Domain Maximus

So far this blog has a notorious reputation for almost never publishing the Part 2 of a blog post that I originally intend to write in parts. (Except the Letters from London. I suppose. Which aren’t really serial-ish.)

But the other day someone left a comment on old write up I put up. It was about a delightful week-long trip I went on to Colombo. The commentee wanted to know when I would write A Strait Apart – Part 2.

Chances are never. I don’t think I remember enough of that trip anymore. Though I still have notes somewhere. On my old phone I think. So who knows.

But as providence would have it, someone who was on that trip with me suddenly sent me an email earlier today. The email had some picture attachments.

I’d borrowed Maria’s camera at the National Museum in Colombo after running out of space on my own.

But as with most of my trips, and almost all photos I take on such trips, I’d completely forgotten about them minutes after boarding the return flight to Chennai.

Maria, none too unforgetful herself, also never emailed them to me. Till today.

I’d like to post just one of them. The most interesting one.

The National Museum in Colombo is as good as any museum of such scale in India. When I visited, the place was over-run by local school groups. However because this is Sri Lanka, and even the kids here are given a glass of coconut arrack in the morning, things were still languid, humid and relaxed. In one room, near the entrance, there was a flat screen TV in one corner looping a DVD on Sri Lankan history. In the opposite corner a museum staffer sat at a wooden table and snored luxuriously. And no one seemed to be bothered by this. There was no embarrassment or sniggering.

Sri Lanka is that kind of country.

But there is plenty to look at in the Museum. Sri Lankan might be a small country that is only half as big as Tamil Nadu–and even then 40% of that is Arjuna Ranatunga. But they have great history, wonderful architecture and were mean engineers in their time.

So as I was floating from gallery to gallery I suddenly noticed, lined along one end of a connecting passage, a line of toilet-like things. All made of stone.

Some of them were easily recognizable as ‘excretion stations’. Others looked slightly more bizarre:

Ass-tentation. Tee hee.

I don’t know about you. But the above toilet looks a little bit like the PWD contractor was trying to make the most of an extra window and his lowest bid.

But in fact that toilet was found in a Buddhist monastery. I was told that toilets like this were found inside dwellings for monks that were otherwise devoid of any ornamentation. The only element of their living space that had any decorative stonework was this toilet you see here. Why was this so?

Apparently at the time non-Monks on the island were spending vast sums of money building palaces and castles and such like. Monks, as you know, abhor such ostentation. (Which is why that fellow sold his Ferrari remember?)

In order to ridicule the luxury of non-Monk homes, and drive home that such things were evil, only monastery toilets had decorative carvings. The monks hated luxury so much… they crapped on it.

On the way out I walked through the TV room again.

This time a bunch of children were watching the screen. Behind them one of the parents sat at the wooden table. And snored luxuriously.

But that’s ok. Sri Lanka is cool with that.

Beirut Panorama. Image via Wikipedia

The most time I’ve ever spent in a single city in the last 22 years, before packing up and moving somewhere, is the four years I spent in engineering college in REC Trichy. Otherwise it has always been brief stints of two or three years before education or employment or pub-lust, has me moving once again to Ahmedabad or Delhi or London.

I am not complaining of course. I think I enjoy this relaxing frequent nomadic-ism that ensures you never get too bored of any one city. Or language. Or food. Or Milan subway.

However this kind of thing does lead to some behavioral quirks.

For instance you are almost always coming across furniture or wall decorations or shopping mall sculptures that you are itching to buy–because it could make your house look like Frasier’s–but can’t because you’ll surely be moving somewhere soon.

You are also constantly somewhat jealous of friends who’ve bought magnificent homes and splendiferous cars because they’ve decided they’re never moving.  This feeling usually bubbles over violently when you see the magnificent wooden bookshelves they’ve installed in their hallways or living rooms. (Also a lot of people in London leave their windows open in the evenings. With all the lights on inside. Just going to the nearest tube station is a tortuous parade of bookshelves and open-plan kitchens and plush sofas and ottomans and wall hangings and such like.)

Personally this also leaves me constantly thinking of myself as a tourist. Therefore I am one of those people who shamelessly strike up borderline-intimate conversations with taxi drivers and auto drivers and waiters. I don’t know if their views of a place are reflective of the average inhabitant’s, but I’ve always had the most amazing chats sitting in the back of battered old car stuck in a jam on Wadala bridge.

For instance the very first day I went to junior college in Thrissur–11th class for you hep folks–I struck up a chat with the dude who was driving my auto from the bus stand near Swapna theatre to my college. The college scene in Kerala at the time was intensely political. There were huge left wing and Congress movements and a laughably small, token right wing set-up. Even before my first day in college I was leaning towards signing up for the commies. Because at the time they seemed pro-poor, anti-religion and corruption-free.

Not to mention all the movies in which Mohanlal portrayed a crusading commie.

As we rattled on in our auto we passed a small procession of commies protesting something or the other. “Are you a leftie?” I asked my driver.

“I am a member of the trade union. But am I friends with all of them,” he said.

“The left is good for poor people…” I ventured, half as a statement, half as a question.

The driver thought for a while and then said something I’ve never forgotten. “They are the same boy. Both of them steal. But there is one difference. When the left win elections only the chief minister’s children go to study in England. When the Congress win elections, everybody can steal a little. Everybody’s children can at least go to an english medium school in Guruvayoor.”

Later I realised that the commies were hardly distinguishable from the Congress hordes at college. But the Congress type tried to convince you to vote for a student councillor with beef biryani. The commies preferred to serve you with fresh cycle chains.

Then there was the cabbie guy in Mumbai who picked me up, late one night, outside a club in Bandra. I don’t remember exactly which one. But I recall it was on top of an ICICI bank, and the dance floor had huge backlit manga cartoons on one wall.

That night there was a huge crowd looking for a ride, but somehow the cabbie gave me the once over and then told me get in. This “once-over” business in Mumbai is utterly revolting. And invasive. I believe I lost my virginity to a particularly slow, excruciating once-over on Marine Drive during my summer internship in 2004. Women have been known to miss their cycles after one.

After a general meandering chat about traffic and cabs and Bandra, I asked my cabbie why he gave me the once-over. He said he was making sure I was a ‘decent party’. I asked him if he was alluding to prostitution. No, he said, he was alluding to couples who made out in the back of a taxi. “I don’t have a problem with that. Children are modern these days. But how can I drive properly from here to Nariman Point if they are doing it in the back? Sometimes they make noise. It is very distracting. And then other taxi drivers make fun of you if they see. Why can’t these boys and girls just wait for 45 minutes?”

We laughed the rest of the way to Wadala. Where I discovered he had a dodgy meter.

And so on to the guy who drove my mini-cab two weekends ago. Mini-cabs are the cheaper, shabbier cousins of the famed London black cab. The London cab, like so much else in London, is fiendishly expensive and best enjoyed from a distance. Public transportation is the cheapest way to get around. But if the night ends too late, or the day starts too early, then a mini-cab booked by phone is useful.

So last fortnight I went with Mr. and Mrs. Pastrami to a splendid and quite fru-fru night club. Which we left shortly because frankly we’re getting too old for this shit. So we went back to Pastrami’s house–yes, with bookshelves and even a fireplace–and threw back a few drinks. The missus, if you’re wondering, wisely decided to sit at home, read a book, watch some comedy and do some baking.

Well past midnight, after the trains had stopped, I reluctantly called up a mini-cab. (The reluctance was due to mental arithmetic that multiplies mini cab charge by 80 to get approx. Indian rupee figure.)

They’d sent a spacious silver Mercedes-Benz that looked at least five or six years old but sparingly washed. The driver was a big, strong, lightly-bearded chap in a jacket and woolen cap. Who looked of vaguely mediterranean extraction.

After some silence we somehow started talking about something or the other. Maybe the weather. I don’t remember.

“So are you married sir?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You went to a club tonight?”

“For a little bit.”

“Alone?”

“Ha ha. Yes.”

“If I went to a club on my own my wife would cut my balls off.”

And then he told me he was from Lebanon. And a big Amitabh Bachan fan. In turn I impressed him with my rudimentary Arabic–hummus, shawarma, tabbouleh, Abu Dhabi, Tahrir. The conversation turned to the topic of unrest in the Middle East.

“Like your country my country is also very beautiful,” he said. “Good food, good nature, good women. No peace. No peace even for five minutes. You have no peace with Pakistan. We have no peace with Syria and Israel.”

I asked him when he’d left Beirut and come to London. At which point he began telling me his story.

When he was 13-years old Israel invaded Lebanon. At which point my driver, let’s call him Rafik, signed up for the Lebanese army. Five years later he fled to the United Kingdom seeking political asylum. The UK let him in but the asylum visa came with a ten year ban on going back to Lebanon. Rafik taught himself to become, of all things, a graphic designer for a magazine publishing company. He married, had children, and occasionally visited his sister who’d found asylum in the US. And then his company decided to shift base to Dubai Media City. Rafik followed but left and came back soon because he couldn’t handle the people, the place and the distance from his family. But by then the economy tanked. And media, as you know, imploded. So Rafik now drives a mini-cab to make ends meet. It is not a terrible living, he told me. Yet he pines to go back.

“I want to go back. I want to die and be buried in Lebanon. You know what I mean? It is my country. This is not home. These people don’t like you. They don’t understand you. Some of them hate you…”

We spoke for a while about racism and home and London.

And then I asked him what he did for the Lebanese army as a teenager. He thought for a while.

“I was a sniper.”

Whoa. I play as many sniping flash games as the next guy. The missus was a proficient sniper during Unreal Tournament LAN games in business school. But I’d never met a real life sniper.

“Did you… did you… kill a lot of people?”

“That is not a good question. We were at war. They invaded. I was a soldier.”

But he no longer hated the Israelis, he said. At least not as individuals. Rafik said that he often ferried Israelis in his cab and some of them were also soldiers. In fact, he said, they’d often swap war stories, shake hands and chat like old friends.

And now, he said, the Shias and Sunnis were killing each other.

“But… how terrible to be made to kill people when you were so young… how do you deal with that…”

Honestly I was expecting a filmy outpouring of emotion. Rafik didn’t say anything.

And then after a silence he rattled off a list of the guns he still had at home: Kalashnikovs, sniper rifles and hand guns. When he went to to the US, Rafik said, he still liked going to a shooting range.

“They are crazy there man. Before 9/11 you can buy a gun from anywhere. Any time. Go to a range. Shoot. It was crazy man…”

“But… what a horrible childhood to have…” I just couldn’t get over the fact that he was a sniper and shooting people at an age when I was merely water-boarding my dad to get a GameBoy

Again Rafik didn’t say anything.

Just before he dropped me at home he whipped out his iPhone and showed me an app.

“Unbelieveable app man. You just press on the picture of a gun and it makes shooting noises. And it is so accurate. You will not believe. It sounds exactly like a gun in real life. Kalashnikov… exactly the same…”

I paid him, added a generous tip and wished him good night and peace to both our countries. He called me brother. And then before starting his car he made a couple of shooting noises with his iPhone guns. And then my cab-driver cum graphic designer cum sniper drove off looking very pleased with himself.

Is there a moral to that story?

The only one I can think of is that I am perhaps much luckier than I sometimes realize.

Krishna shortly after delivering his 4th consecutive State Of The Union address

Ever since India’s venerable Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna created world history by reading out a Portuguese speech at the United Nations, I have been inundated with emails from readers all over the world. And they all want to know only one thing: Why have we not heard about this titan of verbal sleight of tongue before? Why is so little written about this Colossus of composition, Rambo of rhetoric, or even this Dara Singh of discourse?

Unfortunately it is of great contemporary sorrow that so little has been said, written, or recorded on DVDs by Richard Attenborough, about the varied, surprising and often monumental aspects of SM Krishna’s many famous speeches. People are publishing books written with Sachin Tendulkar’s blood! But are they publishing anything about SM Krishna’s stellar history of public speaking with any of his fluids?

Não, não, mil vezes não!

This injustice must end now. I have spent the last weekend painstakingly putting together all the best speeches from SM Krishna’s career. This was not an easy task. There were so many speeches, given in so many places in so many different languages. Yet, in order to save time, and point you in the right direction, I have summarized the best five. I am hoping, through this exercise, to show the whole world that India’s foreign minster is not a man who is afraid of blunders, but he is a man who will walk right up to a blunder, look at it in the face and then express India’s extreme disapproval in the form of a strongly worded letter in triplicate with notarization and passport copy.

Now I present you an anthology of awesome. Enjoy, my fellow patriots!

Speech 1

Time and place: November 19, 1863; Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Summary: At a crucial moment in the American Civil War, just after the Union armies defeated the confederates, Abraham Lincoln attended a function to dedicate a cemetery for soldiers who died at the battlefield. In the afternoon president Lincoln was scheduled to say a few closing words towards the end of the ceremony. Krishna, of course, was meant to sing a native Indian prayer song. However owing to an unforeseen technical problem due to delay in incoming flight Krishna got his schedule wrong. Just as Lincoln was about to speak, Krishna stood up and read with great passion and intensity from Lincoln’s notes. This speech has been recorded as one of the most prominent in American and world history.

Fun fact: The speech includes the immortal lines: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people, based out of Bangalore”.

Language of delivery: Shorthand

Speech 2

Time and place: September 3, 1939; Buckingham Palace, London

Summary: This magnificent exhibition of rhetoric, emotion and humanity came at a time when Europe stood at the brink of one of the most horrible periods in human history. Subsequent to the Nazi invasions of Europe, the United Kingdom declared war on Hitler’s machine of terror and death. King George VI was then asked to speak to his people to give them strength, resolve and direction. Unfortunately the king, played by Colin Firth, had a tremendous stammer that rendered him incapable of prolonged public speech. Unable to bear the sight of the struggling king, SM Krishna grabbed the speech notes from the King’s hand, raced down the halls of Buckingham Palace, and locked himself inside the BBC studio. He then proceeded to deliver a speech that galvanized the British empire and hastened the Germans to their downfall once the Americans joined and brought nuclear weapons.

Fun fact: In the critically acclaimed recent period film that retells these historic events, Yamla Paagal Deewana, the role of SM Krishna was played by Govinda. This role was later cut due to size constraints.

Language of delivery: German

Speech 3

Time and place: August 28, 1963; Washington

Summary: This 17-minute long speech is a defining moment in the history of the American Civil Rights Movement. Delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to a crowd of 200,000 civil rights supporters, the speech ranks amongst greatest ever in modern history. Martin Luther King Jr. stepped up to the microphone and then began speaking. Unknown to the crowd, however, was the fact that the microphones had been wired erroneously that day. Backstage SM Krishna had been practising his own speech on civil rights and freedom. However  the audio visual contractor–Pradeep Light And Sound, NOIDA–hooked Krishna’s mic to the speakers by mistake. Tragically to this day Martin Luther King Jr still takes credit for that inspiring piece of rhetoric.

Fun fact: One of Krishna’s favourite lines from this speech is: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘If you come today, its too early. If you come tomorrow, its too late. Tick tick tick tick tick tick (repeat x 2).’”

Language of delivery: Klingon

Speech 4

Time and place: 10 November 1942; London

Summary: After having well prepared the British Empire for war against the Nazi hordes with his inspirational King’s Speech in 1939, SMK–or Smack Daddy as he is known in diplomatic circle–was also instrumental in crafting a great speech later in the war when the tide began to turn. While many people attribute this speech to Winston Churchill, who did actually give it, it was originally composed by Krishna during Churchill’s secret state visit to Bangalore in October 1942. After Churchill disembarked at Bangalore International Airport he was received by Krishna who offered to drive Churchill to his hotel in the city. Within minutes of leaving the airport their car was stuck in traffic for two hours. Churchill asked Krishna how long the jam would last for. Krishna made history with his subsequent reply: “Oh Winsty, this is not the end of the jam. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.Unless we take this route through Hosur in which case it could be the beginning of the middle part of the end. Or in any case the middle end of the start center.”

Fun fact: Churchill is currently somewhere near Electronic City.

Language of delivery: Braille

Speech 5

Time and place: 4 July 200?; Nevada

Summary:  Just thinking of this incident makes my eyes well up with tears. As you may recall aliens from an unknown planet had all but destroyed the world’s armed forces. And reduced many of our cities to rubble. Massive alien spaceships, played by Govinda, hovered over the earth, while advanced alien fighter craft sought and destroyed life. World governments had all but given up hope. No one knew what to do about these aliens except the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena who beat up taxi drivers. This did not work. Then they tried again in Worli. Again it did not work. Then they went to Mahesh Lunch Home and after that they went home. Finally it was left to a bedraggled group of international jet fighter pilots to launch a last-minute desperate attack. They would attack a mothership and then infect the onboard computer system– Finacle by Infosys–with a virus. As the representative of the world’s most powerful software developer industry SM Krishna was invited to give vote of thanks. This is when he said those inspirational words that will live as long as mankind will:

“Mankind — that word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can’t be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps its fate that today is the 4th of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom, not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution — but from Tamil Nadu.”

Fun fact: Above mentioned speech was delivered on a tank with a megaphone in…

Language of delivery: Cobol

***

P.S. I am currently working on an online anthology of SMK’s written and spoken works. Please leave contact details below to be informed when the repository is live.