The Way To My Stomach

I just spent 41 days as a vegetarian. It was the most unpleasant experience of my life.

42 days ago, my mum celebrated her 60th birthday – her sashtipoorthi. So the brother and I decided to break the piggies and invest in some gold. Which was a testament to our filial love – gold was going up faster than Hugh Hefner on Viagra.

But I wanted to disprove the little voice in my head that told me that my mother would want something more from me – the prodigal son, the (literal) black sheep in wolf’s clothing – and so I asked her if she wanted anything a little more… umm… metaphysical.

“Go get yourself some vegetarianism, my son”, she said.

I batted many eyelids. “Mater of mine! Oh venerated umbilical!” I exclaimed, “What injustice is this? You might as well have asked me to stop eating meat!”

She gave me an old-fashioned look. It was the Mother. She proceeded to give me gyan about how one needs to detox from the meaty juices every anon and how one should eat saatvik food because it was good for the soul – forget all that nonsense about chicken soup, that’s the work of the devil – and I could get a leg up the ladder of moksha if I shunned eating carcasses.

I saw the cause was lost and knuckled down to six weeks of herbivoring. It started the next morning, right after I had the omelette in my flight out of Kerala.

The next month and a bit was just a blur, but one of those long-drawn out, shot-on-low-shutter-speed, smeared out thin blurs that happens when one hungers to push one’s pleasure buttons but can’t. Like Hugh Hefner before Viagra.

I was veggie during Ramzan when I was invited to gorge on dabba gosht at Noor Mohammadi – the only place fit for gastronomic enjoyment in Bombay. I would look on, sighing wistfully, when my mates would dig into tandoori chicken at Urban Tadka. I’d make a moue when roast beef sandwich (from Indigo Café – makes you believe in God!) made its way into welcoming stomachs. I went to Goa and stared resentfully as the mates pigged on prawn vindaloo and stuffed crab at Souza Lobo. I went to the Handi restaurant in Jaipur, with its laal maas and nalli nihaari, and ate Paneer Butter Masala, to the consternation of my friend Azhar Habib. I declined offers to Al Kauser’s melt-in-the-mouth kakori kababs and other food – any food – in Delhi. I stuck to the veggies, devouring cauliflowers, dal, potatoes, tomatoes (now I don’t even care how they are pronounced), cucumbers, cabbages, potatoes, dal, mushrooms, more peas than a month of Switzerlands and the entire GDP of Micronesia in paneer.

It was hell. I couldn’t understand why people would want to live like this. God, or the Big Bang or the Great Sneeze or Brahma, wanted us to eat the flesh of dead animals. We have canine teeth – they help us rip apart chunks of meat for easier processing. We used to be hunter-gatherers; those spears early man carried weren’t to knock apples off trees. We learnt to eat sabre-toothed tigers and stuff before we figured out agriculture. Some of the best food in the world – most of it – is stuff that used to walk, fly, swim, crawl and generally perambulate all over the place.

And now we have vegetarianism. I guess it all started when those sadhu dudes in the olden days used to deprive themselves of the good stuff and gave up their tandoori chicken. That was deprivation enough. Now it’s become the cool thing to do. Like quitting smoking. Ptchah!

PS: On a related matter, this Swiss court has ruled that killing plants is immoral. Tell it to’em.

What Is Your Pet Name?

A few weeks ago, I heard that the redoubtable Ms Momota Banerjee had renamed West Bengal – as Poshchim Bongo. I thought it was extremely kind of her; I hadn’t had a topic to pick holes in for a while.

I see what this is, though. It’s the Rise of the Sons of the Soil. Or at least The Man wants us to think so. This is, ostensibly, the return of the prodigal, the step back into the idyllic ways of our past, the return to Ram-Rajya or Arthashastra or Vedic culture or whichever politico-philosophical zeitgeist is prominent at the moment. It’s an attempt to cleanse ourselves of that which corrupted us and the fabric of our culture.

But which one?

It is also an attempt to forget the insults and injuries of the past. The British, being the latest in a series of people who thought of taking candy from the largish baby that India was, are the Big Villains, the Evil Dark Lord, the Sith, the Monster Under the Bed, the Man With the Paddle who spanked us silly for 200 years. Everything they did was bad; everything they left behind is defiled and meant only to defile whatever they left of our once shining heritage – Sone ki Chidiya and all that guff. It’s an attempt to wipe out the trauma, dry the tears, live in denial and remember the good times. Whichever those were.

So it continues, then. Years ago the Brits came down and named everything Cawnpore and Trivandrum and Madras and Bombay and Calcutta and Victoria Terminus and Park Street and Connaught Place and all. Prolly because Clive and the rest of that white trash bunch didn’t brush their teeth (or clean their tongues) properly and didn’t figure how to pronounce anything more difficult than “London”.

And now the neo-antediluvians strut around with various agendas and myriad noses to brown and change everything. The Congress apotheosises the Gandhi dynasty and CP becomes Rajiv Chowk, with Indira Chowk (Outer Circle) encompassing it in a maternal fashion – like Ghar Ek Sansar. Bombay becomes Mumbai because the Thackerays say that Kolis worship Mumbra Devi and that’s what the city used to be called; all that talk about the word “Bombay” coming from the Portuguese Bom Bahia or “Good Harbour” is just European post-colonial propaganda. Fer sure. And so we have Chennai and Thiruvananthapuram and Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus and Mother Teresa Sarani and Kasturba Gandhi Marg and, I dare say soon, Mumbai Scottish School, Sambhajinagar, Pataliputra, Whatchamacallit Prayag and Dilli/Indraprastha.

And now Poshchim Bongo. Har har de bloody har.

Although the Banerjee claims a more practical reason for this change – it takes the state fro 28th to 21st place in the alphabetical order in the list of Indian states. I think I just swallowed my nuts laughing.

A Tale

This is a tale.

Someone who knew me (I don’t have many friends) called me a few weeks ago and asked me to do something to help her at work. I buffed up the Rather-Musty-Slightly-Moth-Ridden-and-Not-So-Shiny-Any-More Armour and gave my word. I was called to meet the Power That Was on the show, so I landed up bright and squeaky at the office. This turned out to be Naomi Datta. She’s thin, pretty, slightly mongoloid from some angles, earnest, sensibly dressed and ornamented with a bright smile.

She breezed into the tiny conference room, already overflowing from too much of Me, looked at me and pronounced, “So you’re the one who’s as funny as me?”

I was aghast. “I don’t think we know each other well enough for you to say things like that about my face”, I said coldly.

A grin peeped out from corner of her face, unsure whether to make a run for it across her face or wait for clearer coasts.

I decided to show her how it’s done. If my smile had been wider the top of my head would’ve fallen off. “But I do think your face is way funnier than mine, you know”.

This time the grin decided to risk all and took off onto the slightly line at the corner of her mouth. It reached about a third of the way before it saw that the other side was a long way off, braked and wheeled around in the same motion, called itself a bloody quitter, wheeled back and took off back the way it was going, eventually caroming off the other corner up to her eyes and the crow’s feet on the side.

We had a nice enough meeting where she figured I was good enough to help them. She admonished me to buy her book and even threw a sharp-edged url at me for her book at Flipkart.com (go ahead, there’s the link right there, go buy the book, I dare you, I double dare you). It brooked no vacillation and I forthwith toodled over and bought the book.

It looked like a piece of fluffy chick-lit, so I passed it on to a friend who is an obsessive reviewer and roams the bylanes of Yari Road looking for unsuspecting books, movies, plays, TV shows, sports matches and life-in-general to wag a finger at and tell off. He took the book on an office trip to Saudi Arabia, belatedly understood that the cover could have him emasculated, kept it firmly ensconced. He tried reading it on the flight back, came home, slammed the book on the table and questioned my ancestry. He hadn’t got past chapter 2.

So I decided to rush in where fools feared to tread and started reading. The result was this review.

Many moons later, I had a meeting at the same office where Ms Datta runs her personal fiefdom from a tiny cubicle that, I sure hope, is larger on the inside. I had brought the offending book and the bill from Flipkart, and, on spotting her, strode over, slammed the book on her table, slammed the bill on top of it and asked for my money back.

She looked slightly bemused. “You hated it?”

The irresolute smile waved hello, surreptitiously. “I wouldn’t use that same adjective but…” The ellipsis dangled over the atmosphere like the Sword of Damocles.

She decided not to mind. And that’s when I was really impressed. This dame had no airs, no teary blinking or “I just need a moment” or looking at me like I’d been floating in the water for a week. She merely told me the book was in reprint, it was a bestseller, she’s got lots of good reviews and “some bad ones”. We then sat down and had a general chat of cabbages and kings and whether pigs have wings.

It was nice to come across someone who had evolved more than the average bear, who was self-confident enough to laugh at herself, who keeps a stiff upper lip under unexpected stress, who takes on boors and makes them feel a little silly. I haven’t met many people who have that groundedness. Reminded me of one of my favourite English teachers – he used Shakespeare to make people laugh.

So all power to the Datta. She may have written a book I didn’t like, but she’s all right. Decent energies. I just hope she writes books I do like. ‘cos the review stands.

The 6pm Smack In The Face

For one of the many times in my life, I finished a book for the singular purpose of skinning it with a blunt and rusty knife and pulling its fingernails out with a pair of pliers. After I finished, it, though, I didn’t think that it deserved such attention.

But what the hey, I am a man of unlimited opinions which nobody listens to, so I shall tilt at this windmill too.

The 6pm Slot is, very simply, a waste of time. I was done reading it after 3 pages; the rest of it seemed like the literary equivalent of watching paint dry. And that is what you keep doing when reading the book: waiting. Waiting for the characters to add another dimension so they don’t look like cardboard Rajnikant cut-outs or sound like tropes. Waiting for the plot to explode, or at least blossom, into some sort of depth. Waiting for ideas and concepts and the cut-and-thrust of repartee and the brevity of wit.

Naomi Datta brings the big bad world of television to us, and it leaves us as most television does: with an unutterable sense of ennui. The shenanigans of the central character – which seems modelled on a mixture of the authoress, Becky Bloomwood, Bridget Jones and the regular girl-next-door-that-you-wouldn’t-give-time-of-day-even-on-Rakshabandhan – ostensibly take you into the life of a television producer, that much harrowed soul who would much rather be sticking flowers in her hair and emancipating street urchins than sullying her soul with television, but what to do? So the much-belaboured heroine goes forth once more in search of the Holy Grail of rating points (which, of course, everyone in television does without any thought to sensibilities, sensitivities and the general idea of good distaste) unto the breach and takes the brunt of “public school educated dickheads”, itinerant myriad-chinned brown-noses, half-reformed Eliza Doolittles, megalomaniac news channel Grand Panjandrums, the male penchant for sex and the unpredictable television viewing preferences of the Great Unwashed.

Which is the problem I have with this book: everything is too convenient. The characters are what one would expect in the world of television, the scenes are what one knew would happen (‘cos Bunty’s daughter’s friend’s fiancée works in TV and she told me all about what goes on in there – did you know that all reality shows are scripted?), the dynamics are specious, the situations impossibly pat. It’s like a Madhur Bhandarkar movie; it’s a point of view of a person looking in from outside, a clichéd, unimaginative, dinner-table account of the inner workings of a whole different world, full of staples and tropes and platitudes. Oh, and an extremely trite love story.

For somebody to dumb life down like this, it takes a very special talent. Maybe it was thrust upon her.

Anna and the Great Indian Tamasha

So all the brouhaha and all-sound-and-fury-signifying-polarised-opinions-all-round about Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption jihad is done and dusted and the eternal inertia that is the Indian way has reasserted itself, and one can but heave a sigh of relief and wave away the dust that drifts down. A lot of newsprint, rhetoric and righteous indignation doing the rounds about the whole shebang, and Facebook was rife with arguments that begged one to once more unto the breach. I decided to join’em.

I am an unabashed Anna supporter. I support the idea of getting rid of corruption, I support the idea of changing the way things are done in this country, I support the idea of having system that works for me rather than despite or against me, I support the idea of getting what I was promised in the Constitution without having to take recourse to extra-constitutional methods and I support the idea of having a level playing field where a meritocracy can be formulated.

Inasmuch as this is something one dreams of along with Shangri-La and sleeping with Salma Hayek, I still would like to believe, in the bottom of my cynical black heart, that we can come upon such a Utopia. And Anna and his Jan Lokpal Bill is an attempt. It may not be perfect, but it seeks to bring under its purview everyone who could affect us with their corruption.

One of the biggest complaints against the Anna Campaign is that the Jan Lokpal Bill does not conform with the democratic processes that are prevalent in the country After all, they say, this is the largest democracy in the world, the most vibrant, the most participated in, the most visible. It may have faults, they say, but it works. Anna, ostensibly, wants the Lokpal to be outside the ægis of our democratic institutions. Ah, therein lies the rub.

Because if our democratic institutions have given us one thing, it is the devil’s choice. When the Congress fights the BJP, it’s like trying to choose between shades of black – the lesser of the two evils. We try to analyse their merits – or the lack of various iniquities – because neither is inherently better than the other; but we have no choice, so we choose either. Nobody in the country trusts the democratic process. All this "democracy" they talk about is the concept in its ideal form - vox populi vox dei and all that. But the reality is that democracy today is rife with realpolitik. The manoeuvrings of politicians for more power, seats and the positions that guarantee them the power to be corrupt is what democracy is about. People want to get elected to make more money.

The French Revolution was not democratic. Neither was the Soviet. Dandi wasn't. Nor was MLK.

If things aren't working – and this much-vaunted "democratic process" definitely isn't – there needs to be a shakedown. Our esteemed "elected representatives" have been sitting pretty knowing that all of them are different faces of the same evil. That complacency needs to be shaken. They need to know there's another way things can happen. Until we redefine, or at least restructure, our democratic institutions, nothing will change; none of us will bother with working the democratic processes from the inside for fear of being tainted, or at the least tarred by the same brush. In that light, we need a shaking up, and we want to give this power to people we know have not been tainted with the corrupting influence of "democracy". This isn't violent, it isn't anarchist. Anna is just quietly telling them things need to change.

But anyway, all this talk about ‘democratic processes’ and ‘elected representatives’ is just propaganda. These democratic processes are not an end in themselves, they have been formulated to make our lives easier. Now it seems that these 'processes' are more important than the people they were made for. And the people that they were made for don’t want it any more.

The Jan Lokpal Bill may not conform to constitutional processes – because those processes have failed us. The Bill seeks to give the power to those appointed by means that may be extra-constitutional but definitely not undemocratic – if so many people in the country support Anna; isn’t that democracy? It wants a collegium of eminent citizens – people we respect: Nobel Laureates, Magsaysay Awardees, people of good standing and respected throughout the community – to have a say. They believe that this may work. It may not, but it’s a start. And it’s a sign of the helplessness and desperation of us that we want to do away with the very processes that were to make our lives better. That public will has been now given a focal point by the Hazare movement.

The other, more strident, complaint against the Anna campaign is that of those who rattle their jewellery; there seems to be a sense of distaste for the delicately nurtured for the song-and-dance that the Hazare movement had become; the unsightly crowds, the rampant pandering to the television cameras, the larger than life imagery of Anna himself and even the Warholian quarter hour for Dr Naresh Trehan. Yes, it was a spectacle and yes, the media – especially the electronic sort – willy-nilly lent themselves to (ab)use. But the cornerstone of every movement is communication; whether the Goebbelsian/Modiesque sort that justifies pogroms or that of Martin Luther King, Gandhi or Ataturk.

To reach out to people, to speak to them, one needs a mouthpiece; Anna’s was NDTV. And Team Anna figured out how to do it with aplomb. They were not reaching out to the ivory tower dwellers of Amrita Shergill Marg or Walkershwar, they were talking to the people in Ghatkopar and RK Puram, the people who watch India TV and have to pay through the nose and other bodily orifices for services they should not have to.

So now we have a national movement, and a national debate and a national will to change the inertia of rest with which we have been cursed. Whether you like them or not, Anna, Kiran Bedi, Arvind Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia and the Bhushans are here. Whether you like them or not, you can’t ignore the necessity which brought them out. There is a need to change the status quo. If you don’t like the way they do things, then go do something yourself.

You Know I'm No Good

The first time I heard Amy Winehouse, it was her heart-wrenching lament Back To Black. What I noticed was the pain, which came floating gently through her rich, smooth caressing voice like a memory. The voice was mesmeric, quiet but deeply strong in its warmth, its need to tell you what’s hurting her, insistent but careful, like someone you just met at the bar, the jukebox has Duke Ellington on, she looks at you from under her smile and her mascara and you see a pervasive hurt softly lying over her. And she’s quietly, nostalgically telling you why.

It’s that voice that gets you, whether it’s the laconic obstinacy she displays in Rehab, the passive aggression of Me And Mr. Jones, the silent apology of You Know I’m No Good or the hopeless resignation of Back To Black. The whole album is the lament of a broken heart, and her genius shines through like a beacon through the darkened, fogged recesses of her raw, seared mind. Along with producer Mark Ronson she shook off her jazz influences that drove her first album Frank, and went deeper inside her, into soul; she brought back the grace of a forgotten time, when men were men and women were beautiful. It brings you to mind of a gentle evening, you sitting in a warm, dim room, a glass of bourbon in your hand and the soul of Motown running through your soul. One of the most evolved neo-soul album of recent times, it sees Winehouse adapt to R&B format with aplomb, combining emotion with a non-threatening, evocative, smooth-as-old-pain sound.

But they say that those that burn bright burn fast, and Winehouse shone like a supernova on speed. As she shone through her music, her heartbreak refused to find a catharsis and remained within her, spreading its insidious tendrils through her psyche. She was still only 23 when Back To Black came out. A fragile mind that sought release through rebellion and expression was forced to exorcise the pain that she built up carefully, powering her art as it destroyed her life. Drug abuse consumed her health and her performances, making her increasingly unreliable and weird. Other than a single which she contributed to Quincy Jones’ 2010 album, she had brought out no new music since Back To Black, and for 5 years her life spiraled out of control, taking her from zenith of adulation, acclaim and success back into the darkness of despair.

In the end she wasn’t strong enough to resist herself. Like Robert Johnson and all the rest of them, she died at 27. Like them, she shouldn’t have. But like them, she had to. As she said herself:

I cheated myself,
Like I knew I would,
I told you I was trouble,
You know that I'm no good.

Knowing You

This is going to be a long one, a sort of ramble. A few days ago my mate and I were talking about how people process information about other people. You know. When you meet someone new, how do you interact with them, fit them into the scheme of things, understand them enough to be able to focus a certain behavioural pattern towards them.

She thought that we only understand people in ‘chunks’ – bits and pieces of data that we collect from the other person’s choice of words, gestures, tone of voice, body language etc. And since we are dealing with discrete ‘chunks’ of data, we can never be sure how spot on our analysis of the other person is.

I agree – one can never be spot on about how one reads people. This is inherent in the way you process information about other people. You, like every human being, create a template about how to analyse another person. This template is created and constantly enhanced by your experiences. So these templates are unique to you, because all the influences upon you that shaped you will be unique. What you have experienced, the things that have shaped your life, personality, values and behaviour patterns will be different – glaringly or subtly – from everyone else. That is what makes you you, and not someone else. We always try to read patterns and understand the other in our own, personal, unique language.

So you create a format, a protocol, to run that script on, based on how you look at the world, your values and morals. This is the template within which you fit the bits and pieces – the ‘chunks’, as it were – of data you get from someone else and try make some sense of it, break it down into recognizable patterns, get an idea of the flow of that pattern. It’s like solving a jigsaw puzzle.

Yes, we generalise, because things like that fit into a pattern first. It's like looking for a word that begins with 't' in the 't' section in the dictionary. It’s a way of narrowing down the search for identity, to figure out which board this jigsaw puzzle goes on to. Is the person a man or a woman? Indian or foreign? Rich or poor? Educated or not? And so on. But that doesn't mean we stop there. Once that overall pattern is identified, then we analyse the intricacies and varieties and differences within. We then fit the more complex, subtler ‘chunks’ within that larger frame. The devil, they say, is in the details.

In your scheme of things, you are the most important person in your life. You see everyone else through your own template, and that judgement is very personally yours. And yes, it can never be spot on. But sometimes people interest you to the extent that you try to see that other person through their template, their point of view, their frame of reference. You try to understand them as they do themselves, to get an idea of who they think they are. This is called various things: empathy, compassion, friendship, bonding, love.

Mostly, and especially to the strong hearted, someone looking at you through their own frame didn’t matter much: it was their own subjective judgement on you, and that is mostly irrelevant. But when someone shows an interest in knowing you as you know you, then things change. Then suddenly it matters what the other person sees, how they think you think of yourself. You need to make them aware of the true picture you see of yourself, because as far as you’re concerned, that is the real you. And you don’t want them to get the wrong picture, or the wrong angle, or the wrong lighting, and make assessments accordingly. You want them to see how you see yourself. And that is important.

Is that sort of knowing – that intimate, in-depth understanding of another person – possible? Probably not; no one can see what you see of yourself, not completely. Your own view is something only you will know, because however much you try, someone can never get inside your head completely (unless you're in that mindbogglingly surreal movie Being John Malkovich). But there are degrees in knowing. How much do you know yourself? It’s more about what someone else knows about you, not how much. Quality over quantity. If someone else knows the things that matter, the things that make you you, then that’s a consummation devoutly to be wish’d. So yes, inasmuch as someone knowing the real you means knowing the essential stuff that makes you you, it’s possible. It’ll take a lifetime of effort though.

But more than anything else, it’s the attempt, the reaching out that really matters, isn’t it?