High on football

The serene little pub by the mill in a sleepy little corner of Reading was to change character. The Liverpool fans were going to ensure that. They came dressed in flashy reds and settled down with their drinks. I was there with a bunch of sales executives from my company. I had spent the day watching them sell a lot of crap to our hapless customers. Pictures of sophistication all, till the game began! By the end of the first half, with the scoreline reading 3-0 in favour of AC Milan, everybody had turned rowdy. There was a guy shouting into the television set "Get back to defence you b******”. Something must have told him that the message didn’t get across, so he tapped the TV on the side a couple of times. Yeah mate, That helped. NOW you got heard.
At half time, I could feel the taut air around me. These guys were really restless. Ten minutes into the second half, oh how the mood had changed. The score was 3-3. The guy next to the TV was now cuddling it, with the look on his face that told me that he was solely responsible for the incredible turnaround. Liverpool eventually won on penalties. Often I think about the days when I used to be a football fanatic, and I wonder if I was insane back then. But today everything made sense.

Aspirations

I’m ducking and hiding, because my HR Bobby-head is on the prowl. He wants me to fill up the ‘Aspirations’ form and I don’t have the heart to tell him I don’t have any aspirations. Come to think of it I’ve never had any. Of course I did swear by the second-hand ambitions that I picked up from the standard school-boy prescriptions; ‘I want to be a pilot’ , ‘I want to be 6-feet tall’,etc, but never really went beyond that. The only exception to that was a little jihad I picked up for myself in school, to eliminate all ENT specialists of this world. As far as I was concerned, they were the only pests in the world, and I spent considerably amounts of time studying them and plotting their downfall; my own ENTomology if you will.

I’ll have to take you back in time. In school my nose used to act funny and Mom decided to do something about it. We visited the ENT specialist. She contorted my nostrils and veered in. If I thought that was uncomfortable nothing could have prepared me for what came next. She told me that I had an affliction that affected my mental and physical growth. I reacted like any self-respecting teenager, with a red face and complete silence. Before I knew what hit me, she said ‘It probably already has. Look at the blank look on his face.’ My face must have belied the furious pace at which my brain was working to draft a shortlist of dirty names I could call her, because she was now convinced with her hypothesis. She now pushed it in; she asked ‘How does he do in school?’. I knew for all she cared, it was just a rhetorical question. The-answer-my-friend-is blowin-in-the-wind types! My mom took the slight to heart and gave the doctor a piece of her mind. A couple of weeks after this incident, in a show of incredible insensitivity, my father chose to consult the same doctor for a problem he had been having with his ears. He learnt that the doctor had flown away to the UK. My crusade ended right there. Before I could teach her all the lessons I was planning to teach her. Before I could even figure out what hurt my mental development more, my adenoids or the doctor who I thought will cure me.

Meanwhile, I’m working hard on coming up with something phony to satisfy Mr Bobby-head.

I was going to write a poem

I was going to write a poem. I was going to write about a yacht that was moored too long at the quay. I was going to write about the limpets and the barnacles and the stagnation; about the apprehension of leaving the bay; about the fear of even the placid ocean let alone the tempest; about the parting memories of an inscrutable smile and a glintless eye. But…

The week

It’s been a crazy week. Program managers breathing their dirty blocks of bad breath down my neck and my mind whirring at 52x with thoughts which, for several reasons, I can’t publish here.

I’ll remember this week as the one in which I made my stage debut as a guitarist. I felt like Jimi Hendrix (incidentally he was dead by the time he was my age), especially this one time when I got too close to the microphone, the feedback noise sounded just like a riff from ‘Star Spangled banner’. The critics are still debating whether that fitted into ‘Neele Neele Ambar’ or not. Funnily, that is one of the few things that I remember about our performance. The three songs we played passed like a flash and the memory is just a blur. I faintly remember that we mysteriously hit some harmony while playing ‘Jaane Jaan’ and I didn’t want it to stop at all.

And German class is definitely as much fun as I imagined it to be.

Catch up

An internal survey among the members of the UVCE tronics gang revealed that there are more consumers of the water from the river Thames than of any other water body in the world. No, that was a lie, but my point here is that the UVCE tronix diaspora is really spreading its wings and making it's presence felt on all the continents of the world, save 4 or 5. And the couple of us who are stuck in Bangalore find that exclusivity is thrust upon us. *WE* are suddenly the ones in the exotic place.

Growing up in the Indian middle class, I'm hardwired to stay in the herd. My first urge is to play catch up. The idea is to ensure that your resume of life looks as identical to your peers' as possible. Right now, I realise, mine looks too koopamandookish. I watch all these guys fly off to distant places and I begin to question my own inadequacies. I want to do all the cool things that everybody else is doing. I want to be able to start sentences with the words "When I was in the bay area...". But most of all, I want to dirty the waters of the proverbial Thames.

Zip it

Last week Tee turned into a skin head. And yesterday he wore a T-shirt that had the words 'Nazi Punk'. (Avinash also pointed out that he sat on the RIGHT wing of our building, but we'll ignore that suggestion for its contrivedness.) This was definitely cause for concern. Since I had recruited this chap I felt a moral responsibility to straighten out things. I prepared a sermon that began with the images of Treblinka and ended with a celebration of racial equality and tolerance. I confronted Tee at the pantry and pointed one finger at his bald head and the other at his shirt and asked "What's the meaning of this?". He said he had been to Tirupathi last weekend. And the Swastika was a holy hindu symbol he said. Fair enough but what the hell are the words 'Nazi Punk' supposed to mean, I asked. "adha theriyaadh saar" he said. My speech (like so many of mine before this) died a premature death.

When the laugh track went awry

The project manager foresaw bad times for our project and was bracing us for fire-fighting times ahead. Amidst all the frowning faces Kandwal was convulsed with laughter. The guy laughs for just about anything. There was another time when there was a theft in his house, and he was narrating us the story, and he was laughing like a whole pack of hyenas. I must admit it’s uplifting sometimes to have someone see the lighter side of things, but for the most part I usually feel sorry, and sometimes scared, for him. We always wondered if there was ever a cure to his laughing sickness. The answer came at Gaga’s party. Kandwal chose to shine the spotlight on himself by being the only person not to drink. JP, who had downed gallons of alcohol by now, took offense to this and began a weird interrogation. One thing led to another and …
JP: …it’s like an orgasm. Have you had an orgasm?
Kandwal: What do you mean?
JP: Oh don’t act coy! You’re 26.
Kandwal: (snigger)
JP : Don’t you jerk off?
Kandwal : (soliloquoy – Oh god of teleportation, take me away from here. And do it real quick.)
JP : Come’on I’m married and I still jerk off.
Kandwal : (pissed with the gods for not taking timely action)

JP stayed a little longer to ensure that the conversation got as uncomfortable as it possibly could. Even after he left, Kandwal’s face was flushed like he just saw Frankenstein's monster, and for a change we were on the floor laughing our guts out.

The Road Trip

I'll start this off thanking Ashtle for letting us use her car for the weekend's amazing road trip.

Bandipur, the choice of place, was purely incidental. The drive was definitely fun. Pacchi was the DJ, and in a display of incredible professionalism, he even got his own equipment! Jax was the target of a lot of ribbing about the unfortunately skewed polarity of his million-weber magnetism. As for me, I was churning out pedantic fundaes about birds. My gyaan is limited only to the feathered kind, so Pacchi wasn’t interested, but Jax, my ever-keen-protégé can now identify nearly THREE species of birds. We also played what has become the official game when the three of us meet. I don’t know what it’s called, so I’ll just call it Nonsense-building; it always seems to involve names of some well known human organs, some lingerie terminology, and for some bizarre reason, Shekar Suman. We stopped after the game took a sudden ugly turn.

After reaching our destination, the only "tourist" thing that we did there was to go on a 40-minute safari that we unanimously hated. The unexpected rain was the only positive. We lodged in a place called ‘Mountainia’. It had a brilliant view of the Nilgiris and gave us the illusion of being far away from civilization. Just perfect!. Dinner was at a place that was, judging by the quantities of each of the dishes they served us, expecting King King for supper. A combined intake of 240ml of Old Monk and 30 ml of Romanov definitely opened us all up to the dinner-table conversations. Even Pacchi, who rigorously follows the European standards of non-disclosure, was extremely candid. After this trip we now know nearly as much about his love life as we know about the shroud of Turin. There are still a couple of other mysteries, though, that still remain.
1. How come road trips with these two weirdos (One wears a woollen cap in April, the other likes to hang upside down from trees) always turn out so great?
2. Why are there so many Mynas on the road?


Remote Control Snap
Other snaps

Good Friday

I begin most of my weekends resolving to make every minute count. After all, like the motivation gurus tell me, this is the first day of the rest of my life. I had a long weekend in front of me and a whole bunch of ideas on how to spend it.

A couple of years ago, an India-Pakistan cricket match would have been a great reason to stay home all day. Who am I kidding, I could have stayed home to watch a kabbaddi match between Channagiri and Agumbe districts. I can’t tell when the change happened but the sports channels woo me no more.

I tried to interest myself in the book I’m reading just now, ‘The Story of San Michele’. Its a nice book, except when the author takes you into a Lord-Of-The-Rings kind of world infested with goblins and elves, and where the moon is a ghost. A world where no physical laws exist, and so the author can sell any crap. And this is an Autobiography for god’s sake. Even his real life experiences have characters that cheese me off. There is a bear for instance which attacks men but reserves it’s best behaviour for women. I’m guessing its scientific name is Ursus Chivalrous!

I thought of picking up the guitar, but the eco-friendly guy that I am, I didn’t have the heart to displace all those spiders that had built those beautiful cobwebs inside the box and between the strings. There were no arthropods in the harmonica so I played that for a while. As it happens with most things I try, my expectations from myself far exceed my talents, so I put the harmonica away in frustration.

As it turned out I just lay in front of the TV all day without venturing more than a couple of meters from where I woke up this morning. I don’t recollect watching any programmes, I just changed channels several million times. It was a day spent in completely shameful lethargy. I must be getting old, because I really liked it!

Rapture

The kestrel played with the wind. It rose hundreds of feet and swooped down hundreds, but during the half hour that I watched it not once did it flap its wings. Did it feel proud about its adroitness? Did it have Jonathan Livingstone's pretensions? Did it feel special about being able to survey the rain forests from so high above? Well, even without extending human traits to it, watching it ride the drafts, and hearing it's shrieks scattered in the wind, was trance-inducing. I remembered that scene from American Beauty in which the drug-peddling kid shoots the video of a feather dancing in the wind. I remembered the words too 'Sometimes there is so much beauty in the world that I feel I can't take it anymore'.

My Cousin Vicky

Vicky got married last week. And for a couple of weeks before that, my family had been in a frenzied shopping marathon. "Vicky gets married but once" my mom tried to justify. Poor argument! No, I don't doubt Vicky's fidelity, but it's stupid, I explained to her, to go ransacking malls everytime a cousin of mine gets married. It's like declaring a public holiday for every chinese guy who dies; because, thanks to virile, much-married granddads and their undying faith in the undivided hindu family, I have enough cousins to populate a medium sized Indian town. Among family trees mine is a sequioa!

As for me, I decide to exercise thrift. And I didn't feel out of place in my 114Rs Kurta, because the wedding was as unassuming as my costume. No priests, no shlokas, no rites! It shocked a few elders but it turned out to be a huge hit overall.

The second chapter, the reception party, was in Mumbai. It was great fun. After the party, we decided to hit the dance floors of Mumbai (ah! I always wanted to sound like a true-blue socialite!). My spartan dressing sense got me embarassed this time. We were thrown out of the first place that we went to because I was wearing "open footwear". I wanted to stand my ground and and deliver that classic line that I once heard from Nitesh, "These are not chappals, they're floaters", but the bouncer measured a couple of heads taller than me and talked like he had more testosterone than blood flowing in his plumbing. Besides, I wasn't getting too much support from my buddies, most of them had already disowned me. We eventually got into another place that tolerated the likes of me. There I ran out of my wide array of dance steps by the middle of the first song. I laboured through the rest of the song using an impromptu chimp-with-cerebral-palsy style of dancing. But very soon I got bored. I found myself a nice corner to sip my beer and watch the others make fools of themselves.

The next day was for sight-seeing, vagabonding and bowling. Check out this snap of the sunset at Juhu.

Sunset at Juhu
After this we visited the chaat places and indulged in the most vulgar spree of binge-eating ever! It was my favourite part of the trip :-)

It's funny...

...that every person I meet these days claims to have been a 'back-bencher' in college.

Almost everyone had a lecturer who said "Please open the windows and let the atmosphere/airforce/environment in" in class.

And every mother has a kid who stands first in class.

And every software engineer likes to trek.

Appraisal time

It's time for that annual ritual called appraisal, a time when the boss and I get together for a heart-to-heart talk and use words like 'Initiative' and 'Pro-activeness'. It usually happens in four stages.

1.Positive feedback: This is when the boss displays how concise he can be. And on the rare occasion when he decides to be liberal with his praise, you end up understanding not a single word. This time I got shot with this one "Your intellectual horsepower is commendable".

2.Negative feedback: I don't know if this is an example of a-few-seconds-on-the-stove-seem-like-an-hour theory that that Einstein guy proposed, but this part seems very very long drawn. This is also when the boss puts on a wooden face to hide all the glee he's experiencing. But atleast the language is lucid ("You are a piece of stinking horse-shit")

3.Task for next year: They call it fancy names like 'Key result areas' and 'Crucial undertakings' but they all mean the same. They are a bunch of tasks carefully worded such that they bear no resemblance to what you actually do for the rest of the year. The idea is to make next year's negative feedback session longer than this year's.

4.360 degree feedback: This is when the boss demonstrates his faith in democracy. He lets YOU give HIM feedback. Before you can start you have to allow him a few seconds to adjust his posture so that his body language screams out 'I'm not interested!'. But this year, I was determined to pull one back. So after he folded his hands, leaned back and half-closed his eyes, I told him 'You don't do enough to improve team-dynamics'. He's still trying to work that one out!

Insomnia

I toss and turn for a really long time. The sheets are too warm, and it's too cold without them. I don't want to see the time, because that always increases the anxiety. I try to distract myself from the repetitive thought patterns, but it's not easy. Try not to think of a mango, you'll know what I mean. After I have exhausted myself, I always turn my attention to the world, and I can see only the bad things about it. Capitalism, Martha Stewart, Chinese medicine, Al-Qaeda, SUVs, reality shows, global warming, Bihar, "Thank you Bangalore", dams, Mills and Boon, plastic surgery, plastic, greeting card verses... And I get drawn into a species-level masochism. I want everything to start afresh. I wish for an apocalypse, a great flood, an ice-age that will freeze the pee in people's bladders. I swear never to drink coffee again.

Profiling my little American nieces

Medha: The original style icon. She is credited with popularising the sign-off line 'See you later, have fun' among the gang. Not all of her words are that sweet though. She once told me 'You're so stupid you should die'. She was five!

Sadhika: Her most important contribution is to the field of rhetoric. Her revolutionary use of the word 'because' in sentences consisting only of the word 'because' was a mind blowing innovation! You ask her a question, say 'Why did you do that?' and the reply comes 'because.'. Yes, just that one word followed by the full stop. Terse, enigmatic and emphatically final.

Esha: She landed here only yesterday, and I haven't gotten to know her yet. She is definitely not old enough to coin catch-phrases. At present her language has a very limited consonant-set of guttural noises. But she is one cute kid!

Doomed resolutions

"Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws"
"There is a fatality about all good resolutions. They are invariably made too soon" - Oscar Wilde

I meet this guy who irritates the hell out of me for the following silly reasons
* He plays table tennis like he is a gladiator avenging his father's death
* He puts his GRE vocabulary to active use. As a result you're likely to catch him using for instance,the word 'obviate' in informal conversations, and he is more likely to 'opine' than to just say!
* He's under an illusion that he is a mimic artist. Pretending to like his performances builds up a lot of stress.
* He has a blog that is dedicated to Kerberos authentication protocol.
* Some of his most intellectually stimulating moments happened when he was reading 'Who moved my cheese?'

As I dissect my reaction to this bloke, I realise I've turned into a crusty bundle of preconceptions and prejudices and unreasonable expectations from the people around me. My jerk-quotient is at a lifetime high. Which brings me to my resolution.I took up a difficult resolution this year, an extremely phony one. To make new friends. It's turning out to be more impossible than I imagined.

"Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account". Guess who said that? No Oscars for any wilde guesses that happen to be right. (And the puns are rotten too!)

Concert at Karikan

I'm sitting on a rock on a mountain slope. Down the slope there is a ledge which is now serving as a make-shift stage. If I look straight ahead I see lots of smaller mountains all covered with dense vegetation. Beyond these mountains is the sea. When I face the stage, I'm looking west, so the sun is setting right behind it. As the evening progresses, the full moon comes out onto a clear sky and spills a silvery glow down below. Great music plays on, till early morning when the moon has made it's way to the place over the sea where the sun had set the previous evening. Find me a better theatre!!!!!

It was a hindustani music concert. All night the voices, the sitars, the shehnayees, the mandolins and the veenas enthralled. The hippies, making up almost a third of the crowd, were there to lend a little glamour to the show. Some of them even performed on stage. Most of them looked ridiculous in the indian clothes. The vocals got a little monotonous at times, and that's when I stole little naps, but most of the music played was just unbelievable, and together with the dramatic landscapes, the overbearing presence of the mountains and the sea, and the sun and moon providing the effects; the mix was wickedly heady. So many times, it felt like a dream.

Check out some photos here

Ithi Ninna Amrita

A keenly awaited play was performed at the Rangashankara on 18th, 'Ithi Ninna Amrita'. It starred Arundathi Nag and Sreenivas Prabhu, two relatively renowned actors on the Kannada theatre scene. It started off with the two characters reading letters that they wrote each other through the years, in chronological order. After a couple of letters the novelty of the play's format wore off and it became apparent that the whole play was going to be just reading of more letters, and we were left wondering what the hell was happening. At first the Emperor's-New-Clothes syndrome forced me to look for profundity where, I realised later, none existed. And then I just gave up trying to sustain my interest. I became preoccupied with watching the stack of letters that were still to be read and trying to guess how much longer the ordeal would last.

You'd think that this would be an easy play to act in. I mean, how tough would READING be anyway. Arundathi Nag managed to ham-act in this role too!! Her Kannada was just plain pathetic. She slurred, she mispronounced, she paused in all the wrong places. Towards the end, she hardly got a sentence right. She was nearly as irritating as a mobile phone that rings in the middle of a play! I'm convinced that in the right hands, a parrot would have done better. Just because she owns that theatre doesn't mean she can mete out such torture. Sreenivas Prabhu on the other hand was the redeeming influence. Kannada sounds so sweet when he speaks that I was inspired to start reading a Kannada novel after a long time.

Ani's next

Ani has fallen prey ! He is in love and he showed all the classical symptoms. He called me up yesterday and shared with me the developments that have happened over the last few weeks. He chose the understated style that most guys would feel compelled to adopt when talking about such matters to another guy, but it was easy to discern the enthusiasm and excitement in his tone. I discovered how easy it is to participate in his happiness.The only downside I could see is that we stand to lose Ani to Hyderabad for good now. Congratulations and all the best my man, Ani!

Things seemed to have worked out perfectly for Ani. He avoids the uncomfortable frictions at home because the girl is from the same caste. And since this has happened when he has already decided that its time for him to get married, the commitment will take place while the inebriating influence of the hormones is still strong. He will have taken the plunge before he realises that choosing your mate is not an expression of independence, but the tightening of your leash.

Tsunami

******************************************************
In this space stood a posting about my thoughts on the Tsunami. The posting was pilloried by a very unlikely critic. In hind sight my critic was right, it was badly out of taste. The closing statement came in for particularly harsh ridicule and I must admit that it deserved it. It was corny and melodramatic ; like a 'dialogue' designed to be delivered by Jayapradha in a low budget Jeetendra-starrer, just before she breathes her last amid the noises of wailing shehanayees and violins.

Moral of the story : Never document those fleeting moments of soppiness in a public blog. You'll be embarassed.

I say let's evolve

Tyler Durden ! My favourite pop-philosopher in recent memory. Some choice quotes below.

You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.

Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else.

We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra.Fuck off with the sofa units and Strinne green stripes patterns. I say never be complete. I say stop being perfect. I say let's evolve. Let's the chips fall where they may. The things you own end up owing you.

2005. Welcome!

New year's eve! I hate the pressure of a milestone. And I hate the pressure of beginning with a clean slate.

We welcomed the new year at Sapna bar in Yeshwantpur, over cold rum and warm beer, and shayari by Nadeem, the special guest for the day. After that we drove to a party thrown by one of the hyperactive girls that Jax met at orkut. There was no entry criteria but if you smoked like a chimney and drank like a piece of parched land then you could blend in more easily. I felt out of place just 10 minutes into the party. I slithered out.

On the evening of the first of January I met Jax and Alak. We made our resolutions. Jax and Alak vowed to reduce their weights to 70 and 55 respectively. I took up a more serious resolution. I aimed to make atleast 3 new friends by the end of this year. The kind of friends you don't need to call up before visiting.

The other two main highlights of my resolution list are
2. To learn a new instrument (probably the harmonica)
3. To learn a new language (perennial entry in my resolution list!)

The Skinny Alley concert that we attended inspired me further about taking up my second resolution with greater ardour. The way musicians smile at each other during a live show is for me the biggest motivation to learn an instrument. The smile has so much mysterious contentment. An understanding of senses that we mortals can't seemingly comprehend. I don't want to be deprived of that kick any longer.

Narasimha Parvatha

I didn't realise that Chai had turned from a mumbling-bumbling simpleton with chronic foot-in-the-mouth disease to this wisecracking smart-aleck. I should pay more attention to my friends.

Chai on the mountain 


Dragon fly on Narasimha Parvatha 

Click here for more snaps

Still obsessed with Miller

"When I think of New York I have a very different feeling. New york makes even a rich man feel his unimportance. New York is cold,glittering, malign. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit. A constant ferment, but it might just as well be going on in a test tube. Nobody knows what it's all about. Nobody directs the energy. STupendous. Bizarre. Baffling. A tremendous reactive urge, but absolutely uncoordinated."

He could have very well been talking about Bangalore. And no more is the frenzy more visible than on Hosur Road. With all the Computer Engineers driving into their cubbyholes. Most of them with bloated egos. Fed on compliments served by their kin with small expectations. "He's the first in the family to leave the shores of this country". "He earns more than his dad". "He owns a flat already". And each looking for contentment in the meaningless shit they do for ten hours a day. "Systems programming is my passion". "We provide support to almost all the fortune 500 companies"."We made the world's smallest projector". Unfortunately for me, unlike the management of my company have me believe they do, I don't share the enthusiasm for the firm's vision; to make enterprise mobility ubiquitous. Why the hell are we so keen on complicating our lives?

Miller !

Few books have stirred a ferment in my head like Tropic of Cancer. Living in a middle class south Indian society for 26 years is enough to put a thick shell of righteousness around you, and it's not easy not to squirm, when the words "cunt" and "woman" are used interchangeably! But after the first dozen pages had shocked and chased away the prude in me, reading the book was an experience I've never known before, and one that I can never forget. I remembered a quote by Emerson that I read on the very first page of the book "... if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experience that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly". And Miller has done it so extra-ordinarily. The awareness of all the moral,ethical and social tensions that chain me down, progressively became real and tangible. And it's a funny feeling that followed, a medley of happy and depressing thoughts. Happiness in the enlightenment. Depression in the awareness of the chains. Stifling chains. Living, clawing, cajoling chains. All the while etching on the fabric of your brain, till you can no longer remember the time when there were no chains. Replacing the fundamental realities with useless crusades. Killing your appetites and planting perversions in their place. Puke!

Stars change

The man who won't deliver his nightly farts
Without looking up the astrological charts
Didn't lose his faith in the horoscope
When it failed to tell him his daughter would elope
He felt hurt that his daughter went astray
But he hated more the guy who took her away
It didn't matter if he was deaf or dumb or had a limp
If he looked like a chimp or worked as a pimp
What filled him with infinite dread
Was that he didn't wear the sacred thread

A tryst with the lord

Sachor and I waited at the gates for the safari canter to pick us up
for our last safari. The minute the canter drove into our place we
realised our chances of spotting a tiger was zilch. The vehicle was
packed with cantankerous school girls, for whom the safari was just an
extended socialising session. Weird are the ways of fortune. Just a
quarter of a mile into the core zone of the forest, I met the king.
Majestic even in his laziness. The bright orange coat shining
through the thick undergrowth on the forest floor. It was an
unforgettable sight. Just once he lifted his head as if to silence the
excited girls. The lustre of the coat, the harmony of the stripes, the
understated menace in the eyes, the dignity in his demeanour; I had met
perfection. The tautness in the nerves had gone. The splendour of the
forest, the grace of the cinkara, the beauty of the raptors and the
monitor lizards and the crocs and the storks and the trees and the
lakes ,everything now sunk in effortlessly.

I don't remember how long it took to reach the Berdha section of the
forest, but the driver stopped because he had picked out some fresh
pugmarks in the dirt track. We were now on top of the hill where the
predominant vegetation was moderately tall yellow grass. After a few
minutes, euphoria in the jeep turned to delirium, when just fifty
meters away a tigress came out of hiding and walked into a section
where the grass was shorter. She was smaller than the male we had seen
before but no less beautiful. We backed a little to stay close to her
and the girls were now hugging each other to expend all the nervous
energy that was building up from enduring all the excitement in
silence. We backed up for about fifty meters and all along the tigress
was just 30ft from us. She intended to cross the tracks behind us and
our backing up probably disconcerted her. She expressed it with the
most economical of expressions,a not-so-fussy stare. She seemed to give
the driver no choice but to stop, and he obeyed. The rest of the safari
was a daze.

Berdha Tigress 

Click here for more snaps

Time is running out

Just when I thought I had met my share of interesting people for this
trip, I met Sachor on my next Safari. He hails from the Netherlands
and has already seen half the world. He intended to backpack for a
month across India. Looking at the marks he had made on the map in his
lonely planet guide, I realised that by the end of the month he would
have seen more of my motherland than me. He turned out to be another in
a series of people who brought to light my own deficiencies. I
remembered all the apprehensions I had about travelling alone, and how
uncomfortable it was to convince people around me that I REALLY was
travelling alone; about how long I had thought about how many days to
take off, and finally decided on just four; and all my anxiety that
Rajasthan is so far away, not just by distance but as a culture. And
here was a guy who had stopped over at a totally alien land with just a
bag on his back, not knowing where he will be three days from today.

The third of my safaris is a complete disaster. By now I understand
why the locals, expecially the guides and the drivers of the canters,
hate Indian tourists. For one, they are noisy. Noisy enough to drown
the distress calls of the Chital and Peacock that usually hint at the
presence of a tiger. On this safari there is a totally noisy group of indian
families, who divide their time between gossiping and trying to
explain (in vain) the point of a safari to the noisy kids they have
brought along. We sight lots of animals but no Tiger again.
My afternoon schedule included a trip to the fort. I get that exchanged
for another safari. This time I am less luckier. A local small time
politician and his stooges get on board. Between coming up with
brilliant ideas like " tying a goat to the edge of the jeep as a bait
to attract the tiger", the politician is trying hard to strike
conversations with the angrez folk in the canter. To a gentleman from
England who was carrying a little kid who looked mongoloid he asks,
"Is she chinese?". Even the terse, grim reply "She's ours" doesn't deter
our friend from asking more questions.The moron is getting on my already anxious nerves.

We have seen a lot of pugmarks but no tigers. I am now preoccupied with looking only for
orange skin with black stripes. If it wasn't for Shefali and Gaurav I
would probably not have seen the majestic Serpent Eagle staring at us
from the foliage. I feel disappointed with myself.

The first thing I do after getting back to the resort is to cancel my
ticket to Jaipur and book another Safari.

At dinner that day we chat a lot over drinks and food. I curse lady
luck and Sachor threatens Aditya that he would set the forest on fire.
Gaurav suggests that it all was a well orchestrated plan to keep the
tourists longer than they planned. The resort owners, animals and
guides are all involved.

Ranthambore!

Arrived at the Madhopur station at 4:00 in the morning. A jeep had been arranged to pick me up. I reached the resort and was immediately pampered by the army of "Singhs"! Ram Singh wouldn't let me carry my bags, Govind Singh made chai for me and Bhagat Singh told me about my day's itinerary. The first safari was at 6:00. I managed a quick bath and a shave. Before I could gloat over my efficiency, travelling in an open jeep on dirt tracks, I realised all the cleaning was a waste of time.

The jungle here is an enchanting place. It begins so abruptly that it catches you by surprise. The sheer rock faces rise out of the ground sharply and seem totally anomalous from the rest of the landscape. The forts on top of some of these rocks give the place a lot of character, and surprisingly do not reduce the wildness of the place. Instead the ruins tell you a story of the usurper dethroned and the old order reinstated. Justice done to the rightful owners. It made even a perennial cynic like me smile and say "That's the way it should be".

The first safari was a very fruitful one. Met a few Sambars, Nilgai, Chital, Langurs, Boars and Cinkaras. And Gaurav and Shefali. Gaurav, with his long tresses, luxurious beard , sharp pleasing eyes, and loads of wit. He told me he comes there every fortnight, and made me wish I could do that too! While he was filming on his huge video camera, I asked him if that is what he does for a living, he replied "I wish". I liked him instantly. I'll remember Shefali as the woman who negated my prejudice against women who smoke. Her parched lips and tanned face told me she probably hasn't spent a penny on cosmetics. Which explains why she appeared so good looking too. One interesting couple to go on a safari with. By the end of the safari I had stopped just short of worshipping them.

At the end of the second Safari I turned shallow. I stopped fooling myself with exalted theories that all wildlife is just as special as meeting the king. It wasn't true. I had to admit I would go home disappointed if I don't see a tiger. I had spent two of the three safaris allotted to me in this package and I hadn't seen a tiger. There was just one more left.

I met Aditya at dinner. He immediately made place for himself in my Personal heroes List. He threw away his job as an IAS officer. He relocated to Sawai Madhopur and turned into a hotelier-cum-naturalist. Former, for a living ,and the latter was,well , his religion. He downed drink after drink and the anecdotes got more interesting. Only when he started slurring did I notice the time. It was almost morning and we remembered that we had another safari in a few hours time. We retired.

Last Lap

The home stretch of my journey. Can't help feeling it was time well spent, reading a not-so-small book completely. "A House for Mr.Biswas". I like the tranquility that follows reading fully a good book. Taking a little time off to rearrange all the several pieces. To revisit the earlier sections in the new light that the later ones threw. To chew the cud if you will! I remembered what Aby said about the way he chooses the books that he wants to read. He waits long enough and then finds out if people are still talking about the book, letting it pass through the test of time. But I definitely disagree with the approach. I like to "discover" a good book . To identify the greatness of the book myself rather than to rely on the experts and time to profess it's immortality, is a high in itself.