JOST A MON

The idle ramblings of a Jack of some trades, Master of none

Jul 10, 2017

Telephonic Discoveries

A few years of working in Delhi after graduating from IISc, I took up a job in Chicago. Once there, I began to reach out to old friends who'd preceded me to the US. Emails were becoming quite standard at most workplaces and it was easy to track people down. The acquisition of a discount phone card also meant I could call half the planet with impunity.

I heard on the grapevine that one of my classmates was moving to the US. She was working for Tata Consultancy Services. They had tentacles everywhere. Their engineers would usually rent a big flat or house and share rooms, just like in college. I called my friend in Bombay and her father answered. We'd met before and he knew who I was. We exchanged a pleasantry or two.

"May I speak to such-and-such?", I said.

"She is at the airport, flying to the US later this evening," he said.

"Ah," I said. "Where is she flying to?"

"San Francisco," he said.

"Is TCS sending her?" I said.

"Yes, she'll work at a client site," he said.

"Is there a number I can reach her at when she arrives?" I said.

He gave me the number.

A day or so later, thinking she'd have arrived and probably settled down in one of those TCS shared hangouts, I called the number.

A guy picked up the phone.

"Hello," I said. "May I speak to such-and-such?"

"Hello," he said. "She hasn't arrived yet."

"Ah ok," I said. "When does she get there?"

"In about 4 hours," he said.

"Who is this?" he added.

"I'm so-and-so," I said. "We were at IISc together."

"Ok," he said. "I'll tell her you called."

"Will she be staying there?" I said.

"Yes," he said.

"At that same address?" I said.

"Yes," he said.

"So I will be able to reach her at this number if I were to call tomorrow?" I said.

"Yes," he said.

"She's on assignment with TCS, right?" I said.

"Yes," he said.

"Are you working on the same project?" I said, just to be friendly.

"No," he said.

"Ok, thanks," I said. "Bye."

"Bye," he said.

A few hours later, my friend called me, fairly sizzling in outrage.

"What the devil do you mean," she said, "by asking my husband if I am going to stay with him?"

"You're married?" I said.

"Yes, of course, I'm married," she said. "Didn't you know?"

"How the dickens would I know?" I said. "You never told me. And your dad didn't tell me either. We spoke for nearly ten minutes and he never mentioned it."

"Well, now my husband thinks I know some seriously weird people," she said.

"Next time you get married," I said, "Be sure to tell me."

Years later, I still haven't met said husband. My friend still occasionally brings up the story of how I called the man to ask if his wife would be living with him after marriage. I should protest every time, but a blog post is better.

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Dec 26, 2011

Christmas 1

I took the boy to the office on Friday. He was excited, although not quite as much as some of my colleagues. They'd heard of his wisecracks and were looking forward to meeting him in person. 

'How do we keep him entertained?' asked Frei.

'Shall we show him the table football?' said Pitt.

'No,' said Parker. 'That will give him the wrong impression of what goes on in the office.'

'You mean the right impression,' said Pitt, and everybody fell about laughing.

The boy was on his best behaviour. He shook hands very cordially with everybody and only confused the names of two people. He looked at my Bloomberg console and noticed that the Euro was falling in value against the dollar. He walked around the office and came back to sit at my desk.

'You can use this screen and I'll use this one,' he said generously to me.

We fought each other briefly for possession of the mouse.

Frei made a bet with the boy. 'Look,' he said, pointing at the intraday tick chart of Euro-dollar. 'One Euro is 1.3067 dollars. I'm going for lunch in fifteen minutes. Do you think this chart will be down or up at that time?'

'Down,' said the boy.

'Given how we've been doing so far, I wouldn't be surprised if the boy wins,' said Frei to me confidentially and laughed like a hyena.

Meanwhile, the boy had noticed the football table. It was surrounded by four eager men playing desperately for  victory. He waited patiently for them to finish, but they kept switching sides, playing game after game.

Adebayor noticed that the boy was looking at bit forlorn. He went into the football room and muttered something to the men. They looked at the boy sheepishly. They trooped out. 'We got carried away,' said one. 

'That's okay,' said the boy.

'I told them that your son was about to cry,' said Adebayor smugly. 'It always works.'

We went in and whacked the ball a few times. It rolled into the goals at random. The boy giggled happily.

When Frei was about to leave for lunch, we took a look at the currency chart again. The Euro chart had been dropping jaggedly all that time, but as we watched, it suddenly spiked up.

'Oh dear,' said Frei. '1.3077. I'm afraid you lost, mate.'

'That's okay,' said the boy.

We also went for lunch soon thereafter.

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Aug 5, 2011

Age

Our team secretary turned thirty recently. She brought cakes, which were demolished by investment professionals in sore need of a sugar rush. When I stopped by her desk to felicitate her on her achievement, she was clutching her head in despair.

'Why so despondent?' quoth I.

'It's the end,' she moaned. 'It's all downhill now.'

'Oh come on,' I said. 'It is not that bad. You're still young.'

She looked at me in disbelief. Then she looked at my bald head, and cheered up momentarily.

'How old are you, if you don't mind my asking?' she said.

'Forty-two,' said I.

'Well, you, um, you look, er, younger than that,' she said.

Clearly, her innate honesty was struggling against her tact.

'You look,' she began again, and her voice faltered. 'You look about, er, thirty-five.'

I burst out laughing. She went back to clutching her head.

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Apr 23, 2011

Pals

The other day, the boy and his mum had a brief conversation on their way back home from school. He is not yet six and has gained a deep understanding of the ways of the world.

"I only want to play with J," he said. "He is my best friend."

"But he'll go back to China in two months," said his mum. "You need to be friendly to all the boys."

"I only have one friend," the boy shouted, close to apoplexy. "Do you know how difficult it is to make friends?"


************


The boy's cousins, the chetas, are due to visit us in a few days. He is very pleased and goes around with a grin of anticipation on his face. He is already plotting his activities with them.


************


The boy fought with J yesterday. 

"I said, 'What the hell?' and he said, 'What the hell?'"

"I said, 'What are you talking about?' and he said, 'What are you talking about?'"

"I punched him in the face," he shouted, "and then he punched me in the face."

After a pause for breath, he continued, "I'll punch him in the face tomorrow. And when he goes back to China, I'll take my chetas and go over there and we'll all punch him in the face."

And so he has learned another valuable lesson in life. When explaining to someone what's what, it's good to have a couple of heavies behind you.

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Oct 20, 2010

Refined

There are clannish folks in India, and then there are seriously clannish folks. The Bengalis are seriously clannish. There are tales told of not only how they not only congregate and ignore all others, but also how they can sense vibrations in the space-time continuum that help them identify a fellow Bengali in the vicinity. And then they talk to each other in that most polished of tongues, and all bystanders are left to marvel at the ways of the Bengali world.

And then there are the refined Bengalis - that is, those Bengalis who didn't study in Bengal - and so acquire a sort of polish that enables them to communicate unflinchingly with non-Bengalis for more than a couple of hours at a time. My friend Ganguly, though, is a doubly refined Bengali because he grew up in Assam and went to school in Delhi, and he was able to spend weeks, nay, months, without a word of his mother-tongue escaping his lips. That is to say, he spent most of that time with us uncultured boors speaking Hindi and English and even essaying the odd expression in Kannada.

But even he would succumb to his internal Bengalishness every Dussehra, and he would repair to the Uttoro Bongoloro Bongo Somiti to accompany a Rabindra singer with a tabla, and feast on some mishti-dohi, and revel in his Bengaliment, and recharge his Bengalic batteries so that he could tolerate us for another year.

One year, though, he committed a faux-pas of such staggering proportions that it very nearly derailed the career of a stellar Bengalic singer. After having drunk far more sugarcane juice than was healthy for his bladder, he abandoned his tabla and rushed out of the hall and ran up to the front desk and panted, "Bher ij the taayilet?"

Well, actually he didn't say that, because he said the equivalent in Bengali, as shuddho Bengali as you can prefer, and the lady behind the counter reeled in shock at his staring eyes and strained expression, and drew herself haughtily, and pointed in a random direction and said, 'Obher der."

No, no, she didn't actually say that; she replied in chaste Bengali, and as Ganguly was rushing off, it dawned upon him that it was not just any lady, not even any Bengali lady, but that nightingale, that doyenne of pop, that mistress of alto, Usha Uthup, whom he had so unceremoniously inflicted with his desperation.

By the time he had drained the equivalent of the Niagara and returned to the front desk to apologise, Usha Uthup had disappeared, never to be seen again in that part of town.

Well, we say she never appeared in Bangalore again because it suits us to say so, and Ganguly was filled with remorse, especially when we pointed out to him every Dussehra that she never sang again.

I'm pleased now not only for Ganguly but also for that great diva, that she has found it in herself to recover from that terrible experience. I saw her singing with her usual gusto and customary power and panache at the Commonwealth Games closing ceremony, and by thunder it was good. 

Ganguly, my man, your sins are forgiven. You can smile again.

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Jul 17, 2010

Scam

Yesterday I got an email from a fellow blogger saying he was in London, and had been mugged, and was upset by it all, and couldn't get any help from the police, and was late for his flight back. Only days earlier I had had emails from him, and he hadn't told me he was going to be here. But what if it had been a last minute trip? So I wrote back asking if he was all right, and if I could help in any way.

The response was prompt. He had internet access only, he said, as his phone and wallet had been stolen. Thanks for writing back, he said. If you can send me £1271, that would cover the hotel bill, and the taxi fare to the airport.

Hmm, I thought, this is serious. Which hotel are you at? I asked. Royal Park, he said. Have you checked out? I said. No, he said. I called the hotel and asked to be connected to him. They had no person by that name staying there, either yesterday or in the past several days.

Aha, I thought. The man's email's been hacked. A scamster on my hands! I rubbed them with glee. If you can send the funds by Western Union, he said, I promise to pay you back when I get home. Let me know if you are sending the money now?

Sure, I said. Which Western Union location will you be at? The bloody fool sent me an address in Wales. I cooked up a Western Union confirmation number and sent it to him. I'm checking online, he said, but the number is not recognised. Can you send me your details?

Western Union told me that all you'll need is the confirmation number, and your ID, I said.

Then I called Maddy. He, of course, was still in the US, fielding calls from frightened pals all over the world. He told me that the scamster had been quite fiendish in his hack. Not only had the villain changed the password, he had changed all the other secondary identifications that the owner could use to reset the email account.

An hour or so later, Maddy managed to re-establish control over his email, and sent an email asking everyone to disregard it.

Ooh, I replied. You ruined it just as I was having fun with the bugger.

Later I got a slightly urgent email from the scamster. It was timestamped before Maddy got his account back.

I went to the Western Union office, said the blackguard. They told me there was no such confirmation number. Please check and let me have the correct one.

I sure do hope he trekked across to Prestatyn to get the moolah. That would be a small mercy for all the angst he caused.

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Feb 21, 2008

A Sloganeering Summer

In our final year at graduate school, we began to think fondly of the time spent there, and we cast about for a special souvenir to commemorate the grace we had inflicted on the Institute. After much cogitation, fuelled by unlimited helpings of the Andhra thaali at Amaravati (rice, ghee and gunpowder. The palate melts. Rs 18 for all you can eat. The wallet shrieks triumphantly.), we decided that nothing would establish our creative credentials and intellectual gravitas than a - wait for it - a sweatshirt for the class of 1994.

We took to heart the caption that appeared on the chests of several electrical engineering alumni from IIT-Bombay who had recently joined our school. We were four year transformed 1, said the caption punningly and cunningly. We wanted to come up with something equally punchy and pithy.

Immediately, the factionalism that had been hitherto sub-surface bubbled to the fore. The Communications types withdrew from the design committee because the rest of us couldn't understand what they wanted. What can I say? They were lacking in communications skills. The Electrical clan splintered along the usual fault lines: signal theorists disdained the high-voltage types. The Computers had little to say, geeks as they were; although they were conscious of their superiority, they also had a particular desire to please and were willing to go along unctuously with any positive contribution by the others. The Metallurgists preferred to be called Materialists and resented the general implication that they had the IQs of chimps (who, after all, put down Metallurgy as their first choice of study in engineering?)

It was then resolved that the various departments would come up with their own slogans. The Communicators came up with painful stuff such as We do it with samples 2 and Communications Engineers do it in queues 3. The Metallurgists constructed a blunt rod of esoteric materials: a few fullerenes, a few composites, all covered with laminar steel. They then proceeded to terrorise the rest of us with it.

The Electricians sniggered for weeks with their motto: Our discharge is positively shocking.

The truly lame contributions, of course, were those from the Typists 4. I byte bit-by-bit was one. Worse: We go Turing from Church to Post 5

At the end, as with all good intentions, nothing remained. No sweatshirts. No coffee-mugs. Not even a directory of year. 1994 came and went, people dispersed their separate ways, and all that remained were the distant memories of that sloganeering summer.

1 Four year transformed? Fourier? Electrical engineers can't do it without it.
2 Sampling? Nyquist's theorem?
3 Queueing Theory. A must for any designer of telecommunications networks.
4 Typists = computer types. All we do is type.
5 Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, Emile Post: founders of the science of computability.

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Jan 2, 2008

Sartorius

My sartorial misdemeanours started at an early age. In Caracas, during Carnival, kids at my nursery were to appear in fancy-dress. My classmates were all agog. Some were going to wear regal costumes, others wanted to be Simon Bolivar. A couple of Disney fans announced that they would appear as Mickey Mouse. I boasted to everyone that I would be Batman. On the day, I went wearing a t-shirt with Goofy's face emblazoned on it. "We can't afford fancy-dress", my amma had said. I was not too bothered until my best enemy, radiant in a Robin outfit, asked me where my mask was. I shrugged him off and, when later in the day, he ran into a swing and cut his face, I thought of it as fine payback for his villainy.

In Moscow, we lived in a diplomatic enclave, surrounded by rich Europeans and Americans and their fancy-schmancy clothes and ever-present chewing-gum. I was cheerfully oblivious - clothes never did hold any particular attraction for me. (The only thing I truly envied them was their collections of superhero comics. I was starved for Marvel heroes, you understand. For being untidy and leaving our comics on various articles of furniture, my father had torn up the lot - to teach my sister and me a lesson. I'm not sure the lesson sank in very deeply - I'm still not the tidiest person on the planet - but the pain of the loss of all those books lasted a long time. But that's neither here nor there.) We used to do our shopping at the local Russian stores, wearing bright nylon outfits that would have sent Armani into paroxysms of despair. When Richard, the one pompous American boy in a crowd of generally decent Americans, taunted me for wearing a particularly bilious blue shirt ("You got it at the bazaar, didntcha?"), I yelled, "It's Canadian, you bastard!" and jumped him. He was two years older than me and heavier and he was taken aback by my onslaught, but it didn't take him long to throw me off and mutter, "You're a crazy fucker." I was seven years old at the time.

My fashion sense got progressively worse. By the time I was at St. Stephen's College, I was wearing floppy-collared shirts and bell-bottomed trousers. Add to this mix a head slick with Keo Karpin Hair Oil, a straggly moustache, a three-day stubble, and a rich accent acquired in the international school in Jakarta (where any Indian sing-song was mercilessly put down), and I was an incendiary vision. My friends flinched every time they saw me. Women ran for cover. Those who didn't escape in time found themselves introduced to me several times a week (each time they saw me they pretended they didn't know who I was - took me about a month to figure out I was being shaded, as the slang went.) "Hey!" wagged some wags, "It's the seventies again!"

As usual, I ignored the comments. In truth, they didn't bother me too much, except once when worn down by the sniping, I said, "As long as I dress neatly, what does it matter whether the clothes are fashionable or not?"

My pal Eki was not entirely sympathetic. "You may dress cleanly," he said, drily. "But I wouldn't call this neat."

Meanwhile, my good buddy Guru was attracting widespread attention for his wardrobe of Pierre Cardins and Yves Saint Laurents. Cunningly, he had stocked up in Panama where he had lived before coming to college. Women followed him around, gazing at him adoringly. (It later turned out that they wanted his class notes.)

Epiphany struck (ouch) a bit later when I chanced upon the khadi kurta. This worn with faded jeans and Hawaiian sandals (or hawai-chappal in the vernacular) was the costume of choice for the self-regarding pseudo-intellectual. I took to the combo like a Frenchman to goose liver. Visiting the Khadi Gram Udyog Bhavan, fount of Indian handicraft and rough cotton, in Connaught Place was a religious experience. And the kurtas were cheap! Fifteen rupees a pop. Yay.

Around that time I also started parting my hair in the centre and my stock in college fell to somewhere among the slimes. Ah, memories, memories.

Arriving at the Indian Institute of Science in the summer of 1990 was a true eye-opener. I witnessed an entire campus of geeks, none of whom had any sartorial sense. And if I, fashion illiterate that I was, noticed that, you may imagine the scene yourselves. The population was largely Tamilian supported by a big contingent of Bengalis and Andhras. The Tams were an austere lot, wearing bush-shirts untucked, and baggy trousers in various shades of grey. The Bengalis were wreathed in bidi smoke, so nobody could tell what it was they wore. The Andhra types were veritable peacocks. Orange shirts and yellow trousers. Walrus moustaches. My mind was numbed.

So I found myself suddenly - in my khadi kurtas and jeans - the best-dressed on campus. The others recognised a nonpareil in me. I was beset by sundry classmates who were willing to offer me their unborn children as slaves if I brought them kurtas from my next trip to Delhi. The kurtas in Bangalore were a sorry mess: bad cotton, awful lines, terrible cuts. The fashionistas at Khadi Gram Udyog Bhavan in Delhi would have committed suicide en masse had the Bangalore kurtas been attributed to them. But I didn't sell my soul, oh no, and refused all blandishments. I remained top kurta man in IISc throughout my four years there.

Once I found myself gainfully employed, the first article of high fashion I procured for myself was a pair of round spectacles in gold. Ooh yes. Gandhi, eat your heart out. The next thing I did was to buy a bunch of shirts from an export-surplus store in Bhikaiji Cama Place. Sadly, I can't remember the name of the brand. It was good stuff, though. Two hundred rupees for a shirt that wouldn't shame Van Heusen. The Keo Karpin Hair Oil was forgotten, my parting returned to the left, and I moved on to locally produced Christian Dior toiletries. These were so potent that after applying a judicious amount of cologne after a bath, the aroma was destroyed by the time I got dressed. Still, I thought it was better than Keo Karpin's cloying fug.

By 1996, I was in the USA, land of Walmart and shabby-chic clothes on discount. I splurged. I splurged, I tell you! My glasses were Armani now, and my boots Timberland. My moustache glistened under authentic (and liberally applied) Davidoff Cool Water aftershave. Women looked me for longer than two seconds before averting their eyes and nostrils. I was king of my game.

When I met the wife for the first time, I was impeccably coutoured and on top form. My moustache was long gone. I had thoughtfully shaven it wa-a-ay before - a superb bit of foresight, in hindsight (the wife gags every time she sees my old photos). Fellow Malloos1 would have been outraged. As one said (not to me), "Who do you think you are? North Indian?"

My pals Amarnath and Sriram had told me to lay off the poor jokes and to put on the boots they had thoughtfully presented me with on my birthday. Soft leather, very spiffy. Sure to slay any full-blooded woman. I wore Diesel shirts and Dockers chinos. And a London Fog jacket to ward off the London elements. The wife, though, didn't think much of my jacket and parked her posterior on it in Hyde Park while I held her hand and did my thing. She didn't want to get her bottom wet, you see. But she did agree to marry me, so I guess the shoes, at least, did their trick.

To prepare my outfit for our engagement, I went to South Extension, Delhi's top fashion district. I got myself an elegant kurta - not khadi! It was fine silk. Or possibly cotton. Or was it polyester? I don't remember. Anyway, I wore this kurta and a Kerala mundu, and arrived resplendent for the engagement ceremony. The wife was in her room beautifying herself when her sister ran up to her, eyes round.

"He's wearing a long kurta", she gasped. [To explain: we Malloos, you see, have a short kurta. My North Indian kurta, on the other hand, dropped to below my knees. To be worn with the pyjama, you understand. My mundu was pretty much hidden behind the mass of fabric.]

"How long?" said the wife.

"Long", said her sister.

Meanwhile, my cousin Beena was staggered.

"What are you wearing?" she cried when she found her voice.

"National integration", I said, crisply. "North Indian kurta, South Indian mundu."

A friend of mine told me later that I looked like a fucking priest.

The wife was affability itself. She assured me that I looked cute. What can I say? I love the woman and she is a total sweetie-pie.

She maintained the fiction of my cuteness for seven years, until recently she admitted that she had been shocked (shocked) when she saw me. "Cute?" she said. "More like weird."

"Why do you think I insisted that you wear a Kerala ensemble for the wedding? So you wouldn't slay the guests with your haute couture", she added.

It's good to know that we have no secrets between us now. Ahem.

Anyway, after marriage, we retreated to the USA again. Out went the Walmart outfits. "But it's shabby chic", I wailed as the wife tossed one well-loved shirt after another. She snorted. "Forget chic. It's just shabby."

She propelled me, in one tremendous swoop, to Banana Republic. Suddenly, I was a preppy dude. Women took longer looks at me, perhaps lasting all of five seconds.

When we met my old pal Nitish in Boston, he gasped, "You two look like total yuppies." Back at Stephen's, he'd never have said that about me.

Meanwhile he - at the time still a student - was wearing that old favoured staple: khadi kurta and jeans. He looked extremely comfortable. I, on the other hand, I just glowered with envy.

Footnote:

1. Malloos: diminutive for Malayalis, the denizens of Kerala.

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Sep 30, 2007

A Noo Yoak Scene

Cheel Ghosh, his intellectual Chinese pal Elliot and I find ourselves in Soho one sunny summery day in 1995. The day is young and the world is full of possibilities. We amble around in search of one plausible possibility.

On sunny summery days in Manhattan, one often tends to require liquid replenishment. There are any number of likely bars and watering holes, but we feel we are above such obviously alcoholic places. We prefer the more urbane and sophisticated street café, and our feet pull us in the direction of one that appears to have a luminous beauty for a waitress.

She favours us with a smile that stops our hearts. While we gasp out our orders, she stands waiting patiently. Our necks twist and crane as we follow her lissome, zaftig figure winding its way round the bar. Conversation dwindles until we can see her no more, after which, with wrenching noises, we turn our heads back to a more normal configuration.

The street outside is abuzz with activity. Purposeful New Yorkers dart about truculently. Tourists mill around aiming their cameras at various road signs. A scruffy fellow is distributing leaflets. Some punk rock outfit is to perform that night at a nearby dive. He drops a sheaf on our table and moves on. The waitress returns with our drinks.

"What's that you guys got there?" she says.

"Punk rock concert", mutters Ghosh.

She sits down with us. It is a slow day for her.

"Punk?" she says, brightly. "A friend of mine is into the whole punk thing. Mohawk hair and ear piercings."

Elliot, the intellectual Chinese dude, is outraged.

"Punks and punk rock have nothing to do with each other", he splutters. He rants about the differences while we stare at him, aghast. The goddess gets up, bestows another heart-stopping grin on Ghosh and me, and walks away.

We give Elliot dirty looks.

"What?" he says. "She doesn't know."

Ghosh shakes his head. Elliot ain't got a clue, neither.

A while later, we find ourselves in front of an art exhibition. Dillon Gallery, it says on the frontage.

There are large canvases of obviously ultra-modern paintings on every wall. Ghosh and I stagger from frame to frame, slightly dizzied by the profusion of brush-strokes and vivid colours. Biomorphic motifs, indeed. Elliot studies each piece carefully, moving from to another with shrugs or sniffs.

We find ourselves before a large canvas of a woman getting up from a sofa. Or, equally likely, she is sitting down. There are three juxtaposed images of the woman, one in blue, another in green, the third in an indeterminate hue. There is a vase on a side chest to her right. Something that looks like a refrigerator looms to her left. Sinister, eh? It might even be a wardrobe. Or a slab of granite.

A man slithers towards us in a serpentine fashion. He is the proprietor of the gallery. He greets us sibilantly.

"Ssso gentlemen. Sssee anything you like?"

Elliot wordlessly gestures at the painting we had been admiring.

"Ah. A sssuperb work. It'ss by Nikko Sedgwick. Have you heard of him?"

Nope.

"One of our brightesst young artisstss", says the worthy. He switches to a pedantic mode.

"He sstudied in England and Italy before returning to New York. One of the artisstic Ssedgwicks, you know. He has explored all the isms of the twentieth century and developed an individual style of his own. There is a naturalism and vividness in his use of colour which is refreshing."

"Isms?" whispers Ghosh to me, loudly.

"Communism?" I hazard, from ear to ear grinningly.

"Surrealism", Elliot whispers back angrily.

"That's 19th century", I riposte, snippily. (I am wrong, of course.)

"Observe how Nikko has deconstructed the woman's motion", the man continues, aggrievedly. "He empathises with the woman and her desire to be free, constrained as she is by the mundane surrounding her."

"Very Dali-esque", agrees Elliot.

Ghosh snorts and I burst out laughing. The man smiles grimly.

"Enjoy", he says and walks off, his back rigid, disapproving.

"Dali-esque?" says Ghosh. "Dali-esque?"

We will not let Elliot hear the end of it.

If you must:

A review.

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Jun 21, 2007

Oldest Friends

Now that the Internet has been around for, what, a couple of decades, I am sufficiently optimistic that I should be able to track down people I used to know over the years.

I started first by looking for people I knew in Venezuela. This search didn't last too long as I only remembered one friend - Gop. His parents and mine had been in touch for almost twenty-five years after those days in Caracas, but by the time I started my hunt, neither had any idea where the others were.

But Gop's name was sufficiently unusual, coupled with the fact that he had studied at a school with an alumnus association sufficiently active and web-savvy, meant that I located him with almost no effort.

Vastly encouraged by this, I began my search for friends from my Russian sojourn. This proved much more difficult. In fact, of the about ten or so boys and girls I was particularly friendly with, I only managed to find two.

The first, Kolya, lived in the same diplomatic complex as I because his mother had married an Austrian engineer. After I left Moscow, Kolya had been an assiduous correspondent, but I had been lazy in replying to his letters, so he stopped as well. I knew he had emigrated to Vienna, and in the mid-nineties, when I was a tourist in that city, I scoured the telephone directory for him or his father. But at the time, I was unsuccessful.

Around 2000, though, I found a Vienna white pages online. As luck would have it, his father's surname was unique in it; I knew Kolya called him Fritzulya, which meant that his name would be Friedrich; there were three numbers listed, I tried them all, and located his father. Luckily, he remembered the little Indian boy who had been his son's bosom buddy, and was happy to provide me with Kolya's contact details. "Goooooooooooooaaaaaal!".

Next: Nitin Budhwar's father had been a colleague of my father's at the Indian Embassy in Moscow, and he had studied at my school. He proved to be easy to find: a casual Google search did the trick. He didn't remember me when I got in touch, but he graciously replied when I sent him email. Sadly, though, he hadn't kept in contact with any of the old crowd either.

In quick succession, I sought other classmates from my school, Central Special No 14, Moscow. There were any number of matches for some of the names, but further investigation constantly led to impasses. I sent emails to several possibilities, but only one replied, and he was too old to have been my classmate. Even the school itself was untraceable; it was as though with perestroika, the school had been reconstructed too.

In general, is it more difficult to locate girls, or what? I have never quite liked the idea of women taking on their husbands' last name, and this proved to be the show-stopper in this effort as well. But surely it shouldn't have been too difficult to isolate the guys?

By this time, I had moved to the UK. Working for a telecommunications outfit near Cambridge, I chanced to meet Russian clients from Israel. They linked me up to the Russian Internet. I found that my old school had been renamed. There were some old students from there, however, who were posting to a mailing list. I wrote to them, but again, they turned out to be considerably younger than I. They hadn't even heard of my old class teacher, Lyudmila Alekseevna Ilyashuk, who certainly had continued to work there for years after my departure.

So where are you: Seryozha Trofimenko, Misha Kazakov, Nina Petrunina, Tania Mamedova, Natasha Domracheva, Ira Spiridonova, Yura Petrunin, Borya Morozov?

As I have been in constant contact with many of my pals from my stay in Jakarta, I haven't had to use the Internet to locate too many of them. Anyone I missed could quickly be traced by using friends of friends. Liselle Zamuco, though, is a tough nut to crack. I know she went to the Asian Institute of Management in Manila. What did she do after? She was supposed to be a top powerlifter in the Philippines, but there is no mention of her on the Internet. Her name appeared on a pregnancy blog site, but my email posted there elicited no response. So where are you, young Liselle?

I graduated from high school in Kathmandu, and promptly lost touch with everybody from class. This year, it is twenty years since finishing twelfth grade. Nostalgia tugs at the heart and idle fingers do the rest. It turns out that there's an alumnus webpage. But as I half-expected, it is run by enthusiastic chappies fifteen years junior to me. My emails to them resulted in courteous responses, suitably calibrated to one of my gray years. None of my classmates was at the time registered on the website.

A month later, though, I received an email from Ratan Sureka who graduated with me in 1987. He knows the whereabouts of three other classmates. What are the chances of that? I am still grinning like an ape.

Still, there are others untraced: Mamta Choudhary, Shiv Verma, Bharati Verma, Meeta Mishra, Pashmina Contractor, Preetam and Uttam Srivastava. Speak up, folks!

The Internet may yet come up trumps again...

Update: 16 May 2008
I've managed to locate Meeta Mishra now. Amazing. And, what do you know, Liselle Zamuco as well - of all places, on Facebook. Amazing-raised-to-the-power-two!

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Names and Things

Why do Indians in the West anglicise their names?

There may be two reasons. One, they don't like their names mauled and butchered by the ignoramuses among whom they live. I'm not sure I buy this argument completely. All the firangs I met asked me several times over to repeat my name, just so they could get the pronunciation right. Not that they managed to get the rolled 'l' in the last syllable just right - but they did try. Hard.

The second reason, and the one I am inclined to lean towards, is that they want to fit in, and are embarrassed by their polysyllabic names, surrounded as they are by Jims and Marks.

Consider my old buddy, Jayachandran Sethuraman. We used to call him Jayc back in IISc. Now that he is settled in Noo Yoak, he has become Jay. Likewise, Ayan Sengupta is now Neil (although he has the excuse that this was already his nickname growing up in New Delhi).

Other desis give their second-generation American (or British, or Canadian) kids names that make sense to both cultures. So you have your Vickys (for Vikram or for Victor?) and your Ash's (for Ashwin) and your Mayas.

Of course, many desis give their kids multibarrel names too. Check out Shivnarine Chanderpaul. He can't have had an easy childhood, eh? But that's not to say that these kids will go on to pronounce their names correctly as they grow up. I know a Rahul Patel who says RaHOOL, and looks askance at me when I call him RA-hool. There's a Satish Patel who says SAT-ish, instead of the proper Sut-EESH. Pillock.

I wonder if my little chap will end up mispronouncing his name. Very likely he will. The delicate mind reels.

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Apr 16, 2007

Marwaris and Malloos

Pit a Marwari against a Malloo and the outcome is always certain. The latter will be beaten comprehensively.

Consider our Malloo friend V. He has a couple of Marwari colleagues at work. Let's call them M1 and M2. M1 invited V. and his family for dinner the other day. "Pot luck", said M1 beatifically. "Can you bring the dessert?"

V. wanted to know how many guests there would be, so as to prepare the appropriate quantity.

"Including you and your family, and the other guests, there will be 11 adults and six kids", said M1.

Now V.'s wife A. is a mighty fine cook, and she hustled enthusiastically to prepare two pies: one full of rich apricot, and the other a divine pear and apple melange. V and A (and their little boy J.) then went to M1's with much anticipation.

They spent the next few hours with their jaws sagging in disbelief (and hunger). It turned out that everybody else at the party was from M1 and M2's families - parents, in-laws, kids and some indeterminate animals. Another couple who had also been invited were unable to make it.

The hosts spoke Marwari all the time. V. and A. pointed out once or twice that they couldn't understand any of the conversation. This didn't faze the clans one bit. Our Malloos were left to their own devices. The host's wife, especially, ignored them.

For the pot-luck, M2 had brought some samosas. Not fresh ones, mind you, but frozen ones. From Tesco. M1's wife had prepared rice and ghee. Both were execrable. Neither V. nor A. enjoyed the meal, but they did look forward to taking the remains of the dessert back with them.

Anticipating this, M1 cunningly informed them that it was traditional to swap the left-overs with their guests.

So V. and A. went home with the detritus of the rice and ghee, while the Marwaris exulted over the pies.

It later turned out that the invitees who hadn't showed were also Malloos. Let's call them S.

The next day at work, Mr S. rushed up to V.

"I hear that you were invited to pot-luck at M1's?" said S., grinning from ear to ear. "We didn't go because of our experience with them the last time they invited us. Tell me, did they ask you to bring the dessert?"

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