Domain Maximus

Sunday:

In the confines of the small room built outside Swami Narayan Temple in Kalupur, the slide projector and screen seemed as out of place as a Mylapore Maami in a Mcdonalds. That and a few plastic chairs made the setting for the Ahmedabad Heritage Walk. For 365 days a year, come rain or shine, the Amdavad Heritage Walk starts from that small room. Two kilometers through some of the richest history this well-chronicled city has to offer. Last sunday it was mine, and a couple of friends’, turn to be take the walk and see the underbelly of the city for ourselves.

Streaming out from the gateway to the temple the trip winds through the heart of the walled city, or the old city, across the Sabarmati. The IIM, meanwhile, languishes in the newer, some say even tasteless, part of the city across the river. The scenes we walk through are so picturesque and vivid, it seems like a film set in places. Within a few minutes I am clicking away to photographic fame and fortune on my Sony digicam. I step in what appears to be a wonderful epoxy mock up of cow dung on the road. As squishy. The lengths these heritage guys go…

Walking from “pole” to “pole”, the medium sized walking party strains through narrow paths, some only a few feet wide. I walk sideways in places. Jain temples. Many many Jain temples. Wonderful craftsmanship in marble and wood and stone. The residential areas are divided into well-defined enclaves called “pole-s”. I do a rough calculation in my head and come up with the figure of 10 jains to every temple in Ahmedabad. The guide clarifies that everything you see and touch is real. Good lord, not the epoxy goo thing…

What they did all those years ago in Amdavad is awe-inspiring, and 0ften humbling. Bird feeders built tall into the sky like sceptres, elaborate sewerage systems. My photographic genius surprises even me. I struggle to contain my click-happiness. Strangely none of my tour-mates seem interested in my snaps. Wonder why they all stay away. The green stain on my shoe was not epoxy. Dammit.

Temples. Pretty ones. Mostly Jain. I am dumbstruck by the detail, the perseverance. Coming from a campus built in the highest artistic traditions of FCI warehouses and railway loco sheds, it is truly a feast for the eyes, nay, soul. On further revisions of my calculations, I find there are 3 Jain temples per Amdavadi jain person’s limb. Reminds me of Kottayam, driving through which you notice only two things, churches and toddy shops. Mostly in pairs next to each other. Sin and absolution.

The walk winds to a rather abrupt halt at the Jamma Masjid. Its magical shaking minarets lost to an earthquake a hundred years ago, the Mosque, and its sprawling prayer grounds still take your breath away. A delightful Mughal pond in the foreground. The caretaker welcomes us with enthusiasm that could single handedly combat global warming. Earthy tones abound in the column filled masjid. The walled in area for the women in the right background tugs a bit.

Tying up our laces for the last time, we decide to complete our morning with a quick lunch and a movie. I have pasta. And then we watch Garv. If I was younger it may have left me permanently scarred. The walk however gives us much to talk and photos to share. I go back to the insti full of images of temples, brackets, wooden facades, bird feeders, and Salman Khan wearing a magenta shirt, pink tie and sharp white pants.  I also get a cute “I love Amdavad” brooch.

Monday:

Another day another temple. The Ekalavya Foundation School in Ahmedabad. A pioneering effort by Sunil Handa, an alum. Far away from the IIM campus, entering the gates immediately fills one with a melange of nostalgia and young fervour. I wont say academic, that would it make it too wooden. A wholesome campus. Built by the same architect who designed the new campus back at the insti, it wont make it to any heritage walk any time soon. But it is utilitarian, sparse and a little larger than life.

On a personal request I was allowed to take a double-period on World War 2 for the students in classes 9th and 11th. Handa saab was generous enough to let me do something I have wanted to do for a long time. Tell young people about the past, sans textbooks, sans syllabus, sans dates. So here I was sitting in a school assembly for the first time in years and years. After the songs and anthem, I felt, and cliche here, a lot younger.  But no doubt about what I saw in front of me. Potential. Now if only they would learn their history well…

An hour and a half later, I can confidently say I had a class of pretty interested students and staff. Felt warm and fuzzy inside when some of the students send me letters and notes a few days later telling me how some of them now think they should read more and that they never knew history was this good. They better read up on stuff though. Not one guy knew the population of Ahmedabad or Bombay even approximately. They all knew Sachin’s one day aggregate to the third decimal.

Now I have an invitation to talk to the 8th graders and get them to like humanities and not all become engineers…

Tuesday:

The death of my laptop was confirmed beyond all doubt. I have a slight chance of salvaging information from the hard drive, but otherwise the only option left is a full reinstall. I love life.

Wednesday:

Finally got the snaps from a medical camp conducted by the local social service team. Called Prayaas, they conducted a medical camp for the slum dwellers outside the insti compound wall. The team put in all their own money. They gush when they tell you how 140 people turned when they were expecting only 50. If there is a greater, more sincere joy, I am yet to find it. Kindly note the 40% plus people who said in my survery that IIMA junta are arrogant pigs…

Thursday:

Genuine fears of the site losing readers strikes me in the middle of the night.  3 in the morning and I am still bent over a borrowed computer trying to make sense of last years placement budget and figuring where changes need to be made this year. Excel sheet after excel sheet. I start a post on how to buy clothes.  I stop after fifteen minutes. Creativity was flowing as freely and gracefully as obscenities from an auto driver in Jafferkhanpet. And I was writing sentences like: “Thus the fat man should never allocate more than 10% of last years budget for snacks and cool drinks, provided batch size increase…”

Radio Roman Dimension broadcasts again to an increasingly dedicated clientele.  Domain Maximus continues to languish…

Friday:

Imagine the contradiction. On the one hand your in Bschool par excellence, on the other hand a quotation comes back from admin for resubmission. Reason: Font size too small. So much for organizational revolution.. who moved my f!#$%^& cheese…

Saturday:

The cloud cover breaks. My head works again… The music troop plays a thumping good show. My camera conks off after four photos. I go back and read my horoscope. “The planets indicate ease in the workplace and a period of deep contentment…”

Sunday and Monday:

Weird hazy whacky. Nothing really happened.

Tuesday:

5 meetings in 8 hours.

Wednesday:

Voila!!!

The future: Laptop should return in two days. Post drafts should achieve completion by Friday. People till then sympathize, pray for my laptop…

Much love,

Sidin

Peoples,

Pardon lack of update. Will do so late tonight. Placement work at an all time high… But two quick points:

1. Comment, but comment constructively. As was rightly mentioned, I am not Trotsky, there is no greater meaning in my blogs, if you find one, good for you… I have been writing for a few years now, and continue to learn as I go along… But I guess now I have what is called a style… and I guess I am stuck with it… more on this in a post…

2. I got an email saying I shouldnt delete comments. I dont. I guess it says author removed comments. THe author there being the commenter.

Now run along and do your spreadsheets and ppts while I get a batch profile approved and some quotations cleared…

As I write this a hundred poor finance focussed people are reading obscenely long questions on options pricing and arbitrage and swiss bonds and understanding jack. My exquisite portfolio of courses, which is sheer Andrew Fastow on the fraud scale, have no midterms whatsoever. So I sit around and think of education, which makes me think of school, which makes me think of how it was, and how I wished it was.

I always had this fantasy thing going on when I was in school. In my moments of self-aggrandizing introspection I would oh so often make these wild disaster movie type stories in my head, all with me walking in through thick white smoke, and saving the exploited black guy, his dog, one national monument and getting the girl. I would then walk far far away into a blazing orange sunset, valiantly dwindling in size till the curvature of the earth got in the way and you couldn’t see me anymore.

There were no bad guys in any of them I think. I used a lot of guns and bazookas and longswords, but never killed any people. Only animals that were definitely not endagered and aliens I was sure had no emotions and no families back on their home planets. When I shot a cloned rabid Saturnian chicken it died immediately and without pain.

Once a rather lissome belle of a teacher invoked in me a vivid fantasy that never leaves me to this day. It all starts off as a normal day in school. Hundreds of little children bounce into school in their white shirts and blue bottoms, gleefuly unaware of the fact that a RIP-ROARING APOCALYTPIC EARTHQUAKE IS ABOUT TO HIT THE SCHOOL IN HOURS!!!

I arrive late that day to school. Its the fourteenth time and this time the Principal summons me in no kind terms.

“Thats the fourteenth time this year Mr. Vadukut”

“Yes, your teachers have taught me to count…”

“I will not be spoken to in this tone…I am the principal!!!”

“You are a sharp one arent you…”

“Enough!!!… your mid term papers are with me. You have topped in everything again. If it weren’t for your inexplicable intelligence you would be out on the streets… a long time ago…”

“Sir, I came from the streets. The street is my domain. Streets dont scare me…” (I shift in my chair impatiently, sending ripples of muscle through my razor sharp tight white shirt.)

“Ok get out of my office and don’t do anything stupid. We dont want heroes here, only straight As…”

“I do what I have to sir… good day…” (Cue thick white smoke outside principal’s office, assorted administrative staff, the hot school nurse, and some girls from senior school whisper behind my back… fade in electric guitar riff…)

Its halfway into math class. As I walk in, there is a deafening hush. The teacher stops mid sentence, he is intimidated. I walk to my usual place in the left rear corner (so I always get a clear view of everyone in class), prop my feet on the table and slip a strip of gum into my mouth. The bottom of my shoes, as always, are chunky and sparkling clean. Class resumes. And promptly comes to a halt. They just can’t prove the Pythagoras theorem. Having spent years training for a top secret UN agency dealing with evil unendagered animals, and criminal aliens abandoned at birth, I have an IQ beyond my years. Snapping shut the book on particle physics spread on my desk I walk across to the board and write out an elegant proof in yellow chalk. As the drumrolls subside, I walk back to my desk… Just another day for Sidin Vadukut ace student cum secret agent cum cubist painter cum opening batsman cum best dressed male in 8th grade.

Suddenly I hear a soft beeping and I whip out my UN issue commset that has an inbuilt radio, cellphone, pager, xerox machine, microwave oven and orange juice dispenser. All packed into a small plastic cube the size of a 2 by 2 inch plastic cube. What I read off the LCD screen makes me speechless… (Cue small sweat globules break out over forehead… clenched fists… violins…)

Deep under the school, directly below the Women’s staff room, two tectonic plates, Joe and Bartholomew, rumble expectantly against each other. I rush out of class and run to the principal’s office, someone has to warn these innocent children. (Thankfully my parents are out on vacation to the Bahamas and I dont have to worry about them…)

“Please, not another one of your hairbrained ideas Sidin…”

“Sir, we have a situation. At exactly 1400 hours GMT there will be an earthquake beyond anything this school, leave alone the womens’ staff room, has ever seen. If we dont act now, hundreds of innocent lives will be lost…”

“I will not listen to your paranoic schemes. I have good people on the Emergency School Earthquake Response cum Library Maintenance team… Go back to your classes…”

“Sir we have only one hour left… do you want the lives of these children on your hands? Or do you want to do the right thing… Sir, the choice is yours, only yours…”

(Suddenly one of the goons from the Principal’s Secret Service retinue enters…)

“Sir, the vice-principal…”

“Mr. Principal, we have to listen to his man. He may have low levels of class participation, but noone has ever made a still model of the Solar System like his in the history of this institution… he is a good man”

(The Principal thumps desk…)

“Okay start evacuation procedures… and Sidin I want you to go the shelters with the others… our team can handle this… dont stick your insolent business in federal school business…”

“Sir, thank you.. I just hope your not too late…”

Alas the earthquake strikes ruthlessly. After around 20 minutes of hajaar special effects, some heriocs, I finally rush to the staff room to make sure its safe, tremors after tremor rips across the school. As I rush in I see “Le Hotte Teacher” struggling to get out. Her micro mini is stuck to the coffee machine in the room… I run into save her… a huge tremor… the lights go out… there is a thud as I hit the floor…

Now everything in my fantasy falls into place see. We are stuck in rubble, just the two of us, for over 48 hours. The nights are cold, the days are dark. No sunlight comes in through the packed rubble around us. Steamy scene, cut to rescue effort outside, cut to steamy scene and so on back and forth. The ending is a blaze of light and sirens and press reporters and a standing ovation when I walk out of what could have been rubbly grave. Sunset, walk, curvature, cut.

I also had fantasies of going to watch the interschool football match. Due to a traffic jam, blocked roads and a plague epidemic not too many students come to support the team. Alas in the dying minutes, one of our finest forwards is mowed down by the opposition. Victory is essential. (The money we make from the first prize will keep the school alive, else we will be closed down and the land will be used to make a Gujju Thaali place…) The team has no substitues on the bench. They turn to the audience. Only I stand firm. I step on the field, and in three minutes of sheer footballing brilliance, I score 19 goals, thus making our team win 19 – 18. The opposition and the scheming thaali people are foiled. I am carried around on many shoulders…

Then theres the one where aliens attack earth and I make a computer virus to fight them and stuff. I wrote a nice 7 stanza poem on it and send it to my German penfriend Roland. He mailed back saying it was too far fetched and even worse than the one I send him about floods in New York. Dammit.

But anything is better than Swiss bonds.

P.S. Thank you thank you all for the wonderful piece you all earned me in the Indian Express newspaper. And thanks Kiruba for hosting it.

I am famous!!!

Roman Singh Deshtone was born at 4pm on a bright sunday morning in a village three roadside dhabas away from Patiala. He was born into a well to do Punju family. The family was mostly into drug smuggling and organ trafficking, but since they hosted 14-day weddings on a weekly basis and served a lot of free paneer noone complained. Roman Singh had a normal childhood. He grew up eating a lot of Farex till he was two years old. With bits of tandoori chicken. He danced his first bhangra at 3, two months after learning to say his forst word: “balle”. His dad has a snap of the first time Roman pointed to the sky with both index fingers. Roman went to kindergarten, tractored the farm, and acted in two sardar jokes by the time he was 12.

While all this was happening in the burgeoning plains of Punjab, it was not quite gynaecological silence in the green backwaters of pristine Kerala. No one clearly remembers when Dimension Poovathurkaddavil was born. As soon as his mother had gone into labour, (and there was talk of a local bandh as she had sone so without union membership) Dimension’s family ran to Cochin to apply for his passport and Abu Dhabi visa. But the general consensus time was 3 pm. It was after Jose uncle’s phone call from Qatar and just before the neighbours fell into the well after getting drunk on hooch. Dimension was brought up on a wholesome diet of rice, fish fry, fish curry, roast fish, coconut milk, coconut gravy, coconut flakes and coconut halwa all cooked in cocnut oil. His father had named him after “My Dear Kittichathan”, India’s first 3D movie. Dimension was lucky he was an only child. His dad wanted to name his kids 1 Dimension, 2 Dimension and so on. His mom thought it was too long and wanted to call them Biju, Siju, Miju, Liju, Diju, Miju, Niju and so on. Dimension was a compromise.

Roman Singh was an inquisitive boy. He read a lot and by the time he was 18 he could recite all the collected works of Gurdass Mann by heart. But what changed his life forever was the encyclopedia he won in school on annual day. Roman had prepared relentlessly and his whole family helped him practise. His mother was in the kitchen for weeks. Finally on the second sunday of March, Roman Singh Deshtone raced past the field and won first place in the 34th Annual Tandoori Chicken eating competition. All proceeds went to the World Wildlife Fund. His prize was a fresh copy of the Encyclopedia Patiala. 424 pages of all the wisdom in the world incuding a special 300 page supplement on food. He was a little let down. He was hoping to win the Daler Mehndi audio tape. The book was mind boggling. But what really caught Roman Singh’s imagination was the chapter on Radio communication.

Dimension was a hardworking student. He did average in everything, but topped the school in “Illegal Emmigration” and “Practial Passport Forgery”. He loved travelling, and by 7th class he had visited every major international airport in South India. By 10th standard he had memorised the time table of every airline servicing the Gulf sector and cabin luggage allowance for each. He seemed to be heading the same way as his cousins Dinto and Tindo, both of whom were now successful tea shop magnates in Fujeirah. But then in 11th his father bought him a radio from the gulf. It was a wonderful gift. His dad told him how much he had to save to afford one. Dimension treasured his radio and showed it to all his friends. It was a “Philslip” original made in Liberia.

Soon these young minds were enraptured in the radio. They dreamt of circuits and boards, and stations, and sound and sexy radio presenters in pale pink lingerie. (Ed.: This point is highly debateable. We have not been able to establish this without doubt. In one of his letters Dimension talk of lungi-coloured Lingerie.) They bought all the radios they could with their pocket money. They broke them apart and tried to fix them up again. They went to all the libraries and read all the books they could. They were radio freaks.

However, inspite of the fact that Roman drove a speedy Yezdi and Dimension a swift Bajaj, life caught up with them. They were forced to earn a living. Roman started a firm specializing in costumes for Punjabi music video productions and Dimension started operating a bus service between Calicut airport and Guruvayoor. Both failed. Punjabi video producers rented a single bedsheet from Roman and cut it up to clothe the female lead and her 4235 extras. Soon Roman was broke and could barely afford 14 kulchas and 4 plates of sarson ka saag a day. Dimension was even less fortunate. First his staff and then his passengers went on strike. Then in the third week Calicut airport went on strike. He was forced to sell his bed and go around borrowing money for a visa and flight ticket to Sharjah.

Life seemed to go nowehere for our radio-obsessed young arabian horses. Inside them there was a small voice telling them they could do better. Roman’s inner voice even had a bhangra background soundtrack. Dimension knew he wanted to be more than just a tea shop owner in a desert oasis. His sights were higher. He wanted an attached restaurant and a petrol pump. That night they both slept the fitfull sleep of the troubled. They rolled and turned and gunted. At precisely 11:57 pm they both sat up like a bolt of lightening. And they both went to pee. They continued to roll and tumble till four in the morning. Then it happened. The brainwave. They both ran to their underground laboratories and started work on something that had come in their sleep. They worked tirelessly for months. But it would take the unison of minds of both great men to come up with the final product.

They had almost given up on their respective works. Both had reached a dead end. Roman was thinking of starting work on a biotech project that made paddy fields directly give biriyani. Dimension had finally applied for his Visa and was all set to fly. It was in the waiting lounge in Bombay Airport that they both met each other. They both walked up to the TV display, checked their flight timings and turned around. Their eyes met. It was like love at first sight, it was as if they were meant to be. As if they were weird characters in the same weird dbab post. Soon they were talking and within minutes they knew together they could work together (Ed.: The words “some booty” were removed after the word “work” due to gender sensitivity requirements.) and make the radio an unforgettable experience for its audience. They saw dreams of radio beaming out over networks and people smiling and being happy in their rooms. They did not dream the lingerie thing.

They knew with names like Roman and Dimension they would never be able to make it big in radio world. Today they are known as RJs Viper and Fatcat. They play the best music ever and do it with some punju-mallu panache.. so tune in to the Radio Event Extraordinaire “The Roman Dimension” tonight at 12:00 am on http://192.168.117.12:8000 and make it worthwhile having written such a long verbose launch note for it…

Phew,

Viper

FatCat

(People this was the launch post I wrote for a LAN station me and a friend of mine are launching on campus today. The post went up on one of our electronic NBs. Dont try the URL, its doesnt work outside the LAN…)

Hold on peoples. Had to go home for a wedding. So two posts on hold now. One on buying clothes for fat people and two, a nice little travelogue on my trip home. Ahmedabad – Mumbai – Cochin – Home – Mumbai – Ahmedabad in 24 hours.

So please go on doing whatever you all do at the office, and I will be back by 4 in the evening…