Annus Horibilis? AGAIN?

Another year nearly done. Hectic revelry will commence soon and run uninterrupted through midnight and into the wee hours of January 1, 2012. There will be much slapping of backs and hugs and handshakes and at least a few drunks well past their imbibing capacity. Yup, it will be a night of partying exactly like many other nights of partying.

There's plenty you really don't want to remember of the past year. Way back in November 1992, dear old Elizabeth II Regina gave the phrase 'Annus Horibilis' popular currency, and not withstanding the evident scatological punning that it continues to attract, every subsequent year has been thus labelled by someone or the other.

Once you set yourself the task of numerating misfortunes, any year should, statistically, expect to have a fair smattering. Just like business budgets, it is always this year that is bedevilled by problems and the next when the sun will shine and the hockey stick will turn upward.

Seen this same script play, again and again ad nauseum.

Live the moment, I say. Forget worrying about the year that lies ahead. A 13 year old child in the neighbourhood lost his life in a stupid motorbike crash early yesterday. Surely he had plans for the night of 31st too? Of course, it isn't imminent mortality that should cause you to live the moment. There are plenty of other good reasons. Starting with this: it is the ONLY moment in which you are actually alive. All the rest is memories and hopes.

So before you head out tonight, listen to Asha's 'Aage bhi jaane na tu, peechhe bhi jaane na tu, Jo bhi hai, bas yahi ik pal hai'.

Joys of Massage

If you have never enjoyed the sense of separation of mind from body that various popular alkaloids have legendary powers of conveying, don't despair.

I'm at the Six Senses Spa at the Heritance Kandalama Hotel (http://www.heritancehotels.com/kandalama/browse.php?catId=42) for a Fusion Massage. The therapies menu describes it as "a combination of therapy techniques from the world's most renowned massage therapies of Swedish, Thai, Aromatherapy and Sports massages". Ms. Sunita is my therapist ('masseur' is probably no longer PC) for the session.

I am instructed to lie, face down, on the massage table. The lights are dimmed, a mild 'aromatherapy' type, rosaceous fragrance is sprayed into the surrounding air, the body is swaddled in soft, deep pile towels and the massage is ready to begin. Already, the pace is beginning to slow, a mellowness beginning to grow.

A hot compress is firmly applied to the base of the feet. The pressure shifts, smoothly, to the legs. The calves are kneaded, then squeezed, rubbed, gently thrummed until the resistance and stiffness start dissolving away. The therapist's expertise is taking charge and the body is succumbing before a higher power.

As the process segues from feet to calves, then knees and thighs, up through the back and neck to the crown of the head, the mind starts to seemingly disconnect from the rigid connection with the body and drift lazily away.

The alchemy is complete.

I am losing my sense of humour

It is the day after Anant Chaturdashi. 

The final Ganpati Visarjan processions wended their way to the seaside all of last night and any attempt at a sustained period of sleep was thwarted by the incessant fireworks. When I start the car, I am able to sense the residual fatigue but duty- daughter’s school trip, calls.

Drive out of the compound, straight into the tonnes of detritus left behind by the celebrating hordes overnight. Litter at a scale which isn’t necessarily hard to imagine in our filthy city but on a truly breathtaking scale. Plastic, paper and food residue left behind by a million callous people tiles the road, without a visible gap to see the cruel joke of macadamised surface beneath.

All to the tune of, “Main karoon to sala, character dheela hai” pumping out of the car’s music system thanks to one of the several, identity-less, puerile FM channels our city is lucky to boast of.

At this point, I could get into a long rant about the pathetic combination of stupidity and arrogance that informs the average driver out on the road all around me – god knows I do it often enough, but that isn’t the point. I actually get upset because my daughter won’t let me change the music to a CD already in the deck. This is new, in a scary and undesirable way. We have always ribbed one-another during these school trips about what she calls, ‘Bad Music Day’, i.e. a day on which we must listen to awful filmy prurience during the trip but today is perhaps the first time that I actually turn it into a serious conversation about musical taste and aesthetic sensibilities.

Surely the child must be permitted her light-hearted fun at my expense? Surely I have been fully up to it all of these years? What is going on?

I must be getting old.

When did Mathematics become a bother for Indian students?

Back when I was in school, Mathematics was one subject everyone delighted in. After all, it was about the only subject which required no mugging and where by ruthless application of quite commonsensical principles it was possible to get every answer correct and thereby max an examination.

Somewhere along the line, things appear to have changed and my children; they aren't alone for this is a common gripe amongst all their cohorts too, are positively terrified of the subject.

What happened? Popular culture, that's what.

Take a look at all the television, film and online content that a typical pre-teen or teen is today exposed to. Originating from, or inspired by America, it contains endless allusions to Mathematics, nearly all of which are negative. Mathematics (I hate the strange American term Math) enthusiasts are nerdy, bespectacled, wimpy social klutzes. Mathematics dislikers on the other hand are macho, cool and effortlessly bully the nerds.

This seems almost trite but do check out the stereotypes with your own kids. 

Ashramas : What do we make of them now?

Vedic thought earmarks a normal human life span into four stages, the Ashramas. Briefly, these are:

i.                     Brahmacharya: Student

ii.                   Grihastha: Householder

iii.                  Vanaprastha: Retiree

iv.                 Sanyas: Ascetic

There must surely exist innumerable treatises on Ashrama Dharma with all the teleological questions it raises and I am scant qualified to attempt something so recondite. However, I have though often about making sense of these stages of life in a contemporary setting.

We can do no more than speculate about the way a neonate perceives and comprehends the world he is born into. It would be reasonable to suggest that as he grows, quite quickly, into infant, then baby, toddler and so on, he progressively widens her understanding and starts sprouting little tendrils of engagement that will strengthen into bonds of relationship with that world.

We will jump, jump cut- if you like cinematic vocabulary, to the other end, when at the end life is extinguished and, in a metaphoric sense, all those bonds that connected the person to the world are irreversibly snapped.

How does the journey play out?

Brahmacharya is Empowerment. Unlike many animal species that are born with a full complement of instinctual capabilities that will progressively express themselves to enable efficient survival, Homo Sapiens needs a supportive and nurturing upbringing before being able to function autonomously. Brahmacharya makes this mandatory. After allowing the first seven years for a carefree childhood and plenty of parental indulgence, the child begins a period of study with a Guru that shall transform the untrained innocent into a competent adult.

Grihastha is Enrichment. The child having grown into a capable adult must now harness her skills to social and economic wealth. ‘Kama’ and ‘Artha’ define this stage of life. ‘Kama’ is aesthetic, sensory pleasure. It is also the obligation to procreate and ensure continuity of the family, and by implication, the community into another generation. ‘Artha’ is economic productivity. It behoves the householder to create wealth and be the provider for the needs of the household. Wealth is not just material possession but also new knowledge created in the pursuit of household responsibility. The Grihastha builds economic and intellectual capital.

Vanaprastha is Repayment. The Grihastha having discharged his obligations to ‘Kama’ and ‘Artha’ must now ensure that the knowledge, the intellectual capital he has acquired is preserved and passed on. The practitioner now becomes the Guru to another generation of Brahmacharis. In so doing, he repays the obligations he acquired as a Shishya in the first Ashrama of his life. The Gurudakshina that the Grihastha parent provides for his Brahmachari child keeps the wheels of the Gurukul running enabling the Vanaprastha Guru to persevere at his job of preserving and enhancing the knowledge of the community by transferring it to a new batch of eager minds.

Sanyas is Renunciation. All worldly duties having been discharged as required by the Ashrama Dharma, the by now aged and frail Vanaprastha can shed all connections to the transient and quotidian and return to a higher pursuit, of the divine and eternal. The Sanyasin is bound by no restraint that the first three Ashramas impose and is free to seek the greatest liberation, from the cyclical law of Karma.

Look at the journey once more. Through childhood and Brahmacharya, the individual is caught up with himself and his own preparation for adult responsibilities that will surely follow. The family and the community expect little from him except dedicated pursuit of education. Graduating into Grihasthashrama, the individual must grow outward to encompass responsibility for his personal and professional ‘family’ in pursuit of the prosperity and continuity of both. At the next stage, the sphere of influence extends even further as the Vanaprastha becomes a guru to youngsters from the entire community expanding beyond the confines of the personal and professional ‘Griha’. At the final stage, though, life comes a full circle and the Sanyasin starts a final journey inward. To discover (or uncover-after all they are always there) great truths that because of their universality may be found in the innermost recesses of the being.

On an entirely prosaic level, the Ashramas also demonstrate great wisdom about social psychology. Before parental indulgence can lead to pampering, the child is sent away to practice the stern austerities of Brahmacharya. When the austere brahmachari could slip into premature Vairagya or disillusionment with worldly matters, Grihasthashrama beckons and brings with it the earthly delights of Kama and Artha. These indulgences are not permitted to overpower and corrupt the grihastha as he is conscious of his future responsibilities as a vanaprastha. Only at the very last stage do all fetters, quite appropriately, fall away.

Vanaprastha Ashrama deserves a little more attention, particularly in its relevance to contemporary times. Whatever profession we choose becomes our personal Lakshmi, the bestower of tangible and intellectual wealth. While we may enjoy the tangible fruit, it is incumbent upon us to share, and thereby multiply, the intellectual capital we accumulate. Strengthening our industry bodies by active participation, talking to students of all ages, particularly those who wish to pursue the same profession, taking on pro-bono roles in professional development organisations; all these are excellent options for people at the peak of their careers. Regrettably, very few step up to these responsibilities and risk destroying the intellectual capital that they have so assiduously accumulated through their working years.

It appears that ancient seers everywhere had similar insight. Look at what the very first book of the Bible, Genesis 9:7 exhorts the people of the Book, “And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein”. What a wonderful way to summarise the responsibilities of Grihastha and Vanaprastha Ashramas in just a single sentence.

Your best charitable contribution will replenish itself.

Last week I spotted a tweet Looking for donors of any blood group to provide replenishment blood to the TATA Memorial Hospital blood bank for a Cancer patient currently undergoing treatment there.
The tweet mentioned a phone number which I called. The lady Asked me to come to the hospital the next day where she would meet me so that the blood bank could be provided details of the patient concerned.
At the appointed time, I reached the blood bank and contacted the lady. Instead of waiting for her to arrive, I went through the short and painless process, to which I am no stranger, having been a regular donor for the last 10 years.
She had arrived while I was going through the donation and walked up to me soon as e needle came off.
The young lady, just 24, was the patient herself. She is undergoing her second round of chemotherapy. She came down just to thank the stranger who had walked in to Donate on her behalf.
Then as I was walking out of the hospital I saw dozens of patients, their heads having lost hairs under the ravaging effects of chemotherapy, some just toddlers of 2 or 3.
Blood can only be manufactured by one factory, the human body. Thankfully, there are at least 4 billion such factories that are old and fit enough to share some of their production, and days after they've shared it, it will replenish itself, with no residual I'll effect.
Go on, become a blood donor. There are thousands out there who need you to.

Macaroni with Fennel, Pancetta and Mushrooms

Over the last ten years, a few vegetable stalls in different fresh produce markets across Mumbai (and every other major metropolis in our India that is Bharat) have begun sourcing and stocking ‘foreign’ ingredients. Ranging from herbs- if you sing parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, they will offer you all four; to fruit- kiwi, dragon fruit, rambutan

Rambutan

, Granny Smith apples, Thai sweet tamarind; through vegetables specific to cuisines- Thai brinjal, galangal, basil, kaffir lime, kaffir lime leaves; Pakchoy and Inoki Mushrooms for those keen on the Orient; or cherry tomatoes, new potatoes, assorted mushrooms, wide range of lettuce, arugula (rocket) if you are planning on cooking European style.
A conspicuous absentee in this delightful and distinguished line-up, at least for me, was the fragrant white bulb of the herb Foeniculum Vulgare, the fennel

Fennel bulb

. It is

scarcely foreign. No Indian home will be complete without fennel seed: saunf, to be used by turns as post-meal mouth freshener, cooking ingredient (for instance as one of Bengal’s Paanch Foran) or home remedy, particularly for disorderly stomachs. And yet. Having enjoyed its sweet, aromatic character in soups, sauces and salads while travelling in foreign parts, and more recently even in Swadesh, I’d long hoped for a chance to experiment with it at home. Which finally happened yesterday at a wonderful new food shop in Parel’s Palladium Mall.

The protagonist having been identified, a quick casting call around the refrigerator and the provisions cupboard brought together the supporting cast and we were ready to roll. Without further ado, here’s the recipe that emerged:
Preparation time: 20 minutes (but I’m slow and you might get it done quicker)
Cooking time: 20 minutes (I try to slow cook everything)
Ingredients:
Fennel: 1 large bulb (trim and retain a fourth of the shoots too)
Pancetta (or other spicy Italian sausage, I just had this at home): 100 g

(Shakaharis will evidently leave this out and could consider adding a ½ tsp each of ground nutmeg, cinnamon and clove to add back some spice and body)
Mushrooms: 200 g (I had a fresh mushroom packet but you can reconstitute and equivalent quantity of mixed wild mushrooms and will be rewarded with more taste+ the water you reconstitute them in works very well as stock)
Spinach- good old Palak is perfect: 1 bunch
Onions: 2-3 medium sized
Garlic: I used half a medium sized bulb but this is a matter of taste
Chicken or veg stock: 2 cups (but feel free just to use hot water, the ingredients are flavourful enough even without this)
Oil: I keep looking for interesting olive oils and this recipe used a Portuguese Extra-Virgin but I would as happily use a refined sunflower or kardi or rice bran oil too
Chop onion. Crush garlic. I do not chop garlic. Somehow, a bit of pounding in the mortar and pestle gets the essential oils of this bulb flowing like chopping never can. When I’m lazy, which is most times, I don’t even bother to peel it. The bulb goes in, chhilka and all. Trust me, no one will know in the end. Finely chop fennel bulb and about 6 inches of the lovely green shoots attached. Slice mushrooms vertically. This is really a matter of the visual aesthetics. I just like mushrooms look mushroom shaped in the finished prep but if you want to cube them, be my guest. Never, EVER julienne a mushroom. You want it show up as a taste bomb in every other morsel, not become a part of the cosmic background radiation. Finely chop pancetta. I sliced it and then cut it up with kitchen scissors. Tear the palak leaves by hand just removing the hard, whitish stalks at the bottom.
Put big pot of salted water to boil for the pasta. Time to start on the sauce on the other burner. Use a heavy bottomed, lidded deep pan. Pour in a generous splash of oil and immediately add the crushed garlic. Stir until the garlic just begins to sputter. Toss in the chopped pancetta and, about a minute later, the onion. Cover and let rest for a 2-3 minutes. Good quality non-stick heavy bottomed pans will ensure the ingredients don’t stick and burn, just start cooking nicely. When the onion turns kind of translucent, add the fennel and about a half of its chopped shoots. The rest will be required later. Give the whole lot a vigorous stirring and cover. When you uncover the next time, your kitchen should be filled with a blast of richly aromatic steam that will announce your plans to the gharbaar and get their salivary glands firing. By now your cook-pot water should be boiling and you need to drop the pasta in- you know the drill. Now add the ‘shrooms, which will cook in another 3-4 minutes. Now pour in stock, or plain old hot water. Another couple minutes and toss in the spinach. The idea is for it just to wilt into the sauce and this will take no more than 2 minutes, after all by this time, sauce is boiling and bubbling enough to please the most fussy witch from Macbeth or Hogwarts.
Drain pasta preserving half a cup of water to add to sauce if it has thickened too much. Place in serving dish, then pour over your fragrant sauce. Dress with sprinkling of fennel shoot and as much grated Parmesan as you dare. Buon appetito!

Courage? Or cowardice?

As an émigré into Bangalore, you are advised that the city works on the creed “Adjust Madi” : please adjust. You will, it suggests, face various inconveniences from time to time. It is best in all such situations to make allowances for them and move on. Resistance, as the Borg Queen famously put it in Star Trek, is futile. Of course, while Bangalore actually acknowledges it, is this not true for all of us all over India?

You are denied your space to cross at a designated zebra crossing. You adjust. A chap in the car in front of you opens the door only to explosively discharge a litre of glutinous red tobacco spittle. You adjust. A man, claiming that he is in a hurry, jumps into the queue ahead of you at a Railway Booking Counter. You adjust. The municipal authority digs up every square inch of motorable road and walkable footpath in your city. You adjust. Neighbours in the adjoining bungalow use a high power hose connected directly to the main water supply conduit to wash their car. And the driveway. You adjust.

We all adjust. And move on. After some time, even the bile stops to rise. After all, we are like that only. No?

It is India’s historic genius to be the ultimate assimilative civilization. For countless centuries invading hordes entered this country to plunder her riches and carry them back home. Most times, they never went back. Everybody adjusted and before long, disappeared into the rich broth called India. A new gene pool was added to the melting pot and everyone was the better off for it.

Are these two phenomena equivalent? Do they merely represent aspects of an underlying willingness, even eagerness, to accommodate?

Great civilisations share a common desire to define and codify rules of conduct. The finest go further and identify the ethical principles that underlie such rules. Whether Hammurabi of Babylon or Moses of Canaan, our ancient priest king Manu or Quetzalcoatl of the Aztec pantheon, they all became known as lawgivers, arbiters of right and wrong for their societies. Without exception, all of them demanded that their followers be steadfast in upholding the right, even at cost to their own life and limb. Krishna’s revelation of the Gita to Arjun at the battlefield of Kurukshetra is, above all else, a stirring exhortation to uphold Dharma, the righteous way. Indeed, righteousness held a lofty place among the virtues.

When India assimilated, the new incumbents accepted the norms and mores of their host society. Often, they enhanced it. Remember the story of the Zoroastrians who landed at Sanjan in Gujarat, about a thousand years back, telling the King Jadav Rana that they would be as sugar to the milk that was the kingdom? Or the Sufic spiritual legacy India received from Persian and Arab mystics who made this country their ‘Karmabhoomi’? Assimilation, unlike ‘adjustment’ is certainly not passivity.

Right then, let us return briefly to examples of ‘adjust madi’ that we reviewed a few paras back. Could you have told the drivers of the vehicles sitting astride the pedestrian crossing that they had violated the stop line and were committing a brazen traffic offence? Could you have written to the Municipal Commissioner seeking explanation of the craters that we pass for roads and footpaths? Could you have rung your neighbour’s bell and asked him to stop such criminal waste of water?
You could have, but you didn’t. You adjusted, walked on and soon enough, forgot all about it.

There was nothing virtuous about this indifference. You were scarcely beyond the occasional misdemeanour yourself. You tossed empty brown paper bags out of your own car window. You regularly drove the wrong way up a one way; after all it was an extra 1 km if you followed all the no entry signs. Your DDA flat now had an extra room after you covered over the balcony and settled the issue amicably with the local building inspector. When you were at the receiving end of the indignities that these everyday adjustments engendered, you almost saw yourself as virtuous, for having the stoicism to deal with them without demur.

Don’t kid yourself. That wasn’t stoicism, or any virtue of any sort. It was an acknowledgement of your own complicity. And assuming that you were one of the vanishing few whose escutcheon remains untarnished, your apathy was merely a sign of cowardice, not courage under fire. Most times of course it was the devastating combination of both; you were a complicit coward.

Civilisational transformation is, in Malcolm Gladwell’s terminology, a tipping point phenomenon. A lot of small and individually ineffectual changes need to accumulate across millions of people and situations for the change to take effect and transform a civilisation. This change cannot be legislated. When you walk about in the great cities of the East or West, the litter free pavements, well maintained public utilities and encroachment free parks and gardens don’t speak only of strict policing and efficient municipal administration. They speak, in at least equal measure, of a community conscious of, and actively practicing, its civic responsibilities.

Several studies show that this pays real economic dividends. When people believe that other people in their community will act within a prescribed set of norms, they create a trust engine that becomes a huge force multiplier for the entire society. Canada is a great beneficiary of this, as are the Scandinavian countries.

Isn’t it possible for us to see that the ‘adjust’ we do now is unjust?

If you must adjust, do it in a manner that will lead to more, not less civic behaviour.

Statistics : Statutory Warning

A few days back I received an anguished tweet suggesting that every half an hour, an Indian farmer committed suicide.

Sounds terrible, right? You are almost forced to do the mental maths. One every half hour makes it two an hour. Times 24 gives you 48. A week will count 336 dead. And so on all the way up to 17520 every year. Seventeen thousand... India's killing fields. More evidence of the cold brutality that is the grim subtext of our growth story, you tell yourself.

Wait it a minute. Something isn't right here.

Investigate this a bit, you tell yourself. So you decide to look up Wikipedia. India's suicide incidence at the national level is 10.3 per 100,000 population. That's more than 100 per million. For a country now totted up at 1200 million souls, there are over 120,000 suicides a year. Of which about 17,500 are farmer suicides. So back to Wikipedia where you discover that 52% of our population is still employed in Agriculture. Make a simplifying assumption about the family size being no more than the national average and that would put 52% of India's population in agriculture dependent families.

Now if suicides are distributed secularly across the population, 52% of the population should account for 52% of the suicides, right? That would translate into... 62,400 suicides. But the actual figure is less than a third of that. Conversely, non agricultural suicides, 102,000 give or take, out of a non agricultural population of 576 million give you a suicide incidence of 17.7 per 100,000. And 17,500 suicides out of the agricultural population of 624 million gives a suicide incidence of 2.8 per 100,000. You, my dear urban, non agricultural Indian reader are SIX TIMES MORE LIKELY TO COMMIT SUICIDE than your agricultural sister, or brother.

I hasten to add that suicides may well be concentrated in a particular geography and Vidarbha may have a much larger suicide incidence than even the non agricultural average. Every suicide is a tragedy and I am not about to belittle a life lost to fatal desperation.

Mint chocolate and pecan brownies

This is a recipe and not a rant. Really.

Sunday evenings can turn sad and sorrowful with the prospect of beginning another working week in just a few hours starting to loom alarmingly large. Best solution to perennial problem? Find an easy, indulgent snack recipe and address yourself to it. Works for me, everytime.

So here's what you need for the P&MC Brownies
Atta (regular, whole wheat flour): 175 g
Sugar (powder it in your grinder): 175 g
Cocoa powder: 100 g
White, unsalted butter (Makkhan): 175 g
Large eggs: 3
Vanilla essence: 2 spoons
Baking powder: 2 teaspoons
Peppermint Liquer (I used Bols)
Microwave-Convection Oven: 1
Any old 1 litre vol baking pan or tray (and if you have a brownies tray you are way cooler than I am)

Preheat oven to 170 deg C.

Add baking powder to atta and mix them thoroughly. Easy way- sieve them together a couple of times. Melt butter over low heat. Add cocoa powder, then sugar and vanilla essence until the whole thing comes together into a viscous but lump-free mix. Turn heat off. Whisk up eggs and add them to mix and combine quickly to prevent the egg cooking. Now ladle in the atta/baking powder mix in large ladle-fulls ensuring no lumps form. Toss in a large fistful of chopped pecans (walnuts work just fine too) and then toss in a generous pour of the mint liquer. Combine well and pour into buttered baking tray. Stop oven preheat cycle and switch to Convection 170 C+ Microwave cycle for 15 minutes. In a regular convection oven it may take 20 minutes. Start the baking. After 10 minutes, check by inserting fork into centre of pan. If it comes out clean you are probably done but leaving it in for a couple minutes AFTER it comes out clean will give a slightly crunchy crust.

Cool. Cut up (or don't bother, go straight for the whole lallapaloosa). And if you have a nice Burgundy waiting for pleasant company this would be a good time to open and pour a nice glassful.

Suddenly, the morning to follow won't look so forbidding after all!

Cars-inoma

Time was when motor vehicles didn’t come preloaded with indicators, or at least, none that worked. When you learnt driving, your instructor, usually a parent, would explain how the right hand could be used to indicate both a right and left turn. For turning right, you stretched your car straight out and kept it there. The left indication was a little more intricate involving a continuous counter-clockwise rotation of the arm, although the more experienced drivers would probably use just the palm with the index finger pointing the movement. You learnt to ensure that your vehicle was in the correct lane well ahead of the turn so you wouldn’t have to run across the traffic flow at the crucial moment. You learnt that restraint in the usage of the horn was a sign of quality driving. As it happened, horns were tame toots back then, which you had to strain to hear. You learnt deft manipulation of the clutch and brake, particularly when you were on steep uphill gradients like Peddar Road or Pali Hill. There was no handbrake after all, and it was almost embarrassing to allow the vehicle to roll back, even when you got off from a standing start. This also meant that you learnt to keep some distance between you and the vehicle in front to accommodate such a mishap. You learnt to respect the rights of the pedestrians. A zebra crossing at a traffic signal was designed to enable pedestrians to go back and forth across the road, and on those occasions when you landed up straddling it while waiting for the lights to change, you had a real sense of guilt about the misdemeanour. You were aware of the limitations of your vehicle or of your driving abilities and had no hesitation in making way for better vehicles or drivers to overtake you. From the right. A flash in the rear view mirror told you that the vehicle behind you was ready and able to pull ahead and you simply shifted, soon as possible, to a space in the lane on your left to enable the overtake manoeuvre to happen without fuss. Which brings us to the rear view mirror. There were no wing mirrors back then so everything depended upon the one above the dashboard. As soon as you got into the driver’s seat, and even before you fired up the ignition, you checked whether the mirror was correctly aligned making quick adjustments to get it just so. Extra-cautious drivers would buy wider convex mirrors that would clip on to the OEM article and provided a much improved rear view. You knew that the traffic already on the street had right of way when you were pulling out of parking and would not start moving without taking a good look over your right shoulder and waiting for the gap. In any case, the right hand was clearly stuck out to indicate your intentions so even if you misjudged the gap, the other drivers knew you were entering.

With low traffic density (at least as compared to today) and much better compliance with rules of the road, major intersections could do with just a roundabout rather than a signal as low traffic density and sensible practice of the rules of the road favoured the less obstructive solution. Old Mumbaikars will remember when even junctions like Haji Ali, Worli Naka and the Bandra intersection of Linking Road and S. V. Road were thus regulated. Remember that Mumbai has always had a substantial of public transport on the road, whether it be buses, taxis or auto rickshaws and when I speak of the higher standards of compliance, it was as true of the drivers of these vehicles as it was of those driving (or being driven around) in their own.
And licences were not issued without a proper driving test being conducted. The RTO official would direct you to a stretch of road with relatively lighter traffic and put you through your paces. A figure-of-8 was routine. As was doing it in reverse. Parking in reverse into a relatively tight space was also quite commonplace. The official kept a sharp look out for your indicating turns, entry and exit from traffic and so on.

Things began to change in the late 1980s. India began to emerge from decades, even centuries, of abject poverty and incomes began a secular rise that, we all hope, will continue for decades to come. Discretionary spending began to grow and acquiring personal transport was clearly an important rite of passage for everyone as it set them free from the inconvenience and discomfort of public transport. ‘Hamara Bajaj’ was ‘Bulund Bharat ki bulund tasveer’ and later ‘Naye Bharat ki nayi tasveer’ and everyone wanted their own bulundi, their own nayapan.

Unfortunately however, the appetite to own a vehicle was entirely disconnected from any desire to learn how to drive it in a lawful, dignified manner. You fired it up and were ready to roar. You were the king of the road and could weave in out, cut left, right and centre and traffic signals were mere inconvenient obstructions to be run with impunity so long as ‘Mama’, the traffic constable, was not around. Never having driven in the earlier era and possibly having no previous background of driving in the family, there was no one around who knew better.

A malignancy was beginning to breeding in the hot furnace of personal prosperity and vehicular cornucopia. A lethally potent mix of stupidity and ignorance topped off with frothy insensitivity and arrogance.

Mumbai had become terminally ill with Cars-inoma.

Civil Society

Ask yourself this question (and try to answer very honestly). Is it fair that your vote counts for no more in any election than the vote cast by your driver? Your maid servant? The chap who cleans your car? Or the vote cast by the squatter on the pavement just outside your apartment block?

All of them are less educated then you, indeed some of them are illiterates: strictly angutha chhap. They pay no taxes. They don’t have an original point of view on anything. They are the undeserving recipients of endless largesse from the Treasury, which you fill with Income Tax. They are shirkers who slack off after just a few hours of brainless, manual work while you toil endless hours and suffer sleepless nights for your employer. They don’t even understand the first thing about Democracy and Universal Suffrage which has given them privileges way beyond their natural station in life. At the very least, you fantasise about a more reasonable world where a vote like yours counts as equivalent to more than one of any of their votes. Perhaps you’ve imagined a system where votes are sized proportionate to the amount of tax that the elector pays.

You see the utter chaos and corruption that is rife in the Society and State that you inhabit and feel a sense of chronic helplessness, even impotence, that for all your organisational authority and economic contribution to community, you are but a mute spectator to all that is wrong around you. You are so frustrated, in fact, that you have no interest in participating in the electoral process. When the electoral rolls were last revised in your constituency at the time of the General Elections, you even made a sincere attempt to get your name registered but the damned process is so ineffective and tedious, involving sweating for hours in long lines outside a drab Ward Office and filling forms in the vernacular (that you don’t know, which leaves you wondering why they can’t offer the forms in English too) that you gave up.

From time to time, you receive email and Facebook appeals to sign some petition and you make it a point to append your name to causes that you find worthy. You forward them to your friends for their support. Every once in a while, you even donate to some of them.

You had been secretly longing for the day when someone would stand up to hold the authorities accountable. Who would have the charisma, the brio, the guts of steel to take on the venal and corrupt and get them to their heels. Who would offer tough prescriptions against all cancers that had seized our body politic and have the cojones to administer them. When suddenly, such a Crusader emerged. In a most unlikely garb.

A Gandhian Prohibitionist from an obscure village, Ralegan Siddhi, that Google Maps had to scramble to add, had decided to awaken the national conscience. He was a tireless fighter for probity in public life with a solid record of exposing corruption in Maharashtra’s political establishment and he had now decided to turn raise his sights. After CWG, Adarsh, Telecom and goodness knew how many others, he was no longer willing to remain silent. Wonder of wonders, he was proposing not just to fight the problem but actually offering a solution too. An Ombudsman, a Lokpal, he said, was just the ticket. An office that lay outside of the dirty and ethically compromised traditional three organs of Legislative, Executive and Judiciary. With plenipotentiary powers of oversight and, when justified, penalty.

He spoke directly to your heart. Here, you said to yourself, was a new freedom struggle whose time had, unfortunately, come. Here, you heard the news anchors, was India’s very own Velvet Revolution, its very own Summer of Discontent. The frail Masiha had revealed himself.

In Gandhian tradition, the Masiha launched a Satyagraha involving an Uposhan unto death. As the Government looked on, stunned by the rapid sequence of events, a million such as yourself were busy FB’ing, tweeting, texting, emailing one another and canvassing support for this man who spoke directly to your innermost self. A small band of selfless volunteers even gave up their day jobs and formed a platoon around the man. And then the Government blinked!

The new keepers of the national conscience had just agitated themselves the right to discuss a whole new piece of legislation with the government of the day. You were ecstatic.

And a new phrase was born. Civil Society. As distinct from? Criminal Society. Uncivil Society. The terms you had long used secretly in your mind to describe the debauchery and debasement around you. A society full of shining, clean, incorruptible men and women who would rejoice in the shining, clean, incorruptible age of Ombudsmanning to come.

A battle of attrition was about to begin. You can imagine the boxing rink. In the Red Corner, the flabby GOP Champion of Attritions, P. Muks; in the Blue Corner, the Untainted, the Unblemished, the Lean, Hero of Heroes, A. Haz.

Your pulse raced. Your heart threatened to go into arrhythmia. This was finally going to settle it. In favour of the smart, the sensible. The Incorruptible. Against the dross and filth that lay on the other side.

And then the battle actually began. Remember, P. Muks was a much scarred veteran of many campaigns. A. Haz was naive. A greenhorn to Muks’s Chhata hua Badmash. Closed door meeting followed In Camera session. From time to time, there were voices of indignant protest from either side but the parleys went on. Civil Society was staking its all and only a decisive victory would be enough to appease the collective hunger. Of Civil Society (remember?).

But it wasn’t so simple, was it?

Muks and his team dealt in Decades while Haz thought it was just a matter of Weeks, to the Independence Day 2011, no less, by which he could unfurl his victorious Parcham of Ombudsmania over the Lal Quillla.

And then everything started to go spectacularly ulta pulta. Meeting after meeting ended ‘inconclusively’ or worse. Lok wouldn’t have a Pal, or at least not the way Haz had planned it. We, the (deserving) people, wouldn’t have our Canaan.

Kejri wasn’t able to wal it off. Bhushan was unable to negotiate a Shanti that would satisfy you. Indeed, the voices of ‘Civil Society’ seemed to get progressively shriller and less Civil with every day that passed sans result.

And somewhere along that line, your mind, tuned as it was to collecting its order of burger with soda and large fries in about five minutes, was beginning to drift off to planning your next holiday in Switzerland. This painful, long-winded process was not what you had signed up for.

Your l’affaire was over.

Lane Behind ITC Grand Central

Yesterday, our Hon. CM Saheb very graciously arrived a mere four hours late to inaugurate the latest claimant to the title of Mumbai’s longest flyover. This morning I decided to inspect it for myself. By running it, one end to the other.

As you trundle up from the northern end, with the ITC Grand Central on your left and the Bharatmata Cinema on your right, you start to discover midtown from an elevated perch that presents altogether different views than those you were used to. The lane behind Grand Central curves away, dogleg right, into a tree-lined avenue. At the early hour when I took this picture there wasn’t a soul on the road and every prospect pleased.

CM Saheb's Shamiana

Time to turn attention back to the flyover itself. We have barely covered 100 metres at this stage and notice that while the odd car is bounding down toward Byculla, the northbound lane is entirely devoid of traffic. The mystery of the missing vehicles is shortly resolved when, close to where the ramp starts to flatten out into the long flat stretch, you espy a shamiana tent. Yes indeed, the VIPs have left their distinct signature on the brand new bridge. Leaping like a mountain goat over the piles of scaffolding, corrugated sheets, tarp and assorted furniture which the grandees’ majestic rear ends must have graced yesterday, we reach the other side. Given that this apparatus isn’t about to dematerialise like something out of Matrix, we now have a clear, safe run down to Byculla.

खँडहर बयां करते हैं

The Currey Road junction is now behind us and a series of chawls and the textile mills that they once provided with manpower marches alongside for the next km or thereabouts. ‘Khandahar batate hain ki imarat bulund hogi’ you mutter to yourself. Windows that have long lost their glasses, gabled roofs that have lost their red tiles, the evidence of a once thriving industry hollowed out in a matter of decades by indifference and the ravages of time.

Privacy? What's that?

Running past the chawls, you can see clear into the homes and hearths of hundreds of families that had enjoyed generations of relative privacy, with the road lying a floor or two below them. This rare luxury, of not having inquisitive strangers peering at them with impunity, literally meters away from their windows must surely (and legitimately) cause resentment and anxiety but remember, these are lesser mortals. Children of a blue collar god. Unlike the Olympians who reside on Peddar Road and have thus far vetoed a flyover there on the perfectly fair grounds that it could mar their rightful privacy.

Patchwork

Your reveries on the fairness or otherwise of life are interrupted. All this time, you have been looking left and right, away from the bridge itself, but as the road straightens out for its exit decline towards Byculla, you look down and are promptly horrified. This is a brand new road, you tell yourself, but who would believe it looking at its patchwork state.

A run is nearly done. You exult in the knowledge that the commute from Lalbaug to Byculla will now be at least 10 minutes quicker. Then grieve for a lost way of life, a lost age, a whole lost generation from which a very heavy price was exacted only so some of us could live in comfortable 3 BHKs,

Colabaaaah!

5 in the morning. The earliest Koels are beginning to trill as the first tentative tendrils of dawn seep through into the still dark sky. Sunday is run-day and it’s time to get up and get going.

Half an hour later and, with the ablutions completed and the running kit assembled, I drive off to Nariman Point where today’s run will begin, and eventually end. P. D’Mello Road (hey, does anyone know what that P stands for? Peter? Patrick? Pradyuman?) is nearly clear with all of three lorries to be overtaken in the long straight from Sewri to VT (ok, CST if you must) and at 6:02 the car rolls to a stop at the last parking spot along the NCPA sidewalk. Time to stretch, limber up, and get going. Things take a small turn at this stage. Partner for run cries off with a migraine and I begin to have second thoughts about doing the same old, same old. No RTI and back today, I decide, and a route that has long beckoned, hitherto ineffectually, is the order of the day.

I start out North on the Marine Drive but take first turn right at the Oberoi Hotel and head into the thick of the Nariman Point office district. What a contrast this neighbourhood presents early on a Sunday morning to what it will be a scant 30 hours hence. None of the hubbub of commerce and sweaty exertions of desk warriors today. Just gently swaying trees and street cricket games. Run past Mittal Chambers which stirs lost  memories of long afternoons spent in the British Council Library and turn right again to approach Cuffe Parade. Turn right at Cuffe Parade and start heading South. The fishing village is clearly beginning to slow down for the Monsoons. Dozens of fishing craft are berthed, hulls turned to the sky, ready to get their makeovers. Nets await deft hands to fix tears and rents from many months of hauling in the daily silvery catch. Run continues past the few remaining bungalows that once proudly faced the Backbay, sadly reclaimed in the 60s and 70s to spawn an acne of multistoried apartment blocks.

Leaving ‘Goolestan’ (don’t miss the wildly Anglophilic spelling) and its storied neighbour ‘Sea Wind’ (google it if it doesn’t ring a bell), on the left I am now fast approaching the Colaba Cantonment area. The road narrows, a ‘Sadhu t. S. Vaswani Road’ (why here?) is passed on the left and abruptly, I step into the verdant, tree lined greens of another world. The reverie is interrupted, within a minute by? I’m in front of Adarsh Cooperative Housing Society! Visibly incomplete, the most striking feature of the facade is a dozen ‘Anti-Buri Nazar’ charms that we Mumbaikars call mirchi-limbu. These, being in a fashionable neck of town, use only the biggest nimbu and the coolest plump red chillies. (Does a more expensive mirchi-nimbu bestow proportionately greater buri nazar resistance? Is there a lakh wali, crore wali and sau crore wali mirchi-nimbu prescription? Would you use only imported Habaneros or Jalapenos for the top end buri nazar?)

Cantonment starts and the signage declares ‘Gun House’, ‘Garrison House’, ‘Fleet House’, ‘US Club’, ‘Afghan Church’. All the old landmarks that the Fauj has carefully protected and conserved with unwavering attention to detail for as long as 150 years in some cases.

I pass I.N.H.S. Ashvini a.k.a. Bha. Nau. A. Po. Ashvini. Anyone figure out what Bha. Nau. A. Po. means? Answer in footnote J[1]. Run past a hundred Sea Cadet Corps kids proudly wearing their starched white uniforms and head straight down to the Roman Catholic Church (yup, it WAS that simple after all, for all those who had wondered what the R. C. In R. C. Church stood for). It is about 36 minutes into the run and the timer reminds me it is time to turn back. Legs are tiring, throat is parched and it is time to reach for the trusty bottle of water and a few almonds from the stash in the pocket. Revivified adequately, I begin the inbound leg with the clear intention of taking a different route back. A fork in the road just past Ashvini heads, on its right prong, to the Colaba Post Office, which is where I head. Just a few hundred yards down is the gothic edifice of the Afghan Church. To the right, the Colaba Sewage Pumping Station that also has, en suite, a delightful little park, the Sagar Upavan. A regular battle rages within, trying to figure out whether a small detour into park is a good idea but the heat and humidity is climbing, with the Sun having risen well above the horizon, and the spirit and flesh both declare they aren’t up to it. The Cantonment area ends, rather abruptly, at Colaba Post Office and everything goes back to the grime and disorder that is our Urbs Prima.

The Women Graduates’ Union Hostel goes past on the right. How many times have I dropped friends back here after long bouts of elbow bending? Shudder to think what would have been the consequences ff the breathlyserators had been in action back in the 80s and trundle along. The unmissable and unchanged stink of Sassoon Dock is now my partner for the next 4 minutes and that helps, a tiring pair of legs suddenly find a second wind to accelerate past this indolic interlude.

All the wonderful bits of the run are now nearly exhausted though the kilometre turning off near Cusrow Baug, heading to Radio Club and left toward the Taj and the Gateway provide a fitting finale to the run. A gentle amble past the Royal Bombay Yacht Club (hey MNS, what do you have to say about Bombay Gym and the RBYC?) down Rampart Row to Regal and I am done. Khallas!

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[1] Bharatiya Nauka Aspatal Pote – Indian Navy Hospital Ship. Voila!