Train to the past

I boarded the Metro from Krishi Bhavan, having followed very clear instructions from concerned parents about how to buy the token and how to use it. The cleanliness of the station, the silence and the discipline were amazing -- it seemed like I had descended the stairs to another world, where rickety buses, shouting conductors hanging out of the doors and rushing hordes of people didn't exist.

The train was 'wow' and the journey was great fun, as I observed fellow passengers, trying to make out how many were regular travellers; how many, like me, were excited, yet apprehensive; and how many were not really there in the train. I disembarked at the DU station, came out, and stood still. A couple of cycle rickshaw guys saw my uncertainty as the opportunity to make a fast buck, but I 've lived long enough to see through that. I didn't know which part of the University I was in. I looked around for familiar landmarks, but much has changed and 10 years is a really long time. Finally, I was able to make out Chhatra Marg and gladly moved that way.

Better dressed students, more cars and mobile phones, more parking, more cycle rickshaws and facelifts to certain areas was my impression of DU, until I entered D School. It was as if I'd never been away. The building's facade was much improved -- seepage ridden walls had been repaired and the canteen looked, to use a less-used word, posh. Ratan Tata Library was under renovation, but everything else was the same, from the colour of the walls to the bench outside the office.

Voices from the past followed me down the corridor, and many faces that I'd all but forgotten suddenly came back. The new-look, much cleaner canteen served filter coffee as before, and, it tasted just as it had all those years back. I wonder if they have a patent on that recipe. Even the man behind the cash counter and the man serving the coffee were the same as a decade ago. The entire experience was like being reconnected to a part of me that I'd forgotten about, that I'd left far behind in the race of life. It was wonderful to be able to find that bit of my life again, to get re-acquainted with the time gone by.

I took the familiar route through Kirori Mal to Kamla Nagar, and was assaulted by the passage of years. The bookshops facing Kirori Mal had given way to those hallmarks of retail culture--branded goods showrooms, Barista, et al. A walk down one radial revealed that the infestation was widespread. There were very few signs of the neighbourhood shops or the humble restaurants that I remembered; everywhere I looked, I could see big showrooms, the 'Hey look, I've got money' syndrome, and exhortations to spend, spend, spend.

The nostalgia trip did me a world of good, though I wish I hadn't been jolted back to reality so suddenly. The one thing that was unchanged, and I was glad of that, was that the biggest stockist of Hindi literature books in Kamla Nagar still existed, and I was able to add to my collection significantly with his help.

Just read...

"क्या भूलूँ क्या याद करूँ", the first part of Dr. Harivanshrai Bachchan's autobiography. I got this one a couple of years ago from one of the bookshops in Connaught Place, and could come round to reading it only now.

It's the story of a common man, who began his life in a 'mohalla' in Allahabad. The scale, however, is breathtaking, as the writer talks about history, mythology, culture, religion, social issues, art, literature, family, and of course, poetry. Nowhere is it preachy, nowhere is it a dry discourse. The writer weaves in all the influences that have shaped his life so effortlessly, with so much feeling and in such simple, rich language, that I felt part of the story he was narrating.

This is one of the books I read voraciously. After a long time, I've come across a piece of writing that is so human and yet so thought-provoking. It's been a marathon read till 2 am almost every night, until I finished it. And any book-lover who met me in this period didn't even need to ask, "What are you reading?" before I launched into my impressions of the book. My husband, of course, has had to bear the brunt -- I've been exploiting his limited grasp of Hindi literature and yet, his interest in poetry, to wax eloquent.

The second part is waiting to be read, and I'm waiting to read it. It was quite an intense and absorbing experience, but more than me, those around me need a break.

कुछ सुंदर पंक्तियाँ

हाल ही में फिर से हिन्दी साहित्य की ओर जाने का मौका मिला, तो ऐसा लगा जैसे वर्षों की तलाश पूरी हो गयी। यहाँ दो पंक्तियाँ जिन्होंने दिल को तरंगित कर दिया:

- कवि कुछ ऐसी तान सुनाओ कि सब कुछ उथल-पुथल हो जाए...

-जब भी अतीत में जाता हूँ, मुर्दों को नहीं जिलाता हूँ
पीछे हटकर फेंकता हूँ बाण, जिससे कम्पित हो वर्तमान

मुझे किसी भाषा से कोई आपत्ति नहीं है, मैं उनमें से भी नहीं जो सोचते हैं कि अंग्रेज़ी की लोकप्रियता से हमारी संस्कृति भ्रष्ट हो रही है। लेकिन फिर से हिन्दी पढने से अपने समृद्ध साहित्य की ओर मेरा ध्यान गया। मुझे लगा कि जो हमारा है, उसे हम क्यों भुला दें? क्यों उसे संजोने की, उससे कुछ सीखने की कोशिश न करें? हमारी भाषाओं का साहित्य हमारे अतीत की कहानी है, हमारा सच है। उसे भुलाना मतलब अपनी जड़ों से नाता तोड़ लेना। क्या तभी आज हम इतना भटक रहे हैं? क्योंकि हम अपने कल से नाता तोड़ चुके और आज में अपना अस्तित्व ढूंढ रहे हैं?

हिन्दी से फिर से नाता जोड़ने से कुछ ऐसे महापुरुषों से भी मेल हुआ, जिन्होंने अपने समय में भाषा को बढ़ावा ही नहीं दिया, भाषा को अपनी संगिनी बनाया। उनमें से एक हैं भारतेंदु हरिश्चंद्र, और दूसरे हैं संत कबीर। इनको पढने से भाषा की ताकत का अनुमान हुआ, कलम की ताकत क्या होती है, इसका पता चला। कबीर के बारे में तो सचमुच लगता है कि इतने हजार वर्षों बाद भी, वह जो बोल रहे हैं, आज के बारे में बोल रहे हैं। और क्या साफ़, सपाट भाषा में बोलते हैं कि बात सीधी दिल तक पहुंचे, सोचने पर मजबूर करे। अंत में इनकी कुछ पंक्तियाँ:

पोथी पढ़ पढ़ जग मुआ, पंडित भया न कोई।
ढाई आखर प्रेम का, पढ़े सो पंडित होई॥

काकर पत्थर जोड़ के, मस्जिद लिए बनाय।
तो चढी मुल्ला बांग दे, क्या बहिरा हुआ खुदाय॥

Strike two

Fellow citizens, beware of being a public personality. Especially beware of being a public personality in Mumbai. And if you have the misfortune of being both, better learn Marathi pronto.

If certain individuals in Mumbai are to be believed, not speaking the language, even though you've stayed here for decades, is tantamount to being a traitor. Never mind that Hindi is our national language; never mind that you, as an individual, have made significant contributions to the pride and culture of your country.

What's the point of all this? Gujarat is all for Narendra Modi, not because of his ideologies, but because of all that he's done for the economy and security of the state. Ditto for the State Government in Delhi. Given that Maharashtra is plagued with even bigger problems, aren't there many other grassroots issues for over-enthusiastic politicians to handle? Issues that would give them the necessary political mileage and lots of positive press, and in the process, also create some benefits for the aam junta.

Marathi is already a compulsory language or a compulsory third language in many schools, and generations of non-Maharashtrians speak it with more comfort than their so-called native tongues. Vijay Tendulkar's plays are just an instance of how popular Marathi literature is.

And if the concerned gentleman feels so strongly about his Marathi antecedents, why not organize poetry reading sessions and other literary activities that would induce people to know and appreciate the language? Why is it that so many public reading rooms are closing down, when the Marathi language has such vociferous well-wishers?

As usual, issues are made out of non-issues for some quick brownie points; while the real issues languish by the wayside, along with the scores of people they affect.

mi mumbaikar

In the big cosmopolitan city of Mumbai, my locality is a microcosm, a small sample of what the city at large stands for and entails. One of my first thoughts after coming to Mumbai was how easy it was to integrate into the city and its lifestyle. Despite Shiv Sena bandhs, loud exhortations about 'immigrants' and the growing stronger by the day 'Marathi manoos' stand, my faith in the city's fundamental pluralism is unchanged.

But that faith suffered a serious dent recently. Overnight, nearly every shop in my locality has undergone a transformation. Hastily painted cloth banners or signboards or strategically inserted words in the original signboard proclaim shops' names in Devnagri script, ostensibly to say that the shop does have a Marathi signboard. Never mind that people haven't bothered with translation; the speed with which the change occurred meant that the Marathi language had to make do with transliteration from English to Devnagri.

When you've invested lakhs of rupees in setting up a business and spend most of your living hours in growing it and make it profitable, it's fairly understandable that you don't want a bunch of hooligans swooping down to attack and loot your enterprise. Principles and culture don't come into it--it's all a matter of saving your life and belongings.

And that's where politics of the 'danda' scores. Common people are vulnerable, because their livelihoods often depend on the very resources that are attacked by politicians and their supporters in the name of community or religion or culture.

If it's a matter of a mere signboard change, most traders would willingly oblige. Consumers wouldn't care much about that signboard, most of them find it a blind spot after the first few visits anyway. Most languages, including Marathi and English, don't lose or gain; they're too powerful on their own to even suffer the slightest scratch. MNS and Raj Thackeray gain a few column centimeters of print space and a couple of airtime hours; some lawkeepers get a chance to earn their wages; some people are disgusted, while I guess some do feel that it's a victory for the 'Marathi manoos'.

At the end of the day, all that I feel is a bad taste in the mouth and a frown in the mind. Not enough to anger, nowhere near enough to galvanize into action. Just a mental shrug and a sinking thought of where all of this will end.

Memories of a weekend in Alunda...

Alunda is a typical village off NH8 that links Mumbai to Ahmedabad. The closest town is Wada, which is probably the size of, or smaller than, Lokhandwala. In good weather (read roads that haven't been ravaged by the monsoon) and average traffic conditions, the distance between Borivali and Alunda takes about two hours. My in-laws have built a cottage on a plot in Alunda. Their society is surrounded by the hills and lies adjacent to a vast tract of adivasi, agricultural land. Here are some impressions from a recent visit to that haven of silence and peace.

• The first view from the bus of a green carpet of paddy fields, tall grass, lush trees and swollen rivers and ponds
• A lazy afternoon with the sound of the wind through the garden, the occasional birdcall, and the constant tinkling of wind chimes
• Untamed greenery almost five feet in height, growing thickly, running over every bit of available soil
• Watching spiders build webs to catch their dinner; a bulbul's nest on a frangipani tree; a chameleon concealing itself on the trunk of a drumstick tree
• A spider and its tiny web on a leaf, caught under a dewdrop in the early morning
• The ride back home in a Qualis, accompanied by the owner of the car who wasn't too confident about driving on the highway; the local panwallah who acted as driver due to his prior work experience as a truck-driver; and the local odd-job man who came along because "I want to see Mumbai, aur hamare gaaon ki gaadi jaa rahi hai."

e by Matt Beaumont

A new author, a new format, and generous helpings of contemporary, Dilbertian humor. The book's called e, and it's written as a series of e-mails floating through the computers of the various characters that inhabit an advertising agency.

The story's told brilliantly and the characters etched out wonderfully through the e's, as they're called. You get to see everything from petty office politics to high-level corporate intrigue, crises, deadlines, affairs... you name it and it's there. I've never been on edge to know what would happen next in a book that's supposed to belong to the humor genre. Apart from a couple of P. G. Wodehouse classics, I've never read a humor book more than once. And very rarely have I laughed out loud at something I'm reading in a crowded Mumbai local. Clearly, this book was a harbinger of many firsts.

The Unchanged Value of Things

As a child, I remember making an 'eeks-I'm-going-to-throw-up' face at the sight of cream or 'malai' in my glass of milk. I also remember my mother trying to use every bit of malai. She collected it in a bowl by skimming it from the top of cold milk, one or two teaspoons every day, till she had enough to make butter. She would then spend a precious evening making pure ghee from that butter. When she kneaded atta, she ran the dough through the empty milk vessel, to collect the cream stuck in it. If they could have afforded it, my parents and many more people of their generation would probably have bought and used full-cream milk; my parents often talked about the taste of curd made from that milk.

Today, my generation can afford full-cream milk. We can buy a whole pack of cream from the supermarket without a second thought. But, when we see malai or ghee, we think 'saturated fat' and 'high cholesterol'. We'd much rather buy olive oil, which is much more expensive than pure ghee or cream ever was.

To a generation that valued it, it was out of reach. To a generation that can reach it, it holds negative value. Makes me wonder whether value is the inverse of what money can buy.

dilli ka badalta roop

Maybe because I traveled more in this trip, I saw much that has changed in Delhi from even six months ago. Many of those changes may have been building for a while and are manifested now.

• The much-maligned and much-cursed BRT corridoor has made life tough for private vehicle-owners and auto-rickshaw drivers, but pedestrians have never had it better. The traffic flow is much more organized and crossing the road is a breeze; many roads have the prized commodity that was non-existent earlier: pavements that cyclists do not encroach upon, since they have a separate lane to themselves.
• The new buses (Tata Marcopolo) that run in these corridoors are a dream. The ride is smooth; the bus design is good; the journey is as fast as it can be in a bus; and people don't crowd the doors. The only thing is that the buses seemed poorly ventilated, due to the strange positioning of the windows.
• The one thing that Delhi had and Mumbai didn't--precious green cover--is fast depleting. The coming of the Metro sounded the death-knell for lakhs of trees; the regret was palpable in the voices of whoever I had this discussion with, but there was also a resignation to the march of progress.
• Was I lucky, was I so used to it that I didn't notice, or do auto-rickshaw drivers in Delhi throw less attitude at you now? I also figured that the fare calculation is done as follows: average fare to destination rounded to the next high figure + markup of Rs. 10. If the chap wasn't interested in going, he didn't haggle any more, but shook his head firmly. Strangely though, I did not encounter as many refusals this time as I have done in the past.
• The gap between Mumbai's and Delhi's night-life seems to be reducing. While roads in Delhi used to be dead by 8 pm earlier, I saw a fair amount of traffic, bright lights and activity even past midnight on a Saturday night.
• Traffic jams, the bane of Mumbai, are multiplying alarmingly in Delhi, despite the fact that Delhi has larger, wider and better roads. Unless it's an emergency, the office hours need to be avoided like the plague.
• The mall culture has asserted itself with a vengeance. No less than three of these giants stand shoulder-to-shoulder in Saket (more trees destroyed), on a stretch of road that was otherwise desolate at night and only slightly busy in the day. A by-product is that the older PVR Saket bears a has-been look, even on weekends. I am told that M.G. Road in Gurgaon is known as the Mall Road now, because it is infested with shopping malls of every colour and flavour.
• If Mumbai has Navi Mumbai, Delhi has Gurgaon--a suburb with vast, uninhabited spaces that could take the huge overflow of aspirants who want to make it big in the city. For those who knew Gurgaon for the DLF 'ship building' and 32nd Milestone, it's bizarre and even scary to see the colonies of swank offices with their glass and concrete exteriors, the high-rises that house all those for whom Delhi has become unaffordable, and the frantic pace at which construction activity is still on. While Gurgaon promises a certain lifestyle, I was also told that housing in that suburb is also becoming unaffordable with skyrocketing property prices. Plus, problems of finding parking, increasing traffic jams, and power and water shortages are rearing their heads. In short, Gurgaon's becoming as overcrowded as Delhi.
• Now for some things that haven't changed. Connaught Place retains its essence, though several stores have shut down and new ones have taken their place. I spotted three Coffee Day outlets this time, which is two more than last time. The emporia on Baba Kharak Singh Marg are the same, right down to the attitude of the employees who work there; and the guys at Khadi still firmly believe that they're doing you a favour by billing your products and packing them. Janpath is much the same, as is Depaul's cold coffee (Thank God for that!). Dilli Haat is the same; shoppers in Delhi's markets are still a pushing, shoving lot; and auto-rickshaw drivers still love to pass a comment or two to relieve the boredom of their existence. The golgappas are the same, though I couldn't indulge as much as I'd have liked to; Hot Choc Fudge at Nirula's is sinful as ever; and filter coffee at Saravana Bhavan and Sagar Ratna is still a taste of heaven. There, I'm looking forward to the next trip already!
• Nothing about the biggest addition to Delhi--the Metro--you'd notice. A Metro journey is on my wish-list for next time, so I'll reserve comment till then.

Just read...

The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith.

A well-to-do moral philosopher in Edinburgh and the editor of a journal called Review of Applied Ethics, witnesses the death of a young man who falls from the higher rows in a concert hall. She, effectively, is the last person to see him alive as he falls, and feels that she has a moral responsibility to investigate his death. Enlisting the help of her niece's ex-boyfriend, who she herself is half in love with, Isabel tries to probe whether the death was accident, suicide, or murder. At the same time, she tries to get her niece's love life in order, though not with any degree of success.

The mystery isn't much to write about; what comes alive in Isabel's journey is the deep moral choices we face, and more often than not, choose to avoid--telling the truth vs. lying, forgiving vs. punishing, and so on. The slices of philosophy fit interestingly into satirical comments about Edinburgh culture and society and quiet insights into the human condition.

Though several parts of the book were quite interesting, one that stayed with me is set on a bus journey that Isabel makes late at night. The other people on the bus are a man in an overcoat who seems oblivious to his surroundings, a couple absorbed in each other, and a teenager trying to make a statement with his attire:

"Isabel smiled to herself: a microcosm of our condition, she thought. Loneliness and its despair; love and its self-absorption; and sixteen, which was a state all its own."

Another interesting part was Isabel's conversation with a man who has piercings all over his face. She wonders how any girl would like to kiss this guy, and so forth, and then asks him why he has these piercings. That's quite a philosophical conversation too.

Our moral dilemmas and Isabel's perspectives on them make for just the right kind of reading--thought-provoking but not self-consciously so, warm but incisive, leaves you with a smile, but also with several questions.