When a snake converses with an eagle...

As I walked back from the dining hall, the song "Paramasivan Kazhuthil irunthu" played in my head. I am not a fan of old Tamil songs. I attribute this dislike to T.M.Soundarajan whose voice I dislike; this song and a few others are exceptions. The reason for my liking this song seems to be Kannadasan's lines. Kannadasan is a tremendous poet and his words tend to break through my dislike for TMS. In this mentioned song, I simply love his reference to the snake circled around Siva's neck conversing with Vishnu's vehicle Garuda. I love the line "athil artham ulladu" which means  "there is a meaning in what was said". As is usually the case when translating Indian words, like dharma, artham probably has more to it than the meaning.

I hummed the song in my head as I walked up the ramp to the art block. As I turned onto the veranda outside art room I saw a crowd standing around the jack fruit tree. I approached the 17 year old who is considered an expert in insects and reptiles and asked him the reason for the crowding. He said a few people had seen a snake near the tree. I asked him if it was poisonous. He said he did not know for he had not seen the snake himself. I became a part of the crowd for a few minutes. He looked towards me and said "there is no point waiting here. The snake is too scared to come out. Besides it would have settled down comfortably in some nook and has no reason to come out." I believed the guy for he knew more about reptiles than humans. I walked away. Later that evening, I asked him if he had seen the snake. He said "Yes! Its was a harmless bronzeback."

I don't think I will ever forget this boy. I find his passion for reptiles and insects unique. He and a few of his friends can be seen looking underneath stones and rocks in the campus in search of reptiles. When one sees him running through the campus, one can be sure that a reptile has been spotted in the campus. I hear the phrase "in him, snakes have a knowledgeable teen-aged individual" when I think of him.

Across worlds

I am not sure where I am. Everything around seems familiar and yet I am unable to identify my location. I think I know what is happening but I am not sure. As is usually the case, I have very little control of the events taking place but somehow it seems the events are beyond my control. Just the previous day, my spectacles frame decided to break without any warning. One of the screws decided to disappear without trace and I ended with two pieces of the frame and a missing screw. The situation landed in my life out of nowhere and I looked up at the residence of Gods and poured out my feelings as abuses. But I could find a resolution for the situation quickly. But this is different  for I am unable to resolve anything and somehow my life seems to be in a spiral. Suddenly I am surrounded by darkness and the I hear the sound of the rain outside. I realize that I was dreaming; a dream that I no longer remember but something that was not pleasant and yet not unpleasant. 

I realized at that moment, that during the dream I was awake in another world and as soon as I woke up I came back to the real world. I did not hear the rainfall in my dream. I woke up suddenly and almost instantly I heard it. It was disorienting and shocking.

A teacher's tale

I have come to realise that the teaching community thinks of itself as a large family. For the past two years every time a teacher gets to know that I teach in a school their respective faces brighten and they say with a bright sparkle in their eyes "oh! I am a teacher too". Two years back I did not know what to do with this information and ended up exclaiming with a sheepish expression "Oh! Ah! How interesting!" Now I have a better response for this situation. Depending on the gender and age of the teacher I look at him/her as a brother or sister or uncle or aunt. I let the feeling of the warmth of the new found relationship run through me prior to asking something about them. I usually end up asking them about the school in which and the subjects they teach or taught. At times, the responses contain teaching experiences and anecdotes. This evening I ran into one such experience.

We walked into someone's house and the someone welcomed us by saying loudly (not to be misunderstood with shouting) "I hope you did not visit that house". We were taken aback and did not respond. He changed the statement to a question "did you visit that house?" One of us responded tentatively "we did". He moved his head back a bit, covered his forehead with his palm and said dramatically "why did you go now? Did you not know that there is a death in the family? I mentioned the news to you this morning and yet you did not realise. I only got to know later that you planned to visit this afternoon. I tried calling your mobile a number of times but your phones were not reachable". We could say nothing more than "oh!". He continued ranting "now I don't have a choice but to keep away from him for the next few days". 

Soon, the mood of despair changed and the topics of discussion became agreeable. He started discussing about the dramatic events preceding the aforementioned death "though she was in the hospital she was conscious and interacted with others. As a matter of fact we were chatting with her on Whatsapp when she suddenly stopped responding to our queries. We saw that she was online and yet did not respond to our chat. Five minutes later we got a message on the chat which said that she was no more. She died while chatting with us." We looked at him aghast. He shrugged his shoulder and moved on to other family topics.

A little later, the man's brother walked in and sat on the chair besides mine. As is usually the case, he asked me what I did. On hearing my response, he beamed and said "I too am a teacher".  I looked at him closely and realized that he did look like a teacher. Over time I have realized that in such situations the appropriate question to ask is "what do you teach?" but I was not interested in the "what" question and so I asked "where do you teach?" I had expected him to name one of the Government schools in Kerala and I was readying myself to ask the next question "where would that be?" But his response took me by surprise. "I have taught in many places but I retired as the principal of a school in Brunei". My brain froze. All systems in my body looked at each other in confusion. They did not know what to do next. My heart took the lead and gently nudged my brain back to normalcy. I was trying to digest the name Brunei. When a Malayalee utters Brunei, it can only refer to one place. At many times in my growing up years I had heard Brunei being uttered in my family with utmost respect. I had even met a family who had lived in that place for many years. This person sitting besides me did not seem anything like them. Thus my surprise forced me to utter "In Brunei!" The man responded "For fifteen years". I could not contain my curiosity and asked him to tell me about his teaching journey. 

"I worked for a few years nearby for a few months when I got an opportunity to teach in Kenya. I grabbed it and accepted the offer. I taught in  a few Kenyan schools for nearly six years. At that time, South Africa was moving away from the apartheid policy and many Indians teaching in the African continent considered it as a land of opportunities. So I moved to South Africa when I got an offer and started teaching there. Within a few years I got an opportunity to teach at Brunei. Brunei seemed like a land of milk and honey and I moved to there, quite unnecessarily. I had a good career at Brunei monetarily and professionally. As I mentioned earlier, in the fifteen years I spent at Brunei, I became the principal of the school. But I should not have left South Africa.

At around the time I left, the South African government wanted the teachers from outside the country to leave. They did not want to pay the outsiders and thought that the opportunity should be provided to the locals. The teachers went to the court and filed a case against the government demanding a severance package for the separation. The teachers won the case and the government was asked to provide the appropriate severance package. When the government calculated the package, it turned out to be a significant amount. The government, quite rightly, thought it foolish to pay the existing teachers and to spend money additional budget on the new teachers. So they backed out and let the existing teachers, many of them Indians, continue. 

So my colleagues continued residing in South Africa. They became permanent residents and bought properties in good neighbourhoods; properties that the whites leaving the country were selling. Over time, the value of the properties rose. When they retired they sold these properties for a healthy value and returned to India with a more than healthy bank balance. As they were working in Government schools in South Africa, they receive a good sum as pension every month. In most cases, both husband and wife worked as teachers and together they receive nearly Rs. 80,000 every month, which is more than comfortable to live in Kerala. Also they have the big balance to live in luxury.

It is not like I am terribly unhappy or I had a bad career but the decision to move to Brunei was unnecessary."

Everyday journey challenges

The Flaming Lips are not an easy listen. The music can be cacophonous and the singer loves to sing or can only sing off key. But I find the songs catchy. How can one not love songs with words like "this here giraffe, laughed". There's also a terrifying version of the song "What a wonderful world!". Ardent lovers of the original by Louis Armstrong would definitely hate The Flaming Lips for having sung the song thus. The out of tune singing and feedback drenched music makes it an ideal end-of-the-world song. The past week, I decided to play the entire Flaming Lips discography during my ride to and from work.

The winding roads were not tough to maneuver but the cows residing on the roads made the drive challenging. I had driven over mud roads earlier but not over such maad roads. The cows did not care about the traffic. They lay on the left and right side and the centre of the road chewing their cud. As the vehicles approached them, they looked at the vehicles with disinterest and continued chewing. Many times, I tried to decipher their thoughts but they maintained a blank expression. I am sure the Zen monks can learn a trick or two from them. Usually the cows left just enough space for a car to squeeze through them. But they ensured the vehicle had to swerve to the left or right once they get through the gaps. The bigger vehicles did not have this choice. They stopped and honked but the cows were not affected. The driver honked some more. They slowly pushed up their hind legs and remained in the resulting right angle triangle pose for a few minutes. The driver, by now, was desperate and honked with all his energy. The cows pushed up their front legs and stood looking like a chewing rectangle. By now, the driver was hurling abuses about the cow's parents. The cows' love for their parents usually resulted in their moving away from the path of the vehicle. 

At many points during this journey, the dogs take objection to my car and chase it while barking. I have been tempted, sometimes, to stop the car and ask them "why?" but was not sure if I would understand their response and hence usually drive away annoyed. Once I saw a lone boy walking along the side of the door swinging his badge above his head. He soon started skipping along the road twirling his badge above his head. I couldn't help but wonder at his joy this early in morning as he walked alone to his school. The road winded towards the red coloured buildings of the law college beyond which lay the forest. By forest, I don't mean the thick wooded evergreen tropical forest kind of forest but the sparsely populated scrub jungle. I have heard that the forest is home for a few animals.  Not the tiger and lion kind of animals but the deer and mongoose kind of animals. Once i had seen seen a mongoose standing on its hind legs in the centre of the road and look into the horizon at the approaching vehicle; the car I was driving. As the car got closer it probably realized that it was a car, which could squash it and ran away. One morning when the music was not blaring out of the stereo and the window panes were down I heard the songs of many birds emanating from the trees. I decided to drive with no music since then but have forgotten about it since. I am sure I will not remember it the next time I drive through that stretch of the road.

The road curves to the right and the forest lands on either side give way to the bund of a big lake on the left and a smaller lake on the right. I remember hearing that the road did not exist eighty years back and the area was a large lake. As in other places, humanity decided to disturb the lake by constructing a road through it. I marveled at the foresight of the set of people eighty years ago who decided to construct this road for my convenience. I did not thank them for I believed it was their destiny to do so. A garbage dump existed on the right; between the bund and road. On most days, foul smell did not emanate from the dump but recently bulldozers started clearing the garbage and the stink from the decomposing waste that lay underneath the fresh waste became unbearable. Actually, nearly unbearable for I did not raise the windows as I passed it; I held my breath for a few seconds instead. The clearing was not done properly and the road by the dump was littered with garbage. I understand the reason for humans not treating garbage with respect but not the way the place with the garbage is treated. I don't think we truly respect anyone or anything.

The road became messy within a few hundred metres. A few months back the potholes lay beyond a speed breaker but now there were a few prior to it too. I changed to the second gear and swerved the steering this way and that to avoid the potholes. It was a futile effort but I indulged in it every time I passed the stretch. No part of the road existed without potholes and at all times at least one of the wheel found itself within a pothole. Many college and school buses plied on this stretch of the road and a few of the driver were impatient oafs. They got their large buses right behind the car and honked vigourously. Sometimes the oafs yanked their large vehicles to the right and overtook me. Usually I ignored them and focused my attention on the potholes. But a few day existed where this behaviour annoyed me enough to mouth words that I should not.

Soon I reached a location that presented the most challenging situation in my life. I am not sure if I will ever resolve this challenge. I wish I had a Parthasarathi who would help me differentiate the right from the wrong of this situation.

Beyond the bad stretch of the road, I had to take a right from a four road junction to reach my destination . Near the middle of the junction stands a tall lamp post. It is not at exactly at the centre of the road but is slightly to the right of the road. The police have placed a barricade from the post to the centre of the road. The reason for the existence of this barricade is not clear. In India, we are supposed to keep to the left of the road. But at the intersection none of the vehicles taking the right keep to the left. Instead they go as the water would flow. I hate doing that. I cross the lamp post and take the right turn keeping the post on my right, that is, on the left side of the road. This confuses everyone at the junction. The person coming from the opposite side thinks that I am going straight as I did not turn prior to the lamp post and so does not slow down. The person coming from the road on the right side taking a right does not expect me to come onto his path and so does not slow down. The person behind me does not expect me to take a right as I have crossed the post without taking a right and so does not slow down. The person coming from my left going straight and the person coming from the opposite side taking left down do not slow down anyway as they want to get ahead of me. All these persons, ignore the fact that the right indicator on my car is blinking. Usually I let everyone pass and then take the right. But I wonder if I should do what others are doing and not do what I think is right. How can I be sure I am right? Parathasaratheeee! Where are you when I need you?

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.