“There is a Cucumber in My Dosa!” - The Alternative Dosa Guide

It would not be an empty boast to say that if a South Indian were marooned on a desert island, he/she would probably find something to make dosa out of. What I mean to say is that the popular perception that a dosa is “a fermented crepe made out of rice and black lentil” is like saying that India is made up of 28 states and 7 union territories. It is also an insulting definition because it undermines the inventiveness of the average dosa cook. In fact, I like to believe that the astonishingly vast variety of dosas has been partly sired by boredom at the prospect of eating yet another of the aforementioned fermented crepe for yet another breakfast/tiffin.
Naturally, the question is - how many kinds of dosas are there? In order to answer that question, I will have to demolish a couple of popular dosa myths.
The first is that a dosa is the collusion of rice with black gram or urad dal. Well, first of all, historically speaking, that was not how the dosa started off. According to food historian, K T Achaya, the first mention of  ‘tosai’ is in Tamil Sangam literature, dating back to the 6th century AD and at the time, it was probably made only out of rice.  (A close relative of the dosa, the “appam”, first mentioned a hundred years earlier in the Perumpanuru, one of the ten anthologies in the collection of  Sangam poetry called Pathu Pattu, is made out of fermented rice batter, but the fermenting agents range from toddy to yeast, never urad dal.) And even more interestingly, the  “dhosaka” mentioned in Manasollasa, the Chalukyan king Someswara’s massive encyclopedia about daily life in 12th century Karnataka, was made only of dals - no rice at all!
So, it is true that the most common variety of dosa eaten (and sold) today is made out of a fermented batter of rice and urad dal. But it is said that there are 330 million gods and goddesses in the Hindu pantheon and while it may be rash to claim that there is a variety of dosa to appease each of those 330 milion divinities, let’s just say that there are enough to keep our mortal palates perpetually tickled and titillated. And many of these dosas stray off the fermented-rice-and-urad-dal path. The most well known examples are pesarattu and adai – favourite alternative dosas in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. While rice is present in both of them, it really plays a sidekick, the centre-stage occupied a whole melange of dals, all the way from green gram (moong) to channa dal.
But to illustrate my point more vehemently, let me tell you about a lesser known yet far more interesting family of dosas that hails from coastal Karnataka.

Family name (Tulu)- balchat
Most members of this family are made out of rice, but what makes them different is that the grain is ground together with a vegetable. Which could be a selection of greens, though not boring old spinach but a whole host of local, seasonal greens like malabar spinach and colocasia (arvi) leaves and some so local that they don’t even have a name in English! Or then, it could be one of the two vegetables that are my favourites balchat additions – cucumber and white pumpkin. For two reasons. First, both vegetables lend a very distinctive but delicate flavour to the dosas. But they also colour them a beautiful pale, pista-green shade, guaranteed to elicit a very gratifying gust of “oohs” and “aahs” when presented to the uninitiated.
Did I say “ground together”? Actually, that is not always so, because many balchat aficionados prefer to chop the vegetable very fine and then add it to the rice batter rather than grind it along with the rice. The result is that you get these little crunchy bits of the veggie in every mouthful of dosa – absolutely delightful!
And then, though not a member of the balchat clan, there is the dosa with a fruit in it! As any jackfruit lover will tell you, during jackfruit season there is such a glorious glut of the fruit that it inspires cooks to look for hundreds of different ways to use it all up. And one way is to make a dosa out of it – by grinding ripe jackfruit together with grated coconut and rice. The resulting faintly golden, slightly sweet, sumptuously “jackfruity” dosa is so delicious that it requires nothing but a splash of melted ghee to accompany it!
These are traditional recipes and sadly, an endangered species. Which is ironic because there are two things that make these dosas particularly relevant for modern day living. First of all, the presence of vegetables or fruit makes them very healthy and loads them with nutrients like vitamins, minerals and fibre.
And secondly?

Now, that brings me to the second dosa myth. That a dosa is a laborious time-consuming dish, requiring hours of preparation needed - to soak the grain and dal and ferment the batter. Once again, while this is true of the rice-and-urad variety, there are enough examples that are otherwise. The pesarattu, the adai and entire balchat family of dosas are quickies, made from batters that used almost immediately after they are ground. In fact, one member of the balchat family is what I would call the true instant dosa. A version of it, called godhumai dosa, is a popular emergency snack especially in Tamil Nadu and is made out of wheat flour. But the balchat cooks have bettered on this, going straight to the actual grain. And the recipe is brilliantly simple and quick - wheat grain is washed, then ground into dosa-batter consistency and made into dosas and within a matter of minutes, you have a gorgeous, high-fibre, low-cal meal!
But, as far as I am concerned, the star among these no-ferment quickie dosas comes - once again - from coastal Karnataka.

Neer dosa
Beautifully thin and soft with lacey edges, this is a diva among dosas, because though the batter is easy to prepare, it is difficult to make. You see, “neer” means water in Kannada and Tulu and the reason why it is so christened is because unlike most dosa batters, this batter is very thin, almost water like in consistency, achieved by grinding the rice very, very fine and adding plenty of water to it. Therefore, to make this dosa, you cannot place a dollop of the batter in the centre of the tava and spread it outwards in circular motions as you would for other dosas – the “wateriness” of the batter doesn’t permit it. Instead you have to pour the batter around the edge of the tava and allow it to run down evenly to the centre to form a dosa. But to achieve that ‘makhmali’ thinness that is the hallmark of a good neer dosa, the tava has to be just the right temperature, the batter just the right consistency and you have to pour at just the right speed! But if you get all these elements right, the result is magic – a delicate, exquisitely soft, almost translucent white dosa that would put any roomali roti to shame! (Incidentally, this dosa doesn’t need a drop of oil for cooking, just a well-greased tava.)

I could go on because the list is long even though I know only of the dosas that came out of my maternal grandmother’s kitchen. But my point is - there are dosas and dosas. Made out of almost anything that is willing to allow itself to become a dosa. Some fried to a crisp, golden brown-ness (the Kannada term is “gari-gari”, a wonderfully onomatopic term, don’t you think?), others gently steamed to a soft, fluffy whiteness. Some thin as paper (and as fragile), some thick as quilts (and as soft). Some slightly tart, others slightly sweet and still other tarted up with everything from chopped onions and tomatoes to cheese. (One version of the appam has an egg broken on top of it as it cooks – a fabulous Indian interpretation to “sunny-side up”.) Some are stuffed (one famous Mumbai street-food version is stuffed with Chinese fried noodles!), some lined with fiery chutneys and powders and some others prefer to go plain, but accompanied by anything from the ubiquitous coconut chutney to chicken curry. But whatever the denomination of the dosa, there is one thing that all of them have in common.
Holes.
The chemistry explanation is that any kind of batter - including the non-fermented kind - has a certain amount of air incorporated into it as a result of the grinding and the mixing actions. So, when the dosa batter is spread on a hot tava, the heat causes this air in the batter to expand and escape, leaving behind little holes all over the dosa.
But that’s the boring “science-y” explanation.
In Karnataka, we have a different take on these holes and a very deeply philosophical one at that. You see, we’ve figured that the holes have been put there to remind us that however much it may seem otherwise, nobody’s life (and figure) is perfect. Not even Bill Gates. Or Aishwarya Rai. It’s a reminder that keeps envy at bay and makes it a little easier to put up with those dratted Jones. So, the next time we hear about how the rich-bungalow-in-Beverly-Hills-NRI-aunt’s daughter ran away with the Korean cook and how Sambumurthy mama’s perfect son-in-law was caught with his hand in the till, we nod happily, cluck our tongues and crow to each other, “Yellaru mane dosey toothave”.
Literal translation – the dosa in everyone’s house has holes in it.
Figurative translation – Nobody life is perfect.

Teflon Ka Baap

It was an indispensable – and I would go so far as to say sacrosanct - part of the South Indian kitchen (and still is in many places) till the new-fangled non-stick cookware usurped its place. The dosa tava. (In Kannada, it is called the “dosey kallu”, “kallu” meaning stone and probably referring to the fact that traditionally, dosas were also cooked on stoneware.)
On the face of it, it looks like any iron tava, except that the surface feels like lightly greased silk to the touch. But this is no ordinary tava. Reserved exclusively for making dosas, the surface of this tava has non-stick properties that modern teflon-types would kill for. And that is achieved by what I call dosa-tapasya - years and years of using the same tava to make dosas and not washing the tava surface afterwards with a detergent or a scouring powder. The result is that the tava surface gets slowly coated by layer upon thinnest layer of oil and becomes like the politician’s hide – you can make nothing stick on it!

Mysore Dasara - The Flower Show

View the rest of the pics at http://www.flickr.com/photos/36483205@N00/sets/72157625014525681/

Mandara flower

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Originally uploaded by ratnarajaiah

premonsoon sky

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Originally uploaded by ratnarajaiah

Happy Birthday, Lataji!

"When I was barely eight, my father, who was also my guru, had told me, 'Fear only your own self. Ask yourself whether what you are doing is right and if the answer is yes, then move ahead without a second thought'. I have followed his mantra to this day." - Lata Mangeshkar
“To praise Lata Mangeshkar is like holding a lamp to the sun.” Kishore Kumar
The year 1929 is of momentous significance not just for the Hindi film industry but for all of India. In the little town of Khandwa in Madhya Pradesh, on August 13th , a baby boy was born, the youngest of 3 sons. He would be known to the world as Kishore Kumar Ganguly. Just 41 days later, on September 28th and only a few hundred miles in Indore, a baby girl was born, the oldest of what would be four sisters and a brother. She would be known to the world as Lata Mangeshkar. Today, this little girl completed 82 years of what began that day and a huge ocean of adoring fans celebrated the birth anniversary of what to millions of Indians has become the voice of India.
It’s not easy to write a tribute to Lata Mangeshkar. Because there is so much to say and with each passing year, as a fresh rash of grateful, gushing biographies and tributes are piled at her feet, there is therefore so little left unsaid. And also because, to write something other than the length of a book that would do justice to a musician, a performer and a talent so prodigious and a body of work so astonishing both in its virtuosity and in its size is almost an impossibility.
But, side stepping this yearly avalanche of adoration, if we stand and quietly gaze into this extraordinary life, there is a side of Lata Mangeshkar not just forgotten by some, but perhaps not even known to many others. That of a pioneer, a fearless fighter without whom playback singers would have remained just be nameless voices known only by the name of the actor that they sang for or worse still, the character that he or she played in the film. Imagine then, that Alka Yagnik and Udit Narayan would be to us nothing more than the “voices” of “Rahul” and “Anjali” that warbled to each other, “Kya karoon hai, kuch kuch hota hai”!  
The year was1942. Almost 3 decades had already passed since the first screening of “Raja Harischandra”. The silent had become the talkies and with it, India’s great love and tradition of music had started to soak the movies with its magic. The first generation of stars of Hindi film music were already in place. Of the 6 or 7 star female singers  – only 2 were truly playback singers. Shamshad Begum and Zohrabai. All the others like Noor Jahan and Suraiya sang for themselves and all, including Shamshad Begum and Zohrabai, had rich, deep-throated, robust voices. Into this scenario stepped a thin wisp of girl, just 13 years old, looking for work to feed a destitute family of six with her only qualifications - her voice and the training that her father, a classical singer of the Gwalior school had given her before dying bankrupt.
Lata Mangeshkar had come to sing for India….
You’d think a voice that today evokes such worldwide, often fanatical adoration would have blazed its debut like an incandescent star, demanding and getting instant success, fame and money. What happened was very different.  By 1948, a full 6 years later, all that Lata had was a pile of rejections. Her singing debut in the Marathi film Kiti Hasaal resulted in the song being edited out and her first Hindi film song “Pa Lagoon Kar Jori” in Aap ke Sewa Main (1947) sunk without a trace.
But Lata persisted. Perhaps because the only other option was starvation. But also perhaps because Lata was a fighter; not one who gave up easily. Fortunately for her, her sole mentor, the great music director Ghulam Haider, was as persistent. But even he found few takers for this voice in which he saw so much but the rest of his fraternity virtually wrote off. Haider insisted on Lata singing for his film “Shaheed” (1948), but when the producer of the film, Shashadhar Mukherjee, brother of Subodh Mukherjee of Bombay talkies, heard the song, he had it removed because he felt Lata’s voice was too thin. But Haider wouldn’t give up, nor did his little slip of a protégé. And there was one other who shared his faith in this young girl. Music director Naushad, who when he heard Lata song in Haider’s “Padmini”, recommended that Lata sing in his next film. The hero of that film, Dilip Kumar, by then already a super star, disapproved of the choice, doubting openly the Marathi speaking girl’s ability to correctly pronounce Urdu.
Instead of being disheartened by such criticism from none other than the great Dilip Kumar (of whom Lata, like so many other young girls was a fan!), this only spurred Lata on. She found herself a tutor to teach her Urdu diction. When “Andaz” was released in 1949, one of its biggest hit numbers was “Uthaye ja unke sitam” The singer? Lata Mangeshkar, who rendered the song in flawless Urdu. Dilip Kumar was forced to take back his words, which he gallantly did and 60 years later, the song remains an evergreen favourite.
Along with “Andaz”, 5 other films were released in the same year. “Mahal”, “Dulari”, “Ek Thi ladki”, “Badi Behan” and “Barsaat”. All box office bonanzas, both cinematically and musically. And in each of these films, at least one of the hit songs was sung by Lata, of which the one that instantly captured the hearts of millions of Indians was the haunting “Ayega Aanewala” (Mahal). The heroine of “Badi Behan” was Suriaya, so naturally all the songs in the film were sung by her for herself. Except for two, which Lata sang for Geeta Bali. “Chup chup Khadi ho” and “Chale jaana nahin”. They became two of the most memorable songs of the film. 
Naturally, by now, Lata Mangeshkar was a household name. Or shall we say she should have been but reality was very different. The then practice in the recording industry was to put the name of the actor and the name of the character played by that actor in the film on the record label. The playback singer’s name was never mentioned. So, when “Ayega Aanewala” was played on All India Radio, the station was inundated with fan mail wanting to know the name of the singer who sang so exquisitely. It was only when AIR got the name from the makers of the film and announced it, that India heard of Lata Mangeshkar. (On the original records of “Mahal”, the name of the singer for this song figures as “Kamini“, referring to the name of the film’s heroine.)
For Lata, this was the turning point and the beginning of a battle that lasted almost the next 2 decades. That the singer remained nameless rankled anyway, but she also realized how critical a role the playback singer played in creating the magic of a character, a story, even a film and therefore in making the film a success. So, she began the fight to get playback singers their due. A fight which at the time must have seemed as audacious, daring, even foolhardy if we remember that Lata was a lone woman, a virtual nobody, fighting an industry that was completely male dominated. Her obstinate stance could have cost her her career. But that never stopped her.
First, she insisted that the records should carry the name of the singer and not the actor or the character – a stance that almost lost her the opportunity to sing in Raj Kapoor’s Barsaat, because Kapoor initially was not willing to agree to Lata’s demands. (When Lata finally sang for the film, it was not just Nargis, but also Nimmi. Of the six songs that she sang, the most famous is “Hawa mein udta jaaye”, but other songs like “Jeeya bekrarar hai”, “Barsaat mein humse mile tum” and “O mujhe kisise pyar ho gaya” also become very popular.)
That done, she moved on to the next battleground – the Filmfare awards. In 1956, Shanker-Jaikishen were awarded the Filmfare Award for Best Song. At the time, this was the only Filmfare award given to a film’s music. The song was “Rasik Balma”, sung by Lata for the film “Chori Chori”. When the music director duo requested Lata to sing the song for the awards function, she refused, as a protest to the fact that the award recognized only the music director, whereas both the singers and the lyricist had as much of a role to play in the song’s success. No amount of pleading would get her to relent and Sudha Malhotra finally sang the song at the show!
Two years later in 1958, Filmfare instituted the Best Female Playback singer award which Lata won for “Aa ja re pardesi” (Madhumati.) It was a measure not just of the sway in which Lata held the film industry, but also of how she leveraged that clout to fight for the recognition that she felt she rightly deserved. And this should have been where Lata should have put down the gauntlet, happy that she had got what was her due. In any case, by now she was such a big singing star that whenever Madhubala signed a film, she insisted that it be written into her contract that only Lata Mangeshkar would be her “voice”.

But Lata had a few more battles still to fight. And win. And this time, it was not for herself…
Because the male singers remained unrecognized. So, in 1959, once more on Lata’s insistence, Filmfare created the award for Best Male Playback singer. Won that year by her beloved “Mukesh bhaiyya” for the song “Sab Kuch Seekha Maine” for Raj Kapoor’s “Anari”. And a few years later, Lata plunged into another face-off, this time with Mohd. Rafi. By now, the treasure house of Hindi film music had already stockpiled very high – almost two decades of work from some of India’s greatest singers, music directors and lyricists was already in the kitty. The music companies realizing this had begun to cash in, releasing various permutations and combinations of hit film songs.  The era of compilations had begun! (Even today, compilations of old Hindi film music remain the one sure-fire and often the only moneymaking section of an Indian music company’s repertoire!) Lata insisted that every time such a compilation is released, royalties should be paid out to all concerned, including the singers. Rafi refused to join this fight and the resulting rift between the two meant that they did not sing together for 10 years.  (They finally reconciled in 1965, singing together again for S. D. Burman in the song “Dil pukaare” for “Guide”.)
So it wouldn’t be unfair to say that much of the fame and wealth that a successful playback singer takes for granted would have not existed if it wasn’t for Lata’s unflagging and mostly lonely crusade. There are many measures of Lata Mangeshkar’s towering presence. The plethora of awards, the accolades, the firsts and the “only” ”, like the diamonds in a queen's too many to enumerate and measurable now only by weight, not by number. That generations of singers regard her singing as that final peak of musical excellence that they must reach. That not only that she has sung over 40,000 songs – for when did quantity ever define quality - but that of these 40,000, if one were to compile three lists, one each of her most popular songs, the most memorable ones and of her own personal favourites, there would be almost no overlap. And each of those 30 songs would be amongst India’s most loved, listened to and sung music, many of them having endured for over 6 decades.
But amongst this glittering array of achievements, standing there in a quiet corner, are perhaps two of Lata Mangeshkar’s most enduring legacies. The lessons of self-worth and perseverance. Without which almost nothing is possible and with which the impossible is almost always certainty. How else would a young girl, with nothing to her name but her music and her dead father’s diksha, have made that hard, lonely, punishing journey to become India’s Nightingale? 

(With grateful thanks to Sanjeev Kohli)

When The Customer is a SCREWBALL! (Which is almost always!)

 

Okay that’s it. I’ve had it. I’m done with calling “customer care” numbers”.
Why?!! Did you dare to ask me “why”? Because my teeth have begun to grow backwards, my hair has turned into earthworms, my blood pressure is 5078-654 and I have begun to walk in my sleep stark naked. Backwards and singing dirty ditties. That’s why.
And that’s only a small measure of what calling these numbers can do to you.
(More on that in another post.)
Instead what I have decided is to start my own “customer care” hotline .

Kustomer KilliBilli.

Ma-in-law trouble? Call me.

Libido starting problem? Call me

Clogged pores? Call me. (But don’t call for clogged anything-else. I’ll give you another kustomerkillibilli number for that.)

Hubby’s-girlfriend-has-thinner-thighs blues?  Call me

Garlic-farting-beer-burping frog that refuses to turn into a prince no matter how much you French-kiss him? Call me

Constipated pooch? Sister-in-law with verbal diarrhoea? Jelly won’t set? False teeth don’t fit? Saggy-boobs-wife-underwear-sofa?
You get my drift.

Call me.

And when you call, in the hallowed tradition of “customercare”, etched on the walls of the KilliBilli Caves somewhere in the icy wasteland of Outer Catatonia 567,9123 years ago, you will first hear this recorded message…

Thank you for calling Kustomer Killibilli.
If you are an existing user – SUCKER!
Now, that we’ve got you by the short-‘n-curly, press 1
If you are a new user (and obviously want to become an “existing user” or why would you calling u)s – BIGGER SUCKER! And press 2 to know why.

If you press 1, you will hear another recorded message…..

Please enter your 90125-digit number-that-we-tattooed-in-lining-of-your-rectum-while-you-were-sleeping.

That number is incorrect because it has only 90124 digits.
Please enter the 90125-digit number-that-we-tattooed-in-lining-of-your-rectum-while-you-were-sleeping. (If you need help finding your rectum, please dial the 78423-digit number that we tattooed on your other rectum.
You have only one rectum? We’re so sorry, you deformed single-anus cripple. But we’ll help you anyway. Please enter the 90125-digit number-that-we-tattooed-in-lining-of-your-rectum-while-you-were-sleeping)

That number, though it has 90125 digits, is the number of combination lock on our boss’ wife’s chastity belt. (Or so all the 567 boys in the call centre are hoping it is.)
Please enter your 90125-digit number-that-we-tattooed-in-lining-of-your-rectum-while-you-were-sleeping.

That was the number that would have got you automatically turned into the stock of rotting doggy-n-human-poo that Suresh Kalmadi is saving up in case nothing else goes wrong during the CWG but we saved you.

Please enter your 90125-digit number-that-we-tattooed-in-lining-of-your-rectum-while-you-were-sleeping

Bingo. You finally got it right, you dickhead!

Er, what we really mean to say is –
Thank you – We’re happy to know that you finally found at least one of your rectums but all our kustomer-killibilli-excutives are busy, mostly trying to break into the boss’s wife’s chastity belt..
So, we realise your finger is now worn down to the second knuckle, but please wait.

(Why the four-letter-wor-that-begins-with-an-f-ends-with-a-kand-has-u-and-c-in-the-middle-should-I-wait, you’re screammmmmmmmmmmming.)

Please don’t scream. (We know that in spite of the fact that this is a recorded message because everybody starts to scream at this point. And/or jumps off the balcony, yanking out their intestines on the way.)
Your call is important to us because after all, a numbskull-loser-sucker like you is only born one every 1/236768th of a second.
So please wait. We will be with you in about 23.93 years or after your eyeballs shrivel up and fall out of their sockets and become miso soup.

(After 23.93 years AND after your eyeballs have indeed turned to soup….)

“GoogeveningthisisGogagandumgobbleguckeshwarpathinifromkustomerkillibillithangyouphorcallingandholdingwhateveritisyou’reholdingyousicko-pervertyousandhowcan’tihelpyou?”

“Ahumafraidican’thelpunbecauseialreadysaidsoyoubleedingsod&alsobecausethedumbcallcentrecreeposwhoputmeheretoansweryourstupidcallsdidn’ttellmetheanswertoyourdumbassedquestion. So, pleejgobacktothemainmenu….”

How do I do that?

“Pleejenteryour90125digitnumberthatwetattooedinliningofyourrectumwhileyouweresleeping….”

Lord Ganesha and the Matter of a Mouse…

(Pic courtesy http://www.harekrsna.de/ganesha/ganesha.htm)

Vinyaka. Vigneshwara. Mangalmurti. Such a beloved, benevolent god, our Lord Ganesha. And as is with one so dear, he is a familiar God and there is much that we know about him. Beloved son of Lord Shiva and Goddess Parvati, elder brother of Kartikeya and has quite a sweet tooth…er, tusk. (Some say that the modak represents the sweetness of the realized soul.) That the Mahabharata would not have been written if it was not for our Ekadanta. That without his “okay”, not much ever gets done….
And there are some other things that are not so familiar about Him. That he has 2 consorts – Buddhi and Siddhi. That amongst his 32 forms is one in the posture of a yogi (Yoga Ganapati) and another in that of dance (Nritya Ganapati). Two beautiful idols of Nritya Ganapati are in 900-year-old Lakshminarasimha temple in Nuggihalli, Karnataka and in the famous Jagannatha Temple in Puri. That among the fruits found held in his many arms (going upto 16 in Viraganapati!) are the jackfruit, the rose apple and the pomegranate.  That he sometimes also rides a lion. And what is also not so well known is the reason why he favours a mouse as his mode of transport. (Or rat, because it is only English that differentiates a rat from a mouse. Our Indian languages are more accommodating – so mushika, chooha, eeli, yeli could be both a rat or a mouse.)
It does make you sit up and wonder a bit, does it not? I mean, would it not be more befitting for He that can fit the entire universe into His stomach, the mighty Lambhodara to have a grander, more personable or at least a slightly larger creature than a mouse? (Or a rat.) Should not the Siddhivinayaka, the Buddhinatha, the Vigheshwara be riding a steed more impressive?
But here’s the thing. In the Indian (and I think the Eastern) perspective of things, creatures are viewed slightly differently to the Western perspective. That all creatures have the capacity for both the gross and the divine. (And that includes us humans!) So, a boar is can be an avatar of Lord Vishnu, a monkey a God, a crocodile the vehicle of Varuna, bees can be marshaled to form Kamadeva’s bowstring and a fish can imbibe divine knowledge to become a great sage. The rhino and the goat can be emblems of the 11th the 17th Jain titrthankaras. And a scorpion, a dog and a frog can inspire yogasanas. And Lord Ganesha can turn Himself into a crow. Which is how the river Kaveri came into existence….
It was an exceptionally hot summer in South India and to ease the parched land, sage Agastya went to Lord Shiva for some holy water. Shiva put Kaveri – who was worshipping him at the time – into Agastya’s kamandala. But Lord Indra wasn’t pleased by this and asked Lord Ganapti to somehow upset the kamandala. Which He did by turning into a crow and sitting on the rim of the kamandala to overturn it. A quarrel erupted between the “crow” and Agastya. So Lord Ganapati revealed himself, blessed Agastya and filled his kamandala with holy water. Which Agastya then distributed among the devotees and that became the river Kaveri…. (Source : Puranic Encyclopedia  by Mani Vettam)
But back to the mouse. (Or the rat.) Both rodents are low in the animal pecking order. One a timid, timorous creature of pity, the popular choice for laboratory experiments, the other a pest, an object of disgust and aversion, a self-serving creature that lives in the sewers, carries diseases and deserts your sinking ship. Why would such a creature be the great Ganesha’s SUV? Because those are only some of the aspects of the rodent – the not so nice ones. As the great Ganesha’s choice of vehicle, it symbolizes something very different. And here are some of the interpretations….
That in the eyes of the Creator, the biggest and smallest of creatures are equally important. That the mouse’s ability to move quickly, even in the dark, represents the grace of Lord Ganesha which can go into the smallest, darkest nook and cranny. And the slightly less charitable one - that the mouse, a creature of the dark, signifies that which can leads man from darkness to light. Or that its ever darting self, whiskers always a-twitch in search of a choice morsel, represents our wandering, wayward mind, lured always and only by pleasure. And when Lord Ganesha rides it, it signifies the conquest of that whimsical mind by His grace.
But, I’d like to think that the other reason for the mouse (or rat) being Lord Ganesha’s vahana lies in an Aesop’s fable that I never tired hearing from my father when I was a child….

He was the king of the jungle. A glorious, golden, fiercely magnificent beast, who could silence the entire jungle with one mighty roar. And to tell you the truth, the lion fancied himself quite a bit as king material. It was for not for nothing that I’m the Kingy, he’d think as he spied his gorgeous reflection in a jungle stream while practicing his daily roar scales. Who else had eyes that glowed like molten gold, melting the darkness of the night? Who else had such a fabulous tail that swished to and fro in such stately grace? Who else had a mane as splendorous, flowing out all around his face like tongues of yellow fire? Who else could pin down a deer with just one cruel paw or polish off 35 kg of zebra meat in one sitting? And who else had a such a roar, rolling like thunder through the very soul of the jungle…..
And so Kingy the lion ruled the jungle, mostly by the rule of roar.
One afternoon, too hot even to blink, Kingy lay bored, thinking how he was going to go through the dratted heat when suddenly a tiny mouse (or rat, maybe?) had the temerity to scamper past the royal line of vision. In cooler times, he would have ignored it. But now, he desperately needed to be amused and out shot a massive, bored paw and mouse was on its way to become a royal snack. When suddenly….
“Oh, please, please, Your Royal Highness….” Not only had the mouse dared to scamper across the royal line of vision, it also had the cheek to squeak, even as it teetered on the jaws of Death – literally. Naturally such daring surely deserved a fair hearing - which it got.
“Oh, please, Your Roaring Mightiness, please let me go.”
“And why in My Name would I do that?”
“Because, Your Golden Gorgeousness, I may be of use to you some day ….”
Kingy laughed so hard, he almost fell out of his mane. A mouse helping a cat? (After all, for all his grandeur, Kingy was a cat.) And a cat letting go of a mouse?!! But the sheer nerve of one so mousy both amused and impressed him. And so he let the mouse go….
A few weeks later, it was Kingy’s turn - to be caught. Too engrossed in practicing his 10-minute roar for the annual Royal Roarimpics (Kingy had won 2 golds in a row and looking for a hat trick), he did not see the hunter’s snare. And so, there he lay, caught in the hunter’s net, fretting and fuming - and if the truth be told - quaking from some very un-leonine fear. When suddenly, he heard a faint scampering. “Good evening, Your Tawny-ness.” Now where had he heard that squeak before? He looked to see. It was the mouse!
“I suppose you have come to gloat over me with some twaddle like Look, How the Mighty Have fallen. Well, gloat away. Every mouse has his day….”
“Every dog, Lord Thundereshwara. But I come not to gloat, but to help you.” (The mouse had the habit of borrowing freely from Shakespeare, a particular favourite.)
“Listen, I’m not really in the mood for your mousy…er, lousy jokes….”
“But I’m not joking, Your Highness. Watch.”
And as Kingy watched in amazement, the mouse got to work, snipping away at the ropes of the hunter’s net with his sharp little teeth. Before long, he had snipped enough of the ropes for Kingy to get out of the net.
“I don’t know what to say…”, muttered Kingy. Being grateful wasn’t something that came easily to kings.
“Nothing to say, Your Highness. You gave me back my life that day. I said I’d help you. So I did. We mice never forget. Now hurry up and get out.”
“ I thought it was elephants who never forget…” Kingy quickly scrambled out of the net and loped off. Mice, too, your Highness, and you are most welcome, thought the mouse as he watched the mighty King of the jungle disappear into it….
So, here’s what I think is the message from Lord Ganesha this year - in honour of his trusty mushika vahana. If you are a mouse (or think you are), don’t underestimate yourself. And if you are a lion (or think you are), don’t underestimate the mouse.

Mushikavaahana modaka hastha,
Chaamara karna vilambitha sutra,
Vaamana rupa maheshwara putra,
Vighna vinaayaka paada namasthe

                    *******

JAKARTA - Inside The White Coconut

(Wrote this for a Tourism Special Issue of India Today)

“If the tourist has heart disease, infection disease, psychosis disease, stupid diseases. Any disease is forbid to play in it.” Sign in a Jakarta shopping mall.

I tell you it’s not easy. It’s not easy being neighbours with more than forty live volcanoes. It’s not easy being the capital of a country that consists of 17,508 islands. (Okay, so only 6000 of them are inhabited but that’s still 5999 islands too many.) It’s not easy having to make room upwards of 9 million people, 300 ethnic groups (some say 600), 13 rivers, and ten percent of the entire population of humans and cars in Indonesia.
So, you can pardon Jakarta for not being a place that you would describe as pretty.
Overwhelming, maybe. (Jakarta’s population bloats to almost doubles on weekdays.) Extreme, perhaps. (Two million square meters of megamalls stuffed with every brand from Armani to Versace sit cheek-by-jowl with the appalling poverty of the kampungs.). Astonishing. (Jakarta is probably the only place in the world where cobra’s blood is considered a health drink.) Spectacular, even. (Jakarta’s most famous landmark, the National Monument or “Monas” is 450-foot high tower in the centre of the massive 250-acre Meredeka Square. Topped by a giant flame made from 35 kilograms of gold leaf, it was meant to commemorate Indonesian independence. But the locals irreverently call it "Sukarno's last erection," since it was the last monument commissioned by Sukarno, Indonesia's founding father.)
And ever so often, breathtaking. (The view from the top of Monas and from Jakarta’s over-a-hundred skyscrapers.)
But “pretty”? Nah
And that’s no reason to give Jakarta a miss.
To start with, how many places in the world do you know that can trace its history back to… Well, 1.7 million years if you consider the fact that the Java Man, our now extinct ancestor, Homo Erectus lived on the banks of the Bengawan Solo river about 500 hundred miles from Jakarta. But the first record of Jakarta’s existence dates to 397 AD and is the Sanskrit inscription on a memorial stone attributed to king Purnawarman. Except that it was called “Sunda Kelapa” then. Sunda means white, referring to the white ash from volcanic eruptions and kelapa means coconut. And for the almost 1000-year magnificent reign of Hindu kings in the Indonesian archipelago, Sunda Kelapa was important port of call for merchant ships all the way from Arabia, China and Vietnam who came to trade in spices, especially pepper.
The original harbour where those ships docked still stands and is still called Sunda Kelapa and this is where you can see the magnificent Makassar schooners or “pinisi”. The early morning sight of these schooners, some painted in incandescent blues and oranges, poking their long, elegant beak-like prows into the morning mist is one of Jakarta’s most beautiful sights.
The spice trade also brought Islam to Indonesia and by the time the Hindu kingdoms had made way for the Muslim sultanates in the 15th century, the heady scents of Indonesian spices had caught the attention of the Europeans. So, first the Portuguese arrived in 1513. But they didn’t last long, shooed away by the Dutch who made their colonial intentions very clear. To even things out, the local prince allowed in the English  – also lurking in the area. Inevitably, the English and the Dutch fought it out, the Dutch won, razing the town – by then called “Jayakarta”- to the ground and building a new one, which they called Batavia (a corruption of Betawi, a local ethnic people). And Jakarta became part of the Dutch East Indies and remained so till the Japanese arrived in 1942.
In all fairness to the Dutch, after the initial hiccups of making it a city so pestilent that it was known as White Man’s Graveyard, Jakarta flourished under their rule, that terrible sobriquet changing to “Queen of the East”. And some of the splendour of that queen can still be seen in Kota, just a few kilometres from Sunda Kelapa, most of it around the once infamous Taman Fatahillah or Fatahillah Square. This is where the Dutch spectacularly flexed their might, publicly flogging, hanging and impaling people. Naturally, the square’s present day avatar is a much more benign – beautifully cobbled and with three of Jakarta’s many museums are around it. On the south side is Jakarta History Museum, a splendid example of Dutch colonial architecture. Its most curious exhibit is a huge bronze Portuguese cannon called Si Jagur, which has at one end a large clenched fist, with the thumb protruding between the index and middle fingers. This is a symbol for sexual intercourse in Indonesia and apparently, childless women rub their tummy on it and sit astride the cannon in the hope of getting pregnant!
West of the square is the Wayang Museum. Wayang is the ancient Javanese art of puppetry and is the Javanese word for shadow or imagination. Here you can see different collections of puppets including the intricately and delicately carved leather puppets used in “wayang kulit” or shadow pupperty, derived from ancient tholu bommalata of Andhra Pradesh. On the east side is the Museum of Fine Arts, once the Dutch Court where all those naughty people were sentenced to be hanged, flogged etc., but now has a collection over 2,000 ceramic pieces which include pottery the Ming and Yuan dynasties.
(Of course, the mama of Jakarta’s museums, the National Museum, is much further inside in Central Jakarta near that impressively phallic-shaped Monas. This is where you can meet the Java man - or least his thighbone and skull cap - and gaze awe-struck at a cache of thirty-five kilograms of 1000-year old silver and gold artefacts that farmers found in 1990 at the foot of Mount Merapi, Indonesia’s most ferocious volcano.)
But what if you find museums and Ming vases about as exciting as a fruit fly’s sex life?
Ah.
It is said that Jakarta’s nightlife is one of the best-kept secrets in Asia - a lavish, no-holds-barred, all-night buffet that goes all the way from sleaze to swish. With lots and lots of karoake bars in between. The throbbing nerve centre is said to be Blok M in South Jakarta and Jalan Jaksa in Central Jakarta has the slightly more sedate, expat-favoured joints. And if you can afford it, there are no dearth of posh hotspots - some in 5-star hotels like Burgundy at the Grand Hyatt where, according to the Lonely Planet guide, there are “more beautiful people than you can shake a lemon daiquiri at”. But two of the most swanky joints also have the most breathtaking views since they are perched atop skyscrapers - Blowfish on the 29th floor of the Menara Danamon building and Cilantro, on the 46th and 47th floor of the tallest building in Jakarta, Wisma46.
But wherever your night-out may begin, there is only one place where it must end. Where you can catch your breath, sit back and sip a Borneo Sunset and watch the sun rise in what is a Jakarta institution; some even go as far to dub it one of Asia’s greatest watering holes. Café Batavia. Some locals say its glory has faded somewhat since its Churchill bar was voted one of world’s best bars by Newsweek in 1996. But it’s still a “must-see” for the fabulous Dutch colonial interior, the ambience and the rather intriguing decor in the men’s loo. Apparently one entire wall – the one you face when you  “tinkle” is a floor-to-ceiling mirror!
Which leaves the two other things that makes Jakarta’s mind numbing “macet” (traffic jams) worth it.
Food…
“Die, die, must try” Makansutra motto
In 1999, a Singaporean by the name of K. F. Seetoh, decided that Singapore’s famed street food merited its guide and so he complied the Makan Sutra. (Makan means food). It became an instant hit and since then, the annual release of guide is awaited with much licking of chops (or should I say chopsuey?) by gourmets and gourmands alike. In 2003, Seetoh launched his first guide outside Singapore – Makasutra Indonesia and all the top ten listings are in Jakarta!
They are called warungs or rumah makans. (The roaming ones are called “kaka lima” meaning ''five legs'' - three of the food cart and two of the vendor!) By late afternoon, hundreds of these roadside stalls open for business all over Jakarta. (And remain open through the night.) It’s like taking the lid off a massive sizzling, steaming, hissing, clattering, chattering hotpot, inside which Indonesia’s kaleidoscope cuisine busily stews, billowing out a million aromas all jostling each other to catch your attention.
Nasi goreng. Fried rice would be a poor translation of this fabulous all-in-one concoction of rice stir-fried with eggs, chicken, beef or shrimp and vegetables. According to many, nasi goreng is Indonesia's national dish, but Seetoh says it must share that hallowed place with satay - succulently smoky, bite-sized chunks of grilled meat on bamboo skewers, eaten smothered with the ubiquitous peanut sauce. Soto – literally meaning “soup” but actually an entire meal consisting of broth of every denomination from chicken to oxtail, accompanied by rice or noodles, veggies and krupuk – the Indonesian version of papad. Gorengan - the Indonesian take on pakoras. And Sumatra’s famous padang food, served in a rather ingenious version of the buffet. Everything on the menu – which can be as many as fourteen to eighteen dishes - is displayed or brought to you in bowls. You select, serve yourself, eat as much as you and then pay only for what you have eaten. Be warned – padang food takes its chilies very seriously.
But the pilgrimage of Jakarta’s street food is incomplete without sampling two local favourites. The first is martabak manis - an inch-thick spongy pancake, stuffed with condensed milk, cheese and - hold your breaths -chocolate sprinkles! And if your arteries just won’t put up with that assault, then there are the gorgeous Es Twins – es cendol and es campur. Incredible concoctions of shaved ice (“es” means ice), coconut milk, jelly, noodles, syrup and local fruit. There can’t be a better way to beat the sweltering Jakarta heat!
….and shopping.
Jakarta has enough megamall acreage in which to window-shop in till your jaws drop. But when you’ve had your fill and actually want to buy stuff, then the place to head for is the massive six-part Mangga Dua (meaning two mangoes) complex. Go there only if you can survive bargaining your way through over one billion tiny stalls overflowing with everything from fake Prada to kretek, the inimitably Indonesian clove-scented cigarettes. Then there’s Jakarta’s very own Chor Bazar in Jalan Surabaya - where Bill Clinton bought a frog; a bronze one, I must hasten to add.
Jakarta has been called many things, most of it not very complimentary. Kota Kompor or the stove burner city. the Big Durian because like the smell of that fruit, the first impressions of Jakarta can be overpowering. But for me, it is Sunda Kelapa or the Coconut City - a large, tough, rough, unprepossessing hard nut on the outside but once you know how to crack it, sweet and utterly satisfying inside.

Separated at Birth?

Updating the series

They say that there is at least one person (some say 6?) who looks exactly like you. I am inspired to do this series by one that used to run in a now-dead but fabulously irreverent tabloid called Blitz. (It’s editor - a legendary figure – was the irrepressible  Rusy Karanjia)
So here is the inaugural pair – Abhay Deol  and Mark Ruffalo


Suggestions are welcome!

Do Women Have Fixations?

Now I had a vague idea that a fixation is when you look up your calorie counter to find out how many calories you put on when you pass by a plate of French fries but to write this article, “vague” wasn’t good enough. So I whipped out my trusty encyclopedia, which told me that a fixation, apart from being a fad, fetish, compulsion, mania, hang-up or obsession, is also “a treatment to prevent something from fading or otherwise changing.” (Which means everything from facelifts to comeback films.) A fixation is also “a strong emotional attachment which results in a halt, at an early stage in the development, of sexual desire.” Now that explains why boys prefer Mama but would it explain why 70% of women prefer chocolates to sex? (At least they do in the US, according to the findings of a research done by the chaps who make Hersheys’ kisses – who should know a thing or two about both chocolates and sex….)
So, do women have fixations? Well, fixations are like chocolate truffle pastries. You first have to be rich enough to afford them and then be rich enough to go into therapy for having too many of them. Most women in our country barely manage drum up enough money to buy themselves a husband whose mother’s apron strings are longer than her tongue. And who (the husband, I mean) brings home a living wage and won’t beat the living daylights out of her because she didn’t bear him a hundred sons, because there’s too much salt in the dal and/or because there’s nothing on the telly tonight. But with the year so sweetly new, we must think cheerful thoughts and what could be more jolly than delving into this year’s Fall Collection of Female Fixations?
But before we do that, I must also say I think that fixations are a modern day malaise. Our mums had it so much better and simpler. Life is simpler when you don’t have choices. All they had to do was to get married. To a man they often never saw, forget chose. But since they weren’t marrying to have a meaningful relationship with great sex and sharing and all that new-fangled bakwas, it worked out just fine. They made babies and chappaties (in equal quantities) for which they got fed, watered and bedded down and were allowed to sag, droop, spread and wrinkle in the privacy of their very own six yards (nine in some cases). And since our dads never had secretaries whose thighs were thinner (not to mention firmer) than our moms and cellulite was as unheard of as divorce, everyone lived happily ever after.
Then some silly moo cow can up with female empowerment and equal opportunity which meant that we now had to make babies, chappaties and presentations. And open our own doors and buy our own diamonds and be mistress, not of some nice, generous ol’ sugar daddy but of our own destinies. And do all of that while we still had to find a man who is taller, richer, has a longer designation, who can make us laugh and a good crepes suzette. So, can you blame the modern woman for being a teeming cauldron of fixations?
What are we fixated about? Topping my list has to be the way they look. Show me a woman who feels likes what she sees in the mirror (Heidi Blum and Aishwarya Rai included) and I’ll show you a man who doesn’t spend once every 19 seconds wondering whether…….oh, never mind. Every woman, as far as she is concerned, is either too fat, too long, too big, too small, too short, too full, too flat, not to mention too oily or too dry. What adds to a woman’s misery are the whimsies of fashion. Just when she’s spent her Diwali bonus colouring her hair the latest shade of dog’s vomit, it goes out of fashion of make way for a shade of pigeon guano. So is there anything that never goes out of fashion? Three things, really. Like the Duchess of Windsor said, you can never be too thin or too rich. And in India, you can never be too fair.
Which naturally brings me to fixation number. Diets. For women, happiness is fairly simple arithmetic. You’re either fat and miserable or thin and happy. (Ally Macbeal is the only woman who is thin and miserable, which why she doesn’t exist.) So, when a woman is not on a diet, she’s on her weighing scale. A friend mine summed it up very nicely. “Life’s a bitch. You spend the first 20 years of your adult life eating through your nostrils (sniffing food instead of eating it) and then when you think you’ve finally mastered your thighs, it doesn’t matter any more because now you’re an old hag.”
Then there’s money. It isn’t as if men aren’t as fixated about money as women are. The only difference is that women want to have money without actually wearing their lil’ fingers to the bone making the filthy thing. Aristotle Onassis said, "If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning."  We look at things slightly differently. "If money didn’t exist, all the men would have no meaning.” Oh and one more thing. Men want money because they believe that money begets money. Women want money because they know that money begets shopping.
After women, shopping is perhaps the most misunderstood thing since the morning-after of time. People (read men) think that women shop because they have greedy acquisitive little hearts. Wrong. Women shop because it’s a cure for almost everything from PMS to pimples. When boring brown turns into Caramel Dreams, where things aren’t irreconcilably black or white but Ebony and Ivory, and where Heaven is a trial room in which you try on Happily Ever After for size (and Dear God, one day it may just fit!).
Which naturally brings us to men. (For how can Happily Ever Efter be if it’s not with a man?) Scratch a woman who says she’s happy being single and you’ll find a pile of lonely horse manure. I mean, who are we kidding here? Even Gloria Steniem got married, for crying out loud. It’s true men make us kiss them, promising to turn into princes and remain warty, croaky frogs, it’s true they drive us batty with their insensitiveness and talcum all over the bathroom floor. It’s even true that they make us we weep by forgetting our birthdays and leaving us for someone younger and prettier, but we’re still miserable without them. So am I saying that women can’t do without men? I dunno really, but if it’s really true that we’re from Venus and they from Mars, what on Earth are we doing spending so much time talking about them?
Then there’s aging. Men age like wine, women like yesterday’s news. Have you noticed how men always get to the top of the hill (and stay there till they sire their last offspring at age 76) but are never over it? Women on the other hand claw their way about halfway up, by which time they are old hags of 25 and after that it’s one slippery, slithery down hill slide. It’s enough to make a girl’s collagen sag. Which is why we still haven’t decided which is ruder – telling us we’re overweight or over the hill.
There. I think I’m about done. Which doesn’t mean that the list ends there. For the rest of it, switch on your telly and watch the ads. So let me see now, there’s diamonds, mother-in-laws, husbands, laundry, matching everything from your undies to the underside of your trash can (neither of which anyone sees, not at the same time at least), romance, being Superwoman, looking for Superman, gossip, wrinkles, maids, mother-in-laws, husbands, laundry…

The Art of Having a Crush

“The Guide says that there is an art to flying,” said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and missing.” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Come to think of it, there is an art to everything. Pouring exactly 32.5 sips of tea into your teacup every morning. (Barring Sundays and Flashers Unite Day, when it is 37.8.) Pretending your head lice are dandruff flakes with legs. Picking your nose during your question and answer round in the Miss World contest in such a way that the judges believe that it is your goobers, not your breasts that will save the world. Etc. Etc.
And there is an art to having a crush.
Now the dictionary defines a crush as an intense but usually short-lived infatuation. But that’s a shallow definition, as if having a crush were like having a zit or a sandwich and it doesn’t to justice to a noble, ancient art, fraught with such subtle intricacies, not to mention intricate subtleties, that it deserves at least 10 volumes of the Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon. Which I am in the process of penning but till then, this little jotting will have to suffice.

BC (Before the Crush)
Before setting off to have a crush there’s a very important matter that you have to first sort out. And that is to make sure that you’re not Kareena Kapoor. Or Justin Timberlake. (Tick only one.) Nor have been ever listed as one of the World’s Ten Sexiest Warthogs. In other words, the number of people currently beating a path to your door (or website) on account of how hot and whatnot you are should be one less than that for a maggot. This instantly expands by nineteen million galaxies the universe from which you can choose the object of your crush (more on that later). Which can now be anyone from Laloo’s buffalo minder to the boiled potato masher at your favourite vada-pav stall, both of whom, we’ll have you know, are as crush-worthy as your next Kareena-come-latelys.

OOC (Object of Crush)
Having got that out of the way, let us now dwell on the tricky matter of choosing the Object of Crush, henceforth referred to as OOC. Now there have been instances of people having a lifelong crush on a slotted spoon, having taken the word “object” literally. But speaking from experience, people are better. (I once have a crush on a red pencil sharpener for about two weeks and it wasn’t much fun though I have to admit the “prup-prap” sound it made every time it sharpened made my superior gemellus tingle in the most gratifying fashion.)
What about animals, did someone ask? Hm. Well, there was one case of a crush on an amoeba but we’re still as hazy on the subject as the fetish wallahs are on having sex with a shoe horn.
The next and most important thing about your choice of OOC is that he/she (since we’ve now ruled out “it”) should be unattainable. And we don’t mean your everyday, garden variety of unattainable like buying up one floor of Antilla. (Those who are asking “Antilla who?” may immediately drum themselves off this planet.) We’re talking about unattainable that makes crossing the Atlantic on a rubber bath duckie seem like licking tomato ketchup.
Unattainabilty is critical because it’s like virtual sex because you’ll never get to know the more intimate details about your OOC. Spitting while eating boiled egg. Nymphomaniac vampire half-sister who visits every full moon. Barking in sleep. Passing garlic-scented wind during….well, never mind. Mother who’s just had a sex change and likes to discuss her (his?) post-operative plumbing during lunch.
We see you blanch. You’re thinking - Richard Gere and garlic-scented….?
Really?
Who knows me darlings, who knows. But more importantly, do we really want to know.
Also, hop off the beaten path, eschew the straight and narrow and venture to where few others have dared to go. So, while George Clooney is a good choice, George Bush is better. Similarly, Beyonce is sweet but Hilary Clinton is…well, you know. (You’d be surprised how many amongst us think that ice-queen-meets-AK-47-laugh is nothing less than a Playboy centre spread coated Viagra.) So are Prince Charles, aforementioned buffalo minder, Heather Mills, Michael Jackson’s children’s wet nurse, Osama’s third wife (not to be confused with Obama who has only one wife anyway), the man who left a crate of rotting Alphonsos at your door in 1993. Famous dead people are also a good bet, as long as the dead body has been disposed off. (I mean, we don’t want any talk of necrophilia muddying these sacred waters, do we now.) Which mean King Tut is off limits, Attila the Hun is not.

And Now, The Crush
Righty-ho.  Unattainable, dream-the-impossible-wet-dream OOC selected. God in Heaven, coffee on boil, libido on roil. You can now get down to the actual business of having that crush. Which basically involves thinking of the OOC every waking moment (barring while shaving underarms and performing other ablutions that we can’t mention) and generally deteriorating into the most awful kind of drip. In other words, you have to pine and ache, hanker and crave, long for and lust after. You have to gnash teeth, tear hair and eat heart out. (All yours and mercifully, it’s all low cal AND organic.) And every now and then, you have to dissolve into a deliriously gibbering, slavering puddle of ecstatic saliva at what might be a glimpse of the right-hand corner of the hangnail on the left little toe of the OOC.
And you have to do this all the while making sure that the distance of sixty-three gadzillion light years of unattainabilty between you and your OOC has not lessened by a even single millimetre.
Naturally the question that springs to mind like a startled toast out of toaster is - but what if it does? You mean what if you suddenly find that you’ve just pipped Salman Khan to the sexiest-napoleon-with-hair-weave post and Katrina – whom you lusted after for so many long and hopeless moons – is giving you the eye, not to mention the once-over, laced with a couple of smouldery-over-the-bare-shouldery come-on-overs?
Well, remember the stroke-of-midnight trick in Cinderella when the coach goes back to being a pumpkin and the coachman to the dirty, two-timing, double-crossing, whisker-twitching rat that he always was?
It’s more or less the same thing with a crush.
Which is that without so much as a by-your-leave or a hey-ninny-no, it simply will vanish into the morning smog. (Or at the next traffic signal.) And the OOC will topple off the altar, shattering into sixty-three gadzillion pieces and then morph into an ordinary mortal of flesh, blood and gumboils that you can now proceed to have as bossa nova partner, running mate or to drape on your arm to the next Star Parivaar Awards.
But never ever again to be the OOC.

Finally, AD (Or What’s The Bleeding Point about the Whole Darn Thing)
I mean, that’s a bit like asking what’s the point about balloons at birthday parties.  Or umbilical cords if it’s her apron strings that’s going to keep us attached to our dear mamas. Or the p in pneumonia if we aren’t going to pronounce it. These are the unquestionable essentials of life that don’t need silly, pointless things like points. (Which are mainly for fingers and the pervie-brain that designed the pointed bra.)
But since you’re asking, actually there is a point to having a crush. It’s a lesser known but well documented fact that the secret of the longevity of the centenarians in the Upper Silesia (no relation to Yash Chopra’s Silsila) is not bathing in the urine of the Caucasian tur but a lifelong, unwavering, passionate crush on the Abominable Snowman.
And that’s simply because a crush is cross between an emotional laxative and Oil of Olay.
Lemme explain.
See, basically life’s mainly a dreary drag, a grimy grind and the daily diet of the ho-hum and the humdrum clogs up the bowels of soul to ultimately give you the worldview and complexion of an ageing constipated eel. Having a crush evacuates and expels, it also opens up the pores, irrigates the pons (not what you are thinking but close), hydrates the appendix and generally gets what till now was a grudging, grumpy trickle splooshing in great, happy gushes through your tubes.
Leaving you with softer, younger-looking….um….er….well, certainly the bowels of your soul will look like that of a sprightly 17 year-old. We can’t guarantee anything else.

IMG_3585

IMG_3585
Originally uploaded by ratna_rajaiah

Benjamin Zander on music and passion | Video on TED.com

Benjamin Zander on music and passion | Video on TED.com
This is just superb stuff and will change the way not only how to  perceive classical music but all music and life itself....It's all about 'one-buttock" playing!

Ab Dilli Door Nahin – The Truth about Toilet Paper and the Commonwealth Games

“European toilet paper is made from the same material that Americans use for roofing, which is why Europeans tend to remain standing throughout soccer matches.” Dave Barry

It was when I was prattling on and on about the 4000-rupees-per-roll Commonwealth Games toilet paper scam when my mum asked me this question.

“When we Indians consider wiping our nether regions with paper the most disgusting of personal hygiene habits, why are we providing toilet paper during these games?”

Ah, I thought. Now that’s what I call a 4000-rupees-per-toilet-paperroll question and deserves careful thought and an answer.
So, I first tried this answer for size.
“Mumsie dearest, that’s how many of the firangis ablute and part of treating athithis like devas is making sure that they get to clean their fundaments in whatsoever manner they wish to and never mind how disgusting that might be.”

But that argument did not wash (pun intended) because from the look of it, a significant percentage of the sports persons attending the games aren’t likely to be wipers. (As we all know, the world is divided into two kinds of people – washers and  wipers.)
Naturally, I can’t whip out the exact figure because first of all, given the way things are going, there’s no telling who may pull out at the last minute. Which could well be the Brits and/or the Aussies, who all wipers be and put together, would constitute at least a fourth of the competitors. Second, you’ll be surprised who all prefer to wipe rather than wash. For example, I thought toilet paper must have been an invention of the West but was amazed to discover that it was actually invented by the Chinese. (So, thank God, no China – think of how many more crores would go down the drain…er, toilet.)
But only as late as the 6th century.
And before that?
Well, it was really whatever was at hand, if you get my drift. Many did as we Indians do, but others preferred to wipe, using the strangest of stuff including sand (ouch), snow (brrrr), fruit skins and seashells. (Apparently Gargantua, a character in one of Rabelais’ books, recommends “the neck of a goose that is well-downed”!) And according to one expert on the matter, the Greeks used stones. I know – the mind not only boggles but having boggled, shivers and quivers at the prospect of a poor, unsuspecting bottom being scoured with….well, never mind.
In fact, toilet paper as we now it today, made its debut in America only in 1857.
And before that? Who knows? Bison droppings? Albatross gut? Leftover pizza?
But to make up for lost time, today the average American household of 4 uses about 200 pounds of toilet paper a year. Which works out to roughly 2 trees per person per year.
(So, thank God, no Americans are attending and I hope we don’t ever have to host the Olympics. I mean, add up the Chinese, the Japanese and the European contingents and our toilet paper budget will be larger than our GDP. Phew.)

It was while I was trying to work out the methodology of using seashells (ground before use and if so, how fine?) when the penny dropped.
And I was filled and flooded with a new-found respect for the poor, beleaguered Kalmadi. The man was a genius and we have misunderstood him all along
You see, the real reason for the toilet paper was to conserve water.
It had to be.
And not because we want to save-the-planet and the rest of the ecological crap.
It’s because…well, two reasons, both blindingly brilliant.
The first is because we want to have enough water for leaking through the various roofs of the various auditoriums and stadiums and maybe even the ones that don’t have roofs. (And how would we do that? Ah, just leave it all to aapro Kalmadi.)
Did someone ask “why”?
You poor thing. But I understand that not everyone can understand such dazzling planning, so lemme explain.
Laser shows – yawn. Digitally enhanced fireworks –  yawner. Pyrotechnics – yawnest. Flying acrobats – puhleez.  Wot I mean to say is that as far as these games go, it’s all been there and not just done that but done to death So the pressure on Kalmadi was to come up with something that has been never done before.
And he did because what could be more never-ever-before than artistically and perpetually dripping roofs?
(For those who will have difficulty noticing the drippy-drips, there will be neon signs everywhere pointing to the spots. VIP seats will be positioned directly under these spots)
The second reason?
The standard method of winning a sport is by trying to play it better than your opponent.  That’s more yawn-er than even those over-hyped opening ceremonies.
But has any body tried to win by having the sports events take place on wet, slippery surfaces?
Never-ever-before.
(Even as we speak, Indian athletes are being given special training to play on these surfaces. And now you know why we are buying all that medical equipment at 6-7 times the cost.)
See? I told you, Kalmadi is…does anyone have any other word for “brilliant” or “genius” because I have used them all up.
Let the games begin….i for one can’t wait

Shoumik the SolutionsBaba: My-Sore Weekend

Shoumik the SolutionsBaba: My-Sore Weekend

one of the funniest pieces that i have read. I not only ROFL, I almost rolled off it. Attaboy, Sollu!

Meri Biwi Ki Godh mein….It Happened One Morning on the 9.33 Churchgate Fast.

I’ve dined out on this story, narrated by an ex-colleague, countless times and it never fails to perk up the dullest do, the dreariest party.
What makes it even more wonderful is that it actually happened....

Peak hour inside a 1st class compartment of a Mumbai suburban Train.
Squeezed-so-that-you-can-taste-your-neighbour's-Jabakusum-oil-scented-dandruff room only.

Train stops at the only scheduled stop. After the mandatory 7.873 seconds for train to vomit out part of its load, it starts again ...but with a sudden jerk. (Driver probably having a bad Jabakusum-hair-oil-scented-dandruff day)

Protagonist, (friend of the original narrator of this story) who is standing, loses his balance and to his utter chagrin, falls plop into the lap of the woman sitting in the seat near where he was standing.

Woman screeches in horror but the man sitting next to her screeches even louder. Because, unfortunately for the poor stander-who-fell-into-the-sitting-woman’s-lap, the man happens to be her husband.
He starts a loud, angry tirade, along the lines of “tumhare ghar mein girne ke liye biwi-ki-godh nahin hai kya?!”. Aforementioned stander, sweating copiously in embarrassment, begins to apologise profusely, in equal measure to both woman and husband. But nothing will appease the husband, who by now has whipped himself into a right ol’ kuttey-kaminey-bahar-aa-tujhe-dekhata-hoon frenzy, frothing gently in the mouth.  So much so, that if it is possible for a crowd to gather in the squeezed-so-that-you-can-taste-your-neighbour's-Jabakusum-oil-scented-dandruff room only, it does. Delightedly grateful for something to perk up the otherwise every-moning-for-the-22-years-in-the-9.33-Churchgate-superfast ho-hum day.
Finally the stander-who-fell-into-the-sitting-woman’s-lap can’t take it anymore.
“Stop”, he shouts at the husband, who surprisingly does…..mid-froth.
Sticking his briefcase between his legs (not what you are thinking), the stander whips out his wallet and from it, he whips out what looks like a visiting card.
Handing it to the now silent, dumbstruck husband, he says,
“This is my visiting card. My home address is on it. Please come home any day at your convenience and sit on my wife’s lap. That way, we will be even. But now, will you please stop shouting at me?”

From what I recall, the guns remained silent and rest of the journey passed without any further untoward incident. And also from what I can recall, the husband did not take up the stander’s offer.
(Thank you, Vinodini!)

Thank You, Dad!

My father was not a famous man Or a rich one. But he was a good man. An upright, honest man who taught me that a good night’s sleep only came with a clean conscience. He died with his affairs all neatly tied up, his duties done, not owing a penny or a grudge, leaving behind enough so that his beloved wife of forty-seven years would never want for anything for the rest of her lifetime. And for his daughter he left behind a treasure house of memories. How when I was ill as a little girl, he could tell exactly how much temperature I had by just gently pressing my hand against his face. How he’d let me lick all the cream inside the cream biscuits and then imperiously hand over the shells for him to eat. And how when I was older and the roles were reversed, he’d pretend nonchalance at the gifts that I took home for him, and yet when I wasn’t watching, relish them with the joy of a small child.  They weren’t big things – just a box of his favourite sohan papdi or milk sweets, a watch that could do everything but knit you a sweater. But then, that’s the other lesson he taught me. That the greatest pleasures in life were in the smallest things.

I love you, Dad, and miss you deeply.

How the Himalayas Came to Mysore

As the story goes, when the Pandavas were in exile and on their way Badrinath, they decided to take a break at Pandukeshwar, the place that their father had built. One day, Draupadi - as is the habit of the ladies of our epics, was bathing in a nearby river when she sighted an exquisite flower floating downstream. Naturally, she had to have it and sent Bhima in hot pursuit of it. The mighty Pandava set off and after a while, he suddenly came upon an amazing sight – a saucer-shaped valley, filled with the most breathtaking array of flowers.
We don’t know if Bhima accomplished his mission, but he had come to the right place because this spectacular patch of paradise was the flower’s home. We now know it as the Valley of Flowers. Nestled in the Western Himalaya, such is the wealth of flora and fauna that flourishes here that in 1982, the UNESCO declared it a World Heritage site.
And the flower that had so enchanted Draupadi?
Brahma Kamala. (Botanical name – Saussurea obvallata). State flower of Uttarakhand.
And Draupadi must’ve been bathing at night because this flower blooms only after dark and that too, only once in a year. I’ve no clue how this gorgeous Himalayan beauty strayed into Mysore but it did and into my garden as well. This year, we were specially blessed with more than ten buds on one plant, of which five bloomed all at once in one single night. Here they are – the photographs unfortunately can’t capture the heady, delicate fragrance of these glorious blooms.

…

The Flames of Bhopal

Technorati Tags: bhopal,gas,disaster,victims,Warren,Anderson,Dow,Union,Carbide,India,champa,rasheeda

Enough already.
Enough of the rage and the shame.
That we allowed the penalty for the destruction of the over 20,000 lives to be 25 rupees per life.
That we allowed a factory to be built in Bhopal that was using an “unproven” technology “ - meaning nobody knew if it was capable of handling MIC, a chemical so volatile that the only way to muzzle its ferocity is to keep it constantly refrigerated. (The refrigeration unit in the Bhopal factory had been switched off to save money.) That, on December 3rd, 1984, when this chemical spewed a 30 foot high tidal wave of toxic gas over Bhopal, nobody told the people that simply lying on the ground and holding a wet cloth over their noses and mouths would’ve protected them.
That 14 years later, after thousands had died and hundreds of thousands more were dying in a living hell, the Government of India settled for just 470 million of the 3.3 billion dollar compensation that it had asked Union Carbide to pay. When Erin Brokovich helped the tiny American town of Hinkley to sue the Pacific Gas and Electric Company for leaking the deadly Chromium 6 into the ground water, the company was made to pay $333 million for just over 600 people – or $5,50,000 per person. The average compensation paid out to a Bhopal victim is $500.
That 25 years later, the factory still stands, leaching deadly toxins into the soil and water that ultimately find their way into the breast milk of the women who live nearby.
Enough already.
Because it is time to look for a light in this terrible darkness
But to find it, you must first break your heart.
You must go and watch a little documentary on YouTube called “The Bhopal Chemical Disaster”. In which two women talk about the children. The ones who are unable to breathe properly or digest their food and suffer such agonising pain that they can only sleep at night with the help of sleeping pills. And the ones who were baby girls that night and now young women whom no one wants to marry because the gas has seared their reproductive systems with disease. Irregular menstruation, sterility, menopause at age 25-30, uterine and cervical cancer. So, many of them can’t conceive and when they do, the babies born are often terribly disabled or deformed – with cleft lips, cerebral palsy, bone deformities, growth retardation and brain damage.

These women should know.

When the gas exploded that terrible winter night, Champa Devi Shukla was the 32 year-old mother of two daughters and three sons. Twelve years later, her husband had died of bladder cancer; her eldest son, unable to bear the constant chest pains and breathing problems, committed suicide. (Her youngest son also died, but in a road accident.) Her remaining son married but two of his three children were born with deformities, the third died soon after birth. Champa herself and her two daughters, one paralyzed, fight a daily battle with ill health. 28-year old Rasheeda Bi was already crippled by poverty and a mentally disabled husband when the gas struck. It went on to destroy 6 members of her family with cancer and left her partially blind.

But it is not their terrible stories that make these two women unique – there are thousands much worse off.
It is unwavering light of their indomitable spirit that lights this darkness.
In 1985, when the government offered the women of the victims’ families training and jobs at a stationery factory, Champa and Rasheeda signed up only to find that the promised sum of 150 rupees a month materialised to just 6. But it shocked them into finding their voices - and each other. Their protest got them the promised amount. But more importantly, it fired them to form the Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Stationery Karamchari Sangh.
And that was only the beginning.
In 1989, along with 75 other women, Champa and Rasheeda walked 470 miles to Delhi, often begging for food and shelter, to petition the Prime Minister to get their jobs regularised and higher salaries. (They were currently earning just 20% of the normal rate.) Though they did not meet the Prime Minister, their demand was ultimately met. Champa and Rasheeda now set their sights even higher – on bringing Dow Chemicals to book. From 2002, with a series of hunger strikes and dharnas, they confronted Dow officials all the way from Mumbai to Netherlands and finally in America.
Dow Chemicals still brazenly refuses to acknowledge any culpability. But in 2004, Champa and Rasheeda were awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize. Every cent of the 1,25,000 dollars of award money was used to set up the Chingari Trust, a non-profit organisation that provides support for the survivors of the Bhopal gas disaster.
Think about it.
Two poor, physically debilitated, barely literate women have done more than what the Government of India could not/ did not do. At the award ceremony, Rasheeda ended her acceptance speech by saying, “Hum Bhopal ki nari hain; phool nahin, chingari hain.”
So, enough already about the outrage.
In the words of those two brave little flames of Bhopal, this is what we, the people of India, demand.

 Extradite Warren Anderson and stand him to trial.
 Make Dow pay for the medical treatment for two generations of victims.
 Give the survivors full economic compensation for lost employment.
 Make Dow clean up Bhopal’s poisoned soil and water.

yogashala

 

Me, My Cell Phone and the Coconut Tree Man

It was only last week, while I was gazing at my coconut trees and thinking how grateful I was for my cell phone, when the results of the WHO Interphone study arrived. The study was looking for any connection between the over 5,000 brain tumors that had occurred between 2000-2004 and prolonged cell phone usage.
But first the coconut-tree-cell-phone connection.
Now, my relationship with my cell phone could be described at best of times as tricky.
Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against cell phones. But if I didn’t have one, it’d only be a slight exaggeration to say that I’d miss it as much as I would soggy toast. For one, it almost always rings when I can’t find it or can’t answer it. And when I do manage to answer it, it’s never James Cameron asking me to write his next film. Or George Clooney telling me that he’s madly in love with me. Or Steve Jobs offering me stock options in Apple (Move over, Billy-G.) If I talk for more than 30 seconds on it, my ear gets all hot and sweaty and squished up and I feel as if I’m talking on an iron, not a phone. And now that I’m considering getting one of those smart phones (only to keep up with the Jaykumars), I’m worried that it’ll turn out to be so smart that I won’t know how to use it.

And I’ve noticed that other people’s cell phones don’t make them behave any better either. They clutch at it hotly at all times as if it’s a reluctant lover about to make a getaway and when it rings, they rush to answer it as if it was James Cameron calling. Or George Clooney. Or Steve Jobs. And just in case one of them will call one day, they drive with it, take it for walks, to the movies, the loo (what else did you think was that plonk-plonk-sploosh-gurgle sound when you called your boss this morning?), even to bed. Apparently, the next piece cell phone wizardry will allow you to have your phone implanted into your..,er, never mind.

So, the only time I’m really happy that I have a cell phone is when I look at the two coconut trees in my garden. Lovely creatures, really, swishing their fronds seductively like hula dancers and keeping us always topped up with nariyal pani and luscious, freshly plucked coconut flesh. But the trouble with coconut trees is that you can’t train them the way you can dogs. So, every now and then, without so much as a hey-ninny-no, they shed coconuts and dried palm fronds. And since both the trees are near the compound wall, my relationship with the neighbours is, to put it mildly, frosty and distant.
But that was till I found a coconut-tree man with a cell phone.
For the uninitiated, a coconut tree man is someone who nimbly shimmies up coconut trees and divests them of coconuts, dried palm fronds and other such neighbour-unfriendly objects. The problem is, most coconut-tree men are rural folk who come into town only when there’s no work back home and it almost never when your coconut tree is ready to shed its load.
Except if the man has a cell phone. Then you have him on call, like home delivery. (Naturally, I always call from my landline.)
So, when the Interphone study results arrived, I was worried. You see, I always had this niggling fear that if every time I talked on the cell phone, I was sending into my brain the same stuff that scrambles eggs in a microwave oven, it can’t be a good thing, right? Yeah, yeah. I know it’s in the teeniest-tiniest doses, but it’s still electromagnetic radiation, right? And over time, things add up, don’t they - even the teeniest-tiniest? Studies say that electromagnetic radiation is killing off honeybees in the USA and that men who keep cell phones in their pants pocket have shown a significant decrease in sperm counts. Now I haven’t seen any honeybees nattering on cell phones or men talking on the ones that are in their pockets…
So, did the Interphone study confirm or allay my fears? (Would this mean good bye to my coconut tree man?)
Er.
Firstly, even though the results of the study were ready in 2004, the researchers delayed publishing them because they couldn’t agree about how exactly to present the data. (You’d think a study that cost 24 million dollars and covered over 10,000 respondents in 13 countries would be more sure of itself.)
When they finally did decide to publish, this is what they said.
There is no obvious connection between cell phone use and brain cancer.
But…
If you are a heavy user, you have a 40% higher risk; a heavy user being defined as someone who uses the cell phone on an average of 30 minutes a day. According to a 2009 article in the Wall Street Journal, rural Indians talk on their cell phone for about 17 minutes a day. I’m willing to bet my smartphone (the one I still have to buy) that this figure would at least double for the average urban Indian techie-teenager.
Incidentally, the study did not include any teenagers. Or children. Or for that matter, anyone under the age of thirty even though world wide, (and especially in India), most cell phone users today are under age thirty.
Niether did it include rural users. According to Devra Lee Davis, Carnegie Science Medal winner and Founding Director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, cell phones in rural areas emit significantly more radiation because they need to reach more distant antennas.
And if you are still not getting the message, this should reassure you.
Dr. Elisabeth Cardis, the scientist who led the Interphone study had this to say after the results were published. “Until stronger conclusions can be drawn one way or another, it may be reasonable to reduce one’s exposure to cellular radiation. It can’t hurt.”
Actually we shouldn’t worry about brain cancer. Because using cell phones while driving is a far greater threat. Compared to 300 possible brain tumours annually, it is estimated that about 8 people die every day in America in auto accidents caused by cell phone distractions. I shudder to think what that statistic is in India.

Coming Clean ((Or How I ound Enlightenment in a Trash Heap)

Development.
Big word.
And one that has always confused me. Used more liberally than salt in French fries, it’s a particular favourite of politicians. But what does it really mean?
It’s a question that has haunted me since….
Well, lemme start at the beginning.
Twenty-five years ago, when my dad decided to move to Mysore after retirement, it was a sleepy little town, dreaming happily of days when it was the glittering capital of a golden kingdom. Nothing much happened here except Dussera, but nobody was complaining. After all, what was there to complain when the Goddess was on Her hill and the sparkling waters of the Cauvery were indisputably ours and the sandalwood flourished and the air was scented by our very own Mysore mallige.
Ah, the Mysore air.
You know, normally Mysoreans are modest folk, preferring to hide their mallige under a bushel. But the one thing – other than palaces and Mysore pak - that did make us puff our chests out and brag was the fact that when we built a house, we didn’t allocate a budget for fans. We didn’t need to. The Goddess and Her verdant hill made sure - with judiciously timed showers - that for large parts of the year, fans were dispensable.
Ten years ago, when I moved to Mysore from Mumbai it was pretty much the same story. But the whispers had already begun.
“Development!” they hissed, “Mysore needs development!”
And strange things began to happen.
First, the invasion of the two-wheelers, spawning furiously like a pestilence of mechanical rodents, the banks playing eager, obsequious midwives with no-questions-asked-no-paperwork loans. And as they gobbled up road, air and parking space, the cars arrived, hatched by VRS and car loan melas. And then the first traffic jams made their Mysore debut.
Development, I wondered?
As I did, Mysore began to sprawl in every direction in an untrammelled epidemic of residential colonies where most of the “houses’ so flagrantly violated every construction bye-law that you could not only smell your neighbour’s fart but also tell exactly how many pods of garlic ent into that avarekai saaru. Perhaps this was “development”, I thought, as I tripped on another mound of rubble and cement because a neighbour was building a “maadi”. 
But I wasn’t sure.
Even when the malls and commercial complexes – ghastly, glittering-glassy-eyed monsters – began to appear, uprooting the beautiful old bungalows that we were almost as proud of as the rest of the palace-pak enchillada. And what puzzled me was this. If this development thingie was supposed to mean more jobs for our young folk, then why were so many of them still leaving town for “better prospects”, leaving their old folk to rattle around in these bungalows and ultimately sell them off because they couldn’t maintain them any more?
I wasn’t sure even when forests of mobile towers started growing out of our rooftops and mobiles in place of ears and when the mallige started coming Tamil Nadu. And not even when we had to use fans - sometimes even in winter. You see, since we were running out of urban-sprawl space, we decided that surely one Goddess didn’t need an entire hill all to Herself. So, we started regularly stripping it of its beautiful green cover, even burning some of it. Naturally, the Goddess, in disgust, decided we didn’t deserve those cooling round-the-year showers any more and the famous Mysore air slowly withered and shrivelled up.
Even then, I wasn’t sure.
Till recently, when I have finally found the answer - in garbage.
The area where I live was once a boringly clean neighbourhood. But now piles of garbage and overflowing garbage bins dot it. And that can mean only one thing.
Yup, development.
Here’s how. Development, I’m told, means more money to spend. And more money means more consumption. So much more that our poor Mysore Municipal Corporation can no longer handle the resulting bumper crop of shi…er, I mean garbage that we generate. 
I know – you’re outraged that I could write something like this when Mysore has just been declared the second cleanest city in India And compared to most Indian cities, it is still is - one of the cleanest and the prettiest.
But not for long. Mysore’s infrastructure is already stretched to its limits. The JNNURM projects inspire nobody’s confidence and almost every week we’re privy to squabbles between the officials and the city authorities. Potholes are routine, drains overflow with raw sewage every monsoon and every summer we play the roulette of water shortage. If Mysore hasn’t collapsed, it is because the threat of making it a Tier-II city still remains a threat.
This road leads to only one destination.
In other words, it’s time to wake up and smell the garbage.

Technorati Tags: mysore,development,JNNURM,Chamundi

Mala- wati

 

I was worried.
Because I noticed that of late, what once used to shock and thrill, to titillate and bring on paroxysms of outraged ecstasy now barely evokes a half-hearted, bored twitch. That when that Nithyanada video broke the news, we watched (normally at least 40 times but now barely once), yawned and went back to checking if there was a new flavour in ear wax while wearily thinking,
“Oh puhleez, Nitzy. Your video may be beta quality, but ND Tiwari already beat you to this. At age 85. And with three women.”
So, thank God for Behenji and the Maha Mala Mela.
While the sight of what looked like a pink, velcro Loch Ness monster undulating around Behenji and her clutch of fawning party men was riveting enough, what had me glued to the telly was trying to figure out what the Maha Mala was made out of. (And for once, I was grateful to the news channels for looping 3.78 seconds of footage 831 times.) Roses, my mum declared grandly – gulab for  Gulabo, hai na? Rubbish, I thought, surely Behenji was capable of coming up with something less ho-hum than a few hundred thousand roses even if they looked as if they had been genetically engineered to sport the correct shade of Maya-pink...

She did.

Now, there are many amongst us who are outraged by those 1000-rupee notes, damning it as a brazen, blatantly vulgar display of whatever-it-is that Maha Malas of 1000-rupee notes are supposed to be. But they judge Hamari Pyari Behenji too harshly – you see, the only reason the notes scored over orchids or tulips or for that matter chameli ke phool was because they were the only ones that came closest to that Maya-pink…
But why the Maha Mala? (Which, according to most estimates, is worth more than 5 crores, but according to Digvijay Singh of the Congress, it’s upwards 22 crores.) Wouldn’t a modest knee-length garland, punctuated by diamond studded blue mini elephants have done the trick?
Ah.
Well, lemme explain. As we all know so well, Hamari Pyari Behenji’s life’s mission is to turn Uttar Pradesh into the Utter Paradise that it was always meant to be. And towards that end, she has worked tirelessly erecting statues, building memorials, museums and parks; sparing no expense and even regularly forgoing her weekly quota of diamonds.
Naturally, unable to stomach her success, her jealous detractors have been weaving a malicious fabric of nasty lies about her and her beloved Uttar Pradesh.
That for the vast majority of its people, life in one of India’s most backward states is so dismal and hopeless that along with Bihar, Uttar Pradesh has the highest rate of people migrating out of the state. (At least one in every three persons in Uttar Pradesh is below the poverty line.) That on almost every parameter on economic and human development – education, communication, health, power, roads - Uttar Pradesh scores among the lowest. That with a woman as a Chief Minister, Uttar Pradesh has one of the lowest female to male ratio, one of the highest incidence of infant mortality and maternal deaths (twice the national average).  If you are born a girl in Uttar Pradesh, you are five times less likely to reach your fifth birthday than if you were born in Kerala. And if you somehow manage to survive that long, you will still live 20 years less.
Now tell me.
Would the CM of such a state nonchalantly wrap a 5-crore - oh, alright, Diggi Raja, a 22-crore Maha Mala around herself?
Of course not.
And would the CM of such a state, where the average wallah’s monthly income doesn’t amount to 2 of the notes in the Maha Mala, tot up a net worth estimated at anywhere between 60-70 crores (not counting the Maha Mala but counting 72 properties and 54 bank accounts)?
Never.
And would the CM of such a state where every second child between the age of 1-5 years is malnourished, own a silver dinner set weighing 18.5 kgs and perhaps even dine off it?
Unthinkable.
I rest my case.
And that leaves only one other matter – a reminder, actually to the chappies designing currency notes at the RBI. I hope you fellas will have a new note ready for Behenji’s next Jan Kalyan Divas…er, I mean birthday.
Naturally, it will have to be upwards of a thousand rupees.
More importantly, it will have to be pink.

ratna.rajaiah@gmail.com