde - The Complete Plays

William Shakespeare - The Complete Plays

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude

Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children

Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five

P G Wodehouse - The Jeeves Omnibus

Richmal Crompton - The William series[At least I know where this one came from. Might not have happened if I hadn't read Falstaff's list this morning.]

Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities

Howard Zinn - A People's History of the United States

Oh no, I forgot Tolkien. And Dostoyevsky. And Jane Austen. What am I going to do now?

Books I plan to buy next

No plan. I will just know when I want to buy what I want to buy.

Books that caught my attention but I have never read

Virginia Woolf - Mrs Dalloway

James Joyce - Ulysses

Books I own but have never got around to reading

Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace

Philip Roth - American Pastoral

Romila Thapar - Early India

Teach Yourself Bengali!

Well, this list is sort of long, so I think I will stop here!

People I am passing this on to

"Yaam petra inbam perugai vaiyagam" - Let the happiness that I have experienced spread to the whole wide world.

JAP-da - Have you done one of these? If so, post link please.

Karthik - How about you?

Ludwig - C'mon, you love lists. You can do this.

Black Mamba - You knew this was coming, didn't you?

Past-Life Regression / What the $%^#?

Do you ever think that you have lived before? Do you feel that some of your current relationships began in an earlier life? Do you have an illness or problem that you attribute to a past life? Do you believe your present job is related to what you did in a previous life? Past-life regression provides answers and relief that no other method can.
In this class you will learn about life between lives, your current life's lessons and why you chose to reincarnate. This is an experiantial class; each student will have at least one opportunity to privately recall a past life. BYOC (bring your own candle). This course offers a quick, inexpensive way to get in touch with your past lives!

Sec Y Thur Mar 23 @ 7 PM
Class Fee - $49
2940 N Lincoln Ave, Chicago, IL

My mean deed of the day

I once put my ATM card into the receipt slot of the darned machine. So I was drunk. Another time, I went to the airport a week early. My flight was for the following Friday. NY beckoned and I couldn't wait. More recently, I made an U-turn at a STOP sign while this cop car was right behind me. I still maintain that its legal and I have to go to court next month to get my license back. The excuse is that I actually found a parking spot in the city, it just happened to be on the wrong side of the road.

But here's what I have never done - I have never, I repeat, never filled my black Beetle with 2 gallons of diesel. Wait a sec, I don't own a black Beetle. So here's it again - I have never filled the fuel tank of my beat-up, cheap, Japanese car with 2 gallons of diesel.

BM, I am sorry but I really cannot stop laughing.

Have a safe Valentine's day!

No, I am not going to rant about how commercial this whole V-day thing is. Because everyone knows how crass it is and I am going to add nothing new. In fact, I'd argue that it is as commercial and as crass as any other day and anyone who picks on V-day has a severe case of the fox and the grapes syndrome. Instead, I am going to appeal to the people who celebrate V-day to observe some basic social niceties next time around. I believe that these people are not beyond reason - someone just needs to sit down and explain to them how they may inadvertently cause injury to themselves and the society at large. So if you have big plans for V-day(well, next year, I guess) and if you happen to live in the city that I live in, here are some pointers for a safe Valentine's day:

1. Ask yourself whether your Valentine really loves chocolate. When you keep a box of dark chocolate in front of her, does she gobble it all up with a single-minded determination? Or does she say 'How nice of you!' and then neatly put the box back on the coffee table? If your Valentine does the latter, please do NOT buy her a box of chocolates for V-day. Because you might not realise this, but the box of chocolates that you so lovingly gave her will miraculously find itself on the reception desk of her office the next day and guess who gets to eat it? Guess who puts on 5 pounds over the next week? Losers like ME.

2. V-day, in case you forget, happens in February. In the northern hemisphere, it is the middle of winter. In Chicago for example, the coldest month of the year is February. February is great for cuddling up in bed and having gory sex but here's what February is not good for - promenading by the lake. Did I say it gets really cold in Chicago? And it gets windy too. If you are near a water body, it is colder and more windy. Especially when this water body happens to be Lake Michigan which is usually frozen in February, it is even more colder. So the last thing your Valentine wants to do in her off-shoulders little, black dress is to have a walk by the lake. She might not tell you how much she hates it then but later, two years down the line when you are blissfully married, she might stab you with a kitchen knife. [This whole walk by the lake, stabbed by a kitchen knife is a true story btw. Ask anyone who went to Urbana Champaign or Michigan State five years ago and they will corroborate. The dead man used to teach at Michigan State while the lady studied at UC. She is currently serving time in a Fed prison, I believe.]

3. Decide what is it exactly that you want from V-day. Are you aiming to get laid or are you aiming to watch a Steppenwolf production? If all you want is to get laid, taking your Valentine to the Steppenwolf is NOT a good idea. A number of things could go wrong - she might hate the play and hence refuse to sleep with you, she might want to watch the play but with you distracting her the whole time she might just walk out on you or more dangerous, a peaceful spectator like me who for some Godforsaken reason happened to go to Steppenwolf on V-day might just step out, buy an assualt rifle from a nearby convenience store, come back into the theater and shoot you in the head. So if you have to go somewhere and make out, there are hundreds of movie theaters which are screening excretable chick flicks [which I agree is repetitive]. Please go to one of them.

4. Romantic restaurants are overrated. If Metromix tells you that the most romantic restaurant in the city is Geja's, don't take your Valentine there. It is quite a dingy place and there will be 130 other couples at your elbows every time you turn around. You will both come out of the restaurant smelling of chicken broth which is not what to want to smell of considering your plans for the rest of the night. And I am telling you this because I care and NOT because I happen to live a block from Geja's and could do without all the traffic jams that I had to encounter yesternight. In fact, I have been hearing good things about some romantic restuarants in the suburbs - apparently they are much better than the ones in the city. Maybe try one of them next time?

5. Trust me on this one, your Valentine loves SUVs. Next Valentine's day, take her out to the romantic restuarant in the suburbs on a SUV and your night will be made. Horse-drawn carriages are so passe. They were quite the rage in the 1890s but not anymore. Nowadays, all they do is hold up traffic on Michigan Ave and people like me who usually get home in 20 minutes now take an hour and 20 minutes to get home. Think about this - what if one of us peaceful people in the bus get the same idea as the peaceful spectator at the Steppenwolf?

Spreading democracy

Here.

This Day That Age

As I walked out of my building this morning, I couldn't resist walking past the bus stop to 2122 N Clark. Its a landscaped parking lot for a senior care nursing home. It's quite cold today though it hasn't been snowing. I remember reading somewhere that it was quite snowy this day in 1929. The building I live in was built in 1905. Someone must have lived or worked here in 1929. Maybe that day she walked past the bus stop to the warehouse to see what was going on. Maybe not. If she was spotted, she might have been shot too. Maybe she was just at home, sleeping in what is now my bedroom when she heard the sound of machine gun fire. Wonder what was going through her head.

If you have taken one of the Untouchables tours in Chicago, you couldn't have missed this parking lot. This is the location of one of the most colorful gangland hits in Chicago's mob history. "Scarface" Capone vs. "Bugs" Moran. Capone's men dressed as cops, entered the warehouse and shot Moran's men. This hit supposedly led to a huge public outcry against Capone though he was never indicted. Capone was actually booked under tax evasion(in 1931) if I am not mistaken!

You can read about the St. Valentine's day massacre here.

Bring out the brownie

Rich chocolate brownie slightly heated, hot fudge on top and French vanilla icecream on the side. The Whole Foods brownie is bloody expensive btw, try the Trader Joe's one, its awesome and affordable and it comes in packets of four.

Low fat food does not cut health risks, says the front page of the Times.

Those bastards would never give it to me!

Moi and MR went to a Julian Barnes reading at the Newbury Library yester evening. Yes, yes, he is quite good-looking but a good 20 years too old if you know what I mean. The reading went so-so. He picked a safe passage to read - where Arthur means Jean. Not surprising, as I thought that the book itself took a very safe route while it could have been much more.

Mean Moi couldn't resist asking him as he was signing my copy whether he expected to win the Booker. I was waiting for some modest reply like "yes, it was a strong year" or something like that to which I would make some remark about how McEwan was the one who should have won it etc etc. but he happened to be as mean as moi!

"No", he answered "I did not expect to win it at all. Because I knew who the judges were. I knew they would never have given it to me."

Hmm. Sour grapes, you think?

More on Betty Friedan

Yester evening, as I entered the apartment loaded with groceries, Bill, who was supposedly “working” looked up from his laptop and laughed.

“What?”

“The irony of it. That you should go get groceries while I am sitting at home reading this.”

“Reading what?”

“Betty Friedan passed away, the Times reports.”

***********************************************

Books change lives. Remember that Ayn Rand-quoting misanthrope you used to know in school? Or that Sartre-reading existentialist who kept raving about how meaningless life was? But how many books can you think of that changed not just a few lives but the whole world? Books that questioned an entire generation’s attitude to life and their place in society, books that transformed the world as we knew it to be.

Rousseau’s The Social Contract heavily influenced the protagonists of the French Revolution and the American War of Independence, two events which changed the course of history. Marx’s Das Kapital reverberates in various parts of the world even today. Einstein’s essays on Relativity changed the way we looked at the physical universe. And more recently, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (along with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex) changed the fabric of Western society and inspired women’s movements on the other side of the globe. I read The Feminine Mystique when I was 19 and I was completely captivated by what she called “the problem with no name”. She wrote:

"The problem that has no name — which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities — is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease."

Her emphasis might have been on middle-class, suburban American women but there was no doubt in my mind that it applied to women everywhere. I grew up in a place where gender inequality is very much institutionalized and rarely questioned. In classrooms and playgrounds, when you are not “allowed” to do certain things or play certain games, when you need to be more “protected” from the world, when you are “pushed” towards certain professions, when you learn to carry safety pins and chilli powder in your purses, in movies where the women are a “commodity”, at work when you have to work twice as hard and still don’t make the cut, and most of all, at home where your worth is measured by your ability to cook and clean, to bear and bring up children. That I was brought up in a “liberated” household is hardly the point; the biases of the society always wield an unconscious influence in every home, admit it or not. And every single time that happened to me or to anyone I know, I would remember Friedan:

“Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents. They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents. They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights -- the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for.”

And today, as I read the news of Friedan’s death, its very humbling to remember that the many things that I take for granted here in the country that has been my home for the past five years – equal rights, equal pay, legal abortion, maternity leave to name a few – were the fruits of the feminist movement that this woman kick-started in the 1960s. To those who argue that Friedan’s feminism is not inclusive (as she does not seem to include the poor, the blacks or the lesbians), I would say that lets not take the woman or her ideas out of her time and place.

So has the battle been won? At least in this part of the world? Can we all go back home victorious and wait for the food to appear on the table? Not so fast. Just switch on the television set, or read one of those “lifestyle” pieces (remember Maureen Dowd’s book?) that seem to appear with astonishing regularity in the NY Times? Or just look around you. How many of your co-workers slipped into suburban obscurity over the past few years? Can we really deny that in this country, we are still “taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents?” Can we really claim that we as a society don’t measure a woman’s worth by the man she ends up with? And until a day arrives when we can make that claim, here or in any other part of the world, Betty Friedan’s work is not finished. The torch just passes on to you and me.

Update: Do read R~’s tribute to Friedan at Locana.

Black Horse

Apparently, there's some flash fiction contest happening that junta is all enthu about, so I thought I'd attempt it too. The only issue being, you know, I can't really write fiction and so I figured I will rewrite it. Might as well choose a masterpiece then, don't you think?

With apologies to all Kafka fans, here's my Metamorphosis:

One morning, when Gautam Sen woke from troubled dreams, he found himself standing next to his bed, transformed into a black horse. He stood upright, and if he turned his head, he could see a black, bushy tail. He supposed that his bedding had slid off him, as he could see it lying by his right hoof. His long mane, pitifully thin when compared to the rest of his body, waved about helplessly as he turned his head.

“What’s happened to me?” he thought. “How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense?” But that was something he was unable to do as he was used to sleeping on his bed, and in his present state, he couldn’t do that. However hard he tried, he could not fit into his bed at all. He must have tried it a hundred times.

“Oh God”, he thought, “what a strenuous career it is that I have chosen? Meetings day in and day out, monotonous hotel rooms Monday to Thursday, bad and irregular food, missed flight connections, contact with different people all the time so that you can never get to know them or become friendly with them. It can all go to hell!” He trotted to the far end of the room so that he could look at himself in the mirror. He saw his reflection and thought, “Oh God! How am I going to drive that SUV to the airport now? Maybe I should call a cab, I mean, a horse van. But wait a minute, no, I don’t need to anymore. It can all really go to hell.” So he trotted towards the door and knocked his head against it; the door slid open soundlessly and he galloped out into the sunlight.

PS: Falstaff, MR, will you ever forgive me now?

Farewell Betty Friedan

The woman who changed the face of womanhood in the last half-century died today. The torch has been passed on.

PS: Can it be true that God is actually with the right-wingers? Rosa Parks, Coretta King and Betty Friedan within months of each other? There must be something wrong up there.

Go Steelers!

Okay, I know that I am not exactly a football fan. Until four months ago, when my manager literally tied me to a chair and made me watch the World Series, I didn't know the difference between the World Series and the Super Bowl. But I love Diplodocus! We have spent many a fall evening together staring across the street at the Heinz chapel and the Cathedral of Learning while cars zoomed past us on Forbes Avenue. I would get a brownie and cup of coffee from Kiva Han, walk to CLP, pick up some books and DVDs and then I would go sit by Diplodocus and we would keep each other company. I would read out Wilde to him and he loved Earnest; he always kept asking me to read it. That's when he told me that he hates being called Dippy and that he prefers Diplodocus. He also hates kids, he said the brats don't realize that he is a real person and that they treat him like he is some museum piece or something. I never had the heart to tell him that he is indeed a museum piece.

So if Diplodocus roots for Steelers whoever they are, so will I!

[PS: Bill, now you know what I used to do when you didn't turn up on time. I was having imaginary conversations with that stupid dinosaur.]

There's still hope...

for some of us. Here.

Titles

I have realised that the key in any relationship is to figure out how often you want to see the other person. [Please see Falstaff's post on sabbathals for some related reading.]

For the past 3 years, it has worked out pretty well for Bill and moi - once in every 3 weeks we would meet up, have hazaar fun and go back to our own lives. And then one day, out of the blue, Southwest happened, so we started meeting every 2 weeks which I think, is still okay. Over the last month however, mostly due to some tickets being paid for by big, evil companies, we have been seeing each other every weekend which is proving to be a bit too much. I have no time anymore for my reading, cooking, writing, movies, music, friends, well, basically my life. Its like my life's on hold and it ain't fun. And before some of you get on my case and start calling me an ungrateful wretch (BM, are you listening?), let me inform you all that this claustrophobia is being felt on both sides, well, of the Lake.

Tangents before I even begin! What am I to do?! Getting to the subject at hand here, moi's been wondering about names again. Nope, not train names this time. Discussions happening elsewhere about opening lines makes moi think of book titles. So there are titles and there are titles. Here are some favorites:

1. One Hundred Years of Solitude
2. Catch - 22
3. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
4. Great Expectations
5. Remembrance of Things Past
6. Chronicles of a Death Foretold
7. To Kill a Mockingbird
8. A Catcher in the Rye
9. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
10. Midnight's Children

[Before you start crying foul, yes, these include some of my favorite books but not all of them are favorites. For example, I like Kundera but I am not a huge fan. Same goes for Proust.]

What I find interesting about this list(or any top titles list for that matter) is this: just by looking at the list one can easily separate the ones originally written in English from the ones that were originally written in other languages. Certain languages like Spanish (or my native tongue) lend themselves to phrases that the English language would never be able to think of by itself. Quite a few of these lines tend to get lost in translation but the ones that don't are the ones that will always remain in your memory.

Enough said. So what are your favorites?

More NPR moments

Radio Expeditions is in Kawakarpo.

From Salzburg, celebrating Mozart's 250th.

Where is my Frances?

Poem of the day: Confessions to be Traced on a Birthday Cake by Ogden Nash.

Lots of people are richer than me,
Yet pay a slenderer tax;
Their annual levy seems to wane
While their income seems to wax.
Lots of people have stocks and bonds
To further their romances;
I’ve cashed my ultimate Savings Stamp —
But nobody else has Frances.

Lots of people are stronger than me,
With greater athletic menaces;
They poise like gods on diving boards
And win their golfs and tennises.
Lots of people have lots more grace
And cut fine figures at dances,
While I was born with galoshes on —
But nobody else has Frances.

Lots of people are wiser than me,
And carry within their cranium
The implications of Stein and Joyce
And the properties of uranium.
They know the mileage to every star
In the heaven’s vast expanses;
I’m inclined to believe that the world is flat —
But nobody else has Frances.

Speaking of wisdom and wealth and grace —
As recently I have dared to —
There are lots of people compared to whom
I’d rather not be compared to.
There are people I ought to wish I was;
But under the circumstances,
I prefer to continue my life as me —
For nobody else has Frances.

Links to a talk...

that I would have loved to attend. We can all fight for 'freedom' and 'choice', but does it really matter to someone who's starving?

The usual suspects turned up at Xavier's recently for a talk by P. Sainath Anand has a post here and Vikram here. Anand also has a lot of informative links on his post. Well worth your time, I would say.

Buried in hyperreality

"This is the reason for this journey into hyperreality, in search of instances where the American imagination demands the real thing and to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake; where the boundaries between game and illusion are blurred, the art museum is contaminated by the freak show, and falsehood is enjoyed in a situation of "fullness", of horror vacui".

How can one not bloody love this guy? Years ago, I read this essay by the abbey at Melk [I mean, if you are at Melk, you have to read Eco right? And no, I did not have The Name of the Rose with me then. It wasn't planned alright? I just sort of lost my way and found myself at Melk. Okay okay, here's the truth - my fractured femur which was supposed to have healed by then didn't hold up and I had to take the boat into Melk and wait around while my "friends" biked around the Austrian countryside. BM, are you happy now?] and dismissed Eco as your quintessential, snooty, elitist European intellectual with a disdain for all things American. Rereading it now, after spending quite a few years in the land of the Free, I kick myself for not seeing what's so obvious. Eco might be the the quintessential snooty, European intellectual but how could one ever dismiss him?

Audio poetry

Da Black Mamba has an idea*. When pō'ĭ-trē becomes poetry's iTunes, remember you heard it here first. Shares, you ask? What are you waiting for? Start recording poetry.

*Snakes do come up with the best ideas. Didn't you read Chinese astrology?

Live from Chongqing

For you NPR fans out there, Marketplace's Kai Ryssdal is in China this whole week. I listened to today's edition and it is pretty cool. Do tune in.

Pongal on my mind

All my teachers know the day before that I would be sick the following day. Appa used to call it the first floating holiday of the year. I rush home from school to find Amma drawing mavu kolams all over the front yard. I am given the task of filling them with color podis but I keep running inside the house under some pretext or other. I drag one of the tall chairs from the dining room into the kitchen right next to the shelf which has fresh jaggery and grated coconut. I have a mouthful and run back to help Amma. She looks at my face and smiles and says nothing.

Once Appa gets home, I con him to take me along to the bazaar. We set out on his Bajaj scooter to buy sugarcanes and turmeric. When we get close to the market, we see sugarcanes everywhere - every pedestrain has a couple of them; I see them in handcarts, on roofracks of cars, on scooters and bicycles - it's as if people are buying only sugarcanes.

"Appa", I shout. "Are these sugarcanes safe?"

"What do you mean? Don't you like them?"

"I do. But don't they have snakes?"

"What? Who's been telling you about snakes on sugarcanes."

"R, that kid I met in the village last vacation, he told me. He said they when they harvest sugarcanes, atleast a couple of people die every year because of snakebites. Snakes like sugarcanes."

"No, he's making up stuff. And anyway, no one's harvesting canes here. These are all cut sugarcanes."

"What if the snake's coiled around a sugarcane and no one saw it?"

"Nonsense. There is no snake coiled around any sugarcane here. Come, I will show you."

He parks the scooter and takes me to the nearest handcart. He tells the vendor in Tamil that I am looking for snakes and they both start laughing. The vendor asks me to look for snakes in his cart. I do not find any and I am happy now and start looking at other things. People are buying turmeric, and drumsticks and jaggery and plantain and rice. Everyone seems to be talking animatedly in Tamil. The only other time I have seen the market this crowded is during Onam. We manage to buy turmeric and sugarcanes and get home. I try to con Amma to let me eat some sugarcane but she doesn't oblige. Instead, I am fed dinner and told to go to sleep as I have to wake up early the next day. Cousins will start arriving by 8 and I, apparently, have to get ready before that.

Next morning, I get woken up early and asked to get ready. New pattu pavadai is waiting, so there's no need for any conning. I get ready and come downstairs; Amma's getting the Pongal paanais ready. I help arrange them on the kolams. One for Venn Pongal, one for Paruppu Pongal, one for Sarkarai Pongal. People start arriving soon after. They all bring more paanais, so by now, all the kolams in the yard have paanais on them. Amma and all athais start the fire and put rice and milk and jaggery into the paanais. All the kids watch eagerly for the Pongal to flow out - we start shouting Pongalo Pongal anyways. Once the Pongal actually flows out, we are allowed to have breakfast - idlis and sambar and chutney and vadai and kesari and pongal. Needless to say, the sugarcane fest is just beginning.

Appa gets all the kids together and starts telling us about Pongal in the village - of incense and the smell of fresh-cut paddy, of sugarcanes and jaggery and palms, of Boghi and Pongal and the manji verattu during Mattu Pongal where my grandpa's bull never gets caught. We all listen with rapt attention and ask him to take us there to see all this. We are told we will be taken there some year if we all learn a kural. This is where I get to show off - I have been taught a kural a week, so I know more kurals than all my cousins, so I recite one kural after another. This is also where I get beaten up by the cousins for attempting to show off. Soon we are left to our own devices and we start hogging more sugarcane.

It would be fun, I think, to be back home now. I should have gotten a couple more weeks off. Maybe gotten the boy to experience some of it. Maybe take him to the Tam sangham Pongal vizha in the evening; he would have fun. Or maybe we could have actually gone to the village and seen the real thing. Oh, how I miss home. So I start calling people back home. Junta is all happy I called. All my nephews and nieces say Hi. But no, they don't have any sugarcane stories to tell me, no Pongalo Pongal, no manji verattu either. Instead this is what I hear:

"Athai..how are you? No, I want to be home playing games on my computer and they got me here. Can you believe it?"

"Sugarcane? Yuck. Already I am the fattest girl in my class. You are mad kya?"

"Akka, yeah, I am fine. And listen, I will mail you later. I gotta go now. Sun TV is interviewing my favorite actress."

"Pongal? Yeah, they are showing all the paanais on TV. We ordered some from this really cool restaurant. Its awesome."

"Kolams? The last time I did that was for some school competition. You are so archaic! You actually think people draw kolams nowadays."

And so on.

With every call, I am feeling better. Here, in this alien land, I can easily live in my suspended world of kolams and paanais in our front yard uninterrupted by 24-hour TV programming. I don't have to think of reality. Memories are enough. The last call is to my parents.

"Hello, Appa."

"Finally. I was wondering when you were going to call."

"I thought I would call everyone and then call you."

"Okay, okay. First you tell me the new kural you learnt today."

And the eyes start blurring.

Mirror mirror on the wall....

Who is the geekiest of them all?

BM calls yesternight to have a chat.

BM: So how's married life treating you?

Me: Nothing's changed.

BM: People are asking me whats news from the married woman. What am I supposed to say?

Me: I don't know. That I am 3 months pregnant?

BM: Oh shut up. You must be doing something different, something interesting.

Me: Nothing different. I am doing a lot of interesting stuff though. But that I always did na.

BM: Okay dudette, its high time we had a chat about the stuff you do or rather, the stuff you put up on blog.

Me: What?

BM: Remember this. I said nothing when you were killing hamsters for a living and working on Matrix-type Excel workbooks.

Me: I did NOT kill hamsters for a living. I was forecasting sales for a life-saving drug.

BM: Same thing. Isn't the drug made from hamsters? Anyways, thats besides the point.

Me: So what is the point?

BM: And remember this too. I kept quiet throughout your Tolkien phase.

Me: My what phase?

BM: Tolkien phase. Maybe you forgot the time in college when you used to talk to everyone in the language that Tolkien invented. Some of us still remember.

Me: Okay, whatever.

BM: But atleast you didn't write in that language and put it on your blog.

Me: So what did I do now?

BM: Indian Railways. You did a post on Indian Railways!

Me: So?

BM: Don't you get it? There are only two kinds of people who write about Indian Railways!

Me: Please do enlighten me on these two types of people.

BM: Type A - the retired government servant who sits in the verandah of his house doing Hindu crosswords and keeps writing letters to the Editor. If he had a blog, he would write about Indian Railways.

Me: Thats not bad actually. I could sit in the verandah and solve Hindu crosswords for the rest of my life. It sounds pretty cool dudette.

BM: But you, my dear, are not a retired government servant. So that leaves Type B.

Me: Which is?

BM: Do I have to say it? The only other people I know who read Indian Railways timetables are my Dad and Bill.

Me: So?

BM: Don't you see? My Dad and Bill!

Me: What about them?

BM: They are both certified Geeks. That's what's common. You know what people call them? Geek Gods!

Me: Mmm. Now if only Bill was a Greek God, I would be happier. But then, only Linus has the distinction of being both a Geek God and a Greek God.

BM: See, see, you come up with absolutely useless trivia. Who cares if there's a Greek God called Linus?

Me: Dudette, what's your point?

BM: Here, let me spell it out. You are a G-E-E-K. End of story.

Me: Balderdash. Scores of people write about Indian Railways. Thay are not geeks.

BM: Oh yeah? Show me one.

Me: There's this Ludwig guy for one.

BM: Yeah? And how exactly do you know he is not a geek?

Me: Maybe I don't. But that's besides the point. All I know is I am not a geek. I don't know anything about gadgets. So there.

BM: There are different kinds of geeks, you know.

Me: Oh yeah? Are you doing a PhD on the types of geeks or what?

BM: No dudette. I just want to help you here. And tell you that even if you like reading railway timetables, it might be better not to put it on your blog.

Me: No one thinks I am geek because of this post okay?

BM: Oh really?

Me: Yeah and I think now I have figured this out. This is not about me, its about you. You are the geek and you are trying to convince yourself that you are not. So you are making me a geek.

BM: What?

Me: Yeah, you are the uncool one. The geeky one. I don't worship the land Linus walks on. Neither do I spend my mornings reading everything on Slashdot.

BM: Yeah right. So you are all this cool, non-geek now.

Me: Ofcourse I am.

And so it went. And what did you think night time minutes were for?

On train names

A week ago, I was in Kurla station seeing off parents. As the Netravati Express slowly made its way out of the station, my eyes blurred and in an attempt to get on with things, I turned towards the boy.

“Can you put Netravati on the map?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“Where does it start?”

“I know the general area. Not sure of origin. It flows into the Arabian Sea though.”

“Oh really? I would never have guessed! I thought it goes East all the way and flows into the Bay of Bengal!”

“Okay okay. I don’t know where in the Ghats it starts. Just that it flows through Mangalore.”

“My Dad would have known the origin. He knows all rivers.”

“Really? Can he plot the course of the Danube?”

“Oh shut up. Let’s go home and find where Netravati originates.”

And thus we learn that the Netravati has its origins at Gangamoola in Chikmangalur district of Karnataka. The water supply for the city of Mangalore is almost entirely from this river. The namesake train which my parents took snakes down the Konkan coast through Ratnagiri and Goa into Mangalore and enters the northernmost part of Kerala at Kasargode. It then traverses down the entire length of God's own Country and drops my parents home at Thiruvananthapuram.

Back in those days when home was called Trivandrum and life was about inventing excuses to go to Ernakulam with friends, there were no cool Janashatbdis or Inter-Cities. Instead, there was the Vanchinad Express which used to be the fastest train on that single-track route. [Vanchinad literally translates to the land in the shape of a boat - it refers to the shape of the princely state of Travancore.] If one had to go from Trivandrum to Madras in those days, there was only one direct train and it had a very bland name. It was called No: 20 Madras Mail and it would come back as No: 19 Trivandrum Mail. Nowadays though, there’s another one – this train that cuts through the Tamil heartland to reach the city where Ananthan rests is called the Ananthapuri Express.

Now, we Tams, despite popular belief, actually come up with some outstanding names. Well, let me qualify that - we come up with some outstanding names when we are NOT naming ourselves, our rivers, our lakes, our temples, our buses and our trains after movie stars, politicians or worse, movie-star turned politicians. Like a month ago, I was traversing a very-flooded Pallava country on my way from Madras Egmore to the place my parents call home on the aptly-named Pallavan Express. You can also travel the same route if you take the Rock Fort(Malai Kottai, a millenium old fort in Trichy) Express. Here's a secret while I am at this - the best food ever served by Indian Railways used to happen on a meter-guage train on this route. Next time you want to go to the temple city by the river which is always dry(unless you are talking well, 2005), take the Vaigai Express from Madras Egmore into Madurai. On the other hand, if you actually want to land up in a place where you can hog some of the freshest vegetables your urban tongue has ever tasted, take either the Lalbagh Express or the Blue Mountain (Nilgiri) Express out of Madras. And no, my dear Telugu brethern, I did not forget the Charminar Express. Just figuring out a place to fit it in.

At the risk of being disowned by my very S. Indian family, I must make a confession here. Despite some very excellent names that grace the trains that travel down South, I happen to have on my favorites list quite a few trains that go to and from a particularly pretentious metropolis in Eastern India. Their pretentiousness in naming trains is really very endearing - who else will come up Aginveena Express, Gitanjali Express, Azad Hind Express, Ganadevta Express, Rupashi Bangla Express, or the Shantiniketan Express?

You have more trains, you say? What about the Deccan Queen, you ask? And how can I not mention my all-time favorite - the Coromandel Express? How about the Hirakud Express? Or the Golden Temple Mail? And I forgot the Ahimsa Express? And countless number of train names which mean so much to us. Names with so much history associated with them. All you need, I tell you, is a towel and a copy of the latest Indian Railways timetable and the whole country is yours!

What's in a name?

What connects the following?

1. Nethravati
2. Azad Hind
3. Gitanjali
4. Jim Corbett Park
5. Navjivan
6. Rock Fort and
7. Sangamitra

Get this and you will know why numbers, more often than not, prove to be insufficient. (Okay you geeks, so shoot me.) And why mugging your Social Sciences textbook is the wrong way to learn about your country.

Dance of the fireflies

I am glad to inform you all that I have got my own budding, young writer-friend. Where's yours?

And yes, I am back. Regular blogging should resume soon.