MONKEY MENACE

Witnessed a regular turf war today between a pack of dogs and an angry bunch of langurs. It was a full-blown battle. The monkeys, with their superior teamwork, had the advantage over the dogs and would have defeated them hollow had it not been for some serious help from the staff at the nearby office. It felt similar to watching Discovery channel live but without the explanatory commentary and background score.

Langurs

Rhesus Macques

All this reminded me of the monkey menace that we had to endure while in hostel and the shameful manner in which we handled it. The monkeys there were not of any particularly interesting species - plain, old Rhesus Macaques. Definitely not at all ideal for the gross Amul Macho ads. But they made up for their lack of glamour quotient with their sheer numbers. When they came down from the hills and ran in hordes on the corrugated-tin roof of the hostel, the awful din sounded like rolling thunder. And since mischief was high on their agenda, things were not generally amicable between the monkeys and their more modern descendants at the hostel. Every time the monkeys visited the hostel they left behind a trail of destruction. Drawers were flung open in search of food, containers were pried open and their contents spread across the floor, heaps of books and papers arranged perilously on tables were knocked down, the pantry in the hostel mess was ravaged beyond recognition. The monkeys also occasionally made off with clothes, clocks, cigarettes and anything else that caught their fancy. Gifts and chocolates, both for and from special ones, too were regularly stolen by the rampaging devils. Such was their menace that they made the cryptid monkey-man in Delhi look like a veritable Simian saint.We on our part did not lose any opportunity to get back at them. In the weeks before and after Diwali, any monkey which was sighted would be attacked with a volley of firecrackers. Though very few of the missiles actually hit their mark or did any serious damage, but they frightened the Macaques enough to bring peace to the hostel for a couple of months. But peace is a rare luxury and it would not be long before the monkeys would be back with a vengeance. It was almost like Gabbar with a band of monkeys raiding the village of Ramgarh with sadistic delight. But just as "...Ramgarhwaalon ne paagal kutton ke saamne roti daalna band kar diya...", so we too decided that enough was enough. There had to be a way out. Accordingly, one fine Sunday, the raiding monkeys were pleasantly surprised to find a sumptuous feast laid down for them in the dining area. What they failed to notice was that except for one small window, all the other doors and windows in the dining area were closed. Boldly but carefully a bunch of monkeys entered the mess and tore into the food oblivious to the fact that the only open window had been closed. The original intention was to scare the life away from the monkeys with lots of loud firecrackers, but mob behaviour is a strange phenomenon which makes people act in ways in which they normally would not have. What happened next was utter carnage as twenty of the hostel braves (honestly, I was not among them) swooped down on the monkeys. Screams and shrieks flooded the air as blow after blow rained down on the hapless bunch. The monkey-god, Hanuman cringed from his abode in heaven and must have cursed entire humanity. To a band of enraged young men, however, it did not matter if they were reborn as vermins and parasites in their next lives. What mattered was revenge - cold blooded revenge. It was fast turning into a blood-bath, when someone mercifully opened a couple of windows. The monkeys which had managed to evade the blows made a desperate dash for escape while the wounded ones slowly and painfully limped away. When the dust finally settled, someone noticed that one of the raiders was lying slumped on the floor of the mess, quite obviously dead. Amidst much hooting and cheering, the dead monkey was suspended from a tree for all his kind to see and fear. Throughout the day it remained there dangling from tree - a grim reminder of his descendants' cruelty. The other monkeys must removed him from tree that night as it was not there in the morning. I do not remember the monkeys coming to the hostel after that day. And though we never had to clean up our rooms again in the aftermath of their raids, we did miss their thunder on the corrugated tin roof.
The guilt hurts most of us even today.

AN ODE TO AN OMELETTE

Had a bite of an Oriental Omelette a couple of Fridays ago and I was hooked. So simple in its preparation, yet so delicate in taste. Came back home, high on spirits, and promptly wrote this paean to the omelette.

ODE TO AN ORIENTAL OMELETTE

Myriad pubs and seedy bars did I frequent,
Hoping to find the perfect complement.
'Coz the best snack to go with a merry drink,
Was all in my spare time that I could think.

But taste is all about the monies, they said.
The better it tastes, the more you paid.
And so a minor fortune I foolishly spent
In futile search for the ultimate complement.

Alas! In no joint did I ever come across
A flavour upon which a man could gloss.
Or even an inviting aroma strong,
One could immortalize in a song.

All seemed lost, when one crazy, drunken evenin',
On the restaurant menu, below Fish Liver Gin,
I found the beauty I never had met;
It was the humble Oriental omelette.

I swear by Jove, it was a delightful dish.
Stuffed with mushrooms and Parmesan cheese.
Four delicate eggs soft-fried in butter,
Tomatoes and ball-pepper on the platter.

The hard spirits felt strangely smooth
Such did the tender omelette soothe.
And till the very last, broken morsel
It gave me the joy in a kid's carousal.

No more swirling serpents of doubt,
Be it whiskey, vodka, rum or beer stout
The only food on my frugal plate
Will forever be the Oriental omelette.

So what is your chakna of choice?

A STORY OF FATE

It has been exactly eleven years since the day Mrs. Sharma died. It was a terrible misfortune to befall what had, till then, been a small and happy family consisting of Mrs. Sharma, her husband and their young daughter Tara. It would be superfluous to mention that Mr. Sharma deeply loved his wife because on seeing her lifeless body, the bereaved husband had lamented that he could not imagine life without her. But the death of one unremarkable woman hardly affected the general scheme of things in a planet of teeming millions. It was not a surprise, therefore, that Mr. Sharma remarried within a year of the tragedy and started a new family. His daughter too did not seem too unhappy about the arrangement. Nevertheless, she did sometimes wonder about the new lady in their house whom she was supposed to call 'Mother'. This story, however, is not about either Mr. Sharma or his second wife. It is also not about their daughter, Tara. This story is about the events which occurred on that fateful day, eleven years ago.

****************

It was one of those sultry days during the monsoons, when the heat and sweat combine to make clothes stick to your skin like a spandex suit. Fans hardly provide any relief from such sweltering heat, yet, the Sharma family had fought through the day under their illusory comfort. Since it was a Sunday, Mrs. Sharma had suggested, during lunch, that they should go to the only air-conditioned movie theatre which had opened recently in the city. "If not for the movie," she had said, in a manner befitting her middle-class existence, "but for the comfort inside". Mr. Sharma had signaled his concurrence with a gentle nod of the head. How was he to know that on later days he would deeply regret his decision? The late afternoon saw Mr. Sharma lock the front door, tug at the heavy lock to make sure that it was secure and then set off, with wife and daughter in tow, for their evening outing. It did not take the three of them very long to reach the theatre and buy the tickets, but Mrs. Sharma's insistence on having an ice-cream ensured that by the time they were at the entrance of the screening hall, the movie had already started. The usher guided them along the aisle in semi-darkness, pointed out their seats with the beam of his flashlight and disappeared into the darkness. Mr. Sharma instructed his wife and Tara to take the first two seats from the aisle while he chose to sit on the third. It was the best he could do to prevent any unwanted attention towards his wife. Mr. Sharma was just about to sit down when a yelp of pain from his wife brought him to his feet. Instantly, a number of heads turned towards them defeating his intent of not drawing any attention. A concerned inquiry from Mr. Sharma revealed that something sharp, probably a tiny nail protruding from the upholstery, had pricked his wife just as she was settling on her seat. This carelessness on part of the theatre owners greatly angered Mr. Sharma and he hurried towards the entrance to look for the usher. He presently returned with him and pointed out the seat in question. There were loud shouts of protest from the seats behind them as Mr. Sharma and the usher proceeded to look for the offending nail. What they found was not a nail but a pin with small piece of paper, about the size and thickness of a visiting card, attached to it. Under the pale-yellow light of the flashlight, Mr. Sharma saw something written on one side of the card which drained all the blood from his face and sent shivers down his spine. Written in clear, bold letters was the message, 'HIV, ALWAYS POSITIVE' and a small signature scrawled at the bottom. The next few minutes went in a daze. In short, incoherent sentences Mr. Sharma told his wife about the horrible turn that events had taken. Mrs. Sharma was strangely quiet for a few moments and then broke out into uncontrolled sobbing when she realized that none of the people she knew had HIV and that all of them thought that HIV was contracted through dirty habits. By then most of the people around them had forgotten the movie and were staring at them with great interest. The usher saw this and led three of them away from the hall but not without young Tara throwing a tantrum about it. Though her husband tried to reason with her, Mrs. Sharma could already see herself ostracized from everyone she knew. All three of them would be treated like lepers; they would become the living dead. Her husband, meanwhile, was thinking of the two logical things he could do. He could either accost the manager of the theatre or he could immediately take his wife to a doctor. He decided on the latter and accordingly came out of the theatre dragging his daughter by the arm and trying to console his wife at the same time. They walked up to the bus-stop nearby, where Mr. Sharma asked the two them to wait while he himself went to hire an auto rickshaw. Inspite of more than twenty people being around Mrs. Sharma and her daughter during that time, no one was really sure what happened next. Some said she fainted, some said she was trying to cross the road, while some even said that she did it on her own. Whatever might have happened but the fact remains that a speeding bus ran over the anguished Mrs. Sharma mercifully putting to an end the intolerable misery she had been suffering from for the past ten minutes. The screech of wheels brought a bewildered Mr. Sharma to the spot and it took him some time to realize that life, as he knew it, was well and truly over. Since one must take care of the living than worry too much about the dead, so in subsequent discussions about the accident, Mr. Sharma never mentioned the part that the pin played in the incidents of the evening thus saving his daughter and himself from a lot of trouble.

*****************

While Mr. Sharma was still trying to convince himself that the mangled, unrecognizable body lying on the street in front of the theatre was once his wife, a different scene was being played out in a hostel of the government engineering college in the outskirts of the city. Twenty-three youths in the last years of their teens were made to stand in a line in front of their hostel where a few of their seniors had started gathering. It was their daily ragging session - a sort of ice-breaking taken to the extremes. The twenty-three freshmen, with their hair closely cropped and dressed in formals in the warm and humid evening, were a jaded lot. They were a trifle frightened too though none of them admitted it. The seniors sat on the stairs leading to the hostel, sharing a cigarette among themselves while the wretched freshmen stood in attention in front of them. "So are you maggots ready for the quiz?" KP asked with a faux, sadistic smile. All the freshmen moved their heads to indicate an affirmative. It was KP's idea to order the helpless freshmen to watch the movie being played at the matinee-show at one of the theatres in the city and question them later on what they saw. The matinee-show movies were invariably awful and the one which the freshmen watched was no exception. That the theatre happened to be air-conditioned was the sole redeeming factor. "First one from the left, come here", demanded KP. The chosen one came forward slowly.
"You are the one in your batch with the highest marks in the entrance examinations, aren't you?"
"Yes Sir."
"So are you very smart?"
A question such as this was not about right or wrong answers per se, it was about giving the appropriate answers. Previous experience had taught the freshman to keep quiet when the questions were too complicated and so he did not give a reply. A string of the choicest expletives and jeering followed. But that was much better compared to any kind of physical pain.
"OK, then. First question....." KP said."Who is the art director of the movie you saw this afternoon?"
KP was waiting for the answer, when someone from among the other freshmen caught his attention. He beckoned the poor soul to come nearer. There were no questions this time, just two hard slaps across the face which would leave their mark and elicit sympathetic glances from the professors the next day.
"Can you see all of your friends wearing the hostel badge on the pockets of their shirts?"
"Yes Sir."
"Do you know that all new boarders are to wear it at all times when they are in the hostel?"
"Yes Sir."
"So where the fuck is your hostel badge, you bastard?"
"I am sorry Sir, I lost it somewhere."
Two more resounding slaps, this time from another person. It was ARP. "You will find a few extra badges on the table in my room." he bellowed "Take one of them." Smarting under the sting of the slaps and the embarrassment, the new boarder silently walked away. He was back soon with a badge pinned to the pocket of his shirt, it was identical to the ones his friends had.
"It looks good on you" observed KP looking at the card attached to the boy's shirt. Written across it in clear, bold letters was 'HIV, ALWAYS POSITIVE', it also had ARP's signature at the bottom. "What does it say?"
"Hostel-4, always positive. We, at hostel number four, are always positive in our attitude, Sir" answered the young man. One of his cheeks had already started swelling.

Notes:
What are the chances of transmitting HIV through a needle?
Snopes: Pin Prick Attacks

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (A POST IN 5 MINS)...

I am really thinking hard of changing my priorities.
Looking for a something new. Seriously. Same ol' job, same ol' life. Nothing to bring the long unused grey cells into motion.
If there ever is a hero in the Mahabharata, it is not any of the Arjunas or Krishnas or any other cunning liar. It is Karna. Having read more than 600 pages of 'Mritunjaya' gives you that kind of a feeling. Good book this. But the translation by Nandini Nopany and P. Lal leaves a lot to be desired. The use of vernaculars like 'Bhaiya' and 'Arrey' makes for some crappy reading. Which reminds me of Upamanyu Chatterjee's 'Weight Loss'. If ever, there is a book which I would never recommend to any of my readers, it would have to be this. 'Weight Loss' has to be one of the most worthless attempts at writing by anyone serious enough to do so. Sheer waste of half a grand and four hours of valuable time. Should have stopped at 'English, August' before picking up this worthless babble. But 'Mritunjaya', on the other hand, is much better....dispels some of the unanswered questions that a generation of kids watching Mahabharata on Doordarshan might have had. Also read 'Green Berets' by Robin Moore, if you have the time (irrespective of whether your favourite colour is red or not). I assure you, it will not be a disappointment.
Watch '12 Angry Men' and Basu Chatterjee's 'Ek Ruka Hua Faisla' and try to decide which is better. Agreed that Henry Fonda is irreplaceable but then you have to appreciate how Basu Chatterjee manages to adapt the classic for an Indian setting and extracts a memorable performance from Pankaj Kapoor. Annu Kapoor too plays his part with aplomb. Readers with a memory of Indian serials/teleserials from the late 80s and early 90s will recognise most of the actors who play the roles of the 12 jurors. 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' on the other hand is quite a bore. An interesting premise goes to waste here - except for a couple of scenes. What could have been a hard look at some uncomfortable and unusual topics, delves into realms of fantasy and expected dilemmas. Cate Blanchett' s role being the sole redeeming factor. Fincher's 'Seven' and 'Fight Club' were much better. Kevin Spacy's psychotic scream of "Detective....." towards the end of 'Seven' would have put a million Gabbar's to shame.
Also watch 'The Bicycle Thieves'... it is really worth it.

ANSWERING THE CALL OF NEGLECTED LOVES

What am I up to?
Well, it is a return to life without TV and Internet. The TV went kaput towards the end of last month which in turn inspired me not to pay the Internet bill. And honestly I miss neither(not even the Indian Paisa....err....Premier League).
Loads and loads of books....from Ogden Nash to Stephen King, from Upamanyu Chatterjee to Issac Asimov.
Loads and loads of movies....from Bicycle Thieves to Amores Perros, from Citizen Kane to Road to Guantanamo.
And I have a sneaking feeling that this books-n-movies duathlon will continue for atleast one more week.

Footnote: Managed to get my hands on Batman#534, a part of the 'Batman:Legacy' arc. After all it is not in every issue that you get to see the dark vigilante teaming up with Lady Shiva to prevent Ra's al Ghul goons in Calcutta.