Ullaasapoothirikal Kannilaninjavale...

L to R: kannan(outside the stage...looks like he is watchin out for rotten eggs to drop the curtain!), me(don't i look like a dork!), shan(pink shirt, green pants...haha!), kiran(background...enjoyin!), kevin(background...barman all the way!), arun(he looks rite out of a jayan movie), viswan(is that a tanktop shirt???...lol), shinoj(oddly missing in the frame!). Courtesy and Gratitude: Shan for spending his valuable time digging this lousy(but this is the best we have!) snap out!

College wuz all about proving to others that the savages cud do anything under the sun. And Viswan, made it even more tougher for us. Hardly a day wud pass before he came up with a new scheme or adventure...that typical mischievious smile on his face and we were all shouting..."Oh No!...run for cover"...we dreaded his many whims and fancies...as a nice afternoon that wud have been spent lazing away in the backbenches irritating teachers and distracting classmates, shooting bullets, playing cat-and-bull, etc had to be sacrificed for a day-out-in-the sun, raising funds(college panavu pirivus were so fun) and begging for support from teachers and classmates, etc. And that wuz when the Arts Festival came up and we were just happy taking part in essay writing, dumb charades, poetry writing, drawing, music, etc when Viswan dropped the bombshell...we had to dance too! Now, we knew he wuz crazy...except for Arun Hari and Anoop the rest of us including Viswan wud have made mammooty strut with pride!

The infuriating thing about Viswan wuz his vulnerablity and compulsiveness when he cant have things his way...and as usual we fell in line. Finally practise was scheduled for next day...
SCENE-I Viswan's house. The song..."Who Let The Dogs Out"...the choreographer, Viswan himself, the dancers...Arun, Shan, Anoop, Kevin, me and Viswan. Kiran and Shinoj didnt even bother to turn up...they must have been laughing at our plight huddled in some a/c bar while we sweated. Viswan showed us a few steps, told us to practise till perfection and when we tried to sync up it wuz a total failure. Kevin and I were miserable...we had two-left foots, Shan and Arun lazy as ever, only Anoop like a diligent pupil lend his ears to Viswan...who finally ended up in tears as we excavated his cricket bat and headed for the medicos ground. SCENE-II My Basement. To distance us from the medicos ground viswan prudently shifts practise here. After a few mins of practise, the villainous cricket bat comes out again and finally we bargain with Viswan that if he let us play a game we wud obey him henceforth. After frantic calls to get Anoop, viswan despondently breaks the news that Anoop fled to mangalore seeing our performace yesterday and for fear of rotten eggs. After the game when we start practise in earnest, Kiran and Shinoj barge in and they ruin everything poking fun at our clumsy steps and mocking our "master". After half an hour of this parody, Shan announces he is tired and need refreshment...again beerings!

SCENE-III The Footloozers - By now Viswan had Arun on his side, and realizing his inability to coach us,he hires The Footloosers, Trivandrum's champion professional dance troupe to coach us. We stared open-mouthed at the steps they asked us to do... we hardly cud manage Viswans stupid moves...within a few minutes they realized our caliber...we wondered if they wud bolt as they huddled in serious thought at a corner...suddenly asked us if we would be interested in doing the 70's Ullasapoothiri song...we jumped at that idea as it wud be a demo-song and we wouldnt have to dance much. I sulked as Kevin and I were told our services werent required anymore...we were left with just 3 dancers now, Arun, Viswan and Shan and except for Arun, Viswan wuz so comic and Shan wuz so slow on the uptake we were sure to flop. But then we started thinking big...as always...we had to make sure of pooling all our talents to make this work...we had come too far to give up...we created a setting of a bar, arun, shan and viswan wud be dancers with arun as the evergreen action-hero of malayalam filmdom, the late Jayan, Kiran and Shinoj were made two smugglers, Kevin wud play a barman serving drinks and I wud do a singer and lip-sync over the mic.

It wuz meant to be comic all the way and we had to win the crowd...we rented 70's garishly colored, multi-pocketed tight shirts, bell bottoms and huge belts, we collected huge-rimmed sun-glasses from the 80's, we redid our hairstyles and got wigs for huge moustaches and sideburns. When the curtain opens, kevin stand behind the bar, as the singer...I would enter the stage when the music started with a guitar, dancing in a wild-70's disco way. I couldnt do it the way they wanted me to but everyone agreed the comic-effect of wht i tried to do wuz great. Then the dancers wud come in, followed by the smugglers, who were told to improvise on the stage, fake having a few drinks, converse briefly, exchange briefcases and at the end our Jayan(Arun) wud shoot them down with two pistols he stuck into his already tight pants!!

And so the big day arrived. The moment the music started, the cheering began thankfully, our adrenalin raced, I made my wild entry into the stage, our dancers were charged...Arun, a superb dancer and great mimic had perfected Jayan's mannerisms to impossibly sublime heights, Viswan and Shan finally got their steps and synced up well on stage though Shan wuz found jumping up and down in agony after the dance as Viswan accidentally kicked him while dancing, our smugglers and barman were perfect, we had won the crowd and they danced and sung with us all the way. Not a single rotten egg or tomato came our way, and at the end of the dance, our classmates, seniors, juniors and the abvp guys who hated our very sight came over to congratulate us. We did have a shock though...a bottle placed on the bar that we planned to celebrate with after the dance and which the barman wuz supposed to only fake in pouring to our smugglers, wuz served out by our "kannilunni" kevin to an overjoyed kiran and shinoj...but it didnt matter anymore as we were still taking in the euphoria of the moment. For one person, however it didnt last long...the Footloozers where hot on Viswans heels to settle their choreography dues for almost a month giving him a hard time...Viswan vowed never to crusade for a cause henceforth...and we heaved a sigh of relief. Well almost, because a month later he had started planning for Dishaa, our inter-collegiate technical fest, which countless batches of seniors broke their backs trying to organize!!!

P.S - I have suddenly started to feel like an old man...all the ribs abt silver jubilees and quarter centuries seems to have gotten to me...i think this post shud serve to remind me of a carefree jabban-of-a-long-time-back and his fun-loving comrade-in-arms who lived life to the fullest...whenever the boring, predictable side of Mr.Kattakayam threatens to engulf me.

25 Years, 25 Blessings...

Sep 23, 1980 - My parents bring me into this world...i have given them such tough times over the years I have at times wondered whether having kids especially boys is worth all the trouble.

May 6, 1983 - The only person who to this day has shared in all my happiness and sorrows comes along...I feel the time running out on what has been a long journey of comic sibling rivalry, acrimonious fights, and of being each others confidante, best friend, philosopher and guide...I wonder how I'll cope when she leaves.

May, 1984 - I walk into the hallowed campus of loyola not knowing even for a second the ways it wud mould my life later on. An article The Wall Comes Tumbling Down written by my classmate Krishnachandran, says it all...from the viewpoint of a senior of ours at school by two years, but who passed out with us, a python, truely signifies the impact the great institution will forever have on me...

May, 1990 - My first academic success...i manage a first class...for the first time I brought my report card home without my knees shivering.

Aug, 1992 - The caning i'll never forget for a lifetime...eager to watch the sunday evening film, "Mimics Parade" on doordarshan...i rush home too impatient to wait for my dad to pick me up after tuition as he promised...got flogged almost a 50 times till my grandpa stood between us and bailed me out...i guess i'll realize how much pops worried that day about my missing, only when i have a kid.

May, 1993 - I qualify for the icse section in school...fr.pulickal, i know definitely had a hand in getting me thru as except for english and history i fared poorly in everything else.

Oct, 1993 - I am vice-captain of the school mini-basketball team and selected to the trivandrum district team...my mom refuses to let me go for the camp as i wuz on the verge of flunking my exams...in hindsight i think she decided wisely as always, but i gave up the dear sport for almost 3 years in disappointment.

Sep, 1994 - My first and last article to appear on print, got published in The Loyolite, our school magazine. It wuz titled Efficiency, India's Deficiency. Again somewhere down the line I lost the confidence to write for a long long time.

Oct 14, 1994 - Experienced the first death in my family...my maternal grandfather who doted on me more than all his other perakuttis. Sadly the night b4 he wuz felled by a stroke and fell into a coma for 10 days, we quarelled and i have ever since lived to regret that act and with it a realization of never ever leaving an apology, thanks or expressing my affection or appreciation left unsaid for another day. To this day, I believe Appachan and Fr.Pulickal have been steadfast guardian angels, watching over me...every step of the way.

May, 1995 - I am selected best camper at camp india, a summer camp for kids. unfortunately the confidence from that never rubbed off on me in school amidst my super-talented classmates.

Jun, 1996 - In a class of 44, 43 of us pass our 10th with distinction equalling a long-standing school record...it marked the turnaround in my life...never again in life did I worry or cry about academics.

Oct, 1996 - I head out for an iit contact class in cochin with thomman, muthu and ponnan. those were the days these 3 guys were the top rogues in class and i wuz the puny, silent introvert but they graciously took me along. when i returned it wuz like i picked up some of thommans daredevilry and all his high spirits, a slice of muthu's tongue and ponnan and i were deskmates for the rest of school life. Most of what i am today happened in those 3 days spent with these guys and since then i have forever looked up to life, never ever had to look back in regret, look down in shame or look on in silence.

Jun, 1998 - Despite my teachers hounding me and fearing for the worst, i surprise them all with a distinction for isc. the boy who scraped into loyola by the skin of his teeth with a provisional 89th seat in ukg walked out with his head held high and a 16th rank in the 12th. my dad told me that day, except for him everyone else including my mom thought i wud end up a pazham...for me, coming from him that wuz the sweetest praise i ever got.

Sep, 1998 - I write my SAT and get admission into Johns Hopkins and Kansas State Univ but unexpectedly clear my Kerala Entrance and choose home and a Comp Engg seat in SCT over a Mech Engg seat in CET where almost 20 of my ex-classmates had joined. That vacation we all travelled abroad for the first time, to the US and Italy...all I thought the USA wud be over the years swelled up into a great disappointment but somehow I knew I was fated to come back. Italy will stay in mind forever...seeing the saintly Pope John Paul at close quarters and the divine touch of Michelangelo's paintbrush in the Sistine Chapel.

Feb, 1999 - Barely a week after learning to drive an 800, we headed for my cousin's wedding at Kottayam on our uncle's Tata Estate chaffeured by his driver. My parents left for Velankanni, and ammachi, jish and me headed back to tvm but the driver stopped at one of our relatives' bar for a free booze, gets too much to drink and almost got us into two accidents. By then at my wits end and my sis crying about her exam next day and in pouring rain and a bleak night I take over the wheels of the Estate, unsure of the roads to take, abt controlling the huge car and my sheer inexperience, with ammachi praying calmly and not even closing her eyes even for a second...to keep me company, and with a lot of "help" from the driver totally fit and ranting and raving...nobody cud believe the tale we had to tell back home but since that day, for everyone it wuz almost like i cud do no wrong!

Mar, 1999 - Just a month after chastising the driver I take up my first beer and i have never felt more of a hypocrite than at that moment! The 8 guys i identified to let into my heart as friends soon became like brothers to me. I coined the name of our gang, Savages from the first phonetic of each of our names and soon to everyone, classmates, teachers and collegemates we were known under that identity. We shared so much together and achieved so much with our unity...my confidence and zest for life was at its zenith in those years.

Nov, 2000 - Every day in college wud have been worth to mark down here as a milestone but for a few seconds i achieved sheer nirvana...on the cricketing field. We were playing the best team in college and I came in at 0/3 and the first three balls i faced wud forever remain etched in memory. I straight-drove the first ball thru the on-side, and the next, again a straight drive thru the off-side and now with men at mid-off and mid-on I again hit a much straighter one beating both these fielders. The sound of my pals lustily cheering me and the opposition clapping sounded so sweet, for a second i felt like sachin...i saw the ball early, my front foot moved in line with the ball, my bat came down with a flourish and the ball hit the sweet spot, my follow-thru and back foot movement wuz perfect...it wuz unforgettable. But then came the nasty bouncer and I fended it away clumsily to slips and walked back dejected to the same guys who cheered a second earlier, now cursing me under their breath for giving away a fine start. Oh! how I wish nowadays I got a second chance that day.

Oct, 2001 - The time to plan ahead after 3 years of fun and frolic arrived, I distanced myself from friends which made them sad, picked up my Barrons and did a wordlist a day in bus to college and another one on the way back, besides finally paying attention in classes...everyone thought I had gone nuts or wuz tryin to show off...those 45 days were the only time in life I wuz systematic and methodical and the GRE ended up too tame a beast to kill. I still dont know why i never tried to bell the CAT, another road not taken...

Feb, 2002 - The only regret I wuz about to take out of college was my inability to imitate my dad in becoming a student leader. But this incident changed all that...and justified my decision to enjoy those years rather than spend in hatred, colluding and scheming against a bunch of losers. Ever since, I developed a deep distaste for the mallu tendency to politicise issues for scoring brownie points.

Mar, 2002 - I realized the golden years that began in my eleventh all the way thru the eighth sem were well past me...bid a tearful farewell to college and classmates who were by then more like brothers and sisters to me.

June, 2002 - Within a months time, trivandrum suddenly became an empty place with most of my school and college mates leaving, made some blunders...I fled India...and instead of seething optimism arrived a dejected, weary soul in america to make my "riches".

Aug, 2002 - MS started, I realized for a change I had to do some things I wasnt used to...studying and that too countless back-to-back nightouts, work for a living and with the little money i made then, having to budget for rent, food, clothes and a little fun...those were the days of living precariously from paycheck to paycheck...my motivation levels have been so low since then...dunno what gives me the strength to plow ahead, but made a few good friends who to this day...I believe would walk an extra mile to bail me out of any difficulty i fell into.

May, 2004 - The proudest moment of my academic life...recieving the Masters' diploma...with my parents brimming with tears of joy and clapping wildly. Two years of toil, sweat and hunger wuz rewarded, but my carefree spirit and working life have forever since found it hard to co-exist.

Oct, 2004 - No job, no money, no friends, piling debt, all hope lost...i sign up with blogger and 40-odd posts later...thru all i have written I have relived my entire life, expounded a lot of my viewpoints on society and politics, made some friends whose writings I could closely relate with...truely another important milestone in life.

May, 2005 - No job for 2 months,then a job, fired in 7 days, and then a dream job in a week's time....it all happened in one month...got my first proper full paycheck after a year of working and 3 failures.

Last 4 months I have made more money than I ever dreamt of, but I am loosing my soul...I havent found the gratification I expected...the ways of my mind are beyond my own comprehension. So many miracles have happened in my life...HIS gifts have largely gone unthanked for...i have always been like a child who gets bored with a new toy after a few days...thats all the soul-searching i wanna do for now. More than 3 years of shani gets over on sep 27th and my shukran starts according to Pops, I wonder what crazy things will happen now...I am weary at looking to the future, thats why the past seemed more apt to write about on this day.

Malluz Day Out!!!

Another unforgettable Onam has gone by. I am still reeling from its hangover and ksheenam...but i knew if this post made it out today it wud inspire me to make the next one even more grand. What made this one special and unforgettable for a long long time to come wuz how it made me feel so proud of our culture and how the homeland binds together such a lively set of youngsters into good friends. A week back our Onam looked set to end in mediocrity and marred by bad planning. Except for watching Pandipada at the indian theater on friday nite and a secret mini-potluck lunch for about 10 of us leaving a lot of our mallu pals itself out...nothing looked like materialising. But then tell me a mallu guy who can keep a secret...each of us unwitingly called up our other buds and word spread and everyone promised to cook something or the other! By friday night there were 25 mallus and 10 others we had to serve lunch too...the worst part wuz we were all amateur cooks in whose hands our great harvest festival and one of the greatest cuisines in the world wuz about to suffer a great humiliation.

Saturday morning began at a feverish pace. Sadly none of us planned to wear our mundu's coz of an uncle who got a ticket a few days back for indecent exposure when he went shopping after an onam celebration! We still didnt have vazhayila(banana leaves)...until my sis eavesdropping as always on me...let it out casually that she saw vazhayilas and the Food4Less where she went shopping yesterday...she saved my skin yet again as i had declared in imprudent bravado that i wud get the vazhayila without knowing from where. Rajay cooked sambhar, Giby made pulisseri, mathew and subhash cooked the toughest of the lot - aviyal, rohit made ari paayasam, abraham pappadam, philip cabbage thorran, abhiram parippu curry, reji made rice, sujith cooked pachadi and the other sujith's wife simi and my sis made two versions of payar thorran. I had volunteered to make my "special" chicken fry(dont ask me why chicken...the guys here have become such carnivores...that they cant sacrifice it for even a day...moreover that wuz the only thing i wuz confident of making after close to 9 months of inactivity on the cooking front!!).

Well this is the closest i will ever get to a cooking post...so here's how i make my chicken...take it off the freezer...microwave it for 5 mins to thaw it...then apply a paste of tumeric, ginger and garlic to make it loose its smell...leave it out for a few more mins...then microwave it again for 5 mins(thats basically to cut down on time i need to cook it!)...then i pour in a few spoons of chilli powder and a few smaller spoons of coriander powder("sorry sorry...readymade chicken masala is for gals"...i told my astonished sis...who wuz already crying abt the hours of relief work it wud take to get her kitchen back into shape...the poor thing wuz already eating her words for remarking my chicken wud end up like mohanlal's in boeing boeing!), by then my 5 huge onions were being sauted, into which i pour in some more ginger and garlic, and after that my chicken cut into small peices goes...initially it will look like i am goin to make a curry as all this useless water starts coming out from my chicken...the gameplan then is to get it to evaporate...meanwhile i throw in 5 sliced tomatoes(more for the color!), curry leaves, salt, cilantro leaves and lime drops) and after 2 hours of burning my fingers, desperately stirring my chicken, scraping my frying pans bottoms and cursing the curry for not drying up its all ready to eat.

The feeling you get on seeing the vaazhayila's set and each of the side dishes neatly stacked on them is an out-of-the-world one...and with most of the people who i could call friends in LA also around me I knew this wuz the onam i'd cherish the most in life. My sis remarked that I wudnt have survived so long in america if it wuz not for all these nice mallu guys at USC. My mind ran back a year...when I wuz so lonely and depressed and had to beg my kashmiri roomate to take me to the kerala restaurant in san diego to have my onasadhya and his words of praise and thanks for giving him a feel of kerala cuisine. I havent hogged so much in ages...our boys had reserved their best for the most important occasion of all...we served rice in three rounds like at a hindu wedding...with the parippu curry poured in the first, sambhar in the second round and pulisseri in the third and to round it off a most delicious paayasam too! I wonder where I'll be next year...wonder where most of these guys still in school will be working...but so long as I am here...I know I will press these guys to make every Onam henceforth the most memorable event of the year...maybe we'll have an athapoo and a few skits too! Some of us stayed back to round off the night with scotch...listening to folk songs from films and albums...even dancing to a few of them...then settled down and talked fondly for over an hour of the day's happenings and went to sleep wherever we cud find space...worrying if the guy sprawled next to us wud unleash his "sword" in the middle of the night!

Much Belated Happy Onam to all!

War of the Worlds!!!

Yesterday at 12:40 PM I experienced my first power-cut in the US. Except for computers powering off it didnt sound like a big deal at first....but then a colleague came running saying the majority of Los Angeles was hit. Everyones mind wuz on the same topic...the day before's message from Al Qaeda that they wud hit LA and Melbourne. I wuz starving from having skipped breakfast and dinner the night before. To my dismay I found the elevators wouldnt work...came back to the office and decided to drink water to stave off the chickens in my tummy. That didnt work either. So began the climb down 24 storeys...at the half-way mark my limbs had joined my stomach in crying...but i wuz amazed by 40 and 50 year olds actually taking the steps up to get on with their work! At the lobby I had a real surprise..almost 500 odd people sprawled all around! Most were just back from lunch I presume and waiting for the power to be back and the elevators to start working!

I passed by them and walked over to the street...the traffic lights wouldnt work... it wasnt chaos yet...i really admired the people for that...its an unwritten rule here that the first cars at the crossroads get to go in whichever directions they want when the traffic lights are out...but I knew some people had violated that as sirens were wailing all around and LAPD cops hurrying to clear up traffic delays. I struggled on further ahead...I had almost 10 eateries to choose from in the vicinity...as I passed by each wuz met with a "Closed" sign...the reason wuz their cash drawers were automatic. Thought of calling a friend in the downtown area to find out how he wuz doing...the phone networks were jammed!!!

I seated myself at one of the outdoor tables of a restaurant...dang, i couldnt even get a chocolate to eat...well as you all must have guessed by now...I badly needed a reason to smile...and, and I thought abt what a power-cut means to Indians...its so much a part of our lives...we are so ready for it...ups's for our computers, inverters for our homes, generators for movie theaters...nothing ever comes to a standstill, power-cuts are so much a part of our life...here it felt like a miniaturized version of The War of the Worlds...I even imagined a meeting of head-honchos at Pentagon taking stock of the situation. I walked back to my office, dejected and tired...and on the way saw something that made me smile...who else but desis wud improvise in these situations...the sardarji who owned the gas station wudnt let something as silly as a power-cut affect his business...so wht if his gas pumps wudnt work...he still had a food mart...and in the good old-fashioned way he wuz noting his sales down on a ledger. I grabbed a muffin, an icecream sandwich and a cold coffee from there and headed back...on the way wuz stopped by countless number of people asking where I had procured my "lunch" and I wuz more than happy to send them in the way of the good sardar.

The lounge and lawns were all crowded and I headed to my car...had my lunch inside...there wuz a woman sleeping in the car next to mine and I wuz immediately tempted by this chance to grab an afernoon nap. I had been lazy all day and wuz just hoping for this kind of reprieve and i dozed off immediately. Walk up with a start around 2:40 and the woman in the neighboring car wuz gone...ran all the way back... there wuz none in sight...all the people had disappeared, no more wailing sirens...my War of the Worlds fancy wuz over...it wuz time to get back to my newly begun war with .Net Windows Forms...

The Highly Inflammable Years...

Just heard some news that got me thinking and as is wont nowadays for me...these thoughts more often than not always ends up finding its way to this blog. 17-20! What a dangerous age that is...my greatest appreciation for my parents and friends is for how admirably they shephered me thru a phase in life were adrenalin surges and reckless actions have marred many a young life. Came to know of a incredibly talented junior from school and a family friend attending one of india's most prestigious colleges dropping out and in drug-rehab now...and of a cousin, the gentlest and soft-spoken of all boys a few years back, totally into weed and other crap and miserably flunking his exams. Both these boys had left their homes to study elsewhere. A majority of cases like these i have heard have come from families with expat parents who become money-order parents to their kids back home who fail to see the struggles undergone to make the money or those with little time for their children.

Though many would disagree with what i said above...most young people tread such a fine line in these years that I firmly believe from my own experience that there is nothing more beautiful than living these years out of home rather than the all-out freedom of a hostel life. I did a lot of crazy things thru school and college...yet would make sure I got home without fail for dinner at the latest...and though i had to encounter a lot of barbs for getting home early from friends it really pleased me that I didnt give my parents a chance to browbeat me...and though it irked and still irks that i had missed out on some late-nite fun dont think anything could surpass dining with my family amidst the lively chatter and my "watered down" retelling of the days activities while we huddled around the dining table. A question I die to ask them, but never will have the guts to do is whether they knew...all I did, all the money I iskified and whether they ever felt I had to be reined in at some point. Between all of our parents' contacts every single move we guys made could have been traced easily in little trivandrum. Yet despite everything I did, to this day my parents never had to speak to me in counsel about drinking, drugs, smoking or sex...i think they were smart enough to know kids are more intelligent than adults may think.

Pop and Mom were the strict kind until i wuz 15...and then they let me loose, little by little...thank god for that bcoz i have seen too many friends run riot if they got a little breathing space from over-restricting parents(viswa, potha...u guys reading this??...lol). I have sulked at never getting a bike, having to travel on rickety ksrtc buses to college...yet they magically soothed me by letting me drive their cars to college once in a while(must admit, it felt really rotten though...nothing beats havin a bike and riding one!), once forever embarassed with the clothes i wore...they loosened their purse strings in that department without even a word from me, lived on measly Rs.15 and 20 allowances a day for food and travel which never made up the numbers for a day of movies, beer and outings...yet i believe they chose to take a blind eye to some of my misdemaneours in budgetting for books, money for excursions, exam fees etc. Nowadays, I laugh so much thinking about all the precautions i took, the lies I said, the worries I shouldered in never letting them feel disappointed in me...all that deception still continues to this day in some lesser form or the other! If i leave out my pals it would be a big insult...it has been a matter of pride for me that none of my closest friends from school, college or univ screwed up...we had such awesome peer groups...and for the most part exerted so much nice moral and ethical influences on each other...thank god for them too.

I had a cousin, just 10 days older to me who got killed in a car accident while studying for b.arch at madras...tomorrow wud have been his 25th birthday...when his grieving parents see me, i know they picture how their son would have looked like now...what if these parents had not bought him the car, what if he had not left home to study at that age...would he have had that night-out with friends...it doesnt matter anymore but I think all of us, future dads and moms shud give that question a thought. Well, its all about choice and the best education, parents can give their kids, whether it be at home-base or away but fact is at that age we need them a lot more of concerned parenting, and they shudnt be deluded or intimidated by our false projection of maturity, manhood, independence and rebellion. Many many years from now I wonder what sort of a parent I will be...will i be occasionally spying on them, will I deny them all the comforts and freedoms kept away from me...guess it will all depend on the kind of society prevalent then...but I earnestly hope my parents infinte wisdom in rearing us in line with the times will certainly rub off on me then.

Our Constitution, A Case of Diminishing Returns...

Its almost 60 years past Independence...the world as we know it has changed and so has India...we have become servile creatures yet again...not to any foreign power this time but to the political class...the people who have made a profession of serving us have turned the tables...it increasingly looks like they are our masters! Any institutuion be it a democracy, monarchy, school, corporation,etc will stagnate if it stays resistant to the changing times. Isnt it time to revamp the whole Constitution??? 58 years back when B.R.Ambedkar and his men set out to draft the Constitution the politicians they saw around them were leaders of the caliber of Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Shastri, Abul Kalam, etc...the charter they created was in tune with the times in an India abounding with freedom fighters and men who seethed with optimism and idealism to architect modern India...the rot that set in with the passing of these men has gone unchecked for years and years and the Constitution has been left with too many loopholes to effectively curb these traitors to the Nation and to the Constitution from taking advantage of us. It is not the Constitution that failed us...but we who failed the Constitution. Once a passionate student of Civics in school, the interest got reawakened seeing another democracy evolve, rectify and move ahead with the times.

1977 paved a great opportunity for being called a second freedom struggle, but the anti-emergency protests under a great leader like Loknayak Jayaprakash Narayan deteriorated into an effort to supress Indira Gandhi rather than become a correctional force to rectify many of the things wrong with India. Maybe if JP was not at the fag end of his life and had chosen to take reins of the govt instead of a morbid Morarji Desai he would not have lost sight that he had a once-in-a-liftetime chance to reinvent India's democracy. Today many criminals go scot-free with offences, many a time our courts failt to provide justice in time or over-time except for the ones which come with a push from the Law Ministry, the legislature has made a mockery of passing laws with debates in parliament and assembly that reek of politics, the executive tier has become a tool for men seeking power to armtwist corrupt deals, manipulate people in the name of religion and votebanks and the bearaucracy has swollen to become a behemoth lacking guidance and often going wayward like the political masters they serve. Just a casual thought and i felt i had several top-level ideas that could easily give us a better way of government - but like all others this is gonna remain on paper or on this blog until all our politicos suddenly wake up one fine morning and feel its time to reform themselves and our government - highly unlikely, well the other hope is the arrival of a charismatic leader, who draws enough supporters to capture the seat of power at Delhi and puts this idea into practise - highly unlikely again, just as unlikely as another freedom struggle for a new India in a country vying to be a major player in world trade without setting its internal affairs in better order.

The Executive - Do we really need ministers??? We all know its the senior beauraucrats under these ministers coin, draft and spin out all policies...so why do we need these men in khadar, who indulge in scandals, whose eyes are entirely on garnering votes and money. I feel a system akin to the US where only one or two elected officials are part of the govt would be an effective solution...we have highly qualified IAS, IPS and IFS officers who should make up the core of the government and execute their ideas and policies without short-sighted, ill-educated politicians hampering them.

The Legislature - So where does this put our MLA's and MP's...they are our representatives in the indian constituion...but why do we they have to run our government...this system has failed miserably! What we need is several house committees say for eg, Home, Finance, Education, etc in which these esteemed men/women would be members and where they deliberate, vote and finalise policies to be implemented...leaving the execution to the higher beauraucracy who are answerable to the House...unlike the parliamentary committees of today which merely perform an advisorial role and have been reduced to puppets! Anti-defection wuz one awesome rule passed...i'd like to see a law come up which prevents parties without a certian percentage of vote be derecognized by the Election Commission...that would certainly put an end to many regional eerkili parties in India! As for the Rajya Sabha imagine populating that house with 250 members like APJ and Manmohan Singh instead of over-the-hill, discredited politicos who dont have the guts to face the people's verdict and one from among whom becomes the esteemed president of india...so that an highly esteemed person like APJ becoming the president doesnt become a once in a 50 year event!

The Judiciary - Though its the third tier of our constitution and the one which protects our democracy, our founding fathers were flippant in their focus on this pillar of our system...as a result we basically inherited a flawed, outdated structure from the British, who had drafted many of the laws or the precursors to them, we have now, to give a semblance of order to a country, they only intended to squeeze financially and not to govern with justice. With independence and a larger number of people having access to courts and the lawlessness which accompanies a free society, in no time the courts filled up, justice had to wait for years, the corrupt got off scot-free, rapists abounded, criminals have thrived...its only recently fast-track courts have opened up...that the judiciary is not free from corruption has been proved by several recent self-contradicting judgements passed in recent times. Its time to rewrite many of our laws...and cut down on gestation periods...no more court adjourments beyond a few days...its so frustrating...just when a sentence is laid down, an appeal goes to a higher court, or a stay and its years hence that justice is finally delivered!

The Police - Our policemen badly deserve a facelift. Its high time they are reorganized as a modern, professional force akin to the Indian Army, free of intrusion from politicians. Improper, unscientific training and laws which lack clarity have marred their maturing into community leaders - to protect and serve us, as only tales of their bigotry and misuse of powers reach our ears. LAPD officers, here garner so much awe as they treat us with such respect if caught breaking traffic rules, arrive to help people at any time of the day, work as community leaders and though tales of corruption emerge once in a while...it hardly ever affects the common man.

Reservations - Why cant reservations be based entirely on an economic basis??? How long will parties pit people against each other promising more reservations? And are these seats kept apart for reservation ever filled? The reservation of seats for women at the Panchayat level needs to be broadened to state legislatures and parliament...they certainly will make a difference to a male-infested field .

Bureaucracy - Our bureaucracy is bloated...admitted! Most of the red-tape and corruption that affects common people happens at the lower-levels...computerization can save us a lot of grief as it will keep babus who interface with the masses at a minimum...i wonder why our govt which promotes IT in such a big-way doesnt commission an e-governance ERP package from one of the tech majors! As for the upper tiers of IAS, IPS officers - cut them loose of politicans and we can have some of the best brains in the country unleashed to put to practise all the schemes, policies and measures which they now draft for politicians to take all the credit! To cut the beauraucratic flab disinvest from all PSU's, stop creating new government departments.

Local SelfGovernment - Kerala's much hyped People's Plan Programme was a step in the right direction but the men behind it failed in their planning - the people who got loans to start self-employment invested in perishable goods like chickens and goats, etc who finally ended up as chicken fries and lamb stew and defaulted on their loans landing the govt at the doorstep of bankruptcy. The lessons from this misstep seemed well-learned as new welfare measures like Kudumbashree have become models in constructive development. Ultimately LSG can achieve desired results only if devolution of powers to these bodies is better executed. Talking about Corporations and Municiplaities its high time they synergised their activities better with public departments as fast improvement of urban infrastructure is a must to keep pace with the spurt in IT investment thats going to be witnessed in our cities soon. As I write this the preparation for Kerala's LSG polls are moving ahead in full steam with reams of space taken up by political alliances but not a single column dedicated to the development agenda for the next 5 yrs...I sincerely hope the people ask the candidates if they read their parties' election manifestos when they come seeking votes!

Last post had mention abt a fr.pulickal....he taught me history and civics for three years and for many of us that was when we started looking at polity from a different light...my bad that i didnt capitalise on what would have been a great start for any civil service aspirant...if this was one of the expositions he would makes us deliver in class or his history answer paper, whatever blunders i have written here would have made it to the school notice board for juniors and seniors to laugh at us...i am giving away too much material that would have made a great post about him! I feel a little odd writing abt improving india when i am perched elsewhere...realize there are too many holes in my arguments but it feels nice to casually put on my political thinking cap on occasionally...i know all i wrote is impossible to achieve against a political class so well-entrenched, whose bills to increase their salaries and pensions are passed unanimously...men and women like Gandhi, Netaji, Patel, Nehru and Sarojini Naidu who once served and sacrificed so much for India must surely be born every day in some village or city but they will never make it to the political frontlines...they are ordinary people whose acts of everyday heroism are seen only when a tsunami or an earthquake strike or a city goes under water. Time is due for a constitutional review which happens every 10 or 20 years...but where is the political will to usher in change...havent these men heard our IT czars voice the same words..."better business processes"...in every interview they give?? The day we can confidently call many more of our politicans statesmen, we'll have an india that can become a model to world nations!

P.S - I apologize for the length...if you have scrolled down this far! Forget all I wrote. Indepedence Day is over...for those like me who almost missed this article let us all belatedly pay tribute to another unknown indian freedom fighter. The Forgotten Spy

My Seven...before I'm in Heaven???

Seven things you plan to do before you die!!!
- Write a book...how much ever crappy it turns out i know i will have atleast a hundred readers from school, college and the blog world.
- Spend one year of my life entirely in travel...six months through india and the rest thru africa, asia and europe.
- Go back to Loyola and teach something for a year if the good jesuits permit...to feel like a Loyolite and a schoolboy again!
- Plant a thousand trees in Kerala
- Become self-employed and work for my own profit.
- Apologize to all the people I hurt or let down, in getting on with my life.
- On my death-bed, be able to look back and smile at all I did and was lucky to experience.

Seven things you can do!!
- In 1998 when on parting ways at Loyola, we promised to reunite at Athens in 2008, 10 years later for a gettogether...it sounded very crazy then...and today even more so as we grapple with working-day realities...i want to make it happen!
- Do a part-time MBA or creative writing courses to wile away my post-work hours.
- Call my parents every day and talk to them for more than my usual few mins...i suck big-time when it comes to phone-chat!
- Next time, my schoolmates call, get the sixteen odd suckers here to meet up at one place(we had planned for next years' mardi gras but with new orleans down in the dumps that plan stands wasted), instead of just talking on the phone!
- Offer atleast a couple of days of my life and company at an orphanage or old-age home, instead of sympathy.
- Visit Fr.Pulickal's grave at Calicut, spent some time there, just him and me and tell the old man how his spirit lives strong in each one of us.
- Offer atleast an hour of my Sundays' to God every week, instead of my wry smile and hope that he wouldnt turn a blind eye when i call out to him in need.

Seven things you can't do!!!
- Behave like an adult to a 5 year old child.
- Speak and act as frank and honest as my words and thoughts.
- Fall in love again without my parents permission.
- Ride out a roller-coaster with my eyes open even for a second.
- Going to a nightclub and partying
- Filling that unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of a distant run
- Too lazy to work-out

Seven things that attract you to the opposite sex!!
- Independence
- Smiles
- Intelligence
- Contentment
- Dignity
- Humor
- Traditional

Seven people you want to take this quiz.
- Arun Hari
- Praveen
- Jithu
- Sushil
- Anoop(atleast now get back!)
- Jofu (u can do much better than just pictures)
- Shan(if u wanna start blogging)

Well, this one post is for Silverine from whose site many of my current blog-pals came visiting. Most of it must have been crazy...but then, thats me...a bundle of contradictions and wild idiosyncrasies!

Idyllic Bliss Revisited...

Its been years since I visited my native villages...Arakulam in Idukki and Kattanam in Alappuzha. In the ignorance of my childhood days I sometimes abhored the summer holidays that had to be spent there instead of the urban fun and frolic I missed out on in Trivandrum. Looking back I am so glad my parents overruled our initial wild protestations and packed us off when school finished...though...once we got into the pastoral grove....we were so hesitant to come back...today i cant even remember a single vacation spent in trivandrum but every holiday spent in these two little but contradicting paradises on earth still remain so vivid, so fresh in memory...even after the passage of 10-20 years.

Arakulam...yet another village in Central Kerala, abounding with rubber trees, roads that got tarred only in the last decade, surrounded by seven hills like Rome, streams that flow through rubber estates, the Periyar in all its grandeur flowing a stone's throw away and of taking a bath in its freezing cold waters, greenery that would make your heart skip a beat, an unearthly silence broken only by the crickets and the lone owl, the fireflies that dance among the rubber trees in the pitch-black darkness of the night, rain that catches you by surprise...starts with a hissing sound somewhere behind you...and as you belatedly realize wht is abt to befall...the desperate retreat to the house as it teases you in mock pursuit and finally beats down so hard on the earth leaving u drenched...and finally the smell of the earth after a rain! And the people...the rubber tappers, skillfully plying their trade before the world awakens and a second round, to come collecting the milk thats oozed out after their early morning scrape. Then the cliched flashy achayanmar on their jeeps gulping in toddy, fresh off the palm at noon...and imfl, fresh off the bar, by evening...and some of the most beautiful women in the state but then beauty never came with brains in this part of the world, a people who can never get fed up with feasting on chicken, duck, rabbit and pork, of chettathees who compulsarily carry a rosary in their hand...i wonder now why there are so many family quarrels in that part of the world though people pray with such fervor. A visiting friend of my dad summed up Idukki in a sentence..."muttinu muttinu kallu shaappum, muttinu muttinu kurishu pallikalum"!

Kattanam, a hamlet in direct contrast to Arakulam...at sea-level or lesser, abounding with paddy fields stretching miles and miles looking like a green ocean, part of the rice-bowl of Kerala, Kuttanad, a sleepy little village with an unassuming, almost self-effacing race of people...people who are real sons of the soil as they toil at their farms...work hand-in-hand with the laborers they employ...i see my ammachi again...making kanji for the twenty odd farm-hands hired for the harvest season...and its earthy taste when had with the plaavela for a spoon, i remember trying my hand at seperating the grain from the chaff, the cows(and their chanakam in which my mom wud wrap each of my fallen teeth and throw it onto the top of the house for i believe some bird or fairy to come take!), the hens whom we wud displace everyday to see if they had laid eggs, the pond which irrigated the field...near which i wudnt go near coz someone said a python lived there(a mean rumor spread to keep kids away from the water!)...of Sundays, which wuz the big day when everyone decked up in fine clothes for church and the whole village of about 50+ people getting together after church for kochuvarthamanams and visheshams. Kattanam reminded me so much of Pip's village straight out of Great Expectations...and so did many of the people I met there...moreover I wuz born here! The lone similarity between these two places wuz that everyone around wuz related to each other as first, second, third or fourth cousins if not siblings!

Whatever land I would have inherited one day in these two villages have been sold...dont think my parents expected their city-bred kanni-santhanam to write in praise of the simple life in these places...i know for sure...one day i will buy back my lands...if i am lucky maybe even spent a few months at a stretch in these places, become friends once again with the relatives i cared not to know or keep in touch with while growing up. Well so much for nostalgia...here I am...stuck in one of the most crowded cities in the world...without even a generous sprinkling of greenery for miles and miles...unable to rein in my fanciful thoughts...well, this time the grass is literally and definitely more green on the other side...think i will keep revisiting this post often with the Naalikerathinte Naatil song post playing in the background.

THE Rising...

I finally got down to watching The Rising and I loved every bit of it...what struck me most about the movie was how it rightly pictured an India at its lowest ebb, at the very nadir of its 5000 years of history, of a people who had degraded into a spineless, fractitious, humiliated race to turnaround the history of the world by declaring the arrival of modern-day civilization with a 90 year awe-inspiring, non-violent freedom struggle. August 15 heralded the birth of the world's largest democracy and the proud Englishman, Churchill's prophetic words of the sun finally setting on the English Empire became true.

Mangal Pandey, may have been an accidental hero as historians claim but when he lit the spark of rebellion he had also unknowingly checked the centuries-old decay of India's civilizational ethos. The very instruments of modernization the East India Company created to expand their trade and wealth helped catapult their fall. They united the entire Indian subcontinent from Afghanistan in the west to Burma in the East, Kashmir in the north to Kanyakumari in the south under their sphere of influence, networked the whole country with roads and railways bringing into contact people of different lands, started schools and colleges to educate men and women to work as their babus, and as greats like the Mahatma, Swami Vivekanada, Ramunjan, C.V.Raman, Tagore and Netaji kept springing up they realized it was only a matter of time before the Indian Nation would rise.

The India of today...where else in the world would you see such diametric opposites...people who speak more than 1/2 of the world's known languages, people who look and dress differently, people who believe in different faiths, people who differentiate between each other on the basis of castes, a people ideologically divided from the day of the country's birth...yet we dont see civil wars based on these contradictions i mentioned above which have torn apart nations like Ireland, Sudan, Pakistan, Yugoslavia or bloody dictatorships like in Nigeria, China or Afghanistan...even a supreme power like the Soviet Union fell apart not being able to manage their internal contradictions. I belive the way we won our freedom has the answer to this paradox....if we had taken to the gun instead of satyagraha, the Indian psyche would have altered to an aggressive, hotblooded race which would have turned violent for every issue caused by the co-existence of such diversity and though many within and without, ridicule us for being a "soft" state, the Indian people havent suffered at-all for belatedly exploding the atom bomb or the countless withdrawals from Pakistani territory after each Indo-Pak war(America sweating it out to ward off Iraqis on their own soil wud give us enuf ideas...wht it wud have cost us to hold on to those Paki lands we gave up!)...many violent movements have cropped up in our country but none have succeeded or will succeed...from the early Tamil nation movement, to Punjab, Assam, North-East to the himalayan fortress god gave us...Kashmir! Many of these movements began in non-violence but without the support of the people they claim to represent, they failed and the extremist elements within them took to the gun...and u know where that story ends or will end!

Kerala may accuse Tamil Nadu of stealing water, TN charges Karnataka with blocking the Cauvery, Punjab and Haryana hotly claims Chandigarh to be their own(the Govt wisely named it a Union Territory!), the demand for Khalistan has reared its head again, Gujarat remains divided on communal lines and Bihar on caste, the naxals fight for their version of utopia as they strive for the naxal corridor...superficially it all looks a bloody mess! But watching The Rising...i felt there was this chord lying deep within each of us that makes us an Indian which ties us up so inextricably into a nation which will rise up again...and again when affairs go out of hand...too many lives have been taken and too much blood has been spilled on our soil to build this country...the memory of those martyrs and good movies like these that keep coming out(if not for our history textbooks...anytime i'd choose one like that over a movie) should serve to remind us of a nation built of sweat, blood, toil and satyagraha and how each and every one of us is a vital cog in taking our proud nation to greater heights.

Jai Hind!

പുതിയൊരു മാനം തേഡി...

അമേരിക്ക കണ്ടാല്‌ പിന്നെ അമ്മയെ വേണ്ഡ...ഈ നാട്ടിലേക്കു ഞാന്‌ ഇറങ്ങി തിരിഛപ്പം എന്റെ അമ്മഛി ഒറ്റ വാക്യത്തില്‌ അതെ പറഞ്ഞു...പക്ഷെ എത്ര അകന്നാലും എത്ര അകലാന്‌ ശ്രമിഛാലും ഇന്നും എന്നും കേരളവും മലയാളവും നമ്മട സംസ്കാരവും എന്നെ വിട്ടു പോകുന്നില്ല...ഇന്നിതാ ഈ ബ്ലൊഗില്‌ പര്യവസാനിചിരിക്കുന്നു എനിക്കു പൊട്ടിക്കാന്‌ കഴിയാത്ത ഈ ചങ്ങല.

മങ്ഗ്ലിഷില്‌ എഴുതാന്‌ ഞാന്‌ എന്നും മിടുക്കനായിരുന്നു...പത്താം ക്ലാസ്സ്‌ പരീക്ഷയില്‌ മലയാളതിനു എറ്റവും കുറവു മാര്‌ക്ക്‌ നെദിയ വിദ്യര്‌ത്തി ഇന്നിത നമ്മുടെ മലയാള പദന സംബ്രദായതിനെ ചൊദ്യം ചെയ്യുന്നു...മലയാളതെ സ്നെഹിപ്പിക്കാന്‌ എന്തെ നമ്മുടെ ഗുരുനാതന്മാര്‌ക്കൊ പാഡപുസ്തകങ്ങൾക്കൊ കഴിയാതെ പൊയതെ.ഞാന്‌ മലയാളത്തില്‌ എഴുതി തുഡങ്ങാന്‌ ഒരു കാരണം ഇങ്ങ്ലിഷില്‌ ഞാന്‌ വിരുധനാണെങ്ങിലും നറ്‌മം കലറ്‌താന്‌, അറിയാവുന്ന പണി പതിനെട്ടും നോക്കിയിട്ടും പറ്റുന്നില്ല. സ്കുളിലും കോളെജിലും പറഞ്ഞ തമാശകള്‌ എല്ലാം നമ്മുടെ മാത്രുഭാശയില്‌ ആയതിന്റെ കുഴപ്പം ആയിരിക്കണം അതു.

മനസ്സില്‌ തൊന്നുന്ന പലതും ഇനീം മലയാളത്തില്‌ പ്രകഡിപ്പിക്കാന്‌ ഞാന്‌ ഒരുങ്ങുന്നു...ഈ യജ്നം വിജയിഛാല്‌ ഈ ദിവസം എന്റെ ചുരുങ്ങിയ ജീവിതത്തിലെ എറ്റവും ധന്യമായി ഞാന്‌ കാതു സൂക്ഷിക്കും. ഓണം കൊണ്ടുവരുന്ന സമൃധിയും സമാധാനവും സന്തോഷവും ത്രുപ്തിയും ഞാന്‌ എല്ലാ ബ്ലൊഗ്‌ ചെയ്യുന്ന എല്ല മലയാളി സുഹൃതുകല്‌ക്കും ഞാന്‌ ആഷംസിക്കുന്നു. നീന്ദ നാലുകല്‌ക്കെ ഷെഷമുല്ല മലയാളം എഴുതാന്‌ ഷ്രമിച ഈ സംരംഭതില്‌ ഭാഷയില്‌ പറ്റിയ പിഴവുകള്‌കെ ഞാന്‌ മാപ്പ്‌ ചൊദിക്കുന്നു.

P.S - ഈ പോസ്റ്റ്‌ തയ്യാര്‌ ആക്കാന്‌ സഹായിച്ച കലേഷിന്‌ വലരെ നന്ദി. ദൈവതിന്റെ സ്വന്തം നാട്‌ നീണാല്‌ വാഴട്ടെ! Best read with IE6!

Poulose Poulose!!!

As usual I listened to my fave songs, lost in some other world and negotiated the Hollywood bound LA traffic with the experience and complacency of three months on the same road. Suddenly the blare of sirens and lights flashing from behind woke me up from the reverie...and I saw the cop gesturing at me to pull over to the side. I was in deep shit...the only thing on the road i kept tabs on for quite sometime have been police cars and their bikes...and how the hell did I miss this one...I had a missing front license plate, a dysfunctional rear brake light and an expired auto insurance to boot!!Today wuz just my day...I thought. As she headed towards me I could see in the rear-view that she was a black female cop and looked very pleasant. This was my chance...I thanked my stars for having prompted me to shave off my french beard and without that, the innocent smile I reserve for the choicest occasions of trouble came out with all guns blazing...she fell for it...as expected gave me a citation and told me to report to the LA station with the fixes done by September 30 but amazingly no fine...i was expecting anywhere between 100 and 200 bucks but the escape notwithstanding, i wuz really shaken up!!

Summer of 2003, four of my friends from USC...Mathew, Bipin, Vikas and Rohit decided to go on a road trip and we took off to Mexico, returned via San Diego, spent a night at Las Vegas and though totally road-weary decided to push ahead to Grand Canyon...halfway through, our camera melted in the torrid desert-sun and tempers flared as we seemed to be getting nowhere...finally at breaking point we decided to head back towards Los Angeles and I was so pissed at the turnaround and folishly decided the only way to escape the arizona desert and heat was to drive as fast as possible...but a state trooper had other ideas! He flagged us down and Mathew tells me,"veshamikkathe...ipppppam njan ellaam solve aaki tharaam" and proceeds to open his door...the cops hands go to his gun and he shouts "Stay Put!"...for a second we thought mathew would get a trophy to show off for life...he forgot he wuz not supposed to leave the car!

Kerala Police...every youngster must have had a run-in with them many a time. In the seventh, my classmate ganesh and i were going doubles on his cycle when we passed a flying squad...a passing comment from a khaki stopped us dead on our tracks..."mone, inne bournvita kudikkaatheyaano veetil ninne erangiyathe"...the other cops started laughing and totally chammufied i got off. In the 11th, for an IIT contact class in Cochin, we were squatting on the middle of the Marine Drive road at midnight when a flying squad started watching us from a distance...we continued with our chatter and star-gazing but Abba who picked up the unpleasant name abbithoori after this incident chickened out and moved away from us...the cops were by now suspicious and we watched the distant jeep move closer to us as we debated whether to give it a run! A foreigner came out of the jeep examined each of our faces closely...then looking at Jofu says..."He is the man...he is the thief...those same big white teeth!"...and turns to the cops! Jofu shivering with fright forgets his english and blabbers to the man...."I...I, no thief...I...I, student of Loyola"!!! We couldnt help laughing out in front of the grim-faced cops who ordered us to go back to our hotel! Then in the 12th 25-30 of our guys ganged up to "take care" of a guy from KV Pattom in front of his school to settle a score but a shout of "Poluose, Poulose"...was enuf for our ruffians to leave our bruised prey behind and jump into every passing KSRTC and private buses and any two-wheelers willing to give us a lift!

College guys and cops never get along...there is this story of an sfi senior who lead the cops, who came into campus to break up a fight, on a wild-goose chase promising to take them to the spot where the fight was going on and leading them elsewhere while the abvp guys in between getting bashed wondered why the cops hadnt arrived! And at theaters the many friends who took blows from lathis at first-day first shows never again showing the fervor to watch a movie until a few weeks went by! Then there was this bud who sheepishly got pounced on by cops waiting right outside a bar as he just took off on his bike! The mahan spent a night in lockup and his comic struggle to othukkufy the case gave me goosebumps, thinking wht wud happen if my mom stumbled on him at the Vanchiyoor court! My last bump-in with KP happened on the last visit to India and rejoicing at being able to wear a lungi without feeling embarassed, i took it too far by wearing it to the second show at Kaplana theatre, a few hundred meters away from home...after the show as i crossed the street was intercepted by a flying squad who gave me the dressing down of my life...expletives, harsh words, probing questions all answered with the chammufied smile mentioned above...finally they let me off! When I recounted this at home, my mom wuz telling how A.K.Antony's free hand had transformed the police and the royal treatment awaiting brats like me in police stations and how contacts wont work anymore...which sent a chill down my spine but i managed to awkwardly joke, "mummy, ille enne erakki tharaan"!

Seeing a cop evokes so many emotions in me...when i know i am on the law-abiding side a smug look escapes my face daring them to try their luck, when i am bad..i avoid eye-contact unless absolutely necessary, somebody else caught gets sympathy, a cop dressed smartly evokes admiration and your heart goes out to them watching rioters damage public property and pelt them with stones as they ponder the consequences of giving these anti-socials a deserved pasting! Today, that lady cop graciously let me off lightly...i wonder how lawless, people like me would have turned out, if these men and women in uniform werent around to keep an eye on us...in december when i am in india and in the company of old pals and am stoned, wonder whether occasions will arise to make us shout out again...Poulose Poulose!!!

For men who missed the elevators...

The American Dream! What an anachronism this phrase is in danger of becoming for today's indians moving to the US as we find the dream merchants outsourcing their wares to our own country of birth...sadly we who landed on this soil lost our footing at home...for the last two years I have seen the angst of friends who saw the H1B quota filling up in no time...thankfully, I never had to go through that, coz of my GC...moreover my fights were entirely against myself. Its been a long struggle for us who landed here...all the advantages we once took for granted were undone the moment we landed here...an English education which lost its bite when faced with the american accent and deteriorated with every "Say, that again" encountered, the money we once took for granted and now had to be earned, the friends that once abounded, food that once could have been wasted without a second thought...it was a learning experience that came with a lot of heartburn, "akkarapacha" and "paapi chellunnidam paathalam" were always the thoughts of the hour as the moment we got here, India moved into BPO mode and the economy grew by leaps and bounds.

Some months ago, I used to think my sheni dasha had rubbed off on my close friends too as noone got to the heights they aspired to reach(after 3 long years it ends next month!) and were left trapped in tiny companies with challenges and opportunities that ceased to inspire after a while. Today, I laugh at that because my closest buggers have all turned the corner. Bipin kicked the jinx out with a job at Boeing, following which Vikas was snapped up by Cisco, I was hired by Universal, Mathew landed a job at Disney last week and just yesterday Muthu by Argo Consulting. We were the wrong kind of desis to land up here, bcoz other than the thought of making it big in America we didnt know the effort needed to even make a start for our dream. After 30000 dollars spent on becoming a Master of Science...I questioned the Almighty's sense of justice as Bipin went to work at a small earth-sciences tech firm in Long Beach which didnt do justice to his abilities, Vikas at a document-search company in the Bay Area where despite his dedication...his project managers kept hounding him, Mathew languished at a small Telecom company in Los Angeles for two years, I went skipping from one disastrous job to another and Mithun first bade goodbye to MS and US with a promised job in Dubai which ended up as a dead-end, returned with his tail-between-the-legs and a girlfriend who shut the door on him(wuz so reminescent of Lakshya)...studied his ass out and pulled his grades out of a big hole, went to work in Business Warehousing...only to get fed up and drop out, landed a job at a Patel's liquor store and at the very end of the rope he had clung to for two long years found this job as a strategy consultant.

Looking back, I still remember a Vikas asking the dumbest possible questions in the Introduction to Computer Networks course in our first semester at USC totally embarassing us...but his dogged research and passion for the field rewarding him with a coveted job in the largest networking corp, Bipin even dropping a course in computer communications which he thought he wud fail but fought back to graduate as summa cum laude with a 3.8 gpa, Mathew working many odd jobs to earn money for leading a stylish lifestyle which made me really proud of him while carrying his MS along, Muthu who cud chatter hours and hours about any topic on earth other than studies taking such overwhelming command in his field of Operations Management that I had to bear hours and hours of lectures on Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma and Strategic Consulting and me(lemme not say anything more abt myself....coz compared to these guys mine wuz a much more charmed existence in university!).

I feel so proud of these guys today...long back to motivate me and themselves these pals wud tell me of university mates getting jobs at Microsoft, Qualcomm, Paypal, hefty paypackets, etc, etc and I would offer back comfort in my carefree way by telling them we were meant to take the stairs up and not the elevator, despite wondering whether we would ever get there and yet we all did it. Last week, when Mathew talked to me about getting into some sort of entrepreneurship and to stop thinking in the mallu way of a salaried job for a lifetime I finally gave the self-employed idea serious thought...well I am still thinking about it! Making the quick buck is easier said than done... like the past three years I see another struggle for this new thought thats crept up on me...hopefully the idea of moving back to India in a few years with capital to fall back on will give me some motivation! This post is dedicated to all my friends who are still looking for their way to a little sun and succor that a job offers in the mentally tiring journey which is the reality of America life...if these dimwits I wrote about above could do it...I am sure you guys could outdo us by miles. The inspiration for this post came as Rajay, a junior at USC and SCT I befriended and became very close to in just the last few months was left devastated by the H1B quota getting exhausted...aliya, the Master's quota still stands...this may very well be the last struggle you gonna face in life...all the best to you and the thousand more brethren faced with this situation here.

The Wonder Years...

More often than not I have stayed away from dissecting the four years of college as I have found it difficult to bite into (which wuz odd considering, Arun Hari, a pal I closely relate with has stubbornly blogged with this same title to keep our flock together when it seemed we drifted away by reminding us of all we did)...For one, those days were far too romantic beyond the harsh realities of today's working life...two, I still couldnt figure out whether that era made me or dismantled me in the long run. Nothing better than putting thoughts into words to gain a better perspective. College...where every schoolboy raring to grow up dreams of finding himself...watching chetanmaar streak thru in front of their eyes on shiny bikes, pretty girls in salwars and jeans, freedom from a never ending phase of uniforms, discipline, parental excertions, heavy textbooks, progress cards to be signed by guardians, etc, etc and etc. College was all this to me then and more...I had an added incentive to ensure that all the confidence picked up towards the later years of school life which lay dormant there would find meaning, purpose and achievement here.

Well, things turned out much differently to my surprise. A few months on in the first semester...after I organized our first excursion and new year party a big vacuum settled in and in a college standing on a few acres with space only for ugly buildings and a forever choked and dusty pappanamcode junction just off the campus and with an atmosphere of perpetual tension lingering arising from pitched strikes and fights between sfi-abvp-teachers-departments I yearned for a change. The trajectory, my life took from then on has constantly played out in the back of my mind...with all the good that came with the choice I made there was a lot I lost(or did I???). I became one of the savages...at first a loose confederation of like-minded, like-spirited boys looking for all the color, all the adventure and all the frills and risks that neither the college, or the textbooks or the strikes or gals cud give us. I was so happy then...though all along I knew I was changing in ways I found too helpless to deal with...I quit reading, money, money and money...nothing wuz more important, though I wuz studying to engineer computers the only way i cud relate with my field wuz thru email and mp3, materialism corrupted forever whatever inherent idealism had struck root in me...even god became a casualty.This lifestyle set me back by a few years in the US, there wuz a constant struggle to learn to walk without a cruch in every aspect of my days...when my grades slipped to the edge of a very dangerous precipe, when my credit history took a beating b4 i realized the vagaries of student loans, credit cards and paying untility bills in time,when i stayed hungry or lived off junk food b4 i forced myself to start cooking...everything wrong with me then...i simply laid the blame squarely at the roller-coaster of a college life I led.

Time has a way of turning around our perception of history. For some, it is through experience, for others it is through knowledge acquired...whatever be my case, today I am able to put some of the peices back into the jigsaw puzzle that life is. I have seen the 'highs' of being an unabashed extrovert and connoiseur of the good life, the 'lows' of being an introvert steeped in a world of the characters in the books i read and a fascination that I was one of them and the 'medians' of having to straddle these two extremes of human behavior. College gave me many things I never realized, though I lost out on a lot of valuable reading in those years, my classmates there encouraged me to start writing...the savages gave me experiences I will value to the very end...from taking risks, building relationships, being able to laugh at myself, to be street smart and most importantly to be a responsible person. We all fell in and out of love, failed and excelled in exams, won and lost more cricket matches than we can remember, opened our hearts to each other whether we boozed or not...sometimes they were humorous, sometimes tinged with sadness and though many a teachers curse might have fallen on us...we never became the run-off-the-mill set of vaalis...whenever there wuz a dumb charades, quiz, song, dance, cricket, programming contest or semester exams in the offing one or most or all the savages were there to give our best.

Life is short...who knows if there is heaven or hell or rebirth...to say you have done it all and given your best in everything you did is a hard task for any man. Every person, every incident that happens brings me closer to finding out what I want to do next. Though college set me off on the bewildering path of thinking in code and bits and bytes, huffing and puffing to catch up with every programming problem i have to encounter day-in and day-out it may have just set the tone for what the future holds for me...I know not if it will be the 300+(maybe 400+ too) movies we saw at the tvm theatres in the 4 years(shinoj arrived at this approx figure considering a "low' avg of 2 per week which we most likely surpassed) or the economics we debated hotly then or the countless long emails in the same nature of this blog i wud shoot to our class egroups or the data structures, algorithms and the C++ code we scratched our heads abt once in a while that will give me my livelihood. Even if none of these things work out...the friends from whom I benefitted, learned from, bonded with and most importantly still keep in touch despite distance and the passage of time ensures that those 4 years were after all not spent in vain. Today, i am passing through a phase where i feel my friendships drifting away...as the struggle for survival gets more pronounced, my need for them is lesser...its a lonely path in life henceforth...i took a long time to make peace with this existential fact...i am happy for one thing though...ever since this blog started I have been able to pay tribute to a lot of people who moulded me into what I am...if this post didnt come out now i knew i was in danger of committing a grave injustice of overlooking a group of people who sold me a dream once...a dream which I could have lived in only once in life...It would be amusing to see how our kids live out their college life...many years on I will look forward to the amusement and consternation of seeing a Junior Viswan, Chota Shan , Kiran Jr. and the progenies of the other Savages live out their Wonder Years...

Cheers!

To some old companions...

I am sorry my friends...you who contributed so much to my growth as a human being...you who opened vistas to a thousand dreams and words like the ones in this blog...you who gave beautiful expression to my feelings...like Pip in Great Expectations I have turned you all, my best friends, away...yet when these posts keep adding up I never found it worth to dedicate one to y'all until this blessed night... a friend recently complained that my blogs were one-dimensional and that I can never write without getting emotional about my subject. Blame it all on Boz! I have read his David Copperfield and Great Expectations too many times over and over again to know of any other way to write. Every word he has written in the two great novels lies imprinted somewhere in my soul.

One of my favorite memories of reading was my mom frisking my textbook whenever she saw me studying without even exams around the corner. Many a time she had caught me with a novel hidden inside my textbook and the lurking suspicion that I was again upto my old tricks always entered her. 95% of the time the sound of her steps up the stairs would be enough for me to toss the novel far away and in all innocence i would say, "ho, padichaalum kuttam, padichillengilum kuttam"!!! I really dont blame her...though she never ever discouraged my reading i was such a weak student upto the ninth that they had no way other than to forcefully suppress my addiction...even without anyone around I ended up reading that way all through school life and in classrooms it wasnt really an odd sight seeing almost 75% of loyolites having a novel resting on their lap while presenting an occasional straight face to the unsuspecting teachers. Again another abiding memory of how desperate we were to get our drugs was of our librarian, the dear Susheela madam sighing at the young souls searching under book shelves, standing on our toes reaching out for the the top of the shelf, the space behind the shelf, and the wall to which it leans, for long lost books or those hidden by other possessive patrons...as i write this cant help smiling at one discovery i made from beneath a shelf...it had lain there for almost four years...Irving Wallace's Celestial Bed...and the steamy scenes in the book, made our lives...for a few days(remember those were the times b4 mms, pc's, cd's etc - and the vcr and video cassette library were our only recourses and even there i remember many of my friends getting shooed off by owners with the "meesha polum kilichillalloda" dialogue!

Well my reading took the same paths as everyone. From Enid Blyron's Noddy I moved to a period of early enlightenment...where I read a lot of indian and western folk tales, stories from the Puranas, the Mahabaharatha, Ramayana, Bible and a condensed version of the Quran. I dont think I comprehended the spiritual side of the holy books much but that wuz a period I wanted to become a priest after getting inspired seeing my uncle, Fr.Isaac Karoor. Well boys will be boys and no boy who stumbles on a Hardy Boy can get away from it without reading atleast a hundred of them. When an HB became hard to get, the Nancy Drew's, Three Investigators and Famous Five's abounded in our out-of-the-world school library. Sometime in the 7th a friend introduced me to Frederick Forsythe and I graduated to the world of thrillers. Then followed a line of similar writers like Archer, McLean, Higgins, Hailey, Wallace, Grisham, Ludlum and Clancy. Sometime in the 11th I got initiated to the Victorian classics and the plus-two years were well-spent building a collection of the best novels of that age. In between, Shakespeare and Poetry which we had to study, analyze and dissect for the ICSE, ISC exams grew within me and like history I let my mind loose and never once thought of it as something to be studied. Sadly that was the phase parental restrictions relaxed, friendships spilled over beyond classroom hours, the onset of cable television and a film craze that grew manically and has ever since refused to yield ground to anything else in me. The reading since my college days reduced to a trickle in comparison...haha lemme not get into it...i ofcourse read, but at the rate of maybe 10 books a year with that number coming down with each year... not to be left unsaid, the usual exception was Great Expectations and David Copperfield which i read and keep reading countless times just like I have watched Manichithrathazhu.

Moving over to Neil's Book Tag

1. Total number of books owned: I took great pride in how our library at home looked and nobody needed to tell me a second time to keep it clean, i really feel proud of the three sets of encyclopaedias we own(one in malayalam) and once in a while my dad, sis and I would get together to stack the great heaps of sociology books he acquires neatly...at one time I had like more than a 100 novels but carelessly lend many to friends expecting them to return it but I have found much to my despair that Loyolites are never gentlemen when it comes to one thing...books. After coming to the US, I have found thrift stores here which sells books at a nominal 50 cents for charity and aarthi pidiche I have snapped them...but many of them I have been forced to leave behind when the time to relocate came which was like once every six months or so.

2. Last book bought: Da Vinci Code - I am willing to give this away for free...its nothing more than a novel to be read and forgotten...except for a few truths which every objective xian like me must have thought abt(jesus wuz human...i wudnt blame him if he felt attracted to mary magdalene) i have found some of brown's claims in the guise of fiction totally revolting...like jesus having a child whose descendants became the merovingian dynasty...he hasnt substantiated many of the theories he puts forward.Spent freakin 30 bucks for this...that too at a time when i wuz strapped... i am mightily and rightfully pissed!

3. Last book read: Well thats an embarassing one to answer - Check out Anish's Blog. He has a link there to a book written by Rajan's father, Prof.Eachara Warrier if you havent already. It is definitely recommended reading for every Indian and Malayali. If you say thats not a book I really cant remember what I read last...but does it matter??? What with so many fantastic bloggers in our midst!!!

4. Books that mean a lot to me:

Great Expectations - The Pip who conveniently forgets his childhood friends and grows to manhood amidst riches, carefree pals and false pride in his social standing before he sees everything he once lived with crashing to the ground is such a splitting image of myself.

David Copperfield - David's journey through life was Boz's way of writing his autobiography...Mr.Dickens, as long as the world turns and men live in it and know to read you will remain unarguably the greatest writer in the English language.I always wonder how much I am like the David, who fell impractically in love for the immature Dora amidst working odd jobs to survive before his true calling came visiting.

The Covenant - This epic story by James Michener which begins in the middle ages right to the modern-day world of the 60's telling the saga of three families in England, South Africa and Netherlands and how their destinies inter-twine held me engrossed to the very end of its 1100 pages.

Khasakkinte Ithihaasangal - After reading this, I wondered why O.V.Vijayan was never considered good enough for the Nobel or the Jnanapith Awards. His breath-taking style of narration and description of the political, social and geographical landscape of Kerala as it transformed...was so spell-binding. Made me so aware of my ignorance of my own people...wished why i wasted so much of my precious youth in awe of kerala's cities when i could have experienced far more beautiful things in her villages. For those who cant read malayalam his own english translation of the novel is equally brilliant.

Mindapennu - Fascinating novel that we had to study. It depicted the winds of social change blowing across the kerala of the 50's as women ventured outside their homes to work in offices and of men still caught in the time-warp.

Godfather - Do I really need to write anything about this one!!!

My Father, My Son - I wept like a baby reading this one. Apart from a numbingly beautiful storyline it has some great subtly written humor too...somebody in college took it and never returned it.

Little Pricks - This book was an all-time bestseller written in 1916 by a Ralph Moore...another book I retrieved from under a loyola shelf...its a great book about a young boy in the american midwest of the 19th century who grows up to adulthood surpassing great difficulties.

Tom Brown's Schooldays and P.G.Wodehouse - These books virtually mirrored our schooldays though they were written so many years before...so many colorful characters in these books were similar to many of the guys who studied with me not to mention all the hotly contested cricket, basketball and football games we indulged in akin to these novels...i wonder when a book on our loyola days will get written by anyone of my multi-faceted classmates there.

Neil, thanks a lot for this book tag. I thoroughly enjoyed keying in this post. And to you, my dear old friends, whatever I read in you is all that this blog contains...i am certain you guys live...bcoz u breathe so much passion, so much sensitivity, so much life, so many dreams into us who befriend you...maybe you live in another plane of existence...I hope to soon come visiting you guys as of yore...

For a few cents less...

I just couldnt help laughing at myself. Had just come off a heated argument with my sis who wanted to get a tissue roll for $1.97 when i saw another brand for $1.57. Thought about my parents who squirmed in displeasure when I squandered imprudently and of moms regular taunts at me saying "ninakku kaashu ondaakumbam athe veruthe ozhukki kalayunnathinte buddhimutte manassilaakum" and my own inner voices which wanted to shout to them saying "enikke kaashu kittumbam njan kaanichu tharaam life engane jeevikkanam enne". Moving to the present like most of their words of wisdom this one rings true too. As every paycheck comes in I brace for doing a hundred meaningful things I wanna do and the rest to be saved and lo! it has disappeared even before I take stock of the situation. The feel-good part of it is that most of it went into repaying long-standing personal debt...a remnant of the struggling days, meeting far-away relatives, fixing my increasingly rickety car, helping pals out, tickets to India or running the house in style. Occasionally i sit staring at my right palm which has gaping holes between the fingers(my pops is well-versed with astrology and says it signifies all i make will leak through...what comforts me is that he has them too and yet manages his affairs well!).

Once I had this run-in at home when my dad gave me a fair scolding for pulling out crumpled rupee notes from my pocket and leaving it at his desk...it certainly must have hurt to see his hard-earned money treated in some dememaning fashion by me...my response was "spectacular" to say the least...i walked out of home...when i returned without even being apologetic all he did was leave a new wallet in my room. When my sis accidentally dropped my laptop on the floor, my mom and sis smiled as i ranted and raved at her for being so indifferent...the revenge of time! But fact is, she is a smart gal...though she earns much lesser than me, is a compulsive shopper and shares in our expenses when it comes to things i need like replacing a worn-out wallet of many years and a watch that hadnt run for a month...she went out and got stylish ones while I procrastinated and she beams at her bank balances while I look at mine's mournfully when we get down to our once-in-a-while who-beats-who sibling rivalry.

I have learnt valuable lessons in money management from my parents...their entire adult life they have lived on credit...improving their standard of life by taking out loans and investing instead of saving up their salaries and though I wondered when i was small why my sis and I had to wear tailored, old and ill-fitting clothes compared to my cousins who were always well-dressed but today i realize that their journey from a studio apt in kunnukuzhi to a small two bedroom flat at pattom to our present house and then to our both immigration to the US were all vectors that represented the upwardly mobile middle-class ambitions of the india of the eighties and the little things we all sacrificed then certainly played its part to get us here. Its just awesome...I talk to all my friends and they all have such tales of their parents to say...when we were kids they were in their struggling phases, yet put us through the best schools, got us most things we asked for while we never ever had to worry about all the financial worries they hid under a veneer of smiles reserved for us. My dad got his first job at the age of 29 and his current job at the age of 35...like most people then, while most of us yuppies are already at work and settled by our early 20's.

I look at most of my friends here and see a confused lot...some go out and get bmw's and benz's to signify their increasing social life, some absolutely crazed about the accessories the internet tempts them with acquiring, others worrying where to invest their money and squeeze out of the IT field and others abt sending money home for parents to take care of it...but we are all alike in one way, scratching our heads in bewilderment wondering how our parents made sense of needs and dreams and made intelligent spending decisions. Maybe its something we will all figure out as we go along...while we learn, earn, loose and live with these decisons, make mistakes, rectify them, then make other mistakes and finally get it right some day! ...and so we both continued our shopping...i passed the cereals section where I saw the brand i once ate 4 times a day for a few days to save money for a trip to vegas ending up with dysentry and a green-colored poop, then the one dollar rice grain which if boiled even a minute longer makes for excellent fevicol and on which i lived on once three days in a row eating as kanji coz of a paycheck that didnt arrive leaving my bank balance at nil(i bought that again a few months back only to see my mom trash it while giving me an atleast-now-go-get-a-life look) and while going home the one-dollar burgers at macdonalds, which wuz my life giving bread during the university days. We all do crazy things to save money at every point in our life and we all will have evenings like this when we think of those days fondly(and secretly in terror of their ever returing) and how much ever I deny the importance of the rectangular strips of paper my admiration just grows for people who know to spend their money wisely and unselfishly for their dear ones to be happy as i try to figure my way through this maddening maze that adulthood which I once foolishly craved for as a kid landed me in!