When I said goodbye
I wondered
If I'd left something behind.
Then it came to me.
As long as you say goodbye
There's always something left behind.

From my last visit to Bangalore

An astrologer's ad scrolled on local cable channel:

Without any question i will tell you problem. 100% solution with guarantee card. Heart problems, love, marriage, relief, etc will be solved. Specialization in health and business problems.

My thoughts as I flipped through the current issue of Down to Earth:

Tiger farming
According to a new proposal to save tigers, its better to commercially farm them, because we havent been able to stop illegal poaching so far. God!! What's with this urge to domesticate, to use, to consume?! Tigers are not an essential commodity, I thought. Maybe am wrong. Somehow, I found this proposal very weird.

Public hearing for Posco project in Orissa inconclusive

The agitators received a boost with leaders of Orissa Gana Parishad, cpi, cpi(m) and the Janata Dal (s) submitting a memorandum to the prime minister demanding shifting of the project. “Let the project be shifted to barren stretches instead of fertile agricultural land,” the memorandum said.

Now, really? Look who's talking!

Ahmedabad's Narmada water supply scheme not working out

What do we get after drowning all those villages and evacuating thousands of people? A water supply sytem which is so unviable, no one wants it.

Hitchhiker

Vinod Joseph sent me his book Hitchhiker and asked me to review it. So, here it is:

Ebenezer, the protagonist, is a second-generation converted Christian. Pre-conversion, his family belonged to a backward caste, and was regarded untouchable. The conversion doesn’t change their social status much.

But what Ebenezer is bothered about is securing admission into a top engineering college. A couple of months before his exams, he is injured and his mother and sister killed in a caste riot, and he is unable to take the exams. His classmates go their ways, some making it to the top institutes, some not.

Ebenezer eventually fails to get into any of the top or even middle-rank engineering institutes, and enrols for a diploma in a course-vending firm, where he meets Gayatri, the daughter of a rich Hindu rightist. They later end up working together in Mumbai, and falling in love. There is the predictable uproar by Gayatri’s family, and they gradually wean her away.

Desperate to get Gayatri back, Ebenezer converts to Hinduism on an impulse. That seals his love affair, because Gayatri had always wanted him ‘just as he was.’ The Global Evangelical Church, to which his family owes allegiance, is eager to get him back, though. But Ebenezer has had enough with religion. That, now, is the summary of the story.

I came away from the book untouched, unmoved, except for the last couple of pages. Many reasons for this:
i) Too many characters, too little characterisation: People keep coming in through various stages of the book and disappearing just as fast. The story would have lost nothing if some characters weren’t there at all. Like Ebenezer’s numerous friends. Or his teachers. What happens is we end up with too many loose ends. Halfway through the book, I stopped raising eyebrows when the next character popped in and out.

Also, I hardly get to know the characters intimately, even the main ones, barring Ebenezer perhaps. What do I know about Gayatri, except that she’s Ebenezer’s lady love and is the daughter of a wealthy Hindu upper class man? How does she look like? What was their love affair like? Passionate? Platonic? Did they get to create a lot of memories together? Well, I don’t know.

ii) Imbalanced plot: Much time is spent on describing how Ebenezer and his friends are gearing up for the exams, what their dreams are, etc. Now, really, in middle-class India, don’t we know all this? And even if someone didn’t, I think the initial chapters needed some pace.

The initial chapters are filled with such detail that the lack of it in the later ones shows.

iii) Distractions: I agree it’s tempting to narrate all the stories you know. And, Vinod realizes that each of us has one. But frankly, unless you tie them all up, they are like sudden voices in the dark, which leave you unsure from which direction they came, or whether you heard them at all. Example: the death of Ebenezer’s colleague’s wife in the Gujarat riots. And the whole sub-plot about the NRI Gujarati family in UK. And various people’s rambling opinions on world events.

Though the Gujarati family was linked to Gayatri’s dad, did it help in the development of the plot? Using rich sub-plots can be great, but they need to be weaved into the story, else they stand out.

iv) Editing, or the lack of it: Did this book pass under the blue pencil at all? I don’t think so. Innumerable idiomatic, punctuation, and grammatical mistakes abound. Also, for God’s sake, why has a sans serif font been used? (Looks like Arial!!) It’s quite an effort for the eye to go through page after page of sans serif font. Use serif font when you have a lot of text - that’s the first lesson you learn in page layout.

v) Drama: Except towards the end of the story when Ebenezer converts to Hinduism, the story lacks in drama, the capacity to move, the capacity to touch. When Ebenezer’s mother and sister died, why didn’t I feel anything?

Hitchhiker does have a lot of dialogue, which is good. If some of the sub-plots were gotten rid of and some strengthened, the characters more rounded and given depth, and some technical things like editing taken care of, the story definitely has something going for it.

Vinod, thank you for sending the book, and am really sorry this took so long. Keep in touch.

Smart bus drivers?

As a kid, my hubby Linc would wonder, "How do bus drivers know exactly where each person is gonna get off?"






Sometimes, he still manages to come up with similar original thinking.

Bachche wala ghat

Even the sound of it chills me inside. A place where children are given a sort of a half-burial. It seems Hindu law doesnt provide for cremating children below three years. I didnt know about this.

At first glance, I thought this was something to do with the UP High Court's ruling on minorities. Must say plesantly surprised to know why Hindu priests want to boycott Uttar Pradesh polls. For whatever reason, save the river.

A lil adda for the soul

I didnt whiz past them yesterday. I had seen them just once before, but obviously they were regulars. They would gather in front of the metro station for a little adda, just before heading home... you know, that lil bit with friends which makes all the difference between drudgery and living.

They were about 7-8 men, all dressed in either semi-cotton or terycot shirts and trousers with their shirts hanging out, and seemed to be animatedly discussing something. And, as it happens, there were cross-conversations that were part of the bigger conversation. A man, perhaps the oldest in the group, was sitting down in the centre of the group on a stool borrowed from the street food vendors.

But I couldnt eavesdrop, I couldnt understand what they were talkin about. Theirs was a language which made no sound. Fingers danced about in the air angrily, and lips moved. But it was all silence to me.

Perhaps that's how it feels to be left out.

A city in conversation

People in Kolkata are always talking to each other, even if they are perfect strangers. After I got into the auto, the autowallah waved at a Punjabi woman on the street, and then turned back to me and said, "She is a very good woman. She is much respected here." When I said, 'Huh,' he just continued, 'She is friends with everyone in the area. That is what matters - your behaviour with people. Poisha to sabhai kamachhe (roughly translated, it'd mean, 'No big deal about earning money, everyone does it.')' I couldn't figure out why he delivered this monologue, but then, smiled at him and nodded. By now I know. It is a city forever in conversation. We love to talk here.

I had wanted to post something a couple of days ago, but varied news about Nandigram has been pouring in, and has been quite depressing. I love Suman Kabir's daily talk show on current affairs on Tara Bangla. As a poet-singer, Suman is original, refreshing, and stays with you. But that's just part of the story. He's almost a cult figure here. He changed his name from Suman to Suman Kabir, so that he'd be neither Hindu nor Muslim. What I like about his show is his complete ease with the camera, perhaps because he's just being himself. His smiles are spontaneous. When something worries him, it shows. He's been doing a series of shows on Nandigram and related events. In one episode, a doctor, who went as part of a team to Nandigram, said there were about 400-500 people missing from the villages. He had many other gruesome things to tell. At the end of the show, Suman asked his viewers to not write to him, or to anyone in West Bengal, because it would be in vain.

There are reports that when the police tried to enter Nandigram, villagers pelted stones at them and damaged their vehicles. That's when the police opened fire at the villagers, killing three.


Unconfirmed reports say that around 10 people were killed and nearly 50 were injured in the clashes.


If nothing else, such crimes as were committed here today would have guaranteed the end of the road for the state government anywhere else in India.

Singur update

A couple of days ago, Buddha Babu's government was forced to tell the High Court that of the 900 or so acres acquired, they had consent letters for only 300.

Also, today we come to know that TATA will pay back the Rs 150 crore, which the government spent on acquiring land in Singur, in 90 years. Neat.

Linc read these reports on the front pages of Bartaman, a leading Bangla daily. At home, we get two other newspapers: The Statesman and the Times of India. Though The Statesman carried today's bit, I think it missed the High Court story. TOI, of course, had no mention of either stories. And I assume the rest of the media, both Bangla and English, passed it over. I'd love to be corrected, though.

This is how the CPI-M has conducted business over the years. Remember, information is power?