Last night we were driving back home when the missus suggested we chill out the Imax here in Wadala for a bit. We do that on, I don’t know, alternate weekends?
It normally comprises a leisurely stroll around the food court area trying not to be smoked to death by the excessively aromatic Thai food place therewith or a formless slump into the sofa seats at the Crossword with a graphic novel.

But last night, as we drove up to the place I called up the booking number to see if any movies were available

Sidin: “Do you have Ram Gopal varma ki Aag?”

Lady: “He he he. No.” Much chuckling in the background.

Sidin: “It’s gone?”

Lady: “Yes we have removed it…” Guffaws. Snigger.

Sidin: “Ok. Sheesh…”

So tell me how bad is it? One week was all it was given? That hasn’t happened to Mohanlal ever. Sigh.

But seriously. How bad is this thing? Tell me using nifty little metaphors and similes. For instance :

1. As boring as a ‘Veteran Chartered Accountants’ mailing group

2. As painful as a hernia operation where you overhear the doctor say: “I said Anesthesia you fool! Anasthesia! What do I do with this DVD of the Academy Award-nominated animated feature film produced and directed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman at Fox Animation Studios, that was released on November 14, 1997 by Twentieth Century Fox for god’s sake!”

Leave yours in the comments.

p.s. Saturday mornings aren’t so good for my metaphors.

In this 60th year of Indian independence the nation is celebrating some of the things that stand at the very essence of our Indian identity. Things that make us proud to be citizens of this great, great country.
Something that immediately comes to mind is Deepika Padukone.

But today I am going to talk about something that often gets overlooked when we sit and browse through the characteristics that make an Indian the successful world citizen that he is. We all know about his ability to form eighteen queues where, say, the British would only form one (ambition!); to walk resolutely into a passenger jet carrying the exact internationally approved cabin baggage allowance for 18 people (resourcefulness!) and to be extremely hospitable and welcoming even to complete strangers (fraanship!).

However seldom do we hear mention of that one great characteristic of his that has taken him or her to great heights in all walks of life. Yes ladies and gentlemen I am talking about THE GREAT INDIAN IDEA.

Never have a culture been so adept at spotting opportunities and immediately coming up with a brilliant idea to take advantage of the same.

For instance, who can forget that memorable instance when Captain Gopinath of Air Deccan saw his first commercial airline and thought to himself: “Someday I will make thousands of India’s common people, the multitudes who have spent their lives in buses and carts and crowded trains, come to an airport for the first time and then stay there without food or water for well over a week because the plane is delayed due to unavoidable technical reason!”

Or when Venkatesh Prasad caught a glimpse of his first cricket ball, picked it up in his little baby fingers, and thought to himself: “One day I will take the Indian team to the world stage where, towards the end of a tightly fought match with just one wicket and four runs left for us to lift a cup, I will bowl a slow full toss outside off-stump to Steve Waugh.”

And keeping in the spotlight this heritage, I would like to highlight a Great Indian Idea Person who recently emerged in the news.

He is Mr. Amarendra Nath Ghosh who saw an opportunity and immediately swallowed it.

Ghosh was born in Kolkata in 1960 and lived a rather unremarkable life for thirty years. Little did we know that in the early 90’s he would swindle several national banks of over 20 crore rupees and make away with it to the sunny beaches of Dubai.

No one knows quite how he managed to slip away with so much cash but I have a theory: excess cabin baggage.

After a few petty jobs in Dubai he skipped off to the Vanuatu Islands where he pulled off a 300 million dollar scam in cahoots with the Prime Minister (of Vanuatu). By now the world was beginning to notice Mr. Ghosh who himself was seriously running out of luggage.

He then made his way to Germany by air. I am not really sure about this fact, but rumours are that he flew in First Class and then stole the entire cutlery they gave him with the dinner service.

That was the last straw.

Interpol immediately notified the world’s police organizations about “the balding Indian gentleman who is a crafty swindler and was last spotted with a fork and several dessert spoons. Exercise extreme caution and serve only finger food!”

Then in 2003 the Germans caught him and decided to extradite him to India.

At this juncture Mr. Ghosh remembered something his grandfather had told all those years ago in Kolkata: “Never steal from anyone beta. And even if you do, immediately give up if they catch you. It is the honourable thing.” Ghosh, while recognizing the inherent merits of such a noble approach, gave it the finger.

He then did what any young Indian man when faced with a police case does: he swallowed a four-inch long knife and cried hoarse that the flight to India would kill him. (Also there was no way he could make it through a metal detector.)

This screwed up things for everyone. For four years he chilled out in Germany. Well, he chilled out to the extent possible with a sharp cutting instrument strategically placed in one’s throat. Soft music and strictly no roller-coasters and white water rafting is what I am thinking.

But the good news is that just last week the CBI in India were able to book an Air Ambulance (a plane fully equipped with beds and medical devices and a siren) to bring him back.

The plane will have Indian police personnel and doctors to watch over him.

“We have taken every precaution and will do everything in our power to keep him safe” they said, “including electrocution. The flight will be fun.”

We wish the CBI all the best and hope they can finally bring Amarendra Nath Ghosh to justice.

We felicitate Mr. Ghosh on showcasing The Great Indian Idea and wish him a comfortable flight without turbulence.

Ugh.
A day of terrible weather in Mumbai again.

Well not terrible as much as temperamental perhaps. The morning was cool and dark. Then a steady drizzle began, quickly turned into a downpour that sufficiently screwed up traffic everywhere and then, just when you thought offices were going to close and it was going to be a day for much sitcom viewing, the rain petered away and the blazing sun came out.

Dammit. Sweat. Sigh.

Anyways. Of late I have been trying to grapple with a certain social situation. An issue of nomenclature.

I know lots of friends who have nicknames. (It’s something most people from my business school go out into the world with by default. For instance I have been told that the Vindi in ‘Vindi Banga’ of the HLL fame is a product of the compulsory nicknaming convention we have out at Ahmedabad.)

In such an environment you just called people by their nicknames. For instance the missus is named after a character in Sholay (of Sippy). (FYI not Jai, Veeru, Thakur, Basanti or Gabbar.) Everyone I know calls her that even now. And so do I.

Fungus’ parents call him Fungus.

So a healthy proportion of the people I know are exclusively referred to by their nicknames.

Do keep in mind that not all these nicknames are cool and trendy. Some are downright scandalous. For instance a male junior of mine was christened ‘Dildo’. Few will forget the uproar that was caused during our annual arts festival when one of the ladies in Logistics send out an emergency summons message over the PA system for Dildo who was required at the registration desk immediately as “the girls from SP Jain have been looking for Dildo for sometime now and are in a hurry…”

My recent dilemma is because of such a genre of nicknames.

Now suppose a friend of yours, let’s call her Saudamini, introduces you to another friend of her’s. Someone you have never met before. For the sake of argument let us assume he is a medium sized retailer of cellphones somewhere in a market in Andheri and his real name is Kumaramangalam Irla.

(Been carrying that one around for months now. That’s a load off my jest!)

Over the course of the evening’s conversation you learn that Saudamini repeatedly addresses Kumaramangalam by a most scandalous/revolting nickname. Something that has roots in an incident both of them are well aware of but you have no clue about.

I am talking about a nickname like ‘Hernia’, ‘Eczema’ or maybe just plain ‘Shorty’ or ‘Ugly’. Or even ‘Khujli’ which people will tell you was my nick in Ahmedabad but they ARE ALL LYING!

Now my question is when during the course of your friendship with Kumar (which is so much better a nick) do you decide to commence calling him by his nickname? You can’t just start calling him Hernia or Eczema right-away can you? You’ve only just met them and don’t want to come across as too fresh or clingy. And besides it is only polite to ask him why he is addressed so.

But maybe I don’t want to know:

Sidin: “So they call you some nickname Kumaramanagalam…?”
Kumaramangalam: “Hernia…”
Sidin: “Oh and why is that…”
Kumaramnagalam: “Just a sec… see? And here too… Looks a little like Italy if you look at it from here…”
Sidin: “Interesting… Back in a sec…”

But even if the nickname is something like Shorty or Ugly you can’t just start calling them that right away can you? Coming from a stranger Kumaramangalam might think we are being judgmental right away even if he does look like an Uday Chopra walking on his knees when you come to think of it.

Kumaramangalam: “Hi, I am Kumaramangalam, but people call me Ugly!”
Sidin: “No shit!”

So when do you know if its the right time to address someone by their nickname? Do you just decide after a certain number of meetings to call them ‘Skunk’ or ‘Kakkoos’ or whatever? Or do you decide to not take the risk at all and keep calling them Kumaramangalam all the time including at their Birthday parties when the song always ends in widespread dissaray?

I don’t know. It is bothering me. What do you guys do?

Khujli.

p.s. Today’s extremely important advice for marital success: Never have an argument with the missus while you are wearing only thin cotton bermuda shorts made of remarkably breathable material, and she is using the Japanese-imported molten-lava spewing wedding- gift blow-dryer.

I can now rest in peace. I have got my comeuppance.
Last night I finally managed to wrap up an installation of Ubuntu on my laptop. Minor hiccups aside, things like hardware drivers missing and wireless networking issues, I now actually have two operating system coexisting in peace on this laptop: Windows XP and Ubuntu.

This may seem insignificant to you. But in my little world that is worthy of a Nobel. Now I can use Ubuntu as a light and free operating system to take care of all day to day tasks while Windows can take care of the complicated stuff like downloading Backdoor Trojans and spontaneous hard disk formatting.

This finally puts to rest a long, long war of attrition between Unix and your truly that stretches back almost ten years.

One evening, during my third year of engineering, I suddenly got into a fit of placement pangs. All my usual confidence disappeared. It suddenly occurred to me that I was not exactly what you would call prime recruitment material.

This was the time when software had just reversed the poor trends of 2000-2001 and IT companies were beginning to flock to our campuses again. Everyone with serious job hopes were rushing to their rooms after class and locking themselves away with the usual IT job preparation materials: Shakuntala Devi, Edward De Bono, Yashwant Kanetkar, old Infosys question papers and the like.

(I have been told that things are easier nowadays. Last year someone from NITT told me that some of the top IT names don’t even interview anymore. All you needed to do was just clear the written test. Sigh.)

But back in my time a job with Infy was no forgone conclusion. Of course you could safely assume squeezing in somewhere between Infy, Wipro and TCS. But if you didn’t then the going was pretty tough.

Till then I had assured myself that software was not my cup of tea and I would save myself (one is cocky at that age and with that level of blood alcohol on a daily basis) for one of the tech or core companies. Bajaj, Telco, Volvo – the real engineering types.

And then one weekend morning I lay in bed and decided to quickly overview my career plans for a few minutes. But not for too long as the bread pakoda ran out after 9:30 or so.

Now I knew couldn’t program to save my life. The Meta syllabus included a moderately difficult course on C and C++. I’d passed through with flying colours scoring one mark more than pass point. (The highlight of the course was watching the professor, a high strung nervous sort, struggle with an early morning class on Objected Oriented Programming, break into a sweat and then finally faint into the arms of a vigilant fellow in the front row. I bunked that class unfortunately.)

I’ve often wondered over the years hence why someone would want a C program that printed out a pyramid of prime numbers. What essential human endeavour struggles for want of good pyramid prime programs?

“Houston we have a problem!”
“We know. Perhaps a particular problem pertaining to the pyramid prime processor?”
“We like the alliteration Houston!”
“Merely making the mundane mirthful mister!”
“Ok cut it…”

I sucked at most forms of programming. And particularly the fancy shmancy prime number, sorting, pyramid type programs.

But then what certainty was there that I could make it into one of those engineering firms? They seldom came every year and, even when they did, they picked up one, maybe two people at a go. Was I being foolhardy I wondered, as I lay in bed with an eye on the clock.

Then later that evening I decided that I must hedge my risk. I had to ensure that I knew the bare minimum to make it into a software firm just in case my core engineering dreams fell flat.

So I asked Tuhin Chatterjee what I could do on a war footing. The threat loomed large that I would have to give GRE and then do an MS and PhD because I couldn’t get a job.

“Unix man. Unix is the way to go man. That and Networking. Just focus on those too.”

He shared his thoughts during one of our many walks to the gate for chai and cancer sticks.

For one whole month I sat hunched over a UNIX manual and a huge textbook on Networking.

Who was that networking by? Ah yes. Tennenbaum. Andrew Tennenbaum I think.

After a month I thought I was ready to try out some of my newly learnt computing skills at our computer center, the Octagon. I briskly walked into the Unix lab.

Two hours later I was back in my room pulling out an old Barron’s guide to the GRE from under the bed and already mouthing words like apothecary and apothegm fighting back the tears.

It was the worst thulping by an open source operating system I have ever received in my life.

Why were there backslashes everywhere? Why was vi editor such a cold-hearted bitch? Why do I have to press seven keys simultaneously to scroll down one page? Why? Why? Why weren’t things like the way its said in the manual:

finger – display information about local and remote users

When in reality it was more like this:

finger – put in eye in one smooth motion to get in the mood for vi editor

It was a futile struggle. Around me Unix maestros were clearly enjoying themselves enormously:

“Hey there is a problem with my port. Can someone just finger me right now!” was the sort of thing one Unix maestro would say to the other excitedly.

I went on to pick up a job with an engineering firm where engineers worked as they were meant to: grinding and cutting and welding and sweating it out and coming back home with grease stains. Once there I was asked to design a project costing software.

For close to a decade I never crossed my path with Unix ever again.

Till last night. After much recommendation from a friend I decided to give this Ubuntu thing a shot. I followed the manual by the letter. I slipped in the DVD, booted from the disc, played around with my partitions a little bit, set up a root user and finally waited with bated breath while the installation happened.

As of now everything except the sound card and the PPPOE connection for the internet at home seems to be working fine.

I could try to get them to work too. I checked the user forums and there was a wealth of information such as this response from an Ubuntu expert:

This is bug 2825 (http://https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?i d=2825) . The work around is to ~# ln -f /etc/pppd/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf

To which someone with a sense of humour replied:

I can confirm this bug. I am using a tap0 bridge to emulate PPPoE on a Globespan chipset-based USB aDSL bridge and the latests stable eciadsl-usermode drivers (which, btw are not in Universe). It would be nice to have an updated pppd perhaps backported from Dapper.
I know that Debian’s choice of using kernel-mode PPPoE makes rp-pppoe unnecessary, but I wonder if it would be possible to update rp-pppoe to 3.7 for those that still in using it.

I laughed heartily and decided I was ok without the sound.

So for now, between me and Unix, its even.

(p.s. A big hola! to all the regular readers of this blog out at NIT Surat. Especially Raghav and Sanjeev. Much love goes out to you guys! Now send me money.)

Friday night I think it was.
I was motoring home in a suitably rickety Mumbai black and yellow. The audio was tuned to 94.3 I think. But I really wasn’t listening. Instead I was intently reading a New Yorker. The subscription was a gift from the missus. Something about housing in New York and how some 80-year old guy sold his ramshackle old home for 3 million dollars.

Something irrelevant but written well enough to grab attention. I had to hold up the magazine right up next to the window to read in streetlamp light.

Then at some point over Wadala bridge, a few minutes from home, the cabbie began switching stations and he flipped past a tune I was sure I had last heard a long long time ago. I asked to switch back.

Nazia Hassan was singing Boom Boom.

The cabbie didn’t seem to mind. So he left it on after a few seconds of waiting to see if I was interested.

I was glad. Boom is one of an array of songs that takes me way back to my childhood jaunts to Kerala from the gulf. And to my mother’s home in Irinjalakuda in particular.

(Irinjlakuda. Even mallus get tongue-twisted a bit on that one. But not as bad Cherpullasery or Njarakkal.)

It was always one of the the highlights of our annual vacations. Bouncing along the roads and up and down hills as we took a bus first from Pavaratty to Thrissur and then from Thrissur to Irinjalakuda.

The bus to Thrissur was not such a big deal. We did that shuttle several times each vacation anyways. Thrissur was the closest ‘city’ in those days and you had to go take the forty-five minute bus trip if you wanted Corn Flakes and Maltova and the like.

But the Thrissur to Irinjalakuda detour happened maybe once or twice in a vacation and we absolutely loved it. More out of anticipation than anything that actually happened or we saw amid trip. Same paddy fields. Clean little houses. Churches and photo studios. Little AKG Bhavans wherever the reds built an office by the main road.

At Irinjalakuda there was a big showcase built into the wall on the left end of the living room which had a whole bunch of mostly NRI mallu memorabilia.

Optic fibre lamps that rotated slolwy and changed colours. Weird ornamental cigarette lighters in shape of brandy bottles. Plastic camels that crapped Marlboro Lights when pulled up its tail. Little cups and saucers and platters with company logos in half arabic. Fake foliage of varying respectability. Wall calendars with pictures of ships my uncle sent every year.

And on one of the central shelves, occupying pride of place, was a huge (by todays’ standards) Sony radio and music player.

This was one of those those behemoths that had child-sized external speakers, Geiger counter like volume meters and a big round volume control in cloudy steel. Room for one tape in the front and a a row of push-down buttons that jutted out like flat little toes.

And just underneath this shelf there was a drawer stuffed to the gills with audio tapes.

Nazia Hassan, Santana, Bee Gees, Osibisa, Boney M, ABBA, Various Jacksons, Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, a dozen volumes of Best Disco by some forgotten label.

Funky stuff.

You can still find a lot of those tapes in that drawer. The plastic and paper inlays have yellowed and most of the tapes have been ravaged by fungus. But no one has the heart to throw them out.

There was also an adjacent tape stand. One of those revolving ’80’s plastic’ things in a cube shape with slots on each face for tapes. It was always kept a to one side in a shelf with a yellow dusting cloth over it.

That had Laawaris, Disco Dancer, Kabhie Kabhie, Cooolie, Zanjeer and so on. It also had several Kishore and Lata anthologies. I never completely took to the tape stand though. The covers there were so boring compared to the Disco balls and hot pants and shiny sequined costumes of the Funk Drawer.

All these exotic tapes found their way to this medium sized town in Kerala thanks to my daredevil maternal uncle. His list of achievements are pretty impressive. Ship radio operator.Movie extra. Trainee priest. Expat in Sharjah.

And committed audio tape exporter.

I can actually smell the room as I write this. A musty, warm, slightly moth-eaten smell mingled with the scent of Nycil powder. Lots of pastel colors everywhere. The floors were shiny hard black oxide that never cut and always bruised when you fell down.

As soon as we ran in through the front doors, that are incidentally still locked by interlocking bits of wood, we were fed and patted and hugged. Then the elders got on with their thing while we hit the Funk Drawer.

It was a Nazia Hassan special on the radio. We were stuck in traffic at the east end of Wadala bridge. I was no longer reading.

After Boom they played App Jaisa Koi. The RJ, overly excited as her Job Profile and HR manual demands, bubbled on about Ameen Sayani mentioning how App Jaise Koi ruled Binaca Geet Mala for 14 sight weeks.

The funk drawer had both tracks. And Nazia Hassan ruled.

But my absolute oldest music memory has to be those two tracks from Laawaris that got all of us kids leaping abut like idiots and making up words that broadly rhymed with the real ones:

Mere anginemey thoomara kakaamyey

Apni to jaise waise (or) Apni jo taise waise (or) Apni jo waise aise (or) some combination of the above.

We leapt around like idiots with the music on high till dad got pained and screamed at us. Or we fell over the coffee table and grandpa’s newspapers. Or till the domestic help agreed to take us to the top of the hill and then roll us down on his bicycle.

Or someone fed us something.

By the time I got out of the cab and went into the lift I was very pleased with myself

I haven’t been to Irinjalakuda for a long time now. Must go there next time I drop by.

Though now grandpa spends all his time listening to mallu evangelical music.

It’s not quite the same.