Friday, December 29, 2006

Hats off to Mr. Murphy

  • Murphy’s First Law: If something can go wrong, it will.
  • Murphy’s Second Law: Where nothing can go wrong, something will.

I have studied so many laws of science since my childhood days, starting from Newton’s Laws of Motion to Moore’s Law. But I have never seen Laws which are truer than Murphy’s Laws stated above.

How else do you explain my predicament? Let me start the story from the beginning.

About six months ago, I noticed a slight change in the whirring of my 40 GB hard drive. Being the overcautious person that I am, I immediately bought an 80 GB drive and fitted it to my PC. I partitioned it into four partitions for OS, music, movies and data. Then I carefully moved all my data from the old drive to the new one, and also added a lot of new data to it. I only kept my OS and programs running from the old drive because reinstalling Windows and all the applications would take a lot of time, and if I had to do it, I’d rather wait till the old drive crashes.

Well, it did crash last weekend. There were two loud clicks from the drive and my Windows froze. I tried rebooting but the drive kept failing. So I decided to boot from the Windows XP CD and install Windows in the new drive now. Only problem was, Windows XP installer said my new hard drive contained 80 GB of unpartitioned space. I tried Windows 98, but it said the same.

So I decided to pat the crashed hard drive on the head, and try to boot from it again. And this time it started. And then I got the shock of my life.

My 80 GB hard drive containing a lifetime’s worth of data, music, movies and whatnot had been reduced to 80 GB of unpartitioned space and was completely unreadable!

At that instant I literally felt sick. I felt everything was gone… I would never be able to get those things back again. My years of hard work and carefully collected stuff, a lot of which I was stupid enough not to have burnt on CDs. Just imagine, preparing for that disk crash for six months in advance, and when it comes, it strikes the very place where I have been storing away my data.

However, as I said, Murphy’s Laws are infallible; which means they apply to themselves as well. I soon realized that although I had moved most of the data to the new drive, I had kept a copy of my most important directory on my old drive as well. That was a backup six months old, it is true (as I had not updated the file there after I made the new copy), but half a loaf is anytime better than none. The first job I did after finding this out was to get some blank CDs and taking a backup of everything in sight. Then I made a list of everything that I had lost forever. The most important things among them seemed to be:

· All Flash greetings I had made in the last six months

· Some photos that I had taken in the last two months

· My blog related stuff… the photos, the backups, the template changes, and most importantly, the banners that I had made.

· Some presentations and other documents that I had made in the last six months.

· Some programs that I had written.

Apart from these there were numerous movies, songs, videos, audio books, applications and heaven knows what else. I went to sleep sadly at one in the night.

But strangely, a change had come over my mood by the time I woke up the next morning. The sadness over the loss of data was there, but I had discovered a positive side to the whole thing as well. What was gone was gone, but here I had an 80 GB hard drive good as new, for me to fill up again. And the best part was, there was a lot of junk in it earlier, which I was never finding the time to organize. There was at least several GB of such unnecessary data. All that had been cleaned away by Mr. Murphy. Now I can start life afresh. I have a lot of stuff backed up at office. I’ll start by carrying them home somehow. Then I’ll reformat my hard drive and start storing data afresh in the New Year. This time I’ll have a lot more space to store the data.

Until the next time Murphy’s Laws manifest themselves, that is.

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Memories of a disaster

It was this very day two years ago. The time was around quarter to seven in the morning. I was sleeping in the ground floor bedroom in our Hooghly house. It was still a bit too early for me to wake up, but my grandma and the maid were up and about for quite some time.

I was drifting in and out of sleep. It was that state of sleep where your senses take inputs from the outside world, and your brain tries to accommodate those inputs into a dream. In my case, I heard someone shouting something about the pond water. A very prominent sound that I heard was a dog yelping… no, whining or crying would be a better word. I can’t describe that sound now, but I felt that the dog was very scared. There was sound of water, and I heard my grandma shouting that she hadn’t seen anything like that in her life. Somehow I was sure that a dog, probably a puppy had fallen into the pond behind our house and it was crying as it was unable to get out. All the people were shouting about that. Then my grandma told the maid to wake me up as I should also see such a thing. There was a banging on the door and I jumped out of bed and opened the door.

There was no dog anywhere. My grandma told me to go and see the enormous waves that were rising and falling in the pond. I rushed out to the garden. My first impression was that the water was receding from the end next to our garden. Frogs, snakes and crabs that were taken by surprise and left high and dry tried to clamber down to the water level again. And then the water came back with a sudden force and jumped around three feet high. The poor creatures were again carried back higher than ever. But the intensity of the waves was decreasing, and they soon subsided. I heard that before I woke up there were waves around five feet high. Strange thing is, I was the first person to suggest that it was an earthquake. A little later we heard on the news that slight tremors were recorded in Chennai and Bhubaneswar. There was no damage to life and property.

Hooghly is a town full of ponds and when I went out to the market after some time, I saw that all the ponds had been stirred up. It was easy to see that, as the floating weeds and water hyacinth had broken up their smooth cover and lay in tatters across the surface of the ponds. People said that in some ponds the fish had jumped out on the streets. Some self-declared experts were explaining, “It’s not an earthquake, you know! It’s a waterquake. It occurs very rarely. Old Mr. Ray of our colony had witnessed another one in his childhood.” I didn’t say anything. A small Japanese word had come into my memory. I had read it for the first time in a short story in our class sixth literature book. It was a story where a village chief in a small Japanese island had seen the sea receding from his house atop a hill and set his granary on fire so that the villagers would come rushing to put it out and would thus be out of harm’s way when the sea returned with a renewed force. I didn’t know that foreign word was going to be a part of everyone’s vocabulary in another hour or so.

Tsunami.

The rest, as they say, is history.

And yes, I forgot all about the dog. It was our neighbours’ Alsatian Poppy. He cried for a few minutes when the actual earthquake hit, although nobody else felt anything. I heard him in my sleep, but other people were too concerned about the pond to hear.

Friday, December 22, 2006

Merry Christmas

Christmas always brings back memories of home with it. Christmas was never exactly 'celebrated' at my home, but there was a definite feel of festival time. For one thing, it came about midway through our month long winter vacations in Allahabad. Anybody who has spent a winter in North India knows that a holiday is nothing short of a festival, especially if you have to cycle to school at seven in the morning on working days. Then usually we were at Hooghly during this time, or at Salt Lake with my maternal relatives. That also meant a lot of enjoyment.

Sometimes we chose this day (or another day in the same week, what's in a date?) for a picnic. If in Salt Lake, the likely destinations would be the Alipore zoo or the Jheel Meel. The Jheel Meel had not become the 'Nicco Park' yet and so it was not crowded all the time. If in Hooghly, the likely destinations were the Bandel Church and Imambara. In some of the years my great-uncle would visit us from Delhi with his family. He made elaborate plans like hiring and entire ferry for our extended joint family and going for a cruise up the Hooghly River. The kind of fun that we had on these trips is really indescribable.

As we grew older and our school studies became much more important, I spent quite a few Christmases in Allahabad. Christmas in Allahabad meant more or less staying indoors as the dense fog gave it a feel of a white Christmas. If the weather was sunny we would go out in the afternoon, maybe to a park, or to see the Kumbh Mela preparations if it was the Mela year. My mother would probably bake a cake just for the fun of calling it a Christmas cake. She bakes cakes from time to time anyway.

One thing without which my Christmas would never be complete is the voice of Jim Reeves. Just as it was my job to fix up the radio before Durga Puja so that we could listen to Mahalaya, similarly it was my job to fix up our old Philips record player so that we could listen to the LP "Twelve Songs of Christmas" by Jim Reeves. During my engineering days in Kolkata, I would spend the evenings with the FM radio in hope of catching "Dear Senor Santa Claus" or "A Merry Christmas Polka" in Jim Reeve's booming baritone.

The record player has outlived its time. But last year I hunted out a CD collection of Jim Reeves' Christmas songs, so I won't have to live without those songs. And now, as I type this blog post in office, those songs are playing in my headphones.

This Christmas is going to be a bit boring probably, with most of my friends having left for their homes. I don't have any plans for the next three days. My boss wanted me to come and work here, but I lied that I'm going to Bangalore for three days. I worked on the Rakhi holiday, I worked on Dussehra/ Gandhi Jayanti. At least I'm not going to work on Christmas. Half the fun of Christmas, that is the cold weather, is not available here in Hyderabad. I'm not letting go of the other half, the holiday, so easily.

I wish my readers a very Merry Christmas. Enjoy your holidays!

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Of Quizzes, Spies and Buddha Statues

“The 6th Nizam of Hyderabad, Mahbub Ali Khan, bought the Jacob diamond around 1887. It has a rectangular cushion-cut with 58 facets, measures 39.5 mm long, 29.25 mm wide and 22.5 mm deep. The diamond weighs around 184 carats. What use was this diamond later put to?”

I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw this question on the screen at the quiz I participated in yesterday. It was odd facing this question barely a couple of weeks after I blogged about this very diamond and the use it was put to. The team that was asked this question didn't know the answer of course, and it came to us.
But this was not the only time we were lucky yesterday. Just before the quiz as I was telling my friend Abhijit that the latest James Bond uses all Sony gadgets, he replied, "And Don uses all Motorola". Later we did get a question where a Motorola phone, a stylish car and a painting were shown and we were told to find out the connection. I almost blindly said that the connection was the recent movie "Don" (as I haven't seen the movie), and it was the right answer. Several other guesses fell into place and Lo! We were the winners! Now only if the luck stays with us till the Finals in February... well, one of my long-cherished dreams can be fulfilled.
Click to enlarge
And talking of James Bond, I saw Casino Royale on Sunday and simply loved it. Daniel Craig is definitely not as good looking as Pierce Brosnan, but he is handsome in a different way. In fact, he reminded me of my favourite Bond Sean Connery more than any of the other Bonds (Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan) that I have seen. The movie is different in a number of ways, which includes the credit sequence. The beautifully animated sequence does not contain dancing girls like the older movies but is entirely made up of playing cards, the four suits, fractal patterns and silhouette figures fighting in red and black.
I also visited the Buddha statue in the middle of the Hussain Sagar Lake that same evening. It was beautifully lit by floodlights and looked greenish in colour. Previously, I could only see the statue from the shore; I never knew it had such a beautifully carved base as well.
The last week was horrible with respect to workload. I returned home after 10:00 PM almost every night. Hopefully there will be some respite this week, and consequently, my next post will follow soon.

Friday, December 08, 2006

The Festival of Faith

Do you know what faith is? Do you have any idea what people can do for their faith? I thought I did, until I was proven wrong by an event I witnessed in 2001.

I'm not talking about 9/11. I'm talking about the Kumbh Mela at Allahabad - the largest gathering of people in the world.

Visualise people around 70 years old, making overnight journeys on open goods train carriages in January in North India, wearing minimum or no warm clothing for the simple reason that they can't afford them. After they reach Allahabad, they will have to walk 6 km to the Mela grounds, then another 8 odd to reach the Ganga, carrying sacks full of firewood and a few edibles on their heads. There, in the early hours of morning in that chilly, windy riverbank, they take a dip in the Ganga to wash away their sins. Then they spend a night or two on the sandy river bed, lighting a small fire and cooking something to eat, before returning to their homes all over India again the next day.

Not a few people. Not a few dozen. Not even a few hundred or thousand. They come in crores. Most of them can't read or write. Many of them live in villages where there's no television or electricity. Who informs them? Who tells them the route? Who gives them the courage and confidence to come to an unknown city far away from their homes spending a large portion of their savings? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do know one thing: faith can do wonders.

But the Kumbh Mela is not just a festival of faith; it’s a management marvel as well. It’s an event of astronomical proportions, something that would make an Olympic Games or World Cup hosting look like child’s play. And this last sentence was not an exaggeration. To understand how, read on.

Allahabad is a city with a population of about 10 lakhs (one million) situated at the confluence of the rivers Ganga and Yamuna. The Yamuna is a 1 km wide river with a stable course round the year. However, the Ganga occupies a 4.5 km wide bed in the rainy season and dries up to a narrower stretch of water during the drier months. The exact position of this stretch of water in the vast sandy riverbed varies from year to year and cannot be predicted until the water subsides in late October. After the water recedes, the Mela preparations begin on the drying riverbed: preparations to build a temporary city with a population of around 50 lakhs (5 million), and the potential to hold around 2.5 crores (25 million) of people for a day. A city built in just over two months, yet having most modern facilities like electricity, telephone, Internet, fully equipped hospitals, a fire service. You name a thing and it’s there.

This beautiful satellite photo I found on WikiPedia shows the result. In 2001, this temporary city (Kumbh Nagari, as it is called in Hindi) consisted of 77 km of roads made up of chequered steel plates (each of these heavy plates has to be laid by 12 people), 150 km of electrical lines strung over 70,000 poles, 80,000 telephone connections, 1100 fire hydrants, 26 deep tube wells and a hospital with 100 beds and telemedicine facility. 15 floating pontoon bridges were made- 13 over the Ganga and 2 over the Yamuna. Apart from this there were shops (selling everything from trinkets to tractors), public toilets, air-conditioned tent-hotels, petrol pumps and a state-of-the-art media centre with a round the clock satellite link for press briefings. Hundreds of small makeshift toilets and dustbins were installed all over the city of Allahabad. The roads were repaired and lighting improved. About 50 lakh (5 million) people stayed here for just over a month, from mid-January to mid-February. On particularly auspicious days, the number of people in the city reached crores, crossing 2.5 crores (25 million) on Mauni Amavasya, the day most special for a holy dip. The total number of people bathing in the rivers during this time was over 7.5 crores (75 million). These photos were taken by my father on some of the ‘less crowded’ days of the Mela. (Click on them to enlarge)
People who have not witnessed this crowd will have some problem visualizing these figures. Just as a comparison, the total population of Australia is 20.7 million and that of United Kingdom is 60.2 million. Managing such a crowd is not easy, especially when most of them are illiterate village folk. On an average, 50,000 people lost themselves each day. Among them are old people who are unable to remember anything, children who are too young to name their parents, handicapped and retarded people who can’t speak at all. Then there are people who have come from far corners of India and don’t know a word of Hindi or English, and scores of people who have the same name. But everyone finds their relatives in the end.

While handling such a crowd, there is always a fear of stampede. In addition to that there was the added threat of terrorist activity in 2001 and 20,000 policemen had been brought from all over India to maintain law and order. Special commandos, ‘spotters’ (people who can see through disguise of terrorists) and sharp shooters were brought from the army to stop terrorists. Surveillance cameras were installed all over the city and the Kumbh Nagari and helicopters were often seen hovering overhead. Contrary to what we urban people might think, the rural population of India is extremely well-behaved, honest, obedient and disciplined and so law and order problems are quite unheard of. Last time the death toll was about 70, all natural deaths. 70 people dying out of 70 million in one month… that’s way below the normal rate.

On the Mauni Amavasya day, the people were made to walk over a long road bridge right across the river bed to the far bank, and then back over the riverbed to the river. This lengthening of route reduced the chance of stampede. Traffic restrictions were placed all over the city. We saw people going to bathe from our terrace (we are fortunate enough to have a house just next to the beginning of the aforementioned road bridge) and again, it is a crowd only seen to be believed. For a period of around 18 hours, we could see a steady unidirectional stream of people walking, and the surface of the road (which is the GT road by the way, and not some narrow lane) was not visible at all. NGOs organized camps to distribute free food to these people during that whole month.

The Kumbh Mela is a pilgrimage for the Hindus. But people from all over the world come to take a dip here. I have known Sikhs, Christians and Muslims bathing in the Sangam during this time. It’s the common thread of faith that unites them all. When you take a stroll around the Mela grounds in the evenings, the sound of hymns pouring out of tents all around, the smoke of wood fires, and the throng of pilgrims all around creates a magical atmosphere. People who stay there believe that they wash away their sins by spending a month there. At some places you’ll see small sand castle like things made on the riverbed. Those are made by people who have no house. It’s their way of asking mother Ganga for a house, in the next life in not in this one. If you want to see what India is really like, visit the Kumbh Mela once. I guarantee, you will want to revisit it the next time.

The Kumbh Mela takes place after every twelve years. Six years after the Kumbh there is a smaller version called the Ardha Kumbh. That will be held in January 2007. I’m booking my ticket to Allahabad. Are you?

Thundering Typhoons!!!

This is more of a warning to anybody who chances upon this blog than a proper post. You can call it a private rant if you wish. Just needed a way to vent my frustration.

Do not buy anything from Jaikishan Brothers, Mumbai. They are a bunch of thieves, thugs, pirates, ectoplasms, troglodytes, a bagful of bearded baboons, a plateful of periplanata americana.

They sold me this Sony MemoryStick Pro™ for my digital camera in January 2006 with one year warranty, and now when I go to change it because it is malfunctioning they spin up all kinds of stories. Some of them are worth hearing:
  1. Why did you bring it so late? Because, you nincompoops, it stopped functioning just now. And what do you mean by 'late' when I have a warranty for one year?
  2. It is physically damaged. It must have been opened. We can't replace that. A very good story, you could get that published. It has been opened along with your skulls and the material taken out from the insides of both. I don't see any difference in my Memory Stick and a new one apart from the normal wear and tear that results from ten moths of use. If it's damaged you must have sold it like that.
  3. Our shop's management has changed and we won't take any responsibility for anything the older owner has sold you. OK, that's a nice way of saying, "We will rob you in broad daylight, let's see what you can do about it."

To borrow a quote from someone (Mark Twain?), "Some people are alive only because it is illegal to kill them."

Anyway, here's a detailed address of the shop in case some guy wants to Google for this shop and find out stuff.

Jaikishan Brothers

Mobile Phones, Accessories & Photo Stores

191, Dr. D. N. Road, Ground Floor, Opposite Central Bank of India,

Fort, Mumbai - 400 001

Tel: 22678263, 22678264. Fax: 22625781

Thursday, November 30, 2006

Shifting Base

This is my last blog written from my present residence. I am moving to a new flat on Saturday. I have been staying here since September 2005 and I'm in love with this place. However, the owner has almost doubled the rent, so I have no other option left.

Also, my new flat will not have an Internet connection. My present service provider Airtel said they 'do not have connectivity' in that particular building, which is actually visible from my current flat. I thought that was the most hilarious thing that they could say to a customer. I was wrong. When I asked the executives of Hutch about the tariffs for connecting to the Internet using my cell phone, they gave me an estimate which is a little over Rs. 50000 per month for 1 GB data transfer. No, it's not a typo- it's actually rupees fifty thousand only. Any standard broadband connection here costs around Rs. 600 for 1 GB, and those are much faster than the mobile phone thing, so I assume that Hutch people are actually encouraging users to go to their competitors. So nice of them.

Not that I can't survive without the Internet at home. I don't believe in getting too used to anything, especially as I spend much of the day at office where I have a dedicated Internet connection at my disposal. But two things are going to be difficult.

Firstly, blogging. Previously, almost all of my blog posts were written at home. Now I'll have to post blogs from the office. Also, since I won't have any way to carry any typed material from home to the office, I'll have to type the posts there as well. Well, that's going to reduce the monotony of the typical weekday at work, but the frequency of posts may go down. Secondly, I will have to find out a way of transferring the photos that I take with my digital camera to the outside world. In the worst case I'll have to visit a cybercafe from time to time.

I must end this post here, for I have to go and pack my things. The last weekend was spent mostly in hunting for a flat, and this one will go in shifting. I have a hell lot of things for a bachelor too! So goodbye for now.

Sunday, November 26, 2006

Diamonds are forever

Went to the Salar Jung Museum for fifth time yesterday and visited the Nizam's jewelry exhibition for the first time. It was stunning. There’s really no point in writing what the jewelry was like: most of it was, well… ugly.

Surprised? Let me explain. Imagine a glittering diamond the size of a green pea. Now imagine fifty of them set on a single ornament. Now imagine as many sparkling rubies or emeralds of similar size set on the same ornament. Finally, imagine a few more precious things… say fifty pearls larger than green peas set on it. Any guesses for what this thing was used for? It is an anklet, which means it would have been worn in such a way that probably it wouldn’t even be seen.

Coming back to the looks, it looks cluttered all right, maybe even ugly. But ‘awe’ is the only word that describes my emotion on seeing them. I mean just imagine! A single toe ring costs more than what I can ever dream to earn in my whole life. And I’m sure they look bad only because our tastes are developed by European teaching. Europeans never knew such wealth (the British stole the Koh-i-noor from India, remember?), so they developed notions like a single diamond looks good on a pendant. It’s a case of the sour grapes probably.

But apart from these ornaments, I saw something else at this exhibition that took my breath away. It is a diamond. The Jacob Diamond, the 20th largest diamond in the world. It was mined in South Africa and cut in Europe. It is much larger than the famous Koh-i-noor which, incidentally, was mined near Hyderabad. Here’s an extract of what Wikipedia has to say about it:

“The Jacob Diamond is a large diamond, believed to be the same stone as the Victoria Diamond, formerly owned by the Nizam of Hyderabad and currently owned by the government of India. It has a rectangular cushion-cut diamond with 58 facets, measures 39.5 mm long, 29.25 mm wide and 22.5 mm deep. The diamond weighs 184.5 carats (36.90 g). The 6th Nizam of Hyderabad, Mahbub Ali Khan, bought the Jacob diamond around 1887. The Government of India purchased the diamond, along with other treasures of the Nizam, in 1995. Current market value of the diamond is about 400 crores (4 billion) Rupees which is roughly equivalent to 80+ million USD.”

You can read more about this diamond here.

It was kept in a black velvet showcase all by itself, mounted on a little rotating stand and illuminated by white light. The slowly rotating stone broke up the light into small coloured spots that danced around it. I was mesmerized. I was frightened. The diamond was almost beckoning me to break the glass and steal it. Although the armed guards prevented me from doing any such thing, yesterday I realized why there are so many murders in the history of such diamonds. It is nothing strange that men would kill to possess a stone like this. Also, it is quite expected that myths will surround such stones, myths that state that the gem is unlucky for the owner. Indeed, how can such a thing be lucky for the owner if he is likely to be murdered or get bankrupted for it?

What is odd, however, is the fact that the man who owned this particular diamond used it as a paperweight. Truth really is often stranger than fiction.

Friday, November 17, 2006

Minnie

My friend Bhavana keeps asking me to write a love story on my blog. I have put it off till now, saying I don’t have any such thing worth writing in my life, and I can’t write made up stories. But today I’m going to write about someone who loved me more than she loved herself. An unconditional kind of love. As long as she was in my life, she was my best friend. Her name was Minnie.

We met for the first time on a cold foggy winter morning in Allahabad; probably in late November, or in December… who remembers now? It was a long time ago: I was still in school. It was a holiday for me, my sister and my father. We had just settled down to a warm cup of coffee when we heard a squeak from outside our front door. I opened the door and went out, and there they were, sitting on our doormat. Two tiny mongrel puppies probably only a few days old. Chasing them away was difficult, for they had not yet learnt to be afraid of the usual threats from humans. They returned the next day, and again the next. Their mother was old and sick and had short legs due to a congenital defect not uncommon in Indian street dogs. She lived in the lane next to our house. We felt sorry for the pups and took bits of stale bread from my mother to feed them. Next day we found our milkman pouring a little milk on the ground outside our gate for them to lap up. Soon, they were bigger, stronger and faster. We used to blow an old dog whistle that we had while feeding them, and they quickly learnt that it was the dinner bell.

They also learnt to be afraid of us. Not the really-scared kind of afraid, but the curiosity-mixed-with-awe kind of afraid that children feel when their parents tell them that a house is haunted. They came to our verandah, and gave little barks, and ran away just outside the gate when we came out. Our gate had gaps that were large enough for them to pass. One of them was plain brown coloured. He used to wander away from his mother and explore the locality. One day he vanished and never returned. We believed that he had found an owner. The other one was ugly brown mottled with black stripes. She used to stay close to her mom and was friendlier towards us. The kids of our colony named her Minnie, and her mom Molly.

All through the winter they kept visiting our house and our bond grew stronger. I still remember the day when Minnie first let us touch her. As long as I and my sister patted her on the head she enjoyed it. As soon as we stopped she ran outside the gate, as if she had done something forbidden. No, she was not soft and cuddly like the puppies you see on TV; she was hard and bony to touch, and her coat was quite rough and full of ticks.

As winter turned to summer, Minnie and Molly started spending more and more time in our house. Minnie had grown quite a bit by this time, and was proving to be more like a pig in a dog skin rather than a true dog. She was one of the ugliest looking dogs I’ve ever seen, and her habits weren’t helping to improve her image. Allahabad summers can be harsh, and Minnie’s way of dealing with it was first dipping herself into the drain by the roadside so that she was covered in black mud, then climbing up onto our verandah and lying down in the shade. There she dried her mud and it fell down as dust all over the floor. Naturally, this routine was repeated everyday just after our cleaning was finished. Sometimes our wet garden soil would become her bed. And we would have a hard time getting her out of there. She would pretend to be asleep, and continue to do so even if I moved around her paws and tried to pull her up. If I parted her eyelids with my fingers, it would become obvious that she was awake and she would quickly shut them tightly again. She usually didn’t mind our scolding, though we had reason to believe that she understood every single word.

Once I opened an umbrella in front of her face. That scared and insulted her so much that she went down the steps and lay down in the hot sun to show off her anger. The ground was very hot and she kept fidgeting. My sister tried to coax her back onto the verandah, and as she was climbing back up, I remarked, “Huh, she has to come back here, doesn’t she? She can show off her anger but she has no other place to go!” Oddly, she heard that and quickly went back down the steps and into the sun again. She went away a little later, probably to her mom. However, her anger never lasted long, and all differences were forgotten by the next meal time. As I blew the whistle, she would run to our gate and, as if to remind us of her insult a little while ago, would sit down outside with her back to us. Then we would have to go and cuddle her and scratch her head and back and tummy and she would be happy to come and eat again.

Summer progressed. Minnie and Molly spent more time on our verandah now. We did not want them to become dependent on us, because it would be difficult for them when we went away on vacation. Due to some reason, the other dogs of the colony did not like them and fought with them. But teaching Minnie to survive alone was a pain now. Anyone who has seen the movie “Born Free” will understand what I mean. She was becoming more and more attached to us. Somehow miraculously, she could still pass through a gap in the gate that seemed way too narrow for her. Molly could not enter unless we opened the gate and let her in, so she used to come and knock at the gate. We usually turned them out at night after dinner, but on some nights they stayed inside. Once or twice they tried to come inside the front door, but we never encouraged that.

Though short and old, Molly was very beautiful and we jokingly said that she must have had a Welsh corgi parent. Another puzzling thing was that while I tried to teach Minnie to ‘shake hand’ with us in vain, Molly promptly lifted her paw the first time I stretched out my hand to her, without any training. She used to bark at visitors and chase away cows from in front of our gate. Not so with Minnie, whose only jobs were eating, sleeping and whining in complaint if she didn’t like her food. They were sitting on our verandah when we left for Hooghly in our summer vacations. We later heard that they had been sitting there all through the vacations, guarding our house. A rod had broken off our gate so that even Molly could enter freely now.

I could go on and on with this story, for I vividly remember each little incident. But that would serve no purpose. This story has an abrupt end and let me come to that ending quickly.

When we returned from Hooghly, we found that they had left our colony. They had gone to live at a place about half a kilometre away. The first time I met them by accident there, and they acted literally like mad dogs. I particularly remember Minnie standing up on her hind legs with her front paws on my waist, and rubbing her head on my T shirt. She always behaved like this when they met anyone from our house there, and the other people around used to get scared thinking that we were being attacked by mad dogs. They sometimes accompanied us to our house and stayed for a couple of days before returning to their new den.

One day we did not see Molly any more. Minnie became alone. We used to meet her while going to the market, and sometimes we carried biscuits for her. If my mom cooked something good, she asked me to go and call Minnie. She used to come with me, but some time later, she stopped entering our house. Even if she did, she did not like us closing the gate. She had undergone a change. She sometimes used to come by herself in the evenings, and sit outside our gate, as if to tell us, “See, I’ve become independent now. I don’t need you anymore.” My mother was alarmed at this change. “Don’t touch her,” she told me one day, “she may have become mad”. I went to have a closer look at Minnie. She had become even thinner. As I went and stood beside her, she lay down on her back, lifted her paws into the air and waited for me to caress her. I knew instantly that no matter however much Minnie changed, she will always love and trust me as before.

Then one day Minnie disappeared. We couldn’t find her in any of her previous locations. I used the dog whistle to call her, but to no avail. We never saw her again. She could have been run over by a car, or fallen into the big open drain nearby, or killed by other dogs, or simply died of starvation or disease.

Or she may be still alive in some other locality where we didn’t search, hopefully with better owners than us, who can keep her well fed and inside their house.

Friday, November 10, 2006

Music to my ears

I love work; it fascinates me; I can sit and watch it for hours.

~ Jerome K. Jerome

I love that quote; it fascinates me. It fascinates me because it applies to me. It not only applies to me in case of work but for a lot of other things as well. I love cricket, soccer, tennis, carom, chess, acting, dancing, singing, playing musical instruments. All of them fascinate me while I sit and watch/ listen to them for hours. But when it comes to doing any of them, I'm a big failure.

Take music for example. I simply can't live without it. Living without breakfast is no problem, but a day without music? That's unthinkable. However, nobody can claim to have heard me singing outside my bathroom. The only musical instrument I ever tried playing seriously (if you don't count a tiny electronic instrument called a 'mini piano' that I had) was my mouth organ, and although many people play it with ease, I never got a tune out of it. But ask anybody in my office, and they will tell you that they see me wearing headphones whole day. My PC definitely contains more GBs in the form of songs than in the form of work-related data. When I was in Chennai for two months, I became so desperate that I used to listen to Tamil songs on radio in the night.

Which brings us to the question at hand: which songs do I listen to most? When Bidisha tagged me with this question, I started thinking. I play a wide variety of songs- Bangla, Hindi and English. Some of them are old, some are new, some all time favourites, and some only popular because of the latest hit at the box office. Most often I mix them up in a single long playlist, start it and forget about it. Should I give a list of the songs that I have played most number of times in my life? Or should I come up with the songs played most frequently in the last one month? I finally combined these options, and here they are, in no particular order. The ten twenty of my most played tracks, which I love to hear repeatedly, sometimes even in a loop. I have been playing some of them for the last few years, others I have come across only recently but have played them innumerable times. Note that it does not necessarily mean that these are my twenty favourite songs. Debabrata Biswas's "Akash bhara surjya tara" or "Purano sei diner katha" would have topped the list in that case. It merely indicates that these are my favourites among the songs that I have on my PC.

  • Bhalobaasi Bhalobaasi ~ Indrani Sen
  • My Favourite Things ~ Julie Andrews (The Sound of Music)
  • Annie's Song ~ John Denver
  • Krishnokoli Ami Tarei Boli ~ Suchitra Mitra
  • Aanewala Pal ~ Kishore Kumaar (Golmaal)
  • Abak Prithibi ~ Hemanta Mukherjee
  • Ami Chini Go Chini Tomaare ~ Kishore Kumar (Charulata) [Along with the video]
  • Shukno Patar Nupur Paye ~ Feroza Begum
  • Hotel California ~ Eagles
  • Country Roads Take Me Home ~ John Denver
  • Summer Of 69 ~ Bryan Adams
  • Aha Aaji E Basante ~ Indrani Sen.
  • Aye Mere Watan Ke Logon ~ Lata Mangeshkar
  • Radha Kaise Na Jale ~ Asha Bhosle (Lagaan)
  • My Heart Will Go On ~ Celine Dion (Titanic)
  • Memories Are Made Of This ~ Jim Reeves
  • Phoolon Ke Rang Se ~ Kishore Kumar (Prem Pujari)
  • Tomake Chai ~ Suman Chatterjee
  • Salil Chowdhury Hits - Soft Instrumentals ~ Tabun
  • Western Classical Tracks ~ Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Bach etc.

Whew! That was a lot of work! The last two are not single tracks though, but then, I play all of them together. Out of these, “Krishnokoli” is the only track that I couldn’t find on my hard disk. I probably deleted it by accident. But I have included it here because it was with me till recently and I used to play it a lot. And I realized that I have very little choice in Rabindrasangeet here… actually I left some of the CDs back at home last time. Also, there are way too many Kishore Kumar songs that I love. Selecting some of them was really very difficult.

I pass on this tag to Crys, Awry, Kaddu and KM (if they wish to take it up) and any of my readers who might wish to do it.

Among other things, I designed a new banner for the top panel of this blog. It shows the new cable stayed bridge over the Yamuna in Allahabad on the left, and the Allahabad Cathedral on the right. This is the first banner made entirely from photos taken by me. All the previous ones contained at least one downloaded image. More new banners will be coming soon, and if everything goes as planned, a slight change in the tagline of my blog will follow. But that’s not happening till much later, say early next year.

Till then, life remains the same old joyful experience- from Hooghly to Hyderabad.

Monday, November 06, 2006

A visit to Chitrakoot

Chitrakoot is a quiet little town on the UP-MP border about 115 km from Allahabad. Surrounded by forests and small hills, the place does not have anything of much interest other than temples. Ram, Lakshman and Sita supposedly visited this place during their exile and spent eleven years here. Because of this, Chitrakoot has become sort of a little pilgrimage place among the Hindus. However, when we went there during my recent vacation, I was more interested in seeing a new place rather than doing pilgrimage.
We reached there by a hired Maruti Omni in the morning, around eleven. We checked in at the UP Tourism guest house. After relaxing for some time we had a delicious lunch and then went out for sight seeing.
The car set out through the forest covered hillocks towards the places of interest. At a fork in the road, our driver said he wanted to go to Sati Anasuya and be back before darkness, so we chose the road that went there. That road was narrow and serpentine, with cliffs on both sides at some places and forest at others. Our driver drove like crazy, and soon we started feeling that we were riding a sine curve. At one moment our stomach would be pulled downwards with a jolt, and the next moment we would be falling down a slope. After quite a bit of this roller coaster ride, we reached the Sati Anasuya Temple on the bank of a small little river called the Mandakini. There was little water in the river; whatever there was, was stagnant and covered in algae. There were oddly shaped boulders on the bank and in the water. The temple itself was partly cut into the near-vertical cliff face that rose straight up from the riverside road. We spent some time there, took a few photos and left. There were hordes of monkeys all over the place and on returning to our car we found dusty footprints inside. Our driver confirmed that they had raided our car in search of eatables.
After another crazy drive through the woods, and we were back at the fork. Now took the other road which was mostly through fields. Our driver said that he had been driving so fast before because that other road was full of bandits! They often stop cars and kidnap people for ransom in broad daylight.
Next we visited Gupt Godavari which is actually a cave temple. There are two caves: one which contains a temple, and the other which contains an underground river. As we entered the first cave, we suddenly felt warm and realized how terribly damp the inside was. The rocky walls were strange; they showed vertical marks as if cut away with enormous electric saws. The inside was quite well lit. After we came out of the cave, the “Memory Stick Pro™” of my digital camera failed, taking all my photos with it. Anyway, I still had the good old internal memory to take photos with. We entered the second cave now. This one has a tiny river flowing through it. Actually you can see it outside, and then it suddenly disappears. The water was ankle deep near the entrance of the cave, but rose almost up to the knees inside. It was crystal clear, though, and this cave was also quite well lit with big lamps like the first one. The barefoot walk over the rock-and-sand bottom in this cold water felt delightful. At one point on looking up we saw hundreds of bats hanging upside down from the ceiling of the cave.
Bats in the cave
Next stop was Sphatik Shila, again on the riverbank. Here there’s probably a rock that bears something like Lord Ram’s footprint. We did not climb up to see that as there were too many monkeys around that place, and they were not looking too friendly. We went to the Tulsidas temple after that. The decoration inside this temple is done with bits of glass. From here one can have a nice view of the river.
Finally as evening fell we reached Ram Ghat. This place is like a miniature version of Varanasi, with the continuous steps lining the river and numerous boats lined up along the ghats. The boatmen were tempting us with joyrides on their boats along the river. However, with a river only about three times as wide as the length of the boat, boating hardly makes sense. After sitting on the bank for some time, we returned to the guest house. There were wooden toys being sold in small shops along the ghat. The most remarkable among them were creepy wooden snakes that had most realistic joints all over the body. I cribbed and cried and ultimately made my mother buy one of those for me.
Back at the guest house, dinner was again a most delicious affair. I don’t know from where I had the appetite to eat as much as I did at dinner. Same can be said about the breakfast next morning.
After breakfast next morning our first destination was Hanuman Dhara. This is a temple cut in the rocky face of a hill near its summit. It has to be reached by climbing up 591 steps. The temple contains an idol of Hanuman, the Monkey God, and a small natural mountain spring, or ‘dhara’ next to each other. My parents climbed up only about 200 steps and relaxed on a bench under a tree while I and my sister accompanied Govind Guide --- a boy of about ten with a stick taller than himself who promised to protect us from monkeys and langoors, to the top. He charged five rupees for this, and it was a good thing that we took him along, for the place was almost crawling with monkeys and langoors. They, however, stayed away from his stick. Once inside the temple, our guide took out a small mirror from his pocket and carefully put a vermillion tika on his forehead. While coming down we were accompanied by Govind Guide’s dog Tony (we had a strong suspicion that the name was invented then and there as soon as we asked the dog’s name) who took his share of the fee in the form of sweets from his little master.
Langoors at Hanuman Dhara
Finally we went to the Kamadgiri temple. Pilgrims do a Parikrama, or circumambulation of the hill containing this temple along a path that is over a kilometer long. However, we did not do that. Rather, we returned to the guest house and worshipped our stomachs. Then we set out for Allahabad and reached home before evening in spite of having a tire puncture on the way.
This trip was memorable because of a very special quality that Chitrakoot possesses: in spite of being a pilgrimage town, it has not become an overcrowded, dirty business centre. Not yet. It feels really good to go far from the city crowd and spend a couple of days in a quiet little place like this in the midst of nature. However, things are changing. Although there are still no overenthusiastic pandas and shopkeepers around the temples, there are people collecting money in the name of car parking. Wherever you park your car near a temple, they will come and ask for money with a false receipt book. Then there was the man who blocked our road with his elephant and did not let our car go until my father had put a penny in the pachyderm’s proboscis. (Well, not a penny exactly, a five rupee coin; I said a penny for the sake of alliteration). In the night when we tried to see stars we could hardly see any because of the light pollution.
But still, Chitrakoot is a nice place to go. Even if you are not a religious Hindu, here you can meet the simple village folk, get a taste of the forests of UP and MP, enjoy the pure natural beauty of the Vindhya mountains. I only hope it will stay quiet and serene like this for some time to come.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Why no tail?

"Pokkhiraaj jodi habe, tahole nyaj nei keno?" said a character in the immortal Bengali story Ha-Ja-Ba-Ra-La by Sukumar Ray.

It can be loosely translated as, "If it is a king of birds then why no tail?" (though the word Pokkhiraaj is usually used for 'Pegasus' and not for the more literal 'king of birds')

Well, I was wondering just that after I saw these peacocks. I was walking in the Chandrashekhar Azad Shahid Park in the middle of Allahabad which is locally known as the Company Garden. It is a large park with some wooded regions inside. I heard the characteristic peacock call and soon discovered a few of the birds. At first I thought all were hens, but a closer look revealed that the cocks had no tails.

Were they sick? Had the tails fallen off due to some disease? Or are there people who catch these majestic birds and cut off their tails? Peacock plumes fetch a good price at the market. Or was it possible that only those birds have been offered sanctuary here who had been previously assaulted by plume hunters? I had no way of finding out, but it is indeed a sorry sight to see these proud creatures move around like that, as if the Emperor was wearing his new clothes!

And as if this was not enough, I witnessed even a sadder spectacle. I saw one of the peacocks dance. That wonderful dance that the peacock does with his tail fanned up behind him to impress the peahens. Only here he did not have that tail behind him. See the picture on the left (click to enlarge). It was very far and darkness was approaching, but still, you can make out the peacock dancing. I don't know if the hens were impressed, but I felt sorry for the poor bird.

I wish them a speedy recovery, although I have no idea whatsoever whether such a thing is possible, that is, if peacocks can grow their lost tails back. I hope somebody will take notice of the problem soon. Whether it is a disease or due to illegal feather trade, it needs to be looked into. Our national bird should be able to live with much more dignity in our parks and forests.

Monday, October 30, 2006

The Knight Train

It was the dark, dark night of 27th October 2006 when a dark red WagonR pulled up in front of the Allahabad railway station. Four people alighted from the car and counted their luggage. There were three bags: one heavy suitcase, one large kitbag and an oddly shaped large and bright red polythene shopping bag. It would not have been very difficult for any onlooker to guess that it was a family of four, and they had come to see off the son who was going somewhere with those three baggage items. But onlookers were few, for it was very late. So late that it was actually the early hours of the 28th. None of the people wore any warm clothing, though the air was a bit chilly. That young man, who was traveling by that midnight train (or the Knight Train, as Harry Potter fans would like to say) with one luggage item too many for him to manage, was me.

My father quickly found out that my train, the Patna Secunderabad Thirupati Express was delayed by three hours and was expected sometime around 3:30 am. It was not yet one o’clock. We had two options; either wait there in the station, or go back home and come back at three. However, the railway enquiry had misguided us more than once before (which was the reason why we had not called up railway enquiry but had come directly to the station) and it was too risky to go back. My parents and sister deposited me and my luggage on an iron bench on platform no. 9 (actually between 9 and 10… more like 9¾) and reluctantly left for home.

Now I had the task of spending the night there on that bench, not falling asleep when the train came and protecting my three luggage items from theft, for there were several “highly suspicious” characters sitting around me. Apart from that, I also had to be careful about mosquitoes. With dengue and chikungunya spreading across the country, I couldn’t risk too many bites. Even if I (and the mosquitoes) were to believe the experts that the mosquitoes responsible for spreading these diseases bit only during the day, our good old malaria was always there. It seemed the different species of mosquitoes were working in shifts.

I kept the suitcase on the ground between my legs and the kit bag on my knees. The problem was with the misshapen polythene bag that contained mostly food. I kept it beside the suitcase. Then I realized that this position would ensure the security of my luggage, but expose my feet to the deadliest creature on earth. Apart from that there were large rats roaming around on the platform that didn’t seem too friendly either. If having the food bag stolen was bad, then being bitten by a rabid rat was worse. So I pulled up both my legs on the bench and folded them under me. I took out a steel chain that I was carrying and tied all three bags together and to the bench. But again the food bag posed a problem: it was after all a polythene bag whose handles were tied by a steel chain. A person could very easily cut away the handles and take away the bag if I fell asleep. To prevent this, I put a reminder alarm in my cell phone at 15 minute intervals. This would ensure that I never slept more than 15 minutes at a stretch. It would also ensure that the train wouldn’t come and leave without me.

Just before I started on my first 15 minute snooze, it was announced that the train was delayed by 5 hours and would be here at 5:25 a.m. Then started a series of short naps, punctuated by the ringing of the alarm and my hurried switching it off, and dozing off until the next one rang. The people around me weren’t too happy about this periodic beeping in the middle of the night, though. While nobody told me anything on my face, it was evident from their irritated murmurs that they disapproved of my methods. Some time later I had to take out my half sweater and put it on.

Anyway, the night passed quicker than I had expected, probably because I was longing for each of my 15-minute sleep periods to last longer. In the meantime the train’s delay had increased by half an hour more. As dawn broke around me, the platform became more and more crowded. The sun emerged as a beautiful orange disk from behind a mess of overhead wires. 5:55 came and went. The announcements pretended that train number 7092 didn’t exist. Finally the train came at 6:30. It left one hour later, at 7:30. Almost everybody, including me, immediately went to sleep, waking up after several hours. I came to know much later that a bag was stolen from the family in the seats next to mine during this time, most probably when the train had stopped in Satna. This bag had their cell phone, camera, wristwatch, and ATM cards.

The 27 hour journey to Secunderabad was more or less uneventful. There was a girl about the same age as me on the seat above and we started talking. It turned out that she passed ICSE/ISC in the same year as I did from another school in Allahabad and we shared several common friends. It’s such a small world after all.

The person with whom I was supposed to share my RAC berth never turned up and I had it to myself. My misshapen food packet (whose size steadily decreased) was a pain while sleeping, but otherwise all was fine. The train finally pulled into Secunderabad at 10:30 am on the 29th. Although I had spent most of the time in the train sleeping, I still slept for almost whole of the rest of the day on reaching home. Ah yes, I almost forgot to write, I had the usual fight with the auto driver while coming home this time too.

And I think I should mention that my holidays were fabulous. I spent such a long time with my family for the first time after June-July 2005. We also visited Chitrakoot. My aunt had come with her family and we enjoyed every moment of it. Thanks to all my readers for their wishes. I'll be writing more about my experiences soon.

[After staying up till 3:oo last night and typing this all up I found that blogger stopped responding in my house. So I had to mail it to myself and publish from office.]

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Out of blogger on Diwali

I am out of blogger for a few days as I am visiting my family in Allahabad for two weeks. I will resume blogging as soon as I find time.

In the meantime I wish all my readers a very Happy Diwali and Ramzan.

Thursday, October 12, 2006

The Palm Tree


The Palm Tree
~Rabindranath Tagore

The palm tree:  on one leg stands tall
            Towering above all
                  Peering into the sky.
In his mind,    black clouds he wants to sever
            Fly away forever-
                  But he hasn't wings to fly.
.

That's why,     at the top of his head
            In his leaves rounded
                  His wish he unfolds.
Imagines,       his wings are they,
            No ban on flying away,
                  Leaving his household.
.

Whole day,      with rustling sound
            The leaves sway around
                  He's flying, he feels-
In his mind    The sky he treads
            The stars he evades
                  As if going somewhere else.
.

At Last        when the wind dies out,
            Leaves stop swaying about,
                  His mind turns back to look-
As he thinks:   the soil is his mom,
            He likes again his home
                  The Earth's cozy nook.






(Translated by me. Went crazy trying to format the text as the original poem. Ultimately could format but the font had to be changed... and had to put dots for inserting blank lines between stanzas. I'll keep trying.)

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Misc.

This post is titled Misc. That is because it contains all kinds of junk, much like the 'Misc' folder on my hard disk that contains just about any kind of stuff.
Hardly had the Puja nostalgia left me when this problem came up at work... I'm not really in a frame of mind to write. Not that I don't have time. On the contrary, since the last one week I have all the time in the world, but I can't think of anything to write.
Since my team's work came to a standstill last Wednesday, I have been facing many odd situations; situations out of Wodehouse stories. For instance, on Wednesday my boss left at 2:00 pm and dropped me home on the way. On Thursday my boss came asking to me for games... she wanted some computer games so that she could pass her time. On Friday, as soon as the clock struck 6:00 she came to my seat and shoo'd me out. "Why, it's six, and you are still sitting here on a Friday? Go home and enjoy!" I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming, since the same boss had made me stay till 10:00 pm on Tuesday.
But this lack of work is not funny. It signifies a three month delay in the ending of my project, and the plan that I had made for getting transferred to Kolkata is ruined. I am still trying to salvage it, and will keep trying, but I don't see much hope. I could rant about this for long, specifically mentioning the worthless people responsible for this, but that would be against the "Blogging Policy" of my company. So I stop here.
Coming back to my plight, this has happened with me throughout my school/college life. Before the exams, I'd be so sleepy that I would never be able to study at night. The day exams ended, it would be hard to go to sleep. Likewise, when I had blog post subjects left and right, I hardly had enough time to sleep. Now, when I'm swimming in time, I can't think of a topic.
So without beating about the same bush again and again, let me post a few funny signs that I came across here in Hyderabad.
Came across this one in HITEC City... probably a mechanic and puncture repairman sits under this. While the sign itself is quite creative, unfortunately the same can be said about the spelling.

This one on a juice seller's shop in Madhapur. You have to accept one thing: the guy's pretty consistent about his spelling.

Then there is this one. Now don't ask me how or why a "Desine Studio" can be named "Since.....". Just sit back and enjoy.

Found this one in a Durga Puja Pandal. Is that really a new word in the dictionary or just an old one that I am unaware of? Unlike the other signs, this one must have been written by a literate person.

But the first prize goes to...
This sign stands at the top of Golkonda fort. It is really amazing. Every time I read it I find something new!
That's all for now. I hope to be back with a proper post soon.

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Durga Puja Memories

Boss: Are you going somewhere over the weekend? Why can't you come and work then?

Colleague1: Why are you cribbing over not being able to go home? And isn’t Durga Puja still far away ?(said on the Panchami day)

Colleague2: Why are you wearing a new shirt?

What should I answer to these people? How can I explain what Durga Puja means to me? How can a person who has never lived in Bengal understand what it feels to be away from home on DurgaPuja?

For me, Durga Puja isn’t just a festival that has to be experienced by going to the pandals and looking at the idols. It is something that is much bigger, something that surrounds us all the time. One fine day, you wake up in the morning and feel that the sunlight streaming through your window smells of Puja. Suddenly one night in September you’ll feel chilly, and you’ll think, “Oh, the Puja is early this year, so it’s getting cold.” You see tiny green insects with black rear ends jumping under the light, and you realise that Puja is coming. The days are not ordinary any more. The presence of Ma Durga can be felt on earth. I and my sister used to point at the white clouds in the blue sky, and say, “That one looks like a lion, and there’s an elephant’s head.” It was fun discovering divine shapes in the clouds. And if it was a year when we had planned to visit Hooghly, we would start counting the days left for the trip.

I have spent most of my childhood in Allahabad where Durga Puja, though celebrated, is a festival of the Bengalis. There even Dussehra loses out in show to Diwali, the festival of lights. The changes that I mentioned occur there too. Why, they can be felt even down here in Hyderabad. But they are like rainless clouds, like all smoke and no fire. To feel the real Puja one has to go to Bengal. The Puja magic would intensify from Mahalaya. I would take out my old little radio and put in new batteries. The program would be broadcast in Hindi in Allahabad, and much of it would be lost in sleep. However, that’s the real fun of Mahishasur Mardini… you don’t enjoy it as much if you are wide awake.

The next few days would be spent in packing, and finally we would land up in Hooghly on the Chaturthi or Panchami day. The idol has already arrived in our colony pandel by then. I and my sister would go and watch people give finishing touches to the decoration. It would always seem that so much work could never be finished in a day, but they would always manage it in time. The two of us would have serious fights over the Pujabarshiki Anandamela (the Puja-special annual issue of a popular children’s magazine). And yes, I almost forgot the new clothes! Our relatives would give us new clothes that we would wear during the Puja. A new set each day. The best would be reserved for the Ashtami evening.

My father’s house is in Hooghly, and my mother’s house is in Salt Lake. So we would spend the Puja half here and half there. Usually the Shashthi-Saptami in Salt Lake, and Ashtami-Nabami in Hooghly. Then back to Salt Lake a day after Bijoya Dashami and before returning to Allahabad. We would walk around from pandel to pandel, keeping a count of how many we saw. In fact it was a competition with my sister, and whoever saw more idols won. I liked Hooghly more, simply because there you could see more idols on foot. In Hooghly the Pujas are close together. In Salt Lake there is only one Puja per block, and one can’t see too much on foot. Traveling by a taxi or rickshaw somehow didn’t give the same feeling. Once we hired a car and traveled all over Kolkata, visiting all the major Pujas. But it was tiring. Some were memorable, but some places were too crowded. In some places the pomp and show was so much that Ma Durga seemed alien.

In Hooghly we mostly traveled on foot. Sometimes with my cousins and aunt, sometimes with my parents. When we were younger my cousin and I burst “caps” in tin pistols. I was never the brave type, and so when I burst a cap the pistol was held as far from my body as humanly possible, and I usually looked the other way. But chickening out was unthinkable. When we grew up sometimes my cousin and I pandel-hopped by ourselves, or sometimes I’d have to play the grown up and escort my younger sister and cousin brother. I loved to walk along the road beside the Hooghly river, there’s a pandel every few steps. There were glamorous pujas here too; they made pandels that looked like anything from a ruined temple to the White House. They made non-conventional idols that were depicted in unusual poses. Sometimes their clothes and jewelry were also earthen, fixed to their body. They looked pretty, but then I saw that to keep the idol intact and to make the puja easier the actual puja was being done on a smaller idol kept in front. That reduced my liking to a large extent, for what was the use of making artistic idols if you worship another one? It’s not Ma Durga, it’s just another statue! The kind of idol that I like most is the traditional yellow bodied idol with large eyes, and pith decoration (daaker saaj). The idol near the haat (marketplace) used to be like that every year. And the Puja lighting needs a special mention, though to do it justice I should write another post describing it. The past year's principal events were shown in animated form through the lights in the big pandels. I’ve heard that Christmas lighting in Paris is very beautiful. I have seen photos of that. In my opinion, it comes nowhere near Kolkata lighting during Durga Puja.

Our colony Puja is very much like a home Puja. Everything is handled by the colony people. The work progresses very much like when there’s a function at home (I believe that is the case for any colony Puja). The flowers for Ma durga go from our gardens, the work is done by us. We, the colony people supply the cassettes that are played on the loudspeakers. Some kid is handed the mike and asked to make announcements,

Omuk barir kakima, apni apnar bado thalata niye chole asun, amader proyojon ache. Tomuk barir didu, apni chatpat asun, bhog rannar samay hoye gechhe. Edike amader handi bhanga competition kichhukkhoner modhyei shuru hobe. Jara angshogrohon korte ichchhuk tara chat pat chole eso.

[Lost in translation: It's a call to different people of the colony, by their names, to bring things needed at the Pandel. Also, an announcement is made about the pot-breaking competion starting soon.]

Then we would have the running commentary of the handi bhanga competition on mike by a slightly older guy. It is a game where a blindfolded person is told to walk a little and then break an earthen pot with a stick. Most people fail, of course, and end up doing hilarious things. Reproduction of that commentary here is beyond my literary abilities, I hope you have understood the situation well enough to imagine what it is like. In the evening the kids and not-so-kids would be told to perform on a stage in front of the idol. Extempore. We would see nice song, dance and poetry recitation performances.

One of the most eagerly awaited things about Durga Puja is the sound of dhaak. A dhaak is a large drum that is hung on the player’s body and played in a particular rhythm during the Puja. Again, it’s not just another musical instrument. It creates magic in the air. The atmosphere created during arati is truly electric, with the incense fumes and dhaak sound shutting out everything else from the mind.

On Nabami we would have bhog in our pandal. That is, we would eat prasad for lunch, sitting in front of Ma Durga. On Dashami we would go to my uncle’s house in Chinsurah, the neighbouring town to Hooghly. There we would spend whole day with my cousins. The house next door is owned by the Adhyas. They hold a Puja in their household that is centuries old. Their idol is different, here Ma Durga isn’t fighting the demon. She’s visiting her father’s house with her husband Shiva and children Ganesha, Kartik, Lakshmi and Saraswati. The traditional idol is lovely (see photo). In the evening, the idols are carried out of the house one by one and arranged outside. It feels like some dear one is leaving from our house, as if their bags are being packed, everyone is running in and out, and is checking and re checking if everything has been taken. Finally She’s carried to the river to be immersed, on men’s shoulders, as was the custom in the olden days. I feel a lump in my throat. Another year before I see Her again. That is the strange thing about Durga Puja; it is four days long, which is longer than most festivals, but it still seems too short. Probably that is because we don’t see it as a festival. Suppose your mother stayed away from you and she visited you once a year for four days. Would you feel that was long enough?

After the Adhyas’ idol was carried away, our Bijoya used to start. We went to the relatives’ and neighbours’ houses and touched the feet of the elders, and got nice things to eat in return. The same thing happened once we went to Salt Lake, and a third time in Allahabad.

Today is Nabami. Another Puja is almost over. I tried to enjoy it here in Hyderabad, but that’s really not possible. I should have understood that last year. For one thing, Puja pandels are hard to come by. Then the people you see there are more interested in bragging about their children’s achievements than anything else. Young people are either discussing their job related technical stuff (much of this population works in the IT Industry like me) or filming their family in front of the idol with handycams. In both the pandels that I visited, there was a stall put up by a matrimonial site that arranges marriages for NRIs. Obviously, they expect to do good business by advertising there.


Do blog about it…”, said Greatbong, who prefers to ignore the Puja to prevent feeling depressed. I couldn’t. With so many fond memories associated with this festival, I simply couldn’t write a sad post about how miserable Durga Puja feels here in Hyderabad. So I ended up sharing my happier memories of earlier Pujas spent in Bengal.

Monday, September 25, 2006

Am I losing my sanity?

Am I seeing things?

It was expected that I would be tired after working throughout Saturday and Sunday from morning to night. But this much? Is this the beginning of madness? What happened to the rat?

Let me clarify a bit.

Yesterday morning, I noticed something in one of the windows of my flat overlooking the balcony. It was something stuck in the very corner of the window frame, just next to the net. It was outside the net, and so it was not clearly visible from inside.

My first reaction was to turn away. I thought it must be a cleaning cloth put there by the maid. I was getting late for office. But it started gnawing at the back of my mind... the shape of that thing seemed vaguely familiar. Finally curiosity got the better of me. I went out on the balcony to look at it from the other side.

It was a large rat. A large brown hairy rat. I couldn’t see its face as it was facing the corner. It seemed lifeless. There was a bald patch near its head which made me think that it was already decomposing. I had never seen such a large rat from so close before.

I went back inside and prodded it from the inside through the net. It didn’t move. I came out again and started thinking about the next course of action. Who will remove it? I thought if I should pick it up by the tail and throw it away, but I kept aside that idea as the last resort. I took my nose close to the rat and sniffed (Yes! I actually did that). I did not smell a rat. That meant it was still fresh. Probably the watchman wouldn’t disagree to throw it away for me. Besides, I was getting late. On a holiday probably, I would have taken a photo of that rat (now I wish I had). But yesterday I didn’t have time for that, so I got ready for office. While leaving, I went to look for the watchman. He and his whole family had vanished without a trace. I waited a little for them, and then left for office.

When I came back in the night, before I went up to my flat, I had to explain to the watchman’s family what I required. The watchman was absent, and I had a tough time explaining to his family about the dead rat. These people can speak and understand Hindi perfectly when they are discussing something about their salary. At all other times, they speak only Telugu and understand little else. After much explanation, they understood. They thought it was very funny, and assured me that the rat would be removed this morning.

When I came up to my flat, I peeked at the window again. And lo! The rat had vanished! I looked carefully all around. Not even a single hair remained to assure me that it had existed before. The position of the rat was such that it is not probable that a crow came and took it away. Then? Was it a figment of my imagination? Too much of finding bugs at work makes me find bugs (okay, a rat is not a bug, but it’s a pest anyway) at home too? Or was it just a lazy rat with a sleeping habit like Kumbhakarna? I wish I knew.

There are other strange things happening too, like when I woke up this morning, my spectacles were lying on the floor mat. I keep them beside my pillow when I sleep, on the side opposite to the floor. But I must think of one problem at a time.

So I must solve the mystery of the missing mouse first.

Friday, September 15, 2006

Revisiting Hyderabad

Exactly one year has passed since the day when I came to this city. I stayed here all the time except for a few brief visits here and there. So why this "revisiting" thing? Actually my sister visited me in Hyderabad this week, and I traveled with her all over the city again. My one year’s worth of sightseeing (and more) condensed into four days. I even saw things which I had not seen before. Since we IT professionals here live mostly in a shell, working throughout the week and too tired to go out if we have no work on weekends, it seemed as if I was living in a separate world within Hyderabad. A world where we only know about software and coding and testing and projects. It was nice to visit the other Hyderabad for these four days.

And we saw a lot. I took my sister to Hussain Sagar, to the multimedia laser show in Lumbini Park, to Salar Jung and Charminar. When I had visited Salar Jung the first time, one year ago, I had formed this desire of revisiting it with my art-loving sister. Finally it was fulfilled. The laser show was something that I too saw for the first time. It was a nice new experience. We visited Birla Mandir in the afternoon, when the stone floor felt like an enormous frying pan to our bare feet. It was a memorable experience no doubt, but one that I would rather not have again. We visited Hitec City, which is very close to my apartment. We also saw Superman Returns in IMAX 3D. This was the first time that I saw a (partly) 3D movie in the IMAX. While the movie as a whole was not really up to my expectations, the special effects and the 3D scenes were good enough. After that we strolled along the necklace road, while munching on roasted maize and looking at distant lightning over the lake.

But the best part of our sightseeing was the visit to Golkonda fort on the last day. I had visited Golkonda once before, but did not have the time to climb all the way to the top. This time we went right up to the Baradari, 373 stone steps above the ground. The view of the city and the setting sun from the top was more than worth the climb. Then we spent an hour in the glorious past of Golkonda by watching the sound and light show before returning home.

These four days were remarkable, for although we were traveling from morning to night (and much of the time on foot), instead of getting tired I got wonderfully refreshed. And along with that, I rediscovered Hyderabad. I found that Hyderabad is not all Cyberabad. There is a part of the city that lies quite oblivious to the IT boom. There is the 440 year old Hussain Sagar, calm and serene as the Buddha statue in its middle. There is the Salar Jung, with its timeless treasures. There is the Charminar and the bangle market under it, exactly like that from times immemorial. And then there is Golkonda, where time has stopped moving long ago. We only need to open our eyes and see. We only need to spend some time to understand our history.

In the last one year, I went to Mumbai and Pune, just for traveling. But after this “revisit” to Hyderabad, I realized that I have much to see here. To quote Rabindranath Tagore:

Bohu din dhore, bohu krosh dure,
bohu byay kori, bohu desh ghure,
Dekhite giyachhi parbotmala, dekhite giyachhi sindhu,
Dekha hoy nai chokkhu meliya,
Ghar hote shudhu dui pa feliya,
Ekti dhaner shisher upore ekti shishir bindu.

Which can be roughly translated as:

I traveled miles, for many a year,
I spent a lot in lands afar,
I’ve gone to see the mountains, the oceans I’ve been to view.
But I haven’t seen with these eyes
Just two steps from my home lies
On a sheaf of paddy grain, a glistening drop of dew.

I’m not going to leave Hyderabad before I’m done with all the dewdrops around this place. There’s lot more to see. I have wasted the last one year, but I’ll not waste the next.