The Pedant

Last weekend, my son announced, Appa I’m inviting a friend of mine home for dinner on Sunday. Could I please be a little less sarcastic and little more courteous, definitely not in that order? Also, Amma, can you make some adai avial and Vaangi Baath, he is a big fan of both of those. Left with no choice, I grumbled a yes. I looked up at the year calendar with a small photo of Lord Ganesha and big bold typeface inscribed name of Lakshmana Groceries, their way of rewarding frequent shoppers and prayed that this new avataram not be one of those new generation mobile savvy, startup dreamy, torn tank top and low waist jeans flaunting hombre who would attempt to make me put down the remains of my provident fund into his application which would deliver me coriander leaves at the click of a button in twenty two and half minutes, ninety seven point eight percent of the time. So help me God.

“How do you know him? Is he working? Is he an engineer? Where did he go to college? Sarkaar college il a private college il a? Which caste does he belong to?” unleashing the barrage of questions, I found myself panting at the end of the monologue, I had forgotten to breathe in the middle.

Jr. Me stared at me, with his jaws wide open. With a shake of his head, he thrust his earphones back in his ears and started waving his hands in the air. Whatever he was listening to, it wasn’t Subbulakshmi’s Suprabhatam, the pace did not quite match with the violent gyrations of his body. Shiva Shiva!

On explicit orders of Ms. Me, my soulmate of this lifetime, I picked up a cloth bag and set out in the direction of Lakshmana Groceries. Unfortunately, the raw materials for adai avial, Vaangi Baath and a bunch of culinary delights Ms. Me and Jr. Me were planning didn’t grow on the trees lining my street. Lakshmana Groceries was going to turn a profit this year too, courtesy my family.

The day of reckoning came sooner than I’d have wanted it to and I found myself extending my hand out to shake hands with Jr. Me’s friend. Jr and he sat down and talked about topics in the world ranging from latest X Box releases to upcoming Formula One Grand Prix and Spanish La Liga all the while munching the savories Ms. Me was constantly doling out from the kitchen. I was left to wonder whether these poster kids of posterity were indeed talking about happenings on Planet Earth or some equivalent in a parallel universe.

I was relieved when Ms. Me announced dinner services and in the short span of a few seconds, found myself sitting at the head of the dining table, with the self-illusion that I was back in control.  I decided to strategically preempt the discussion in areas I considered myself to be pedantic and asked, “So do you follow state and national news?”

“Of course, I do!”

Eager to find a weak spot, I asked, “Are you aware of the recent skirmishes on the India Pakistan border?”

That, in hindsight, was the sentence I should not have uttered. I should have let the evening play out by itself, Jr would have handled it adeptly but I was keen to show who was the master in the house. Mistake. Big mistake.

It was as if someone turbo charged Jr’s friend. He launched into a tirade against the atrocities committed by Pakistan. He then proposed to blame Pakistan for all the ongoing problems in the world. Looking back I have no recollection of how he changed gears but his diatribe expanded and covered everything from Islamic State and Israel Palestine conflict to Chinese influences on North Korea and American imperialist aspirations in South East Asia. It was as if he had the solution to all the problems in the world, unfortunate part was that no one had thought to put him in charge! Thankfully, before the topics could expand any further, adai avial ran out. I used that as my opportunity to run to the wash basin. Golly, I needed a break! It was like I was listening to a speech in Klingon.

Finally, after a few more minutes, it was goodbye time. It couldn’t have come any sooner. As we all gathered at the door to see him off, he suddenly remembered something.

“Oh I forgot. My ammi had asked me to get a 10-kilo packet of idli rice from a grocery store on my way back. I only have Rs. 200 with me. Uncle, aunty, would you know how much a kilo might cost, so that I could decide if I need to stop at an ATM before purchasing?”

The Linguist

I was assigned to man the classifieds section of the newspaper that day. It was a peaceful setting, and one, where I thought I could work on some ideas for an Op-Ed piece that I had promised my editor I’d deliver within the week. As I was writing and striking off ideas that were popping in my mind, I was interrupted by a group of youngsters who appeared in front of my desk.

The guy in the center introduced himself and his friends to me and said to me that he wanted to post an obituary in the next day’s newspaper about his grandfather’s brother who passed away a few hours ago and he inquired if I could direct him to the right section.

“You are at the right place” I said. Pushing a pen and piece of paper towards him, I said, “Do write down the matter to be published and hand it over to me. You can pay the fees at the counter on the ground floor.”

No soon as I had pushed the pen and paper towards the group, their faces lost the ring of purpose with which they had come in. His face switched to reflect a confused state and his peers were looking at the ceiling and floor of the building with a new found esoteric interest.

“I do not know how to compose in Malayalam sir. I studied in an English medium establishment.”

Aah so this explained the tectonic behavioral shift of the group.

“Not a problem. You can compose it in English, I will translate it into Malayalam for you and give it inside.”

Now, the expression on their faces switched to chaos. One of his friends muttered from behind, “Hey man, do what they want and then come back down. We’ll wait outside, near the car park.”

Before the young man could open his mouth, his friends around him vanished. And he was back to staring at me, with a flushed look at my face. It was starting to dawn on me the reason for this unique group behavior. Neither himself nor any of his mates was confident enough to draft the same in English as well, the language over which they supposedly command over!

As he stood before me coyly, with his feet drawing imaginary circles on the floor below, my face betrayed no emotion. “What’s the matter?” I asked, feigning innocence.

“Please excuse me sir, I just remember I have an urgent chore to attend to. I’ll compose the matter from home and be back shortly.”

Saying this, he turned back and almost ran away from my presence.

I caught the back side of his T shirt when he retreated out of sight. It read “I was born intelligent but education ruined me.”

The Krishna Conspiracy

Scene 1

Battlefield of Kurukshetra

The great battle of Kurukshetra is all set to begin. Arjuna makes his way to the middle of the battle field on his chariot with Krishna as his charioteer. Seeing all of his relatives on the other side of the battlefield, Arjuna becomes depressed and is confused if fighting them is indeed the right thing to do.

Arjuna tells Krishna, “Over the other side, I see Drona. He is my guru, the great warrior, he has taught me all I know about warfare. Next to him is Bhishma. His love and wisdom lies within myself, within my heart and my soul. How can I fight people who have helped me become what I am today?”

Krishna tells him about his dharma. Arjuna is still not convinced.

Then Krishna tells Arjuna. “Alright mate. You don’t want to fight, fine? You don’t care about adharma triumphing over dharma, fine. How about this, I’ll keep a condition for you. Go to an engineering college in India, complete four years of baccalaureate degree course. If you think you can do that, then forget Mahabharata, forget the kingdom you are rightfully supposed to inherit which you have been unethically denied. If you can complete that four year course successfully in due time, I’ll agree to your points of view and I’ll steer your retreat from this great Kurukshetra.”

Arjuna thought about the moral dilemma confronting him and decided that it would be much easier to go to an engineering college and earn a degree than to face his own relatives in a battlefield.

Scene 2

Entrance examination center

A puzzled expression dons the visage of Arjuna as he stands in queue before the mandatory frisking before the beginning of the engineering entrance examination. His face certainly belies his state of mind. He had come in his royale attire, donning the gold jerried dhoti and his customary bow-and-arrow.  He is puzzled that he is quite an object of attention of the entire chunk of young men and women around him. Arjuna was quite used to looks of admiration and obedience he used to get from his subjects but the looks he was getting now was none of that. None of them are wearing dresses that Arjuna could comprehend. And he was surprised he had to stand in queue, waiting for his turn. Back in Kuru kingdom, he was always privileged to skipping ahead of queues but people did not seem to recognize him. So he stood, in that sweltering heat wondering if he had indeed made the right decision.

The queue inched forward slowly till Arjuna finds himself standing in front of a gruff security officer. As soon as he set his eyes on him, the security officer unleashed a torrent of gaalis Arjuna had never even heard prior! His confusion is momentarily cleared when the officer shows him a memo from the examination board. It read, “Don’t bring any device or anything along with you which can create trouble for you better to avoid things like hair band, cap and scarp, nose pins, bracelet, earrings, bow and arrows, watches and mobile phones.” Silently, Arjuna hands over his bow and the quiver of arrows to the officer who then pushes him to another officer. He thrusts the same piece of memo in front of Arjuna, a different statement is highlighted. “As per the new rules the candidates are advised to wear light clothes shirts and T-shirts having half sleeves which do not have big buttons, generally avoid wearing fancy type clothes.” Arjuna, clad in his dhoti and not wearing anything equivalent to the modern day shirt or T shirt, is again left in the lurch. He silently curses Kali Yuga as he makes his way to the nearest garment store to find something that fits the requirements for appearing in the entrance examination. He made a mental note to ask Krishna next time, whatever the challenge, do not send him to undertake a task in Kali Yuga….

Scene 3

Engineering

Arjuna stands with pride in front of the gates of the engineering institute into which he got admitted into. Though the feat of appearing for the entrance examination seemed much tougher to Arjuna than clearing the examination itself, he is nonetheless proud of himself and is looking forward to show Krishna and the other Pandavas his entrance examination results card when he returns. Focusing on the task at hand, he pushes open the gates only to find a huge mob of youngsters charging towards him. “Good God,” he thinks, “This seems it is much more of a battlefield here than Kurukshetra itself.” As the mob appears closer to him, the faces of the individuals on the frontline belie their state of mind. If he had his bow and arrow, Arjuna could have taken down however large a mob with his arrows but he felt naked now without his bow. That darn flight journey to college, they didn’t allow weapons to be carried on the flight, he had to check those in with his check in baggage and in the true spirit of Kali Yuga, the airlines had misplaced his checked in bags. Arjuna was helpless and didn’t have Krishna to turn for advice. However, his survival instincts told him that the best way out in this predicament was to turn around and run as fast as he could. He attempted to do just that but he was a moment too late. The leader of the mob caught him quite effortlessly.

“Who are you?” he barked.

“I came to join this college for first year engineering,” a tame Arjuna replied.

Huge guffaws accompanied Arjuna’s answer. “Do you know who we are?” quizzed the leader of the mob.

“No, I don’t.”

Slap! Before Arjuna could react, a hand had reached up and slapped his cheek. “We are your seniors. From now on, you are our junior. And all juniors are our slaves.”

And thus began Arjuna’s life at an engineering college. He would be in the middle of completing his engineering drawing assignment due to be submitted tomorrow when he would get that dreaded call from a senior to withdraw money from the ATM. As per Murphy’s law (he realized that Mr. Murphy had simply renamed Kali Yuga after him, he planned to write a thesis about Mr. Murphy copying from India’s religious heritage sometime during the course of his degree), the nearest ATM would be out of cash and he often ended up travelling to the other end of the city to find an ATM that had enough cash. A day before the mid-term examination is when his seniors would feel the need to have their rooms cleaned before they started preparing for his exams and Arjuna was called upon for doing the cleansing. Arjuna’s number seemed to be on speed dial for all concerned. When any of the seniors ran out of money to pay the dhobi to wash the clothes, it was upon Arjuna to wash their clothes till their accounts were refilled by their parents the next month. Buying alcohol (absolutely against his beliefs, mind you!) or a smoke in the middle of the night, standing in queue bunking classes to reserve railway tickets for seniors, you name a menial task, Arjuna had done that in his first three months. The icings on the cake were when he went to a driving school, learnt driving a four wheeler and appeared and passed a driving test as a proxy for one of his seniors who was too lazy to do all that.

Among all this, he had to manage studies as well. Although in terms of time and effort committed, studies lagged far behind multitude of other commitments (most happening of which are afore-mentioned), he managed to push along his coursework as well. He used to get so many redraws and repeats on his engineering drawing assignment that he strongly came to believe that his instructor of that subject was a descendant of the Kaurava clan. Engineering workshop was another highlight of the first semester. The T-joint which he had made as a part of his carpentry assignment, an elephant could pass through the wedge hole. Mathematics and Physics were all about derivatives and integrals. It started with first level derivatives and integrals but by second semester they had gone to double differentiation and surface integration. It seemed that every semester added one additional level of integration and differentiation, he shuddered at the very thought of what awaited him at the seventh and eighth semesters. After he added water to a huge beaker of sulphuric acid, there was a mini explosion of sorts in the Chemistry lab and he was given a damages bill that to him, didn’t seem much different from the semester fee bill. And to top it all, after a tiring day of classes and labs when he came back to the mess, they served him two rotis and a dal which had cooked of a healthy proportion of a dozen grams of dal in a liter of water or so. Staring into his katori of dal, which, if it was a lucky day, would contain couple of dozens of pieces dal, he reminisced about the royal food he used to get when he was with his siblings.

Scene 4

Battlefield of Kurukshetra

As in the first scene, Arjuna is sitting on the chariot behind Krishna. He has a sullen look on his face. Krishna smiles and asks Arjuna, “So, were you able to get the degree? Should I turn the chariot around?” Arjuna looks up to Krishna and says, “My Lord, please don’t taunt me. I confess I underestimated the challenge you threw upon me. I thought that it would have been much easier to get the engineering degree and that would have avoided the predicament wherein I would have had to face my uncles and relatives in this epic battle. But now, I realize, getting an engineering degree in Kali Yuga is much more impossible than fighting and winning this battle. Now I do not have an iota of doubt in my role in this world. Steer the chariot straight ahead my Lord. Let’s go get ‘em.”

And Krishna turned forward and the horses galloped to the center of the battlefield. And the rest, as they say, is history….