Ba ba bacon

 "Get some bacon from the super market."
"Now?"
"Right now!"
"Are you sure supermarkets sell Kevin Bacon?"
"If I am a cannibal, you wouldn't be here to ask this question."
"Ha! I like your thought."
"If you continue like this, this liking shall pass too.
 Go now and get the bacon. I feel the need to fork in some pork."
"Pork - fork. Neat rhyme crime my dear."
"Go on! Go away and get back soon."
"... so that you can work with a fork on the pork."
"Stop being a pig. Don't tempt me to bacon you. Go now."
"Oh no! Your desire for bacon has woken up the pagan in you. I am leaving."
"While you are there get some Salami too."
"Salami! Tell me that you love me if you want some salami."
"I will not trivialize my love for the sake of a few slices of salami."
"You find mixing love with salami alarming."
"I mix love in everything I make but I will not bargain love for salami."
"I give a salaam to you for your thought. 
  I will give you salami and bacon soon."

 

The Times They Are A-Changin'

Every week I bought one and a half dozen country eggs from a vegetable shop close by. The shop was run by a family. At most times, the husband sat behind the billing counter. Over the course of the past two years, I have developed a cordial and yet distant relationship with him. On most days, we only exchanged a smile with each other. My smile was usually hidden underneath my mask. At times, we talked a little about eggs. 

"When did the eggs come in?"

"Yesterday."

"Are they fresh?"

"Of course! I only buy two crates of egg as not many people buy country eggs."

The cost of the eggs has remained the same for the past year or so and so I don't even ask "How much?" before I pay. The payment takes place through Google Pay and so we don't even have the "do you 5 rupees with you?" - "No. I don't have 5 rupees with me" exchange with each other. Overall we maintained a professional relationship.

This morning too, everything went in the usual manner. I picked the eggs placed it in the boxes. He helped filling one of the boxes. I placed the boxes in the bag and took out the mobile phone from my pocket when he asked a question. "Have you heard of the RSS?" The question took me by surprise. Of course, I have heard of the RSS but I did not expect him to ask that question to me. So I blurted "The RSS?" He confirmed "Yes. The RSS." At that point I noticed his attire - a shiny saffron shirt and a saffron mundu. A 'U' shaped vaishnava namam adorned his forehead. I understood which RSS he was referring to. I responded "Yes. I know RSS". He asked immediately "Would you like to join the RSS?" The question shocked me. I did not expect anyone to ask me that question. A few years back, I realized a cousin has been a member of RSS for many years. Even he has never talked to me about RSS. But this person whom I barely knew was asking me to join RSS. I was reminded of a Malayalam movie dialogue "Aye, njan anganathavanalla". I responded "I am not that kind of person". He did not let me proceed beyond the sentence and started on a long monologue on RSS. It contained the following points.

• RSS is a very good organization.
• RSS helps in a person achieve self control and other attributes that are described using words starting with 'self' through Yoga, exercise and other such activities.
• RSS conducts pooja's and other religious activities for a person to achieve something (I don't remember what now).
• RSS discovers common people who quietly serve the downtrodden/needy in our society. These are people who serve food for the needy or teach them for free. They do it quietly without fanfare. Members of RSS discover them and send information about them to city/town/village office. From there the information is sent to the centre via the district and state offices. He gave example of many people in our neighbourhood who are involved in such services.

The last point got me worried because I wondered if he had discovered some selfless service that I had rendered to the society. I frantically searched through my head to discover an activity that will fit the description he had provided but found none. I felt relieved. I will not receive an award from the RSS. That would be the end of my social life. Though I don't give a damn to left or right, I have friends who think right is not right. But that's not me. I am so non-left and non-right that I freeze with one of my legs stuck halfway in the air when I hear a dance instructor say "now twirl your left leg around your right leg and jump half a feet in the air". Before anyone says "Dance! You!", let me tell you that there a few poor souls who have tried to make me dance and who still believe that they I will dance one day. As far as I know none of them like the right. They refuse to do dance steps that involve putting thei right leg out first. 

Damn! I digressed.

Anyway, at the end of the monologue, he gave me a card that had the picture of goddess clad in saffron saree, holding a saffron flag leaning against a smiling lion. He said "please attend the guru pooja tomorrow morning". I smiled beneath my mask and said "I will try". As I walked out of the shop I had two questions in my head.

1. "Should I find a new shop that sells country eggs?"
2. "Why did he think that I am a good candidate to be a part of a guru pooja conducted by RSS?

Kosiru (Roughly translate to unimportant extra bit)

As I was driving to my parents place, I noticed the number of the car ahead of me was TN74AY... The 4 was written such that it looked like a stylised 'G'. I commented the '4AY' in the car ahead looks like 'GAY'.  A little later I overtook the car and my son observed that the car had a BJP flag at the front. Almost immediately he commented "it's a BJP car. So it's definitely not GAY. It has to be 4AY".

Today's child's world

Words have a way to get into your heart. Not just words from a poem but words from prose too. Recently, I came across two instances where words and thoughts struck a chord with me.

Ad Busters

From time to time, he brought one of his books and shared something interesting in them with us. I have never understood his selection of books. I never knew that such books existed. Normally I would not have considered the topics that the books covered as topics for a book at all. But most books turned out to be interesting. Though life did not give me the time required to look through these books, the past two times I have taken out time to go through the books that he brought to me. One such book was a journal called Ad Busters. The March/April 2011 edition of the book has an interesting article about children called ‘Dopamine Squirts’. This article contains the following snippets based on an interview with Dr. Gabor Mate in Democracy Now!

• If your spouse or partner came home from work and didn’t give you time of day and immediately got on the phone and started talking and texting with other people, your friends would not say “Your partner has a behavioural problem. You should try tough love”. They would say you’ve got a relationship problem. But when children act in these ways, many parents think their children have behavioural problem and they try to control those behaviours. In fact, what our children are showing us – my children showed me this as well – is that we have a relationship problem with them. They weren’t connected enough with me and were too connected to their peer group.
• The child peer world is so dangerous. It is fraught with bullying, ostracization, “dissing,” exclusion and negative talk. How do children protect themselves from all that negativity in the peer world? They are not committed to each other’s unconditional loving acceptance. Even adults have a hard time giving that. Children can’t do it. So those children become very insecure. To protect themselves emotionally, they shutdown. They become hardened. They become cool. Nothing matters. Cool is the ethic. You see that in the rock videos. It’s all about cool. It’s all about aggression and cool and no real emotion.
• Brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing … the worry is that we are raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.
• The conditions in which children develop have been so corrupted and troubled over the last several decades that the template for normal brain development is no longer present for many kids. Dr. Bessel von der Kolk, a professor in psychiatry at Boston University, actually says that the neglect or abuse of children is the number one public health concern in the United States.
• There are about half a million kids in this country receiving heavy duty antipsychotic medications such as are usually given to adult schizophrenics to regulate their hallucinations. But in this case, children are put on these medications to control their behaviour. So, what we have is a massive social experiment of the chemical control of children’s behaviour, with no idea of the long-term consequences that these heavy-duty antipsychotics will have on kids.
• In other words, what we’re doing is correcting a massive social problem that has to do with disconnection in society and loss of nurturing and we’re replacing that chemically. These stimulant drugs seem to work and a lot of kids are helped by them. The problem is not so much whether they should be used or not. The problem is that 80% of the time a kid is prescribed a medication and that is all that happens. Nobody talks to the family about the family environment. The school makes no attempt to change the school environment. Nobody connects with these kids emotionally.
• Canadian statistics just last week showed that within the last five years there has been a 43% increase in the rate of dispensing stimulant prescription for ADD or ADHD, with most of these going to boys. In other words, what we are seeing is an unprecedented burgeoning of the diagnosis. More broadly speaking, what I am talking about is the destruction of American childhood because ADD is just a template. It is just an example of what’s going on. In fact, according to a recent study published in the States, nearly half of American adolescents now meet some criteria for a mental health disorder.
• There are parts of the brain in the prefrontal cortex, right in front of the brain, whose job it is to regulate our social behaviours. They give us empathy. They give us insight. They give us attuned communication with other people. They give us moral sense. They are the very conditions that, according to a Notre Dame study, are now lacking. So, a lot of kids today are growing up without empathy, without insight into others, without a sense of social responsibility. Bullying is just one example of that.

Poor Economics

Many years ago, I gave a talk to a set of students in a business school. At the end of the talk, I was given a book as a memento. I saw that the book had the word ‘Economics’ in its title. So, I put it at the bottom of my book shelf at home and forgot about it. Recently, when I was cleaning my bookshelf, I chanced upon the names of the authors of the book, Abhijith Banerjee and Esther Duflo. The name Abhijith Banerjee seemed familiar. Soon I realized that he had won the Nobel Prize for Economics recently. Suddenly, my respect for the book went up. I looked at the title of the book. It read ‘Poor Economics’. Under the title of the book was the phrase ‘A radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty’. For reasons beyond my comprehension, I felt a deep interest for the book rising through me. I put back the Malayalam novel that I was reading and started reading this book. I found the contents of the book interesting. The authors presented interesting views of poverty. One of the chapters talks about the role education plays in alleviating poverty for families across the globe. This chapter has the following points on the issues in the education system with respect to the education for the poor.

• In a study designed to study whether this prejudice influenced teacher’s behaviour with students, teachers were asked to grade a set of exams. The teachers did not know the students, but half the teachers, randomly chosen, were told the child’s full name (which includes the caste name). The rest were fully anonymous. They found that, on average, teachers gave significantly lower grades to lower caste students when they could see their caste than when they could not. But interestingly, it is not the higher caste teachers who were doing this. The lower caste teachers were actually more likely to assign worse grades to lower caste students. They must have been convinced that these students could not do well.
• Because in many developing countries, both curriculum and the teaching are designed for the elite rather than the regular children who attend the school, attempts to improve the functioning of the schools by providing extra inputs have generally been disappointing.  … It should now be clear why private schools do not do better at educating the average child – their entire point is to prepare the best performing children for some difficult public exam that is the stepping stone towards greater things, which requires powering ahead and covering a broad syllabus. The fact that most children get left behind is unfortunate but inevitable.
• The public-school teacher seems to know how to teach the weaker children and is even willing to put some effort into it during the summer, but during the regular school year this is not his job – or so he has been led to believe. Recently in Bihar we evaluated a Pratham initiative to fully integrate remedial education programs into government schools, by training the teachers to work with their materials and also by training volunteers to work as teacher’s assistant in these classrooms.  The result was striking. In those (randomly chosen) schools that had both the teacher training and the volunteers, the gains are substantial. Where there was just teacher training, on the other hand, essentially nothing changed. The same teachers who did so well during the summer camps completely failed to make a dent. The constraints imposed by the official pedagogy and the particular focus on covering the syllabus seem to be too much of a barrier. We cannot just blame the teachers for this. Under India’s new Right to Education Act, finishing the curriculum is required by law.
• A combination of unrealistic goals, unnecessarily pessimistic expectations and the wrong incentives for teachers contribute to ensure that education systems in developing countries fail their two basic tasks: giving everyone a sound set of skills and identifying talent. Moreover, in some ways the job of delivering quality education is becoming harder. The world over, education system is under stress. Enrolment has gone up faster than resources, and with the growth in the high-tech sectors, there is a worldwide increase in demand for the kind of people who used to become teachers. Now, they are becoming programmers, computer systems manager and bankers instead. This is going to be a particularly serious issue for finding good teachers at the secondary level and beyond.

Minor occurrences

Some days back I saw a child rummaging through the lost and found box for a water bottle that he had lost two years back. I informed him confidently that two years is a long time and objects missing for two years will not be found in the lost and found box. He then tried to find the water bottle that he had lost six months back. I politely shooed him away. That evening, I wrote the incident down and posted it in this blog. I smiled at the naïve hopefulness of the boy as I pressed the 'publish' button. The next day as I walked out of the dining hall two boys came running towards me. One of them held up a bag and talked excitedly "Look at what I found". I asked "What?" He responded "I found the shoes that I lost a year back in the lost and found box".  I was stumped and did not respond for a moment. The boy was disappointed to see my reaction. He waved the bag in his hands and repeated "I found the shoes that I lost a year back in the lost and found box". I forced a thin smile onto my lips and said "that's nice! You mean you lost this pair of shoes a year back?" He responded "yes". I continued "... and you found it in the lost and found box?" He responded "yes, yes, yes". I asked "can I see the shoes?" He opened the bag and brought out a pair of sports shoes. I said stupidly "you are right; these are shoes". He agreed "Of course". I said "That's good. Yeah. Cool. I gotta go". As I walked away from the boy I hoped that the boy I had seen the previous day searching for his water bottle in the lost and found box would not hear this news.

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I did not notice the little boy on the path perpendicular to mine till he stopped to check the sole of his right foot. Something on the sole was bothering him. He wiped it with his hands a few times but he was not happy with the result. He wiped his leg on the path tentatively. He started moving slowly but halted from time to time. He dragged his right foot over the stones that paved the path. As I reached closer to him, he started walking faster. I saw that he was wearing a yellow t-shirt with black stars on it. By the time I crossed his path he had gone ahead some distance. His walking had become normal and I decided to not ask him if he had an issue with his foot. I continued on my way to the office. On the way back, I saw the boy going in the opposite direction. He was now skipping down the path with a happy smile on his face.

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The boy had a sheepish expression on his face as he walked out of the toilet. He looked at me and said "there was a frog in the toilet. I felt scared". I said "The frog was probably scared too. What did it do?" He responded "Nothing! It was just sitting there. I squirted water using the faucet. It went away". I smiled at him. He smiled back and went away.

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On seeing me he asked "Should I attend the workshop this weekend?" I responded "I hear it is a good workshop. You should try and attend". He pondered at my response for a moment before asking "Are you planning to attend the workshop?" I responded promptly "no". He asked "Why?" I said "I don't have the time this weekend." His face brightened as he said "I too am occupied with other activities this weekend and so will not go either". 

As I was having my breakfast, a colleague looked at me and mentioned "I hear the workshop this weekend is interesting. You should attend it". I responded with a noncommittal "Oh is it? How interesting!" Later, as I was leaving she asked "So can I confirm that you are attending the workshop?" Her question should have surprised me but it did not. I responded without hesitation "No. I am tied up this weekend".

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She said "Updation is happening". He looked at me and asked "is updation a word in the dictionary?" I felt confused because I thought it was and that I had used the word at some point of time in my life. I searched Google for the word. The top entry in the result page read as follows. 

updation

/ˈʌpˌdeɪʃ(ə)n/

noun: INDIAN

the process of updating something.

"the deletion or updation of data"

The word 'noun: Indian' seemed interesting. On searching further, it was mentioned that the word was not a part of the Oxford or Merriam-Webster dictionary but it is believed that the word is used by Indians. I felt updated.

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Lost and found

The different areas of the school campus are ideal locations for children to forget their belongings. In the evenings, after the children leave, a member of the staff walks around the campus with a big bag, picking up these forgotten objects. The objects are placed within a set of large boxes, which is referred to as 'lost and found'. The 'lost and found' boxes are not a pretty sight to behold. Usually, they remind one of streets in a riot ridden city. So the boxes are kept at the end of the dark corridor that leads to the physics lab. Sometimes as I walk in and out of physics lab, I am seized by the desire to rummage through the boxes in the hope of finding some lost treasure. Fortunately, I don't let this desire take over me.

Last evening, as I was walking out of the physics lab, I saw a pair of legs hang out of one of the 'lost and found' boxes. I wondered if the owner of the pair of legs belonged to the lost or found category. I walked up to the box and asked "Hey, what are you doing? Are you lost?" A boy got off the box and said "Oh! I am looking for the water bottle that I lost four years back?" I thought I did not hear him right and asked "Four days is it?" He responded "Four years". I found it difficult to not sound surprised when I asked "You are looking for a water bottle that you lost four years ago?" He said "Yes. I lost it four years back and my teacher told me that I can find it in the lost and found boxes". The boy said this with a lot of hope and I hated to disappoint him. But as hard as it is, truth had to prevail. I said "You might have found it four years back but a lot of time has passed now". The boy hung his head down in disappointment. He said "you mean the 'lost and found' box has lost it". I responded "that's right. The 'lost and found' box has lost it". After a moment's silence the boy asked "Does the school have a 'lost from lost and found and found' box?" I looked at him. He seemed to have asked the question in seriousness and so I responded likewise "No". The boy said "ok" and jumped right back into the box. I was puzzled. I asked "what are you searching for now?" The boy responded "I am searching for the water bottle that I lost six months back".

Sunday evening blues

Plainly, my life has taken a boring turn
Can't credit it to inactivity but to excess of it
Wish I could be still in a place alone
But every morning I see faces catching my attention
I wish to turn away and ignore all
But my inability to
      be rude to the young souls
      disappoint their belief in humans
      drive them towards early cynicism
Forces a smile to appear on my lips
While attempting to reflect their chirpiness in my responses
Thankfully I escape the notice of many
What is the point in being noticed!
I love my life to be below the damned radar

As the day proceeds, the variety in activities
Confuse my poor head
I wish I only had to this and not that
Or only that and not this
But if wishes were horses
It would rain donkeys
So I move from one activity to the other
Acting sane and cheating myself
Into believing in the sanity of others
By the time the sun reaches overhead
I wish King Buffalo was crooning Acheron into my ears
I blow the ridiculous thought away
For in this profession, I have to keep my ears and eyes open
To the needs of others and the possibility of incidents and accidents
Sometimes I escape from the dreary world
By staring at the cells containing meaningless numbers and words
I only wish to stand in front a young crowd
Ignore their thoughts and disseminate knowledge
Without a regard of its use for them now or ever
But life ain't never that convenient
And I do what I am supposed to do
Later in the evening I trudge into a cool space surrounded by walls
Its been a year and I am still not sure what I do in this space
I spend a few hours acting like I know what I am doing
At the end of the day, I spend twenty minutes driving along
Cow filled country roads listening to something loud
The end of the day signals the beginning of yet another similar day
But the week has begun and the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth day
Don't really matter
It is the darkness of the thoughts on the evening of the seventh day of the week
About the first day of the week that upset me

You should go and get a new life says a voice in my head
I did but the newness only lasts a few years
Now, I can no longer differentiate the new from the old.

Slumber Plumber

Translated from the Lithuanian original "Miega vandens darbo žmogus"

Did you know? You wouldn't know

They got the story wrong

About that beautiful girl

Who slept like a log

Till a Prince Charming came along

And woke her up with a kiss

The truth was far from this

Very far; how far you ask?

The sleeping one was not a girl at all

Sleeping Beauty never happened

Slumber Plumber did though

The plumber worked hard through the day

For in the fifteenth century

People were busy renaissance-ing

And no one had time to ensure

That the taps fit into the pipes well

So, water leaked from the taps

Drop by drop

Much to the annoyance of all

The plumber being the only plumber in the village

Had to fix all the leaks quick

Running from house to house across the village

Made him tired at the end of the day

He like the so called sleeping beauty, slept deep

Tip top tip top tip top tip top

He woke up to the sound of water leaking from the taps

And then one day, for reasons known to none

The taps stopped leaking

The sound from water leaking ceased

The plumber's impetus to wake up no longer existed

Everyone forgot his existence for there were no leaking pipes

And so he slept for a few years

And then one day, for reasons known to none

The taps started leaking again

Everyone remembered the plumber

They found him sleeping in his barn on a bed of straw

Through years plants starting using his bodily resources

Grass grew out of his nostrils, moss covered his hands

A tiny thyme peeped out through his open mouth

It danced to tune of his snore

"Oh God! He's dead" cried one from the gathered crowd

"Don't be stupid! Can't you hear him snore?" retorted another

"Let's wake him up" shouted many

They tried by shouting, by shoving, by shaking

By pulling, by pushing, by pouring water

But of no avail, he continued to sleep

Attracted by the commotion, a holy man entered the barn

He cut through the crowd

Saw the cause of commotion

Checked the plumber eyes, hands and legs

And announced thus

"A curse has been placed by a sage on this man

For this man disturbed the sage's slumber with unholy water

From his insides. Enraged the sage cursed

'Sleep with water in your mind

Wake with water in your mind

But my rage freezes water too

Wait for a kiss from the green jumpy one

Once pretty, now a frog'"

Thus the plumber sleeps

Among the shrub that grow on and around him

His muffled snore heard by many

Who have forgotten this tale

If you find a pretty green frog

Trying to mouth the word 'help'

Direct the frog in the direction of the snore

And await to witness a miracle.

NOTE: I don't think I have written anything hurtful to anyone here. I don't expect any Lithuanian to visit my page (Yeah right!). But in case, a Lithuanian reads this and feels "What the hell!", please replace Lithuanian with a language of your choice and use Google Translate to translate 'Sleeping water works man' to that language. Thank you for your patience.