My famous sis-in-law

She (Mridula) started her blog — Travel Tales from India — about a month ago and her blog is already featured on BBC and The Guardian. Cool!

About fiction

Steve of This Space talks about how literary fiction is perceived, here. What I think is, fiction can be bifurcated into two parts: pulp fiction and literary fiction. The Brothers Karamazov is literary fiction (which I haven’t touched for a long time after reading more than 300 pages) and If Tomorrow Comes is pulp fiction.

Both kinds of fictions are not defined by the kind of things they tell, but by the way they tell things. Most pulp fiction books narrate stories of love, passion and crime. But so do most of the classics that are the epitomes of literature, be it Tolstoy, Garcia or Hemingway. Our own Indian classics are replete with romance and intrigue. Talking about Indian literature, literary fiction is less esoteric here. You cannot compare Dickens with Munshi Premchand. Premchand mostly depicted poverty, illiteracy, backwardness and their associated miseries in rural India whereas Dickens mostly wrote dreamy romances in the backdrop of putrefying English society.

Literary fiction makes you a part of the story, and pulp fiction tells you a story. I don’t want to go into the debate that literary fiction is more intelligent and pulp fiction is less but one can easily make out the difference. The readers of pulp fiction want to read the book like a quickie — be done with it. They don’t care how the words are used, how the sentences are constructed, and how the droplets of tiny incidents are turned into a wave of imagination. They want everything understandable, and they don’t want to use their brains — at least while reading pulp fiction.

No, easy language does not mean dull writing. Hemingway — I’ve never read him — is known for using very simple expressions to write very complex thoughts.

Literary fiction readers on the other hand look for a deeper satisfaction. It may not be immediate, but the intellectual pleasure they derive is long-lasting. You always end up learning something new. You are not merely a viewer; you get involved with the nerration. The writers of literary fiction make ample use of extensive research. Take for instance White Mughals; the author, William Dalrymple, spent 9 years researching for the book and travelled to multiple continents in order to glean valuable but deeply hidden details. Can a pulp fiction writer do that, or afford to do that? I doubt it.

Life’s lessons

A while ago I was thinking about my old principal. I haven’t seen her for a long, long time — don’t even remember how many years it has been. Though, I remember when I sat with her for a long time, for the last time.

She’s one among few persons I’ve learnt lessons from. I’m not talking about “study” lessons, but lessons that teach you how one should lead life. We rarely agreed because of our religious differences but still, even till today she remains one of my favorite teachers.

About the last time we sat together…

Twenty days prior to this meeting I had been “expelled” from the school for cheating twice in my class tests; I was in 10th standard. I can write a long psychoanalysis of why I did that, but out of those two incidents of cheating, the first one was untrue and the second one was true. I cheated the “second” time because I hadn’t cheated the first time…it’s a long story. The first time when I hadn’t cheated (but the substitute teacher thought I had) I was “pardoned” by the teachers and was made to say sorry to the substitute teacher by my class-teacher, which was quite humiliating. The second time when I actually cheated, I was sent to the principal’s office, where a panel of 3-4 teachers including my class-teacher (whom I trusted and loved deeply) and my principal was waiting for me. I can justify the events that lead to this predicament, but, I’m ashamed to say that, I cannot justify the events that followed, no matter how solid the litany of excuses I can put forth.

I kept lying till the end of the meeting. I told them there was great difficulty at home so I couldn’t study. I told them that one of my sisters was sick so I couldn’t concentrate…and all sorts of other bullshit. All of them had known me since my childhood so they knew I was lying (ironically, even though my class teacher had known me since my childhood, she believed the substitute teacher and made me apologize to her when I was “caught cheating” for the first time). I can lie to a lie-detector now, but at that time I must’ve been pathetic at lying. I was expelled.

There was no other school I could go to at such a short notice. Ever since I had started studying in the real sense I had studied in that school. My teachers, my mother and my friends had great expectations from me because I was the first and the only student of the school (I studied in a special school) sitting for the board exams. There had been a Herculean effort put by me and my teachers to bring me to a stage where I could give the exams (in one year I jumped 4 classes…another long story). What would my mother say? How would she get me admitted to a “normal” school? It was already October and the exams were to be in March. Would I miss the entire year? Would all the effort of jumping the four classes in order to save the lost years go down the drain? A whirlpool of confusion roared inside my brain and before I could know it, I was feigning my own fainting and hence hit the nadir of my self-respect.

All the children were sent home and I was taken to a separate room. They had an idea that I was just feigning it. A male teacher almost gorged my eyes out in order to cause me enough pain (in order to make me open my eyes — I didn’t) by pressing his both thumbs against my eyebrows and was stopped by my class-teacher just in the nick of time. To cut the long story short, I was “revived” after an effort of half-an-hour. A taxi was called for me (“Let his mother pay for it,” I still remember someone saying). I was too jittery to walk, so I was put on a wheelchair, and my principal started pushing it from behind. This is the time she gave me a very crucial lesson:

Pali, whenever you do something, always be ready to face the music.

All my old friends and teachers address me by my pet name.

Maybe at that time I didn’t understand the complete context because I was too disturbed, but this was one of the most valuable lessons I have been delivered by anyone.

The lesson has seen me through thick and thin. It made my accountable for my own conduct and hence instilled great strength into me. It’s not that after that day I never indulged in “adventures”, but from then onwards, whenever I did something, I took the full responsibility and never put the onus on other people. Feeling responsible is a great feeling. It makes you weigh the pros and cons, and helps you evaluate the consequences more subjectively because you know somewhere you went wrong and you don’t want that happening again. It might sound a bit strange, but I’m glad that that incident happened.

Coming back to that last meeting…

The expulsion was just to give me a jolt. My mother had started preparing me for the open school exams when we received a letter from the school that I could join back. I didn’t want to, but my mother insisted that I should, and I think she was right.

I felt like a pariah when I reached the school. The children had been told not to talk to me, and the teachers and the attendants too only approached me when it was extremely necessary. Desperate to go back home, I was aimlessly going through my course book when my principal knocked at my door (I was the only student in the 10th class and hence had been assigned a separate room) and asked me if she could come in. She put a burning candle on my desk and sat on the opposite chair.

“I know you don’t like praying,” she said, “but I’ve been praying for you all these days. I know it is not totally your fault that we are witnessing this complete moral collapse inside you. You never get to sit in the right company. I know how stressful life has been of late. Still, how could you do that knowing well you had to set an example for the other children? They were all, we were all looking up to you…”

Her long talk made me sad, extremely sad, because I was certainly not what she thought I was turning out to be. There was no moral collapse inside me and all my values were intact. There had been this strange phase, but it was over. I was back to be the Amrit people admired. I wondered how she had forgotten all my hard work. She was judging me on the basis of merely a few days that could have easily been termed as an aberration, an aberration triggered by an unfair implication by a substitute teacher, an aberration caused by the lack of trust my class-teacher had shown in me.

Well, I was touched by her concern, and I believe, no matter what were her notions, she was really concerned for me and wanted me to come back to the righteous path. That was the last time we sat together and talked. And I think it was the last time I properly talked to anybody in the school. I never felt close to my friends who had turned total strangers when they were told not to talk to me. I could never be my natural self with the teachers. There was always this invisible wall between us. Something had broken permanently, and I felt nobody wanted to mend it. I tried, but got no positive response.

There was another lesson that I leant at that time: no matter what you do, normally, your family and very close friends mostly stand by you, and therefore, they are invaluable. After the initial shock, my mother (she was a teacher in a government school) immediately contacted some of her colleagues and they all decided I should appear for the exams independently. On the other hand, all those teachers who had worked so hard with me all those years took no time becoming total strangers. My school friends never tried to contact me secretly just to communicate any sort of feeling. They just told me that had been told not to talk to me. Although sometimes we meet and talk, I have never been able to wash off the stains of those few months.

To use the clichéd phrase, so much water has flown from under the bridge: it’s been 20 years. Small things sometimes can damage years of relations. I studied in that school for 7 years, and in just 20 days, all bonhomie and goodwill vanished as if it had never been there. All those teachers have grown old, but a mere sight of them opens the floodgates of the memories of those last months I spent under their frosty tutelage.

Caught red-handed

This mosquito was caught sucking my blood red-handed.

Beetle invasion

We were recently invaded by a ferocious looking beetle.

Having a sip

An ant freaking out on my spilled Sprite

Our newspaper sucks

We have been ignoring this for a long time (because we simply have no other choice) but our newspaper, The Asian Age really sucks when it comes to acting “secular”. Not that it is a lousy newspaper — in fact I wouldn’t like to get any other newspaper at the moment. It’s just that it is highly biased. Take for instance the recent Salman Khan fiasco. It has been totally blocked out. There was a small news concerning the police recording Aishwarya Rai’s voice, but nothing about Salman Khan. This is, to put it mildly, blatantly absurd and biased. I hate to give such comments but this newspaper shamelessly sidelines anything that portrays the Muslims in bad light. This becomes more conspicuous when they highlight similar news from other religions. A few months ago for two consecutive days they kept publishing the photograph of a south Indian priest drinking blood of a live goat as a ritual. A few days earlier or later they published the photograph of a Muslim child carrying a lamb in his arms on the occasion of Bakrid — same thing shown with a totally different perspective because in both the incidents the animals a butchered barbarically in the name of religion.

Then, recently when two suicide bombers were nabbed in Delhi, for this newspaper the news was not of much importance. Whereas almost all the newspaper carried the news on their first pages, The Asian Age published the news in its city supplement, and that too in a single column, in the right corner. Let Togadia say something and it becomes a national presentiment for them.

News should be news; it should not be Hindu news or Muslim news or Christian news.

Even the columnists seem to be at a constant ideological war with either the RSS or the United States. There is always a reason (although they mildly oppose the actions as if performing a formality) for the terrorist acts, but the RSS activities are of the inexcusable type and totally abhorrent. Narender Modi becomes the Bad Indian (he totally deserves the title) but people like Osama etc., are the bi-products of faulted American foreign policies and hence do not incur verbal wraths the way others do. Terrorists interpret the Koran wrongly, but they are not beasts even if they lock up school children without giving them food, water or clothes.

Now that I’m on this subject, I am compelled to say that the Muslim community is quite shrewd (and they are always acting the victims of a transcontinental conspiracy against their faith). Whenever they are in majority they cannot look beyond the Shariat but the moment they are in minority they embrace secularism and cry for human rights. If you are in a Muslim country, you have to abide by their whimsical laws and customs. If they are in some other country, they want their customs and laws to be assigned special privileges, and if they don’t get those privileges they resort to terrorism — well, not always, but this is presented as a reason by the Muslim intellectuals. In the name of secularism they always want to have an upper hand. They don’t want to follow other faiths, but they want their faith to be followed. And this is not just limited to the lower classes. Most Muslim columnists of The Asian Age are perhaps highly educated and well-read (Oh! I can’t believe I’m talking like this!), still, they cannot come out of the wail of their Muslim ideology (again, I can’t believe I’m talking like this!).

Still, we are not going to change the newspaper because no matter how biased it seems, it still is perhaps the best newspaper available right now.

The origin of Kansa

I often wondered how Lord Krishna got an uncle — Kansa — who was a demon. Recently I read the story in the newspaper. Ugrasen was the king of Mathura and Karni was his wife, the queen of Mathura. The queen was very beautiful. Once while they both were strolling in their royal garden, a demon flew by. When the demon saw the beautiful queen, he fell in love with her (it was lust, not love). With his magical powers he somehow distracted the king, transformed himself into the form of the king, and made love to the queen, perhaps there and then, and flew away. The queen must have thought: What has gotten into my husband — all of a sudden he has turned into a sex stud!.

Anyway, the sperm of a demon begot a baby demon that later on turned into the famous Kansa. I wonder why this birth didn’t set the king into frenzy. After all there must have been some tell-tale signs of the queen giving birth to a totally different looking baby. There should be a hell of a difference between a human baby and a demon baby. Demons are supposed to be scary, aren’t they? Even if all baby’s are cute and somewhat have the same baby sort of appearance, you can notice the difference between a cow’s baby and a dog’s baby. There is some part of the story that we don’t know here.

Chai pani for pani

There is an old Kishor Kumar song: Alla megh de, pani de, pani de gud dhani de. It means, Oh God, give us clouds, give us water…I don’t know what gud dhani means; but the gist is, water is very critical, and it is divine.

Water is something that we don’t have these days. The Jal Board is responsible for distributing water in Delhi, but since somehow they are unable to do so, they supply water using the water tankers. You need to go to your area’s complaint office, register your house number, and their website says you should get water within three hours, subject to availability of the tanker. The service is free of cost.

Not for the Jal Board employees who distribute the water. To get water, you need to offer them chai pani (a colloquial term for bribe).

Their standard line is, your number is not in the book, and if you insist that you had gotten your complaint registered in the morning, their supervisor promptly takes out the book and shows it to you. Now, you can never make out whether it is the same book you saw in the morning, or some different book. If you are really desperate, offer them chai pani and lo!, who says your number should be their in order to get your water tank filled?

Initially they were quite prompt. We got the complaint booked in the morning, and we got the water by evening. Since this was too much to ask for, this bonhomie couldn’t continue for long. Although we get the house number booked everyday, somehow it disappears from the book when they visit the colony to distribute water. It has been happening for three days; and they are expert strategists. They know for three days we haven’t received water. So today, since our house number is not there, we can give them some chai pani and get our share of water, for which, incidentally, we regularly pay the monthly water bill. I refused to pay the chai pani, although there was a strong desire to pay them some monthly money so that they fill our water tank whenever they visit the area

Tomorrow I’ll go myself and make sure they enter our house number. If we don’t have water, we’ll purchase from a commercial vendor. Tomorrow if again they ask for chai pani I’ll probably register a complaint against them, or may be not. Maybe I’ll choose to pay them some monthly money so that we don’t need to bother about going to the complaint office everyday in the morning.

Since childhood I’ve seen my parents paying small amounts to various government officials to get things done. It’s the only way to get things done here, they say. And I always protest. I always say that they ask for money because we give them when they ask for it, and then they don’t do the work without having it. It’s a vicious circle. Once they taste the blood, they don’t want to part with it.

Corruption is rampant in our country, and at all levels. Can a single person fight it? Yes and no. It needs determination, and above all it needs time and perseverance because if one person refuses to pay bribe, there are thousands who eagerly pay it. In fact in the government sector it’s a norm what they call it as ooper ki kamai — the extra income. Some people earn extra incomes ten times their actual salaries.

So if tomorrow I refuse to pay chai pani what happens? I don’t get the water. Ok, I complain, then? I don’t get water for quite a long time because people who register complaints get their cuts from people against whom the complaint is being lodged. They can even discontinue our regular supply. I can file another complaint at a higher level — same thing happens. Do I have the time? No. Do I want to be a crusader? It’s not one of my priorities. But then whose priority is it? We rant about corruption, but we (most of us, if not all) don’t want to be the first ones to stand against it. We want a clean administration, but we don’t want to be the cleaners. There are many people who are quietly or vocally taking a stand. I would like to join hands with them instead of fighting a lone battle. Thinking about tomorrow…

The Comic Project

Just now I stumbled upon this wonderful blog titled The Comic Project via balancing life. The blog attempts to revive the old charm of all those Indrajal Comics heroes that enthralled us during our growing years. Before Diamond Comics captured a major portion of the market, Indrajal Comics was the main staple for us comic-hungry kids.

Among Bahadur, Flash Gordan, Mandrake, Vetal etc., Vetal (Phantom) who lived in the dark jungles of Denkali used to be my favorite. They used to call him chalta phirta pret — the walking phantom. I had a fat comic that traced the history of all the five generations of the phantom, but can’t remember where or how I lost that gem.

When I used to live with my grandparents in Ambala, whenever my mother came visiting me, she used to bring some Indrajal comics that she would buy at the railway station for me. Those comics were the fragments of my life that I had left behind in Delhi. I couldn’t read much, but with some concentration I could follow the story. The mere sight of the logo used to incite the feeling of that room in our Delhi house where many a time I had flipped through the pages of such comics and read the story through the sketches. Since I couldn’t read much, I constructed the stories from the sketches of the comics.

Since Hindi was (still is, to some degree) closer to me, I mostly read Hindi comics; in fact where we lived, we never saw English comics.