Domain Maximus

After I was done with a little bit of research for this blog post I was left even more nostalgic, warm and fuzzy than I started. But let us cross the water when we come to the bridge shall we?

Regulars to this blog will know that once in a while, four or five times a year tops, I write a little post about growing up in the Middle East. It is almost entirely based on my own life with little… err… social commentary and random observations as with most other posts.

(I love that phrase. Social commentary. Makes me sound so Arundhati Royish. Page 3 BUT in Fabindia clothes.)

This is one of those posts that non-bloggers keep cribbing about. "Who cares what happened in his life? Besides the incident in the lingerie section at Shoppers in Bandra of course. The rest is utter crap."

So where was I. Ah yes the middle east.

The time is the mid eighties. Back when the middle east, by which I mean Abu Dhabi in particular and the rest of the UAE in general, belonged to no one in particular. The locals knew they needed outside help. The outsiders knew they were making certain trade-offs in life when they moved in and there was a pleasant, incidental and largely observed-with-satisfaction equilibrium in relations between the various ethnic communities.

Think of it like one of those multi-ethnic chawls they used to show in old hindi movies and new TV serials. Except here everyone minded their own business. None of that melodrama with the families fighting and the sikh family mediating and all that.

This is actually a trickier situation than you think. Especially for the media. What programming do you have on TV? Which languages? How does one cater to the Petroleum engineer from Dallas, the accountant from Lahore, the engineer from Bombay and the building supervisor from Dhaka. (This is well before the Filipinos flooded the place and taught us desis what kick-ass lifestyle was even with salaries of less than thousand dirhams a month.)

The most cosmopolitan TV channel was Channel 33. Dubai’s official non-arabic channel.

I use ‘non-arabic’ for a reason. This was because they played all kinds of programming: English English (Fawlty Towers), American English Upper-Middle (Full House, Charles in Charge), American English Lower-Middle (Bill Crosby, Different Strokes), Gameshows (Blockbusters) and, the point of this entire blog, Bollywood Masala. (Okay there was also wrestling, english football much before ESPN made it cool, and nightly news bulletins with fifteen minutes of news and fifteen minutes of names of pharmacies open for 24 hours.)

Thursday nights was Hindi Feature Film night on Channel 33. Dad had halfday on Thursdays and this meant we spent a few hours after lunch helping him water the plants, vacuum clean, dust, fluff, fold, align at right angles and so on. (He is a little bit of a freak that way. He used to wipe clean each individual leaf of each plant every weekend. We had to sit around and help him. Which explains why I am so easily amused. He has now bought plastic plants and on a fortnightly basis bathes them under the shower. Please don’t ask.)

Around five or six in the evening we would move to the living room and begin fiddling around with the TV antenna. This was a box behind the TV with a dial on top. You moved the dial a little and then waited while the antenna, perched somewhere on top of the building, slowly motored into place. (It seems high-tech and lavish to you. But we were big Bill Crosby fans if you know what I mean.)

Channel 33 was on TV while we nudged the antenna a little this way and that. Sometimes it took two hours to get it aligned perfectly. (Meaning that, with any more static, we would routinely confuse Mandakini with that guy who played Samba. The cool anglo-name guy.)

Finally after dinner we would sit with bated breath for the movie. ( I don’t think Channel 33 ever published movie details till actual showtime. The newspaper listing simply said "Hindi feature Film." Also "Wrestling". "Football". Hulk Hogan? Aston Villa? Tito Santana? No way of knowing. Full and full suspense only.)

The movies were all mid-late 70s and early 80s classics.

And thence we begat our knowledge of all things Indian and filmy.

There was no ambiguity of characters in the movies those days. There were the good guys and there were the bad guys. Both disagreed on everything. There was the rare traitor who, unsuspectingly, would change sides at the last moment. But we knew who it was halfway through the movie because of the way he kept speaking or smiling to himself in every other shot. But there was none of the gray fellows whose loyalties are wavering till the end. That was blasphemy back then.

Many movies would start with the credits playing over a ‘negative’ clip of the ‘Aha!’ scene: the scene where it becomes clear how Amitabh is actually Rishi’s brother and Pran killed their father raped their sister, threw their mother’s head against a corner table and scared away the domestic help. Also there was some funda about Kumar Gaurav also which we do not recall because, let’s face it, no one ever gave even two flying !*#$% about Kumar Gaurav.

This might seem all regular and usual for you guys. But for us NRI kids who knew our India from the CBSE and biannual leave trips, it was pure, unadulterated awesomeness.

We quickly got our hang of the formula though. Even when you were six years old you knew that the kid running on the road will grow up into the hero. While running on the road. That the first non-cabaret song will be the one that brothers identify each other with in the timber mill. Or ice plant. Or dockyard.

Brother one: "Tum. Yahan. Kaise?"
Brother two: "Auto. Frauded meter. Bastard!"
Brother one: "Dey! One movie. One social evil."
Brother two: "Sorry"
Mom: "Kheer anyone?"

We knew without doubt that it will take the hero one month and four songs (one random first meeting, one disco type campus number, one semi item dream number, one impressive youth festival seductive number) to convince Kimi Katkar to go out with him, but exactly ten minutes to convince her that he is actually reincarnated and that his family in the pre-life was massacred by a bald man with a pipe and baggy cap and related to Kimi by virtue of being, according to her statements, ‘her father’.

Shortly after her tacit content to their liaison it would begin raining and two hibiscus flowers appeared on screen and gently quivered in the wind in metaphorical fashion. (In one mallu movie they used a dead lizard. Symbolically. I think. I hope.)

Of course her dressing sense rapidly changes from ‘screechy flourescent slut’ to ‘salwar suit with enticingly large back window’ as soon as they decide to go steady.

We also gleaned that the harder the hero gets beaten up as a kid the longer his revenge action sequence will be in the end: The Vadukut Inverse Thulp Theorem. "This one for my father" SLAP "This one for my mother" SLAP "This one for the little girl who lives down the lane" SLAP "This is fun! I can do this all day!" SLAP

Also someone always had to walk down the stairs clapping slowly during the climax scene. This was one of the great scenes of 70′s to 80′s bollywood. One that is sorely missed in movies these days. This was also signal for you to run to the loo finally after holding it back for some two hours. (Few advertisers wanted the SEC C Indian (Malabari) demographics. Sometimes Konica, Masafi, Al Kabeer and such like. Vicco Vajradanti on tape rentals.) After the clap a speech was due by someone and, in any case, we never knew enough Hindi to get those long speeches anyway.

Young Sidin: "Daddy… err… what is the meaning of Izzat lootna?"
Daddy: "Umm… err… talking to women impolitely and without any respect."
Young Sidin: "Oh. Nothing at all to do with the fact he just ripped her blouse of?"
Daddy: "Of course not…"

There are a million more such cinematic axioms from the 70s and 80s I could jot down. I’d actually begun to forget many of them.

But the fact is that as I saw Om Shanti Om at Imax a few days ago, all of those memories came flooding back to me. Cringing when the villains thumped the little kid while hanging his valiant policeman father. Punching the air when the hero wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and suddenly found new strength to fight. Clapping and screaming when the long lost brothers came together, settled their differences, jumped into the jeep and sped to the villains hideout amidst funky music and bongos. Holding my breath while the suitcase with incriminating documents flew in the air from heroine to hero just missing finger tips of bad man. Feeling a little jealous when a lucky child star roughed up a minor villain with  cricket bat.

For me OSO stood for everything that was good and great about old-fashioned heart-pounding Indian cinema. Call it parody if you will. Call it slick spoof. Marketing gimmick. Anything you want. But while watching OSO there were moments when I felt all those things again. When those axioms came to play again. Sure Karz’s ending song was better. But when was the last time in recent memory you saw a climax to a movie like that? Reincarnations are timeless! And I just knew there HAD to be a supernatural angle to it.

Next to me, in the theatre, there was an elderly couple. Both probably peeking into their fifties. The husband whistled and danced in his seat while his wife tried to hold him back smiling herself. All around us people erupted in laughter as Bollywood star after Bollywood star poked fun at themselves on screen. I may have whooped a few times myself.

OSO was not about Shah Rukh or Deepika. It was not about any individual or song or six-pack abs or anything. OSO was about a world and style of entertainment that probably has little space in our lives today. A style which politely asked us to keep our minds and troubles and hopes outside and step in for a few hours of pure escapist pleasure. Trash the movie and our kitschy heritage all you want. But no one landed a punch like an Amitabh scorned. No one has ever since proclaimed the greatness of mom dearest like Shashi Kapoor.

And really no one can dance on a giant rotating record wearing a silver jumpsuit and get away with it again quite like Rishi Kapoor did.

But what do I know? I was an NRI kid with his chin on the floor and his eyes glued to a grainy National TV screen.

And, sob, this is what my research on Channel 33 uncovered: Some three years ago the government of Dubai quietly shut-down Channel 33. Apparently the expat communities now had their own TV channels on cable and satellite. No more could they find a role for Channel 33 to play for the migrant hordes. Why keep afloat a universal voice when the more passionate individual ones are doing better?

And with that another pleasant memory of childhood had disappeared as well. But thanks to OSO, not entirely.

Viva La Disco! (Trumpets! Funk! Bongos!… aaaaand CRASH CYMBAL!)

Sniff.

Sometimes you just can’t have enough reasons to like somebody’s blog no? Well here’s one more to read DM more often.

If you are a fan of rock music or like concerts and music dos in general then you might want to drop in at the JAMCAT concerts in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune. Four simultaneous concerts in these four cities with performances by awesome bands some as good as (Warning: Hype ahead) Dire Straits!

Dee-tayles:

On Sunday Nov 18 @ 6.30 pm in these cities:

Bangalore
St Joseph’s Boys School, Museum Rd
Bands playing: White Noiz, Junkyard Groove and Motherjane

Delhi
College of Vocational Studies, Sheikh Sarai (south campus)
Bands playing: Prithvi, Them Clones and Parikrama

Mumbai
SNDT college ground, Juhu
Bands playing: The Works, Gaurav Dagaonkar and Zero

Pune
Elysium, Koregaon Park
Bands playing: Black, Brute Force and Agni

Thanks to the people at Bindass and LG you can print out as many invits as you want and get all your friends to turn up as well. Feel free to post up in company noticeboards, insti lanboards, engg. colleges etc.

Also fancy going to space? Turn up early (3-ish) for Bindass Go to Space auditions.

Click on www.jammag.com for your ek dum muft invites.

p.s.: Actually it makes good sense to turn up. That way concert goes well. Sponsors like it. Rashmi makes money. She gives some to me. I donate half to a noble cause (Dominoes)  and the rest for my expenses. Which makes me need to freelance less and blog more. Which you like no? So really if you love yourself at all you have to turn up.

You owe it to yourself.

(Well yes there is an alternative. You can just send me money. But that strategy doesn’t seem to be working for me at all outside the family. Chalo, I am off. I need to donate blood for cash. Cough cough. Sigh sigh.)

Hola peeples!

Back from a most exhilarating trip to the Dilli to meet the in-laws, play cards, eat copious sweets and so on.

And not to forget the drive around the city after midnight on Diwali when I had a great chance to take in all that atmosphere. By which I mean suspended particulate matter that now covers the inside of my lungs to a depth of several microns and has aggravated my minor asthma. And let’s not even start about my nose. Let me not get all picky. (Hah!)

Sniff. Gasp. Gurgle. Blow. Ooh barfi!

But I get ahead of myself. All details of the Diwali trip will appear in a friendly blog avatar very soon.

Today I need to get back to work and have only just about enough time to post this frolicsome image from a website I was browsing recently. It is an advertisement for Sharekhan doled out by Google Adsense exhorting novice investors to sign up with them:

Now I like the format. It is quite lively and engaging because of the comic book look and feel. The guy on top looks suitably bamboozled by forwards, options, blue chip, P/E and such like.

But observe the guy at the bottom. The man from Sharekhan.

The friendly face of reliable wealth management he is NOT. In fact he has a look of someone who is just waiting to lay his hands on your money (among other things) before disappearing forever from the face of the earth.

FirstStep – A unique program for those who have never invested before! And will never ever invest again! Unless they sold a kidney! Ha!

Would you give your hard earned money to that man with that sneer?

On the other hand would you give it to a freelance writer who needs it?

Sigh. Thought so.

My heart aches. I am fighting back the tears of indignation that well up. Cannot cry during Diwali, I tell myself, as I sob in time with the roaring of the AC in the office so that no one notices.

How could you people do this to me? How could you let me carry on this blog with two copies of the exact same blogroll on the sidebar of this page for two whole weeks without as mush as a peep.

All you people care about are the blog posts and the content and the wisecracks and all that. I am just  a piece of meat, with some words thrown all over it, for you guys.

I feel used. I have removed the extra blogroll. But our relationship is never going to be the same again.

ROAR! Sob!

In other news the missus managed to destroy the tryanny of under-connectivity perpetrated upon us by the vile people at Wilson Cable here in Wadala East. She is terribly proud of it and I think it only right that I tell you all about her moment of inspiration which now helps me, literally, to run around anywhere in the house and browse porn interesting material on applied sciences and contemporary sociology.

The Wadala East area is heavily under the control of a cable-internet cartel managed by the people at Wilson Cable. They may sound like a nice, warm and friendly outfit in the english countryside as depicted by Blyton or Herriot.

"Hey it’s the man from Wilson! Hello Tommy! Top of the morning to you laddie. Good show with that Set Top Box. DVD quality indeed!".

To which the real Wilson Cable people from Antop Hill would respond: "Oh why don’t you pop over with me to this khopcha and I could, perhaps, feast you on some of my special and copious  kharcha pani."

You take panga with these people at your own risk. They have their own TV channel and stuff. These are bad asses I tell you. Ms. D’Costa from upstairs refused to pair her bill last year on account of poor picture quality. Then one day she went to the airport to catch a flight and was never heard from since. (Some say she migrated to Canada. But we are not believing that story.)

And yet the missus prevailed. Woo hoo!

The thing is this. We have a 256 kbps connection laid to our home by the people from Wilson. Now they may be tough nuts but they are reliable people to do business with. The connection works well and more than once, minutes away from a column deadline, they have repaired a down line so I can mail off things.

Two years ago, when we first got the connection, you could plug in the ethernet line into any PC’s lan port and dial up. All you needed was a PPPOE connection. (Look it up. Basically it is a way to put a dial up connection on the end of a broadband connection so that there is some security and control.)

Then suddenly one day we received a call from the Wilson Cable office. There was a moment of discomfort in the home when we saw the caller id flashing. What did…. gulp… they want… with us? Gulp. Shudder.

"Ab ek hi MAC address chalega… Nahi… Sorry… Bas ek. Aapko kuch problem hai to aap ek kaam keejiye, Antop Hill Wilson office mein aayiye… Oh Ramu! Woh peeche waalah ‘discussion’ room khulwake rakhna…"

Apparently some genius had signed up for one of their unlimited internet connections and then, through a router, set up an illegal internet cafe. So they decided that henceforth they would have two types of accounts: cheap single user accounts for poeple like us, and more expensive multi-user accounts subject to location checking and vetting.

We did not complain and continued to use several laptops on our connection, all using MAC address spoofing but, of course, only lappie at a time. And we always paid Wilson Ke-bill on time. Heh! (Phew. That one’s been inside me for months.)

Then last week, the tech geek that I am, I decided to have a wifi enabled home. This way I could work online not only in the bedroom, but also absolutely anywhere in the living room. Imagine!

Two days later a shiny, cute Netgear wifi router was shipped in by Ebay and I eagerly unpacked it with dreams of complete domestic mobile computing in my eyes.

Eight hours later I went to bed with the sheer ecstasy of someone who had just wasted eight hours of his life and 2000 bucks (inclusive of VAT) of his hard earned money.

I had forgotten one simple fact. Stupid me. Even if I had spoofed MAC ids all over the place on both lappie and router, the network would still not allow more than one device to access it. Therefore even if I was hooked up to the internet, and the lappie was hooked up to the router I could do nothing with the network.

"Connection ek, aur computer do! Bahut na insaafi hai!" the network would say unnecessarily falling back on a tired Sholay cliche yet again.

Therefore I was adamantly left offline. Completely unable to get on the net and do anything.

Except, of course, obsessively update the software on the Netgear router.

But after four hours of this, the initial exuberance dims somewhat. "Goddammit you fool! NO NEW FIRMWARE VERSION! F&@# I quit!" was the sort of message the router was beginning to spew.

I gave up and went to bed. A sad, broken man.

Next morning I gave the wonderful people at Wilson a call to find out what was wrong.

"Aapne ghar pe ROUTER lagwa diya!" he said with undue emphasis on that exclamation mark. Apparently I had broken some unmentioned rule of the Cable Omerta. After a few moments of pregnant silence he said that this would not work and I would HAVE to take a multi-user account. At a little more than double the rent I pay now. "Main aapko ek aisa offer doonga jisko aap mana nahi kar sakte!" he said. I hung up immediately and ran for protection to the honourable Don Bosco chapel nearby.

Later at home I walked over to the router, packed it back into it’s box, then into the Ebay envelope and then placed it on the coffee table in the living room to forever remind me of my folly.

That evening, back home from work, the wife suddenly had a brainwave. The sort of idea that only comes to those truly gifted with IT. A eureka moment sans compare.

"Use the router as a node. Don’t let it dialup. Then connect to the wifi network with lappie and dialup as usual. Should work…"

I had tears in my eyes. I ran to her and fell to my knees as I tripped over the internet wire. But no matter. I got up and did exactly as she wanted me to: did the dishes and put out the washing to dry.

Then I worked on the router.

Would you believe it? It was working perfectly. Now we have internet anywhere at home. Everywhere at home.

Truly we are a tech advanced household.

If you want to see how it works you are welcome to drop in for a looksee. However we have hidden away the router behind the flush tank of the attached bathroom.

We don’t want them Wilson Cable people ever finding out. And don’t you be telling them a word. Silencio. Mucho secreto! Grazie.

Ciao.

Every once in a while, well every few years really, there used to be a small fire in or around the building we lived in Abu Dhabi. Nothing major. Nothing glamourous. Just a little short circuit in an apartment nearby or one of those old white and silver, heavy as hell, National brand irons with the striped cord abandoned on an old ironing board. Something unremarkable like that.

(One of the universal truths about residential buildings in Abu Dhabi, maybe all of the UAE, was that the freaking fire alarms were always broken when you moved in. I have NEVER seen a building in those parts which had that "Break glass in case of fire!" devices intact. My dad always thought those pesky arab kids did it.)

Touch wood, no drastic fire type things happened while I was there but we had a routine drilled into us by my dad for just the occasion: "Ditch everything, pick up the bag with the passports and RUN! Okay fine. Walk briskly!"

My dad, like most veteran NRI’s, is paranoid about passports. And it doesn’t even have to be his or his family’s passports. The moment he walked into an airport he’d spot somebody with their passport in their backpocket or some firang just leaving it out there on the duty free restaurant table or something like that. (This was a rather disconcerting habit with citizens of countries where replacement passports did not mean calling James (agent) in Worli who would talk to a ‘friend’ (Patil) in the passport office, who would then do his duty, as a Govt. servant, to take only Rs. 2000 (Assistance fee) and give you the contact of someone else (Khobragade) in the office who would come and collect all your papers and then within just three days, exactly as may be expected from the Tatkal service, disappear forever from your life taking with him the LAST attested copy of your leave and licence agreement.)

Dad, on spotting such lax passport maintenance, would then hyperventilate. He’d start mumbling to himself and telling  us how we must never leave our passports out like that and always inside a bag. If not somehow surgically within our bodies itself.

Dad kept our’s within an inside zipper pouch which itself was hidden inside the central compartment of a chunky Samsonite travel bag that was then secured to the body of my father by a stout leather strap, which was wound around at least three limbs and one neck (sometimes all his) at any given time.

The sad thing was a little bit of all this paranoia rubbed off on me as well.

So if you see a slightly perturbed looking portly man, handsome in a George Clooney sort of way, at the airport, palming his pockets frantically every fifteen minutes or so, you should walk up and say hi. It’s probably me. Or my dad.

So imagine my panic when, last month, I was impatiently waiting for someone from our party to turn up at the airport with my papers for the flight to Malaysia which would leave in two hours.

And by papers I mean everything. Tickets. Passports. Visa. Spending money. Hotel bookings. Tour plans. Contact numbers. Everything except my PAN Card. Which I had lost during the honeymoon in Rajasthan. (Don’t ask how or why.)

Inside, mentally, I was in utter disarray. My mind created various scenarios whereby I would forever be cleaved from my passport. Had the travel agency guy scooted off with it? What if the member of our tour party, who had everyone’s papers, got looted by a rogue taxi driver? Had he been bragging about the trip in public drawing unsavoury elements towards him?

Outside, in order to not alarm the missus, I appeared perfectly calm. Composed.

"Stop that sobbing and sniffing my man! The guy will be here soon enough!" the missus said handing me a paper napkin.

Thankfully, an hour or so just before the flight, MQ landed with the package. And for the first time the group congregated as one. We looked around and nodded. Eight intrepid travelers. So this was the merry bunch I would spend four days in Malaysia with.

It was pretty much the kind of company I was expecting. Except that it was completely not.

Three weeks before that tense night at the airport Rashmi passed on the email from the Tourism Malaysia people with a stern warning.

R: "These press junkets are loaded with old fogey freeloaders who are there only to enjoy the freebies, drink free booze and wind down away their twilight years as unpleasant gruff news hacks. You will loathe their company the moment you set eyes on them."

S: "Free booze you say?"

R: "You are missing the point Sidin. If you are on one of those package type tours made by those Raj Travels type people then you will have to spend all your time with these old men. And get none on your own…"

S: "Free booze you say?"

So when I was suddenly faced with an array of lively, bubbly youths fresh from the campuses of assorted Mumbai colleges I was taken aback.

Of course there was one other press person. The initially enigmatic but later lively PD who wielded her pen for the venerable Time Out Mumbai magazine. She was the first one I met at the airport. I shook hands with her in a lively fashion and then went on to crack a dozen or so lively jokes in order to break the ice. PD seemed to enjoy them if one interpreted, liberally, her cold stare and later aloofness.

Perhaps when I said youths I was not clear enough. The six youngsters had their parents all at the airport to drop them off. There was the usual last morsels of advice: "Zyaada non-veg mat khaana! Late night party sharty mat karo. Phone card se call karna. Hamesha saat rehna… Arrey! Is uncle bhi aapke saat hai kya?!!!"

I made a futile attempt to blend into airport scenery. The wife was nowhere to be seen.

I was told, firmly, to take care of all the kids and make sure they came back in one piece. (Each one of them individually I mean. Not all of them in one huge piece. Though any more uncle references and I could arrange that.) I nodded and quickly entered the airport after bidding the wife a hasty goodbye by sms.

Inside the terminal MQ quickly handed out our packets which contained return tickets, passports (phew!), photos and some tour schedules and information. It all came in a dull blue folder with the words "Raj Travels" emblazoned on it.

Hmm. This trip was getting interestinger and interestinger.

To be continued…