Domain Maximus

We have this course called Persuasive Communication. The prof really didn’t want to offer it, but we talked him into it. During one of the PC classes, he mentioned how engineers always think and communicate logically. Which immediately set me thinking. A very stereotyped person is the poor engineer. Accused of moral and social weaknesses, material follies, and compromised ethics, the engineer is doomed the moment he steps into his first engineering drawing class. From that moment he has lost all chance of being accepted as a normal human being by his fellow non-engineer human beings.

It is quite a tragedy really. If a normal guy wears a pair of Hawaii slippers out on a weekend its comfortable chic. However let it out that he has a B.Tech degree and works for a software firm and his choice of footware is affrontery and irreverence. “They don’t teach manners at engineering college…” grunts the Commerce graduate. Which is completely untrue. For example every engineer knows that a cigarette is never smoked alone in company, it is always passed. Nor will an engineer ever hog all the alcohol at a weekend drink-a-thon. Never. He always makes sure everyone gets enough. (especially the women, but there are reasons for this as we shall see…) I had a friend who was an expert bartender. The mere sight of a bottle of firewater and his mind would go into mix mode.

Me: Hey!!! Look an old partly drunk bottle of Old Cask lying in the bottle of the drawer. Good for the party?

Friend: (After come quick mathematics in his head…) That should be enough for 17 drinks of 60ml each with an allowance of 100 ml for spills…

Me: Its a party for only mallus…Friend: er… 4 drinks then.

(Yes yes I know no true engineer would leave booze lying around undrunk. They teach you that in first year. Unless you are a teetotaller. Teetoallers learnt how to seal all the cracks in your hostel room door and windows using newspaper.)

Indeed it is unfortunate that people do not appreciate the great computing power of the engineer. Many are the IT behemoths that run on the Indian engineer’s intellect. Infosys, Wipro, Nasa and Desibaba just to name a few. Without him and his complete dedication to his work and his employer where would they be today. These and many other multinationals owe everything to him and his utter lack of social life.

But how can one have social skills if one is told from birth that one has to become an engineer and protect the family from endless ridicule and shame. One spends all his time between tuition centers and school and coaching classes that very soon society is but a sweaty mass to be avoided on local transport. When he goes to a book fair he is bought IIT guides and question banks. When he sees a movie he notices even Rajnikanth in “Padayappa” is a mechanical engineer. (Which reminds me of this good friend who had never read a normal book in his entire life until his dad bought him a classic by mistake. It took him two days before he noticed there were no formulae or questions at the end of each chapter. His dad was not happy to learn that he had got the title wrong and it was not “The Unbearable Lightness of B.E.-ing”.)

Then there are those who accuse the poor engineer of promiscuity. Look, they say, all they do is watch porn. All they do is talk kinky. Have a heart people. Only a person who has gone through four years of mechanical engineering and such allied sciences knows what it means to be deprived. No this is not the deprivation of the non-vegetarian stuck in a Saravana Bhavan for life. No this is infinitely worse. Anything remotely comparable is the plight of the Thakur in Sholay who lost his wife and both arms. Indeed much mirth and celebration happened on the days when women were seen in and around the Mechanical Department. Entire academic proceedings once came to a standstill when a new textbook on fliud dynamics had a pretty lass on the cover. Oh yes we were quite active in trying to handle our deprivation. I distinctly remember the scoring sheet when paper contests were held in our department back then.

Technical Content: 10%

Presentation: 10%

Primary research: 10%

Sex of author: 70% + 40 million bonus points

It wasn’t an easy life by any means. And after all the rat race was over we got recruited into multinational companies who offered us high career growth jobs. HR told us that we were lucky to join a firm that did so much to ensure our jobs were designed to fit our individual strengths and weakness and from the day we joined we would receive personal mentorship. This was told during our orientation programme which took place in a stadium so as to hold all the new recruits. It was a tough life. Employee of the month one day, laid off the other. And still no sign of a cance to propagate the species. Of course some of us decided enough was enough was enough and wrote GRE. For some even that did not work. A very close mate was rushing on his bike to his GRE centre in Chennai, almost out of time when a busfull of Ethiraj College women passed by. The poor fellow had not a chance.

And then there is Bschool with all the women. And boy was it a cultural shock.

“THEY study here?”

“Exchange women actually come here????”

“THEY WON’T EXPEL IF YOU GO TO THE GIRLS DORMS???”

“ALL THAT STUFF IS SHARED???…. YOU CAN COPY IT???…”

Blame culture shock I plead you. not the innocent ignorant technologist. In fact next time you spy an innocent engineer being lambasted for anti-social behaviour spare a thought for his past that has made him the substance abusing, hormone driven animal he is today. It just isnt his fault. It was all society fault. But also remember this. The earth will finally be inherited by the engineer. The man of science will indeed triumph over arts, commerce and such majors. (Except maybe physical education. Those guys are huge sometimes. So they’re cool.) The brave technologist will indeed rewrite our future as we know it. (No seriously he will. All the novels you have read about the future isn’t called chartered-accountancy-fiction is it?) Then the world will be a better place where people are happy, content, and have a lot of free porn.

People dont ask. It is summer internship all over Indian b school world and it is not a time for dilly-dallying or blogging. But after a month or so of devestating silence, here I go again.

The latest addition to my growing collection of books on food is one by Vir Sanghvi. I don’t particularly like his brand of TV presentation. Its too conceited for my liking. Reminds me of a maths teacher I had in school. Never let his students get the upper hand.

“Now Mr. Vadukut what is the square root of 14641..?”

“121 sir…” (With as much flourish and panache as ash shorts and white shirt dirt-caked from recess football will allow…)

“Ahh… very good… and the cube root of 234665772883…?” (Thus obliterating every remnant of grin from my face…)

Nope I dont like Mr. Sanghvi on TV. But the printed word is a whole different ball game. The man is a genius when it comes to describing food. He conjures up images of food so lifelike, at one point I burped after a rather vivid mimeo on tandoori chicken. Mr. Sanghvi is so good he makes food I have never seen, heard or pronounced before taste marvelous. Like Foie Gras or Carpaccio. Personally I never knew such skill existed outside Penthouse Letters.

As anyone who has seen me in person will testify, I am not one to back from the sizeable meal. I relish a good spread and have had a few gastronomic adventures of my own. Though unlike Mr. Sanghvi, they are not particularly good ones to talk about. Like the time my uncle took to me to this aloo wada place in Mumbai. Somewhere near Santa Cruz we went to this totally local aloo wada shop. A place that made nothing but aloo wadas all day long. A big sweaty well-fed man (I abhor use of the f-word) squated in front of a gas fired stove lording over a humongous cast iron wok-type thing, not unlike the thing in which they shot Titanic. The vessel had 1.2 million litres of oil in which thousands of aloo wadas bobbed up and down in crispening synchronicity.

He knew my uncle well and nodded in recognition. My uncle nodded back, letting loose a flurry of salivary emanations. We were soon on our way home in his Omni van with a bag full of aloo wadas sitting pretty on the seat between us. Conversation was muted during that drive. The all-encompassing aroma of tenderly cooked potato enrobed in crispy luminescent yellow dough, everything covered in a sheen of aorta-clogging, heart-stopping, medical-insurance demanding cooking oil.

As soon as my grandmother doled out the wadas I devoured them at the rate of knots, as Ravi Shastri would say. Pick out a wada, rip it in two, carefully making sure there was an even distribution of dough and filling, smother in green chutney and pop into mouth. After more wadas than I can describe without nausea even today I retired to bed. I slept soundly till roughly around 3 in the morning. Then the burping started.

At lunch time the next day I was still burping so much my folks took me to a doctor. While initially I enjoyed the satisfaction of a good burp every few minutes, too much of anything is indeed bad for you. It drove me nuts. I couldn’t speak a whole sentence without letting one rip. Soon I was seeing images of being featured on Ripley’s and becoming an item in school. My belly, which was no chiseled marble block, as it is today, back then, swelled up so much my dad was afraid he’d have excess baggage trouble on the flight back to Abu Dhabi.

Thankfully the doc prescribed two chemists’ worth of Gelusil and I was deflated and happy in no time. To this day I can not look at a plate of aloo wadas without evoking tremors of gastric effervescence within. Now would something like that ever get published? Even if I was rich and famous? I dont think so.

In fact my adventures with things culinary have been many. And many of those have been inane. If you have ever been to an upmarket restaurant with waiters who can’t read the menu you know what I mean. And Trichy was full of them. My advice is to try something simple first and see if it registers. For example, see if you can get, say, a pineapple gateaux ordered with minimal sign language. If then you get served gulab jamuns, it’s adios to all hopes of having the fancy french and thai stuff.

Then there’s plane food. Ugh. I like air travel. For all its idiocies, hassles, uncomfortable waiting chairs, bad food and under-whelming in-flight service, I like whizzing around once in a while. And being an NRI makes you a veteran of jet travel by the time your four years old. Indeed, by the time I was 10 I could convince the customs guy that the thing in the box was a large ash tray that looked like a VCR and not a VCR itself.

“Yes sir, it is an ash tray… that’s where the ash goes in sir… no sir…it does not play anything sir… we smoke a lot at home sir… entire packs at a time… yes even the children sir… oh look a 50 dirham note stuck to the side sir… yes you can sir… thank you sir… that way sir??… happy vacations to you too sir…”

Those were merry days before liberalisation and all. Now noone wants Brut deo, Nido milk powder, Cherry umbrellas, National Panasonic tape players, and Sharp torches. When your Ambassador car reached home they would unload the bags and boxes first, rush them indoors and devour them. Depending on who got what, the visitor from the gulf would get the room upstairs with fan and bed and nonstop power supply, or got dumped in the corner room with the only egg-laying chicken. Being an NRI was a lot tougher than you could imagine.

Air travel also brings out the worst in people. People are at their anti-social disestablishment worst when they have an air ticket in their hands. Take a perfectly well mannered, well brought up, educated, polite type person (or any random mallu in other words) and give him an air ticket and, boom, before you know it you have this fidgety, finicky, queue breaking, nitpicking, rule breaking animal. Raise your hands all of you who wait for the plane to come to a complete halt before standing up and taking your bags out. (Not as much a single little finger in sight…) or what about a quick “aye” from everyone who has never carried more than one piece of cabin baggage… And what about all those who have stolen a quick ogle at the stewardesses… (Just one arm per person will do thank you…)

Indeed I say the true test of a man is when he has to fly. Observe him and you will know what lies deep uder the polite and gentle facade. Of course there are some things which are just meant to infuriate you in a plane. If your well-built like I am, you should be well aware of the agonies of economy class travel. Tell me, whoever designs, these things, why is there one armrest between two people. Whats with that? On a long flight all it does is evoke this weird arm moving, jostling ritual fight for a few inches of plastic armrest. People refuse to go to the loo for hours on end to protect their hard earned limb space. (Of course here we need to thank nature we don’t get all cat or dog-like when it comes to designating personal space.)

But the food. Good lord the food they serve in airplanes. I could write a whole post on that. So I will. Adios and a thousand apologies again.