Saint and sinner.

Venal, graft-riven, gimme-more-minded Middle India with so many sinister secrets tumbling out of its closet of late might as well lay a claim to Ludwig Wittgenstein as its saviour saint. Wittgenstein was seriously flawed, disturbed and tortured – nay, anguished by an awareness of sin and guilt and the need to do soul-searching aloud. In point of fact, he was the self-confessed sinner who aspired to sainthood. He was also phenomenally gifted so much so, in fact, that the Cambridge Apostles as well as the Bloomsbury crowd were duly deferential to him. Some of his biographers have revealed his “penchant for disciples” and his eagerness to dominate, cow down and virtually terrorize his followers as well as be venerated by them. Fania Pascal, his Russian tutor in the 1930s and later his colleague in Cambridge where he was the lionized philosophy professor described a bizarre incidence. Wittgenstein once insisted on reading to her, on a priority basis at a time when one of her children was ill, a written confession of his sins, viz., his failure to tell his friends about his Jewish ancestry and his denial of having physically abused a former pupil. To her irritated query halfway through the stiff recital: “What is it? You want to be perfect?” he answered with a thunderingly affirmative retort: “Of course I want to be perfect.” The other “father confessor”, Rowland Hutt, was equally uncomfortable listening to Wittgenstein’s loud recital of his purple misdemeanors delivered across a table in a Lyons café. That very year, i.e., in 1937, Wittgenstein went to the village of Otterthal (Austria) to apologize to the parents of the children who had been at the receiving end of corporal punishment meted by him in his capacity as an elementary school teacher from 1924 to 1926. His open intolerance for his intellectual equals prompted his disciples into jeering at contrarian views. Mrs Pascal, though, thought of Wittgenstein as “remarkably unself-conscious”, oblivious of his capacity to wound others or arouse fear in them. He was unimpressed by class, status and temporal success. He was as demanding on himself as on others. He seemed to her the least neurotic of men: single-minded, resolute and steel willed. All this, in her estimation, would “… make him stand out as a prophet … not intrigued or amused by human nature ... [but] sure this nature was evil; and his attitude to it was one of despair.” To her, he appeared as a “free” man, one who had given up wealth, community, close national ties, pretence, adaptation so that he inspired awe among others. To John King, a student at Cambridge and friend, Wittgenstein was “a man of high moral, intellectual and artistic integrity ... tolerant of those who had less ability than himself and never censorious except of what he considered humbug, hypocrisy, affectation”. In his view, his teacher “saw a high seriousness and purpose in life”, and said: “Of one thing I am certain – we are not here in order to have a good time.”

Penny dreadful. Utterly awful.

A couple of days ago, I finally finished reading The Sexton Blake Casebook: A Collection of Adventures featuring the other world famous detective compiled by Mike Higgs (Galley Press, Leicester, 1987). I had acquired this curious volume off the footpath on Hornby Road http://tinyurl.com/68gn8cy back in the eighties. The hardcover volume in a large format has a slip-jacket sporting a woodcut illustration of Blake in a red nightgown smoking a pipe presumably in his Baker Street flat. It also has five novellas: [1] The Mystery of Glyn Castle (The Sexton Blake Library, No. 269, 31-01-1923, 4 d.); [2] The Case of the Society Blackmailer (The Sexton Blake Library, No. 12 New Series 31-08-1925, 4 d.); [3] The Crime in the Wood (The Sexton Blake Library, No. 104 New Series, 30-07-1927, 4 d.); [4] Down and Out (The Sexton Blake Library, No. 174 New Series, 03-01-1929, 4 d.); and [5] The Missing Millionaire: The Very First Sexton Blake Story (Halfpenny Marvel, 1893, Price not stated.) After plodding through these shoddily plotted and clumsily written tales set in sylvan Victorian surroundings about status-driven perils suffered by British toffs (blackmail, kidnapping and the like), understanding why Sexton Blake was anointed “the prince of penny dreadfuls” and “the office boy’s Sherlock Holmes” was simplicity itself. It is amazing how Sexton Blake, Tinker and Pedro the bloodhound have managed to survive from 1893 to the late 1970s not only in penny dreadfuls but also in comics, stage plays, cinema, radio, a 78 rpm gramaphone record and a set of playing cards. If Blakiana http://tinyurl.com/ cm9zyp is to be believed, the saga carries on regardless even in the Kindle era. There’s no accounting for popular tastes, I guess.

Civil as in…

“Civil society” is the phrase making the rounds in the Indian news media these days. I wonder what sense “civil” conveys here. Webster’s http://tinyurl.com/6cc7atu defines the adjective six ways. In the first sense, it means “applying to ordinary citizens as contrasted with the military” as in “civil authorities”. In the second, it means “not rude; marked by satisfactory (or especially minimal) adherence to social usages and sufficient but not noteworthy consideration for others” as in “civil behaviour”. In the third sense, it denotes “of or occurring within the state or between or among citizens of the state” as in “civil affairs”, “civil disobedience”, “civil strife”, “civil unrest”, “civil war” and “civil branches of government”. The fourth sense signifies “of or relating to or befitting citizens as individuals” as in “civil rights” and “civil liberty”. Fifthly, it signifies “legally recognized in ordinary affairs of life” as in “the civil calendar” and “civil marriage”. In the sixth sense, it conveys “of or in a condition of social order” as in “civil peoples”. Though Webster’s does not mention “civil society” and “civil life” to illustrate the first and the sixth senses, my guess is that either of those must be the intended meaning of the current usage. But given that Indians are partial to their own choice of vocabulary, I cannot be too insistent that I’ve hit the nail on the head. After all, we’re prone to saying “rubber” when we mean an “eraser”; “flat” when we mean a “residential apartment”; “eve teasing” when we are thinking of a woman being harassed sexually by offensive words. We also use “tight slap” for “hard slap”; “pindrop silence” for “total silence”; “hill station” for “mountain resort”; “redressal” for “reparation”; “expire” for “die”; “prepone” as the opposite of “postpone”; “allopathy” for "conventional medicine"; “loose motion” for diarrhoea; "charity" for "philanthropy"; and "corruption" for "graft". Indian English tends to be in an on-going state of civil disobedience or civil strife, I guess.

Humbug? Bullshit? Claptrap? Hokum? Drivel? Balderdash? Travesty of truth? Fibbing? Fraud? Swindle? Fakery? Hoax? Or, plain lying?

A beautiful young woman, on an international flight, spoke to the priest sitting in the adjoining seat, “Father, may I ask you for a favour?”

”Of course you may, my child. What can I do for you?”

“Well, before boarding the flight, I impulsively bought this expensive electronic hair dryer in the Duty Free Shop. But it is well over the Customs Duty limit and I'm afraid that they'll confiscate it from me. Is there any way that you could carry it through the Customs for me? Under your robes perhaps?”

“I would love to help you, child. But let I warn you: I shall not lie.”

“With your honest face, Father, no one will question you.”

When they got to the Customs barrier, the young lady let the priest walk ahead of her.

The Customs Officer asked, “Father, do you have anything to declare?”

“From the top of my head down to my waist, I have nothing to declare.”

The Officer thought this answer strange, so he asked, “And what do you have to declare from your waist to the floor?”

“I have a marvelous little instrument designed to be used on a woman which is, till date, unused.”

Roaring with laughter, the Officer said, “God bless you, Father, go ahead.”

Moral of the story: Never tell a lie. Use your mind.

Question to ponder for the Catholics: What will the priest tell his father confessor? (“Father, forgive me. For I’ve sinned by fibbing the Customs officer at LAX…”?)

Question to ponder for all readers: How would you describe the Father’s reply to the Customs Officer? Your options are in the heading of this post.

Hints: (1) A helpful definition: “HUMBUG: deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody's own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes.” http://tinyurl.com/3wjqrkj. (2) “Bullshit” is never well crafted or carefully wrought. http://tinyurl.com/bxtbyg.

One more recent instance of probable fakery: Did Sarah Palin fake Trig’s birth just prior to running as the VP mate in John McCain’s 2008 US Presidential bid to cover up, maybe, for her daughter, Bristol? http://tinyurl.com/3c24vge. Also: http://tinyurl.com/3dyqwep.

What’s in it for me?

It may seem churlish and unfeeling to cite the following two examples that illustrate Middle India’s persistently pathological sense of entitlement. Item #1: 5 members of the family of a SAIL employee who died in 1994 took poison because the Bhilai plant refused to give a job to his son. http://tinyurl.com/6le8xbm. Item #2: Arunima Sinha, an up-and-coming volleyball player, lost her leg in a chain-snatching incidence on a train in UP. The Sports Ministry offered her Rs.25000/- as interim compensation, Rs 2 lakhs for hospital expenses and a job in railways – and still face the wrath of the athlete as well as media. http://tinyurl.com/6dh4cbj. What I find astonishing in the first instance is that the SAIL ex-employee’s family – which till date has not vacated the government premises to which he was entitled as a staff member – feels also entitled to continued employment of at least one family member by the steel giant. In the second instance, I find it equally flabbergasting that the victim holds the railways and probably both the Government of India and the UP Government responsible for her sorry plight. If a chain of responsibility must be traced, I would say the fault lies principally with the goldsmith who made and sold the gold chain she was wearing and with her for buying it and flaunting it in a manner that tempted the thieves to snatch it. If it comes to that, she need not have resisted the chain snatchers. A limb is any time more precious than a gold chain. Passing the buck and pointing fingers at others ought to stop.

The baksheesh culture.

It’s time to celebrate the birth of Rama, the mythological king of Ayodhya who stood for all that’s just, moral and righteous in this world. It’s also the right time for Middle India to seethe with righteous indignation and rile at the ten-headed demon of corruption. What an Indian means by “corruption” is “graft”. Or, “baksheesh” in street parlance. If history is any indication, we Indians have been giving and receiving baksheesh with guiltless impunity from time immemorial. It stems from our feudal past that has seamlessly extended into our present. Again, if history is any indication, it will continue to extend effortlessly into our future too. The Middle Indian housewife who was excitedly waving a candle just yesterday to support Anna Hazare will hand out baksheesh to the peon in the school where she is seeking admission for her darling son to help her jump the queue for the admission forms the very next day − without blinking an eyelid. In the bad old days of Socialist India, it used to be fashionable to curse the licence-permit-quota regime for nurturing the baksheesh culture. It is ironic that, in the times of liberalisation, Middle India has become even more liberal with baksheesh. The baksheesh culture, further bolstered by the spread of rentier capitalism, has an insidious way of spawning an endemic sense of entitlement even among non-performers and marginal factotums. The queue of ministers, bureaucrats, go-betweens, petty officials and other hopefuls at the receiving end grows longer by the minute. Can you imagine the lewd obscenity of the baksheesh announced for the World Cup heroes. As if they were playing for peanuts in the first place!

Lost and found.

This, believe it or not, is a story with a happy ending − the ‘Lost and Found’ story, not The Cloud & The Kite tale. You may find it hard to accept the happy ending assertion simply because this blog, which as a rule tends to be subdued and cynical rather than over-the-top optimistic, says so.

The story started, if memory serves, in 1977. I was working in Everest Advertising at the time. The comprehensive dummy of the children’s book The Cloud & The Kite, written by me and illustrated by my friend Sanat Surti, was lying in a drawer in my cabin in the office. Then, one day, it suddenly went missing along with the typed manuscript or original text. This dummy had had the rare distinction of having travelled all the way to Japan and back. http://tinyurl.com/3m3aga2.

Yesterday morning, believe it or not, I found the carbon copy of the long lost original text at home. It was lurking in a long forgotten bunch of papers tucked away in a drawer that had not been opened for years. If only, hoping against hope, I can now persuade Sanat to redo it, we may be able to take a crack at getting it into print as a children’s book.

Meanwhile, I am going to post the entire original text here so that, even if it doesn’t get published, it will get read by at least a few people. I have always felt that The Cloud & The Kite is a children’s book that deserves its place in the sun and that even some grown-ups with their inner child still extant may relish it.

By the way, the story-propelling device used in it is what you may call the plodding “if not this, then what” trial-and-error modus operandi of deductive reasoning. Read it and you’ll know what I mean.

[The Cloud & The Kite original text starts here …}

The Cloud & The Kite

By Deepak Mankar

Pictures by Sanat Surti

©Deepak Mankar 1976. Pictures ©Sanat Surti 1976.

A little cloud was wandering all alone in the sky one day. His name was Meghashyam.

“Oh, how I wish it were the monsoon,” he thought. “Then I would have lots of friends for company.”

But the rainy season was still far, far away. The sky was clear and blue but for Meghashyam.

“I shall change my shape and watch my shadow on the ground,” said he. “That will surely pass the time and keep me happy.”

First, Meghashyam turned himself into a rabbit with long ears and a cotton-bud tail.

“Ha, ha, ha,” he laughed. “Look at the funny bunny. Just look at his long, long ears and short, short tail.”

“Ho, ho, ho,” answered someone suddenly. “Bunnies are white and fair, not grey and dark like your silly shadow.”

“Who said that?” cried Meghashyam angrily.

He looked and looked but could find nobody.

So he went back to his game. He changed the rabbit into a flower with tiny petals and a short stem.

“Ha, ha, ha,” he roared with laughter. “This time, it is a cute little flower with a short tail. Just take hold of the tail and you will get a beautiful flower.”

“Ho, ho, ho,” jeered the same voice again. “Flowers are pink and fair, not grey and dark like your silly shadow.”

This time Meghashyam looked longer and harder than before. But he still could not find the owner of the voice.

“My ears are playing tricks on me,” he said.

“No, they are not,” said the voice shriller than before. “I am right here, behind you.”

Meghashyam turned round and noticed a kite flying smartly and shining brightly in the sunlight.

He had never met a kite before. Kites do not fly in the rainy season, do they?

“My name is Meghashyam. It means a dark cloud,” he said politely. “And, who are you?”

“Why don’t you find out for yourself,” asked the kite, smiling mockingly.

“Are you a balloon? You shine like a balloon,” Meghashyam told the kite.

Then he turned himself into a balloon and looked at his big, dark shadow on the ground.

“No, you are not. A balloon looks like this, not like you,” he said.

By now, the kite was giggling unabashedly.

“Try again, you silly cloud,” he shouted.

“If you shine like a balloon but are not a balloon, are you a butterfly? You are full of pretty colours like a butterfly,” said Meghashyam.

Then he changed his shape to resemble a butterfly and looked at his big, dark shadow on the ground.

“No, you are not a butterfly, my friend. A butterfly looks like this, not like you,” said he a wee bit sheepishly.

By this time, the kite was guffawing brazenly.

“Try once more, you woozy goose,” he cried.

”If you shine like a balloon but are not a balloon, and if you are colourful like a butterfly but are not a butterfly, you must be a bird. Your tail flutters like a bird’s tail,” Meghashyam told the kite.

He at once took the shape of a bird and looked eagerly at the big, dark shadow on the ground.

“Oh, no. A bird you surely are not,” he said disappointedly. “A bird looks like this, not like you.”

That remark made the kite go into even louder peals of laughter.

“Try one more time, you oaf,” he taunted Meghashyam mercilessly.

“If you shine like a balloon but are not a balloon, if you are colourful like a butterfly but are not a butterfly, and if your tail flutters like a bird’s tail but you are not a bird, you must be an aeroplane. You fly like an aeroplane,” said Meghashyam hopefully.

Then the cloud became an aeroplane and looked expectantly at his big, dark shadow on the ground.

“Oh, no. You are not even an aeroplane. Because an aeroplane looks like this, not like you,” he wailed bitterly.

The kite was about ready to split his sides with laughter.

“Try really hard this time, you numbskull,” he screamed scornfully.

But Meghashyam was feeling sorry for himself and in no mood to oblige. He started crying.

“No, I will not. Sob, sob, sob. I give up. Boo-hoo, boo-hoo. I do not even want to know who you are anymore.”

You know what happens once a dark cloud begins to cry. It just cannot stop until it has shed all the tears.

The cloud was no more his former sneering self. Now, for the first time, he felt a tinge of fear. He knew that once he got wet and soggy, he would never be able to fly again.

“Please, oh, please stop snivelling, Meghashyam,” he pleaded. “I am really, really sorry I made fun of you. I take back all the wicked things I said. I will even tell you who I am. But please stop crying at once. There’s a good boy.”

But, try as he might, Meghashyam just could not stop crying.

So the kite got wet and soggy and nosedived alarmingly.

On his way down, he got caught in a huge tree and could not free himself.

That day everyone in the neighbourhood wondered how it had rained so heavily when the rainy season was still far, far away.

Nobody thought of asking the kite caught in the tree.

But then nobody could tell he was a kite anymore.

Because he did not shine like a balloon anymore.

Because he did not look colourful like a butterfly anymore.

Because he did not have a tail fluttering like a bird’s tail anymore.

Because he could not fly like an aeroplane any more.

Well, well, well. Even Meghashyam did not find out who the kite was, remember?

[The End.]

Love thy nemesis.

MK Gandhi did what no other Indian leader had done before him. He turned India’s struggle for freedom from the British Raj into a mass movement in a relatively short time. But, with his emphasis on religion and non-violence, he also managed to acquire a gamut of enemies. His most relentless enemy was, perhaps, the erudite Dalit leader, Dr BR Ambedkar. The good Doctor never forgave Gandhi for his chosen nomenclature for the Dalits (literally, “down-trodden” or “crushed”), viz., Harijan (“children of God”). He saw it as a devious and hypocritical ploy to keep the Dalits captive within the confines of the Hindu religion. After India became free, Ambedkar even led a mass exodus of the Dalits to Buddhism. He also never forgave Gandhi for opposing, in the early 1930s, the grant by the British of a separate electorate for the Dalits by embarking on a fast unto death. Gandhi was also hated by the orthodox Hindus for “favouring” the Muslims; by the fanatic Muslims for insisting on Hindu-Muslim unity (they saw it as a way of perpetuating Hindu dominance); and by the revolutionary radicals who thought of him as a reactionary and a coward for shunning violence. Contrast this with what happened in Lancashire which Gandhi visited during his voyage to Great Britain to attend the Round Table Conference in 1931. The boycott of British textiles that he had called for in India had been partly instrumental for triggering the unemployment of the British textile workers. Nonetheless, when he confronted them, while some of the out-of-work hecklers booed him and threatened to tear his eyes out, many others somehow sensed his innate goodness and cheered him as “Good old Gandhi”. Amazing, considering this was their first and only sighting of Gandhi.

Men in White (Khaddar). A KK Covert Op.

The WikiLeaks about the Congress Party MP Satish Sharma spilling the beans and his assistant Nachiketa Kapur taking a US Embassy staff member on a guided tour to view the chests of cash for buying votes to ensure Parliamentary approval of the Indo-Us nuclear pact in July 2008 remind me of the antics of Mack Sennett’s totally incompetent Keystone Kops. The best way to keep a secret is to let as few as possible be privy to it. Simple? Apparently not. S&K made it absolutely sure that there would be every chance of a leak or two by doing a show-and tell for their American friends. The latter made it even doubly certain by promptly sending a jubilant cable to Washington D.C. If the Corps of The Queen’s Couriers operating since the 15th century http://tinyurl.com/6kkhqd6 had not fallen under the axe of the jittery HM Government’s fiscal axe, cloak-and-dagger communications delivered personally by a “silver greyhound” would stay under wraps. Likewise, if Uncle Sam’s nephews and nieces had emulated their cousins across the big pond by instituting The President’s Courier service modeled on the successful UK prototype, there would have been no need to worry. Well, well. These days there’s no dodging the Keystone Kops lurking in the corridors of power and diplomacy the world over, I guess.

And so it goes. But whither?

Admit it or not, like it or not, India is still in a loosely federated semi-feudal flux. At the centre rules a royal family anointed by history. Currently, there’s a much maligned puppet regent. The various states (erstwhile “provinces” and “princely states”) are now fiefdoms – some of them supporting and others hostile in varying degrees to the central rule. There are pockets of armed revolts notably in the North East, Kashmir and the Naxal corridor. Frankly, things haven’t changed much since the days of the British Raj. There has only been a transfer of power from the departing British to their chosen Indian successors: the English- speaking middle class and crony capitalists. Some of these worthies insist that India is a successful working democracy despite evidence to the contrary. Fortunes are being made by hook or crook and the guilty seldom get punished. Juggad (innovative resourcefulness, improvisation, ingenuously devised jerry-rigged solution finding), resilience and survival tactics are much valued in a situation of perpetual shortage of wherewithal particularly among the less affluent. The recent WikiLeaks about the Congress Party buying votes to get the Parliament’s nod for the Indo-US nuclear pact on 22 July 2008 give a surreal tinge to what goes on in this country. Is the tsunami of corruption, abuse of political and economic power the tsunami of corruption of frightening proportions, ongoing abuse of political and economic power, unbridled private expropriation of public wealth with government collusion, lack of access – particularly for the poor – to public services and, last but not the least, ever-present terrorism and militancy as a reaction to the unbearable injustice of it all turning India into a full-fledged banana republic? Is the “India Shining” hubris of Middle India also a major contributing factor? Take a guess.

Aberrant exit.

The literarily inclined may well have noticed the startling proximity of locations that the two novels dealing with the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust caused by World War III have. Both of them – Nevil Shute’s On The Beach (1957) and Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence (1948) – are set in neighbouring Australia and New Zealand respectively. In the former, human life has become so unbearable and unsustainable that the government is nudging citizens to suicide by cyanide. (No public interest litigation to stem the tide of suicides, thank you.) In the latter, life limps along somehow. Obviously, in both these fictional scenarios, the end comes with a nuclear bang. But, maybe, TS Elliot describing Guy Fawke’s demise on the gallows in the aftermath of the failed Gunpowder Plot in his epic poem The Hollow Men (1925) strikes closer to the truth if one were to judge the end-of-the-world predictions in the light of the recent events in the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The course of events also suggests that at work is the deft hand of a wily Indian soap writer team adept in the craft of dragging the tale by its tail much like Scheherazade. http://tinyurl.com/5sn3a7w

God of gall.

I'm often flummoxed by how people cunningly and adroitly make hay while the sun shines. Yesterday, I was off-colour with a touch of flu and took total bed rest after visiting the family doctor. After gulping down the first dose of tablets and capsules (5 in all), I picked up a book that Ujwal had got from her cousin, Vibha. The latter’s husband is a Trustee of an ancient Ram temple in Ramwadi, Kalbadevi. The book is purportedly written – or, shall we say haphazardly compiled? − not only for commemorating the more than 200 years of the temple's existence but also for establishing beyond a shadow of doubt its place in the history of India’s independence struggle. The Chaphekar Brothers assassinated Rand and Ayerst in Pune on 22 June 1897 when the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria’s imperial reign was being celebrated all over India. The provocation apparently was the high-handed misbehaviour of the British troops in the exercise of the emergency powers vested in them for controlling the Bubonic Plague epidemic raging in Pune. The Brothers used to be the musical back-up for the daily kirtan performed by their kirtankar father in Ramwadi. They quietly vanished for a couple of days to do their appointed task in Pune and then returned to resume their daily routine in the Ramwadi temple as if it was business as usual. Later they were betrayed by a desi Judas called Dravid, arrested and sentenced to death. By the way, one of the Chaphekar Brothers had earlier tried to enlist, was rejected on account of his caste (Chitpavan Brahmin) and held a grudge against the gorra admi. A plaque honouring the Brothers was installed in Ramwadi in early 1987. All that is splendid but does it call for a disjointedly compiled, shabbily produced volume full of factual errors and quite a bit of atrocious writing to drive home the point ? The needle of suspicion veers towards vested interests. The principal compiler and contributor, a State Award-winning historian, who also happens to be the chief honcho of the Trust that owns and runs the Ramwadi temple seems to have seized the opportunity to guide the flow and components of the narrative for his own ends. The volume reads like a self- and sire- hagiography vanity-published at the cost of the hapless Pathare Pradhu temple Trust. He misses no opportunity to show how kind, considerate, humane, virtuous and far-seeing he and his dearly beloved father who is no more happen(ed) to be. If you take the drivel he shovels at you at face value, they are/were manna from heaven. Good grief, Charlie Brown. Remember Lucy’s immortal words: “I never made a mistake in my life. I thought I did once, but I was wrong.”

A steady diet of kitsch and later.

Today, I suddenly realised that I had been on a steady diet of kitschy books for quite a while. A recent break was Kiran Desai’s 2006 Booker Prize winner, The Inheritance of Loss. The one huge benefit I got from my erstwhile diet was that my enjoyment of Desai’s novel was that much more heightened. On second thoughts, though, there was no way I could not have enjoyed the book immensely in any event. The main reason for it is personal. I am more than familiar with the historical background against which the story unfolds and find Desai’s even-handed portrayals of the Indian (for that matter, Third-World) “losers” – those who stay back as well as those who break away – something I can empathize with. Of late I also happened to be thumbing through Alfie Thompsons’s Lights! Camera! Fiction! A Movie Lover's Guide to Writing a Novel (Running Press, 2006). Thompson is clear about who her guide is meant for: only those wanting to author “popular, an-editor-will-be-interested-in-buying-it, written-for-readers stories”. What she has in mind is the product of what the Marxist art theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer called “culture industry”. This happens to be the culture mass-manufactured to satisfy “false” needs created by Capitalism, pandering to what Virginia Woolf designated as middlebrow tastes. Here readers buy books that are on bestseller lists rather than for their intrinsic literary value. According to her view, art, beauty, form, integrity and value don’t matter. What moves the merchandise is the so-called experts’ nod: The Book-of-the-Month Club, the NY Times Top 10 list, Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club and so forth. If memory serves, Russell Lynes, the erstwhile editor of Harper’s Magazine, made fun of the Woolf hypothesis but nonetheless subdivided her middlebrow category into upper-middlebrow and lower-middlebrow. According to him, the former were art patrons as well as owners and administrators of museums, operas, art galleries, orchestras and publishing houses – in short, all that comprises the fountainhead of consumable culture created by the highbrow set. A member of the lower-middlebrow set would use art to improve her minds as well as her lot in life. Today’s Middle India seems to have a surfeit of these worthies.

Fake will do.

Simply amazing! I'm referring to the perspicacity of whoever chose the Kishore Kumar number “Pal bhar ke liye koi hame pyar kar le, jootha hi sahi” from Johny Mera Naam (1970) as the finale of the “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bangalore” episode of The Simpsons. This episode, by the way, happened to be the 17th of the 17th season. It was first aired in the US on 9 April 2006 and recently telecast in India. The song of which the punch line gives a grudging nod to momentary love of the fake kind is an apt and telling footnote to the American attitude toward exotic mysterious India (cf. Raiders of the Lost Ark: Temple of Doom) as well as the Middle Indian propensity to accept anything Western (especially American) as manna from heaven without bothering to determine its provenance and authenticity. In India, fakery even when tinged with mediocrity gets celebrated mainly by default. This was proved decisively once again by the gushing obit outburst after the recent death of the so-called pioneer of Indian comics. This worthy had the gall to unleash, in the late 1960s, on his unsuspecting compatriots a spate of badly written, shoddily produced, garishly and unimaginatively illustrated and tinted comic books based on simplistic and cliché-ridden depiction of Indian folklore, mythology, religion and history. This may well have done untold harm by conditioning an entire generation of Middle India particularly to think of Indian historical and mythological narratives and characters in two-dimensional (good/evil, hero/villain, virtue/vice) terms of reference insidiously implanted in their minds by years of reading these contemporary, seemingly canonical word-and-picture spin-offs.

Worst-case scenario. Worse than a dirge.

There was actually a time in the Hindi film timeline (much before “Bollywood” became the vogue word) when really big-time stars did not flinch at being paired off with non-stars. The most glaring examples were Geeta Bali matching dancing steps with the erstwhile stunt star Mater Bhagwan in Albela (1951) and Shriman Satyawadi (1960) where Raj Kapoor consented to acting with Shakila without batting an eyelid. In those days, star earnings were not counted in crores of rupees but in single digit lakhs. They also did not have any product endorsing or ambassadoring opportunities and idiot box appearances to fall back on. Life was simple and honest and so was moviemaking. Middle India, the chief consumer of Hindi movies, too was not as greedy and self-indulgent as it has now become. To get an idea of how much of a turn for the worse things have taken since then, you should listen carefully to Middle Indian preteens slurpingly describing the food spreads they’re frequently privy to or their mall and multiplex visits. When I was their age, I did not know enchilada from my elbow. And, although I was clued in to Hindi and Marathi movies and cricket from a fairly early age, my role models were neither film stars nor cricketers but fictional characters like Robin Hood and Sherlock Holmes. I was totally ill informed on the availability of goodies of all sorts and didn’t really crave for them probably because there were not too many of them around. (The only stuff I craved for was the unattainable 25-cent novelty items advertised in American comics.) I’m not saying that I was particularly virtuous, moral, principled, just, straight, honorable, honest, upright or incorruptible. I was just too dumb and deprived of temptations. I didn’t either know or use the F-word till well past puberty. Times sure have changed.

Chawls of Mumbai. Revisited.

In the Overview section in The Chawls of Mumbai: Galleries of Life (ImprintOne 2010), Sandeep Pendse, Neera Adarkar and Maura Finkelstein remark that “the current rulers [of India shining!] certainly prove themselves to be more ‘colonial’ in mentality than the white British. They too wish the ‘natives’ were not there, as citizens; that they would quietly perform their tasks and disappear into the woodwork”. The quote is lifted from Eunice de Souza’s 11 February Mumbai Mirror book review http://tinyurl.com/4dfda5c. The “born in the USA” flunkeys of the present rulers emulate their masters unflinchingly. McDonalds and Dominoes, for instance, refuse to home-deliver their exorbitantly priced junk to denizens of the chawls in Girgaum at least to the best of my knowledge. This is ironical considering the fact that the delivery persons probably hail from a chawl or, even worse, a zoparpatti. Apart from “warehousing people”, meaning ordinary folks, the Mumbai chawls have also been accused of “warehousing criminals”. For instance, there is the Dagdi Chawl, literally a chawl built with stone, at Saat Rasta, Byculla. It used to be the fortress of Arun Gawli, formerly an MLA and currently a resident of the Arthur Road Jail. As far as “warehousing future cinema stars” is concerned, there is “Jumping Jack” Jeetendra – who claims to have been a Diwali kandeel (lantern) making champion in his childhood – from the chawl abutting the Girgaum Portuguese Church near Central Cinema and Rajesh Khanna from a chawl in Thakurdwar. Contrary to the rumours you may have heard, Lohar Chawl is not a building where ironsmiths reside but an area close to Crawford Market where you can shop for mainly electrical goods but also a lot else besides. The Purple Foodie confesses to having found her blow torch at Saria Steel in Lohar Chawl, in fact. http://tinyurl.com/4dfda5c

Lie to me. Once more with feeling.

Now that Maria Schneider (Last Tango in Paris) is no more http://tinyurl.com/4dokmot, Bernardo Bertolucci, who directed it, belatedly expressed regret for robbing the actress of her youth. Sophie Taylor who wrote the above-cited article in The First Post on 4 February, writes that both Schneider as well as her co-star felt exploited and humiliated by their participation in the movie. The actress of course was a newcomer and, presumably, inexperienced when she got her $4000 break in Last Tango because Bertolucci’s first choice, Dominique Sanda, went hors de combat owing to an ill-timed pregnancy. But Brando was no starry-eyed ingénue. He was a veteran and quite capable of judging the implications of his role. In any case, this kind of talk from actors and directors makes me want to puke. As Hitch and Ashok Kumar would have said, it’s only a film for heaven’s sake. http://tinyurl.com/4gt4fkg. What you do on screen is acting. It has nothing to do with what you happen to be off screen. In the snippet of Last Tango I saw on YouTube http://tinyurl.com/dk8j8h, both Brando and Schneider seemed to have got under the skin of their respective characters – real troopers that they were! – and enjoyed themselves while they were doing this crucial scene. So why all those pious after-thoughts, I wonder.

Lie to me. One more time.

Those who have been trashing Arundhati Roy because of her “seditionist” views on Kashmir and the Maoists have probably never heard of Ferit Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate, whom the Turkish government had imprisoned for his interview in the Swiss Das Magazin in which he said: "Thirty thousand Kurds have been killed here, and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares to mention that. So I do." Once again, I’m reminded of what George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) about truth: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” Pamuk too had to face a hate campaign and even flee Turkey for “insulting” the Motherland. He said he was fighting for freedom of speech and Turkey’s last chance to come to terms with History: "What happened to the Ottoman Armenians in 1915 was a major thing that was hidden from the Turkish nation; it was a taboo. But we have to be able to talk about the past." Another Orwellian interjection is in order: "He who controls the past, controls the future."

Chawls of Mumbai.

Every time I think of a chawl in Mumbai, I’m reminded of a couple of lines from Phoebe’s Smelly Cat:

“Smelly Cat, Smelly Cat what are they feeding you?”

And, no offense, but:

“And you're no friend to those with noses.”

I also think of Patrick Geddes’s apt description, c. 1930, of the primarily industrial workers’ overcrowded living spaces as being not for housing but for “warehousing people”.

My first visit to a chawl was at age 8 or 9. A classmate in my first school − Sirdar High School – took me to his home in a chawl within walking distance of the school as well as 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://tinyurl.com/48tnw4. This chawl − it still stands in the 3rd Khetwadi Lane, close to Wilson High School which I attended later on http://tinyurl.com/45c9zxw − housed families of betel leaf sellers and a few white collar workers. On every floor, there were several single rooms along a common balcony at the end of which were a shared toilet and a bathroom for all those living on that floor. On an average, 5 – 10 people lived in each room measuring probably six square metres or less and having a little mori (enclosed washing space) inside it with a faucet connected to the municipal water supply. The presiding smell here was overwhelmingly verdant leafy.

The other two chawls I was familiar with in my childhood had mostly white collar workers and were near Prathana Samaj http://tinyurl.com/6kph3qfand in Kandewadi close to Khotachi Wadi http://digbig.com/5bbrww respectively. The all-pervading musty smell in both was of stale daal (lentil) stuck to the bottom of a cooking vessel.

In Tales from the chawl http://tinyurl.com/6hawqab Neha Thirani calls PL Deshpande’s Batatyachi Chaal http://tinyurl.com/6bh9jvj a romanticised view of the Mumbai chawl. To me, it has always been a satirical, nearly Orwellian but wittier depiction of the plight of the white collar lower middle class family trying to eke out a bare existence in heartless Mumbai. The “musty smell … of stale daal (lentil) stuck to the bottom of a cooking vessel” is very much there.

My friend Rajan describes his recent visit to the chawl near the Matunga Road Station where he had spent 26 out of his 29 years in Mumbai. He found the building dilapidated and mostly deserted but did talk to an old couple of his acquaintance there who had nowhere better to move. The experience was overall “depressing”. http://tinyurl.com/4uaw4ww.

There are many more chawls in Mumbai that I’ve been to other than the three I described here. Maybe, I’ll talk about them sometime later.

Sound of Money.

There was a gushing piece about a soon-to-be-staged production of Sound of Music at NCPA in a morninger recently. It brought to mind my watching the Julie Andrew movie at the Sterling sometime in the late 1960s. The pleasurable experience I had was probably as close to the one with My Fair Lady or The King and I. Watching the movie later on the idiot box came nowhere close to the real thing. It had nothing to do with big screen/small screen but my state of mind at that time. I have always felt that the reviewer’s state of mind at the time of watching a movie or a stage play has a lot to do with what sort of a review it gets – good, bad or indifferent. This may not be true at present when many producers don’t mind paying for the reviewer’s time and good mood. A post-preview table spread, for instance, may well act as an added mood improver. Why are Indians so greedy, easily corruptible and mendacious in all they do?

Not everybody loves Sachin Tendulkar.

Reading The Hindu’s and The Telegraph’s online reports of his 50th Test Century this morning, I thought of the neighbours Sachin will soon have when The Tendulkars move into their new home. It is now under construction off Carter Road, close to Otters Club – which, in June 2002, turned down Sachin’s request for membership − and Jogger’s Park, in Bandra West. Right now, the builder’s crew is making so much of a din and a nuisance of themselves that the folks staying around are just about ready to throw up in a manner of speaking. This – despite the fact that Sachin had sent them a letter in advance begging for their indulgence for the inconvenience that was going to be let loose on them! Well, almost nobody can get universal adoration, I guess. Didn’t a psychotic fan shoot John Lennon in New York in 1980 just because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Lie to me.

Don’t know about you but I can still remember the time when there were no senior citizens about, no differently abled folks. There used to be old people and disabled people. Movies were movies then, not franchises. Governments used to be as vicious and ruthless in dealing with citizens acting against their diktats, i.e., not toeing the official line, as they happen to be today, though. Had Julian Assange or Arundhati Roy or Dr Binayak Sen been around then, they would have been hounded as relentlessly and mercilessly as they are being hounded right now, no quarters granted. Little white lies were the better part of valour, then as now. Demonizing or criminalizing the enemy of the State used to be the favourite gambit. It continues to be likewise. This brings to mind what George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” Also, for people who love to rewrite History to suit their own ends, here’s another Orwellian gem: "He who controls the past, controls the future."

My good self at a Clarion reunion.

Excuse me but I’m a bit allergic when it comes to reunions. I don’t quite fancy gassing about good ol’ times half of which I cannot quite recall with guys I once knew well but have been out of touch with for a long time. I don’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings when I state this. But then as time goes on, people change. I am not the Deepak I used to be in Clarion-McCann. http://digbig.com/5bcrrq. Anyway, an email invite from Rajan, a follow-up call from Jitu Kothari and a not-so-gentle nudge from Ujwal sent me scurrying to Pritam Restobar in Dadar – a place I don’t much care for – on Saturday, 27 November, a day after the second anniversary of 26/11. It was good to meet the Clarion crowd, though, despite my apprehensions. There was good ol’ ARK Pillay, then accountant now heading several NGOs, reminding me that I was somehow responsible for getting him his first landline connection through my friend Vairale. There was young Bhawsar, then art director now graphic designer/"tutor", gushing about how active he is at his age despite his heart condition and diabetes and how he will be going for the umpteenth time to the US of A next year. There was Jitu who hadn’t lost his talent for keeping in touch with people out of genuine affection and who reminisced about a crisis he faced when the journalists he was herding did not reach a CIDCO inaugural function in time because of a mix-up about the address of the site. There was Robin, then an Account Executive and eternal victim now a happy retiree in Goa, sounding really excited over the cellphone about hearing my voice. There was one gentleman who apparently joined Clarion much after I’d quit and whose name I didn’t quite catch. And, there was ever-smiling Rajan, then AE now heading his own ad agency in Chennai and an acknowledged expert in rural marketing all over India, telling me how much he had enjoyed living his life, handing me a copy of his self-published autobiography and asking for a feedback. Mrs Rajan was there too watching the proceedings with a half smile. A couple of mugs of draught and a vegetarian meal rounded it off. Short, sweet and memorable.

The Chicago Manual of Style.

The Windy City and I are not even on nodding terms. My only and somewhat tenuous links to it are the eponymous Oscar winner and The Chicago Manual of Style. I happen to possess the 14th Edition of it in a rather shabbily brought-out Indian reprint by Prentice-Hall of India, New Delhi, in 1996. I managed to get one of the advanced copies through the kindness of my late friend, Shoiab. The reason I’m reminded of it (Can’t say I’ve used my copy very much – I had to really search in my book cabinet to find it!) is because the 16th Edition with “state-of-the-art recommendations on editorial style and publishing practices in the digital age” went on sale in the US end-October. As the very idea of an authoritative and seminal guidebook on style and usage has always fascinated me, I thought that a timeline of how The Chicago Manual of Style evolved was worth looking at. http://digbig.com/5bcxtt.

1891 The University of Chicago Press with own compositing room and experienced typesetters opened for business. A common set of rules for the process of typesetting to ensure consistency in usage and style (a style sheet) was evolved. It later became “the University Press style book and style sheet”.

1906 The 1st Edition of Manual of Style: Being a compilation of the typographical rules in force at the University of Chicago Press (200 pages) was offered for sale for 50 cents plus 6 cents for postage and handling.

1949 The 11th Edition of the Manual went on sale.

1969 150,000 copies of the copiously rearranged, expanded and updated 12th Edition of the Manual were sold matching the combined sales of the all the earlier editions.

1982 With the publication of the 13th Edition of the Manual, the nomenclature was changed to The Chicago Manual of Style as at present. Among the then current issues it addressed were the new US Copyright rules, the emerging typesetting technology and the PC and word processor.

1993 The 936-page 14th Edition dealt more systematically with the style, usage and technology issues concerning the wide spread use of PCs. Sales soared to 500,000 copies; cumulative sales to over one million copies. (I own a copy of this Edition.)

2006 The Chicago Manual of Style Online debuted attracting more than 200,000 recurring visitors by 2010.

2010 The latest Edition appeared in October simultaneously in print as well as web formats.

History of India after 1947. Redux.

There’s much chest-beating and heart-burning every time Arundhati Roy’s recently expressed view that Kashmir was never a part of India is discussed. If you were to realistically and unemotionally look at the geopolitical status of pre-Independence India, it was as follows. The British Raj consisted of British India directly governed by the Governor General – and, later, Viceroy − of India for the Emperor of India and close to 590 Native Princely States under suzerainty of the British Crown, supervised by Residents. There were also Portuguese India comprising Goa, Daman, Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Pondicherry (now Puducherry), Karikal and Yanaon making up French India. India was pretty much balkanized as of then as it used to be before the East India Company took over the governance. Come to think of it, even with the so-called Mughal Emperor in Delhi or prior to that reign, balkanization was the rule rather than the exception. The Undivided (except for Pakistan) Independent India was an idea of those to whom the absconding British transferred power in unconscionable haste in 1947. These latter worthies with eminently Middle Indian values, sensibilities and concerns used the stick and the carrot route to fashion a federation out of it. Along with the transfer of power, the departing Imperialists also left behind with their successors their arrogantly domineering Imperialist attitude and style of governance. The inheritors promptly picked up where the British Raj had left off. For their own first colonial conquest, they chose the native aborigines and tribals and the rural masses to play the role of the victim. Arundhati Roy summed it all brilliantly in her The Greater Common Good. "The Indian State is not a State that has failed. It is a State that has succeeded impressively in what it set out to do. It has been ruthlessly efficient in the way it has appropriated India's resources – its land, its water, its forests, its fish, its meat, its eggs, its air – and redistributed it [sic?] to a favoured few (in return, no doubt, for a few favours). It is superbly accomplished in the art of protecting its cadres of paid-up elite, consummate in its methods of pulverising those who inconvenience its intentions." And: "India lives in her villages, we're told, in every other sanctimonious public speech. That's bullshit. … India doesn't live in her villages. India dies in her villages. India gets kicked around in her villages. India lives in her cities. India's villages live only to serve her cities. Her villagers are her citizens' vassals and for that reason must be controlled and kept alive, but only just." (pp.14-15, IBD, 1999) There have apparently been 60 million oustees ever since 1947 as a result of these river dam projects. Numerous atrocities have been and are being perpetrated by forestry department’s official, police personnel and contractors on tribals with impunity. The first one of them was at Pararia in West Bengal in 1991 where the guilty went scot-free. In the second instance, a few years later in Sagbara District in Gujarat, the two policemen who raped Guntaben, a young tribal, were imprisoned for ten years thanks to the intervention of Amnesty International on her behalf. The other instance happened in Nandurbar, Narmada Valley, where the tribals were displaced four times, literally hounded by the officials all the time. The motive for the horrendous treatment is to demoralize the hapless victims who have nobody to turn to, nobody to fight on their behalf. (The Dalit at least have a champion in the shape of a political party to take up their cause.) In the very first major river valley project, Hirakud in Orissa, the oustees living on open land were relentlessly harassed by the forestry personnel. The story repeats itself in Singrauli, also in Madhya Pradesh, where the tribal oustees were displaced at least three times in three decades. Felix Padel, the co-author of Out of This Earth (Orient BlackSwan, 2010) and the great-great grandson of Charles Darwin, hazards a guesstimate of displaced persons in India since Independence at 60 million and in Orissa alone by the Aluminum Cartel at 3 million. Given the scenario of virtual genocide of the tribals and the continuing armed occupation of Kashmir, why should the Maoist upsurge and the Kashmiri call for azaadi outrage us?

Would Ripley believe it? Or, not?

There is a self-confessed manic depressive living in Colorado, US of A. His name is Philip R Greaves II. His claim to fame is The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover's Code of Conduct. This self-published work became available for download as an eBook last week at $4.79 a pop in the Amazon.com Kindle store and immediately whipped up a storm. It attracted 100s of angry reviews, calls for boycott of the website unless it stopped selling it − and just one sale according to the author. Although Amazon.com has refused to comply on the grounds of its opposition to censorship, freedom of expression (First Amendment?) and the customer’s right to choose her/his own reading material (they say they won’t sell porn, though; apparently, they don’t think this book belongs to that dung heap), the download link does not seem operational right now. The 404 Error message reads: “Looking for something? We're sorry. The Web address you entered is not a functioning page on our site” and redirects you to the Home Page. Would Ripley believe it? Or, not? Believe it or not, Mr Ripley, in early October, the United States Justice Foundation had faulted Amazon.com for "contributing to the potential rape and molestation of children" by offering for sale Understanding Loved Boys and Boylovers by David L. Riegel and threatened it with protracted litigation if the book was not removed within 30 days. The link is still operational at the time of writing. There is even a “Look Inside” option there.

Next of kings.

I’m at my wit’s end. To get to the bottom of my puzzlement, you’ll have to scroll to the bottom of the list (please see below) at the bottom of the recent email I received from “Coca-Cola Company”. It informed me that my email address had won £500,000.00 in the “just concluded annual final draws held on the (21st September, 2010) by Coca-Cola in conjunction with the British American Tobacco Worldwide Promotion”. To claim the prize, I had to send them the following details:

“1. Full Name:
2. Country:
3. Contact Address:
4. Telephone or Mobile:
5. Marital Status:
6. Occupation:
7. Ticket Number:
8. Sex:
9. Email:
10. Age
11. Ballot Number:
12. Next of kings:”

Could it be a case akin to a serial murderer leaving clues so that the investigators can catch him? I rest my case, members of the jury.

“Let my people go.” Fate of Kashmir.

I’m no Old Testament fan. Leonard Cohen, Woody Allen, The Marx Brothers, Mel Brooks, Albert Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, MC Escher, George Gershwin, Dorothy Parker, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David and the clueless Rabbis in the hilarious Rabbi jokes are some of the Jewish folk I admire. So, why am I quoting from Exodus 7:26 wherein God orders Moses to tell Pharaoh to “let my people go”? Syed Ali Shah Geelani as Moses, the Indian State with its occupation forces in Kashmir http://digbig.com/5bcstf as the Pharaoh and India’s multiple vicissitudes in the valley as the ten plagues let loose on Egypt by God somehow seem to be the perfect metaphors for the current scenario. You cannot keep an entire tribe captive against its wishes indefinitely. The Pharaoh learned it the hard way. So has the Indian State. It has tried the carrot (Special Status within the Indian Union) and stick (armed occupation) approach. Now it’s probably the time to follow in the Pharaoh’s wise footsteps and bid adios to the crisis. Give the Kashmir Valley the “azadi” it is clamouring for with a clearly agreed proviso that once it leaves the Indian Union, both of them shall have nothing whatsoever to do with each other: no military and financial aid, for instance. A clean break is most likely the best solution.

News’s doppelgänger. (I’m stupid or what?)

Now that I think about it, teaching myself to write good ads did not come easy. In Clarion-McCann which I joined in 1965 http://digbig.com/5bcrrq I became obsessed with making the print ads I wrote resemble news as closely as possible. This was because I thought naively that an ad qua news (even spurious news) may command greater credibility with newspaper and magazine readers than an ad with no such pretensions. I remember working on a Forhan’s Toothpaste extension product ad for more than two months on my own time at night and early mornings to develop the “perfect” editorial ad. Call it persistence. Call it stupidity. The ad got plenty of praise from the finicky client as well as within the agency. Unfortunately, the new product launch got canceled. This, however, did not dampen my spirit or my resolve to write credible ads. I looked for affordable inexpensive books, mostly paperbacks, to teach me how to write crisply and to the point. Among them were Rudolf Flesch’s The Art of Plain Talk (1946), The Art of Readable Writing (1949) and The Art of Clear Thinking (1951). For a while, I became an ardent admirer of the Reader’s Digest house style with its technique of neatly compressing stories into bite-size info-bits. In the sixties, the magazine was at the zenith of its popularity and success selling more than 20 million copies a month the world over. I got over the infatuation after a brief flirtation, though. In the process, I developed my own style and also learned a few tricks about how to vary the style for different types of ads and products. I gradually mastered the technique of converting raw facts into persuasive writing fairly quickly. Simultaneously, I searched for a reliable technique to generate ideas speedily. The one described in James Webb Young’s A Technique for Producing Ideas (1975) worked for me. (Young, by the way, was J Walter Thompson’s VP for creative work and an Advertising Hall of Fame inductee.)

Dysthymia.

For those of you who are like Maya, a great singer, a devout Shahnaz Husain fan and my copywriter colleague in Everest Advertising http://digbig.com/5bcqyf, I will give you something to worry about. Before I tell you what it is, I shall try and explain to you why it would worry Maya. In Kitab Mahal of which Everest occupied the entire top floor, there was a wholesale book distributing agency on the first floor accessible by the back staircase. I used to go there almost daily and pick up books at discounted prices. Once I picked up a Dictionary of Symptoms and took it up to my room where I dropped it seemingly carelessly on my desk to catch the eye of any visitor and after a while called Maya on the pretext of discussing a copywriting assignment. I knew she was like me an avid book reader who couldn’t pass a book within reach without picking it up and browsing. As soon as she arrived, I left my room saying I had to pee in a hurry. By the time I returned, she was already scanning the book looking worried. I pretended not to have noticed and started chatting about this and that. Mayamemsaab was not listening. She had got up from her chair and was pacing behind it with the open book in her hand. Then, she asked me if she could borrow it for a while. She had swallowed the bait, hook, line and sinker. The next few days were hell for her. Every now and then, she would come to my room and check with me if she was looking all right. She kept on dropping dark hints of suffering from some new malady every few minutes. I also caught her off guard checking her pulse once. Others too noticed her unease and we all had a big laugh about it. She never returned the “borrowed” Dictionary and I did not bother to remind her. The ghastly deed had been done! In retrospect, though, I was thoroughly ashamed of myself. I had played the dirtiest trick one could on a hypochondriac. Which brings me to the very same dirty trick I’m about to play, with advance warning, on those among my few and far between readers who are in the habit of imagining that they suffer from some rare psychological malady. In this case, the malady on offer is “Dysthymia”. http://digbig.com/5bcryg. This deadly sounding condition is defined as “a mood disorder characterized by chronic mildly depressed or irritable mood often accompanied by other symptoms (as eating and sleeping disturbances, fatigue, and poor self-esteem) – called also dysthymic disorder”. Any self-respecting hypochondriac can easily delude herself into believing that she is the victim of this scourge – thanks to the vague “one size fit all” wording of the definition, just the kind of stuff a bestselling Dictionary of Symptoms is full of. Want more food for thought? How about “Dysrhythmia”? http://digbig.com/5bcryh.

What do you expect from an army of occupation?

The recent “Breaking the Silence”/Facebook exposé of the callous abuse of hapless Palestinians by Israeli soldiers reminds me of the acrimonious and blasphemous label Arundhati Roy recently used to describe India after Independence: a “colonising power”. Her choice of the epithet was guided, no doubt, by the Indian State’s attitude toward and behaviour with the tribals at the time of building the dams and granting mining rights to business interests as well as by its armed occupation of Jammu & Kashmir. The well documented human rights’ abuses by the Indian Army behind the protective shield of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 are no doubt a result of their brutal role as an army of occupation just like the Israeli Army amidst the Palestinians. That is how guardians of disputed property tend to behave. If possession, as the well-known adage goes, is nine-tenth of the law, is it any wonder that the Indian Army personnel look upon the Kashmiris as their inferior – by no means their equal? To me, the Kashmiri cry for “azadi” sounds like a desperate plea for justice and fair play as also sheer survival: “Don’t kill our children and innocent bystanders at the slightest excuse. Leave us in peace.”

Lower your expectations. Even, aspirations.

Curb your enthusiasm, enthuses Larry David. He ought to know. He curbed his, quit Seinfeld at its zenith, went on to HBO and greater heights with Curb Your Enthusiasm and later on to the lead role in Woody Allen’s Whatever Works. Recently, when I was in the US, I was witness for the spell of a few hours to the family life of a guy whom I had met before on a previous trip there and also in India. He is a trained architect from India. He is married to a white Caucasian who works as a nurse part time and owns a dressage horse she rides herself. They have two pre-teen school-going children, live in the Topanga Canyon in the Greater Los Angeles area. Theirs is a rather cluttered house built on a hillside and seems to reflect their belief in sustainable living. The lunch they served was far from fancy, no liquor – not even beer or store wine. What I saw there was a contented family. I mean, really, really contented – no stress at all. This guy is far from successful, seems to be making his living with little chores nobody else wants to do. But his Third Worldliness seems to stand him and his family in good stead. They have lowered their expectations as much as they can in the pressure-cooker, cut-throat LA environs. Alas! If only more of Middle India were to do it instead of aspiring to First World life style in India and resign to the fact that India is a Third World country that’s likely to remain in the Third World for a long, long time. Take my own case when I joined Everest Advertising http://digbig.com/ 5bcqyf in October 1976. The Chairman of the ad agency, which was run along feudal lines, was a pseudo: a total fraud with pretensions of being a socialite. He dropped names, including brand names. He was surrounded by his inner circle of ardent sycophants who treated him as the ultimate oracle on trends and life style. Since I used to work on Swissair, I had to constantly interact with him. This meant I had to appear to be as suave and well-informed as the next guy in his coterie. Fortunately, there was a Swissair annual publication that used to come to me as a part of the brief. This amazing compendium used to carry advertising of the latest life style products as well as nuggets of curious information on Swissair service, year after year. Given this arsenal and my propensity to read, I could gather enough ammunition to outtalk the best of the pretenders among the courtiers. In the process, though, I began to crave a faux life style and, for a while, even lived it – thin imported cigarellos, Bacardi with soda, the works − until the scales fell from my eyes somewhere along the way. I realised that lowering my expectations as well as aspirations was a sure way of saving me from disappointment, especially since I was a Third Worlder living in a Third World country.

In these biblioclastic times.

I love reading. I adore it to distraction in all its exclusionary, anti-social, selfish, I-me-myself glory. You could call it bibliolatry. Well, almost. Some of the books I read transport me to where nobody can follow me. What’s more, I love every “forest-killer”, turn-a-page book as noumenon, “thing-in-itself”. http://digbig.com/ 5bcqef. Let me loose in a well-stocked Borders or Barnes and Noble and watch me go giddy with delight like a kid in a Toys”R”Us. So, the latest ruckus about Such A Long Journey ought to make me fume, don’t you think? Strangely, I’m unperturbed. My personal preoccupation with books has nothing to do with what happens in the world. Come to think of it, the world – especially, the Third World – may well get along better with a little fewer books on the shop shelves, for all I know. Right now, what this country needs is, maybe, a really delicious 5-rupee wada pau. Now don’t give me all that talk about being facetious and not supporting freedom of expression and the rest of the rot. The moment you allow these humourless and witless twits to get your goat, all is lost. Let us instead drool over all the extra sales that apro Rohinton’s Indo-Nostalgic novel must have drummed up thanks to the much ado about nothing. By the way, good ol’ Rohinton is no stranger to a bit of brouhaha. Back in 2002, in the course of his US tour to promote Family Matters, he and his wife were racially targeted at every airport (he had the looks of a Muslim in the eyes of the US Immigration officials) and had to even cut short his long tour. I’m happy for him now that the local goons in his erstwhile home town have targeted his book and pushed up his sales. The only worry is, in the process, the Indo-Nostalgic nice guy that he is may well metamorphose into an Indophobic boor – although, with him, it seems highly unlikely.

New meaning for old.

The wonderful thing about the English language is that not only does she willingly admit new words into the Oxford English Dictionary but also readily accept old words acquiring new meaning. The latest example of the cheerful adaptability of the English language is “dogging”. Remember the time when a determined sleuth used to dog a desperado? Well, you can forget it already. To learn the new not-so-innocent meaning of “dogging”, please go here: http://digbig.com/ 5bcpcy. (Want a clue to what you’re about to learn? Think where cats differ most from dogs and pigeons, particularly in shamelessness.) For even more enlightenment, go here: http://digbig.com/5bcpda.

Lame duck? Devil incarnate? Choose one.

Not a day passes without someone pointing out the linkage between crime, terrorism and the “minority community”. Whenever this connection is made, I’m reminded of MS Sathyu’s Garam Hawa (1973) and Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s Salim Langade Pe Mat Ro (1989). The former film deals with the turmoil in the mind of the Agra resident Salim Mirza (Balraj Sahani) in the midst of the post-partition tumult around him until the time he makes up his mind to stay back in what Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah had for a while been calling “Hindu India” and joins the mainstream in the final shot. The other Salim living in latter-day India is a victim of poverty and prejudice. With little education under his belt, he has turned to petty thievery for survival. His tragedy is that, after seeing the error of his ways, despite his best efforts, getting on the right side of law and out of the clutches of his former criminal colleagues in order to earn an honest living seems simply out of his reach, mainly because of his religion. Whereas Salim #1’s saga is deathly serious, being as it is set in the aftermath of a monumental blood bath, Salim #2’s saga is laced with a lot of humour, somewhat like Mirza’s tele-serial, Nukkad. Both of them are very relevant to the Indian reality as of now.

Goodness gracious! A lion in my lap, no less.

If memory serves, I saw Bwana Devil (1952) at the Strand Cinema in Colaba, wearing the special polarized specs, in either 1953 or 1954. The tagline in its publicity material, I distinctly recall, was: A lion in your lap! A lover in your arms. This Natural Vision movie kick-stared the 1952-54 3-D craze in the US as a kneejerk reaction to the TV threat to cinema, the others being CinemaScope and the 3-projector Cinerama. But the makers of Bwana Devil were so hell-bent on proving its three dimensional credentials that the ingredients which make a movie (plot development, acting and the rest) were ignored with disastrous results. Most critics in the West mauled it mercilessly. Even I who used to be quite naïve about English movies then found it intolerable. A better-made 3-D movie, I’m told, was Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954) using the process to bring out the depth of field instead of wasting it on gimmicks such as stuffs being hurled at you. It was released in India in the 2-D format as also was the horror flick House of Wax (1953) made in the alternative StereoVision 3-D process with its paddleball man and cancan girls showing off the 3-D edge. For that matter, even The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and It Came from Outer Space (1953) came to India minus the 3-D. All this chitchat reminds me of a character in the sci-fi comedy Back To The Future (1985) set in the mid-fifties who wears the red/blue 3-D glasses to remind us from which era he hails. He is called 3-D. Coming back to 3-D and me, though, I later realised that, in the West, from the 1860s to the 1920s, almost every middle-class home owned a Holmes stereoscope and stereo cards. http://digbig.com/ 5bckrx. In the 1920s, it seems a couple of movie halls in New York City had mounted on the seat in front a pair of gooseneck rotary-shutter viewers somewhat like the present liquid crystal shutterglasses. http://digbig.com/ 5bckry. Again, I read about the 70s sexploitation 3-D movie, The Stewardesses (1969) and the critically acclaimed Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1973) purely by chance. There was apparently a brief revival of the 3-D fad in the 1980s with Jaws 3-D (1983) and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (also 1983). Finally came the 3-D revival in the new millennium spearheaded by the 2009 magnum opus Avatar. Alfred Hitchcock briefly toyed with 3-D (Dial M for Murder) but did not persist with it. He went nowhere close to CinemaScope with its aspect ratio of 2.35:1. He did experiment with VistaVision in To Catch A Thief (1955), Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959) before returning to the good old aspect ratio of 1.33:1 in the standard (Academy) format for the black and white cult classic, Psycho (1960). Makes sense and works for me too.

Life across the board. Mine, to wit.

Truth to tell, I haven’t been much of a game player most of my life. Neither the board nor the outdoor variety. Among the earliest board games I played were Snakes and Ladders and Ludo, both among the more popular children’s board games. As a child, I used to persuade my mother or father to buy me a combo set of Snakes and Ladder-Ludo-Chinese Checkers-Draughts every year we visited the Navi Wadi jatra (fair) or went Christmas shopping. http://digbig.com/5bchts. One of the reasons for doing this was that, after a few days of use of the new purchase, most of the play counters used to go missing and we had to make do with unsatisfactory substitutes like buttons. All this had become a sort of ritual, almost. And, being the pampered son that I happened to be, my wish was my parents’ command and mostly granted. I must have graduated to Monopoly when I was about ten. Scrabble too must have come into my life around the same time. Draughts (Checkers) had been a part of my early board gaming. I distinctly recall a Mankar family heirloom predating my birth: an exquisitely crafted black wooden box with large red and black Draftsmen stored inside. You opened the box, turned it on its innards and it became a Draughts or Chess board. I stumbled upon Chess much later in life. In 1972, if memory serves, when the Fischer-Spassky world championship made Chess the flavour of the month. Since then, I’ve spent many pleasant moments playing it. For instance: http://digbig.com/5bchtt. In fact, I became quite a Chess aficionado acquiring quite a few fancy Chess sets including one, purchased in Nepal, with the Chess pieces resembling warriors, elephants, camels, horses and so forth as well as the board wrought in brass. Also, a large number of (mostly unread) trade paperbacks on play analysis. One book on the game I enjoyed most, though, was the story of the Fischer-Spassky world championship I bought from my friend Shoiab. My board game playing in the 21st century has been mostly confined to playing with Armaan http://digbig.com/5bchtw and Anika http://digbig.com/5bchtx. Both of them don’t like to lose and, until recently, used to get terribly upset if I burst out laughing at the turn of events. Armaan has his own innovative approach to board gaming. He makes his own rules as the game proceeds.

Lust is in the eye of the voyeur.

Renato (Giuseppe Sulfaro) of the puppy-dog eyes and halting speech, a resident of the Sicilian small town of Castelcuto as yet wearing a humiliating pair of shorts, is about to come of age. He becomes the proud owner of a bicycle on 10 June 1940 − the day Il Duce declares war on the Allies. On the same day, he joins the gang of bicycle-owning oglers of the daily spectacle of a stroll through the village square by the callipygian Maddalena Scordia (Monica Bellucci), aka Malèna, a recently widowed school teacher who is the daughter-in-law of their Latin professor. So infatuated is he by the unwitting siren that he begins to stalk her. In the process he becomes a voyeuristic witness of her secret life and a raconteur of her tragic tale. Her widowhood makes her an “available” target for all the lustful men and an object of hate for all the women in Castelcuto. Imaginations run riot. Tongues wag. Gossip gets spun. Malèna’s name is mud especially after she sells herself to the German Army officers out of desperate destitution because the town has ostracized her. Once the war ends, the women of Castelcuto turn vengefully on this sinner among them and, after a merciless beating despite Renato’s valiant attempt to shield her, virtually force her to leave town. When her husband, wrongly presumed to be dead at the start of the war, returns looking for her, Renato writes him a quasi-anonymous note assuring him that, no matter what happened, Malèna had always loved him faithfully. He points him to her probable destination. A year later, the Scordias return to Castelcuto. They stroll through leisurely across the town square, she a little plumper now, demurely handing on his arm. The townsfolk seem to be in reconciliatory, let-the-bygones-be bygones mood. They gradually accept Malèna whom Renato wishes the best of luck after he lends her a final helping hand to pick up the oranges she has spilled from her overstuffed shopping bag. This in a nutshell is the moving narrative of Malèna (2000) written and directed by Giuseppe “Cinema Paradiso” Tomatore http://digbig.com/5bchtr I happened to chance upon the other morning on Star Movies. Lucky me! I even found the exceedingly apt adjective “callipygian” in the Online Dictionary by sheer accident.

Once a delinquent, always a delinquent.

One morning recently, out of the blue, I had a bout of nostalgia. It was about a friend who is no more. He was my colleague for three years in Clarion-McCann http://digbig.com/5bbsqw when we became firm friends. He had to leave his job because he could not get along with his boss. Although I used to be quite serious and solemn about work and the world in general in those days, I made an exception in his case and got to be quite fond of him. He used to address me as “DW” (short for “Deepak Waman” Mankar) – a very British trait (“TS” = “Thomas Stearns” Eliot and so forth) he had acquired during his years of stay in London for higher studies followed by a job in advertising. He did it to nobody else, though. I was his chosen victim probably because I used to be such a square and a crushing bore in those days. The bloke was straight out of PG Wodehouse, full of pranks all the time. PG was also one of his favourite authors as he was mine. Our other shared reading preference was Edgar Wallace http://digbig.com/5bcadw. We used to hunt for PG and EW books jointly in shops stocking old books, magazines and other scrap as well as pavement stalls on Hornby Road and Lamington Road. He also loved Topol and "If I were a rich man" from A Fiddler on the Roof . He watched it several times when it ran at the Sterling in the eighties. Later on, we discovered that he had been Ujwal’s contemporary in St. Teresa High School which he had to quit after rustication as a reprisal for what he himself described as a “dastardly” prank. He finished school in St Sebastian. Though a devout church-going Catholic himself walking almost a mile to attend morning mass at the red St Teresa’s (Portuguese) Church, Girgaum, he apparently never got along with the priests running both the schools and even St Xavier’s College. One of his abiding passions in life at that time, besides chess games on the terrace of 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://digbig.com/5bafde and spending the whole day in the David Sassoon Library in Colaba, was the World War II history. He used to regale me with thrilling accounts of the various battle theatres. One event of the era we disagreed about was the Holocaust. He didn’t think the accounts of it were grossly exaggerated although he agreed with me that history is mostly written by the victors. Somewhere along the way, he had acquired a taste for locally brewed hock in spite of his years of pub crawling in London. It probably had something to do with his dire financial straits. He had his own unique style of downing his poison. He would take a fairly large swallow of his drink, make a face, take a lick of salt, quickly pour his next shot, bolt it down and make his exit. He also got into the habit of carefully hoarding stubs of cheap cheroots to later crumple them and smoke the tobacco in a pipe. One of this prankster’s weirdest – and stupidest − pranks cost him the opportunity offered to him on a silver platter for a late comeback into advertising. A newly launched ad agency floated in the late 1980s by his friends had hired him as the operational head. Had he taken the tide at the floods, it could well have turned out to be his swan song, his last hurrah. Alas! It was not to be. Instead of concentrating on marketing and client acquisition, he frittered away scarce resources on ads released on a whim and also alienated a few clients. Then came the point when he had no other alternative except to resign. For several years before his death a couple of years back, we had lost touch. When we came to hear of his hospitalization, both Ujwal and I went sick-visiting almost every day. We even attended his final service held at his younger brother’s flat in Bandra.

Nostalgia on steroids.

Namrata Dutt Kumar, the elder daughter of Nargis and Sunil Dutt, writes well, even cogently. She is the chief narrator of Mr and Mrs Dutt: Memories of our Parents (Rollibooks, 2007). She wrote it in tandem with her younger sister Priya Dutt, according to their joint admission in the Foreword. I’m impressed by the élan with which they shrug off, also in the Foreword, the responsibility to be truthful and to avoid veering toward hagiographic excesses: “Seen from the eyes of their children, an objective and impartial view [of the parents’ lives] is perhaps an unrealistic expectation.” I loved the master stroke at the bottom of the Foreword: their handwritten signatures appearing below their photographs from early childhood. I was not looking for 100% honesty and authenticity when I picked up the book. As an ardent admirer of the actress par excellence though (I thought − and still think − she was one of the greatest talents ever to have graced the silver screen pre- and post-Independence), I was looking in the narrative for the Nargis I remembered vividly from those days. I found some of the Nargis I remembered in her movie stills. I could at a stretch accept Namrata and Priya's portrayal of her and her bubbly buddy Shammi clowning around like Lucy Ricardo (Lucille Ball) and Ethel Mertz (Vivian Vance) from I Love Lucy (ibid., pages 66 -71 and page 90). But pre-Mother India Nargis without even a fleeting shadow of Raj Kapoor is like Hamlet without the ghost in Act I, Scenes 1, 4 and 5 of the eponymous play, especially considering the trouble they've gone to piecing together the antecedents of both their parents. I find it incredible that the son and daughters of Nargis never heard by sheer chance, if nothing else, at a wayside tea stall or over Radio Ceylon maybe the Lata Mangeshkar-Manna Day all-time hit: “Pyaar huwa iqraar hua hai, /Pyaar se phir kyoon darta hai dil?/Kehta hai dil, rasta mushqil, /Pyaar ki hai kahaan manzil?” (Love happened, vows were exchanged, /Why then is the heart so spooked by love? /The going’s arduous, says the heart, /Who knows where the trail of love leads?) Apocrypha has it that even poor Morarji Desai got a first-hand glimpse into the Fifties’ First Romance when he was the Chief Minister of the then Bombay Presidency. That of course was much before the Dutt progeny came on the scene. All this ducking and dodging and sticking one’s neck into a hole in the ground like an ostrich reminds me of what Erica Wagner wrote about Sharon Dogar’s soon-to-be-published novel for young adults, Annexed. This is a fictional account of Anne Frank’s life when she was hiding from the Nazis and incarcerated in the concentration camp to which the Anne Frank Trust has taken a strong objection because of graphic accounts of the narrator Peter van Pels’ desire for Anne and intimate scenes between the two. “When does history become history?” Wagner asks. “How do we draw a line after which speculation — factual or fictional — becomes permissible and unlikely to cause offence to anyone? Living memory? Longer? Who gets to decide?” http://digbig.com/5bbwxr. Wagner goes on to confess that she found it difficult to find a “true version” of any event while writing Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters, her non-fiction book about Ted Hughes’ account of his life with Sylvia Plath in a series of poems. Did the truth vanish in thin air then?

The Croupier.

The following is a real story. Once upon a time, for one enchanted evening, I was indeed the honoured guest of an honest-to-goodness croupier working in a London casino in Great Russell Street (for all I know). I never got to watch him actually working in the pit: dealing the cards expertly or raking in and pushing out chips with his long T-stick across the green felt surface of the gambling table, though. By the way, the guy happened to be the elder brother of an ex-colleague of mine from the time I was in Forward Markets Commission in the early sixties. http://digbig.com/5bbsqt. Clarion-McCann http://digbig.com/5bbsqw, where I worked for a little over 11 years from 1965, sent me to London in 1971 for 3 months’ training. This was the time when the ex-colleague offered to inform his brother in London of my visit and make sure he entertained me suitably. I had been unaware till then of the brother’s existence. The reason for keeping it hush-hush became clear only after I met him. In London, I was rooming with an old school pal who was writing his Ph D thesis in Chemistry. This was in the attic of an old house in Drayton Park, Islington, in North London with its own taciturn London landlady in attendance. The eponymous tube station was on the Northern City Line, 5 minutes away from where I was rooming. Anyway, the mystery brother called me one Friday to say that a limo would pick me and my friend up the coming Tuesday at 7 in the evening. He said Tuesday was the day of choice because it was his weekly day of rest. The designated Tuesday arrived in due course. On the dot at 7 pm so did the promised limo. The aforementioned landlady was startled out of her habitual stupor to express her astonishment at its appearance to my friend and me. To cut a long story short, we rode in the limo to an unknown destination which turned out to be the restaurant and watering hole attached to the casino where the mystery brother worked. There we were treated to a most lavish spread of dinner with champagne flowing. My friend as well as the mystery brother and his cheerful sari-clad wife were teetotalers. So, I was the only guy guzzling. From what little they told us, it turned out to be the classic black-sheep-of-the-family story but with a happy ending: the ne’er-do-well finally making his pile in faraway London. I was puzzled why the couple was going out of their way to impress someone whom they had met the first and, most likely, the last time in their lives. I reckon they must have wanted me to carry a glowing report of the royal treatment I had received to their family in India. I did my bit out of gratitude. A few years later, I heard from my ex-colleague that his brother had passed away and his widow had opted for living in London rather than going back to India. I guess it made sense. The couple had no children and also no emotional ties left in India.

Work fascinates me. I can watch it for hours.

This morning, I went out wearing my canary yellow T-shirt with the “Work fascinates…” legend emblazoned across the chest. That, by the way, is not “by the way”. I’m upset at the way Mumbai opens up for work later and later as time goes by. As late as the early eighties, shops in our neighbourhood used to be open by 8 am. Now you can count yourself as lucky if the shutter is up by 9. By one of those bizarre happenstances, all my chores today got done earlier than I had thought and despite taking a really leisurely walk via Khotachi Wadi http://digbig.com/5bbrww to my final chore I reached the spot 45 minutes too early. There was no alternative – no good bookshop within easy reach – to while away the time on hand. So I strolled aimlessly through a sudden but brief cloudburst around the once familiar neighbourhood most of which seemed so alien thanks to the new shops and new multistoried buildings. I finally landed up in the Cosmopolitan Restaurant & Stores http://digbig.com/5bbrwx for a cup of tea. After taking my order, the lady who now seems to be in charge of the Irani Café started scolding someone for being late. He happened to be the man from the raddiwala there to collect the used cardboard cartons and plastic bottles for recycling. His lame excuse for being late was the cloudburst I mentioned earlier. I watched him as he went about his task systematically while I sipped my tea. He seemed to be good at it the way he unhurriedly undid every carton and flattened it out to arrange layer on layer. It took him as long to finish his chore as it did me to finish my cuppa: all of fifteen minutes. My last chore saw me again admiring someone taking ten minutes and a lot of chitchat on the side to do a job that should have taken no more than two minutes at the most. That’s the way the cookie crumbles these days, I reckon.

Category error.

Something is categorically amiss – nay, noxiously rotten – in the erstwhile State of Porbandar. That, by the way, was the principality where the grandfather as well as the father of the Father of the Nation did duty as Dewan or Prime Minister once upon a time and where the latter was born. Porbandar, on the nose of the uniquely shaped landmass of Kutch and west of Ahmedabad and Sabarmati Ashram, was categorically not on the Dandi March route. That salt-bound trail of 241 miles wound its way southwards along the mainland coast.

But that’s neither here nor there. Except perhaps for the fact that the 241 miles that Gandhi and his 79 Satyagrahi followers covered in 24 days inspired Montblanc of Germany to launch a limited edition of 241 hand-crafted Gandhi fountain pens. Tushar Gandhi, MK’s great grandson, found nothing wrong with the idea. According to BBC http://digbig.com/5bbrea “[h]is charitable foundation has already received a donation of $145,000 from Montblanc and will receive between $200 and $1,000 for each pen sold.” Tushar, I reckon, thinks like the bania that he is and his great grandfather was.

Banias are from the trader/merchant stock. According to Jafar Mahmΰd (Mahatma Gandhi: A Multifaceted Person, page 53) http://digbig.com/5bbreb, Gandhi once admitted that he was a bania and there was no limit to his greed. On page 64 of the same book, there’s an account of how he was not averse to raising money by auctioning the gifts he received. A lime went for Rs.10/-; a cotton garland for Rs.201/-; a golden takli (drop spindle) for Rs.5000/-; a thrice-auctioned ring worth Rs.30/- for Rs.445/-; a casket for Rs.1000/-. Imagine what these bids would be worth at the 21st century prices. When it came to raising funds for his causes, Gandhi was also a shameless beggar.

Dijo Kappen of the Centre for Consumer Education, Kerala, does not agree with Tushar Gandhi’s bania logic. The Centre stopped the sale of the Montblanc product by filing a suit in the Kerala High Court evoking a 1950 Indian law prohibiting the improper use of emblems and names. “It is a mockery of the great man and … an insult to the nation … to use him as a poster boy,” argued Kappen. Are there haves and have-nots among NGOs and are there internecine rivalries and jealousies out there too, one wonders.

The text on the Montblanc website http://digbig.com/5bbrfj clearly says that the $25,000 (£16,000) gold and silver limited edition pen is homage to the 241 miles travelled by Gandhi on the Salt March from Ahmedabad to the coast.

Is there what is known in philosophy and semantics as “category error” lurking here?

I’m reminded of my mythical friend Henry Root’s daughter, Doreen, a student of philosophy and sociology at the University of Exeter in the sober seventies when Mrs Thatcher ruled the roost in Britain. http://digbig.com/5bbrfk. Young Doreen used to be rather adept at spotting logical faux pas.

She would probably have posed the question in the present case as follows.

Can a profit-making product pass off as homage to a man who made a fetish out of living in poverty although it took a lot of money to keep him there, said Sarojini Naidu?

Or, can a self-serving act pose as homage to a selfless person?