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Some pictures from Wardha

Some pictures from Wardha.

Travel on no money

It was at around 10 pm, with no lights on the street, no sound of humanity, and only the occasional roar of the tide, when we asked Mr Dhanavade, "Where is the nearest ATM, Sir?"
I, along with two friends, was concluding my two-day back-packing stay in Diveagar, a small beachside hamlet on Maharashtra's Konkan coast. It is the sort of sleepy villages you see in old movies, where a tightly-knit community lives off kitchen gardens, fresh sea food, and the money paid by a few families that drive down from Mumbai or Pune, looking for a quiet weekend. There are no hotels, no supermarkets, and no ATMs.
Mr Dhanavade, owner of Dhanavade Niwas where we stayed and ate delicious Maharashtrian food cooked by his wife, smirked. "I think a 100 km or so," he said. "You don't have enough cash?"
The three of us, still in college and living off a monthly allowance, had carried a pittance to Diveagar, assuming that the food and stay would be cheap. This was until we decided to stay a day longer, without as much as a thought about dwindling cash reserves, and low chances of finding an ATM anywhere around this near-isolated coastal village.

There was no better way to put it. "No Sir," I said, my head hanging half in shame, half in the stupidity of the city-bred assumption that one can always 'withdraw' in case of a cash crunch. The bill was Rs 1,450 including two days rent for a small room where we slept, and the five meals we ate. We had, totally, Rs 600. There was no limit to our sense of shame. The Dhanavade couple had extended their hospitality to random half-hippie half-rockstar youngsters. They took good care of us: the food I had still continues to be the best home-cooked sea food I've ever eaten, and Mrs Dhanavade's willingness to prepare tea at odd hours on request, taking time out from her household chores, humbled us. And now we did not have enough money to pay them.
I expected an upheaval. There was no ATM around, and no bank where we could withdraw cash from. Our bus back home was to start in an hour – the only bus in the day -- and we had college to go back to the next day.
Mr Dhanavade was staring at all of us now, one by one. He sighed, and looked at his wife. They nodded at each other.
"Can you take down my postal address please," he said.
"What?" I asked, confused.
"Please take down my postal address. When you go back, collect the cash and send it to me by money order. I trust you."
That was it. He got up, and retired to his bedroom.


The time when Steve visited India, is also etched in my memory. He had contacted me on CouchSurfing.com, a service that lets users find lodging (a ‘couch’) in other users’ places. Not paying for hotels this way means cutting down on the largest share of any traveller’s expense, with the added benefit of interacting with local, similar-minded people.
On the lazy summer afternoon when Steve arrived, I lied down and listened to him talk about Canada, and his life there. Between mouthfuls of the roasted Indian groundnuts that he liked so much, Steve told me how he worked as a tree planter for half the year, and used the savings to travel for the rest of the time. His tales never failed to inspire me.
“Planting trees for half the day, every single day, involves intense physical stress. I’m sure you know what mental stress feels like. But with your conventional job I’m sure you don’t know what it is to be stressed from hard, physical labour. You have to feel it, to know it,” he said, belittling my strenuous gym workouts into a mere fad. Sitting there in that sultry room of my flat, I could imagine him trampling through Canada’s dense forests, earmarking spots, and planting saplings. I could see him dig a pit, push-in a wet plantlet with all his might, and refill the soil -- all in flat thirty seconds. The sweat, the heavy breathing, damp air, muddy shoes – I could feel it around me while he spoke. And when he paused in between, to scoop up more groundnuts, I let my mind wander around those forests, and that country, walking with his friends, meeting his family, and attending parties. Canada seemed so familiar, yet so distant. Steve made me want to lead his life, to work for the environment, and not work in air-conditioned environment-unfriendly buildings. Yet India is no Canada. Will any job wait for me after I’m back from my carefree travelling? Nobody pays for planting trees. I wasn’t on a tour, I did not own any mode of transport, nor had I stepped outside my home. Yet, sitting in the room listening to Steve, the eagle soared over the forests of Canada.

Gem clips. Small yet big.

When you used a paper clip this morning, did you give it more than a moment’s thought? You would have opened a box of clips, picked up any one of them, and clipped your manuscript with it. You picked one of them at random – each one being as preferred as the other. Little did you know that the same clip represents a history of struggle for identity; each clip picked from among a hundred others could tell a different story.

Ask your grandmother, and she will say it was Johan Vaaler who invented the clip. True, Vaaler, a Norwegian who lived in the late 19^th century, was long known for that. He had received patents for it in Norway and USA. Encyclopedias and dictionaries since the 1950s mentioned him as the inventor of the paperclip, first in Norway and then internationally. However, this is a myth. True, he developed a version of the paperclip, but it is among many others developed around that era, and certainly not what you used this morning.

The common clip today is a “Gem” clip. We call it that just the way you call a photocopy machine, a Xerox machine. It was Gem Manufacturing, a British company, that started production in 1870s, and which holds the credit for popularizing today’s paper clip. The clip is so commonly used, that till this date we call it a “Gem” clip; obviously, a single British company does not supply it to the rest of the world! The first twist of the paperclip’s identity comes here. Nobody has heard of E. P. Bugge. Well, what we know today as the “Gem” paper clip was developed and patented Bugge of the United States, vide patent no. 3,057,027.

Vaaler’s version of the paperclip, like scores of other versions, was ineffective compared to the Gem clip. It lacked the last turn, and a subsequent long side -- making the clip highly flimsy. It would give its user a hard time trying to push it across thick paper.

Why did Vaaler become so famous then?

It was a fight for the Norwegian identity that made him a hero. The paperclip by then had become a very commonly used item, and claiming it to be an innovation from Norway gave great pride to Norwegians, especially in the aftermath of World War II. They wore it on their lapels as a symbol of resistance, when wearing flags pins was prohibited by the Nazi party.

Writers of history too did not leave out the opportunity, of building national pride in Norway by using paperclip as a symbol of their unity. There was a School Paperclip Project in Tennessee, USA, where students of a middle school collected 6 million paperclips to show solidarity against the holocaust. Soon enough, Johan Vaaler was portrayed as a hero of the Norwegian Jews – when he wasn’t even Jew. This was great attempt by war-struck Norwegians at using the paperclip for artificially constructing of national pride and identity. What is interesting is that a monument was erected in Norway commemorating Vaaler’s invention; the paperclip depicted here is in fact the Gem clip, and not Vaaler’s version at all.

A twisting and turning of identities, indeed!

Woody Allen

 

There’s something very Real about Woody Allen’s movies. Its like he takes all the riff-raff out of the situations he portrays and says “hey, this is how life eventually is. you have a woman fancying two men at a time, or you have this artist guy who just wants women around him and doesn’t stop a bit to hide that from anyone. this is life in the face, man.”

Most scenes are very lovable, and many of his movies have a narrative going in the background (like in Vicky … ) or there’s the protagonist breaking the fourth wall and describing his feelings, or the situation (like in Whatever Works, Annie Hall, etc). This saves the director a lot of time in terms of making actors chalk out prototype expressions / acts that would tell the average movie watcher that “they are now in love”, or “she is having a great time with this guy”. Whatever is the needful is said by the narrator or the protagonist and this way there is more time to get the story moving on, and to probably notice other things that are more important to the formation of the plot or the movie than simple logical movements among the characters.

 

I used to think that a movie in which Allen doesn’t act by himself, won’t be that good. But somehow, i hardly felt any difference between the two. He magically imbibes among his actors the same haste, stumbled speech, queerness, and the fear of commonplace life, that he himself so skilfully portrays in almost each role of his.

 

As an actor, he is one person who has achieved everything that he ever wanted his audience to know – while essentially being the same person in each movie. All his movies look more or less like sequels to each other with all the other actors and the scenarios just changing but the Allen is the same thin small guy wearing the same type of clothes, talking in his trademark way, and worrying about his trademark stuff.

 

He is one talented filmmaker whose films unfortunately go unnoticed by the “high circles”.

I think I like it better that way.

you’re fired

 

Reading headlines and news opinions about layoffs isn’t half as appalling when something like that happens close to you. especially something in the next cubicle at work. It almost makes one think that there’s absolutely no value for good work anymore in the world. I mean, a guy comes al the way from a different city, starts working, dedicated his entire life and thoughts to the work, but all he is for the company is a “resource”, with a price-tag attached. When the burger’s too expensive, they go for the hotdog. Bye-bye burger. Do these “HR” people even think once about what impact would this have on, the other employees (‘resources’)? Aren’t they taught psychology in their MBAs?

In a way, firing a professional isn’t too different from employing a poor jobless to do your gardening and then one fine day, just asking him to stop.

 

I think the problem is in the way we have perceived the contributors of knowledge and work to the making of successes. We tend to look first at the success – a company, money, a building. And then, like a pyramid chain, we tend to go downwards and downwards till we reach the point where the man who put his heart and soul into probably the smallest of the working parts, is the one looked upon as merely a liability. We don’t start by looking at him, that selfless contributor who sold his soul to dedicate himself for something he hardly even profits from.

Marx’s ‘alienation’ couldn’t be more true.

"Classes"

My tyrst with classes began, first, in my tenth standard when I joined the first and last tuition of my life. As far as I can remember, my classmates had been to this mysterious torture hole which gave more homework that school itself. I remember in my third standard or so, classmates leaving school hurriedly to gobble up lunch and reach their 'tooshan's.

When i joined my tuition it was more out of need for discipline than anything else and God knows i learnt it well.

These 'classes' have always haunted people of ages three and beyond. Right from the neighbourhood aunty/uncle who is good at maths, right till those hellholes designed to push people into engineering institutes, till professional institutions meant for the graduates and beyond and training them to excel at the world-wide competitive examinations. a Lot of money has been made off people and has made common teachers into tycoons..

Autos.

This blog is dedicated to this hard working tribe of 'shared' autowallahs, who instead of plying on 'meter' and looting the city of cash, instead do a service by moving on fixed routes with fixed prices and giving us humble citizens what the city buses cannot.

The first striking difference between a 'normal' auto and a shared one is the absence of meter in the latter. It looks rather odd since we have all grown up seeing that good old meter (usually made by Super Meter Works, Hadapsar, Pune) ticking away to glory and placed on that age old position on the frame dividing the driver's area from the passenger's.. in fact, seeing an auto without a meter would make one think it is out of order. Yet, almost everyone has had their own stories of their rendezvous with different types of auto meters. while those in maharashtra region are known to show values that need to be multiplied, divided, subtracted, added, and what-not to eventually land upon the correct legal fare. on the other hand, the autos in hyderabad have always believed in reducing the arithmetic load on people by always getting the meters tuned to the currently running fares. this gives a distinct impression that the meter moves too fast (since every 'tick' is worth 20 paisa). it is indeed palpitating to see the meter go tick tick tick faster than the auto itself (60-80 km/h)

we move on to seating space. all autos proudly write "to seat 3 only", "3 + 1", &c &c. For the metered autos, this rule more or less applies unless the commuters are ready to pay him a tenner to get that fourth friend sitting on somebody's lap instead of getting another auto. BUT, writing "to seat 3 only" on a shared auto is nothing but dry humour. The revenue model itself of a shared auto restricts the minimum number of commuters to 5. This is when creativity jumps in and you have specially designed coffee table-like seats on either side of the auto driver. These are to house two extra people beyond the three already sitting on the driver's seat. Metered autowallahs sometime spend that extra cash they get from plying a firang (Rs 300 only) into decking up the interiors with extra-cushy seats, posters of preity zinta on the left and sridevi on the right, and even a sub-woofer. (it is assumed that every true autowallah has a music system installed as a part of the whole machinery).

It is really good to see an auto with a "3+1" sign containing 6+1 people, with the latest telugu hit songs blaring from below the commuters seats.
Its even more fun to be one of the 6.

(more, later)