A girlfriend with six wheels

A girlfriend with six wheels

Nandagopal Rajan

“Who is this Sindhu?” there was a puzzled look on my mother’s face as she underlined some entries in my personal diary with her fingers. I couldn’t help laughing though I was angry that she had read my “personal log”; anyway there was nothing interesting there except records of bunked classes and seen movies.
I’m sure my initial smirk made Amma think she’d finally found the reason for my long telephonic conversations. But she was mistaken. The rather feminine sounding Sindhu was anything but the focus of my college love life, if at all one could have anything like that in a boys-only college, then aptly called “marubhumi” (desert) for this very reason.
“That’s our college bus, Amma,” I explained. But she was unimpressed. Not her fault, as almost all dates on my diary started with a reference to this girl (in this case with six wheels).
An ideal day for most of us Sindhu-goers started a little bit earlier than the others. We took the longer route to reach college. Though guys like me could catch a bus to Medical College just five minutes down the road, those ugly green beasts didn’t have the charm of this girl, after all she belonged just to us, just to the boys of Devagiri.
I for instance used to travel three kilometers the other way to the City Stand beside Mananchira to begin our “direct flight” to college. Those days there was just one other bus that had a direct service to the college gates, but that used to be stuffed to the rafters from Feroke.
At City Stand we’d all have our eyes peeled for the first sight of our darling, the first ones to spot it always got the head start. They’d be the first to know where the driver would stop that day, and would be the first to slam-dunk their bags on the free seats. But that didn’t mean we could put our bags wherever we wanted. The first few seats were reserved for chechis from MA and the senior chettans. We were free to fight it out for the rest of the seats. But things changed with time, by my first year BA – my third year in the bus – I was promoted to the third row, a seat I kept with my best friend Sai Manohar till the end of my degree course.
Once settled, the next step would be to make sure that the “non-student class” got to know that this was a Devagiri special, we did our best to make it a “students only” though much to the chagrin of the conductor who’d be left with just 40-paise student passes during the 8.15 trip.
Then the fun began. This was no ordinary trip, it was the time to catch up with the latest news, discuss the latest movies and songs, take notes and even dissect those theories that you failed to understand in the last lecture.
For me however it was the time to hone my PJ skills. My “unbearables” would start as soon as the bus crossed Coronation, much to the delight of some and the irritation of the others. By my final year, most of the regulars were used to my style of humour and some had even started their own schools.
But above all, this was the time when the friendships were nurtured and foundations of new ones laid. Most of my best friends were Sindhu boys too. I still keep in touch with others who I first talked to aboard that darling bus of ours.
Sindhu gave me one of the most memorable times of my college life. Something I could bank on every morning, unless if there was a bandh or bus strike. No wonder I shed a tear when made my last trip to college in that friend of five years a morning in mid 1999.
No wonder when I went to college a couple of years ago to meet my beloved teachers in the economics section I chose to wait for Sindhu. But she’d changed by then, more girls than boys, almost blasphemous for an authentic Devagirian like me who believed this was among the last standing bastions of male suzerainty. But some things never change, like the twinkle in the eyes of the teenagers that tell you they have their sights set on the world.

Flying high, low cost

Nandagopal Rajan

I was returning to the skies after 15 long years, almost a lifetime as far as Indian aviation is considered. The last time I flew was much before the bright-tied Damania tried his bit to bring the Indian skies to the middle-class below. Then flying was anything but low cost, the reason why my grandfather decided that the best way to give me a trip of the airways was by taking a flight from Thiruvananthapuram to Bangalore. The flight was so short that by the time I'd overcome the bitterness of the welcome drink, we were circling over the Garden City.
But, things have changed this millennium, mainly because of Air Deccan – the very carrier I opted for to break my rather long interlude from the skies. I was flying Kolkata-New Delhi, all of two hours.
The first few hurdles, right from getting the boarding pass to the security clearance–yes, I too had to get my wallet x-rayed–passed without a glitch. Hmm, the Deccan experience wasn't as bad I thought it would be.
"Be the first off the bus and first on the plane to get the best seats," we'd been warned by frequent fliers, reminding of the daily jostling for seats on the college bus. I was hoping to be greeted by the colour-coded saris of the airhostesses, but was instead ushered in T-shirt clad contemporaries touting the latest deals on offer.
The flight soon filled up and we were in air within a few minutes, just five minutes late…this was getting better. Soon, it was time for snacks and coffee. Our eyes lit up on seeing the Café Coffee Day on the paper cups, time for an early morning cappuccino, I thought. A couple of minutes and Rs 25 later, I got to know that it was going to be a make your-own-coffee experience at 25,000 ft. The rest of the coffee break isn't much to write about.
Hovering over Delhi I tried to locate my colony, saw the Qutub Minar and spotted our office building nearby, and yes it was much better than Google Earth. I glanced at my watch as soon as we landed. 8 am: we were dot on time. No wait for the luggage either. We were on the road by 8.25. I had made up my mind, Deccan it will be from now on, after all it costs just a few hundred rupees more that the regular AC III-tier.
But the euphoria lasted only till I reached home and opened my suitcase to find the LCD of my digital camera smashed. Maybe Deccan did some cost cutting with the baggage handlers. A week on I'm waiting for a reply from the company. The repairs will ensure that my trip to Kolkata is billed first class…so much for low cost.

my fish

The one under the stone is an Oscar. He's dead though. The two silver dollars are also no more. The jewel fish now enjoy their retirement in a cement tank.

Dance of the learned

To understand Kathakali is like learning a new language and mastering it. It's tougher since you have to comprehend the sign language as well as the spoken (padam) at the same time.

A watery grave?

Nandagopal Rajan

It’s a long wait for me every evening. I wait, all dressed up for office, to hear the hissing and spluttering which announces the arrival of my daily ration of water. Often, it fails to turn up on time, and I have to leave, my mind full of fear that the tank will run dry in the midst of my morning ablutions.
But when she comes, she comes with a bang. Often with so much silt that I wonder if the water is being piped in straight from Lake Pareechu. Thank God my buckets are better than Nathpa Jhakri, or I’d have had to shut shop for desilting. But even they call it quits by the weekend, their innards so murky that I have to disembowel them and give them a good rinsing. Soon they are ready to take on the next day’s muck. Don’t get tense; I have better sense than drink something which has a chemical content more elaborate than H20.
I get a weekly supply of bottled water. Come on, stop smiling. It’s better than that piped stuff. Yeah, I’m sure it’s full of pesticide too, but at least it’s been filtered somewhere. But I’m trained to tackle contingencies like this. “In a disaster zone drink tea,” they used to tell us at journalism school in Orissa. Soon, we had the chance to put our survival training to practical use.
The Super Cylcone of 1999 made sure we had nothing else to wash down our Haldiram’s Soan Papdi, the only packed food available, except carbonated drinks. There weren’t many takers for colas in Orissa, they were just too expensive. After hearing the horror stories that the catastrophe bought with it, most of them associated with water in one way or the other, we were happy to be drinking the liquid “safely bottled” before the cyclone.
But that was seven years ago. This is my first summer in Delhi, and I already dream of the wells back home in coastal Kerala which used to nearly spill over after every monsoon downpour. But then we’d scorn at the sight of ground water, often coming up with weird excuses: “It smells of moss…where do the fish shit…it’s salty.”
I’m sure God Almighty is taking his revenge, subjecting me to the torture of having to bathe in water that reminds me of a particular sewer in downtown Cochin. I distinctively remember my chemistry teacher saying the smell was that of a sulphuric compound. I’ve been vaccinated against Hepatitis, but I’m still afraid of all the underworld connections my glass of water is making before making his appearance through my tap. I’d rather drink a glass of pesticide. 

Two sides, same coin

The best thing christian education has given me is the ability to understand how other religions
work. Though I am not very religious myself, I know for sure that I will never become a fanatic. You just cannot think that way when you have learned how other religions think. There is no one RIGHT after that, its always your right and their right. You just have to acknowledge there are two sides. All communal problems arise when you end up saying that this is what I think and I'm right. There is no scope of fanatical thought if you even acknowledge the other side.

To be continued

 

Desert moon

I'm a man of the night. I work when most of you are fast asleep. This nocturnal life style gives me the ability to understand the images of the dark better. At least I think so. This picture was taken at Connaught Place, Delhi.  

A young rebellion

Nandagopal Rajan

“No reservation, yes scholarships,” screams a bumper sticker on a gleaming new sedan parked in a posh South Delhi colony. The message this innocuous looking piece of on-road graffiti signifies is significant: The Great Indian Youth has finally arrived at the scene of political activism. Their days of vicarious agitation and activism seem over. The indicators were there for all to see; often so obvious that they were overlooked.
Till some time back it was widely believed that you could judge a man’s affiliations by the books he read – the 1984s and War and Peaces were a great giveaway. But we Indians have of late been too busy to read. For the X+ generation, the pressure valve comes neatly wrapped in celluloid.
A couple of years back, south India had two major blockbusters – 4 The People and Boys – both with the obvious message that youth need to change things for themselves. Well nothing new here if you have seen great Hindi formulae films of the 70s. But the message this time was more direct, planting a bug in those impressionable young minds. Up north, Rang De Basanti too said the same things at a time when Anniyan (Aparichit in Hindi) was making 16-year-old stand up and take notice in the villages of Tamil Nadu.
There was rebellion in the air, but no one smelled it. When the spark came in the form of the OBC reservation hoopla, the tinder was ready to be stoked. Soon even the “this-is-not-my-headache’ packs of students across the country were marching on the streets, sweating it out on footpaths and trying their hand at making the most devious looking Arjun Singh caricatures, all in their fight for the Right to Equality. Many of them still might not understand the necessities or intricacies of caste politics, but they sure do understand that they can’t lie back and wait for the wheel of time to set things right.
Half a century of collective frustration seems to be finally finding its voice in a generation that has not learnt to wait, or to forgo. From Coke to PCs and mobile phones they have always got what they wanted. Their attitudes are different; their agitations might be stomped down, but not their resolve. We better not confine the similarities to Bhagat Singh and Azad to silver-screen scripts. Remember history teaches more about the future than the past. Look back, have we seen all this before?

My Oscar

Oscar
Originally uploaded by kamikazengp.

This little devil has eaten up half the other occupants in my aquarium. He goes ravenous when he sees food leaving nothing for the others...