Monthly Archives: June 2010
Haiku:: Fish Stew
Plinky.com, a site intending to pull befuddled bloggers out of the whirlpool of writer’s block, asked me to compose a Haiku on the last meal I ate. This is a classic example of why you shouldn’t force yourself to do anything, much less write Haiku for the first time.
The fish immersed,
in a gravy of pulses,
it was disgusting.
The Birds, The Bees and The Boys
A day must have come in the lives of every individual out there, wherein he/she, a tiny tot, upon witnessing a humongous belly leading a mother or an aunt or some arbitrary lady, enquired, “Why is Mom/ she so fat?”
It came in my life too. The woman in question was my Aunt.
The Grown-ups in the hall sat still, shocked at my innocuous indecency. Uncle rose up from his seat, smiling embarrassedly, while Aunt looked at me in the same loving manner. Uncle shuffled a bit before replying, “Your Aunt is gonna have a baby! You will have a cousin to play with!”
The Grown-ups looked at each other and smiled, admiring inwardly the stately knowledge and cognizance of Uncle who looked rather pleased with himself. What better way than to have shown an over-inquisitive brat a mental picture of a new playmate, with the intention of shutting any query regarding the obvious?
They must have thought.
There is a preface in every NCERT book conceivable which has been written by Gandhi, in which he exhorts us to have a Scientific Mind, and not to accept anything blindly. Therefore it was entirely Gandhi’s fault when I asked the next question,
“How did he get in there?”
Uncle’s mouth drooped. Grown-ups murmured something about lunch and started dispersing. Meanwhile Deep, the would-be brother of the to-be playmate (who turned out to be a girl), entered and mentioned catching a snail somewhere, which we later broke, dissected and examined. Grown-ups were saved that day.
I didn’t venture to ask any more questions anytime soon. Their cautious behaviour made it veritable; children are not supposed to ask how babies get inside mothers, even thinking about it is diabolic.
It was hard though, not to think about it. The psyche of a child is uncontrollable. He ponders over wonders in the most gruesome manner. Ideas ranged from how some angel came, ripped apart her stomach and put the baby inside to how she must have performed penance to Lord Shiva and got the child after years of Ghor Tapasya (Yes, I was a Mahabharata buff as well). I was sure there was some magic involved, which only the Grown-ups could perform and couldn’t confide in a child about it, as it would subject them into eternal damnation.
Atiesh, a friend of mine, startled me one day. “What’s the matter with you?”
“What do you mean?” said I, jerking into my senses.
“You sit here during lunch time mulling over something which you won’t tell us. You have dark circles under your eyes. You won’t even share Maggi with us anymore.”
“Oh I am sorry.” Said I, handing over my entire lunch box to him. He sad on my desk, stuffing himself with a mouthful of Maggi.
“You-wonna- dalk –abot-id?” asked he.
“Its’ probably nothing man. I am just confused.” And then I told him about the problem plaguing me for so long.
He gulped and stared. “Me too!”
And 3 people in my vicinity voiced their ignorance as well. Everybody agreed it wasn’t something you could discuss in the public, with the girls as well as with Grown-ups. We adjourned the meeting with the end of the lunch break, pledging that whoever comes to know about the secret will share the fruits of his knowledge with the rest of the group.
The first real clue I received was through some 1950’s classic being beamed on Doordarshan. A man was trying to force himself on some woman, who kept yelling “Bachao Bachao!”. The strange thing was the man wasn’t trying to hit her. It was then I realised that he was trying to put a baby inside her. The lady was shouting in distress because it was obviously a painful procedure.
I told of my findings to the group. They seemed pleased with the progress, until someone said, “But where do we get the babies from?”
Nevertheless, we kept the quest alive. I, for some reason inexplicable, knew that the only information I could procure would be from Indian films, and for this sole reason I now would be glued to the television every weekend. The next big hint came soon enough.
A couple gets married. During suhag raat they sleep together side by side, and on subsequent days too. 3-4 days pass and Voila!! A screaming offspring is being rocked to sleep by a doting parent.
The group took this finding very seriously.
“So all we have to do is sleep with a girl next to us.”
“That’s right” Said I.
“Gross.”
“I know. But you can sleep alone after having a baby. It is like a necessary evil.”
“How come the earlier woman was screaming then?” asked Atiesh.
“The procedure is painful only if the man is not married to the woman.”
“Still doesn’t make sense. There has to be some exchange you know? Something we give to them…”
We ruminated over it. The next day a member came back with scintillating news.
“They KISS! Oh, how could we have missed that! They exchange saliva! The man’s saliva goes in to her stomach where a baby is born, which then comes out of the anus.”
For a moment we all were too disgusted to reply.
“Making a baby is grosser than I imagined.” remarked Atiesh.
“This doesn’t feel right. If it was so gross, nobody would even make a baby. We have to find a more credible source…”
I knew where the credible source was at home. The Oxford Encyclopaedia New Edition.
I opened the page discretely, checking around for the presence of Pater or Mater. My heart throbbed with the ominous premonition of being caught red handed. Pater I knew was in the bathroom, Mater in the kitchen. My fingers shivered with ill-concealed anticipation as I read the words Sex and Reproduction in bold.
The next one hour was dedicated to enlightenment. And to adapt to the fact that girls didn’t have a penis.
“They don’t have a PENIS?”
Atiesh’s eyes were two saucers of disbelief. The others possibly thought I had gone daft. But they couldn’t argue. I had thrown at them words like ‘sperm’, ‘ejaculation’ and ‘orgasm’ earlier. A guy who could throw those many words without stuttering was a man to be shown respect.
“It has become grosser than we started. I can hardly touch any girl at the spot where they piss from.” a member contemplated aloud.
“All for the greater good my friend, the survival of mankind.” I patted his shoulder.
“That means..that…oh my God…” said one of the members, giving every indication of having an epileptic seizure. We gave him water. A minute passed before he could speak again.
“Our parents…”
That took us longer to adjust to. It was just hard to figure as it felt so wrong. We, the members of our secret group, thought we carried a disease. It was during this time that the proverb “Ignorance is bliss” made its meaning clear.
I never got a ‘Bees and Birds’ talk from my parents. The school took care of it. They hauled off the boys to the auditorium, where the Principal awaited our arrival. By now, in the 7th grade, all of us knew what sex was. Somewhere in the proceedings I saw Atiesh from a distance. He had been shifted to another class as a result of the annual allotment of classes to the children. We hadn’t conversed much since.
He turned to look at me just as Principal Ma’am said, “…today we shall learn about Sex and Reproduction…”
I could have sworn we both winked at the same time.
Macho* Man(ia)
This memoir dates back to the second year of cramming for IITJEE, transporting me to a place colloquially called the Rajdhani. Rajdhani has several things to boast about. The one I shall be alluding to is the bitchy winter.
The 12th standard in the life of your average IIT aspirant is excruciating to say the least. Cram at school, cram at hostel. Have dinner, cram more. Take a shit, cram more. A better idea, of course, would be to wait until morning to perform lavation along with your ablutions, in which case your dailycramming routine gets augmented by an awesome 10 minutes. Khidki Hostel had only a handful who struck to this regime. That handful lived below the top floor.
We, the group of 12thies on the top floor, were known for our warden defying, lock-smashing, CCTV camera shattering ways (lemme assure you, nothing was unprovoked) apart from academics. Every couple of hours of mugging would be accompanied by an act of defiance against the warden, either by creating a pandemonium or abstract art on the walls of the building.
November was the onset of some phenomenon really weird.
Chinka, my roomie, had earlier attended some godforsaken boys’ school in Darjeeling, the same one, he claimed, as in the backdrop of Main hu Naa. He also had with him a true incident to recount of that period, involving Amrita Rao and Zayed Khan. This is what happened.
(Scene:- Both of them huddled within a blanket before a fire, staring at the boo’ful mountains.)
Amrita Rao: The weather is so erotic, no?
Zayed Khan (rumour had it that he was educated in some godforsaken school in Dehradun): Erotic?
Amrita Rao: Ya? No?
Zayed Khan: I think what you mean here is erratic…
Amrita Rao: Ya, ya, that only…
Anyways the annotation regarding Chinka was to illuminate the fact to readers that he was the only one in the hostel with a 6-pack, and he worked out everyday to retain it. Some months earlier had seen the movie Om Shanti Om being released to the unassuming Indians, which had gone on to be a major hit, leaving me flabbergasted. People were talking Punarjanam and Picchle Janam ka Pratishodh all over again. On top of it all, a 40 year old Buzurg mocked the younger generation, preening with all the 6 pack abs in tow.
Maybe the aforementioned, or the need to be the same among ranks, or some delirious thought involving acceleration in the process of getting a girlfriend, but the inmates of the 4th floor started working out, all of them.
6 am in the morning I would witness Rishabh Mota bouncing 2 millimetres up and down on the tip of his toes with his flaccid arms flailing on either side, trying, maybe, to envisage himself skipping in the 4th dimension. It really complicated matters for us, for now he had started shedding copious amounts of sweat, and with his existing habit of not having a bath every week he had started stinking more so than before.
Shukla and Sentiman had similar workout patterns. They both hanged out. They would be seen suspended from the door sill absolutely still, in order to strengthen their fore-arms and shoulders, no different from a Vampire bat.
I took every advantage of a fitness trainer as a roomie. He taught me how to do the calisthenics, then push-ups, crunches, and the others among gym jargon. Soon I could do 60+ crunches unabated.
We begun organising tournaments: ‘The Most Push-ups’, ‘Maximum number of Crunches’ et cetera. It had started affecting our daily study routine. The times of ingestion of food would see the gluttonous wretches wolfing down large amounts of the same food we would cringe from a few days earlier.
Abhishekh Agarwal aka Hillu (nickname arose from the way he kept nodding his head in acquiescence whenever some doubt was being explained to him. It could easily have been ‘Noddy’, but it wasn’t indigenous enough. Another peculiarity he exhibited was the repetition of any word, phrase or sentence 3 times exactly) had been a victim of this pandemic, much earlier than any of us. Daily work out was steadily reducing his character to that of a narcissist. He would saunter up to anyone of us and then, hoisting his shirt above his chest, ask us to ‘feel’ him. Shukla, the un-straight one, would oblige only too heartily.
That fateful day we met after dinner.
He was coming along that corridor, that country bumpkin smile plastered on his face. It was too late to turn back. He saw me and immediately made his way over.
“Hey Biswas, you know what? I am making abs, abs, abs!!”
“Why, that is so wonderful!” I slapped him on his arm jovially.
“Ohh yes. It is very hard. Not my penis, my stomach I mean. Ha Ha ha!!” He looked down at me in anticipation of an acknowledgment of his joke, which I was too stingy to give.
“I heard you were doing crunches too? They told me you did 75 nonstop the other day?”
I gave him a modest, crooked smile. “Well, yeah…78 actua…”
“Hey, you know what? Punch me in the stomach.”
“What?”
“Trust me. Go on and hit me.”
I did, swinging my fist forth in an extremely good imitation of a right hook.
His smile didn’t falter. And I wasn’t ready for his malice.
“My turn.”
And before I knew it I was bent double, wheezing and spluttering. Out of the haze came a train of words, “You aren’t working out hard enough. You should be more determined. Anyways I gotta go. Bye!”
Even the ‘MaCho*’ came out in laboured wisps of air, barely perceptible to my own ears…
_____________________________________
As I later found out, the spectacle had been witnessed by everyone in the floor. And just as suddenly it had sparked off, the fitness fever within everyone died down. Nobody did anything other than cramming, barring Shukla who would try to grope Hillu any chance he got.
In retrospect, who cares about abs? I got through JEE. 
Kehlaaya Wo:: Shaktimaan!
Adbhut, Adamya Sahas ki Paribhasha hai,
Ye mitati Manavta ki Asha hai!!
Stand aside for the India’s own ass-kicking, villain-incinerating, criminal-whupping superhero with a paunch…
Shaktimaan!!
Created and played by Mukesh Khanna, the TV programme Shaktimaan went on to be a grand success with the Indian Junta, what with tiny children leaping off skyscrapers, slitting wrists and shooting themselves in the eye with arrows yelling, “Shaktimaan, mujhe bachaooo!!” which led to the producers including that small disclaimer in the beginning, the one that goes like, “Is dharaavahik ke sabhi kirdar kalpanik hai…”
Shaktimaan’s alter ego, Pandit Gangadhar Vidyadhar Mayadhar Omkarnath Shastri works as a photographer in a newspaper Aaj ki Awaaz, somewhat like the Daily Planet (Sounds familiar? No?). His muse is Geeta Biswas (not my relative) who is a news reporter for the same newspaper, somewhat like Lois Lane (Now does it sound familiar? Still no?). In the course of the program Geeta comes to know about Gangadhar’s real identity (Now? No? Pathetic. Go read some Superman comics and come back.)
Shaktimaan gets his power from the Five elements of the Universe:-Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Sky and from penance of 7 gurus of Suryanshi, a sect that follows the Sun. The antagonist in the series is Tamraj Kilwish, who is a former sage-gone-bad. He derives power from the Pap-Punj (which also happens to be Shaktimaan’s Kryptonite) and the wrongdoings of the plebeian.
For a boy who grew without proper television hours for the better part of his life, I would, as a child in my 1st grade, be jumping with unhindered anticipation when the title track would blare through the radio speakers. Each dialogue, each composition of creepy music acknowledging those one liners, would be imprinted in my mind for the entire week. Imagery after the other would be embellished with phantasmagoria born from day dreaming as well as those action-packed, testosterone-driven nocturnal reveries. Sometimes I would forget about the presence of any corporeality, imagining myself to have mastered the all my Chakras and the god-knows-what-they-are Kundalinis and feel awesome about my newly acquired apparent super powers.
The TV was finally turned on in my 3rd grade (just the Doordarshan though, which was better than nothing). I and my kid brother suddenly had a fucking good life. Our imagination had a bad guy in flesh and blood to brood about, and not a wraith which we would conjure up from mere descriptions. Sometimes we would have an argument over who had it in him for being the real, raw Shaktiman, which would be settled with a wrestling match.
As it would turn out, I was the real Shaktimaan!
The cable TV ultimately came to my rescue in the 7th grade. It was as if the gates of a dam to an over-filled reservoir were finally opened. Now it was all Schwarzenneger, Van Damme, Jackie Chan and others. Shaktimaan gradually phased out until one day, when I accidently stumbled upon Doordarshan while channel surfing and watched 5 minutes of the TV phenomenon that had earlier gripped my very soul. That day Shaktimaan was completely forgotten.
Towards the end of the programme a small segment aimed at ethical development of the quintessential kid of India would be aired. A child, or a group of them, would be perpetrating something gravely wrong. Say, for example, not washing their ears properly. Or eating the larger portion of the cake. Enter Shaktimaan, who would say “Ruko!!” with fucking Authoritah. The child would immediately realise his folly and say, “Sorry Shaktimaan!!” Thereafter Shaktimaan gives a 5 minute lecture on why it’s wrong.
Chhoti Chhoti Magar Moti Batein!!
Boasting of a vast inventory of Super Villians of vile mien, Shaktimaan would, many a times, be pulverised as an outcome of their bad-assery. As much as Shaktiman remains etched in the minds of the discerning viewer, the Villains definitely occupied as much, and in some cases, more space then Shaktiman himself. Their sheer notoriety, individual idiosyncrasies and the uniqueness and intonation of their dialogues made an indelible impression on my mind.
Tamraj Kilvish
Andhera Kayam Rahe Hamesha!!
Tamraj Kilwish, the meanest, maleficent bastard in the series, harried Shaktimaan till the end, sending a battalion of minions from time to time. The face earlier hid within a hood, giving him an aura of animosity and anonymity. The face revealed is no less grotesque, every line, wrinkle, pimple depicting foulness.
Such has been his nefariousness that Daler Mehndi, a completely normal, God fearing singer got inspired by him and as a tribute used the following dance move in Ho Jayegi Balle Balle.
Andhera Kayam
Andhera Kayam with Balle Balle
____________________________
Dr. Jackal (pronounced Jay-call)
Dr. Jackal
Paahhwaahhh!!
Dr. Jackal has been one formidable rival. He cloned Shaktimaan starting with just a strand of his hair, (which FYI, he stole from a research facility that was studying its tensile strength. That single hair lifted a tonne of weight, and the scientists only called it quits for that day because they were tired from lifting all the weight. But I digress.) and used the Bad Shaktimaan to terrorise citizens and be a pain in the ass of Good Shaktimaan. He regularly derives power by saying “Pahwah!” every 5 minutes in the show.
Other loathsome creatures…
Pretoola
Kilvish as Werewolf
Indian Catwoman
Finally, the song that is an integral part of the Indian-ness that we all are an integral part of.
All Hail Shakti-Shakti-Shakti-Maan!!
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Readers' Hypotheses on Mine
AvradeepB on Pray. Love. Eat. NOT. Sourabh Biswas on Pray. Love. Eat. NOT. AvradeepB on Pray. Love. Eat. NOT. Sourabh Biswas on Pray. Love. Eat. NOT. Archika on Pray. Love. Eat. NOT.
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