Sixth-Finger

56. A POLITICAL HYBRID

2011-02-10T00:48:00.000-08:00

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Every morning a few points of my BP shoot up a little and then after one or two hours it comes down to its original state. My doctor suggested that I try to avoid this unnecessary hip hop of my pressure. The only way out is to stop reading the newspaper. What could an old retired guy like me do other than this everyday morning? Does it not become a routine part of our lives? Imagining the numbers of zeroes you have to add to the assumed amounts of corruptions makes anybody jitterybut it is a nice pastime! It is even more interesting than playing the sudoku! So I could not help but reading the news and playing a ‘deadly’ game with my blood pressure.

But two days back a centre page news item made me feel so happy. I did not feel any usual head swinging after reading the paper. It was a different story. One centre page news item told that Italy is more corrupt than India – at least one step ahead. The country does not stop with that. The sexual exploits of the PM, which can be competed ball-for-ball by one of our own old governors, are really awesome. How can we, the normal human beings, try to feel envy of those ‘big people’ and their games? Italy’s PM not only enjoys his ball game with ‘under-age nymphets’ but also earns the support of half of the country’s poplulation. But I don’t know whether the sexual exploits and the support have any correlation. The story was long and very interesting, and challenging too for the Indian bahus.

With this joyous mood I closed the paper for the day. But suddenly another thought came to my mind. It was a sort of scientific query. It was about HYBRIDS. Dictionary says a hybrid is an offspring produced by two different varieties of parents. A question propped up in my mind. What would happen if there is some one as an ‘offspring’ of an Indian – Italian pair taking the prime post in India?

Disclaimer: This post without any picture is very dull. So just to add some ‘colour’ I am adding a few photos of known people. Don’t connect the content of the post with the photos.

55. AN OLD STORY RETOLD ...

2008-07-25T11:22:00.000-07:00

An Old Story:

The Ant works hard in the withering heat all summer building its house and laying up supplies for the winter. The Grasshopper thinks the Ant is a fool and laughs & dances & plays the summer away.
Come winter, the Ant is warm and well fed. The Grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.

The following Indian version of the Old Story has been made by some sick mind and so it has to be corrected (உண்மைகள் அப்டின்னு ஒண்ணு இருக்குல்ல ) and retold:
(The “original’ is in blue colour and the corrections are in red)

Indian Version retold:

The Ant works hard in the withering heat all summer building its house and laying up supplies for the winter.(Long long ago .. so long ago .. the ants proclaimed from the tops of temples that they had come straight from gods’ some vital anatomical parts and hence they were more than normal humans; and prescribed that the destiny of all grasshoppers is only to serve the ants. They sapped all the fruits of grasshoppers’ labour and enriched themselves for millennia. The grasshoppers were forbidden from any type of learning for long by the ants… a real great strategy – to keep their work force in absolute ignorance. At the end of this story you will find the ants continuing this strategy still to this day!)

The Grasshopper thinks the Ant's a fool and laughs & dances & plays the summer away. (No, instead, for long the poor, illiterate and enslaved grasshoppers toil and suffer, never even knowing their rightful place as ‘human beings’ in this society. Such was the way the ‘mantra of ants’ worked on the lives of the grasshoppers.)

Come winter, (Some great souls like Ambedkar, Mahatma Jotirao Phule, Periyar ... appear on the scene and infuse some sense of decency and rebellious mood into the grasshoppers.) the shivering Grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the Ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.(The voice of grasshoppers is slowly getting noticed.)

NDTV, BBC, CNN show up (It should have been so different if these agencies do such a balanced act. But these agencies invariably run for and run by the ants project grasshoppers with least esteem. Who would forget the way these channels show cased the AIIMS issue? ) To provide pictures of the shivering Grasshopper next to a video of the Ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. (அடப் பாவிகளா! ) The World is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be that this poor Grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Arundhati Roy stages a demonstration in front of the Ant's house.

Medha Patkar goes on a fast along with other Grasshoppers demanding that Grasshoppers be relocated to warmer climates during winter. ( They don’t spare even this lady! Anybody who cares for the downtrodden grasshoppers would become a laughing stock for these ants. Their only concern is their supremacy is never questioned and they always remain at the top of helm.)

Mayawati states this as `injustice' done on Minorities.

Amnesty International and Koffi Annan criticize the Indian Government for not upholding the fundamental rights of the Grasshopper.

The Internet is flooded with online petitions seeking support to the
Grasshopper (many promising Heaven and Everlasting Peace for prompt support as against the wrath of God for non-compliance.) (On the other hand grasshoppers have been always tutored that they can get ‘moksha’ only if they serve ants.)

Opposition MPs stage a walkout. Left parties call for 'Bengal Bandh' in West Bengal and Kerala demanding a Judicial Enquiry.
CPM in Kerala immediately passes a law preventing Ants from working hard in the heat so as to bring about equality of poverty among Ants and Grasshoppers.

Lalu Prasad allocates one free coach to Grasshoppers on all Indian Railway Trains, aptly named as the 'Grasshopper Rath'.

Finally, the Judicial Committee drafts the ' Prevention of Terrorism
Against Grasshoppers Act' [POTAGA], with effect from the beginning of the winter. (If such things really happened the fate of grasshoppers would have improved a lot by now. முழுப்பூசணிக்காயை இப்படி மறைப்பதற்கும் ஒரு திறமை வேண்டும். இந்தத் திறமை antsகளிடம்தான் கொட்டிக் கிடக்குதே..)

Arjun Singh makes 'Special Reservation ' for Grasshoppers in Educational Institutions & in Government Services. (அப்படி வாங்கப்பா antsகளா வாங்க .. இதுக்குத்தான் வருவீங்கன்னு தெரியுமே! This is what was said in the beginning – the ancient and very original strategy of ants to forbid the grasshoppers from any type of learning – is continuing to this day. When this scheme is threatened the ants feel that their ‘supremacy’ is at stake and rise as one against such proactive measures. நல்லா இருங்க’டே!)

The Ant is fined for failing to comply with POTAGA and having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, it’s home is confiscated by the Government and handed over to the Grasshopper in a ceremony covered by NDTV.(ஒரு புரட்சி வந்து இப்படி நடந்திருந்தா, வேணுகோபால் & Co.வை வீட்டுக்கு அனுப்பியிருக்கலாம். Ants strongly feel that the higher institutions are meant only for them, the chosen and ‘meritorious’ ones. )

Arundhati Roy calls it ' A Triumph of Justice'.

Lalu calls it 'Socialistic Justice '.

CPM calls it the ' Revolutionary Resurgence of the Downtrodden '

Koffi Annan invites the Grasshopper to address the UN General Assembly. (Ha! Didn’t the erstwhile B.J.P. government obstruct the issue of dalits to be taken to U.N.?)
Many years later... ( இப்படியெல்லாம் நடந்தா நல்லாத்தான் இருந்திருக்கும்; நடக்கலையே)
The Ant has since migrated to the US (you mean, deserter, preferring greener pastures? could be .. it is always said that they were afterall a nomadic group.)and set up a multi-billion dollar company in Silicon Valley,

100s of Grasshoppers still die of starvation despite reservation somewhere in India, (ha..ha… Hi dear ant! Have you not looked around you of late? It was true many ants migrated and became rich in the land of plenty. But of late the ants are outsmarted, outclassed and outnumbered by a variety of grasshoppers in that land proving that ants are in no way better than grasshoppers!! Why go for onshore examples? Even in our motherland it is being proved time and again. Any doubt? Better see this It is just the tip of the iceberg…It is not the end; not even the beginning of the end; but just the end of the beginning for things to come.)
AND
As a result of loosing lot of hard working Ants and feeding the
grasshoppers, (Is it not the other way round all these times?)
.
India is still a developing country…!!!(Sadly it is true .. majority are the grasshoppers… and still a great number of them are to be lifted up from the murky depths into which they were thrown; they are to be shown a new humane way of life as equal to any other human being .. a lot to be done. But the major stumbling block is the ant and its விஷமத்தனம், மேட்டிமைத்தனம், ஆங்காரம் etc..etc..)
But the days are not far off ……

you need to see this post of Dr. Bruno also: a reality .. A POOR GRASSHOPPER .. help her

54. AN OPEN LETTER

2008-01-22T23:38:00.000-08:00

This open letter is meant to one Mr Eric in response to his article in Wall Street Journal.

SEE MY TAMIL POST ON THIS HERE.

Mr. Eric,
Happened to come to your article in WSJ - - from the columns of P.Sainath, the winner of the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts in The Hindu dated 18.01.’08 -

It made an interesting read!

Just wanted to make few comments:

- From your title I understand that you say that the Brahmins WERE at least once the fortunate lot and that has reversed now.

- From the data in the table given by you and from the corrigendum to your article those ‘misfortunate’ lot are the RICHEST lot (65% and 50% respectively)

- I understand that for your case study you have taken a poor teacher from the RICHEST group.

- I request that you may consider to compare this poor teacher with another poor from the POOREST group, some one from the 91%. I am sure it would give some very interesting points for your future columns.

- Since your name sounds different I take it that you are from a different culture. If so, I would like to request you to first understand the ground realities before you make your valuable comments in a journal of any kind.

- There is a saying in my mother tongue, Tamil: “Some cry for sugar for their daily milk; while there are many who cry for salt for their sporadic gruel”. Your article was about an unfortunate from the former. Why not try to know somebody from the latter. Try. No harm.

53. MY EARLY SEX EDUCATION - 17

2007-10-27T00:54:00.000-07:00

In our days we did not have as much worldly knowledge as the modern day kids have. I think every present day kid of eight years is exposed to much ‘sex’ than what an adolescent was exposed in our days, thanks to the media. In a way it is good to know proper things in a proper way.

I still remember how not only I but all guys of my age in those days never had any chance to know about ‘the secrets of sex’. There was no chance to see or to read or to hear anything about sex. It was all hush-hush thing among close friends. So it was mostly like the characters in the story of an elephant and four blind men. One blind leading another blind led only to more confusion. Especially puberty of girls was a great enigma for us. Talking about that brought goose pimples and we were thrilled to share our information with others. I got most of the gossip about sex from my rural friends, especially during my summer visits to my native village. Each one had his own theory about sex, puberty, menstruation, masturbation etc. We were totally a confused lot. This confusion made sex more and more a mystery and we had no chance to know about it. This made sex more enigmatic and mysterious and we always talked about these matters only with our very close friends. So naturally since we had our references from fellows of our own age, it was mostly like one blind leading another blind from one dark spot to another dark spot! We were very stupid. Hot discussion on the nature of genitals of the opposite sex happened often. There were times when we were not sure how a baby would come into this world. To make matters worse comparing a cow and a woman especially in the matter of their anatomy and mode of delivery was common. This state of affairs even continued to very late period of our adolescence. Such was our ignorance in those days!

I had a cousin. His father and my father were first cousins, and they had the very same name and worked in the same school. To avoid confusion people used to call my periyappa as senior so-and-so (periya ..) and my appa was known as junior so-and-so (chinna ..). Like our fathers we also had the same first name. He was just two years senior to me. But he played the role my ‘friend-philosopher-guide’. He was the one who was unraveling the mysteries of sex to me. His house was on my way to school and church, the two places around which my early life was revolving. So I used to go to his house on my way to school or church and then we would go together. He came out with so many newer things about anything and everything. I very submissively accepted all his ‘doctrines’. Never questioned them. Except the one time when he was explaining the ‘dirtiest thing’.

Whenever he came out with anything he used to always show an air of superiority which was quite right since I was too wet behind my ears for my age and what all he said were ‘scriptures’ to me. I never dared to question his statements. But one day on our way back from school he started giving me extraordinary information on sex. He told me with the same and usual air of superiority what a married man and wife would do in private to get a child. My God! It sounded so obscene and dirty that I thought there could not be an iota of truth in what he said. I said I did not believe what he said just then. He majestically told me that was the truth and nothing but truth. I kept silent for some time mulling over on what he said. I was simply flabbergasted by this unbelievable and dirty thing. For a few moments we were walking in silence.

Then I asked my cousin: “Then … er.. how about my father and mother?”

“Well, it has to be so”, he shot the answer without a moment of hesitation. He was very cool answering my question.

Few more moments of silence. I was still trying to digest what he had said. But I could not. A flash came and I asked him: “In that case, how about your father and mother?”

This time he took some moments. Hesitated a bit. But came out with an affirmative answer. But this time it was not as authoritative as it was for the previous question.

Still I could not believe it. Our own parents. This much dirty. Oh! No, I thought. I did not believe it and wanted to prove him utterly wrong.

My next question was very much pointed and poignant too. I asked him: “If it is so, is it the same way between Mother Mary and St. Joseph?”

He was thrown off balance by this question. Clean bowled. He was dumbfounded now. I was happy that I could at last nail him down to his utter lies. How could such a dirty act be true? Could any decent human being, leave alone the divine persons, do such nasty things?

I was waiting with batted breath for his answer. This time he did not have the guts to say yes.

52. DUAL WITH RAJA - 16

2007-10-17T09:20:00.000-07:00

DUAL WITH RAJA

In our school the 'A' section of all the classes was meant for the 'creamy' layer, or for the so-called brighter students. I don’t know whether other schools also followed this. I was admitted in I Standard in A section. That would have been of course by virtue of my appa's influence. I think that streak continued till I finished my VI form in the high school. For those of this generation, in our days the schooling years were only 11 years - five in elementary and 6 in high school. In the former each level was called ‘Standard’ and the high school levels were called 'Forms'. So the school finishing class would be VI Form.

My V Standard teacher was Mr. Lucas, a very tall, lanky man with a smiling face. But his knuckles were very strong and every one of us dreaded his knuckles. He either used his knuckles or a thin striking – rod, a bamboo cane. His theory was thinner the cane pain it creates is greater. I got reprimanded only once with two strikes of that cane for a peculiar / funny situation. (I don’t think that incident can be narrated in a foreign language, since it is related to my mother tongue, Tamil. I have elaborated this incident in my Tamil blog. Now ...it is the 'dual' I had with one of my classmates. It was more like the two eternal cowboys with their guns drawn taking steps before they try to outshoot the other in their mortal combat!

Whenever Mr. Lucas wanted some lessons to be read to the whole class he always asked me to read the lessons. That was a sort of privilege I enjoyed for long. I don’t know whether I read it properly or was due to my appa's influence. None had any grudge for this, at least that was what we all thought till it was challenged one day. Raja was one of my classmates, considerably a bigger boy in our class. One day when our teacher asked me to read a lesson and when I was about to start Raja stood up and to all our shock and astonishment asked face to face our teacher why always it should be me. I think Mr.Lucas was taken aback and he was speechless for some time. Then he said that he did so since he thought I was good in that. But Raja did not lose his rebellious mood. He challenged that he could read better than me given a chance.

Mr. Lucas was speechless for some time. Then he said that he would set a 'dual' between me and him and gave the details of the modus operandi of how it should go. He suggested that both of us would stand on both the sides of his chair. Simultaneously he would pat our backs. For the first pat I would start reading from a lesson. Then after few sentences - another pat. Now I would stop and Raja would start from where I left. And it should go on like that. To make it more democratic my teacher said that there would be four 'judges'. They will be seated in the front bench with a score sheet. They would count mistakes, stammering etc. during our reading for each of us. Whoever had lesser score would be considered victorious.

Raja came out with another challenge. He wanted a bet for this dual. It was fixed that the bet money would be one anna . (That is 1/16 of a rupee then.) That was real "big" money in those days for a guy in elementary school. I who was so far listening as a silent observer more as an outsider came to the world of reality only then. I said I did not have the required money for the bet. There were immediate sponsors for me. I remember the names of them: Kathiresan and Vetrivel. They paid the money to our teacher. Raja paid his bet.

I remember how the whole class was in an expectant mood. I could clearly visualise even now what had happened more than a half century back. Our class alone had the luxury of being in a separate room, next to our Headmaster's Office while all other sections of V Class were in a common hall. Benches with back rest for all was a specialty for our class. The excuse given to other classes for this special treatment was that if and when school inspectors from the education department gave surprise visits, they could easily watch our V Class - A Section and so this special privilege for our class.

The dual started.

After certain time Mr. Lucas stopped the dual. The judges were asked to make a total of the minus points they had given us for our shortcomings during the 'dual'. I won the dual - that too, with a very 'handsome' margin. Raja immediately came to my side of our teacher's table and shook my hands. I did not know all those etiquettes. Our teacher gave one anna to me, the prize money and my sponsors got their money back.

In retrospect, what look great to me now are the rebellious spirit of Raja and the very fair mind of my teacher. I used to always wonder how could a boy aged just ten or eleven doing his fifth standard could be that much rebellious and dare to question the authority of the teacher. The second thing was the way our teacher settled the issue and also his conscience. How could he take a question on his authority with such magnanimity? He was so fair that he made some of our own class mates as judges. Both Raja and Mr. Lucas should have been great souls and I realized and experienced that at least with regard to Raja since he and I had maintained a life-long relationship. Till his death two years back, we occasionally met. If there were other friends during our meetings, Raja with all gusto would start narrating the whole episode. He never became tired of this since it looked as if he was waiting for a chance to narrate our old story to new friends. It was only he who remembered the names of my sponsors and told me after many years.

51. ELEMENTARY SCHOOL DAYS - 15

2007-10-07T10:32:00.000-07:00

ELEMENTARY SCHOOL DAYS

I dont know how some of the very early happenings in our lives remain permanently etched in our minds. I already mentioned that I dont rememeber even a wee bit of things that happened when amma was around. Memories of childhood start only after amma's death. The life in Kasiapuram , and appa's wedding are all quite vivid. Immediately after appa's wedding with my new amma I came to Madurai. Then started the schooling. Appa was working in St. Mary's High School, a renowned school in the whole city in those days. I was admitted in St.Mary's Elementary School in the same campus.

I very clearly remember the very first day of my schooling. Appa took me in his bicycle. In the campus, the elementary school was a rectangular block at the back of the church. But there was a single block standing alone in between the main school buildings and the church. Probably it is as old as the curch itself. It was standing alone there. It was a high raised building with just one large class room and an adjacent small room. I dont know why that building alone was so constructed, so high above the ground level. There should have been at least 10-15 very wide steps leading to the class room. Appa took me by hand and led me into the class room. The teahcer was in all smiles and he showed a lot of respect to appa. Mu first class teacher's name was Mr. Manickam, a fair, young gentleman. He asked me where do I want to sit in the class room? Appa's influence helped me opt a seat of my preference! I chose the bench in the very first row - not that I wanted to be there as a good studious student as a front-bencher! In stead that was the only bench in the class with backrest! All other benches did not have a backrest. Anyway, that front bech with backrest was full. But still one of the poor poor guys in that bench - in all probabilities, whose father was not known to the teacher - was asked to go to one of the back rows and I was offered my preferred seat. That's how my first day of schooling started.

Not much is in memory about the rest of the next 5 years in that school, except two incidents. When I was doing my III standard in Madurai there was a big show of some Indian and foreign muscle men. Names of Tarasingh, who later became a famous cine star, and King Khong are just the names of two Indian muscle men I remember. There were some foreigners with names hard to pronounce. So they had some nick names, names that would attract the local wrestling fans. I remember only one such name, Red Scorpion. He visited our church one day and I remember most of us from our class with our teacher thronged around him as soon as he came out of the church. His visit made us talk about the wrestling matches and the different styles and prowess they had in wrestling. Somebody showed me one of the famous ‘monkey-hold’ of these wrestlers and also the way to wriggle out of it. I had a friend. I vaguely remember that his name was Sivakumar. He used to be shorter than me, though I myself was one of the ‘shorties’ in my classes. I gave a demo as to how to hold that monkey-hold. Poor guy, he did not know the defense for that. So he was totally under my control when I held him so. He was surprised. Then I asked to him to hold me like that. He did. But now I used the trick which was taught to me and overthrew him over my head. Fellow fell flat on the ground and started weeping. I thought the matter was over with that.

But the very next day his mother, a teacher herself, came to our class and met me. She made me feel sad for what I did to her son. I was worried that she may take the matter to my teacher and then to my app a . But she left me with that little reprimand. But Sivakumar who was so far close to me never talked to me after that.

One more incident is also one another unforgettable incident. And since it needs little more importance I plan to save that for the next chapter!

50. MAKING OF A SMOKER & A FILM BUFF - 14.

2007-10-06T22:17:00.000-07:00

MAKING OF A SMOKER & A FILM BUFF

Two great changes happened in my life due to these hours of freedom. One was the old desire rejuvenating and getting deep rooted into a new habit. I mean the old and unflinching desire for smoking. These hours of freedom and the gang that was formed during this time was handy. I started where I left unmindful of the promise I made in my native place years ago. If it was inside a well or a thoppu in those early years that I tried my hand in smoking, this time we had ‘royal connections’. The Thirumalai Naik Palace was very near to our school. In those days it used to be busy since the court was functioning there and people used to throng the whole place. The terrace of the Palace also was free for visitors. Only many years later the courts were moved to a different place and the palace was taken by the archaeology department. Till that time this became a nice hideout for fellows like me to have our first lessons in smoking. The terrace of the Palace was so expansive we had no fear of being caught by anyone known to us or to our parents. As days went by we became more and more 'courageous' that we changed our venue to more and more open places. It was thus I got hooked to cigarette smoking and that continued till 11 p.m. of January 6th, 1990 which started in the early sixties.

The other change that happened also became a habit of lifetime. In those days, I would not be allowed to go for any movies other than the sporadic ones with the family. Now there was ample chance to go for movies without parental knowledge. I still remember the very first movie that I went like that. It was Norman Wisdom’s On The Beat. He was a famous British comedian of those days whom our famous and successful comedian Nagesh could have had as a role model. I mustered courage as well as gathered money for the ticket and one day sneaked out to the film. It was so funny that I burst into laughter when I was having my supper with appa. I was doing my first year B.Sc. then. Appa asked what the matter was. I managed to tell him some cock and bull story. The movie was so good that I became a regular visitor to Regal Theatre, an exclusive theatre for English movies in those days. I became, in short, an English movie buff. The timing of these English movies was also so conducive that one could go to the movies without raising any doubt for the people at home. Unlike the Tamil movies, these English movies would start quite late and would end very soon. So I could start very late from home and reach the theatre in time cycling at the fastest pace and also come back even at 8.30. Tamil movies would end only by 9.30. Only precaution that I had to very carefully do every time was to discard the counterfoil of the ticket without leaving any telltale evidences to my watchful appa. With such preplanning and meticulous operation this habit also grew and became a lifetime passion. Now I realize that of the two changes I acquired due to and during my hours of freedom, at least one habit did some good to me.

49. I SALUTE MADURAI A.C. (TRAFFIC)

2007-06-23T01:49:00.000-07:00

It was during one of my rides on our Madurai roads in a late evening, I happened to witness a road accident involving a young couple and their few month old baby. They were just passing me on my right side when their vehicle hit the so-called 'median' on the road, which was hardly above the ground level. The median was also barely visible since there was no bright street light and any bright lights of vehicles coming in the opposite direction could have made the visibility all the more hard. Luckily the mother held her baby close to her and saved from any mishap. The couple had some minor bruises.

I left the place of accident not knowing who is to be blamed for this: the corporation, the police, or whole government machinery for the poor condition of the road and the median at that busy road junction.

When I was crossing the same spot after a day or two I saw some police official standing in that junction. I went and told him of the accident and the reason for it. Surprisingly he showed real concern and asked me what could be an immediate solution. I suggested at least for the time being a "traffic-drum" at the spot to show the road divide. He immediately called a cop and ordered him to get and place a "traffic-drum" within the next hour.

To my surprise on the very next day when I crossed that spot there was a "traffic-drum" and within the next two or three days there was some more modification which made that spot quite safer now. I was so happy that a police officer has shown so much care and concern.

Then, after a fortnight,I felt a new traffic island on the road (near Fatima College) I regularly commute had a problem. I talked about that to the cop (Mr. Kumar) standing there. He promised that he would send the phone number of Asst. Commissioner for traffic through the cop who would be on duty the next day. Next day the duty cop (Mr. Abu Bukker) gave me the number. Both these two cops were also very obliging and understood and accepted what I said.

I rang up the number and experienced joyous surprises one after another. I thought some lower level police man may attend the phone and would give me some evasive answer. But it is not so. It was the A.C. himself ( I came to know the name of the A.C. from Mr. Kumar and Mr. Abu Bukker: Mr. Sivanandan) who took the call. I asked him whether he could spare a few minutes. He readily obliged. I told him the problem. He asked few questions and more explanations. He very politely explained to me the plans they have already charted out for that traffic island and told me very earnestly that he would remember the problem that I talked about and would do the needful.

I am not yet sure whether both these officers are one and the same or not. However, it was a great surprise for me since in both the instances I got a very pleasant and utmost courteous responses and in both the instances I saw immediate action too.

I record my sincere appreciation for the person(s) concerned. It has made me feel so happy and hopeful of a bright future for our nation with such officers. I wish more and more bureaucrats of this sort come and save our country from its present rut.

48. I STUDIED SO HARD(LY) ! - 13

2007-03-04T09:22:00.000-08:00

I STUDIED SO HARD(LY)!

Always there was magic between my textbooks and sleep. As soon as I took a textbook in my hands immediately the goddess of sleep would lovingly embrace me. Till I finished my studies I had this disease ! So I took to outdoors for my night study to overcome this problem. Till late evenings, say, up to 9 o’clock in the night our school campus became my study place after I joined college. This campus became part of my life since appa worked there and I had my whole school life there. And not only that, we had the church, the big cathedral and I was a regular church goer in those days. Till I reached my middle forties I preferred to attend services there for festivals like Christmas and Easter. The campus had been an inseparable part of my life and this attachment made me have my first grandson’s baptism there in that church.

The other place, which was my study-spot, was under the streetlights of our road. During nights, especially after 10 o’clock, a group of five or six of us, all from different schools but neighbors used to come together under the streetlights. The favorable spot for all of us was a corner building, which housed the local post office. There were two advantages. It had a brighter mercury light since it was a sort of road junction and the other one was a overhead shed which could protect us on cold wintry or rainy days. Studying under the streetlights had its own advantage. Since we were always in groups one cannot so easily sleep but we had so many things to share – secrets of teenagers. The hours we spent on roads to study were much less than what we spent to share our little secrets, adventures and escapades. Though our group had around six or seven fellows only two from the group came up to post-graduate level and the rest either just passed their higher secondary exam or flopped even in that. I would be so fresh when I was with this group and once I got into the terrace of our home to continue the studies, within no time the unconquerable goddess of sleep would embrace me.

My other study center was the St. Mary’s School-Church campus. I was almost a campus-kid since all my childhood and adolescent days were revolving around the church and campus. In those days there used to be two services everyday, the first as early as five in the morning and the other at 6 o’clock. Appa and amma used to get up at 4.30 and they would go to the first service. They would wake me up before leaving to the service. Amma would come back from the church. I would be then going for the second service. For many years we used to get our daily milk from the farm in the campus and so immediately after the service I should get the milk and rush back home. The farm was closed after some years and so I was relieved from that duty. When I reached the last two years of my schooling I stayed back after the service in the campus. The excuse was that I could study for an hour or two before going home. The school provided a room to study in the evening for some day scholars who did not have good facilities at home. This facility was extended to me even after I joined the college as I was the son of a popular teacher. So some hours in the morning and evening became hours of freedom for me. The strict discipline maintained at home would be missing and I was the master to myself in these hours. These were the hours of total freedom for me. I enjoyed these hours to the hilt.

47. THE HOUSE WE LIVED IN FOR LONG - 12

2007-02-17T04:02:00.000-08:00

THE HOUSE WE LIVED IN FOR LONG

Once appa got married, life changed a lot. Days of pampering and petting were over. Life took a different turn. I was so far a pet to everyone in the village. Everyone looked at me with utmost sympathy and special care and love were showered on me. I was a 'motherless-child' for every one. I stood out from the crowd in the village. All these things changed once we came to Madurai.

It should be 1949. I should have been five years old because immediately after our arrival I was admitted in the school in the first standard. Better I say something about the house where we got settled. It was an old house in the South Marret Street. Compared to the modern standards it was more a ‘mouse trap’. It was in a busy area and so like any other house it was packed among a row of houses on a considerably busy road. It was a rectangle and the portion we rented out was at the back of the house and the house owners lived in the front portion. The two portions were divided by a well. Like any old house of those days in Madurai this well was small, probably three feet in diameter. It was called nazhi kinaru ( 'cylindrical well' ). I don’t know what could have been the depth. But for a kid it looked very deep. For some time peeping into the well during noon time and seeing my image deep down there was a good past time. I was always afraid of looking into the well from outside in our village till I learnt swimming. But here there were protective stone slabs around the well and they were almost shoulder high to me then. I felt safe here unlike the large and open wells, which were like open-mouthed giants. This well had an important association with my early days since for many years – almost for the whole of my school life – I was in charge of keeping a large drum near the well always full for the use of the whole family. I used to have a big callus on my left knee since I used to keep that point of my knee as a fulcrum to help me pull the bucket and how I hated that responsibility imposed on me. Even at odd hours I would be asked to draw water. That is about the well. Let us come back to the house now.

I still wonder how we managed to live in that house for so long. It was a long period of 16 years – starting from my school entry to the end of the first year of my post-graduation. We entered the house as a three-member family, appa, amma and I. When we quit the house we were, I think, nine! There was only one pucca room and even that would be half-filled with sacks of rice for most part of the year, in addition to a wooden almirah, a sewing machine and a table and chair. I am wondering now how there was any moving space at all in that room since it was not even a big room. Wooden lofts on three sides of this room probably helped us keep most of our things. I had one rack in a cupboard on the wall for keeping my books and other things. My dresses would be in a small suitcase, which would be above the sacks of rice.

Then there was a sort of verandah with tiled leaky roof making it almost unusable during rainy days. The only safe place during such days was a corner made safe by curved stairs overhead. Even part of this was occupied by a manual grinder. The only furniture in this low roofed room was appa’s cot. Many a time that formed a tier system – appa on that cot and I safely cuddled under that, the lower berth! Then there was a kitchen. Don’t imagine a kitchen with a lot of cupboards, gas stove and all that. It had on all sides bamboo mats making it a separate entity with one cupboard on the wall and a firewood stove at the ground level with a stack of fire wood, and cow dung-cakes on one corner. We had also a luxury item of those days, a kerosene stove.

Wondering that I have not mentioned anything about a bathroom? Well, it was an open space next to the well and that was also the passageway for our portion. Appa made some arrangements with some more bamboo mats giving it a little more privacy. This passageway along the well had a great significance since it was a nightmarish experience to get somebody to our portion of the house. The passageway was narrow between the well and a wall. Part next to the well had a stony pavement but the other half used to be quite slippery with constant flow of water. Anyone stepping on that part was sure to fall like an uprooted tree. Whenever somebody visited our home for the first time they had to be carefully ushered for a ‘safe landing’ on our portion of the house. Once I got into college I never invited my classmates to my home worrying about the great fall they could experience.

There was one good thing about this house that it had an open terrace. It had half-built pillars. I was told that the owner wanted to go for another floor and paucity of funds deterred him from that and half-finished pillars stood as a silent testimony for that. Appa made a shed there with some bamboos and coconut-mats. This became a comfortable place for the students who used to come in large numbers for private tuition. Appa was a great and popular teacher in English and Math in our school. Till this day I consider him as the best teacher I had, especially his way of teaching English grammar was fantastic. It is not merely a son’s blind appreciation. But a real, impartial and judicious statement which I hold till this day.

The terrace became my living place once I got the courage to be there alone in the nights too. Because always the very big banyan tree on the next road with its rustling noise at nights could scare any week hearted person. Added to this was the story of somebody who committed suicide on the very next house. The room where the suicide took place was within a few feet. The stairs running down from this terrace was mostly very dark, who had very bright lights on those days! So whenever I alighted the steps at nights after switching off the only light at the terrace, I used to have a feeling that somebody, mostly the person who committed suicide in the next house, following or rather chasing me down. I used to run down faster in the beginning. Then I thought I should have a ‘face-to-face’ fight with this ‘follower’ once for all and do away with ‘him’ for all times. So with this decision I stopped running madly down from the terrace; instead I used to step down very slowly and at times would stop and turn around to warn anything that could be at my back. Once I did this a few times the fear was gone for ever and then staying alone in the terrace became routine and casual. Once I entered into my teens it became my abode for the nights. It was also my study room.

46. EVIL OF CASTEISM -11

2007-02-16T00:17:00.000-08:00

EVIL OF CASTEISM

Before I reached my college days, this caste situation underwent a lot of changes, good and bad. Waiters in the hotels were not addressed anymore as sami. They were simply waiters irrespective of their caste affiliations. This was due to, I strongly believe, the social reformation that was brought by Periyar and his Dravidian movement. But the sad thing was this movement was mostly anti-brahminic and not pro-dalit, a term which came into being only very late. So sami was replaced by ‘waiter’ but the so called low-castes and the treatment they meted out in the society remained so for long – rather, it still continues. Periyar’s service would have made people realize that brahmins were not from the forehead of Brahman as believed but the pitiable plight of shudras and panchamas remained and is remaining almost the same as it had been for centuries.

Even in college days, I never became conscious of this caste differences. Caste was a thing about which I never bothered. The first instance in my life when caste or its importance surfaced was when I shot my very first application for a job. It was even before results of masters exam. I responded to an advertisement from a college. I applied. Though people suggested that I should mention my caste I did not. Somebody gave me an idea that I should add my caste name as the postfix to my appa’s name so that I get an advantage since the college was run by people of my own caste. I did not. Then in the interview I was repeatedly asked some indirect questions – like my father’s name, the grand-father’s name – since that was the period when the previous generation always had the caste name added to one’s name and the next generation slowly shedding it -, then my native place which could be clue to my caste. So both I and the interviewer were beating around the bush. Then came the very direct question. I had to answer. When the interviewer came to know of my caste he started saying how sad he felt since the job had already been promised to another guy – of course not belonging to my caste and how glad he would be if I applied again later. I enjoyed his predicament. But never applied to that college again.

More than half of my career went on without any shade of casteism. But in the later years this evil had spread so much in the society it got very much reflected in the college life too. In the later eighties, as I know, the dalit movement had come up in the open making the dalits demand their social and political rights. Animosity between dalits and people of thevar caste, the later being just above dalits in the caste hierarchy caused a lot of friction in the social milieu and this got reflected in every social sphere. The saddest part was that even in a college like The American College, which was and is a cut above many other colleges, had been afflicted with this social malady.

45. 10- PERIYAR & THE CASTE SYSTEM

2007-02-15T20:42:00.000-08:00

PERIYAR & THE CASTE SYSTEM

In my childhood days in Kasiapuram I used to find one odd thing. It was the visit of some poor people in the late hours of evenings with their bowls to every house in the village. They were the dhobis and barbers of the village. They would come by the back door and very humbly announce themselves. Ladies of the houses would give them a chunk of old maize-choru or kazhi as it was known. For this they used to make this kazhi once a week. There were so many questions in my mind then. Why not they could be given freshly prepared kazhi and why always week-old kazhi? Why should they come so humbly and ask for alms? Why were these people treated differently from our other relatives? Even as a child I was tutored to call or talk to them with least respect. Even aged people were called by even children in such language? So many questions. But I never dared to ask anyone about it since it was part of that village life. Whether I liked it or not, I too called them in the usual disrespectful way as everyone. This habit came to an end only when I was around 9 – 10 years old. By that time I hade moved to Madurai.

We had a hair-cutting salon near my house and that is where my appa used to take me for my monthly hair cut – those days I had really thick hair on my present bald head! The owner’s name was Thangam and his salon was entirely of a different type unlike other salons of those days. Salons of those days used to have an array of mirrors and lot of pictures of pin-up girls. I still don’t understand the psychology of those decorated salons of yester years. Was it because it was out and out a male domain and they had the privilege of drooling over such sexy pictures? I still don’t know. Nevertheless Thangam’s salon was not of that type. His shop was quite above the road level without any proper steps; just some stone blocks served as the steps. Whenever I went there I had to be hauled up by Thangam into the shop from the ‘steps’ which were so low. He had just two large mirrors opposite two salon-chairs. There were no pictures; no blaring radio; no unnecessary crowd discussing national and international politics. In any such a salon you could find every minute somebody dropping in to give ’final touches’ to their hairdo, using the comb and mirror of the salon for free. I never knew whether they were all regular customers or regular intruders. Walls of the salon would be very clean. But there used to be only one picture occupying a prominent place in the salon. At that time I did know whose photograph was that. I thought it could be somebody related to Thangam. I used to go there for the regular cutting only with my appa and here too I found appa talking to Thangam in the same parlance as they did in village to those who used to come for the kazhi late in the evenings.

Probably I was doing fourth or fifth standard when for the first time appa sent me to salon alone. He gave instructions as to how my hair dressing should be done and asked me to pass those instructions to Thangam. When I got into the chair in the salon I started reeling out the instructions given by appa. I addressed him using the same disrespectful language. Thangam listened to my instructions. Then very calmly in a soothing tone he asked me which class I was doing. I told him. The next question was very pointed. Did your teacher teach you like this to address elders in this disrespectful language? I was stunned. The question whacked me right on my face. Mr. Thangam appeared to me growing into a colossal figure right in front of my eyes. I mumbled my apology. From that minute I always addressed my elders with respect irrespective of any other factor.

Latter I came to know the photograph that adorned the walls of Mr. Thangam’s salon was the portrait of E.V.R. Periyar !

*

44. 9- AN APPARITION - SIGHTING OF ANGELS

2007-02-12T08:57:00.000-08:00

AN APPARITION - SIGHTING OF ANGELS

Yemen was once given the responsibility of taking me back to Kasiapuram after a visit to Kurumbalaperi. We went by bus and after alighting from the bus to reach our home we had to walk by a sandy stretch through palmyra-tamarind fields. Along the stretch we had our family cemetery. It had tombs of our grandparents and that of my amma. I used to always have a mixed feeling whenever I went that side. It was a bit weird. I always wanted to sneak a look at the tomb and at the same time had a sort of fear to look at that side at all. Usually the former feeling used to win. This time I was on the shoulders of Yemen and he started talking about amma as we were nearing the cemetery. I was, as usual, in splits. I was under Macbethian to-be-or-not-to-be dilemma. I did not turn till we almost crossed the cemetery. But I succumbed to the temptation at the last minute. I turned for a fraction of second towards amma’s tomb. What I saw there is still quite fresh in my mind. On both the sides of my mother’s tomb I saw two very tall angels in the usual kneeling position with bowed head and folded hands that we see in pictures. Those two guardian angels were so brighteningly white. They, in the kneeling position, were to the height of the palmyra trees at the background. It was just for a fraction of a second but that “apparition” had become a permanent mental picture.

As an atheist now I analyze that ‘apparition’. It had been rammed into me that each person would be ‘supplied’ with a guardian angel and it takes care of you and all that stuff. And one sees pictures and statues of angels in that kneeling position. I was also quite convinced that my mother should have gone straight to heaven since she was considered by everybody as a good person. These facts being in my inner mind made me see what I wanted to see there. Rather it was a projection of my own mental picture. Apart from the dream my periyamma had at the time of amma’s death which I said about earlier, this is the one another ‘supernatural’ thing that had occurred in my life. While I am able to give satisfactory explanation for this second episode, I am still not able to adduce any explanation for the first.

After I switched over to urban life Yemen visited us twice. He came to Madurai for some medical help. Though I did not understand anything about his ailment then, now I assume that he should have got gangrene on his toe. He was advised to get it amputated. But he refused the first time and went to back to his village. After some time when he came back it seemed the condition had worsened and was asked to go for amputation of the whole foot. He declined to go for it and went back. That was the last of him. I came to know that he passed away shortly due to that wound. Whenever I went to Kurumbalaperi after that I used to enquire about his family. I got only disinterested answers. By that time chithi got married and my visits to Kurumbalperi became rare. Though I had never got any other information about him or his family, till this date his memories in me have never left. Probably he became a reference point in my life for my feelings towards the evils of caste system. Better I talk about this in a separate chapter.

*

43. 8- YEMEN - THE OUTCASTE!

2007-02-04T08:54:00.000-08:00

YEMEN - THE OUTCASTE!

Let me go back to Kurumbalaperi since I have to mention one another important character. He was Yemen(ஏமன் - எமன் என்பதின் மரூவாக இருக்குமோ?). I had only short association with him but he had remained as a very important character in my life. I don’t know the exact reason how his character had been etched so deeply in my mind. He used to be a tall and well built man. Whenever I used to visit Kurumbalaperi he would come to see me. But he would not enter our home. He would wait in the outer quadrangle but once I come out he would lift me and would carry me around on his shoulders. I felt that he took both pleasure and pride in doing it. When I go out with him it would be very tough for me to make him allow me to walk with him. He always insisted that he should carry me. People in my family showed affection for him but in the early years I was always wondering why he was not permitted to enter our home in spite of the affection they had. It took time for me to understand the intricacies of the caste system. It was so strictly followed in villages that entry into our homes was a forbidden thing for them. The in-built complex in him due to his so-called low birth had made him feel indebted to my amma. He was from lower caste and by the custom of those days in villages he had to depend on our family for all their material needs. When he lost his elder sister with whom he had been very close he wept so inconsolably. My amma consoled him that she would be his akka. That had made him feel so grateful to her since according to his own narration to me it was unthinkable for a higher caste person to accept a person of lower caste as a sibling. Now I wonder what a rift the caste system had made between people. My own caste is not anything that comes under the so called ‘higher’ bracket. Still the divide between castes was and is so deeper into the psyche of the people.

42. A BIG Q.

2006-11-19T05:49:00.000-08:00

If one were to travel by a time machine and go back to the distant past, one may find so many striking aspects. The archaeological finds tell us that human life and culture existed even 400,000 years back. The great Indus Civilization had been there for millenia before Christ. Though India was not a single nation then, though its scattered parts were ruled by different dynasties, big and small, there had been great civilizations and great achievements in various fields.

Some such things are:

The sixth Century B.C. saw the rise of Buddhism. Though it failed to withstand the onslaught of brahminic Hinduism within India it crossed the borders of this land and got rooted in many eastern countries. It is always said that the two great religions till this day, Hinduism and Buddhism were given to the world by India.

Nalanda :Founded in the 5th Century A.D., Nalanda is known as the ancient seat of learning. 2,000 Teachers and 10,000 Students from all over the Buddhist world lived and studied at Nalanda, the first Residential International University of the World. The University flourished during the 5th and 12th century.

380-412 A.D. Chandra Gupta II. Under this emperor his kingdom witnessed unprecedented flowering of art, literature and sciences. Kalidas, the famous Sanskrit poet and dramatist, Aryabhatta, the famous mathematician and Varahmihir, a great astronomer adorned his court.
The fourth Century saw the rise of Pallavas in Deccan and their meteoric rise made art , culture, music, and architecture flourish. Mahabalipuram a.k.a. Mamallapuram with its shore temple and monolithic stone temples still stand as mute testimony to the greatness of the Pallavas, withstanding all natural havocs like the recent tsunami even.

985 A.D. The Chola Dynasty in Deccan rejuvenated the art, culture, architecture of this part of the land. Rajaraja Cholan, the Great (985-1014) built the Prahadeeswarar Temple in Thanjavur a.k.a. Tanjore. It was an architectural marvel. The cupolic dome at the top of the temple, is octagonal and rests on a single block of granite, a square of 7.8 m weighing 80 tons. It is still a wonder how did they raise such a monolithic stone of that size to that great height.
1336 A.D. The empire of Vijayanagaram had its own glorious period.

The traveler in the time-machine would have witnessed all this past glory till this 14th Century. At what quirk of fate, no one knows for sure, all these glorious past came to an abrupt end with this century.

At this point of time only the Western world began to develop in leaps and bounds through the Industrial Revolution. It mainly started in England and spread to all of West later.
To quote some developments:

16th - 17th C. The methods of making glass, clocks, and chemicals advanced markedly.
1760 – 1830: It was the period of agricultural revolution in England which changed the whole English countryside.

1705: steam engines were discovered and got manufactured in large numbers. 1750-1830: Revolution by technological growth made the cost of making cloth nine tenth cheaper. 1830 - a railway line was opened from Liverpool to Manchester 1831 Michael Faraday’s discovery of electricity.

There was no looking back from that point onwards for the West, while East stayed back. India with all its glorious past was left high and dry and the momentum which touched the West 500 years ago is yet to touch India.

The big question that could come to any body’s mind is how come India with such a glorious past could go to nothing in this period, from 1500 to 2000? Of course in the recent years India is rising up strongly in all spheres proving that people have been all along capable of rising to greater heights. But what happened to them in those dark years? Is it only because of successive invasions and finally colonization by British? It cannot be that alone. There has to be something more than that. Some logic is missing.

Anyone having an answer?

41. A TEARFUL DAY.

2006-09-17T23:14:00.000-07:00

I had a short stint of 100 days in U.S.. I used to write everyday to my two daughters. The following is one such page from my journal. This is a day’s experience – to be precise on the Day 41.

DAY 41 19.03.’02 MONDAY

It is the 41st day. So far it had never happened this way. Only today – now – I am crying. Tears are rolling down my cheeks. I don’t know what to do. The day started like any other day, or rather started well since I woke up only at 10.20. Till then had a very peaceful sleep. On days without class mostly I had been taking brunch. That makes things easier. I take a late brunch and then go to the lab and stay back for long. So, thought of taking a brunch today also as any other day.

On a day started so well, I am now sitting in the kitchen alone and crying. Cao, the Chinese friend, has gone to Chicago and is yet to come back. I am lonely. Luckily none is there to see my tears. I feel so helpless. I am unable to stop the stream of tears that is running down my cheeks on to the t-shirt. I don’t even try to wipe them off with my hands. What’s the use?

I think of you people at home. Tears well in my eyes more and more. Is it the same thing they too experience, I wonder. Still the tears are running down. Then I feel that I am lucky since this will be all over exactly in another 60 days. On the 60th day from this day I will be flying back to home, sweet home. But even this thought does not bring the tears to halt. I keep shedding them unashamedly.

Then a bit of reality and philosophy. Reality – it is only for another 60 days. Then things will straighten themselves out. Philosophy – if I have to shed tears when I cut onion for making sambar like this, how long you, the womenfolk have been suffering all along and will be suffering!

Well! even all that does not start well likes this ends well. With all the tears and all that, today’s sambar has come out good. Almost like that I used to have at home, except for the density – it was a bit dense. So, a great cook is born, nay, made today! I patted myself for that.

post script:

Things were quite good in all respects in those 100 days. However one major problem I had to tackle was to prepare my own food and more than that eating it too! The times in the kitchen were the trying times for me. Before the eyes of my Chinese room-mate, Cao I had to many a time crouch down in the kitchen. He was such a good cook and I had never ventured more than trying my hand in preparing tea at home. When I tried to fry fish it turned out to be கருவாடு! When I tried to heat the readymade chappaathi in the oven it turned into முறு முறு அப்பளம்! குழம்பு became கூட்டு and vice versa. Got so fed up with this, on the end of my stay there I preferred fresh veg with vegetable dip and fruits. However, things are so different now since with vengence I tried my hand once I was back to India!

40. ANSWERING ORANI - அந்தக் காலத்தில...

2006-08-31T22:35:00.000-07:00

Thanks Orani. Your Q on my earlier post "PAINTING OUR LIVES RED" has made me think on different lines. First a digression !
We were driving back from a friend’s தோட்டம் after a 'water-party' (thanks Ilavanji) on the previous evening. During that party, I was the ‘senior-citizen’ (always it happens so. It is good for an oldie to be in company with youngsters; but how about those poor youngsters?! Though I always pity them, I could never help it !) and so naturally the ramblings were on the changed times and all that. During the drive back to city, the talk meandered back to the same old topic of the previous evening. I was telling them how we had to wait for a gas connection / phone connection for a minimum period of 5-6 years. As a rejoinder I said how we had to book a scooter with Rs. 500 and then wait for 5 years and also explained the term ‘premium’ for these scooters. Prabhakar, who was at the wheels suddenly swerved the car to the left and simply stopped. He was so flabbergasted ! He could not believe that for buying a scooter one has to wait so long. I could easily understand his astonishment since nowadays bikes are being sold even in street corners, virtually!

So Orani, so was the case on ‘our’ days ! The buyers were at the mercy of the sellers. Whatever they produced were in high demand and it was sold easily. No competition among producers but it was so high among consumers. That’s why scooters and such things went on premium.

This can be explained from two different fields: one, economics and the other is from your own field: evolution.

Economics: it was simply the supply-demand theory. Very less supply and very high demand. The simple philosophy of ‘beggars can’t be choosers’ worked with the manufacturers. They didn’t have any need for improvisation, improvement, variety etc. since anything that came to market got engulfed by the consumers. No competition. That made things easier for them. So goes the economics of it.

Evolution: You know the concept of evolutionary divergence. As long as the environmental conditions are ideal what is the necessity for a species to go for ‘variations’. Only when the living becomes problematic those little little changes resulted by mutations with some adaptive values become more prominent and they accrue more and more leading to perceptible and useful variations – leading the species to be on the forward march in evolutionary process. Right? The same thing happens in our marketing also. You have bicycles of just two colours. They are in good demand. So there is no necessity for the manufacturer to go for variations or divergence. That’s the end of things.

As to the question about the psyche of the consumers – I somehow don’t remember at all anybody thinking of or asking for ‘variations’. We probably did not have even the mindset to think there are even possibilities of having variations. We probably got stuck with some set patterns and simply accepted them. Looking back, why we didn’t think of a ‘red bicycle’ is beyond my understanding. As for the shirt colours, or the dress code of those days, a young man in white pants, white shirt tucked in and black shoes would be mostly identified right as a medico. We the guys from arts colleges rarely go in that combo since shoes and white pants are mostly out of reach. If white full-shirt is the zenith point in ones wardrobe, pale, pastel shaded colour shirts were the norms for all. I remember in early seventies there came a movie, Aradhana starring Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore. Colourful kurthas worn by the hero became a big hit and my first kurtha in a flshy colour ( not in today’s standards, anyway !) made many look at me twice!

Some trend-setter !!

39. PAINTING OUR LIVES RED

2006-08-29T02:00:00.000-07:00

VARIETY is the spice of life, they say. True. But what one has to question is how come this concept developed so very recently and even in the recent past it was given a raw deal. Look at the automobiles that are plying on our roads today. One can find cars in varieties of hues today. But just some two decades ago such a thing was not at all in vogue. It would be mostly black or just white, no in between at all.

More than cars, the bicycles were out and out stereotyped; they were mostly black and the one another color that you could find those days was dark green, which seen from few feet was nothing but black. So it was all black. Leave alone color. Even the very style of bicycles was quite monotonous. They all came in one model with a single exception. The ladies’ cycles had just one vertical bar different. But nowadays bicycles with varied color patterns come in very many different styles. No handlebars of two cycles going past are going to be of the same style.

Take pencils. What a burst of colors we have nowadays with so many cartoon figures and beautiful designs on them. The earlier generation was not lucky even in that. It was always a drab brown. The buses that are plying nowadays are a stark contrast to those of the olden days. Multicolored and with beautiful pictures painted every bus looks like an art gallery on wheels. For a person who has been seeing these differences in his life time, what a relief from a boring monochromatic life to a cheerful and colorful life!

Leave alone the inanimate things. In a sexually separated group of audience, in those days, the side for the gentlemen would always be colorless since most of the men used to wear white shirts. Even if they wore colored shirts mostly it would be in very pale shades without any striking colours or designs. But the other group of the audience might be brightly colored with colorful dresses of womenfolk. Today also one may find the same ’sexual separation’ in seating arrangements but the ‘color difference’ has vanished. Men side will have the same riot of colors, sometimes even more to the envy of their female counterparts.

It is a well known concept of Darwin that VARIATIONS are the raw materials for evolution. Mutations or the genetic variations result in changes in species and these changes get piled up leading to speciation. So goes Darwinism. If that has to be given serious credence then the infusion of colors in modern world has to be given equal importance. Colours lead to variations; variations lead to modifications; modifications need innovation and imagination. With so much innovation and imagination the end-products have to be naturally far better than those colorless, style-less old world products. Some process of Evolution !

Let us make everything around us more colorful and have variations which could make us and our life more evolved!

38. 7- KURUMBALAPERI DAYS - CONTINUED

2006-08-22T22:14:00.000-07:00

KURUMBALAPERI DAYS - CONTINUED

During my stay in the summers, invariably there would be a family function. It was ancestral puja. In the family garden next to the house were the cemeteries of my great grandfather and great grandmother and there used to be this function every year. If I happened to be there during that function, I would not take part in any of the rituals and would keep myself quite away from it, since as a ‘true christian’ I was not supposed to be part of such rituals. The teachings of Christianity were so much rammed into me, I used to say that it was all for evil spirits. So my relatives used to keep part of all the offerings separate for me before the rituals. Such was my faith. Sadly such was the teaching of Christianity !

When my chithi got married, she was sore about one thing. The groom was less qualified than her. But this feeling was there in her only till the day of her wedding. The very next day she took it on her stride and never felt anything about it. Her relationship with her mother-in-law used to be much talked about thing in the whole village. They used to sit together for hours and chat about anything and everything. It was she who managed the family as well as the school that was run by the family. She made everyone working for her feel that they should never hurt her feelings. Such was her way of dealing things and people. It was not by her powers but by her love she was able to administer.

After chithi’s marriage my visits to Kurumbalperi became very rare and short. In stead I used to go to chithi’s village, Sivanadanoor, another hamlet some five or six kilo meters from Kurumbalperi. Chithi’s husband was a jolly good person as far as I was concerned. For most in the village he was a terror but I used to be casual with him. Probably he understood the love between me and chithi and permitted me to be so with him also. He had many ‘firsts’ – the first home to get electricity, the first to get a big German – Grundig - radio with lovely piano buttons and so on. I always used to admire his wardrobe. It was not the variety but the sheer number. He used to wear white khadhi dhoti and shirts. But they were washed so well that they used to be so white and well pressed. He used to change two sets of dress everyday. It was an odd thing in a village that too so long back when people of those villages of that time, never even bothered what they put on at all.

37. 6- DAYS AT KURUMBALAPERI

2006-08-19T00:27:00.000-07:00

DAYS AT KURUMBALAPERI

Unlike appa’s native place, amma’s native place did not have much impact on me. But the most important thing was that every time I visited the place I was always accorded a very special place as a motherless child. Everyone in the village, on seeing me, would immediately mention my amma’s name and would give a very sad look spiced with some equally sad comments. One uniform thing that I would find in their comments was how good my amma used to be for all and how an untimely demise had snapped her off leaving me as a lonely motherless child. Even the very way they used to look at me made me feel sad and gloomy.

It was another village like Kasiapuram or even smaller. The name of the hamlet is Kurumbalaperi. It might be around 25 kms from my appa’s place. I remember only the visits I had after appa’s wedding. The conditions were slightly reversed here comparing it with appa’s family situation. In the latter I saw the glorious period in my childhood which had gone very bad in the course of time. But in amma’s place it was just the opposite. In my childhood I saw only the glimpses of the golden days of yore. But then conditions had changed to the better lately.

The house of amma should have had a glorious past. But when I was young it had only remnants of it. The main entrance had a grand façade. It was a very high raised structure with a large number of broad steps leading to a large hall with a high canopy. Just opposite to the steps, at the end of the other side of the hall, there would be a large stone bench to the full length of the hall. The whole structure used to appear to me like a ‘Durbar Hall’ where important people could have been received in the days of its past glory. This hall with the grand façade would open into a quadrangle and on the right side stood a double storied building. High platforms with tall pillars of the ground floor and ornamental arches and pillars of the first floor would be facing the quadrangle. But this building was partitioned into small portions and my grandparents and their two daughters occupied one portion. They used this as their living room and they had a small kitchen on the opposite side. The first floor was never used and the neglect for long time had robbed its past grandeur.

Near to the house there used to be a Pillaiyar Temple. It was like a two storied structure. One part of it was quite high from the ground and half of this structure had a small cubicle as the sanctum sanctorum. The other half extended from the sanctum sanctorum as a platform. These two structures of the temple were constructed with stones. There were two stone pillars on this platform with two human figurines. They used to tell me that it was my mother’s grandparents who constructed the temple for the village. In front of this stony part of the temple, as a next lower tier, there was to a long verandah. It had high tiled roofing. On any hot day this temple used to be very cool and so naturally it used to attract the villagers. Always you could find at least half a dozen people sitting there, resting, chatting or playing a popular game - which I used to think that it should have been the forerunner of chess – with three pieces as tiger for one player and 12 pieces as sheep for the other player. Annual function of this temple was a great attraction not only to that village but also for some nearby villages. During such functions till date amma’s family would be given the first rights and respect. Looking back I find that both my great-grandparents had constructed Hindu temples for their respective villages. All in appa’s family got converted at the time of my grandfather’s marriage while my amma’s family still remains as Hindus. It was only my amma who got converted at the time of her wedding.

Though everyone at Kurumbalaperi had a soft corner for me and were affectionate with me it was my chithi, the younger sister of my mother, showered me with all her love and concern, not only during my childhood. Till the end of her life I had a special place in her heart. Chithi was a great lady. I am yet to find another person like her in my whole life. In all my life I have experienced that there will be always some negative remarks about a person from some quarter or other, however noble the person is. But I have never heard any one single person saying anything negative of her. She loved me so much. Though she had four sons of her own, she always used to say that I was her eldest son. During my visits to Kurumbalaperi she doted on me. She used to feel proud of me since I was able to prove myself better than the kids of my age in that village. The only reason for my superiority was that I was an urban boy and I could ‘act’ smarter than those kids in the rural. She used to encourage me to play word-games with other kids knowing that I could always outsmart them. I always liked to lie on her lap and asked to run her fingers through my hair, which was quite thick then ! It was a nice pastime for both of us and we enjoyed it.

36. A WELCOME NOTE

2006-08-14T03:06:00.000-07:00

At last I have made it. I have made my senior colleague and friend Mr. J.Vasanthan to start a blog of his own - http://jvasanthan-penbrush.blogspot.com/, after so much persuasion. I had to pull /push him into this since I thought his works, present and past, would be a joy to read for the bloggers. What was so far in print media should also get into this blog-world, I thought.

JV was a former English Professor in The American College, Madurai. He is man of many talents. He staged so many English plays in our college. Had been a prolific writer, film critic, artist, cartoonist…the list goes on! His writing is not the rib-tickling type, instead subtle and intellectual types.

JV has accepted to bring the regular columns he is presently writing in Metro Plus (Madurai edition), The Hindu under the title: Down the memory lane. His own drawings enrich each article. Wish that he brings in all his earlier writings also here in his blog since many of those have stood the test of time and are interesting to read as they would have been few decades back.

Hope bloggers of Blogdesam enjoy his writing.

35. 5. A GREAT ACTOR WAS BORN!

2006-08-12T01:03:00.000-07:00

A GREAT ACTOR WAS BORN!

In my teens Kasiapuram had a different type of attraction for me. We were growing up. Visits to chandai now looked below our stature! Interests in rural games, swimming, ‘hunting’ – don’t ever imagine they were real hunting, they were all just walking through pathless fields armed with sticks and catapults – were more interesting. Two important things happened in this period. One was good and other one was bad. Good thing first! Our aunts planned for a big celebration in the school. I don’t remember what was the occasion for it. But it was planned to be a very big function and it was a real big thing for that small village. Daytime had small events like song and dance and the big show was reserved for the evening. It was a drama. The story of the prodigal son. Mostly my cousins from cities played the major characters. For the hero one of my cousins elder to me by two years was selected and was tutored by my aunts. He didn’t come up to their expectations. They were now in search of a ‘hero’. My name cropped up. Since they found me too young for that ‘heavy’ role, I was first given a ‘screen test’! I was asked to memorize a lengthy dialogue – the son coming back to the father with profuse apologies. I passed the test. Thus I became hero –in the very first chance of my ‘long’ acting career! And that cousin who was selected for the hero-role first, was given the role of just the friend of the hero!

I remember the long and serious rehearsals we had. My role was split into two – the first part was that of a toughie and later part of a softie. The two aunties trained me for each part, the younger Mary aunty for the brash role and Rose aunty for the later part. Their personal characters matched this ‘division of labor’. Then came the D-day. Stage with all lightings and screens rented out for the occasion should have looked grand. In one of the scenes I had to visit a hotel and eat something and then to find myself without any money to pay for it. I was given something to eat and the ‘prompters’ from the side urged me to straight away start the dialogues. But I, a sincere artist, would not budge so easily. So I took some eatable and had a bite. What an ill luck I had! What I bit was a hot chilly. I hurriedly took gulps of water and that didn’t help. How could I utter the important dialogues - since the drama was at the crucial turning point – with my mouth drooling with saliva caused by the miss-bite! So I hurriedly went for the sweet in the plate. But the prompter thought that I was using the chance to go for the sweets! Anyway who would understand the problem more than me? So I took the sweet and then started the dialogue. In the next part of the scene the hotelier pulls out my dress and throws me into the street. My appamma later told me that I made her moved to tears with my ‘terrific acting’ in that scene. I should have gone into acting, in retrospective I feel.

34. ECCENTRICITIES KNOW NO BOUNDS

2006-08-10T08:13:00.000-07:00

Dare to be different is a pet phrase for me. If one has to stand alone on a principle or conviction then he can and should. But one need not be different just for the sake of being different from others. This second behavior would then be aptly called ‘eccentricity’. Though Word web gives the meaning for this word as ‘Strange and unconventional behavior’ there has to be a tinge of madness in it also since people give any eccentric person a slight look.

Do the Americans come under this category? When the whole world was driving on the left they alone made it to right. Were they right ? What made them drive right, none knows. Was it just because the whole world was ‘left’, I mean driving on the left side of the roads. Or did they want the whole world steer to ‘right’? Good rightists, anyway! (No political connotation, please!)

Steering to right was sometimes interpreted as showing their insolence to British. But they have thrown their weight with British as far as weighing is concerned! While most of the world weighs in Kilos they still keep pounding on pounds. Their ‘mileage’ also is still as good as British. So the theory of being insolent to British fails.

Also they are not as good as British in many respects. For British, the successful policy of divide and rule is kid stuff. From time immemorial they are adept in this art. They would break anything into pieces or at least into two, like for instance, India and Pakistan. Their greatness is that even after breaking people’s neck like that, they would be able to keep ‘cordial’ relationship with them. It may be under the guise of forum like Commonwealth.

Americans show the opposite of this British feature. If British used to play both with the cat and mouse successfully and simultaneously, the Americans play a different ball game. They first play with mouse and try to make it a big bandicoot so that it now thinks that it can defeat the cat. Whether that happens or not, now the ‘big’ bandicoot starts giving problem to its own mentor. Mentor now becomes ‘enemy # 1'. Now the fight would be not between the cat and mouse but the bandicoot and the mentor. When Britain has been successful with its noble philosophy of ‘divide and rule’, U.S. is not successful with its cat and mouse game. Look at Vietnam. The Americans supported Ngo Dinh Diem, an anti communist against Ho Chi Minh and to their bitter experience Diem turned against Americans.

If that was a thing of past, their present problem with the Taliban backed Al-Quida is another example proving that U.S. is not adept like their British allies in such international games. In all their political ploys every time they get terrific backfire. The problem is they never learn from their mistakes. Probably another sign of their eccentricities.

33. 4. THOSE GLORIOUS DAYS

2006-08-08T08:38:00.000-07:00

THE GLORIOUS DAYS

It appears that the Tamil saying that every family and its status go up and down every thirty years. In Kasiapuram people used to say that it was my great grandfather who dug a deep well in his own land during a dry spell and then donated it for the whole village and always it was called oor-kinaru, common well of the village. Just next to that common well there was a considerably big temple for Kali and that was also the contribution of my great grandfather to the village. The irony of it was that next to this Kaliamman temple stood the school which was built in the next generation by my pattaiya and this school only served as the first church of the village. Now while this school-cum-church had become a desolate and deserted building, the Kaliamman kovil retains its past glory.

I remember many of the past glory of the family in my days at Kasiapuram. Those were days when my appamma used to have big pots of milk from our own cows and buffalos. When I was in Kasiapuram as a kid, every morning I used to be woken up only by the sound of my appamma grinding the milk. Mounds of butter were made everyday. After every harvest the granaries that would stand for nearly eight feet – there used to be three such granaries in the first floor – in addition to paddy in sacks would be full to their brim. Part of second floor was used to mainly dry the paddy. There would be an opening in its floor. It was to push the paddy to the safety of the first floor in case of any sudden and unexpected rains. I remember how hurriedly people would rush to the second floor to save the drying paddy from such sudden rains. I had personally enjoyed such encores. There used to be two small cabins in two different spots in our ancestral home. They would be very small chambers, the whole interior of which would be coated with cow dung. A very small wooden door would fix exactly the opening of the chamber. These chambers would be used to ripen the plantain that would be grown in our fields. Green plantains would be neatly staked in these cabins, some dry hay would be burnt and then the whole thing would be tightly covered. To make it air-tight cow dung will be pasted on the door. When the cabins would be opened there would be a beautiful fruity smell mixed with the smell of the smoke. A peculiar aroma, and I still feel them in my nostrils! Virtually things were overflowing – whether it was milk or paddy or plantain. It was customary first to give a cup of water and a piece of jaggery to any visitor to our home. A diluted version of country-made coffee would follow. My appamma would always take care that I got a good flow of ghee in every meal of mine in those days.

On every chandai day our house would be very busy since my pattaiya did business too along with his regular agriculture. He had a big chunk of land 10 km way from our village. People of that village would be thronging our house on that day. They would have come either with their agricultural merchandise or they would have come for their weekly pay from my pattaiya. Later I came to know that they all mostly belonged to the depressed class by caste. But I remember that there was no discrimination. Appamma treated everybody equally and all had either their water-cum-jaggery piece or coffee or buttermilk. The only condition for the visitors was that none should smoke inside the house. Though pattaiya died when I was young, I remember him as a very hard worker and astute businessman. His days would start very early and he would personally go and call all the employees for the day’s work and everyday would end with visits to the employees’ houses to remind them of the next day’s work. In those days brick houses, that too storied houses were not that common and in our village there were only three houses and one was ours, the second biggest. The biggest was the house of my pattaiya’s elder brother. But in addition to our house, pattaiya had the biggest shopping complex of not only our village but also of that area near to the chandai rented to his friend named David for very many years. I was told latter that there were only three people in the whole village who would have change for a hundred rupee note in those days. They were of course my pattaiya, his elder brother and that Mr. David.

But…all these pomp and glory did not last long. After the demise of pattaiya, my appa and his four brothers kept fighting over the lands so much and so long that things declined fast and all that remained then was only the past glory. That too was soon forgotten. Sadly I witnessed every step of the decline. I remember how the size of the milk-pot appamma had, was fast shrinking. There were days when every visitor to the house was given a cup of buttermilk. Later since my appamma knew that I preferred curd with my every meal she would go out and get curd from our neighbors. The sound of churning milk had stopped for long. Luckily for me, after they started buying milk for making coffee, my visits there became very rare. The same thing happened to all the other things also. Granaries shrank in size and finally they disappeared once for all. The plantain-chambers became places to dump odd things.

Later when appa’s will regarding his properties surfaced to my dismay and bitter bewilderment I almost severed all my connections with appa’s family and so I never went to Kasiapuram for long years. In my late fifties there was a chance to go to another village next to it, during one of the two-wheeler trips from college with colleagues. I was tempted to visit the place. So I went taking Silas, a friend with me. On our way to Kasiapuram I stopped the bike in a particular spot since I remembered the very first accident that I met in my life. In those young carefree days during every visit to the village from Madurai, I used to enjoy riding bullock carts. The fellow who worked for us was just two years elder to me. But he had the entire wherewithal to handle the cart and he would make all the fuss before allowing me to ride the cart. He would give the ropes to me only after we leave the village – what a traffic problem we could have otherwise! Once we had the cart fully loaded with firewood to be taken to our vidili. Vidili is a very small thatched shed in the Palmyra fields where they used to make jaggery. Since the cart was with full load my friend did not allow me to ride the cart. He insisted that it would be tough to handle the bullocks with load and promised me that I could drive the empty cart on our way back. I was joyfully sitting on the top of the firewood in the cart. We had to cross a tar road and get into the field by a vertical slope. My friend thought that it would be safe if he drove it on sideways rather than going quite vertical in the slope. So now one wheel of the cart was on the flat solid tar road and the other wheel was on the soft sand. Well, simple physics worked! The wheel on the soft sand went deeper into the sand and so the whole cart fell on its side. I was thrown on one side of the cart. By some reflex action or something, I rolled again and that saved my life. Because the cart which fell on its side rolled again and now it was completely upside down. The ropes that had the bullocks tied to the yoke were cut and so the bullocks were free. My friend also fell from the cart – just on the other side of my fall. After the initial shock he got up and found me missing. He immediately thought that I had been caught right under the cart and started yelling! I too had to come out of my shock. So I was lying on the other side of the cart not knowing what had happened. Then I heard the yelling of the friend and that made me stand up. He saw me from the other side and what a relief for him! He ran around the cart and hugged me and told me that he thought I had surely died. Praise the ‘instinct’ that made me roll!

From that spot we entered the village. None could identify me nor could I identify anybody till we reached our ancestral house. What I witnessed was a big shock to me. What all looked grand and glorious earlier they all gave a pathetic look now. The house which was once buzzing with so many people in and around it looked desolated and haunted. Since appa and his brothers unceremoniously fought and demanded equal shares in all properties, all now they had was bits and pieces in every property. None had any sizable worthwhile property. The house was awkwardly divided and more than half of it was in a very bad state. The kitchen roof had completely come down. The big thinnai adjacent to it had no more use for anything at all. It once served as the dining hall for so many. The oonjal, which was meant for the kids and a flour-grinder which used to be in the corner of that thinnai were no more there. The oonjal used to be small but made of rosewood and had many artistic handworks suitable for a prince. No trace of it now. The big northern room with its high ceiling was divided with some pathetic wooden partition. The centre hall looked in my early age big and the pillar in the middle was a favorite spot for me. As a child I used to go around that polished and pure black pillar. I remembered it as a tall one but now it all looked so small and insignificant. All the walls of the hall used to have a neat row of photographs. Now many were missing and the remaining ones were all dangling in every direction. The southern part of the house where one of the plantain-chambers was in a corner, had now changed almost into a ‘Mumbai-type house’, that is, within a small square they had modified it into a ‘house of some sort’. It was just what they used to call as ‘sparrow’s nest’.

The buildings which were once housed the school and church - the places where I spent most of my motherless days – wore a terrific look. The part which housed the church once was in utter shambles now. The roofs had completely collapsed. Our cow sheds of those earlier days were much better places than this. The other building which was built latter had been divided into small portions – rather ‘cells’. They had been rented out, it seemed. Less said better about the building where once the famous and busy shop of Mr. David was doing a roaring business. The same fate of being divided into bits and pieces among the brothers had made the building look like a haunted place. All the big shops in the building had gone to other better places and now only a small tailor shop and grocery shop remained. All the traces of its past glory had gone. I thought that it would have been better had I not visited the place. The glory of the past alone would have remained in my mind.

32. A PIOUS KID AT KASIAPURAM - 3

2006-07-30T07:49:00.000-07:00

PIETY AT KASIAPURAM

Immediately after appa’s wedding, the little family comprising the young newly married couple and their child, that is I, settled in a house in Madurai. But the connection with the birthplace and its attraction for me was there for a very long time. Though we visited Kasiapuram only during the vacations, the visits had a great impact on me. Virtually there used to be a great magnetic pull towards it, at least till I reached my twenties. The nights before the travel by train to my native place were always sleepless. I would try to gather as many things as possible for the friends there at the village. Glass marbles that I took from Madurai were attractions to friends in the village. In the same way the things I gathered from the village were great attractions to friends back in Madurai. The latter used to wonder at the kal kundu, handmade stone marble that I would get in exchange of glass marbles. If I tried to smuggle to village such novelties from Madurai, father would bring Wren & Martin grammar book without my knowledge to give me special coaching during the vacation. Such sessions would make me feel that appa was tyrant and spoilsport of my vacation.

Probably till I reached my teens, days in Kasiapuram had more religious activities. The family-run school was also used as the local church of the village. By the time I got shifted to Madurai the two aunts who were taking care of me when I was in the village had left Kasiapuram. The elder one became a nun and the younger one got married and left. In their place were now two other aunts, father’s youngest sisters, were ruling the roost! Of these two, the elder one was very close and affectionate towards me and she too became a nun later. Her name is Rose. Rose aunty, a very pious one, used to carry out all the church activities. During the vacations not only our families, but two other families would land up at Kasiapuram. Total number of cousins from these families would be fairly large and we were considered by the locals as special since we had come from big towns. All these cousins would gather every evening at the school-cum-church for prayers along with the local children. In the months of May, Rose aunty would arrange special prayers for St. Mary, since we, Catholics, devote the month of May to Mary.

On every evening in May, all the kids from the Christian families would gather in the church and from there we would march out and would visit a Christian family. There we would have a little prayer and a few devotional songs. Rose auntie’s voice used to be very sweet. She would lead the ‘chorus’ – a real chorus since we, the kids, would sing in our own ragam and timing! The best part of this would be the march. There was no electricity in the village on those days. So we would carry a hurricane light and one candle. Treading through the dark lanes of the village to reach our spot would be very hard even to imagine for those who were born and brought up after electricity became common. The candle bearer would lead the group. Invariably some would falter in dark and would fall down. All other kids would enjoy at the fall of one of themselves. Such skirmishes and mischief would never distract our Rose aunty; she would be in her own world of singing and praying. Murukku and black watery coffee made with jaggery supplied at the end of each such prayer meeting at different houses were the routine things given to the prayer group. Still I remember the taste of those two and how much we enjoyed them.

One another interesting and different thing in Kasiapuram was the weekly market or chandai. In those days every big village would have some weekday as the chandai day. Varieties of merchandise, starting from grains, seed grains, agricultural utilities and such vital materials for the populace to novelties like glass bangles would be brought on that day. Usually such chandais would be in some common place earmarked for that. Visiting the chandai at late evenings with aunts or appamma is still fresh in my memory. This chandai was just a few houses away from ours and one could hear the noise from this chandai. I don’t know why I imagined then that the noise from the chandai sounded to me like that of an ocean. Probably a matter of perspectives!

Now for the bad thing. It was my first experimentation with smoking. There may be genetically something in me, which made me always attracted to the ‘aroma’ of smoke – whether it is from a beedi or a cigarette. Till this minute I have that weakness inbuilt in me. Though it is now more than one and half decade that I stopped smoking still the love for it continues. It is right when it is said that a smoker is always a smoker. During one of our summer visits to Kasiapuram a big jing-bang got together and ventured an outing with the sole aim of stealing some nice moments of smoking. We would have been around 6 in number. First day it was in the tamarind-thoppu. One by name Johnson not only initiated but also volunteered to supply the much-needed beedis and a matchbox. In our village beedi-making is a big profession for many, young and old, male and female. So every home had people who were in this trade. But it was considered below our dignity in our families and so none in our households was involved in this. So it had to be somebody who would be ready to sneak a bundle of beedi for us. And it was Johnson.

We all went into the interior of the thoppu, which was next to our school. Sitting around the trunk of a big tree and trying to hide ourselves from any passerby and at the same time trying to light our beedis in that windy condition – all these made our adventure more exhilarating. If we saw something moving we would all douse our beedis and run away in search of newer and safer places. Mostly we were running around than smoking. So when the session was over we felt that we did not enjoy it at all. So I and two of my cousins – one younger and another elder to me – decided that we should try the costlier thing, the cigarettes. First we planned to pool our resources. Once that was done the next thing was selecting a safe hideout. We did select a very dangerous spot. It was the well where we were trying to learn swimming that summer. It was quite away from our village and it was on the way to the next bigger village on the main road, Alangulam. We had to have a purchasing spot other than our village shops since news of the purchase in any shop in our village would immediately reach our respective families. So we had a meticulous planning. We chose a shop. We decided that the buyer would be youngest among the three of us. He was not a town-guy like me and the other cousin. So he could always escape with the excuse that the cigarettes were for some other relative of him. At least that is what I told him and made him buy the cigarettes. It was a full pack of Berkley cigarettes. Of course with a matchbox. We straightaway went to the chosen well and the water was a few feet deep from the top and so we climbed down and chose a cozy corner of the well. We settled comfortably and started to get on with our job in hand. Only then we found that it was not that easy for amateurs like us to light the cigarette and have nice puffs. Each step was very hard. Lighting the cigarette against the winds, we never imagined, would need so much skill. Then keeping the cigarette tip dry was absolutely impossible. Even before we lit the cigarette the tip would be fully drenched with our saliva and had to be pinched off. Getting a few puffs was a race against time, as the tips were soaked with our saliva sooner than we puffed!

Anyway, we were in our own world coaching, encouraging and chiding each other. We forgot the world above us, I mean, the world outside the well. We were simply ‘frogs in a well’. Then we had two of our cousins, very seniors to us, descending on us from nowhere. We were caught red-hot-cigarette handed. They scolded and more than that blackmailed us saying that they would report the matter to our families. And that was like sentencing us to the ropes. We pleaded. Then they proposed a deal. We were asked to write on the cardboard of the cigarette box itself a promise that we would never smoke thereafter at all in our whole lives. And then the cousins tore that into very small tiny pieces and threw them into the well and told us that we could smoke only if we join all the bits of papers; else we should never smoke. We made the solemn promises. It appears that of the three of us, my two cousins kept that promise but I continued to smoke throughout my school days whenever there was a chance. I liked it so much. During the end of my degree course I became a habitual smoker and continued that thing for 26 long years, till 6th January,1990.

The late teens had one more attraction in this village life. It was the amman-kodai, the annual festival celebrated for ten days. Though our village was small it had a big temple disproportionate to the local population. But during this festival people from all over the State, especially those who migrated to Chennai would turn up in large numbers. Festive mood would be in every individual and in every nook and corner of the village. Dance programmes would go long into the night. Don’t imagine that there would be grand stage for these dances. It would be all in open spaces in and around the temple. In those days dance in such festivals meant only the folk dance, karagam. We would take vantage points so that we would be able to have an eye on the girls for whom we had a crush or vice versa. Truly the girls would be very romantic during that festival time. Stolen glances and secret signs would fly across the dancing floor. But once the festival was over, they would turn blind eye to us. We had to wait for the next year for the romantic period.

Thus it was church-related joyful days till I was ten, then it was visits to chandai and our hunting that made our village visits joyful, and lastly in the late teens and early college days it was this annual festival that brought cheers to the vacation in our village. But all these faded and I was becoming more and more a town boy because in the early years at least twice we visited the village, a short visit during Christmas and a longer one during summer. As years passed, we stopped going for the Christmas. Visits during summer also got slowly reduced

31. 2 EARLY DAYS AT KASIAPURAM

2006-07-29T00:58:00.000-07:00

MY VERY EARLY DAYS AT KASIAPURAM

After mother’s demise, father lived as single in Madurai while I was left with my grandma – I called her appamma – at my father’s native village, Kasiapuram. It was just a few miles away from my mother’s place. I very vaguely remember how I was doted by appamma and two of the 4 sisters of my father. These two aunts were then working as teachers in our own school run by our family. Pattaiya, that is my grandfather, was the one who started that school, the very first in that area. If I remember right, it was St.Joseph’s Elementary School. I remember my aunts taking me by hand to the school everyday since appamma used to be busy doing her daily score at the fields. How vividly I visualize even now the dawn-to-dusk hard manual work the womenfolk at home did. Father used to visit me now and then during his vacations. What stands out during those visits, firstly, as soon as he came home my aunts would lift me in their arms and weep inconsolably. The sight of my father would open the floodgate of their grief on the demise of my mother and my ‘motherless status’. Not knowing the reason for their grief, I would also cry along with them. In those first few minutes, a pall of gloom used to hang over the whole household. Secondly, father used to bring something or other every time he paid those visits. The usual and much-expected thing would be grapes. What we used to get in those days mostly were green, sour grapes. But the grapes father used to bring were black, sweet and juicy and were called Hyderabad-grapes. During one such visit he brought me a tri-cycle. Probably half of the kids of the village should have been around it when the news of its arrival broke out. None would have seen such a cute thing in their lives. I very well recollect that it arrived well packed with flannel tapes. Body painted in bright green, solid wheels in bright red and black rubber handle grips. None in the village – leave alone the children – would have seen such a cute little thing. It was a treat to watch in those days. I was too young to pedal it myself. I would simply sit on my tricycle and there would be severe competition to push me around in our backyard. Duraisamy, a distant cousin of mine was my favored one to push me around. For many years whenever I visited my village I would try to meet him. In the latter years I always found him sitting in a petty shop in an inebriated condition. A five or ten rupee note would in such times make him very happy. One day I got my right toe in the wheel in one such push-me-around sessions. Blood scared everybody and after that accident none came forward to treat me with the ‘royal pushing’. It compelled me to learn to pedal myself. Then I was free to ride around the whole village. Probably in the history of our school, for very many years mine was the only vehicle parked under the trees during the class hours. When I leave in my cycle to our house, there would be scores of people watching a little kid majestically riding his tri-cycle. A real cynosure!

This cycle remained in the family for nearly forty years – that too in full use – as the ‘family tri-cycle’. Only thing, my daughters were denied the chance of enjoying it while other children of my other sisters ‘inherited’ it and rode around. Another novelty of those years in our village home was a mechanical-gramophone – the only of its kind for miles around in that area. My aunts would play the very few records we had only on very special occasions or for visitors coming only for the purpose of seeing and listening to the ‘musical wonder’ of those years. It was a proud possession of the family for a long time since electricity came very very late to our village. Most of my childhood memories belong to those ‘powerless’ days.

So went those days in Kasiapuram. Everybody in the village would be a relative. Every relative petted me. Everybody had a soft corner for me since I was a motherless child. This should have done a lot to my psyche at that age itself. It was one type of recognition I got for many years.

There was a lady-teacher in our school. She was close to my aunts. She was from a nearby village, called Kuruvankottai or something. Everyday she used to come to our home to take her lunch with my aunts. Though her face got completely erased from my mind I still remember her as a very fair, slim and beautiful lady. I don’t remember why and how it happened – probably people were talking about that – I very much wanted that she should become my mother. I don’t know how that proposal got fizzled out. Then comes father’s wedding. I have never found an answer as to why and how I remember many of the things in my life very clearly after that wedding while most of the earlier happenings are all so foggy.

Well, coming back to the day of father’s wedding, inside that village church it was a sort of triangle – my father in front near the altar, I, on the side of church in that big chair and the entrance through which the bride was expected any moment. She then entered. She was in a golden yellow pattu saree, thickly brocaded with golden jaree. Seeing a Christian bride with a veil over her head should have been a novelty for the local people. A group of kids followed the bride marveling her dress. She looked quite pretty but the face had seriousness in it. Probably it was due to the bridal tension. In the latter years also she carried that perpetual seriousness on her face. I always liked her smiling face but never that seriousness-laden face. The wedding was in my mother’s village, since father’s new bride was a close relative of my mother. I was never able to remember any other person, especially the relatives of mother attending the wedding.

It is more like a movie with a lot of cut-shots. Because the next thing that I am able to recollect was the wedding procession through those village streets towards the bride’s house. It was in an open car. I was seated sandwiched between the couple – appears very odd even now to me! Could be compulsion of ….I don’t know what. There were people looking at me during the procession. Those faces showed mixed feelings.

The next cut-shot is father’s village in the late evening of the wedding day. In this scene, the whole village had converged on to my pattaiya’s house as was the custom of those days. There were a few petro-max lamps brightening the celebration. Kids were hovering around those lamps – another novelty for them. The house, to the village standards of those years, was comparatively a large one – one of the few storied houses in the whole village. There were three entrances. I was sitting on the steps on the southern side, a side entrance. I was engrossed looking at the urchins playing around the hissing lamps competing with the buzzing insects. Someone from behind touched my shoulders. I turned and looked up. It was father in pattu dhothi. He sat near me. He asked me who was the bride to me. I said “chithi”. That was what I was told. Father said, “She will be hereafter your amma and you should call her so. Okay? “. I said yes and kept that word always. Not for the namesake. I meant it always. Visitors to our home in the later years never could find any difference. But later…. It all changed…. by a quirk of fate or what? Anyway, that’s another story altogether.

30. MY APPA'S WEDDING THAT I ATTENDED -1

2006-07-28T04:48:00.000-07:00

MY APPA'S WEDDING THAT I ATTENDED.

When I look back, the earliest memory of my childhood is my appa’s wedding. Yes, it was the wedding of my father. I vividly remember most of the details. It is like ruffling through an old family photo album. The photos are old, sepia-toned retaining the old-world flavor. The images in the photos when I look at them start moving back and forth in time. It may be like a sequence of still photographs. But when I look at each one of them, I get a short length movie running in my mind. It absorbs me into the picture, which by this time gets animated. I become part of it. Things move around me. I move around things and people in each photograph.

Among such photos the very fist one shows the interior of a village church. My father, the bridegroom, is in a cream colored suit of shining gabardine. He is kneeling at the pew and praying or so it seems. The bride is yet to arrive. I have not seen her yet. I’m inside a big chair specially provided for me, since chairs in those years were rare commodities, that too in village churches. I don’t know how was it for my father, for me the waiting was filled with suspense and a sort of thrill. I’ll describe the wedding later, since I have to provide a few more details to fill the gap.

Though father’s wedding is, as I said, the earliest memory, there were few other things in my memory bank. They, however, are not as clear as the wedding and the subsequent events. They have a veil hung over them. Like moth eaten photographs. They are not clear. Probably that is compensated by the sound track – the oft-repeated narration of elders in the family rambling into my ears during my growing years. What elders said help bring back some foggy memories. Elders used to say a lot about my mother. But unfortunately I don’t remember anything about her. However hard I try I don’t get even a hazy image of her. After my birth, I am told, she became very sick. Got tuberculosis. A dreaded disease in those days. She was given some treatment in Madurai. A few months before her death, for some time she was in Madurai Government Hospital as an inpatient. In my later age, I remember some of my relatives were trying to identify the block and ward in the concrete jungle of that hospital. I wantonly avoided knowing it. I don’t know why I felt that way. When her condition became worse, she wanted to spend her last days in her village house. So she was taken to her birthplace, a village named Kurumbalperi. Both of us were there for a month or two. During these days she tried to keep me away from her fearing I would also catch the disease. From what others recall, I should have been a big nuisance to her. Anyway her painful days were over when I was hardly 2½ years old. It occurred early in the morning around 4.30 a.m.

I had a periyamma – Madurai periyamma – who used to be very fond of me when I was a kid. She was in Madurai and she was pregnant then. On the day of my mother’s death, this periyamma had a dream. In the dream mother in a complete white dress came to her with a piece of sugarcane in her hand. She took a bite of it. Chewed and spat it. Then she said to periyamma “ Akka, I’m going. Look after my son”. And then she drifted off, rather floated off. Within few hours she received the telegram informing the demise of my mother. This had been quite often repeated by my periyamma. I don’t know what to call this. Calling it a trumped up incident looks unethical and ungrateful to the memory of my periyamma. So, though I grew up wondering about the rationality of this, I was never willing to question it. This is one of the two incidents in my life, which has a supernatural touch. About the other one, I will talk later.

After mother’s demise, father lived as single in Madurai while I was left with my grandma – I called her appamma – at my father’s native village, Kasiapuram. It was just a few miles away from my mother’s place. I very vaguely remember how I was doted by appamma and two of the 4 sisters of my father. These two aunts were then working as teachers in our own school run by our family. Pattaiya, that is my grandfather, was the one who started that school, the very first in that area. If I remember right, it was St.Joseph’s Elementary School. I remember my aunts taking me by hand to the school everyday since appamma used to be busy doing her daily score at the fields. How vividly I visualize even now the dawn-to-dusk hard manual work the womenfolk at home did. Father used to visit me now and then during his vacations. What stands out during those visits, firstly, as soon as he came home my aunts would lift me in their arms and weep inconsolably. The sight of my father would open the floodgate of their grief on the demise of my mother and my ‘motherless status’. Not knowing the reason for their grief, I would also cry along with them. In those first few minutes, a pall of gloom used to hang over the whole household. Secondly, father used to bring something or other every time he paid those visits. The usual and much-expected thing would be grapes. What we used to get in those days mostly were green, sour grapes. But the grapes father used to bring were black, sweet and juicy and were called Hyderabad-grapes. During one such visit he brought me a tri-cycle. Probably half of the kids of the village should have been around it when the news of its arrival broke out. None would have seen such a cute thing in their lives. I very well recollect that it arrived well packed with flannel tapes. Body painted in bright green, solid wheels in bright red and black rubber handle grips. None in the village – leave alone the children – would have seen such a cute little thing. It was a treat to watch in those days. I was too young to pedal it myself. I would simply sit on my tricycle and there would be severe competition to push me around in our backyard. Duraisamy, a distant cousin of mine was my favored one to push me around. For many years whenever I visited my village I would try to meet him. In the latter years I always found him sitting in a petty shop in an inebriated condition. A five or ten rupee note would in such times make him very happy. One day I got my right toe in the wheel in one such push-me-around sessions. Blood scared everybody and after that accident none came forward to treat me with the ‘royal pushing’. It compelled me to learn to pedal myself. Then I was free to ride around the whole village. Probably in the history of our school, for very many years mine was the only vehicle parked under the trees during the class hours. When I leave in my cycle to our house, there would be scores of people watching a little kid majestically riding his tri-cycle. A real cynosure!

This cycle remained in the family for nearly forty years – that too in full use – as the ‘family tri-cycle’. Only thing, my daughters were denied the chance of enjoying it while other children of my other sisters ‘inherited’ it and rode around. Another novelty of those years in our village home was a mechanical-gramophone – the only of its kind for miles around in that area. My aunts would play the very few records we had only on very special occasions or for visitors coming only for the purpose of seeing and listening to the ‘musical wonder’ of those years. It was a proud possession of the family for a long time since electricity came very very late to our village. Most of my childhood memories belong to those ‘powerless’ days.

So went those days in Kasiapuram. Everybody in the village would be a relative. Every relative petted me. Everybody had a soft corner for me since I was a motherless child. This should have done a lot to my psyche at that age itself. It was one type of recognition I got for many years.

There was a lady-teacher in our school. She was close to my aunts. She was from a nearby village, called Kuruvankottai or something. Everyday she used to come to our home to take her lunch with my aunts. Though her face got completely erased from my mind I still remember her as a very fair, slim and beautiful lady. I don’t remember why and how it happened – probably people were talking about that – I very much wanted that she should become my mother. I don’t know how that proposal got fizzled out. Then comes father’s wedding. I have never found an answer as to why and how I remember many of the things in my life very clearly after that wedding while most of the earlier happenings are all so foggy.

Well, coming back to the day of father’s wedding, inside that village church it was a sort of triangle – my father in front near the altar, I, on the side of church in that big chair and the entrance through which the bride was expected any moment. She then entered. She was in a golden yellow pattu saree, thickly brocaded with golden jaree. Seeing a Christian bride with a veil over her head should have been a novelty for the local people. A group of kids followed the bride marveling her dress. She looked quite pretty but the face had seriousness in it. Probably it was due to the bridal tension. In the latter years also she carried that perpetual seriousness on her face. I always liked her smiling face but never that seriousness-laden face. The wedding was in my mother’s village, since father’s new bride was a close relative of my mother. I was never able to remember any other person, especially the relatives of mother attending the wedding.

It is more like a movie with a lot of cut-shots. Because the next thing that I am able to recollect was the wedding procession through those village streets towards the bride’s house. It was in an open car. I was seated sandwiched between the couple – appears very odd even now to me! Could be compulsion of ….I don’t know what. There were people looking at me during the procession. Those faces showed mixed feelings.

The next cut-shot is father’s village in the late evening of the wedding day. In this scene, the whole village had converged on to my pattaiya’s house as was the custom of those days. There were a few petro-max lamps brightening the celebration. Kids were hovering around those lamps – another novelty for them. The house, to the village standards of those years, was comparatively a large one – one of the few storied houses in the whole village. There were three entrances. I was sitting on the steps on the southern side, a side entrance. I was engrossed looking at the urchins playing around the hissing lamps competing with the buzzing insects. Someone from behind touched my shoulders. I turned and looked up. It was father in pattu dhothi. He sat near me. He asked me who was the bride to me. I said “chithi”. That was what I was told. Father said, “She will be hereafter your amma and you should call her so. Okay? “. I said yes and kept that word always. Not for the namesake. I meant it always. Visitors to our home in the later years never could find any difference. But later…. It all changed…. by a quirk of fate or what? Anyway, that’s another story altogether.

29. WORLD CUP - MY DIARY- TRIVIA

2006-07-23T21:55:00.000-07:00

TRIVIA:

**********During the matches there was a row of persons wearing bright orange colored vests. These people would be standing around the stadium facing the audience,while the fierce battle for supremacy would be going on at their backs. Any lively action at the ground would be reflected by the vociferous audiences. But these persons would stoically stand guard, never getting tempted to turn to see what was happening at their backs. When the whole world was watching the match they would be turning their backs to the play. So near they were, yet so far they were from the matches! How would they have selected people for this unenviable job? Did they pick up avid cricket fans from India?

Even for any one dayer one could find a big crowd on the roadside teashops and shop windows to witness the telecast of these matches. So is our interest in Cricket. But no such thing was sighted in all these days of world over football fever. Our Indians stoically kept away from such ‘trivial sports’!

=============================== = =======================

*********People say that God is Omniscient and all that. It seems It knows past, present and future.
During the football match days I used to wonder sitting before a TV at every match. The questions in my mind would be always who would win the match and whom did I want to win and all that suspense. This feeling heightened as the championship proceeded. There would be a lot of suspense and at the end of the every match according to my expectations and wishes I would be either feeling happy or sad. Anyway that sort of gripping suspense till the last minute keeps the interest in the whole championship and in every game.

But I used to wonder – If there is a God, naturally It would know the results for every match even before the match starts! And also the final winner of the championship even before the football fever starts for the whole world. So no suspense to the Almighty! Right?

What a boring ‘life’ it would be for the Almighty – a life devoid of any suspense, a long and boring one ! POOR GOD!!

28. WORLD CUP - MY DIARY-page 12

2006-07-16T22:29:00.000-07:00

ITLAY vs. FRANCE

RESULT: 5 : 3 (PSO)

Much water has flown under the bridge. Once the final was over the mood to complete this diary also waned. Both the teams went in full steam from the first whistle and an early goal by France thru a penalty made it all the more fierce. Then came the equalizer within the regular time. So it was 1 : 1 and the game went into extra time. There were two fierce head-butts from Zidane, the French captain. One during the second half and it hit the horizontal bar and the Italian goal survived. But in the second butt the victim did fall flat. That was a brutal head-butt by Zidane onto the chest of Matterizi, the Italian player. Zidane was duly shown the red card and was sent just a few minutes before the match came to an end after the extra time. Then in the penalties the first shots by each team was scored but the second and third shots were missed by the French while it was all so easy for the Italians. And victory was theirs.

The Zidane affair is being discussed for long now and since Matterizi has made some foul and personal remarks, the world has gone with Zidane and felt sad for the way he left the ground since it is the last in the long and glorious march of the French in the last three championships.

27. WORLD CUP - MY DIARY-page 11

2006-07-08T21:01:00.000-07:00

SECOND SEMIFINAL

FRANCE vs. PORTUGAL

RESULT: 1 : 0 (P)ZIDANE

More than the players of Portugal, Scolari the name of the team’s coach was more in the media. He is considered to be the top person as a terrific coach and his teams were always on the winning streak…etc…etc… but that place of pride was snatched this time. Portugal lost to France thru a penalty goal awarded for a foul in the Portugal’s goal mouth on Henry. The penalty awarded was taken by the Zidane. No nerves. No external show of feelings. Just a plain kick. Ball safely traveled to the left corner of the net, escaping the outstretched hands of the Portugal goal keeper.

As any match where the fate is decided by penaltyFIFA 2006 or shoot outs, this game also was a disappointing one for me. There were at least one more incident at the French goal mouth which raised a question: why not a penalty now to Portugal. Anyway the match was over and French team sails into the finals. Portugal’s C. Ronaldo showed his mettle. I liked what I saw in him.

26. WORLD CUP - MY DIARY-page 10

2006-07-04T22:15:00.000-07:00

FIRST SEMI-FINAL

GERMANY vs. ITALY

RESULT: 0 : 0; ET - 0 : 2

From the very first whistle the match went into top gear. The ball was consistently visiting both the ends. The custodians proved their mettle time and again, especially the German, Oliver. For both the teams there were many a thrilling escapes. Especially for the Italians it would have been a great heartburn when for two successive shots just at the first few minutes of extra time the posts came to their rescue. The players also showed their skills so well that rough and unnecessary fouls were much less. The Italians had a higher percentage of ball possession but the opportunities created by both the teams were almost even and so the whole match was a nail biting experience.

The full time play did not bring out any results and the game went into extra time. The first 15 minutes were over again without any result. Then in the second half of the extra time also minutes passed without any result. But in the real 'dying' moments the German goal fell by a concerted effort of Italian forwards. The Germans immediately surged towards their opponents' goal mouth but it was only a vain attempt. But within the next few seconds – in the real last seconds of the game -another goal for Italians. German's fate was sealed.

25. WORLD CUP - MY DIARY-page 9

2006-07-01T23:43:00.000-07:00

QUARTER FINALS:

30th June 2006

GERMANY vs ARGENTINA

RESULT: 1 : 1; 4 : 2 (PSO)

Two disappointments in this match. One, Messi did not play in this game, I don’t know why. I have not seen him playing so far and everyone is talking about him. I missed him. Second, Argentinean game was just at par with the Germans, not any notch above them. Two equal sides fought for supremacy and of course that was quite absorbing. Both the goals scored came in the second half and after that the extra time did not bring in any definite result. So the game went for penalty shoot out and Germans won.

ITALY vs UKRAINE

RESULT: 3 : 0

Every one knows what is sleep-walking. But I don’t know whether people know what is ‘sleep-watching’ I did that on that day. The match started by 00.30 a.m. and even then I was half asleep. I remember the game starting with referee’s whistle. After that everything was quite cloudy since I was lying in front of the TV. I used to wake up now and then and see the score. When I first saw it was 2:0 and when I woke up next 3:0; and at the next time three people were sitting and talking about something that was happening in Germany…they called it World Cup Football Championship or something. Who cared? I went to sleep again with one difference – to wake up this time only late in the morning, that too, to shift myself to the coziness of my bed!

2nd July, 2006

PORTUGAL vs ENGLAND

RESULT: 3 : 1

At the start I wanted Portugal to win the match. But as the match was approaching the end after the extra time, I wanted England to win. I thought, well, if a full team of players cannot win an oppent with just 10 members playing, that too without their star players Beckhamm and Roony, they don’t deserve to be the winners. But the commentator was making a commentary that Englnad has never won by penalties. This time also the same blind lady of fortune turned her back to England.

In their earlier match against Trinidad & Tobago, England forwards Lampard and Crouch were quite an eyesore for me. It appeared to me that with these two in the forward line, T & T need not worry at all, so was their abilities as scorers. Lampard took many a ashot at goal, but almost all of them were way away from the target. If forwards take shots like that, why the opponents need to worry. Crouch, the other forward looks to me more a caricature of a football player. His game just matched his looks. He was lucky since finally it is his heading that resulted in the only goal scored against T & T. After Rooney left the scene because of his huff Crouch took his mantle. He and Lampard played their 'original' game and spoiled or wasted many chances of their team. It all finally led to the penalty shoot out and England as is their routine lost it.

BRAZIL vs. FRANCE

My favourite is, for like most around the world, Brazil. Wanted Ronaldo and Ronaldinho to come at the peak of their form at the right moment. But that never happened.

There were many moments when Brazilian goal was at danger. Somehow they came off from them . But both Cafu and Ronaldo got booked with yellow card. Juans’s crucial tackle earned him a yellow card but almost saved a sure goal. Credit for the fist half should be given to Zidane. His play making moves and the ball distribution were fantastic. He is the only star twinkling bright. Like Beckham, his free kicks landed right on the desired spot. In one such shot the ball was just tapped by Henry resulting the French one goal up. I thought this would spur Brazilians a little more and one could witness some sparks. But all these expectations were turned to naught and the French team kept up this slender margin and entered into the semifinals, leaving the Brazilian fans in tears.

24. WORLD CUP - MY DIARY-page 8

2006-06-29T10:04:00.000-07:00

BRAZIL vs. GHANA

RESULT: 3 : 0

At last Ronaldo might have got his magical touch back. The first goal in the fifth minute of the match was a brilliant one. He could shirk away the off-side trick of the Ghanaians and then had a solo run only the custodian to beat. The last minute swerve he took to avoid the on rushing custodian was a beauty. It was all there for a fraction of a second, or even lesser than that. But it has the signature of Ronaldo of yester years.

Is it a good sign that he is coming back actually into the championship. If he continues to enthrall everyone with such tactical run and moves it would be great watching the samba team. Ronaldinho is still disappointing. He is yet to get his touch. Will he along with Ronaldo reach the right peak of their games at the crucial matches that are awaiting them? One has to hope so.

Of course Ghanaians had a spirited game and the African-Brazilians had to bow down before the original Brazilians !

23. WORLD CUP - MY DIARY-page 7

2006-06-29T09:12:00.001-07:00

ITALY vs AUSTRALIA Result: 1 : 0

Quirk of fate? That is what one has to say of this match. By the half time itself Italy got one of their men sent out with a red card. Second half was 10 vs. 11. Ball mostly was in the possession of the Aussies – the game was centered around Italy’s goal mouth. There were many scoring chances. Either Aussies missed or messed them up. Foray into Aussies goal was just sporadic. Minutes were ticking off. Time was over. The whole of 90 minutes. Games extends for 3 more minutes for the lost time. Now the seconds were ticking off. When there was hardly a minute Italy’s Lucas Neill had a solo run and was at a striking distance when he was fouled by Fabio Grosso. Penalty was awarded and Totti did not have any trouble putting the ball into the right corner of the goal.

This time I expected Italy to win and also wanted Italy to win. It won. But always my heart goes in sympathy for any team that is defeated with a penalty stroke. This time my sympathies lie with Aussies.

22. WORLD CUP - MY DIARY-page 6

2006-06-23T08:10:00.000-07:00

BRAZIL vs JAPAN result: 4 : 1

At last Ronaldo has broken his voodoo and has come out of the spell with two goals in this game. But Brazil, probably, needed a knee jerker. Though the ball possession statistics was favourable with Brazil, it was the Japanese who scored the first goal. It appeared that this opened the flood gates since there was more vigour in the game now and within a very few minutes Ronaldo headed a ball into the goal. Ronaldo made us think that scoring a goal was after all so easy. All these happened in the first half. In this half, it looked that Brazil wanted to specialise in minus passes and the game was very much restricted to their half. Only very sporadically Brazilians forayed into their opponent's half.

The game after the moiety took a different turn as the ball moved from one end to the other often. Though the Japanese tried very much only their citadel fell three times. The fourth goal was by Ronaldo again and some shadow of his artistic talents was to be seen in this goal. However, throughout Ronaldo was there in the field like a queen bee in its hive waiting for its slaves to bring whatever the queen bee wanted. His active movements were sparse. But all said and done, he has come back and proved his presence with those two goals entering into the record books. Let him strike back to his form and let more football flow from him.

21. WORLD CUP - MY DIARY-page 5

2006-06-20T10:41:00.000-07:00

SECOND OUTING OF BRAZIL

BRAZIL Vs AUSTRALIA -- RESULT: 2 : 0

Brazil, as expected won the game but not in theie inimitable style. Still they have to fall into the groove. Their style - the total foot ball - is missing. Better they shake away their rustiness and shine better in furhter rounds if they are serious about their ambition of retaining the cup for the record sixth time. But it is not going to be tht easy, since very serious contenders are emerging even in this pool stage. I missed the first game of Argentina. Reports of their fine form have raised their rating. Germans with their cohesivieness and with the advantage of playing on their own 'father land' are also coming under the hopefuls.

Still Ronaldo's form has not become anything better than what was sadly witnessed in the first game. Of course, he was the one to supply a pass to Adriano in their first goal. Still he is yet to shed his lethargy and get into form. When he was substituted by Robinho a very clear difference was able to be seen. Robinho became the live-wire and his brisk running and good play opened up many chances. Actually the second goal by another substitute, Fred was a rebound ball by Robinho. From right corner of the box he hit a sharp stinging shot and the ball hit the base of right vertical and the rebound was tapped by Fred. Probably age makes all the difference. And also the burden and eagerness to prove oneself is naturally more with Robinho.

GERMANY Vs ECUADOR -- RESULT: 3 : 0

This match should have given a big boost to the Germans, since the game 'clicked' well for them while Ecuador were much wanting. Not a single pass was accurate and they were always found nervous.

20. WORLD CUP - MY DIARY-page 4

2006-06-16T08:11:00.000-07:00

ENGLAND vs TRINIDAD & TOBAGO

My real feelings about the British come out to the open many a time; for instance when I see some movies like “Earth’ I always spill the beans unashamedly, though I know that I am wrong on many points. (If you have patience, you can view my view of British here and the reasons for that.) When I see this match between England and Trinidad, because of the heroic saves of Hislop, the custodian for Trinidad in their previous match against Sweden I had a soft corner for that little nation and its heroes. When the forwards of England team, Crouch and Lampard missed great opportunities time and again my heart went for Trinidad out and out. The game also proceeded goalless for long till at last at 84th minute Crouch headed the ball into the goal of Trinidad and soon Gerard followed at 90th minute with one another goal.

The irritation over the failure of the England’s forwards was heightened by the excellence of Beckham’s brilliance. He was so efficient that all his long passes dipped right in front of the goal mouth, for the forwards just to finish it off with ease. But the forwards, Crouch and Lampard played very badly and missed many a chance. Beckham’s balls were like darts hitting the bull’s eye landed squarely before the forwards time and again all in vain.

On the other hand I could not understand why T & T played such a defensive game. My pick of the player of this match was Glen of Trinidad. He came in the second half as a substitute. He had the great knack of dodging many defenders of England and was able to create many chances at England’s goal mouth for his team. But the pathetic thing was that the Trinidadians were mostly on their half and he did not get any support from his team mates. Had there been a little cooperation from them, he could have changed the fate of the game in favor of his team. Such was his game. He could make solo runs with the ball and that is the end of things. Without proper support he could not end such forays into goals.

Anyway the better team won the match.

19. WORLD CUP - MY DIARY-PAGE 3

2006-06-15T08:09:00.000-07:00

Match timings are quite conducive this time in a way – much better than the earlier world cups. The first match is at 6.30 – somehow I return home only around 7 pm.; so invariably the first half hour of this match is always lost; and then after 7 pm one has to fight with the women folk for that great serial ‘Anandam’ which is also from 7pm to 7.30 pm! So goes the first match.

The second match is a peaceful time and one is permitted fully to view this match with a go-to-hell-principle by everybody at home! But the third match from 00.30 onwards is too late for an old man like you, comes the advice from all corners followed by variety of threats. In spite of this I made a point that I will sit tight for the first match of Brazil in this championship which was played in that third slot.

On retrospective I wonder whether the pain that I took was worth all the efforts. The game against Crotia was very sedate never reaching any great heights. The utter disappointment was with Ronaldo. His game on that day just reminded me of the final Brazil played against France in 1998 World Cup Final. In both these games Ronaldo was to be seen as physically quite inadequate. The times his foot touched the ball were very few; even when he had the chance to get the ball, he never ‘played’ them with his usual artistry. He looked very ordinary. Even when he was caught offside, even after the free kick is taken for it, he was found in the offside without even hurrying back. So much was his lethargy. On the other hand, Ronaldinho was always well covered by at least two Croatian players not permitting him to have enough space to play his game. His toothy smiles looked more out of place and rather inappropriate. Carlos, the old war horse was showing his old self. In the end, there was a taste of dissatisfaction and disappointment. All said and done the goal by Kaka has saved them. Hopefully they come back with new vigor and better planning and above all, if Ronaldo comes back to the scene as the hero of last world cup, what a treat it would be.

If the above match was a sedate show of talents, another match between Sweden and Trindad & Tobago (by the by, where is this country? I keep thinking to explore it in the world atlas!) was a thriller. The underdogs T & T became TNT! What an explosion of spirit and their never-say-die-efforts. Kudos to these minnows. The irony of the match was many folded: the ball possession between the highly ranked Sweden and T &T were 60 : 40; the latter played with just 10 members for the whole of second half; the ball was always, especially in the second half, deep in the Trinidad’s half. In spite of all these things, Swedes could not break their opponents’ defense and score a goal. And the whole credit should go to Hislop, the custodian for T & T. He was the hero of the day. How many saves he made on that day! It was a gripping match, the Trinidadians robbing the hearts of all, of course except the die hard fans of Sweden and the Swedish themselves.

If the above match was like sitting on a TNT keg all through the match, one another match was like a pathetic drama ending with a great sentimental and anticlimactic turn of events. Yes, it was the match between the Japs and the Australians. The former had a surprising early goal, in the 24th minute itself. And there was almost a goal for parity from Australians but luck was then on the side of Japanese. So went the game for the full length – well, almost to the full length. Because in the last minute, to be precise from the 84th minute within a span of 8 – 10m minutes three goals against Japanese turned the tide completely against them. It was so unbelievable on such an event of three quick goals and the whole thing changed.

18. WORLD CUP - MY DIARY-PAGE 2

2006-06-10T11:32:00.000-07:00

10th June

First match was between England Vs Paraguay. Score was 2:0.
Match never reached any unusaula heights. Owen was substitiuted soon after his first goal, for what reason I dont know. Rooney was sittisng onthe bench. Beckam's long
shot was headed into goal.

Second match was between Trinidad VS Sweden. The former was considered the underdogs and their defeat would be with a two goal margin. But to everybody's surprise they held their fort, that too in the second half with just 10 people. Overall ball possession was 60% with Sweden and there were 8 corners for them against one for Trinidad. In the last 30 minutes ball was within Trinidad's half and in spite of all these Swedes could not get a clear view of their opponents goal mouth at all. Rock-like stood the goal keeper of Trinidad, Shakka Hislop. He was the hero of the day, undoubtedly. The dying minutes of the game was very tense and he made beautiful saves thwarting a victory to the Swedish. Swedish, both players and their fans struck by this unexpected result were simply stunned and remained so silent in contrast to the jubilinat mood of Trinidads after the game was over. In one of the earlier championships I remebmber a young Swedish player - I think his name was Brolin or something. I dont know waht has happened to that player after that world cup.

17. WORLD CUP - MY DIARY PAGE 1

2006-06-10T01:53:00.000-07:00

It was World Cup 1986. For everyone in India that should have been the first experience to watch live matches of World Cup Football since that was the first time we had TV coverage and that too, live! I did not have a TV at home then. There was only lackadaisical interest in TV since there were no worthwhile programs then. If at all there was one program which attracted every Tamil was the “light and sound” (ஒலியும் ஒளியும்) on Friday evenings. The rest were all in Hindi. Only from 1987, on the first day of Tamil month, Thai Tamil broadcasting came into being and we were ready to welcome it by buying a TV on 23rd Dec.,”86 itself.

So during the days of 1986 world cup I was thinking of all possibilities - whether to go to a friend’s house at 5 km distance or to choose some other spot. Luckily one of my neighbors was in earnest search for a viewing-partner. Even if Pele or Maradona plays what would be the interest unless a small group of football aficionados come together to watch a match. We found each other and made an arrangement. I would join him at 11pm or 11.10 pm, since the match started at 11.20. The ten minute gap was meant for us to discuss the teams, their strength and weakness and to predict the outcome of that day’s match. Then with rapt attention broken by intermittent shouts of ha’s, hoo’s and achachoo’s we would be absorbed for the next 45 minutes. Then the tea-break for us. We would be having a hot tea, banana and cigarettes. And of course analysis of the game with I-told-you-so would ensue before we plunge back into the game.

Watching these matches in the small screen was itself a very new experience since that was the first time we witnessed the work of graphics. Even the immediate play backs and umpteen number of angles covering a goal mouth melee were new to Indian viewers who would have watched only the tamashas shot at the studio interiors of Doordarshan – with the same set of stage-props for all countless serials. Hearing every time a commentator shouting - gooooooooooooal ! – would send a shiver to the whole body and psyche together.

Even before the tournament started, though we have not seen any world-level football till then, Brazil was our favorite team, since the love for Brazil is always attached to the fame of the all time great, Pele. One of the matches we remember was the match between England and Argentina, spear headed by the next-to-Pele, Maradona. The (in)famous hand-of-god goal of Maradona and the next goal by his solo effort from the midfield were memorable. The one thing I hate in football is the fate of any team getting decided by penalty shoot-outs. In every such situation my heart used to go to the loser, whichever team it could be. Umpire’s whistle for a penalty shoot out always sounds to me quite ominous. This time it was our favorite team, Brazil was destined to be defeated by France in a penalty shoot out. I still vividly remember the candid shots of sad faces from Brazil’s supporters in the audience – an old man, supporting his chin with his walking stick was unmindful of the tears running down his cheeks; a young Brazilian lass, bubbling with youthful energy till then, dancing and merry making during the game was now in total disarray, looking utterly crestfallen.

To compensate these sad tidings, we developed a liking for that pudgy workhorse, Maradona. All our support went for him and his team and we were happy at the end of the tournament since it was the final victorious team. Along the course, the English player Lineker also won our hearts, though not as much as Maradona.

1990 World Cup:
This time it was solo-watch at home and I remember the matches were in quite awful times, late nights or very early mornings. Most of the matches were watched in sleepy mood . Brazil remained the favorite team, and individually Maradona as the favorite player. Winner – Germany

1994.
That was almost immediately after my second heart attack. At the time of discharge –it was just a week or so prior to the championship - I asked the doc what are the dos and don’ts. One of the don’ts was seeing world cup, since I might become emotional which could hurt my week heart. That never deterred me. This time Ronaldo captured my imagination and the favorite team won the cup.

1998.
Very much disappointed with Ronaldo and the Brazilian team.

2002.
Ronaldinho became my favorite player. Japs got a soft corner with its captain, with his multi-colored hair!

PRESENT WORLD CUP
Like any other time Brazil remains the favorite team, with Ronaldinho as its key player. The next favorite is Henry of French team.

DAY 1:
It seems games would be mostly played at 9.30 pm. Not bad. I think I have to skip the midnight timings for some matches.

Match I: (June 9th) Germany Vs Costa Rica – for long I have been thinking to identify this nation in the atlas. Should do it soon.
This game, the very first one in this championship, was a thorough anti-climax. Didn’t like the way the game went. Both the teams very much lacked positional play. When a Costa Rican player gets the ball, the Germans at least 3 of them will be crowding that guy. Bet before the game started was that for Germans it would be a walk over with 2 or 3 goal margin, that is, 2-0 or 3-0. But it was 4-2 which shows Germans in bad light.

The second match was between Ecuador and Poland. I don’t why my heart always go for the team with darker skin! Am I a racist; has to be so, always siding with the black-team (!) when the opponent is white. So also for Ecuador. They won 2-0. I watched the game 15 min. after the moiety. In the first half, Poland played with short passes and their opponents passed high balls. They scored once. But still in the second half they changed, I don’t know for what, their style and went for short passing as the Polish team.

Plan to add up further on daily basis. Let us see............

16. A POEM FOUND ON MY PATH.

2006-05-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

Lying on the sands
Eyes on the horizon
The hypnotic clouds
Merge, then diverge.

Lying alone
With only the wind's sound
Feel lifted, begin to float
To spaces beyond,
And Times before.

Memories crowd
Can't cry, can't smile
Does it hurt, can't say,
Can only see
The Times gone by
No desire left
To live or to die.

Were I to sit back
And watch the world go by?

The wind tries to push me
And rains rush down.
I stay there,
Move not.

Over me waves begin to roll
I remain there
No desire left
To live or die.

I wonder
Am I dead already?
And my thoughts floating about
Like the ash of the burnt wood

I wonder.........

15. HISTORY AND PLIGHT OF DALITS OF INDIA -3.

2006-05-27T22:47:00.000-07:00

*
A 3- part article:
Post 1; Post 2; Post 3;

*

After Independence, to fulfill the Constitution provisions, the Indian Government has passed various legislations to enforce the abolishment of 'untouchability' and remove the barriers of caste discrimination impeding the socio-economic progress of the Dalits. This included the Protection of Civil Rights (Anti-Untouchability) Act, 1955 and various land reform laws to redistribute land to the landless, a large and disproportionate percentage of whom were and still are Dalits. Later years saw the passage of the Bonded Labour (Abolition) Act, 1976, Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993, Jogini Act No. 10, and the Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 & Rules, 1995. The central and state governments also established SC/ST Welfare Departments soon after Independence. In the early 1990s, the Central Government passed legislation establishing the National Commission for SC/ST and the National Human Rights Commission.

There is no doubt that none of these would have been possible without the interventions made by Dr. Ambedkar, to ensure that Independent India would be based on a democratic constitution that guaranteed equality, fundamental rights and dignity to all regardless of caste. Had he succumbed to his contemporary dominant-caste nationalists who pressured him to settle these matters internally, Dalits would be much worse off than they are today.
The much acclaimed affirmative actions by the Governments, in the form of the Constitutional provisions, powerful Legislations, Judicial Activism and the existence of Human Rights Mechanisms – National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes (Dalits) Commission, National Commission for Women are not able to protect Dalits from the heinous crime of untouchability.
Any small attempt of Dalits, to “assert their rights or their resistance against the violence” unleashed on Dalits, is viewed as an act of Disobedience and creation of a Law and Order problem. This results in brutal attack on Dalits, by the state machinery, especially the police. The Dalits are at the receiving end, both by the dominant caste and by the state police force, which is also very much dominated by the dominant caste persons. Crimes and atrocities on Dalits have ever been increasing over the past few years. The National Crimes Record Bureau recorded only 8,500 crimes against Dalits in 1997 but the ‘Minor Studies Series’ puts the figure at between 55,000 and 65,000 per year. There has been a sudden spurt from around 18,000 per year in 1993. The Report states that over 250 people have been killed in caste clashes in TamilNadu since 1995. Eighty-six were killed in 1997 alone. Of the total of 167,000 cases of crime against the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes framed between 1995 and 1996, only 4,322, a paltry 2.6% resulted in conviction. Chopping of heads of Dalits, maiming limbs, chasing them from their inhabitations and looting their properties, still persist. Dalits are prevented from contesting in local body elections and in case elected, not recognized and allowed to function as leaders of village body Panchayats.
More than that the people in power still have no real concern for the emancipation of the dalits.
The Indian Government sounded increasingly irrational as it shouted itself hoarse to deny a problem that everybody else can plainly see. Similar to its predecessors in the Nationalist Movement who opposed Dr. Ambedkar for raising the specific concerns of the Dalits with regard to Independence in the Round Table Conference, the then BJP Government was opposed to the efforts of Dalits who seek the support of the United Nations in the context of the World Conference Against Racism in strengthening India's own constitutional obligations to abolish 'untouchability' and caste-based discrimination. As on date, courts have to intervene and order district collectors to make it possible for dalits to rightfully partake in the temple functions.

Either the constitution or the legislations or the judiciary or the other Human Rights mechanisms in the form of Human rights commissions at various levels from the states to the center are not providing effective safeguards and guarantees to ensure Dalits rights. Even the most powerful instrument currently available in defense of Dalits rights, namely SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989, hardly provide effective safeguards for protection and promotion of Dalit Human Rights. Article 17 of the Indian constitution proclaims that the practice of untouchability is abolished. Denial of temple entry, prohibiting access to common water sourecs, denial of share in the common property of villages, separate burial grounds, prevalence of two separate glass system in tea stall, are some of the inhuman forms of manifestations of untouchability that exist even today.

Caste discrimination cannot end without concrete social, educational and economic changes. The irony is that dalits, comprising 16% of India’s population, suffer from a disease, even more pathetic than the practice of untouchability – the ideological dominance of the upper castes who control not only social, economic and political power in the country but even knowledge and opinion. Even the personal experience of being discriminated against does not become an issue unless ‘permitted’ by the experts and the state. To disbelieve them is a necessary precondition for dalit assertion. The Dalits have been in dark in exercising their political rights viz the denial of rights to contest the village local body election. The village Melavalavu in Madurai District evinced the murder of the Dalit Panchayat President and other six Dalits by the Dominant Caste, for they could not assimilate the winning of a post in election by a Dalit.

Education: The correlation between quality education and emancipation is well established globally. How then can we justify that 50% of dalit children (64% dalit girl children) are pushed out of the school system before they can complete even primary education? How do we ensure a strong nation, assuming that dalits are part of the nation, when we cannot even ensure basic education to 16% of our population?
Civil Protection: The current government statistics of murder, rape and assault that dalits are subjected to paint a horrible picture if extended to a history of 3000 years. We have reason to believe that approximately 21,90,000 dalits have been murdered, 32,85,000 raped and over 7,50,00,000 assaulted. The violence perpetrated on dalits cannot be rooted out until long term economic, social and political measures, such as land reforms, are firmly implemented. The helplessness of dalits gets magnified by the general apathy of bureaucrats and especially of the police force to rush to their help. Even when dalits are attacked by caste hindus it is always the dalits who bear the brunt of the violence. The Keezha-vanmani burning decades ago or the recent killings in Melavalavu and the routine massacres in Bihar and the significant lack of conviction will always remain as indelible stains on our democracy. Unless dalits too get social positions, especially in the police force, the administrative institutions will be always against the dalits.
All these things are what the government and othe s have to do for the emancipation of the dalits. But this would not be enough at all. The awareness of the dalits themselves is most essenctioal requirement. Any amount of eduction or awareness programs cannot result in the assertion of the dalits. Instead it has to come from within. Waiting for somethjng to hapaen outside to help themcome out of their pitiable state may be a pipe dream. An even more serious question is whether the state that represents a certain class and caste culture, can be entrusted with the responsibility of education, especially for dalit children. Education, if perceived as a tool of empowerment, needless to add, cannot be trusted in the hands of state agencies. The oneness of all sects of dalits and their inner force to break the shackles are the need of the day.

14. HISTORY AND PLIGHT OF DALITS OF INDIA - 2.

2006-05-26T03:13:00.000-07:00

*
A 3- part article:
Post 1; Post 2; Post 3;

*

In the course of the movement for an Independent India, the problem of 'untouchability' and caste discrimination against Dalits became an international issue. It was due to the radical, bold stand that Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, leading Dalit figure of the 20th century and architect of India's Constitution, made on behalf of the ''Depressed Classes' as the British prepared to transfer political power to the dominant castes who influenced the character of the Independence Movement.
He made one of his most brilliant stands on behalf of the "Depressed Classes" in 1930-1931 at the Round Table Conference in London, in which leading representatives of the various communities in Indian Sub-Continent met to discuss and come to an agreement on the main points that must be included in the constitution for a self-governing India. Ambedkar plainly told the Conference that the "Depressed Classes" would not accept any constitution for self-rule that did not guarantee them equal citizenship and fundamental rights and abolish the practice of untouchability.
Ambedkar's bold, radical stance was strongly resented by many dominant-caste leaders of the Independence Movement, who accused him of dividing the Independence Movement and playing stooge to the British Raj. They lectured him that the situation of the 'untouchables' was an internal matter and urged him to wait until Independence was achieved. (the same argument was raised when dalits wanted to reaise their issue in the THE UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (WCAR) held at Durban) Ambedkar, however, saw things quite differently Religious orthodoxy and deep-rooted caste prejudice confined the nationalist movement to largely representing the aspirations of the dominant castes for political and economic power. Ambedkar was keenly aware of this.

“I am sorry to say, Sir, that I have been deluded. I find now that although some of our people would desire me and others to join them in their demand for Dominion Status, they do not join with us in demanding that the Government which will be set up under that Dominion Status shall be responsible to the people of India as a whole. I never thought there would be this division of opinion, and that I should have to stand up to defend the position we take. Now, Sir, speaking on behalf of the Depressed Classes I cannot honestly consent to responsible Government or to Dominion Status unless I can be sure that the people for whom I speak are to have a place in that constitution”.

Ambedkar's intervention at the Round Table Conference articulated an authentic democratic vision of Swaraj based on equality, liberty and fraternity, principles alien to a social order based on caste division and hierarchy. It was largely as a result of Ambedkar's interventions at the Round Table Conference that the Indian Constitution guaranteed fundamental rights, established universal suffrage, abolished 'untouchability' and guaranteed reservation in legislature and government services for Dalits, Adi Vasis and minorities.

It may be interesting to note that Gandhiji, for all the propaganda surrounding his name, did not abolish untouchability. Ambedkar, the `Father of the Indian Constitution' and greatest leader of the Black Untouchables (Dalits and Adivasis), has written about Gandhi's policy of subjugating the Untouchables,
" Hinduism is a veritable chamber of horrors. The sanctity and infallibility of the Vedas, Smritis and Shastras, the iron law of caste, the heartless law of karma and the senseless law of status by birth are to the Untouchables veritable instruments of torture which Hinduism has forged against untouchables. These very instruments which have mutilated; blasted and blighted the lives of the Untouchables are to be found intact and untarnished in the bosom of Gandhism."

This is because Gandhi was a staunch follower of the Brahminist caste system. :
" Supporting the caste system he [ Gandhi ] said: "I believe that caste has saved Hinduism from disintegration." He also said, "To destroy the caste system and adopt the Western European social system means that Hindus must give up the principle of hereditary occupation, which is the soul of the caste system. The hereditary principle is an eternal principle. To change it is to create disorder."
The greatest crime committed by Gandhi against the Black Race was to deny the Black Untouchables of India separate electorates and sabotaging the plan to emancipiate Untouchables :
" In the Round Table Conference held in 1932, the then British Government accepted the demand of the Dalits for separate electorate. The basis of that demand was the fact that the Dalit are not Hindu but a separate nation. Gandhi started his 'fast unto death' against that plan and sabotaged it. It was a thunderous blow to the cause of the emancipation of the Dalit."

Indeed, Gandhi displayed a marked bias against the Black Untouchables." In 1933, he established Harijan (Dalit) Sevak Sangh for the welfare of the Untouchables (Dalits). But when there was a demand for the representation of the Untouchables on the Governing Board of the institution, he flatly refused it. He disapproved appointment of Mr. Agnibhai, a distinguished personality, as a minister in the Congress cabinet in the Madhya Pradesh because he was from the Scheduled Caste."
As a supreme fate of irony, it is the Brahmins the Mahatma so supported that eventually killed him !

There were also other social redformers like E.V.R. popularly known as Periyar, a contemporary of Dr. Ambedkar. Periyar's self-respect movement began in an aggressive way at Vaikom, in the present Kerala. It was on behalf of the Untouchable castes who were not allowed even to walk on a street right before a temple. The agitation became famous as "Vaikom struggle". Dr. Ambedkar wrote an Editorial about this historic achievement in his journal, Mooka Nayak. If Ambedkar challenged the Brahmanical order of society and sought to uphold the basic human rights of the depressed classes. E.V. Ramasami's contributions were no less significant. The imprint of his struggles are to be found in the social and political spheres of the Tamil region in Southern India. His challenge to Brahmanism was sought to be posited through an alternative, democratic culture. It was the unique self-respect movement.

13. HISTORY AND PLIGHT OF DALITS OF INDIA. - 1

2006-05-22T08:29:00.000-07:00

*
A 3- part article:
Post 1; Post 2; Post 3;

*

Though there are so many things about India - like its prehistoric civilization, multicultural ethnicity, present day technocratic social milieu, its upcoming prestige as a global IT giant - that can make every Indian proud, there is one another aspect of our society that would make every Indian feel ashamed. That is the caste discrimination. Indians have been living with this shame for centuries now. Can anybody with a conscience accept the atrocities heaped by our society as a whole upon those who carry the night soil on their heads, those who toil in the lands of the rich as bonded labourers for generations, those who are kept more as inanimate things than as normal human beings. How long this sickly psyche blaming all these to ‘fate’ or ‘god’s will’ will go on? Sadly none can be sure when, if ever, this blotch would be cleansed once for all from the face of Indian society.

Origin of this caste system in the Indian society dates back to thousands of years. The fair skinned Aryans arrived in India around 1500 B,C. from South Europe and North Asia. When the fair-skinned Aryans invaded India, about two thousand years before Jesus Christ they defeated the dark-skinned indigenous people, Dravidians, who were the founder of the Indian Civilization. The Aryans subjugated them, learnt many things from them and built up another civilization, which came to be known as the Ganges Valley or Hindu Civilization. To perpetuate the enslavement of the original inhabitants of India, the Aryans created the caste system, and thereby excluded them from their own society with the name of Sudra (which means slave). And more than this, another group of people were left as ‘outcastes’ who were even denied of human status. In order to secure their status the Aryans resolved some social and religious rules, which allowed only them to be the priests, warriors and the businessmen of the society. History of the Aryan intrusion into India and their dominance over the original inhabitants, Dravidians and the prominence given to the scriptures of the former were the root cause for this caste discrimination. Vedas, smiruthis and manushastra, the scriptures of Aryans became the pillars of Hinduism. Caste system institutionalized by them had been made as Varnashram ordained by their gods. Varnashram, not only classified the society into four divisions, left out the fifth category, the untouchables and even unseeables. The fate of this lot had been remaining the same for all these past millennia. The Hindu caste system upholds with religious sanctions a hierarchical society. It does not even recognize this fifth class as human beings at all. The Brahmanic varna system (`varnashrama dharma') is basically a genocidal apartheid system designed to exterminate the `black varna'. The theory of Aryan invasion could be a matter of dispute and there is, of late, a counter theroy denying the 'invasion' ofAryans. But what cannot be denied is the place for varnashram in Hindu Vedas.
Following quotes from their manushastra will prove the level of cruelty they showed towards the low caste and outcaste people:

" Having killed a cat, an ichneumon, a blue jay, a frog, a dog, an iguana, an owl, or a crow, he shall perform the penance for the murder of a Sudra." -- [ Manu IX.132 ]

" Every act that is considered the privilege of the Brahman, such as saying prayers, the reciting of the Veda, and offering of sacrifices to the fire, is forbidden to him, to such a degree that when, a Sudra or a Vaisya is proved to have recited the Veda, he is accused by the Brahmans before the ruler, and the latter will order his tongue to be cut off. However, the meditation on God is not prohibited.-- [ al-B.ii.127 Ch.LXIV ] "

· " A once-born man (Sudra) who insults a twice-born man (Aryan) with gross invective, shall have his tongue cut out; for he is of low origin." -- [ Manu VIII.270 ]

· " If he mentions the names and castes (Jati) of the (twice-born) contumely, an iron nail, 10 fingers long, shall be thrust red-hot into his mouth." -- [ Manu VIII.271 ]

· " If he arrogantly teaches Brahmins their duty, the king shall cause hot oil to be poured into his mouth and into his ears. " -- [ Manu VIII.272

The great distinctions of caste are to be maintained not only in the earthly life, but also after death. According to Markandaya Purana, after death, the virtuous Brahman goes to the abode of Brahma, the good Kshatriya to that of Indra, the worthy Vashya to that of the Maruts, and the dutiful Sudra to that of the Gandharvas. Apparently, the Untouchable (Dalit) does not deserve any place in any heaven, may be because of his untouchability even by gods themselves!

During the British period the rulers had tried to implement some affirmative measures to the welfare of the outcastes. They were the ones who introduced the terms: scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. British Government provided the outcastes with free lands, known as Ipanchami lands. But by the dominance of the upper castes and the ignorance of the outcastes, all the lands thus given for outcastes are with the upper castes. The term ‘dalits’ meaning ‘broken people’ was first used by Jyotiraj Phule Maharashtra (1827-1890), a backward class social reformer, to describe the untouchables and outcastes of India as the oppressed and broken victims of the Hindu society. The term is a constant reminder of their age-old oppression and deprivation. It does not actually mean poor or outcast but it is a state to which a certain section of the people have been reduced through systemic and systematic religious process and are forced to live continually in that predicament. Dalits all over India are forced to undertake the filthy and the menial work of sweeping, manual scavenging, drum beating and cremating the dead bodies. Dalits are treated as slaves and still they are forced to bear the pains of “social boycotting” an illegal pronouncement by the dominant caste people.

Naked parading, forcing Dalit women to become maidens to God, - a ritulalistic prostitution and sexual harrassment of Dalit women by the dominant caste persons, which are still a common sight in some parts of the country.
to be continued.....

12. MOTHER TONGUE - THE RAJ LEGACY

2006-05-12T01:13:00.000-07:00

The one Raj legacy other than cricket that keeps haunting India is theEnglish language and the continuing debate on the dominance of English over mother tongues. Those with good English knowledge have always an overriding advantage in Indian society and the respect they earn due to their command in that language is also immense. A young student from an educated and well-to-do family automatically prefers English medium ofeducation; English medium schools are normally keep up good standards and facilities; this automatically makes him eligible for good courses in higher education; he ends up with a plumb job and becomes a successin life. This has made everyone draw a line between the success in life of a person and the English-medium education he got. A simple equation is thus made: English medium schooling leads to good jobs and success inlife. No denying of this fact.

But there is one another side for this argument. All said and done,after all English is a foreign language and thought processes will always be in one's own mother tongue. Hence there has to be a gap between learning in one's own mother tongue and in a foreign language. Especially this is very much so in lower classes, say, till the end of schooling. So a student can acquire more knowledge faster if he does his studies in his own mother tongue and his comprehension and mastery over the subject would be much better. What he has to do in addition is to learn one another language, English and he will have definitely enough energy to do well in one more language since his learning process of other subjects through his own mother tongue would be considerably and comparatively easier than being through English. Our schooling focuses on quantity and not on quality. Loads and loads of information are fed to the students not worrying how much is being grasped, absorbed and assimilated by the students. This leads to rote learning. The cognitive levels of understanding, comprehension,analysis and appreciation are left out from our schooling system. Many a time what a student would do in lower level gets simply repeated at his college level. The pity is the college students in general donÂt show even a trace of knowledge of those lessons they already studied, nay, 'covered'in schools. It is because they would have learnt it then by memorizing it without understanding and simply forgotten them then and there. Anyone who teaches in the college level would be familiar with this but if nothing has been done to rectify this, the blame is squarely on the shoulders of the teaching community.

What could be ideal is to teach and lay a strong foundation in at least two languages, mother tongue and English and if possible, one more language at least since it is said that till the age of ten children have aptitude for learning languages. Once the children finish the elementary education with strong foundation in languages then in high schools different subjects could be taught up to knowledge and comprehension levels in the mother tongue. A good foundation in languages would stand in good stead both in their understanding of the subjects and also in their communication skills. This lack of a good foundation in languages - in the mother tongue as well as in English - is a common feature and this had been deteriorating fast in the last two decades. Quality or depth of knowledge has become the first sacrifice in the altar of avaricious educationists who vie for quantitity.

English is essential, no doubt, as a bridge with rest of the world. But those who have to cross that ÂbridgeÂ will be so few and with a strong foundation of basics in English any one can develop his virtuosity in English as and when he needs it. A noteworthy point is that even in many of the developing countries that got their freedom from earlier colonization recently have switched over to education through their own mother tongues. But in India with its multilingual and multicultural ethos a common compromising language formula is very hard to reach and we reap the consequences of it.

But, for how long?

11. Lighten the load of students: KALAM....

2006-04-28T07:41:00.000-07:00

Lighten the load of students: Kalam …The Hindu…22 April,05..pp15

Full version of the letter that got accepted to LETTERS TO THE EDITOR in THE HINDU,April 23rd, 05

For years people keep talking about shedding the load of syllabi of our kids. Thousands of jokes have been in magazines about the literal load our kids carry everyday to their schools. But nothing has been actually done. What is the necessity for a kid in third grade to learn the names of the counties in England and the respective agricultural and industrial produces? Our text book ‘makers’ are too avaricious and try to cramp a heavy load of knowledge. Young age is the most suitable period to learn languages. Let our kids learn more languages, and more of languages and just a wee bit of math. At least let them wait to learn the heavy things from standard VI. Too much of knowledge oriented syllabi not only kills the creativity as our President has remarked but they are generally very weak in the languages – whether it is English or their own mother tongue. In higher levels of education they lack communication skills to express what they have crammed.

Will the words of our President fall into the ears of our educationists? Our President should also pursue this further

10.SOCIAL HARMONY vs RELIGIOUS FAITHS*

2006-04-14T09:11:00.000-07:00

History tells us that all major religions are terribly blood stained.The births of religions and their spreading made havoc with human history. Many a time the might of sword made all the difference in helping the spread of most religions. Always it was a macabre drama. A ‘new found god’ trying to overtake an already existing popular god. Massacre in the name of gods was a very common feature when we look back the human history. Religions have been always vying with each other to ‘prove’ their superiority over the other. Each religion claimed that theirs is the‘only way’ resulting in acrimonious animosity among the followers. Each group wanted to outdo the other. No religion is an exception to this.

No wonder the same sad scenario prevails even today. No doubt it will continue in the decades (millennia?) to come. What would have been the history of mankind without religions is hypothetical question. No answer can be given. But I really wonder whether the world could not have been a much better place to live in? No one knows for sure! Nations have fallen apart; people have fought and are fighting against each other - brother against brother. All in the name of gods.

No light at the end of the tunnel. No hopes to have a peaceful future even in the far distance either. The religions would have been started with noble ideals of bringing out the best in man; to make him follow set ideals; to keep him within boundaries of decency and comradery. But man has not taken the religion in his hands as a guiding light instead it is a torch to burn down his brethren and his belongings; a club to clobber his neighbours. What was meant to be a source of solace is now a source of hatred and enmity. Man is responsible for this. But so also the religions.

Each religion,at least the major religions of the day, teaches man that THAT is the true religion; the only true religion. Preaching are drilled into the minds and dogmas are poured into their growing minds from the very childhood. This and the environment the children have in their early days make them grow very strong in their faith. The greatest horror is that children growing in one religion always gets tutored to hate other religions. Religion possesses them.They in turn become possessive of their religion. The religion becomes a matter of faith. No rationality is needed. It is mere meek acceptance of faith. It is just what somebody taught to somebody. The receiver never questions what was taught. In religion doubting or questioning is an anathema. The Cartesian doubt is right to be remembered in this place:“Doubt everything of which we cannot be absolutely certain. We will then find that most of our beliefs, which we have acquired casually from parents and teachers are not beliefs of which we can be absolutely certain”. But questioning of the religious dogmas is blasphemy to any person of faith.

Mostly we belong to a religion not by faith but by birth. So the conditioning starts from the cradle. The sad thing is that we many a time forget that there are two sides to every coin. We happily stop with knowing and completely accepting just one side of the coin. We are so much entrenched in the teachings of our childhood we do not even accept that there can be another side to the coin. We become more faithful. More the faithful more the fundamentalist. More the fundamentalist less tolerant to other faiths. Even tolerating, leave alone accepting, other religion becomes impossible. Negation of other ideas and religions become the proof of one’s depth of faith in one’s own religion.

Not only that, the feeling of being on the right side makes such a man of religiosity to think that he is a much better man than those belonging to other religions. This feeling of superiority alienates him from others. This alienation leads to intolerance towards the‘unfaithful’. The intolerance naturally leads to hatred. Disharmony is the very final result. What to expect in such a situation other than bombs and bloodshed! It is needless to say that this acrimonious psyche exists more among the three Semitic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

This antagonism grows in the mind of people so much that even people who got converted themselves one or two generations earlier get so much alienated with those who belong to their own earlier religion. So a society with two or three religions becomes virtually a battlefield – each side probably trying to prove that their gods are much superior to other gods! The roles of man and his creator become topsy-turvy – it is now the man who starts protecting his god from others! Our Indian situation is an apt example of this state of affair.

It is true that all religions preach love. But the religions very much stick to their own superiority over other religions also. These conflicting standards of religions make man more parochial. If the religions concerned happen to be organized religions like Christianity or Islam the problems become all the more serious since the decisions taken by a few at the top gush down to the grass roots to be accepted even without any whimper or second thought. It is the fiat of such few people always rules the roost. People at the top invariably are more fundamentalists since they have to prove to their following mass that they are more religious!

Man created religions and discovered god – mostly in his own image!Somebody said:” if triangles have gods, their gods would be BIG triangles”. I prefer to say, if buffaloes have gods, they would be BIG buffaloes,probably with more horns or so!

Religions thus created by man, of course with noble aims, grew into great powerful institutions. What was created became the master of the creator himself. The creation of gods and religions would have been purely for noble purpose but the followers of those institutions failed the original cause. Some religions became organized. Such organized religions became more and more powerful. Present day world is reaping the consequences of this draconian growth of religiosity. And it is very hard to hopefully assume that a day will come when the religious differences will vanish into thin air and people will all feel that they are one and the same – irrespective of their faiths. Faith is strong blind belief.So the ‘faithful’ also become ‘blind’ to other ways of life.

Our grand-parents or at the most, our great grand-parents (especially in the Indian context) would not have been the followers of the religion that you and I follow today. They would have got converted for some reason – definitely it could not have been based on their philosophical moorings; it could not have been after a thorough comparison of the religions concerned. There have been so many socio-economical reasons for the conversions, which most of us are aware. But now we hold on to that religion so dearly mostly due to our birth. When conversion from one religion to another is possible – a convenience we don’t have with castes– religions are like wearing a shirt. What should have been like a‘vest’ has become more like a ’skin’ to us which raises the question:

பாம்புகள்

தங்கள் தோல்களையே

சட்டைகளாகஉறித்துப் போடுகின்றன.இவர்கள்

ஏன்தங்கள்

சட்டைகளைக் கூட

தோல்களாகத்தரித்துக் கொள்கிறார்கள் ?

A translated version of the above:

Snakes cast off even their ’skins’ so easily;But why these human beingsWear their ‘vests’ more like their ‘skins’?

* A paper read in an workshop conducted by the Inter-religious Dept, M.K. Univeristy, Madurai

9. THE GREAT DICTATOR

2006-04-13T11:57:00.000-07:00

It all starts on the very day when I become the Prime Minister of India. On that day I start to promulgate list of drastic changes and orders. I send a fiat through all channels of television at 7 a.m. asking all the citizens to submit the details of their property. This info will all be fed into a Super Computer so that each individual gets an ID card within 3 months, with individual Identity Number. Different coloured and coded cards will immediately tell your status and all other particulars about every individual. No more benami - even for politicians!

The second day begins. Reservation policy remains with the following conditions: First generation candidates get the full extent of the advantages of the existing reservation policy. Second generation gets only one third of the benefits. Children from financially sound families - identified from their respective security numbers fall under common pool. On the other hand children form poor families irrespective of their castes get the ‘one third benefits’. The minority ‘rights’ are to be replaced by minority ‘protection’.

The third day. Lots of news about threatened riots come from all corners of the nation. So the third day becomes a busy day - giving orders to the military and paramilitary forces to proceed to all corners of the nation. At 7 p.m. I telecast in all channels sending a very stern warning to the people trying for the ‘uprising’ of the masses. I mainly focus on the communal and religious leaders to keep their mouths shut. And finally a serious toned warning to all politicians of all hues and colours not to wag their tongues. I warn them that it is good for them to keep idle - no speeches; no comments; no notifications; no nothing. The final word from me is that all the wealth of them and their kith and kin will be blindly confiscated even if there is an iota of doubt about any of them. Lesser they talk safer their wealth. That seals the major source of troubles tight.

Fourth day. People have started to anxiously wait for my messages everyday at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.. This day brings them total ban on hartal, strike, bandh and such things. Religious, communal, political processions and public meetings of all sorts are banned totally - just by a word from me. Bureacrats are warned that either they produce results or go home. The term ‘accountability’ in all walks of life is to be stricly followed and stressed.

Fifth day. A very mild pleasant morning. So also my telecast brings in mild suggestions and orders. No maternity leave for the second delivery. Cut of one increment for every child after the second child. Disqualification of people to hold any public office if they have more than two children. Politicians are filing all their tax returns for the past 10 years with the details of their wealth in these periods within the next 15 days. They can choose to do this or face further repercussions.

Sixth day - A think tank for the country is nominated. I select just 4 dependable people and make them charge of 4 different think-tanks - one for economics, one for social, one for administration and one for justice. These people have to select a set of intellectuals suitabale who should be above board in all respects. They are commanded to conduct affairs of their repective fields. They are to bring results at the shortest span possible. They are all supreme and take orders only from me.

The seventh day dawns. I have a feeling that I have achieved what I wanted to. I really feel tired. I cancel the daily routine. No telecast today. I relax. Go to bed. I’m almost slipping into a very deep slumber. But suddenly there is a slight drizzling. I woke up and find that my daughter is waking me up from my Sunday afternoon nap sprinkling water on my face.

8. OUR SUPERSTITIOUS YOUNGSTERS

2006-04-13T09:59:00.000-07:00

It is always considered that youngsters bubbling with youthful energy
are great dreamers. They, of course, don’t stop with dreaming;
instead with all the future ahead of them, they begin to plan to reach the
heights they dreamed. At least whether they do it this or not, that is
how they are expected to be. On the other hand, the oldies after having
gone through the trials and tribulations of their past, have little
hope left in them. This drives them towards some soul-soothing and
self-deceiving things and they normally start running behind those
self-professed in neo-sciences like numerology, nameology, gemology. Well,what one
observes nowadays is that, leave alone the oldies; -let them have their
fancies- the youngsters who have to repose their faith on their own
skills have started running behind these people who merchandise their
products so successfully using the glamor of media. Some channels
specialize on these types of programs. They would sprinkle religious-selling
also along these advertisement-programs....

People would have already gone through the experiences of pinning their
faith in horoscopes and such other traditional but fake-sciences. Even
when things don’t work out as per their horoscopes, they always have
the excuse that horoscopes are true; it is only the interpretation given
to them was wrong. The recent ‘disease’ that has been raging is vasthu.
Here again no two vasthu experts would concur on a point. Still
sheepishly people go behind such experts. As if this is not enough, a new crop
of physicians appear every day. They ‘cure’ all diseases. They always
have a human-anatomy chart at their back in every such show, none
knows for what purpose! And another peculiar aspect of these ‘doctors’ is
that their clinics as seen in the TV programs look so humble and still
how could they spend so much on advertising their ‘miracle cure’. It
only shows that more advertisement you make about yourself more crowd
follows you. It is becoming the land of pied pipers. This advertising mania
has captured not only these physical doctors; it has been suitably
followed by ’spiritual-doctors’. Anyway it is not sure who was the
forerunner in this ‘business’ – the spiritual ones or the physical ones!
However both claim ‘miracle healing’.

When older people go behind such people and their quirky wares it can
be said that they have gone through a lot of pains of life and are
trying to get some solace through such hope-giving balms. But the sad aspect
of this is youngsters are equally attracted to this hoodwink. Rather,
of late, youngsters show more inclination in changing their names
according to numerology, and in going for other such idiosyncrasies.

Does it not mean that our youngsters have lost the faith in themselves?
In that case, is there any other worse sign than this to our Nation’s
Future?

7. JOLLY GOOD FELLAS...!

2006-04-08T11:36:00.000-07:00

REAL TIME JOKES…
Collected from actual matrimonial ads of men taken from shaadi.com in their COMPLETE ORIGINAL FORM, of course with some comments within brackets.
Your comments too are welcome.

DISCLAIMER: I am not responsible if you forget your basic grammar
after reading these snippets.

HERE GOES;……………

* pranav my family histoy my two brother two sister and fater&mother
sister complity marred

** (Somebody please explain in comments section how to get married
'completely'?)

* Hello To Viewvers My Name is Shiva , I am single i dont have female,
If any one whant to marrie to me u can visite to my home. I am not a good
education but i working all field in bangalroe.. if u like me u welcome to my
heart...when ever u whant to meet pls viset my resident or send u letter..
Thanks
yours Regards Shiva ~*~

* i want very simple girl. from brahmin educated family from orissa state
he is also know about RAMAYAN, GEETA BHAGABATA, and other homework

**(Homework?)

* Wants a woman who knows me better and can adjust with me forever. She
may never create any difficulties in my life or her life by which the entire life
can run smoothly. thank you

** (The principle of running life smoothly was never so easy!)

* She should be good looking and should have a service. She Shoulsd have
one brother and one sister. She should be educated.

** (is it not unique !! 1 brother 1 sister criterion !)

* I am a happy-go-lucky kind of person. Enjoys every moments of life. I
love to make friendship. Becauese friendship is a first step of love. I am
looking for my dreamgirl who will love me more than i. Because i love
myself a lot. If u think that is u then why to late come on .......
hold my hand forever !!!

** (effect of being a regular film buff?)

* i am simple boy.I have lot of problemin mylife because ofmylucknow i
amlooking onegirl she caremeandloveme lot lot lot

** (straight from the heart. Isn’t it?)

* My wife should be as 'Parvati' as in Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki and as Tulsi
as in KSBKBT......

** (Ok I haven't seen these soaps but I am sure he must be demanding too
much, ain't he?)

* i want a girl with no drinks if she wants she can wear jeans in house
but while steping out of house she should give recpect to our cast

** (some M.C.P.?)

* HYE I AM A GOOD LOKING BOY,WHO HAS THE CAPABILITY TO MAKE ANY BODY TO LOUGH.I BELIEVE IN GOD AND ACCORDING TO ME FRIENDS ARE THE REAL MESSENGER OF GOD. THE 3 THINGS I AM LOOKING FROM A GIRL ,THEY ARE 1.THEY MUST BELIEVE IN
GOD.2. THEY HAVE TO LIKE MY PROFFESION AND THEY SHOULD NOT GET BORED WITH ME WHEN I WILL TRY TO MAKE THEM LOUGH.

** (all of us are “loughing”!!)

* whatever she may be but she should feel that she is going to be someone
wife and she must think of the future life if she is toolike this she would
be called the woman of the lamp

** (I am clueless, I feel so lost. Can anyone tell me what this guy wants)

* i love my patner i marriage the patner ok i search my patner and i love
the patner ok thik hai the patner has a graduate ok

** (I am again clueless but I liked the use of "ok". The person is
suffering from "Ok-syndrome")

* HI IAM VERY COOL NUATHER OK MY HOBBY IS SEE T.V AND NEWS OK I HAVE 1 CAR AND
1 BONWL OK MY MOTHER ALSO GOOD OK MY FARUET WORLD IS OK

(the "ok syndrome" again)

*iam very simpel and hanest. i have three sister one brother and parent.
I am doing postal sarvice and tailor master my original resdence at
kalahandi diste naw iam staing at rayagada dist.

** (actually what is this guy doing? Postal service or tailor.??)

* my name is farhan and i am unmarried. pleaes you marrige me pleaes
pleaes pleaes pleaes pleaes pleaes pleaes

** (height of desperation! )

* Iwant one girl who love me or my mother. She love me heartly or she
havea frank she's skin colour 'normal'not a black or not a whitey. IThink the main
think is heart if your heart is beautiful then you are beautiful.
but iam not a handsome boy or not a good looking. but my Mom say that Iam a
good boy. My father already expired . iam ''AEKLAUTA''. THE CHOICE IS
YOUR.
bye bye.

(great guy.!!??)

* iam kanan. i do owo businas.one sistar.She was marred.

(No comments)

* I AM LITTLE FAIR INDIAN COLOUR. I DON'T HAVE ANY HABIT.

(may be the poor guy meant no BAD habits)

* hello i am a good charactarised man. i want to run my life happily.i
divorced my first wife.her charactor is not good'. i expect the good
minded and clean habits girl who may be in the same caste or other
caste accepted ...

(but credit cards not accepted..???)

* my colour is black,but my heart is white.i like social service

** (Zebra..???)

* i'm looking out for who lives in bombay, girl simple who trust me lot
should be roman catholic, LOVE ME ONLY.

(Now that criterion is a must, isn't it?)

* to be married on jan-2005. working man perferable

** (this guy has fixed the marriage date too! Poor desperate guy!)

* i would like a beautyfull girl. and i do not want her any treasure.
because girl is the maharani.

** (Now she is going to be a lucky girl! Any takers?)

* ssc failed three times and worked with privated ltd company which not
paying salary at present.

(Poor guy. Any takers again?)

6. SPREAD THE WORD, PLEASE!

2006-04-05T07:25:00.000-07:00

HI EVERYONE,

There was an appeal from one blogger, Ms. Premalatha of London - of course, originally from Kombai, Tamil Nadu, India to spread the word on the plight of the poor inmates in a Girls' Hostel run by Government in Madurai, my home town. To understand the spark she got from the news coverage of NDTV and to appreciate - if possible to join in the venture - one has to know what the NDTV says about these poor girls.

Over to...NDTV

Excerpts

Defending the outrageous measure, the hostel warden says it is the best way to keep the girls under check and prevent possible premarital sex.The register has columns for the exact dates of their cycle. Even slightly irregular dates invite snide remarks and harsh reprimands by the hostel warden.But while their records may be strictly monitored, their sanitation is not. The girls claim their hostel has just one bathroom but that is exclusively for the warden. The girls can enter it but only to clean it and not use it. Ironically the moral brigade is unconcerned about the fact that the girls have to bathe out in the open after dusk.From hounding an actress for airing her views on pre marital sex to banning jeans and t-shirts on college campuses to monitoring the menstrual cycle of teenage hostel girls, primitive mindsets, it seems, are there to stay in Tamil Nadu.

More than this helpless condition of the girls, the logic given by Premalatha to start thinking to help the inmates made me sit up and think. Don't you too want to know her 'logic'? Here it is; I Quote:

Hi all,
I know many of you might be thinking that it is not a very serious issue, and there are many more serious issues you see everyday.

I agree. But, Please go through the following.

1) Less serious issue means less complications for us.
2) not politicised
3) we can have a small but focussed objective. for example: improving the facilities, i.e. building few more toilets for the girls.
4) as it is a "small" objective, there is a possibility of us seeing it happening in real sense. "small" means less "money" needed. So, there is a possibility of "making this happen" in real sense.

Premalatha continues:
We are also planning to collect some fund ourselves. It might be a fund raising event. Nothing is finalised yet. Your suggestions are welcome.

WHY NOT WE DO WHAT LITTLE WE CAN - TOGETHER, from our blogosphere?

As a first step, please contact: spread the word, please.

And also contact Ms. Premalatha with your ideas.
Her blog: http://premalathakombai.blogspot.com
Her mail id: http://premalatha_balan@yahoo.co.uk

Thank you, folks.

5. SMOKE SCREEN

2006-04-03T22:52:00.000-07:00

The problem is that it is she who is going to be both the investigator and the judge. I am terribly worried over the impending conviction. Before I proceed further, I should give the lowdown of the scenario till this minute. If I tell you that I am in my forties my married brethren will immediately recognize who the ‘she’ could be to me. However for the sake of my lucky bachelor readers let me tell who the ‘she’ is. Who could it be other than the lady to whom I made a promise – not realizing the consequences that lay ahead in the years to come - at the altar not to be separated ‘till death do us apart’.

I managed all these years and I was comfy with my inseparable partner till she saw a program in the telly on the hazards of smoking. It had a great visual impact on her. That program spelt the death knell to my carefree smoking days. She had started showing her true colors after all these years. She came down on me heavily as a ‘benevolent dictator’ with all her 90 kg weight. Many things were banned. The days of coffee-at-will and a puff-after-every-cup were all over. The great blow was the cut in the pocket money and the fatal blow was strictures even for the outings during my evening hours. Instead I was made in charge of my kids’ home works. Things were becoming far worse than you could imagine. Fellow who was smoking carelessly 3 packs a day, if suddenly pushed into smokeless void – well, you could understand only if you happen to be a free smoker as I was. Even then I managed a few drags everyday. What else the office canteens were meant for? But that again got a big jolt. One of my colleagues was living in the next street whom we used to call, of course behind his back, as ‘gnani’ or ‘rishi’ since he never joined us in our canteen-gossip-groups and always minded his business. My ‘she’ befriended his wife and made our ‘gnani’ as her personal detective. She got even the exact times that I visited canteen during office hours. So I had to either sneak out shedding my shadow now or cut altogether my visits to canteen. Thus the ‘forbidden fruits’ were becoming more and more tastier but less and less available, thanks to the dictatorship of my ‘she’.

Somehow things were moving smokeless thus for a month. Recently things became so hard for me I made up my mind to quit smoking – not of course completely. I chose specific timings for my rendezvous with the white-robed beauties. Evening serial times were quite handy for my escapade from home. On Sundays also the movie-times came handy. Things were going without any hitch for some time. But yester evening I inadvertently and foolishly dared to bring a pack of the remaining cigarettes to home. To escape from the smelling and searching investigator I planned to get the help of my daughter. I pleaded my daughter to keep the pack in her shelf along with her school books. She mercilessly turned down and declined to do even this daughterly duty to a suffering father. Then I made some ‘arrangement’ with her and made a double-cross promise that it would be only for a night and next morning I would smuggle it out without her mother’s knowledge. Events followed dramatically on that fateful evening.

Accidentally the cigarette pack was unearthed. And to make things worse a fresh 10 rupee note was also found in the same location along with the pack. Then came the commission of enquiry. My daughter first stoutly denied any knowledge of the pack of cigarettes. But she confessed under duress and turned approver. I could not but accept that it was I who brought the cigarette pack and hid them there with the help of my daughter. But we, I and my accomplice, stoutly denied any knowledge of the currency. But my daughter could not give any satisfactory explanation for the source of that unaccounted and unaccountable money. Then I had to confess. But I insisted that I gave it only as a sort of ‘winding up charges’ for the ‘service’ rendered. But my ‘she’ accuses that it is an outright ‘commission’ and said that she would go deep into this and pass her judgment tomorrow evening.
I am waiting...

p.s. Rajiv Gandhi flatly denied in Parliament that no commission was paid to anybody in the Bofors deal. But when the cat came out, at least partially, he accepted that there was some money being exchanged sides. And his famous statement then was: (The crores of rupees that was received by some) “….was not commission for the deal but only winding up charges!”. Anyway the above write up does not have any connection with that!

4. RELIGIOUS FANATICISM

2006-04-01T03:06:00.000-08:00

If the disputes are on a piece of land – as it is between India and Pakistan or as it was between China and India – there could be some compromise and peace between countries at some point or other. If it is just a matter of pride – as it is between England and France – then it may not always lead to a Waterloo. When it is on economical resources – as it was between Iran and Kuwait – it could be over in a jiffy. But when it is on dogmas, especially religious dogmas the problem becomes endless. The present terrorism by the Islamic fundamentalists is based on
their religious faith. It is their religious duty , they believe, to avenge the infidels for their ‘crusade’ against Islam. As long as a fundamentalist group believes something is their religious obligation, then the first casualty is rationality and reasoning. It appears that we have to live and learn to live with this religious menace since the greatest superstition of all is to expect fundamentalists to heed to good sense.

3. HUMAN BOMBS

2006-03-19T04:41:00.000-08:00

In the fiction ‘The Negotiator’, by Fredrick Forsyth when in the last pages the hostage is blasted by a remote control, it made a chill pass through my body. It all sounded so scary. But within few days from reading such a fictitious account, in the very same way Rajiv Gandhi was brutally assassinated. When details of the assassination came to light what surprised me was how can anybody be motivated to push the trigger to explode oneself. Moreover during investigations almost everyday there was the photograph of Dhanu, the human bomb, clicked just a few seconds before she pushed or pulled the trigger. She was all smiles in those snaps. There is no tinge of fear or shadow of death on her face. She looked so cheerful. How is it possible for a person to be so cheerful when facing death so close? Would they have been doped? A person selected for such a crucial mission cannot be served with dope and so that is ruled out. Then what could be the other factors? Brain washing is another theory. Even when some one might have gone through great ordeals, just for revenge will anyone kill themselves? Assuming that Dhanu, the assassin was personally affected by India’s IPKF, assuming that she lost all she held dear to her because of IPKF and assuming that all her anger and animosity was nurtured against the Prime Minister of India, still can a person’s vengeance could go beyond ones own life. And, when one is so sure that he or she is going to die in a few more seconds how can he or she be so normal? So what triggers such people to push the fatal button of ultimate self destruction? It is an enigma.

In the7/7 London explosions, all the three ‘live detonators’ were from a normal background. No precedence of criminal behavior in their records. Just a short sojourn to Pakistan. Now, within such a short span how could they be molded so differently to convert themselves as human bombs. Are human minds so meek to be changed so thoroughly? Can any body’s religiosity be whipped up so much making them so fanatic in a jiffy. It all surprises me.

Of course now all of us have gone to the next stage of accepting these instances as regular features in our daily lives. It could be anywhere in the world. Only if you don’t get a news item in the front page of your daily about any such bombing in any part of the world is a news now. 9/11 has become one of the most important dates in the history of mankind. And the dates of such importance are to be followed, it seems. If 7/7 is followed by 9/11, will the next be far beyond? Where will all this lead us to?

2. TRAFFIC: INDIAN & U.S. STYLES

2006-03-19T04:36:00.000-08:00

It was quite past midnight; should be about 1.30 to 2 am. I was
tracking back to my room after a party. I have to be careful, I thought. Since in the evening on the way to the party I missed my way. Though it was a small village of 8000 as its total population, that too, nearly 75% of them being local college students, with straight roads and by lanes cutting at right angles, with large trees on the sides of the roads, individual houses were not easily visible or identifiable with lot of vegetation covering every house. So when I ventured a little in the previous evening to while away a few minutes – I wanted to be right in time for
the party and not before time – I missed my way and was lost for some
time. I don’t want that to happen now late in the night. So I was trudging carefully- the path was also very moist with snow – back home. At last I arrived the main downtown-area. This was a well lit area with four roads radiating. The automatic signals were on. When I reached the junction there was a car waiting for the change of signal. The little inebriation I had evaporated at the sight of it. Because the whole area was deserted; no vehicles or anything on sight but still the man behind the wheels was waiting for the signal before proceeding.

This thing happened in a village, Oberlin, Ohio, U.S., 2 years back.

And on another day I was waiting in another signal. The place was Saidapet
intersection, Chennai, India. Time was 9.20 am.

In the morning peak hour there was a heavy rush and at the junction I
was waiting for the green signal. The automatic digital clock showed 100
and so I put off the engine of my vehicle. When the clock read 10 I
ignited my machine and thought I have another full 10 second count-down.
Voila! Even when 7 seconds remaining, vehicles started moving at mad
pace and though I wanted to wait for green signal, with blaring and
threatening movements from behind I had to jump light to avoid getting jumped over!

Laws will be there. But two things are necessary: one, the will of the
people to have at least a modicum of respect for the law of the land;
and second: the executors of the laws should do what they have to.

1. MY CONFESSION & WARNING...

2006-03-19T03:46:00.000-08:00

WELCOME TO MY ENGLISH BLOG
for those of you who have walked into this trap inadvertently or willingly.

I cannot wish you "A HAPPY READING" since this blog is going to have my personal ramblings, ramblings of an oldie. Any skeletal frame of an oldie would make a lot of sounds; it would whimper and whine; creak and croon. When these sounds may not even be pleasing for the individual himself, I wonder, how is it going to be the one sitting next. So could be going thru this blog. But do you think I can help it?

I had an English blog for some time and after starting one another in my mother tongue, Tamil all my time and energy went into that, orphaning the first one. Now, since a new compiler, BLOGDESAM has come into being, I thought I would rejuvenate the earlier one and stuff this new blog with my old contents and keep adding further with the 'vast' experience I have acquired with my Tamil blog standing behind me!

Let me have a gala time 'at your expense' a little! Right...