Buffoonery Omnibus

The recent viral video of college students sitting on the roof of a Chennai city bus and tumbling down when the driver applied sudden brakes, really sums up the city's youthscape. One can find boisterousness among youthful commuters in all the cities, but Chennai takes the cake.

With hardly any pubs and other recreational places to hang out, and Tamil cinema promoting stalking on an industrial scale, for most college students in Chennai, the city bus is a mobile vanity fair - the big stage to display their physical agility and singing abilities to impress women passengers. These guys will hang on to the footboards of the wider middle door of the buses, even if seats inside are empty, and sing latest Tamil chartbusters.

At every bus stop, they will alight and then allow the bus to move a little and then make a dash to get a toehold on the footboard. An exemplary camaraderie exists within these gangs. They will lend a helping hand if someone among them is finding it difficult to make it to the footboard after the bus leaves a stop. 

During my stay in Chennai, I often used to meet these boisterous groups while on my way to the office in the afternoons. They would board from stops near Pachayappas college, an institution of 1842 vintage, but well past its glory days. It counts noted Mathematician Ramanujam among its alumni, but somewhere down the line, it lost its plot. A few decades ago it earned the sobriquet 'rowdy factory' and now it is engraved in stone.

The songs are often accompanied by thumping of bus body, and they get shrill when the bus reaches women's colleges like Ethiraj or Women's Christian College.

Quite often their attempts to daredevilry of jumping into a moving bus used to end up as damp squibs. Once as the bus left a stop a guy started sprinting towards it, but to his dismay, a lamp post came on his way and he was forced to slow down. By then the bus sped away, leaving him to fret over his tough luck.

In another instance, a guy nearly got into the bus after his sprint but his slippery fingers gave way and he fell off. As the bus was not moving fast the impact of the fall was not that strong.

As the bus moved on I peered through the window and saw him spring back on his feet in a jiffy. As this happened in the month of May - the 'high noon' of Agni Natchathiram, Chennai was at its searing best with the tar on the road close to the melting point. So probably for him, it may have seemed like landing on molten lava and hence he got up quite unmindful of his pain!

Needless to say, they were a perpetual nuisance for other commuters, especially while boarding and alighting. And I often used to wonder what type of woman gets impressed by such buffoonery!

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Inimitable Keshu

When he came into our lives he was a tiny little bunch of fur, small enough to fit in our palm. He was very delicate with his prominent head dwarfing other body parts.

My wife found him abandoned outside and decided to provide him with a home. We took out a long-abandoned perforated plastic box with a lid from the loft and stuffed it with some old clothes to set up his new abode.

He was motionless and weak, and we were clueless as to what should we feed him. Mostly he lay curled with his head buried between his body and the curled-up tail.

My zoology-deficient mind was caught in a three-way dilemma - whether a squirrel is a reptile, mammal, or rodent. I sought refuge in the universal Mr. Know All - Google search, which enlightened me that our new visitor is an Indian palm squirrel or three-striped palm squirrel. It is of class Mammalia and order Rodentia.

Knowing about its mammalian link, we decided to feed it water and milk. But that was easier said than done.

We had to rummage through our medicine box to look for a filler that probably came along with tonics my daughter took in her childhood.

But making him drink milk was like taking the proverbial horse to water. Whenever it complied to take milk or water, half of it used to spill out through the sides of his mouth. Later we switched over to a syringe, minus the needle, and it proved more effective. But feeding him continued to remain a challenge.

In the back of our minds, there was this worry about whether this little fella would survive this delicate stage without his mother's love and care. Will our faith and a daily dose of a few drops of Nandini milk help him see through?

However, a week later he started showing signs of activity. He began moving around within the box. Soon the confines of the box became restrictive and we began letting him gambol around in the bed.

He soon began climbing onto our hands and shoulders and found it very cozy to hide in the tresses of my wife and daughter. Quite often only the tail will be visible. Hence we named him 'Keshu', taken from the Sanskrit word Kesh, which means hair.

Keshu soon began taking solid food and oats became his initial favourite, which later got replaced with cooked rice. Perched on his hind legs he would use his forelimbs to hold the morsel as he fervently nibbled. He later developed a taste for wood and began nibbling away at my daughter's pencils and the edges of wooden furniture.

He also soon discovered his way to the window sill and it became his favourite haunt. We kept the window permanently shut to prevent him from going out. Climbing up the window grills became his favourite pastime and when he was exhausted he would languidly relax on the window sill. It was indeed a sight to behold - with all his four legs stretched apart to make the most of the sunshine. His idea of sunbathing.

Needless to say, the window sill required much more frequent cleaning due to his droppings and leftover food.

The much famed three stripes became more distinct on Keshu's back and he became very swift in his movement with lightning reflexes. He turned out to be an artful dodger and I soon found it almost impossible to catch him. My wife and daughter, however, had a better success rate in this respect. It became a challenge to put him to bed at night inside the box.

Whenever he is not seen on the window sill or the bed, we used to feel concerned and immediately launch a search for this little fella. The usual suspect locations used to be under the pillow or blanket. Sometimes he won't be there either, thereby raising our worries and apprehensions. Then out of nowhere, we would find a moving protuberance under the bedsheet, pillow cover, or blankets. It would move randomly then at the end of the sheet his head would pop out.

Keshu was quite a natural in the Houdini Act. He would always improvise new ways to make himself disappear from our clear sight. We always had this fear that we might end up accidentally sitting on him while he is busy with one of his vanishing tricks. Hence were quite mindful while sitting on the bed or reclining on the pillow.

Gradually Keshu began exploring other rooms. He would climb up the sofa in the drawing room and recline on top of the headrest. Sometimes he would snuggle and bury himself between the cushions, sending us on a panic-stricken hunt.

While browsing my laptop on my study table, all of a sudden I would experience a pinch of his claws on my shoulder. He would undertake a Spiderman-type leap from the bed onto my shoulder and then descend to the study table through my hand that is wielding the mouse.

We used to take him out onto the balcony under strict supervision as we feared he might fall off or get attacked by predators such as crows or even bigger squirrels. On the balcony, he loved climbing onto the flower pots and savouring the flowers. The flowers from the nearby Tabebuia Rosea tree that used to fall on our balcony were an added attraction.

He once gave us real fright after he fell off the balcony. Some frantic runs downstairs and timely alerts to our apartment watchmen saved the day.

Soon we realised it was almost three months since Keshu came to our house. He had grown up in size, though still not large enough to be a full-grown squirrel, and the tail was still not that bushy.

It had also become much more mature. When he used to feel sleepy at night he would descend from the window pane, or wherever he was, and get into his sleeping box on his own, bury himself up with clothes, and call it a day. We would later put on the lid, which he will knock open from inside the next day to come out.

Then we decided to let him enter the final frontier - climbing trees. The Tabebuia Rosea nearby had branches abutting our balcony railings. We even used a tiny rope to tie up one of the branches with our balcony railings so that he could easily move from tree to balcony.

When we first released him, Keshu gingerly moved on the branch and after going a few feet returned to the balcony. Gradually he began gaining confidence and the duration of his outings became longer. He started venturing into extreme ends of branches and even started jumping from one branch to another.

However, whenever Keshu was out we used to anxiously keep a watch from our balcony to see whether he was out of harm's way. He was savouring every moment of his outdoor sojourn - nibbling at barks, flowers, and some mysterious objects he found on trees which he used to fondly hold on his forelimbs and nibble. But whenever he felt hungry or tired, he used to climb back to the balcony through the 'ropeway'.

For a couple of days, it went smoothly. Then one day a pair of squirrels, both full-grown ones, who were in an adjoining tree, sighted Keshu and approached him. He grew scared and beat a hasty retreat. After giving them a chase he managed to land on our balcony. Keshu looked very tense and refused to go back to the tree and preferred to stay on the window sill for the rest of the day.

However the next day he seemed to have forgotten the unsavoury episode and left for a tree outing and it was more or less incident free for a couple of days.

Then he came across a lone squirrel, which later proved to be his nemesis. This squirrel used to hang around the terrace room of a building opposite to ours and used to lord over the Tabebuia tree. He perceived Keshu as a threat, an intruder into his territory.

Whenever he happened to see Keshu on the tree he would launch a chase. And Keshu would valiantly run towards the balcony by performing some daredevil jumps from one branch to another (making us miss a few beats) and romp home.

This went on for a few days and one day while I was at the office I got a call from home. "Keshu has run away," said my wife. I was struck with dumb despair and could not comprehend. Then she explained that when Keshu went on a tree outing, he failed to notice his rival lying in wait amid the thick cover of leaves. He sprang a sudden ambush and it disoriented Keshu, who lost his balance and fell on the road below.

Though my daughter rushed downstairs to catch him, it was too late. He had crossed the road and got into a vacant but densely wooded plot that was walled and had an imposing gate that was locked. Keshu got in from the gap below the gate and climbed onto one of the trees there. It was nearly dark and we also did not know who owned the plot.

The next day we managed to contact the plot owner, who stayed in the house located in the next plot. The house owner, an elderly woman with US-settled children, was cooperative and opened the gates of the empty plot for us. However, we could not spot Keshu though there were many squirrels, of various sizes, chirping on a mango tree that was loaded with fruits. Probably sensing our disappointment the house owner offered us a few mangoes.

Though quite often while discussing Keshu's future we had always accepted that one day we would have to let him go - after all, he is a creature of trees. But the fact that it happened so abruptly was something we found very difficult to come to terms with. All three of us were struck with a pang of despair as we cleaned up the window sill and put back the plastic box, Keshu's abode for a few months, onto the loft.

Postscript: We did not remove the rope used to tie up the branch with our balcony railings, hoping that Keshu may someday find his way to our house.

The Troll Mantra

Hitting above the belt is a strict no-no. It is a sign of a lack of killer instinct. Anyone doing so will immediately be pink (or saffron) slipped.

Political discourse is meant to be debased. We should see it as a bottomless abyss. The moment people think ‘ok, it can’t get any worse’, we should spring a surprise by plunging to new depths.

Red lines are for the sissies. We should see every such line as a new frontier to be crossed.

Knowledge of choicest expletives should be your second nature, as they form the crucial building blocks of our arguments. Ability to coin new pejorative terms (for example sickular, presstitute) would be an added plus and richly rewarded.

Making the opponents and our readers feel perpetually nauseated should be our all abiding motto and we should work tirelessly with amoralist fervour.

The other elements include a gift for sophistry, whataboutery, and demonization. All these tools should be used as and when the situation demands.

If you or your leader is under attack, try to look for skeletons in the opponents’ closet. If not manufacture one. Referring Postcard News can be handy, make that your home page.

Another time-tested tactic should be to deflect the issue by whataboutery. This who-cast-the-first-stone argument helps in immobilizing opponents and misleading people.

Keep in mind some important dates such as 1947 (Congress raj began) and 1984 (anti-Sikh riots), 1975 (Emergency) and 2014 (the advent of Ram Rajya).

Depending on the context hurl back the questions. If it is on the slow pace of development then ask: ‘What good has happened in the last 70 years since 1947?’. If it is about riots and communal atrocities then ‘Where were you in 1984?’. For matters related to the curtailment of civil liberties ‘Why you did not speak up during Emergency?’.

If none of the above work, then there is Jawaharlal Nehru, the ultimate fail-safe option. Even more than 50 years after his death, India’s first prime minister has the unenviable reputation of being the most invoked scapegoat and demonized for all the ills plaguing the country.

Lastly, to blow one’s own trumpet there is always UNESCO. This UN wing is a low hanging fruit and its officials sitting in distant shores have no idea what all gets concocted under its name and gets lapped up as gospel truth on Indian WhatsApp groups.

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Working class heroes: Apna Time Aaa Gaya

Working class heroes have quietly carved a few sweet spots in the Bollywood box office. Actors like Ayushmann Khurrana and Rajkumar Rao with their boy next paan shop looks and non-filmy backgrounds have succeeded in becoming ‘bankable’ with their movies turning out to be money spinners.

In their movies they hold regular middle-class jobs - a private company executive or a government bureaucrat and move around in two-wheelers or not so fancy hatchbacks like a Wagon R or a Santro and live in very middle-class colonies and apartments. Their love lives also would be far from perfect and sometimes even their love interests need not have ‘heroine’ looks as in Dum Laga Ke Haisha.

However, both Ayushmann and Rajkumar partly owe their success to Amol Palekar, probably the first working class hero with a middle-class background in Bollywood. It was Amol Palekar, who in association with director Basu Bhattacharjee and Hrishikesh Mukherjee painstakingly carved a niche for such characters in the 1970s, when larger than life heroes held a vice-like grip over Bollywood box office.

During my childhood days in the 70s heroes were six-footers with drop-dead looks, while heroines dazzled us with their flawless skin and even more flawless aadarsh Bharatiya naari character, someone above all forms of suspicion.

Those movies were three-hour long dramas with highly formulaic plots, laden with distinctly black and white characters and copious running-round-the-trees duets. Needless to say, our young impressionable minds easily got hooked to it.

Along came Amol Palekar with his aam aadmi demeanour harried about the challenges of life. Back then it seemed sacrilegious to us that a hero could go about the whole movie without even getting involved in a single fisticuff; not court his lady love in fancy cars, but BEST buses and local trains; drive a rickety Lambretta scooter or Standard Herald car. No Impala or Ford Mustang car chases, no horse riding ... tsk tsk, how can he be a hero!! We wondered.

After some initial tut-tutting people started warming up to him thinking that cinema need not always be an escape from reality, a little dose of realism with a pleasant middle-class setting as a prop was welcome.

Then came guys like Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri, and it led to further unlearning of our concept of heroes. They came with hard as nails reality and provided a peek into life in lower middle class and slum localities. It took a lot of time for people to appreciate their style of acting.

Their legacy was carried forward by the likes of Manoj Bajpai and now by Nawazuddin Siddiqui. However, though this particular category enjoys greater critical acclaim, its bankability in the box office is low.

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Goa: Weighed Down by Desi Beats

Goa has been a land of languid charm. It is how it has been picturized in cartoons by Mario Miranda and mainstream Bollywood movies. While early Bollywood movies had easy going happy-go-lucky anglo-Indian characters longing to go back to Goa, or some wine drinking, cigarette smoking vamp with names like Suzy or Rosy (often played by Helen), who stood as a foil to the sanskari heroines; the new ones show new age millennials from Mumbai and other cities heading to its famous beaches to let their hair down.

I never had the fortune to visit Goa during its halcyon day of the 1970s, the high noon of its much-vaunted hippie counter-culture, as I was still in school. The now-defunct Illustrated Weekly of India and Caravan, in its earlier avatar, used to sometimes carry photo features of hedonistic life in Goa, the annual carnival and the King Momo.

It stood in stark contrast to the social mores, steeped in prudery, of the rest of the country. As if to make up for all that monkish deprivation, now every domestic tourist visiting Goa hopes to see the fruition of the fantasy he had nurtured after seeing those magazines or watching films.

Though the emergence of Kerala and coastal Karnataka as tourism destination took some sheen off Goa, the erstwhile Portuguese colony still retains its charm as its society is more open and permissive than in other parts of India, especially with regard to dressing and drinking.

While it has been a repeat holiday destination for many, I happened to go there only twice - first in the 1990s and then this year. In the 90s itself, it was facing the onslaught of domestic tourists(especially those from the cow belt), but Goa back then was somehow holding on to its Western ethos. Moreover, those were early days of satellite television and the hold of MTV and Channel V was quite strong.

During the evening boat cruise on Mandovi river at Panjim, the musicians back then used to play the popular MTV pop chart busters such as Cecilia, the boy bands - Backstreet Boys and Boyzone and of course Michael Jackson.

The audience comprised people from the rest of India with some extended families, including grandparents in some cases, and north Indian newlywed couples with women wearing the traditional red and white bangles right up to elbows. It used to be a pretty uptight affair with the audience listening or foot tapping as the musicians played along.

Even the dress code observed by domestic tourists back then was pretty formal with most women wearing salwar kameez and men clad in shirts and trousers or jeans. Skin show? - Leave it to foreigners.

The boat cruise this year was a boisterous affair, bordering on riotousness, with DJs belting out latest tapori Bollywood numbers, the one to which a Ranveer Singh or Arjun Kapoor may gyrate to on screen and the crowd was more than eager to shake a leg. The compere was talking only in Hindi and exhorting them to come to the stage as they have come to Goa to 'enjoy'.

The dress code too had undergone a drastic change. Young brides still adhered to traditional red and white bangles, but salwar kameez and sarees have given way to tank tops, capris and even hot pants, to make the most of the short respite from Sanskari mores of their home towns. There were also much fewer extended families in sight.

Another major game changer was the mobile phone. My last visit was during pre-cellphone and even pre-digital camera days. One had to keep in mind the number of clicks and the exposures left on the film roll. 

Hence narcissism back then was purely mirror-centric and the word selfie was not even coined. But now thanks to smartphones and social media it has spilled over to the streets and every public place. In short, the selfie affliction has reached pandemic proportions. Every hawker or knick-knack seller had a small stock of selfie sticks to cash in on this obsession.

The beaches were swarming with those looking for the fulfillment of their long-held fantasies triggered by yesteryear movies like Dum Maaro Dum or Dil Chahta Hai, or more recent Dear Zindagi. I visited the Candolim beach (it happened to be a Sunday) and it resembled Mumbai's Chowpatty Beach during Ganesh immersion festivities or Chennai's Marina Beach on Kaanum Pongal. With free-flowing alcohol unshackling them from their repressions, the crowd was noisy and unruly, with some ugly brawls thrown in.

While driving through Goa I was quite fascinated to see some old tiled roof mansions with Portuguese sounding names beginning with words like 'Casa' and 'Cidade'. But like most ancestral homes they were well past their glory days. Some were so dilapidated that they gave the impression that no human habitation has taken place for decades. They had missing roofing tiles, moss-ridden walls and the front courtyard had lavish toppings of dry leaves accumulated over the years.

The whole state seems to have turned into a road contractors' Mecca with road widening, concretization in full swing in many stretches. I was also quite baffled by the number of flyovers being built, though the traffic volumes on Goa's streets and highways seemed hardly compelling enough to warrant it.

The copious Mandovi river already has two bridges and now a third one was complete. With pillars 15 metres taller than that of existing bridges, this cable-stayed bridge looks too imposing and appears to be a clone of the famous Golden Gate bridge of San Francisco. I am sure that for future tourists it is going to be a mandatory prop for photo ops.

However, concerns are being raised about its environmental impact as the starting ramp of the bridge at one end begins on a mangrove. Moreover, some construction experts have raised doubts about whether the bridge will be able to cope with the 'wind load', especially during monsoon months when the wind speeds are high.

Lastly, those who are fond of fish and seafood, Goa is a place worth checking out as the options are sumptuous. Burp!

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In Which Urjit Gives It Those Ones

Urjit Patel had the unenviable task of stepping into the shoes of Raghuram Rajan, the rock star economist who had wowed both the banker class and the laity. He had also set a tall order of standing up to the ruling establishment and fight for the interests of the Reserve Bank of India. 

And Patel began on a note that couldn't have been more lacklustre. Barely two months after he took over, the Narendra Modi government came up with its most controversial decision to take away nearly 86% of cash in circulation. He appeared to be a man who was totally clueless about what was going around him.

Ideally such an announcement should have been made by RBI governor, but the Prime Minister chose to take the centrestage and delivered his famous 'Mitron' speech.

As the collateral damage unfolded - dry ATMs, long queues in front of banks and widespread distress, Patel made himself scarce as a Great Indian bustard. The then Economic Affairs Secretary Shaktikanta Das and current RBI Governor performed the unenviable task of announcing ad-hoc changes in rules regarding deposit and withdrawal of money from banks.

Patel soon earned the sobriquet 'Invisible Man' and became the favourite muse for meme makers and became a butt of ridicule on social media. He came across as a person who could not handle the glare of TV flashbulbs and his parroted response 'we are still counting', when queried about the amount of demonetized currency notes deposited in the banks, helped him move up a few more notches in the meme makers' popularity charts.

Amid all this hilarity nobody noticed when Patel turned the corner. It is difficult to pin-point when Patel's seemingly limitless malleability reached the end of its tether, but appointment of S. Gurumurthy as non-executive director certainly was one such trigger.

Ties between the government and RBI grew frostier with every bi-monthly Monetary Policy Meeting to decide on interest rates. Things reached breaking point when Patel realised the government had sets its eyes on RBI reserves and was planning to hang the Damocles sword over him in the form of hitherto unused Section 7 of RBI Act.

Even then no one thought Patel may actually quit, but this reclusive Gujarati thought it was an opportune time to leave as he did not want to add a new blot 'allowed dilution of RBI autonomy' in his CV, in addition to the existing one - 'presided over demonetisation'.

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Jawa: Back From The Dead

For the bikers in the frugal licence permit raj era of 1960-70s, when 'Be Indian buy Indian' was the norm, owning a Jawa was nirvana on two wheels. Though entombed nearly four decades ago, this Czech pedigreed bike continues to remain in the recesses of the memory of 40-plus generation.

On the other hand for a millennial the name only means a computer programme (albeit with minor spelling change of 'v' instead of 'w') and voluminous books to master it adorn the shelves of second-hand book stalls.

Back then the motorcycling world was ruled by a triumvirate of Jawa, Royal Enfield 'Bullet' and Rajdoot. Jawa and Royal Enfield were considered classy, while Rajdoot was for the plebeians and country bumpkins, and looked down upon.

Jawa and Bullet had its legion of followers. While the former had a sleek look, the latter with UK pedigree had an erect ramrod stiff exterior. While Jawas were patronised by college students and young urban professionals, mainly medical representatives, the latter by those who wanted to wear their machismo on their sleeves. 'It takes a man to ride a Bullet' ran the print ad catch line.

Both had their own unique quirkiness. While Jawa had a kick-starter, which doubled up as gear after ignition, not found in any other bike, Bullet had brake on the left and gear on the right, and it migrated to 'standard' format much later in 2007.

To the credit of Royal Enfield management, they stood the test of time and through their upgrades and new models remained in the business. It weathered the storm of 100 cc bikes and later the entry of global names such as Harley Davidson and Triumph.

Whereas Jawa later gave way to a new avatar Yezdi and that too got mothballed in the 90s, under the onslaught of fuel efficient 100 cc bikes.

Most Yezdis faded away to scrap yards, while some aficionados kept them running with a missionary zeal, despite facing challenges like scarcity of spare parts. For the millennial crowd an occasional bike rally by Jawa-Yezdi Motorcycle Club provided them a nodding acquaintance with the classic their uncles once rode.

However last week Mahindra and Mahindra, under it subsidiary Classic Legends, decided to bring back this iconic bike from the dead. The move has rekindled the euphoria among many cutting across age barrier, evoking a mix of nostalgia and futuristic feel.

While old timers were happy the manufacturers have taken care to retain its retro looks, especially the iconic petrol tank, the younger generation was drooling over the fact that it had high tech features like liquid cooled engines, used in high performance bikes.

There are three models on offer – Jawa, Jawa 42 and Perak. All with eye-catching colours, and the bobber design of Perak has left many bike lovers pining for a test drive.

Once again the old rivalry is back. Considering the pricing and specification of its models, Jawa is once again pitted against Bullet. However, Jawa has a lot of groundwork to do in terms of establishing dealer and service network across the country.

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