The only pleasant phase of my long sluggish drive to office is a brief stretch of Cubbon Park. Ideally, vehicles shouldn’t be allowed through this park. On my part, I am guilty of using this stretch because it saves me time whenever I am running late. I know I shouldn’t be using this route. There is enough pollution already in this once-beautiful park.

For those of you not familiar with the topography of Bangalore, Cubbon Park is a green hub right in the middle of the city. A sprawling park spotted with numerous trees. In the mornings, there are enough vehicles passing through this park to impart a smoke-screen on the greenery. One such morning I enter Cubbon Park and line-up quietly behind a trail of cars. We are all waiting for the traffic signal at the far end to mercifully spit us all out from a lovely park into the concrete jungle lying adjacent to it.

Suddenly, a car slides right next to mine. I notice from the corner of my eye that someone is signalling towards me. I turn my head to the right and find the car’s driver asking me to roll down my windows. With the tinted mask gone from my sight, I notice the white gleaming car parked periliously close to my car. The driver is a young chap, with a beard – a goatee rather, and has sunglasses perched on his head rather than on his nose. He munches on an already half-eaten apple and blurts, “How is the car?”

“Sorry?” I try to understand what he just munched.

“The car. Car. How is the car?” he repeats, in a tone that tells you he has miles to go before he can have a nap.

I realize he is asking me about my car. For some reason I look at my dashboard, as though that is where the answer lies. I then look back at him and say, “Yeah, the car is good. No problems so far.” I nod my head a couple of times in affirmation to what I just said.

He munches on his apple a bit, says a “hmmm”. I look out of my window to figure out the make of his car. But he had parked the car so close to mine, it was impossible for me to know the car model.

“What car is yours?” I ask.

“Volkswagen. Polo.”

“Wow, that’s cool. How’s the car?” and I suddenly start believing that asking a stranger about his car is perfectly acceptable.

“No leg space” he says in a dejected tone. “I should have bought your car,” he continues in a regretful tone.

“But you’ve got a great brand. It’s an European car after all. My car is one of those cheap Korean brands, not much of a reputation there,” I try and cheer him up. I was feeling bad for the boy now since he seemed quite depressed of having bought a ‘wrong’ car. For me, though, his car was just as good as any other car. In fact even better owing to its German roots.

“What use is this brand when there is so little leg space,” he laments with a remorseful look on his face. Then he shakes his head, drops off the core of the apple somewhere between the front seats and raises the window through which we were conversing.

No bye, no thank you, nothing. The conversation ends just as abruptly as it had started. A vendor comes by selling mobile chargers for cars. The signal had turned green, the dormant cars had switched on their engines and everyone’s right feet was on the accelerator raring to get to wherever they had to go.

The Volkswagen Polo slides away hurriedly ahead of me, and one of the most dejected guys I have ever seen is steering that car. I roll up my windows, drive past the glitzy UB City mall. The security staff there is getting ready, some of them cycling in with their lunch boxes in tow. No half-eaten apples in there, I suppose. No dejection on having a life without too many choices, perhaps. What gives? What makes one person depressed about a thing such as a car? And what makes one person strive to get to work in a cycle?

As these thoughts swirl around my head and fade away into the radio’s constant noise, I pat my car’s dashboard and congratulate myself for having bought this car. I don’t know much about cars, but if someone who owns a Volkswagen wanted my car, I have perhaps done it right.

This blog has been missing out on a lot of action in the recent past. The reasons are plenty and not necessary to get into. One noteworthy fact is that Twitter has managed to steal a greater percentage of my digital communication.

I also understand that I had cited a similar reason many months ago to explain the paucity of posts here. Things seldom change. While I re-resolve to blog regularly, here are some interesting links which you might find interesting (some have already been shared in my tweet stream):

• Tour de France 2010: Circle of Death marks century of suffering http://bit.ly/dx4ogO – Fantastic writeup on the history of the Tour de France and how arduous it really is! Must read to give you an idea of man’s endurance limits (or rather the lack of limits)
• Penguin’s next march http://bit.ly/atGj9i – This is about the publishing house named after the black and white forever freezing bird. Penguin’s 75th anniversary (yes, it is that old) is coming up and as it approaches this milestone, how does it deal with the rising challenges of the industry
• The urban housing conundrum http://bit.ly/9ZNlLS – Rahul Chandran writes at The Mint on the problem of “inclusive” accommodation. How India’s cities need to plan to accommodate the ever-growing population of the urban poor. Very insightful and well written.

And oh yes, in the meanwhile The Better India celebrated its 2nd anniversary.

Enjoy, ladies and gentlemen.

A popular radio channel hosted a “coffee cup reader” on its morning show yesterday. While listening to the show I managed to figure out that a “coffee cup reader” is some sort of a soothsayer.

Out of the many people who call up to know about what lies ahead in their lives, Karan Singhvi is one. This lad of 18 years loves playing cricket and wanted to know when he would make it to the national team.

Nawal Gani, the lady who reads coffee cups (and she takes about half an hour to do so per cup per person), announces that Karan will be in the team within 4 to 5 years. She also adds the apt disclaimer that in order to make it happen Karan will have to ‘persist with his dream’ and put in the hardwork required.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you manage to see a Karan Singhvi play in the national team within the next 5 years, do let me know. I would like to be the first one to visit Ms. Gani. With my coffee cup in tow.

In other notes, here is one of India’s premier physicists Jayant Narlikar talking about “The Scientific Case against Astrology“

The Aman ki Asha initiative by the Times of India and the Jang group has created a fabulous advertisement. I really loved this one:

If you are unable to see the embed above, click on this link to watch the advertisement.

The editorial page of Hindustan Times carries this revealing article on why the west might now be encouraging their people to “let it flow in the great outdoors”:

As suspected by some of us busy unclogging pipes here in India, these ‘naturalists’ with a twist want people to urinate in the open to save the world from — well, of course! — global warming. The more we take a piss in the privacy of our bathrooms, the more we end up flushing the lavatory, thereby ‘wasting’ water.

Well, someone should figure out soon on what we should be doing. Lest we have a globally warming smelly planet on our feet.

As much as I respect the Tata group (and consider myself lucky to have seen Mr. Ratan Tata in person way back when I was in school), I think they have gone a bit off the mark here.

Tata Sons has reportedly filed a suit against the popular travel community website OkTataByeBye.com. Infact, a panelist of the World Intellectual Property Organization has declared that the ownership of this domain should be handed over to the Tata group!
Clearly, the usage of the phrase “Tata” in the website is more in line with the colloquial goodbye that we all use. I really don’t think this infringes any copyrights or trademark of the Tata Group.

Please read the appeal put out by OkTataByeBye.com here:
http://www.oktatabyebye.com/support-us/Appeal.aspx

And add your comment there if you think this is a bit overboard.

Tata for now, ladies and gentlemen. I meant the goodbye one, of course.

Time was slowly slipping by on this blog while things were becoming too fast paced in the offline world. Finally, a balance seems to be on the horizon as we resume interacting here once again.

First news first, Dhi Junior aka Taksh has well and truly arrived. Taksh is named after the founder of the Takshila University. For those with a mythological interest, Taksh was the name of Bharat’s son (Bharat being Ram’s younger brother of course). For those who think this is a wonderful name, we should let you know how the name got selected. Those who think this is quite a bad name, we should still let you know how the name got selected.

Rewind a few months back and the Mrs. and I are thinking whether we should start thinking about names. The Mrs. thinks perhaps and I say perhaps and then we go about doing other important things like solving crosswords and drinking tea. Rewind a few weeks before Taksh is due and we are thinking whether we should start thinking about a name. But then again, we don’t know the gender so why bother right now? More crosswords and more tea follow and we nod in unison at our decision.

Taksh arrives, known and recognized more as the son of the Mrs. and Dhi. We are still thinking whether to start thinking of names. I get online (what more could be expected of someone who blogs) and search for names. That becomes a tiring exercise so we break for a crossword and tea. Then we get possession of a book of baby names and believe that this was the best thing to happen to us (after the baby of course). We are told by the powers that be that the baby’s name should start with an R or a T. We run through the Rs and don’t find anything interesting, anything remotely difficult to pronounce or explain. We then browse through the Ts and immediately stumble upon Taksh. It’s got a slight tongue-twisting feel to it and the dude is going to have to spend some time explaining the word and the spelling.

“So much like my name,” I beamed to myself. That was sufficient for us as far as naming him was concerned. And thus arrived Taksh. We are back to our crosswords but are briefly and rightly so interrupted by him every few hours of our sleeping time. He is one of the reasons why I have groggy eyes and sleepy afternoon meetings. He is also one of the reasons why blogging, apart from other essential activities, has taken a back seat.

Moving on to other things now. During one of the nights that I spent at the hospital, I am walking on the corridors at around 11:00 pm. A couple of nurses with worried faces are running behind a sort of matronly looking nurse.

“Sister, sister, we don’t know what are the exact procedures to be put up in the list sister”, one of the younger ones complains with a hassled face.

“Yes sister, how can we know the procedure?” adds her companion meekly.

The matronly sister turns around and says “Eh, what ya! Take it from the net no! It is there on the net, just take it from there.”

I smiled and felt glad that even hospitals were referring to pieces of information on the internet to know procedures of some kinds. Hoping it wasn’t exactly some life-saving procedure, I walked along as the nurses turned around and trotted away with immense happiness.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to give Taksh his due attention lest he decides to bawl through the night.

More later. Enjoy.

It is 7:45 am and I have just jumped out of bed, staring in horror at the clock which wasn’t supposed to be so ahead in time.

I squint my eyes and double check the chrome minute hand before my brain finally registers and confirms the time. It is indeed 7:45. Suddenly, my cellphone starts beeping. It takes me a moment, just a fleeting moment, to understand that this is not an alarm tone and instead it is someone wanting to communicate.

“Hello,” I say in my modified non-sleepy voice so the other person doesn’t really think I wake up this late.

“Dude, can you make it to the Egg Factory for breakfast?” says the Devil.

A pause before I can comprehend. He continues “We shall have an omelette dude”

The Devil calling this early in the morning? I couldn’t believe that he, of all the people in this world, had woken up this early. There is usually one thing that you could always win your bet on – The Devil not waking up early in the morning. That myth has now been shattered.

“Sure man, I will try to be there by 8:30 or so,” I reply, still maintaining my non-sleepy voice.

“Dude, I am already on my way,” he announces with, what seemed to me, a flourish of victory at having woken up earlier than anyone else in this city.

“Oh ok,” I say and hang up. A mad rush follows and I manage to get out of home by about 8:30. I wanted that omelette, of course.

I look back in the rear view mirror as I exit one of the traffic signals leading from the front, with the entire herd of metal and fuel closing in on me. I feel the traffic build around me and slowly ensnaring me in its ever expanding embrace. After dodging a few small cars and many not-so-small cars, I finally reach Brigade Road, that former heaven of a 20 year old me.

I pick up my cellphone and call up the Devil. No response. What ever happened to my omelette, I wonder, as I move towards the end of Brigade Road.

The parking lots are empty and suddenly I get the urge to park my car in one of those empty lots. Now, you may not appreciate this urge of mine. But trust me, parking on Brigade road is a joy which you can only understand when you go on this road on busy Saturday evenings and fail to find a single parking spot for over an hour. So yeah, I slide my car between two slanted white lines and halt a few inches before the yellow and black striped pavement. A security man in uniform appears out of nowhere with a bag of five rupee coins. He asks my car number, punches in a few keys in the parking meter, which does its gargling sound and sputters out a white ticket. I place the ticket back in my car, cross the road and walk up to the coffee shop in the basement.

When I order my coffee, the Devil calls up and asks “Where are you man?”

Before I can answer he informs me that he was done with breakfast and was already back in his office. I didn’t want to do without my omelette for the day of course. But heck, this coffee shop did not serve omelettes.

“Anything egg based?”, I inquired trying not to look too inquizitive.

“Egg puff sir,” replied the lady at the counter, who was wearing a white coat similar to those worn by junior doctors in pathology labs.

I throw out the pathology bit from my mind and order one of those egg puffs with my coffee. Omelettes can wait, but I can at least aim to get a part of the deal with an egg puff.

My coffee arrives and so does the egg puff, which for the un-initiated is a half-boiled egg covered with some spicy gravy and finally wrapped with flaky stuff that is usually found in, well, puffs.

I finish these two and as I get up a young man approaches and starts cleaning the table making me seem like a baby who didn’t know how to eat a flaky egg puff. I rush back out on to Brigade road. The traffic has increased but the parking lots are still empty. A thought of coming here on a Saturday morning and parking my car for the entire day strikes me. An evil thought I decide, also slightly influenced by the amount of parking money involved in that plan.

I drive my car back into mainstream traffic and 20 minutes later swerve into the road leading to my office. Right ahead of me, a car had managed to brush a TVS-50 (which, for the uninitiated, is a tiny scooterette with 50 cc of power. The uninitiated take up a lot of my time explaining) and a card board box had fallen upside down on the road. When the TVS rider walks up and turns the card board box around, a few things from the box fall on the road. To my extreme surprise at concepts of probability and coincidences, those things are nothing but egg puffs.

“What is with this stuff and me today morning?” I think to myself and then I notice that the rider was picking each one of those puffs from the road and putting them back in the box.

Someone was going to have an egg puff today that had touched an asphalted road. A road which many cars had passed over. Cars which had driven over slush and mud and sundry other things. Someone who had an evil thought of blocking parking lots in the city might end up eating that egg puff. Who knows?

I pass by the flaky crumbs which were strewn on the road and enter office, with thoughts of karma and omelettes mixed in a heady combination readying me for the day.

“Are you ok?”

Many people have asked me that since yesterday. As I open my mouth to answer that once again, the next line slips in:
“Are you ok Annie?” and Michael Jackson croons with some great music in the background.

What happened was this: I was walking on the footpath of a road. A path that is meant for pedestrians to walk on.
However, someone had kept a long wooden platform on that footpath, merely to deter bikers from parking their bikes on that section of the footpath.

I was oblivious of this fact of course, and keeping my head high, I trotted along the footpath, looking around for some missing clue about our life and this universe.


Suddenly, I notice that my right foot was no longer keeping up with the rest of my body. My brain wakes up and gets instantly into first gear, detecting a pending calamity. Electric signals from my brain’s few million neurons fire relentlessly trying to get the word to my right leg as soon as possible.
The right leg, in the meanwhile, has shut off incoming communication. My brain is still frantically trying to establish organic contact. No luck though.

In the meanwhile, my body’s upper half has lost the plot and starts yielding to the by now strong strains of gravity.


My right leg finally realises its mistake, wedges itself out of the platform and signals back to the brain, “All is Ok. Move on now.”
“A little too late,” signals my brain back as it now gets into the tried-and-tested damage saving mode. Both my hands, which were until now waiting for orders from the higher ups, spring into action. With the palms hoping to cut off gravity’s intense strength, my hands move faster than my falling body, past my upper torso and prevent the ground from taking my full impact. A slight jerk in the shoulder and my brain disengages from “panic mode” and switches to the “realization mode”.


However, all is still not well. The right leg, in its attempt to get out from underneath the wooden plank, and under immense pressure from the brain to react, had put in a little extra effort which had to be passed on to the upper parts of the body. All this meant that my face now came crashing down on the stony pavement, my hands looking sideways at each other not quite knowing where this face landed from.


I now have a couple of bruises on the right side of my face, quite close to the eye. And my shoulder aches occasionally. Yet, here I am, writing this blog post and still keeping an eye out for that missing clue about our life and this universe.


Bouquets and get-well soon cards accepted for free. Just leave a comment here indicating so and you will get a reply with delivery instructions.

Once in a while when summer is in full bloom, a lot of new things appear around you. On a Sunday warm afternoon, I walk out into my balcony with a cup of tea in one hand and a current affairs magazine in the other.

I don’t really read current affairs in these magazines even though I start with the idea initially. But within about 5 minutes I find myself on the Bollywood gossip pages and before I know it I am done with the magazine. Now, its not that the Bollywood gossip really interests me. It doesn’t. But I can’t really do all that heavy reading about current affairs and Bollywood gossip makes for easy reading, especially the pictures.

So, while I am finishing my last minute scan of the magazine, I hear voices of kids on the street fighting over something. I flip the last page of the magazine, glance at Katrina drinking a mango drink, pick up my cup of tea and lean on the railings of the balcony to see what the fuss is all about. I see 4 little kids, all neatly dressed in bright summery colours holding badminton racquets. The racquets are as big, if not bigger, as the kids themselves resulting in they becoming unweildy in those tiny hands. The fuss is over who should play next and whether the current player was ‘out’ or not. There is such a thing as an ‘out’ in street badminton which refers to a player making way for another due to not having struck the shuttle. The kids speak fluent English at an age when perhaps I wasn’t speaking even my native language coherently. I suppose this is what the information age is all about.

The kids then decide to stop playing badminton and instead announce loudly that they shall play “Colour Colour”. This announcement is followed by wide flourishes in the air with the racquets and the two girls in the group do a little bit of a hop and a skip in glee. I didn’t know what “Colour Colour” was all about, so I stayed on at the balcony overlooking this plan.

One of the boys, dressed in dark maroon shorts, a chequered tiny half-sleeve shirt and a colourful Mickey Mouse adorned watch (at least it looked like Mickey Mouse to me), moved away from the group, looked around, closed his eyes and said “Ok, ready.”

One of the girls screams out “Green”. And the boy shakes his head and says “No”

“Blue”
“No”

Red”
“No”

“Pink”
“No”

“Orange”
“No”

A little hop and a skip by one of the girls and then the guessing resumes.

“White”
“Yeah”, the kid smiles and feels sheepishly disappointed.

So that was what “Colour Colour” was all about. The other party had to guess what colour this boy had in his mind. While to you and me it might seem that it is so easy to fake by just changing the colour in your mind all the time, it wasn’t quite the case for these kids. They were honest in admitting what colour they had in their minds. Nice and simple. Perhaps just how life should be.

A couple of rounds into this game and now it is the little hopping girl’s turn. She thinks for a few seconds and says the customary “Ok. Ready”. The other 3 guess perhaps at least 20 colours between them but to no avail. This one is a tough one to crack and now even I start thinking of all the colours that I know of.

The 3 are now tired of guessing and they just don’t know any more colours. So they ask the girl to reveal what is the colour in her mind.
To this, she says, “Transparent” and starts doing her hopping and skipping bit in a victorious manner. The kids were not quite sure what to make of it and the little boy attempted to start an argument but stopped soon after the others readily agreed to this “colour”.

Transparent! I couldn’t help but smile. Technically this might not be right but I don’t really care. I was amazed at the amount of intelligence that these kids had at such a young age. After a few rounds of this game, they just sit down on the side of the street and start chatting in general.

The hopping and skipping girl overhears someone call her a copy cat. And she raises her badminton racquet in a gesture asking the others to keep quiet.
And then she says, “Do you know why there is a word called copy cat?”
The others just shrug, with the little boy dismissing the question by looking away from the group.

The little girl goes on to explain – “See, a cat does meow”
“Now, any other cat also always does meow and nothing else. So, all cats say meow. Therefore every cat is copying each other. That is why the word copy cat.”

The rest of the kids, except the little boy, acknowledge this sudden enlightenment with a joint “Yeah, you are right”.
The boy stands up, holding the badminton racquet in one hand, and says “What ok? A dog does bow-bow and every other dog also does bow-bow. Why is it not copy dog then?”

The other 3 kids submerged his question by shouting at him and saying he doesn’t know anything. The boy just turned around and started walking up the street, dragging the racquet along with him. The little girl did a hop and a skip and the other 2 kids started doing the same.

I was done with my tea and turned around, picked up the magazine from the balcony floor and went right back inside. The things I had just overheard were far more interesting than reading the current affairs magazine, which I promptly flung on to the corner table. And then suddenly,without any warning, a feeling of being quite old in this world came over me. This world which was teeming with bright ideas and brighter questions. There was a time in my youth and early professional life when a few veterans had to make way for youthful employees like me. And it dawned on me on that Sunday afternoon that not too far from now, there would be a time when I shall have to move over and make way for something more fresh and more inquizitive. Heck, I am still on the better side of 30, managing to cling on, but I do know deep inside that the inevitable will catch up soon. The kids outside return, start playing something and then get into an argument. That brings the smile back on my face for no apparent reason. Perhaps the inevitable is not to be feared or protested against. Perhaps.