A memorable journey

[I am sure that in school, you wrote an essay on this topic. I did, more than once. Here is the last piece that I will ever write under the heading]

One of my most memorable journeys has happened just today. No, I didn’t go to see the sun rising on the Kanchenjunga, nor did I see any canyon, nor the Taj. I didn’t even drive through a quiet countryside in the mysterious twilight. I just took a flight from Kolkata and came to our second home in Bengaluru. 

Let me begin at the beginning. If you you’ve caught a flight at the Kolkata airport recently, you would know that their trolleys are physically challenged. So the first stroke of good luck was that I got one that had all the four wheels. 

As I was at the tail of a long queue for checking in, a young girl who was womanning the farthest of the Jet Airways counters—who no one seemed to have noticed—came out from behind her desk and asked me and a few others behind me to move to her counter. She didn’t have to. I felt she was not just doing a job in the service sector, she was actually serving people. If all the employees like her in airlines to banks to post-offices believed that they were in the business of service, life would be so much better! It is a shame that I didn’t read her name tag. 

There was no queue for security check, and unlike a few other times, I didn’t forget to collect my laptop on the other side. I bought a handful of magazines and newspapers and settled down in a comfortable chair near my departure gate. As I was debating with myself whether I should buy a coffee for a hundred bucks, I was stunned!

Deepika Padukone walked in casually pulling a leather trolley-bag and went past me. She was in a striped top, black jeans, with a light blue jacket casually thrown around her shoulders. She exuded charm and confidence, in fact, an aura of beauty, just as we have seen her on screen. She was being looked at from 360 degree around! As I watched her carefully and tried my best to look disinterested while my 65-year-old heart trembled, I felt something must have been wrong. Dipika Padukone wasn’t expected to take an all-economy flight with ordinary mortals like yours truly.

Slowly, the penny dropped. She was  actually not the diva. But she could have been Deepika’s twin sister lost in a fairground. Rarely do you come across two people so uncannily identical. 

After boarding the airplane, I took an aisle seat and forgot Dipika as I watched the Bengali mom seating next to me combing her twelve-year old son’s hair with the undivided attention of a neurosurgeon during brain surgery. As she was going through the procedure, she loudly complained that the boy hadn’t even learned to comb his hair. (How on earth would he, with such a loving mother? No wonder lots of Bong boys never grow up. They move from under their mother’s wings to their wife’s and thereafter, the two women fight over their possession till the cows come home.) And then Deepika Padukone boarded the aircraft! 

She walked straight towards me and smiled, ‘Sir, I think you are in my seat.’ I had noticed that my seat number was 16 D, but somehow, it had become 14 D in my pickled brain. I always mix up numbers and dates and names and faces—my students have some entertainment on the side as I often call Bipasha Vishakha and Jagtaar, Jagdeep. Anyway, for a change, I thanked my dysfunctional memory as I got to get a ten-million-dollar smile thanks to it. The flight took off before time.

The food was good. Jet Airways goes out of its way to cater to food preferences of their finicky customers. Besides the usual veg and non-veg fare, they had low-fat, gluten-free, and Jain meals. And the two stewards, Subhashish and Saif who served us were exceedingly polite and helpful, like their colleague at the check-in counter. 

It is common knowledge that the quality of service is inversely proportional to the size of an organisation. Of all the airlines I have flown, British Airways perhaps has the snootiest air-hostesses. At home, Indigo was super when they started. But as the airline grew bigger, the smile on the faces of their employees became shorter and shorter, until it vanished completely. Anyway, coming back to today, during the flight, Saif and Subhashish continuously moved up and down the aisle, bringing a paper to someone, a coke to another and so on, with a professional but genuine smile pasted on their faces all the time. And the pleasant experience didn’t end there. 

My bag was the first to come out on the conveyor belt. And as is usual at the Bengaluru Airport, I got a taxi without immediately. But the icing on the cake was the unjammed roads – I covered the distance of forty kilometres in an hour, something that you usually do in your dreams in Bengaluru.

My stars chose to shine brightly on me today. I ought to have bought a lottery ticket after reaching home.

Bengaluru / Tuesday, 08 August 2016

A carnival of music

Dhriti, who enrolled in a master’s degree programme at our university, had been an air-hostess in her previous birth. And she did look like an ex-air-hostess—tall, slim, and gorgeous. As far as dress sense went, Dhriti was roughly two generations ahead of her time. She was often seen in economical shorts and spaghetti tops, not to mention faded jeans and see-through white shirts.  

Soon, she formed an apparently deep friendship with her classmate Keshav, who we called Keshav Da because he was a married man in his late-thirties. The liaison disappointed many, needless to say. Keshav, was short, dark, and fat, but had an intelligent face with piercing eyes and bushy beards. The last object, along with his circular  metal-rimmed glasses made him look like a nineteenth century Bengali intellectual who had just materialised form a Rabindranath Tagore novel. He wore parachute pyjamas and white kurtas. When Keshav and Dhriti were together, aesthetically and sartorially, they were a study in contrasts. The odd pair was always seen together, on the campus and outside. Actually, they were a threesome, they had a sidekick too, a thin guy of vague features. But lackeys are not remembered by history, not even as footnotes. I’ve forgotten his name. 

Keshav was a touch snooty; normally, he wouldn’t deign to talk to lesser mortals like yours truly. The first time when I had the good fortune was an evening when both of us happened to be customers at Raju’s hooch shop in Goalpara. In winter, Raju sold excellent tadi made of date palm sap at his dimly lit open-air tavern. When we both were sufficiently tipsy, Keshav spoke to me at length. He was an erudite man, I discovered. The light friendship we developed that evening when we were drunk continued in times when we were both sober, unlike what had happened in Chaplin’s City Lights. 

I don’t recall who I went there with, but I clearly remember that Ganesh, a familiar Bihari rikshaw puller, was a fellow drinker that evening. I remember Ganesh’s presence because suddenly, he burst out singing a familiar Tagore song, Badal baul bajay re ektaara. Bauls are a sect of wandering minstrels in Bengal; the song is about a baul cloud playing the ektara, a one-stringed instrument, as the matted hair of the sky darkened the world at the onset of a storm. The song was a tad incongruous under a cloudless winter sky lit up by a trillion stars above and a hurricane lantern below, but Ganesh sang it beautifully. His diction was a little rustic, but the tune was perfect. It was one of those unforgettable snippets of time that remains with you for ever.  

A few weeks after the Goalpara rendezvous, my friend Dibyen and I were on a bus on our way to Jaydev Kenduli on the bank of Ajay. The local people believe—without evidence—the village Jaydev Kenduli is the birthplace of the thirteenth-century poet Jaydev, who composed Geet Govinda, a landmark on the Bengal literary landscape, in Sanskrit in the 13th century. Jaydev Kenduli is also a religious centre with old temples and several ashrams where thousands of bauls congregate in the Bengali month of Poush (December-January), at the end of which a fair is organised over three days. The fair is actually a carnival of bauls, and it was also believed the best of Indian hemp was found there in happy abundance. 

Dibyen, my partner in minor crimes, was thrilling company. A charming fellow, he had interest in almost everything in life. (He is very much alive today. The past tense just indicates I’ve lost touch with him!) He and I wanted to get a taste of baul songs at their authentic best. We also looked forward to smoking grass. 

As it was the last day of the fair, we just about managed to find seats on the last row of a bus, which filled quickly. Soon, before us was stood a solid mass of human bodies, mostly male, some of whom were smoking. Because of the freezing draft, the windows had been shut. The cocktail of smoke and human smell created an interesting ambience in the bus.  

About half an hour into the journey, I had nodded off when there was a sudden commotion. It seemed everyone was jumping towards the front and left of the bus. Fortunately, any force applied within a moving bus doesn’t have an impact on the bus as a whole, thanks to what Sir Isaac Newton called his Third Law of Motion. Otherwise, the bus would have overturned. What was the matter, had a pickpocket been caught? When I asked someone, the excited man said in the local dialect, ‘Bitichheleto bidi keche go!’ (Oh Dear! That female is smoking!)

Dibyen and me wanted to get to the bottom of the matter, and what did we see? The troika mentioned at the beginning of this story had seated themselves comfortably on the corner seat beside the driver. And Dhriti, in faded jeans and a white shirt, was calmly smoking a bidi, the indigenous cigarette made of unprocessed tobacco and leaves. she was gracefully unaware about the commotion her simple act had created. … Incidentally, that was the last time I saw Dhriti. For some reason, she would leave Santiniketan a few days later, never to return. 

*

 

Darkness descended soon after we walked from the bus stop to the river bank. Ajoy is a mighty river during the rains, but in the winter, water was nowhere more than waist-deep. The wide expanse of sand with a few slender streams were waiting for the holy dip to be taken by a few thousand faithful a few hours later. In the tenebrous twilight on the fairground dotted with trees, shacks, and small eateries, there were thousands of people. All of them  except a few like us were children of Rural Bengal. And there was something else. 

As I grew up in post-Partition West Bengal through years of refugees, floods, draughts, and near-famines, I thought I had seen poverty, but that evening I realised that I hadn’t. Everywhere in the fairground there were shallow holes of say six by two feet, crudely dug and covered with hay, twigs, and leaves. I had seen nothing of its kind before, and at first, I couldn’t understand what purpose they might serve. The penny dropped after a while. They were temporary homes, not of the bauls who stayed at the ashrams, but of  the beggars, who had gathered there in hundreds hoping to cash on the pilgrimage-induced generosity in the minds of the people taking the holy dip. In the biting cold of the Birbhum riverbank in mid-January, they had made themselves the most wretched homes one could imagine. But those wretched of the earth were a side-story in the carnival of music. 

The soul of the fair was in the many circles formed by bauls in colourful clothes, who were singing with the accompaniment of an instrument with just one or two strings, and sometimes, keeping the beat by holding ghungroos in hand.  Except for the singer, others were smoking grass from earthen pipes, which were passed on to the next person after a l-o-o-o-ng, unhurried puff. The pipe went around; the air was heavy with the captivating aroma of hemp. 

After walking aimlessly for a few hours, when Dibyen and I were tired, we sat down in one of the circles and received the smoky prasad when our turn came, no questions asked. We listened to songs by rustic voices that recreated the smell of the Bengal earth and sky. In the dark new moon night, anything outside that circle of holy bliss meant nothing. Gradually, the world beyond receded from our consciousness. What bliss!

The singers were poor men rich in happiness. The exact opposite of the money-rich-time-poor young business officials of our time. The night grew older, but no one noticed.  <>

 

Bengaluru / 22 July 2022

 

From ONE RANK, ONE PENSION to NO RANK, NO PENSION

 A friend of mine who I respect a lot has written on Facebook: “I think the Agneepath recruitment scheme is excellent. One retires young with about 12 lakhs in his/her bank account. At 25 the retired Agniveer remains eligible for a wide range of jobs.”

For those unfamiliar with the beautifully named scheme, Agnipath is a plan is to recruit men between 17 ½ and 21 years in the armed forces. The recruits, called Agniveers, will be a distinct rank, different from all other existing military ranks. So far so good, but the catch is they will serve for 4 years and no more, although 25% of them will get the opportunity to join the regular forces. After drawing a fixed salary for 4 years, they will go home with Rupees 11.71 lakhs. No gratuity, no pension.

Moving back to my friend’s post, I do not know if he has lost his mind or is being deliberately provocative. His opinion is grossly untenable for the following reasons:

(1) The 25-year-old will be ready for jobs, as my friend says, but jobs won’t be ready for him, particularly in the current economic scenario.

(2) Hand over 11-12 lakhs in cash to 10 twenty-five-year-olds, 9 of them will either blow it away in months or invest in assets like a house, which unfortunately cannot be eaten. People with much better experience with managing funds find it tough to manage a corpus to yield enough for their monthly expenses, particularly when interest rates are falling steadily. Ask any retired person except the blessed government pensioners, you know how the cookie crumbles. Do you seriously expect a moderately educated 25-year–old with natural cravings for the good things in life—fast bikes and fancy clothes, not to mention wine and women—learn to invest astutely or begin a successful business in a decaying economy? You must be kidding!

(3) The Agnipath scheme is also called “Tour of Duty.” Does it allow us a Freudian peep into the minds of the Gujju idiots who consider the army a “tour”? Last night, I was hearing a retired Colonel’s opinion that the Indian Army needs 5 to 6 years to make a jawan battle-ready. Therefore, this bizarre four-year “tour” will not only make the armed forces weaker, it will also destroy the ironclad discipline and efficiency of the Indian army, which is one of the finest in the world. The traditions and discipline built over centuries of blood and sweat will be destroyed in a stroke of a failing government which doesn’t have money to pay pension. But has money for projects like the Bullet Train, the tallest statue in the world, PM’s fancy residence, and a subway for him to drive to office, and so on.

(4) When they are out of the army, how will these unemployed young men with incomplete military training (and discipline) be used by a religious fascist government? Will the Brown / Black Shirts from Europe in the 1930s come back? I don’t see any other way to deploy them given the shrinking economy, ever decreasing job opportunities, and our relentless journey on the fascist path.

(5) According to Yogendra Yadav, a rare politician who talks sense, the vacancies in the army at the jawan’s level was 16,500 eight years ago, but now it has ballooned up to 97,000. So, the government that blabbers ceaselessly on national security has neglected what matters most. 

(6) Yogendra Yadav also said Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Bihar and a few other states with a martial tradition contribute a large percentage to our armed forces. Personally, I have seen, many from Kerala and Tamil Nadu join the army. However, unlike them, the North Indian states have little job opportunities outside the army. Therefore, from the teenage, boys there work hard, exercise, run miles and miles to prepare for the military. The new scheme has also made recruitment uniform all over India. Therefore, if a Haryanvi youth could look at say, 1000 vacancies in the past, now will find much fewer, perhaps 250. We can understand why young people have burst in anger in North India. And why young men are committing suicide.

I do hope there won’t be another suicide and the protests will be peaceful. Neither will another train be burned or any other property destroyed.

Finally, this is the latest of a number of disastrous steps taken by the current government which began with demonetization. Hopefully, this will be the last and one hopes the government will have the wisdom to shelve the bizarre plan immediately.

PS: I have copied the caption of the story from Facebook. I will acknowledge the author as soon as I see the post again.

17 June 2022

California Diary 1: From Pacifica to Morro Bay

Last month, when Arundhati and I spent a few weeks in California, our son Ritwik hired an eight-seater Toyota Sienna and took us on a drive along the California coastline. I have been fortunate to travel to many beautiful places and I’d say that the 450-kilometre drive was one of the loveliest I have ever experienced. We drove along California State Route 1 which connects San Francisco with Los Angeles and runs almost entirely along the coast. As we were driving south, on our right was the deep blue Pacific, colossal, awe-inspiring, and unvarying. On our left was the coastal mountains of California, which for some reason, has no given name unlike her cousins with well-known names, Sierra Nevada and the Rockies. She’s just called the Coastal Mountain Range.

As we drove, landforms on our left kept changing every 20 miles or so: from rugged mountains to dark forests, to open land with millions of flowers blooming in the spring, to huge tracts of agricultural land on the slopes of hills on which cows were grazing. If you have found the previous sentence little heavy and difficult to follow, then I have been able to convey what I had felt during the journey. It was a bit too much of captivating sights! I have had similar feeling in large art museums. After a few hours, the brain refuses to absorb anymore.

We began at a place called Pacifica, a picture of which you see above, and ended at Morro Bay. The unvaried sea and the widely varying landscape were punctuated with quaint little towns that were straight from Western movies. Let me digress for a moment here. My Oxford dictionary defines the word “city” as “a large town”. Americans however apparently call every human settlement a city. For example, Carmel-by-the-Sea or simply Carmel, is a city with an area of 2.75 kilometre and a population of 3,220! I will come back to this place in the course of this travelogue. The cities on the way that were somewhat bigger were Salinas (population 163,000) and Monterey (30,000). Incidentally, the American author John Steinbeck was born in Salinas and Monterey has a named after one of his novels, The Cannery Row.

I guess the introduction has been long enough! Let’s see some pictures.

Wild flowers on the way

The Pacific Ocean seen from the Pigeon Point Lighthouse. The lighthouse, built in 1871, is one of the two tallest lighthouses on the west coast of North America and is still functional. 

"Research published 2022 by the San Mateo County Office of Sustainability found that the lighthouse was vulnerable to erosion caused by sea level rise." [Wikipedia].

What you see below are not dead fish. They are female and young elephant seals. Ninety miles south of Monterey, we came across the stretch where 25,000 elephant seals come and relax during different times of the year. The place is called Piedras Blancas Rookery, rookery being the term for the breeding ground for sea mammals.

April-May is the moulting season, when female elephant seals shed their skin. They eat nothing for months during their sojourn on the beach. However, it was not the season when males come ashore in search of mates. Adult male elephant seals, which can be as long as 4-5 m and weigh up to 2,300 kg, would be something to watch. The females in comparison are much smaller at 2.5-4 m long and weigh 400-800 kg. 

We passed by Carmel-by-the-Sea, or Carmel. It is a tiny but wealthy city in Monterey County which has beautiful plush homes right on the beach front. Many of them apparently are owned by actors and artists who obviously have deep pockets. Movie star Clint Eastwood was elected the mayor of the city in 1986.

Our hotel was away from the beach. It was a quiet place in the lap of nature. Nishaant is carrying a crutch as he broke his leg while playing a few weeks ago.

The Riverside Inn is beside a river which was narrower than the sign you see in the picture below.

The sun sets in Carmel-by-the-Sea, but a little away from the sea

This is how the place looked next morning. 

Spanish colonialists from Mexico invaded and captured California in the 18th century and called the province Alta California. (Alta means upper and baja means lower in Spanish, Baja California is a state in Mexico just south of the US California.) As everywhere else, missionaries were the soft power used by Spanish imperialists too, who set up their first mission in San Diego in southern tip of present-day California in 1769, and followed it up with a slew of missions along the coast up to San Francisco. In these missions, padres made every effort to bring native Americans to civilization, using temptations and brute force. But it was not smooth sailing for theme, the San Diego mission was burnt down by rebellious locals in 1775. 

In the background of this picture is Carmel Mission Basilica, founded in 1771 by Saint Junipero Serra.

I wish I could tell you the name of the river on which the bridge is. 

The pictures below however, do not need labels. 

 

Our journey ended at Morro Bay, the main feature of the place being volcanic mound Morro Rock. Morro Bay, a city of 10,000 people looked desolate after sundown. 

In the morning that followed

The marina. In the whale country, this is how the weather cock looks.

Finally, the route, courtesy Mr. Google