Dabbawala

Mumbai's dabbawalas are a pampered lot. Everyone likes them- Prince Charles invites them for tea at the Buckingham Palace, Management Schools want to study their work ethic and Networking gurus use their numbering technique to come up with a path breaking routing protocol! It looks as if dabbawalas can solve world hunger; of course they can, they are after all in the food business! They seem to be leading such cushy lives, that soon, some of us would have to carry dabbas for the dabbawalas!

We need to find out what turned the business around for the dabbawalas: a new CEO, a new mantra, or a lean-mean, literally hungry workforce ? I am particularly interested because my dabbawala at school was quite a distance from all the good things said about his ilk these days.

Firstly, I just don't see a need for a dabbawala, at least not for a school going kid. It looks more like a fashion statement that the school kid wants to make and at that age, it has to be nipped in the bud. If the kid protests, he needs a little rap on the knuckles and simply ordered to carry his lunch with him. As simple as that!

Anyway, my dabbawala did not add much value. There were more days when my poor mother would have to rush to school because the dabbawala played truant. If he showed up, he would either be late and give me exactly five minutes to gobble up the food or leave someone else's dabba which I couldn't anyway eat because it wasn't vegetarian! Reprimanding him just didn't help. He was oblivious to reproach and continued his delinquent ways.

He was also occasionally known to sample food from different dabbas before he delivered them to the destination. Suspicions arose when the rather skinny dabbawala grew over a period of time into a nice, rosy, rotund figure while the school children actually looked famished! That's when the round of enquiries started and to our disbelief, it was found that the children always received a poori or a chapati less and missed a serving or two of sabzi as well!

But what caused a greater stir was his camaraderie with my friend Baida. Baida was called Baida because of his unusual affinity to score an egg (baida, i.e. zero) in every test. We quite forgot what his real name was. Some said it was Vaidya or Vaidyanathan, but Baida fitted him to the letter. He had to escape Mrs Clare's Maths period after lunch because he hadn't done his homework. Baida was good friends with the dabbawala and actually rode pillion on the dabbawala's bicycle (along with all the dabbas!) to Five Gardens where he would spend the rest of the afternoon just loitering! Well, as luck would have it, both Baida and the dabbawala were caught. For sure, hell broke loose. But Baida and the dabbawala somehow managed to stay afloat and lived to see another day!

We always used our dabbawala as a sort of spokesperson from Mumbai's famed Meteorological Department. Mumbai's rains are unmatched in fury and the dabbawala would be quizzed during the lunch break on the level of flooding at King's Circle. My dabbawala had a standard response. His eyes would bulge and his fingers would be placed just below the nose! We would immediately rush to the Principal's office and scream that the school had to be closed half-day or we risked drowning on our way back home! Sometimes, this plan worked. Based on the testimony of dabbawalas and the number of students crying themselves hoarse, we would be allowed to go home half-day! The sense of accomplishment used to be immense when we found that King's Circle was perfectly fine and had had hardly any rain much less any flooding.

On those days, we truly thanked our dabbawala and ensured that he doesn't get fired!

Dramatics at Don Bosco!

To borrow a modern comparison, Subra was our Dhoni in high school. Whatever he touched, turned to gold. He was academically brilliant and never stood second throughout his career. When it came to debates, he was peerless. He could draw, he could compere, he could act, he could sing. It looked as if there was nothing that he couldn't do. We were only thankful that he was senior to us by a year so that we could look up to him with awe and never had to battle with him. But even the best occasionally falter and it is these incidents which supply text for later narration!

Subra had a lead role in the finals of the school dramatics competition. He was to play a mother with a newborn child, stuck in a poverty ridden home. To set the context right, ours was a boys school and some of us had little choice but to essay feminine roles as well. The plot was dark and revolved around the travails of this lady who had to fend for herself and her child and deal with an irresponsible husband as well. You get the drift- a story straight out of an art film. But you could trust Subra. In his element, he would have brought tears to the eyes of  the most hardened eighth grader, which is no mean task.

But that day was different. Subra had to wear a skirt and blouse and cradle a doll which was supposed to serve as the newborn. At the most opportune moment, just when our protagonist exuded pathos and was at his melodramatic best, the doll decided to have some fun. Suddenly, the head of the doll slipped out of the body. It bounced a couple of times, did a few somersaults and fell out of the stage! The script did not deal with this eventuality at all. In a sudden reflex, Subra scampered down the stage and ran after the head which continued to elude him a few times! Soon he hurried back, and in full view of the public, spent the next several seconds fidgeting to screw the head back to the severed body of the doll! It's never easy to get it right and quick in these situations. Meanwhile, he had little choice but to keep the dialogue of the play going which now looked completely incongruous!

The audience was in splits and boys were seen holding their sides and rolling down the aisle! The judges tried their best to appear stern and serious. But the most austere have a tipping point. Just when normalcy seemed to return and the actors got back to their somber selves, the doll's head decided to do the bouncing act one more time! This time, the judges couldn't contain themselves. Their pens and evaluation sheets were cast to the winds and they too joined the laughter riot! It was too comical for even the participants on stage to continue any more. Their giggles turned to loud guffaws and they had to beat a hasty retreat to the green room. Subra was on the horns of a dilemma whether he should run after the head this time or continue the play with a severed baby! Abandoned by his comrades, he stood like that boy on the burning deck! There was little help that the prompter could give. As he turned several shades of red, the curtains came down and brought the play to its most illogical end!
Even the best of comedies hadn't evoked this kind of spontaneous response ever! As far as we were concerned, it was the best play ever and were quite disappointed that it did not win a prize.

There was just one individual who saw things differently. Mrs Clare, who had struggled with this group for months was heard screaming behind the curtains, "How many times did I tell you during the practice sessions not to play exorcist with the baby!!"

P.S. For the uninitiated, playing exorcist refers to the act of rotating the head of the doll so that the face would now be to the back! That's the game high school boys like to play with dolls and occasionally wished they could do the same to those who taught them !!

What is a raaga ? - a painter's perspective

What's in a sunset that it creates some of the most dramatic images ? Why are some of the most evocative paintings set in darkness with candle-light adding just the highlights ? Why do some film makers swear by black and white and refuse to delve in colour ?

On closer scrutiny, a pattern emerges in imagery! It looks as if restricting the colours on the palette actually helps to heighten the feeling in the picture. Regardless of the topography- an ocean front, a mountainscape or even a city skyline, a sunset is arresting because there are fewer colours. The sky is aflame in a deep orange in the background; silhouettes dominate the foreground. Mainly two colours- orange and black. The same scene looks quite ordinary at a different time of the day simply because we have all the colours.

It is precisely this concept that Indian music is based on. Every raaga comes with a fixed subset of notes (swaras). It's as if we took all the notes, arranged them all as colours in a paint-box and then carefully chose just a  few of them. Now, with only these colors (notes), we paint a musical picture. That would be a particular raaga (say Mohana).
Next, we go to the same paint-box with the full set of  notes and choose a different subset of colours. Another picture with just these notes and we have another raaga (say Shivranjani).
The dramatic element in raagas comes from this  restricted usage of notes, much like our sunset picture. Shivranjani tugs at our heart because it has just five notes. To give some popular examples from films, "jaane kahaan gaye woh din" (mera naam joker) and "tere mere beech mein" (ek duuje ke liye) exude pathos. Papanasam Sivan's "tarunam idaiya" is good example of a classical composition in Shivaranjani which evokes the same feeling. It is difficult to convey such profusion of emotion and that too predictably in music if we used all the notes.

That's what sets Indian music apart from other musical systems of the world. We have pentatonic (5-note), 6 note and 7 note raagas. Some have experimented with even 3 notes, but that's more like a black and white picture with no shades of grey- it's too discrete.

We now have a research topic on our hands. May be, we can assign a colour (real colour like red, blue etc.) to every note in music. Next, we try a series of paintings based on different raagas using only those colours which are native to that raaga. We would soon have some musicscapes on canvas. Perhaps, some pattern will emerge: looking at a set of paintings, on completely different themes, we would be able to decipher that it is in the raaga Kalyani!

Can these paintings move us the way raagas do ? Will a Sahana canvas evoke compassion, an Atana picture.. a sense of bravery and a Saama landscape... a general feeling of peace ? Will a painting of Amrita-varshini (or Miyan ki Malhar in Hindustani) touch the rain-gods or do these gods relate only to sound?
Paintings have some obvious limitations. Musical notes are far more refined and delicate than the paint and the brush. Painters can climb a tree!

Sounds of the rail

If you want to really enjoy a train journey, you need to board an overnight train. Day-trains have a magic of their own, but our attention is divided. We catch a bit of the scenery here, strike a conversation which ends up in a heated debate there and the foodie in us, of course needs to explore every item available at the platform! It is a melange of sorts which just does not allow you to savour the experience in full.

Not so when the train travels through the night. We are truly in the train's lap and alive to every subtle sight and sound that it has to offer. AC compartments insulate us from the outside world and totally deaden the sensation. The second class compartment is the best box office seat that you can get and it is well worth it.

It is therapeutic to lie down on the top berth, sink in the faint blue light with which the entire compartment is bathed and just listen to the clatter of the wheels. The wheels maintain a constant, rhythmic beat which doubles up briefly when the train switches tracks and then returns to the original rhythm.  It's just as if Zakir is on the tabla who keeps us interested all the time with sudden twists and turns in the percussion rhythm.

The effect is heightened when the train has "run late" through out the day and needs to "make up" for lost time at night. To borrow a Cricketing metaphor, the batting has smouldered for a major part of the innings for no rhyme or reason, the asking rate has climbed up and now needs some heavy hitting from Yusuf Pathan  to get back into the game!
That's when the train cranks up speed and howls through the darkness as if possessed by some demon!

We suddenly lose the plot once more; there is no green signal and the train grinds to a complete halt. Silence takes over. The whirr of the fan above is heard louder than ever as also the clearing of throats from fellow passengers who cannot sleep. The repeated hoots of the engine resemble a wail as it protests and pleads for the signal to turn green so that it can get going. Not so easy. It must wait in the darkness for an eternity. As we press our forehead to the bars of the window, an outline of a small house slowly comes into view. It stands all alone, with pockets of dimly lit windows and some quaint beings who can barely be discerned from this distance.
We wonder what kind of beings stay here, what vocation they are involved in and what aspirations they pursue. It seems so removed from our familiar city world, that we visualize what turns our lives would have taken, had we been part of this household!

The silence is punctured by a shooting whistle and a deafening roar of a train which comes from the opposite direction and in a ten second cracker burst, it has rushed past our train and disappeared into the dead of the night. It is now clear why we've been kept waiting. Silence reigns once more except for the crackle of a cricket outside the compartment.

Our train starts unobtrusively with a little creak here and a squeal there, slowly gathers momentum and gets back to the rhythm of the clatter and rattle. We are back on track.

Co-passengers in a train

I have never managed to use the berth assigned to me in a train compartment. If I am supposed to be on the upper berth, a bean pole of an individual has a polite request whether I can take his side berth because he just wouldn't fit in it where as I might just. If I have the lower berth, an elderly lady would prefer to use it and banishes me to the top berth. If it is the middle berth, a family is travelling together and wonders whether I could use one of their berths in the next coupe or sometimes in the next compartment. If the window seat is mine, a child stares at me relentlessly and forces me to vacate it. At times, I feel, they need not assign a seat for me at all and should just leave it as a wild card. That way, I wouldn't wallow in self pity that I am simply being kicked around!

However, it is these co-passengers who make train journeys truly fascinating. Take this case of the gentleman who was particularly irate and rightfully so. He had slept on the top berth but his feet stuck out. He was rudely woken up in the middle of the night when his foot suddenly felt heavy. To his horror, he found that in the darkness of the compartment, someone had mistaken his toes for a hook and had hung a water bottle off it!

There is a particular co-passenger who always gives me the shivers. He's typically found on the top berth and just does not stir for the entire duration of forty hours! He appears drugged and needs no break either for food or even for the rest room! He covers himself from top to toe with a blanket which gives our fertile imagination even more material to worry about. Sometimes, he changes his position and we relax a little. At times, the blanket is motionless and registers not a ripple and we are positively worried and wonder whether we should try giving him a little pinch!
The moment we reach the destination though, he suddenly rises like a phoenix, fresh as a daisy, picks up his luggage and makes a dash for the exit with greater agility than anyone else!

The glutton (glorified in today's language as a foodie) treats the entire journey as one big meal with several courses. At 2:00 am, he beckons to the only vendor patrolling the platform premises at Lonavla station and digs into a full packet of Maganlal chikky and washes it down with a cup of tea. He can eat anything and everything at any time. Groundnuts (referred to as time-pass in rail parlance), idlis, vadas, guavas, oranges, jack-fruit and bananas are swallowed in full and several cups of tea, coffee and cool-drinks are guzzled with consummate ease between the main meals. He eagerly looks forward to breakfast at Solapur, a sumptuous lunch at Raichur and a full dinner at Guntakal junction. He submits a detailed review of each item to the other passengers and gets them interested as well. His unruly son is perched on the top berth with a never ending stick ice-cream. Its steady drip catches a passenger on the lower seat unawares. The dress is now stained and the hair is sticky as well. The glutton tenders a simple apology on behalf of his son who continues to slurp his stick ice cream much to the irritation of the affected party.
Sometimes, he proffers a biscuit to one of us. When we hesitate, he announces loudly, adding to our embarassment, "Don't worry! I am not going to drug you and steal your valuables!" We have no choice but to throw caution to the winds and take the biscuit. He ensures that you eat it too!

We like the co-passenger who risks his personal well being and fetches water for the less nimble, offers a helping hand for someone else's luggage and cajoles a baby to sleep. We hate the group of ill-mannered students who don't have reserved tickets but still take it as their birthright to impose themselves on you and encroach upon your seat. We are indifferent to the co-passenger who buries himself under his novel and looks up only when the ticket collector comes around.

By the end of the journey, the initial suspicion with which we viewed some members is completely set aside. We've exchanged family trees spanning several generations and geographical locations. Personal details which would have ruffled quite a few feathers in the immediate family circle have been openly exposed!
It is natural to feel a little lump in the throat when we alight at the destination. But, we know that a similar family will be around when we travel the next time. Till then, au revoir!

Scripps Spelling Bee in India

We were spell bound watching the latest edition of the Scripps Spelling Bee on TV. Leave alone spelling the words correctly, there were very few words that we had even heard of. At times, it looked as if the spelling bee was not in English, rather, it was a test to measure the skill in languages like German, Italian, Latin, Yiddish and Hebrew. Children barely in fifth grade seem to have devoured entire dictionaries in multiple languages and tackled poly-syllabic words with ridiculous ease leaving us totally dumb-founded. And we thought, we knew the English language reasonably well!
What is popular in the US has to be imported to India so that we can have our own version of  their favourite shows like "Who wants to be a millionaire". It is here that Scripps Spelling Bee would run into rough weather should it make its way to India.

America churns out boys and girls who are phonetically so uniform and perfect that they all speak and sound alike. They are programmed to pronounce every English word identically- when they murder Indian names, it is again in a consistent and predictable way. Hence, it is easy for the contestants to ask- "Any alternate pronunciations?" for any given word and get an answer which has possibly just one or  two variations.

Indians in India cannot be slotted so easily; we have an individualistic streak in us. As common-place a word as "vegetable" will lend itself to multiple pronunciations and the questioner would have to reel out an entire list: "veg-tabl", "vegi-table", "bhej-table" and "vezi-table" to just name a few. Similarly, the contestant would also have a lot of variation in articulation and the judge would have to be alert to tolerate the differences- "yum-ai-yen-ai-yum-you-yet another yum" (for the word 'minimum') to give a fairly straightforward example.

"Nataka" was the only word that I could decipher in the latest edition of the Scripps Spelling Bee. The questioner mentioned that the word came from Sanskrit and had a fairly long explanation on what kind of drama came under that category. For once, we had an upper hand over the contestants and felt amused that the Jamaican kid should spend so much time over nataka! With due sympathy to the contestant, I really have a problem here. Who is to decide that nataka has to be spelt only as "nataka"? Why should it not be "naataka" or possibly "naataca" ? After all, a word in a different language can always be spelt in different ways when the sounds and letters of the alphabet are not exactly the same in the two languages.

Once we come to an Indian version of spelling bee, it would only be fair to include words from other regional languages. If nataka can be a valid word in Spripps, why not kinkartavya-vimoodh  for the Indian equivalent ? Language of origin would be Sanskrit and adopted by Hindi. The meaning of the word would be "a state of helplessness or confusion". When it comes to pronunciation, we can come up with a pageful depending on which individual is saying it.
Or how about "urulaik-kizhangu" (potato in Tamil) or possibly "phulapakharu" (butterfly in Marathi)? We could well have a civil war of sorts with every state pushing for its favourite words to be spelt in English! Language jingoists will spit on their palms and gladly join the gladiatory fights at the Coliseums across the country!

Of course, we would have several coaching classes mushrooming (and a booming business for sure!) to cater to this new-found craze and the brightest kids would soon be learning Bhojpuri, Kashmiri, Konkani and Tulu words in English! Who knows? It could be a novel way to promote national integration!

The audience for the Scripps Spelling Bee is too mild mannered. An Indian equivalent show might want to reconsider whether parents should be in the audience at all. Over-anxious Indian parents (in India) are extremely vocal and don't mind giving their ward a mouthful (e.g. you duffer!) or even resorting to more violent means in full public glare, should their child stumble over a word.
Parents might even come up with ingenious ways to create a secret code between the child and themselves so that every word can be read off by the kid on stage by simply watching the parents' sign language! Also, Indian parents cannot stomach their ward's defeat so easily. The entire contest could come to a standstill and be rendered null and void with parents threatening that their ward got a raw deal and was eliminated controversially because everything was rigged! The spectre of "spell-fixing" would loom large and the media would have one more topic to beat to death.
We would soon have nation-wide protests, fasts unto death and vast sections of the public screaming- "No Scripps Spelling Bee...! Scrap the Spelling Bee!"

Cricket in the neighbourhood

"Paagal mami" (mad-lady) scared the hell out of us. At a time when cell phones were unknown, she maintained an animated conversation from her balcony all by herself. We never knew whom she spoke to-but her lips moved, her face registered reactions and she used her hands as well. She would even pause and wait for the "other person" to respond and would then continue the thread from her end. As kids, it was a baptism by fire to fetch the Cricket ball from her home should one of us hit it into her balcony. Invariably, it would be the batsman who would have to do the unenviable job. Rumours were rife amongst kids that  she had contact with goblins and dark creatures of the other world who were always on the look out for young boys to be indoctrinated into their fold! Many a time, the bravest would chicken out and the ball would be forever stuck in paagal mami's house.
On rare occasions, in a sudden act of bravado, one of us would be emboldened to ring the bell and get several trapped balls out of her house in one stroke. On those days, we had an undisputed hero!

Shivram's house was forever locked. His balcony was completely grilled and stood at what would be a sort of "silly mid-on" for the batsman. The best fielder would be positioned at this location simply because the game was over for the day once the ball was hit into his balcony. There was no easy way to get the ball back. Agonizingly, the ball would be well within sight and still be out of our reach. At times, we  would insert two bats through the grill and would try to scoop the ball out like a grain of rice between two chop-sticks! There was many a slip between the cup and the lip! The ball would be tantalizingly within reach only to bounce away and go so far back into the balcony that  it would leave us totally frustrated!
At times, the ball would be successfully retrieved through this innovative method, but  in our exuberance, at the last minute, the bat would slip out of our hands and fall into the depths of the balcony! Invariably, a stack of balls (and occasionally bats) would be seen at the far end of the balcony with no hope of fishing them out since they were hopelessly out of reach. We would have to wait for the next monsoon and hope that the rain water collecting in the balcony would get these balls closer to us! We always hoped that one day Shivram would return and we could take possession of the treasure that was rightfully ours. Sadly, it never happened as far as I can remember.
Shivram would always be in some exotic place (as we learnt from others who kept changing his coordinates) like Samoa or Puerto Rico or some island in the South Pacific!

Mr Swamy was a character. He had a perenial scowl on his face and there was little doubt that he hated us and the game that we played. If the ball was hit into his house, we just had to buy another one. We never knew what Mr Swamy did with the balls. There was a theory that since he had retired, he used to sell these Cricket balls to make some extra money. There was credence to this argument because we had hit so many balls into his flat  that it should have been overflowing with Cricket balls and at least some should bounce out of his house and roll away, should he simply open his door! That was never the case. In our own way, we tried to keep things even by traumatizing Mr Swamy. On hot afternoons, I would bounce the ball against a wall which was common to his flat and mine and hit it back ferociously so that the impact would be felt on the other side. It made him mad all right, but it was payback time as far as we were concerned!

The only other obstacle to Cricket was a tree bang in the middle of the compound. Sometimes, the ball would get lodged in one of the upper branches and would refuse to come down. It would need Bheema's might to shake the tree from its roots and get the ball out or a person who could climb it without the elders watching. It was a big relief when the entire tree was cut down one fine September morning simply because the Ganpati festival in the building required serial bulbs to be installed and the tree was perceived to be an impediment!
Of course, the earth was green then and hence one tree could be cut down with no pangs of conscience gnawing us! Cricket was easy after that!