SriGobbledygook

When relating a tragedy, story-tellers seem to employ a time-tested strategy: unravel the events as experienced by one of the victims. Think, for example, of Titanic, where the fate of the ocean liner hit the rocks along with the fate of the two young lovers aboard the ship. Or, consider Pearl Harbor, where once more a tale of love and loss escorted the attack on the American port into our consciousness. Moving away from cinema, the viewpoint of one or a few of many victims is also the spine of documentaries that detail natural and man-made disasters. Could it be that we are better at extrapolating the misfortune of one of the victims – chosen by the auteur and intimately introduced to us over the course of the narrative – to sympathize with the tragedy of the many, than at gauging the impact on each individual when presented with the account of the trials of an impersonal mass of people? What made me wonder about this style of narration being a strategy is a Kannada movie I ...

The debate started pulsing sometime in the second week of July. Its rhythm rose rapidly as the week unfolded and reached a crescendo by the end of the week. The debate was neither new nor has it been settled for ever. It is something that occupies our thoughts when we witness unexpected success. The success, of course, is unexpected because of those succeeding and our appraisals of them. Kevin Anderson, who reached the Wimbledon final, and the Three Lions, who reached the semi-final of the FIFA World Cup 2018, had divided sports fans into the pack that labelled them lucky and the pack that lauded their labor. The luck versus labor debate rests largely on your definition and perception of luck. When luck is viewed as a set of factors that occurred and so carried someone to success despite minimal or no effort on their part, luck is bound to trouble the self-averred meritocracy. Given their maxim of effort alone elevates, they have no choice but to expend effort on casting the succ...

I do not favour night shows, but we had no choice. Two new movies, starring celebrated heroes of Sandalwood, had edged this one out of the limelight and the sunlight. As we walked to the cinema hall's entrance, some people could be heard grumbling in discontent. They were bemused that this movie was being screened instead of their favourite superstar's most recent mishit. The film opens with a comic scenario in a prison gaurds' office. The officer, engrossed in a teleserial, teeters at the threshold, his attention demanded by both Sita entering a pyre and a death-row convict jumping over the wall. The rest of the movie is an escape with the felon - a highly-priced one, carrying a bounty of ten lakhs. As fate should have it, the felon hitchhikes with a former executioner who is on his way to the central prison. The old man has been invited to train new recruits in eradicating culprits and thus maintaining law and order. Along the way, these two gentlemen meet an eloped ...

As a series of dots were arranged to form the words SUPER STAR on the screen, there was a harmony of whistles. Yet, I also noticed something about the background score: as far as I could remember, this score was not the signature tune with which the words appeared. Was this meant to signal a departure from what one has come to expect from his movies? I hoped so, and also that the departure would be worthwhile. There were howls, roars, and more whistles as Thalaiva appeared on the screen for the first time, and the audio arrangement persisted for much of the introductory sequence as he traded the prisoner's garb for an elegant suit, an exquisite wrist watch, and shades that only he could possibly carry off. Briefly, we were able to hear the conversations among the characters, till they arrived at the site where the 'title monologue' would be uttered by Thalaiva. The roars reached a crescendo as we saw Thaliava gesticulate and mouth the now immortal lines packaged into the...

Disguised to blend in with the air-strip’s grassy surroundings, he is trying to hack into the control systems of a plane about to take off. His aim is to keep the plane on ground. To his annoyance, the control systems he hoped to tinker with are well shielded against intrusion. As he desperately swipes on the screen of his tab, looking for anything he can disrupt, he notices someone sprinting towards the plane. It is his dapper cohort, decked out in a bespoke suit, and he is determined to foil take off by any means necessary. He is the hero, who must savor risk and not seek safety. And so, he gets on the plane, ‘on’ and not ‘in’, as he clarifies to his prostrate colleague on the grass. I remember the old adage that packing light is the best way to travel well. With this opening sequence began a flight of fancy, insisting you leave behind the unwieldy load of logic before you get onboard. Many in the audience whistled affirmatively. I wonder if they squirmed in their seats watching the...

As the sun adorned the zenith, the last fault in this man's stars was set right. He could finally shed his muffler, but one question remained: should he pop his pop identity or endure the popping of a few blisters instead? The question was significant as he would soon have to rid himself of a muffling cough that everyone recognized him by.  As he revealed recently, many others had got him hot under his collar, and so the muffler had to go. Pop identities, of course, can always be reinvented. Following this revelation, he assumed a new identity, having had his heavies throw out the raving ones interrupting the ceremony.  To be fair to the raving ones, they seemed merely drunk on idealism and hung up on a hash of honesty – stuff that had been served at the party they had thrown together with the current host. The defining characteristic of their party had been that it admitted the Mango People: the commoners, who could, at best, crave to savor a mango, at least those that ...

Spies and charlatans assume new names to dupe others. Some people respell names or respond to new ones, in an attempt to secure the shibboleths to future peace and prosperity; some, to rid themselves of taunts. Still others rechristen themselves to signify a renewal that involves the death of a part of their erstwhile identity to enable the development of more desirable traits. With the English label of my beloved hometown altered in nostalgia, I hope the city doesn't merely revel in its past glory, but changes for the better. I do admit that change implies relinquishing some qualities and cultivating new ones; and that better, like any other adjective, is subjective. A few hundred engineers graduate from the various engineering colleges in the city each year. A significant number of these engineers are from the city or will have fallen in love with it during their not-less-than four-year stay. But for a couple of companies with operations in and around the city, it is usually t...

Learning is a progression through abstractions, each abstraction adding details to what you already know. As in a video game, the complexity increases with each level, needing you to use skills from the previous levels to secure passage to the next. Consider what you learnt about India's independence. Initially, you were told that Mahatma Gandhi got India freedom. Then, lest you should view Gandhi as an all-conquering comic-book superhero, you learnt that he used non-violent satyagraha and fasts unto death to defeat the colonizers. Often, it is the fasting that is iterated. But, this incongruous way of beating someone makes you wonder if the British were so compassionate that they departed a wealthy colony to let one man live. With more effort, you likely found out that Indians refused to submit to the British. Indians, desiring freedom, were infused with a passion that hadn’t manifested as violence largely due to the restraint enforced by Gandhi. If Gandhi were to die, this ...

I had written a blog post on why the SMS, and other forms of instant messaging, are preferable to phone calls: casual conversations bereft of any urgency are not hampered by the delay in verbal exchanges; there is always a trail to refresh your memory in case of abruptly paused conversations; it is easier to lie and to maintain the consistency of the lie, be it innocuous or otherwise; texting affords greater privacy in an age we are almost always surrounded by people; perhaps most importantly, you can choose your words wisely, at least after reading what you've typed in. I still find it comfortable to trade thoughts in short bursts of text rather than by blurting into a phone. But conversations in recent months have made me want to call, largely because of the person at the other end.  SMS and IM work for me because I try to use the same phraseology and sentence structure in speech as I do in writing, and yearn to say something clever. Indeed my speech is often filled with pa...

The Nirbhaya episode sounded a chilling alarm to the urban Indian woman. The peals of that alarm have been kept from dying down and even amplified by the Shakti Mills case and the many other cases of rape and sexual assault that have been reported since. Recent reports from Bangalore of a 22-year old's being abducted and ravaged in a moving car, and a 19-year old inebriated and assaulted by a one-time boyfriend have kept the IT capital from feigning ignorance of the alarm. Yet, it was the story that jumped at Bangaloreans in between these two reports that shocked them into focused silence: the story of the six-year old girl who was molested at her upmarket East Bangalore school.  The reaction to this story has come alive in the physical word, breaking free from the condemnations and demands for justice on the internet. Unchecked outrage has been directed at the school authorities for their insensitive attempt at hiding the horrid happening on campus, and at the police for a ...

Although an imminent naming ceremony does not necessarily follow a wedding, some brave souls do take that stride and cross the crevice between a married couple and a family. The hesitation and reluctance of the majority may be rooted in an awareness of the rising human population that threatens to soon be verminous, the financial costs and insecure incomes, or the gamble that procreation is. In the spacious corridor outside the labour wards, two men sat in the opposite rows of seats. Both would occasionally acknowledge the other's presence with a smile when they looked up from their smartphones, waiting for data to download, or when they occasionally paced the hallway and nearly bumped into each other because they weren't looking up. With their wives in labour, they had opted to be alone in their anticipation, only to be anxiously lonely. A nurse emerged from the ward and invited one of them, Shiv, in, so that he could cut the umbilical cord. He went in grinning, dabb...

If you lived in the same city through your school and college days, you might be able to relate to this more readily. I got all my formal education in Mysore. Most of my fellow students from primary and higher primary school went to the very high school I did; then, many of us attended the same Pre-University college; quite a few of us pursued our Bachelor of Engineering degrees on the same campus. When you grow up with someone, you trust you know them. Then, you discover some traits that threaten your surety, and often go on to confront aspects so radical that you're convinced that you never knew them. Much of this experience is, of course, mutual, and in keeping with the evolution of individuals. You do, in fact, go through a similar course of recognition, realization, and repudiation while considering your own evolution. And, while the circumstances you find yourself in fuel this evolution, some happenings catalyze and rapidly crystallize your worldview. Admission to educati...

A slew of well-intentioned commandments, which are pithy about the goal and hazy about how to reach it; instructions, based on the interpretation of your parents, on how to practise the commandments; your observations in seclusion and corresponding tinkering with what you are doing; advice from all and sundry drawn from their understanding of some of the commandments; an ongoing reinterpretation of the commandments and subsequent exhortations by experts to reform your practice; more conscious observation and retraining; and finally, you advocate a particular interpretation. These stages sound very familiar, don't they, reminding you of the process of religious indoctrination, and the inculcation and imbibing of rites and rituals?  Now, consider oral hygiene. The commandment - thou shall keep thy mouth clean. The goal is unambiguous, but not so the means. The goal is a combination of burnishing your teeth to a sparkling white, ridding the gaps between your teeth of once-comest...

"What inspired you to do this?" That was the one question I had for him. In response, he recounted his childhood in the water-deficient Coimbatore region of Tamil Nadu. When the water was in supply, he'd had to stand in line at 11 in the night to get water the next morning - a routine that spanned his teens and lasted till he turned 22, when he moved out to pursue a job after college.  Today, he is an upwardly mobile middle-class Bangalorean, working  –  as is typical for the demographic  – with a multinational technology company. He lives in a three-bedroom house in Mariyannapalya, a house that is a testament to his passion for, and his awareness of his obligation towards, sustaining the environment.  The house is built with mud bricks, which, I faintly recall, are known to keep both the heat and cold outside from bothering the inhabitants as much as they do in ordinary constructions. The house also has a sky light that lessens dependenc...

Thinking twice or thrice about picking up that ticket online, not because it was exorbitantly priced, but because other expenses had 'eaten into' your savings; cringing at the cost of the nibbles you'd have to buy during a five to six hour stay at the stadium; taking the bus to the office for a week to make up for the fuel consumed by the long trip to the stadium, because the bus fares aren't as low as they used to be; choosing to watch the games from home instead, only to flip channels in between to find the programming on the news channels more amusing and compelling. The 2014 edition of the IPL is in its final week, and most of us barely noticed.  Although IPL had been diagnosed with an insidious sclerosis ever since symptoms of betting and match-fixing became visible to the world, few would've anticipated the tournament's being confined to the apolitical small talk space of conversations. But, drama on the field is only interesting when there is an unc...

Analyzing the Aam Aadmi Party's debut on the national stage, respected political scientist and psephologist, Mr. Yogendra Yadav, in various interviews, offered some interesting insights. He highlighted the positives: the party's having found a wide support base of enthusiastic volunteers across the country even in its infancy; the more than one crore votes that the party got from the 434 constituencies it contested; the four seats that it secured, comparable to the first-time tallies of parties like the BJP and BSP; the party's having emerged as the alternative to the incumbent and as the foremost challenger of the victor in Punjab and Delhi, respectively. At the same time, he also acknowledged the alienation that resulted from the AAP's abdication of the seat of power in Delhi - a unilateral decision, unlike the one to form the government, devoid of a 'referendum.' The alienation, of course, made voters skeptical of AAP's viability as an alternative t...

Now that Mr. Narendra Modi, and by association, the BJP, has a majority in the Lok Sabha, we know who the next PM will be. The speculation on who will be chosen by him as his cabinet colleagues, however, does persist. The intrigue, specifically, surrounds the portfolios that the once senior, now seen as senile and surplus, leaders may be handed.  The sleight of hand in picking contestants for the polls excluded some of them and led to one leader's rather conspicuous expulsion from the party. A few others who could not be cold shouldered without sufficient padding, were pushed out of the constituencies of their choice, or divested of all choice. Yet, you must wonder if the BJP might have preferred to be short of a few seats in Parliament that are now to be occupied, health permitting, by these leaders blessed with wonderful longevity. Among the few leaders who gracefully retired from electoral politics before the polls, albeit to make way for his son, was former Finance Mi...

I had obstinately refused to vote and vigorously defended my right to not vote. This time, however, with a new candidate, a columnist of decent repute, contesting from Mysore, I had half a mind to vote and arrived in my hometown from Bangalore on the night preceding the polling day. Once the public meetings and rallies cease to be held, 48 hours before the election, the party cadres start knocking on doors, handing out pamphlets for one last time, exhorting voters to choose their party's candidate. While walking this last long mile, the cadres also hand out small slips having the details of where one is to vote, something they themselves glean from the electoral rolls published by the Election Commission of India. During every  past election, I had consigned both the pamphlets and the slips to the bin. Now, I gathered the pamphlets and the slips to see where I might have to go to vote. To my disappointment, I did not find a slip with my name on it, though everyone else at home h...

Leaders of several political parties have cautioned us of two Modi traits: an inadequately masked majoritarianism and an autocratic abuse of authority. Intending to be incisive, some have evoked the epitome of ethnic imperialism - the German who caused the death of tens of millions of people before killing himself in his bunker. Independent India, of course, has experienced emergency, and the woman who threatened her, it is well documented, had ambitions of being an empress, if only one elected endlessly by the voters as per her will. Now, I am not sure if Modi has such ambitions, but I only intend to make the case that he will mostly be foiled if he pursues them. The unity that we see in the BJP, notwithstanding the piqued proclamations of leaders who have been political deadwood for a while, is perhaps expedient and inadvertent and not an enthusiastic endorsement of the Gujarat CM. The BJP is devoid of leadership, and given the similarity of its manifesto to that of the Congres...