Aravindante Athidhikal

Though the movie "Aravindante Athithikal" begins in sadness, it proceeds to humourous terrain quickly. Srinivasan, Vineeth Srinivasan, Aju Varghese, Urvashi, Premkumar and others make the middle portion of the movie funny. But the last half  an hour turned out to be a bore. I did not feel good about the feel good ending. Through the movie, the ending was hinted by many characters and I watched in dread as the movie went through the expected zones of twists and unsurprising surprises. The two high points in the movie are 

1. The song "Rasathi": I love this song and the way it is taken. I like Vineeth Srinivasan's singing in this song as in many other.

2. The "24 hour running hot water" sequence. I am not sure if this scene has already appeared in another movie but I found the interpretation of the phrase "24 hour running hot water" funny. I will watch the movie again just for the sequence.

Ēkaṭi rēla yātrā

Though I had slept late the previous night, I woke up earlier than I wanted to. Fortunately, it was later than my usual wake up time. I decided to get up and take care of the morning duties. The Indian style toilet resembled the Indian roads during monsoon. So I had no choice but to use the western style toilet. I stepped in with the mantra that I have repeatedly evoked while facing disgusting situations -  "disgust is nothing but a feeling". Composting has helped me assimilate this mantra by making me understand that the disgusting and smelly decomposing vegetables ultimately turn into beautiful manure. I walked into the toilet and did the job I had to do. There was the minor complexity of the mug being fixed to the wall using a small chain on my left hand side but I believe I handled the situation dexterously.

On getting back to my seat I realized everyone was asleep still. I went up to my berth and went back to sleep. I woke up when a fellow passenger's phone rang. From the previous night's events I had realised that the fellow was quite a fellow and he lived up to being a fellow by attending the call on the speaker. A young voice asked him what he was doing. The voice sounded shocked when he said that he was sleeping. She exclaimed "but it's 10 o clock".  He responded with a nonchalant "yes, we slept late last night". Now it was my turn to be shocked. I looked at my watch and found that the time was 9:05 am.

I find it interesting that I write these words about the fellow sitting right next to him. 

In a few minutes, every one got up and the middle berths came down. Everyone sat down and started staring and meddling with their mobiles. I took out my headphones and started listening to songs as I looked through my Facebook wall. Ian Gillian was struggling to sing "Black Knight" to a bunch of screaming audience. I started watching the aisle at intervals for breakfast. The choice for breakfast was limited - bread omelette, bread cutlet and upma-vada. The pantry car was manned by people from the north of the country, who found it difficult to pronounce upma and vada let alone make it. Bread and cutlet seemed an awful combination. Years of eating cutlet has helped me realize that the quality of a cutlet can either be good or bad and in most cases it is bad. So I waited for "braidomlate" to arrive.

Opeth's Blackwater park came on and suddenly and quite unexpectedly a feeling of bliss came over me. It was raining outside and most lights within the compartment were off. Water droplets ran down the window drawing zigzag lines; fortunately on the outside. The bleakness of the song matched the bleakness around. I decided to listen to the whole album. As the songs came on, a chaiwallah came by. The co-passenger ordered for "two teas". When he received the cups, he looked at it with disdain. He asked the chaiwallah "why only half a cup? Why don't you fill it up?" He did not get a response. He gave back one of the cups and said "this is too little; fill it up". I too got a cup of tea. As I sipped the tea, I realized that it was not tea but masala chai. As is usually the case, the masala chai tasted like everything other than tea. But I was happy to let the warm liquid travel to my gut. 

Finally, the food I was looking for arrived. My travels over the past few months have made me realize that bread-omelette is served differently in different trains. In one case, it contained two slices of bread and an omelette. During the onward journey, I was surprised to find three pieces of oily potato fries and a seven small green balls that looked like peas. On that occasion I had stuffed the omelet, potato and peas within the slices of bread and chomped them. This time they had thrown in a small pack of butter to the contents mentioned earlier. I looked at the butter pack suspiciously. It carried the name of a popular brand on it but the package looked suspiciously thin. It opened easily and I spread the butter on one of the slices. The butter looked surprisingly genuine. Asian paints could have used the yellow of the butter to represent "mera wallah yellow". I tasted the butter; it tastes genuine. I reached the conclusion that the butter was fake. The other items were not branded. Here I forget the packet of ketchup which is also usually provided too. I have never understood the Indians obsession with ketchup. We like to immerse everything in ketchup. Omlette - ketchup, bread - ketchup, Hakka noodles - ketchup, puffs - ketchup, pasta - ketchup, samosa - ketchup. Personally I can never forgive people for murdering the samosa in ketchup.

I placed the omelette on the slice of bread with butter spread over it. I placed sad pieces of potato and peas over the omlette and enclosed the mess with the remaining slice of bread. I bit a corner of the gruesome sandwich and enjoyed the different flavours running around my mouth. At that moment it did not matter to me that most of the ingredients could be adulterated or fake. I think we have to accept that human beings have moved to the next phase of evolution. We have now the ability to live on absolute crap. We eat crap, breathe crap and drink crap. This does not bother us for we can exercise and pop some pills into our mouths.

The man besides me asked a lady co-passenger "are you a Nepali?" She looked at him for a moment without answering. The man persisted. "Where are you from?" She hesitated for a moment before answering "from Jharkhand". The man seemed perplexed as he said "from Jharkhand!". By now, another lady co-passenger started sharing family gossip with someone over the phone. Her husband listened intently and occasionally provided information that she had missed. From time to time she said "we are Brahmans" or "at least the boy was a Brahman". The curious man's wife observed the conversation keenly and when her husband asked if she wanted fish for lunch, she refused by saying "I will not have fish in front of them. Did you not hear her speak?" She had eggs for lunch and complained to her husband about its tastelessness later.

The train's running late by three hours and it is refusing the make up the delay. The 27 hour journey promises to extend by another 4 hours. 

A rainy day

As the bus passed the group of shops a small board caught his attention. It announced "Best clinic wanted doctor". For a moment, he wondered if the best clinic had found the wanted doctor and the reason the doctor wanted for. The clinic did not seem much like a clinic and to top it it did not have a doctor; that too in the past tense. So how was it considered a best clinic? He let the silliness of the moment pass. He heard the little girl in pink call his name. He looked around and found her smiling at him. She pointed at her friend and said "In the mornings, I sleep on her lap and in the afternoons she sleeps on my lap". He smiled and said "That's nice! There is no better place to rest your head than on a friend's lap." The little one changed the topic abruptly by saying "Look! Her bag's pink and so is mine." She and her friend spent the next few minutes identifying every pink object near them. He listened to them with a smile on his lips and provided the concluding remark "So much pink! I think we should call this bus 'the pink bus'". The two of them giggled with happiness and repeated "pink bus" a number of times. He smiled and looked out of the window at the wet landscape crawling past.

That afternoon, he sat in a corner of the classroom and looked at the centre of the campus through the windows. The centre being the centre was the lowest point of the campus and hence rain water from different parts of the campus congregated there. Two sequences of stones, each perpendicular to the other peeped out of the water. These small islands provided limited amount of safety from water for the human feet and the slippers that adorned them. The children had been warned of the ill effects of rain. They were reminded to wear rain gears and to keep themselves off the outside. But as researchers have found some of the children possess a complementary circuit between their ears. So they indulged in the exact opposite. 

A set of seven years old walked up through the water before turning around and walking right back. They turned right, walked a bit, turned around and came back. They, then turned left, walked a few steps, turned around and came back. They continued such maneuvers for many minutes. At all times, they took care to keep their feet submerged in water and when they took a foot off the water, they ensured if re-entered the water with some force. They squealed and screamed as the water splashed about. The rain fell on their heads at a steady drizzle. A girl, unlike the boys, used the stones to walk across the stones. She took care that that the water did not wet her red shoes. When she reached the last stone she stopped and looked at the water-less ground for a moment. The ground was just out of reach for her. She took the longest stride she could but could not cross the water. Her red shoes landed on the water with a sploch. She waved her right hand in annoyance and walked looking at her wet red shoes.

An adult followed the girl. She walked briskly from stone to stone with an umbrella held above her head. When she reached the centre of the path, she paused abruptly and as a result nearly lost her balance. She turned unsteadily and decided to use the path perpendicular to her initial path. The stones of this path were placed at some distance from the stone on which she was standing. She stretched her right leg and managed to land her foot on one of the stones. Almost instantly she lifted her left leg off the stone and placed it on the stone ahead of the stone on which her right left was placed. She had changed her direction of motion successfully in a matter of two seconds. 

The boys continued playing in the water unaware of the complex maneuver attempted by the children and adults walking on the stone.