To Madam, with love

The title is a dead give away. This women's day, I would like to pay my obeisance to my favourite teacher who, 24 years later, continues to be the guiding light to many students till this day. 

It was in nov 1982 that I first met her. She was our English teacher in class 5, at Visakha valley school, visakhapatnam. The school, back then, was one of the two better known schools in vizag, the other being timpany. One could sense that she was impactful right from the very beginning. Thanks to dad's transfer, I joined that school with barely 4 months remaining in that academic year. Not only did she teach English in such a way that one learnt to love the language, she also found I was struggling with my new third language, Sanskrit, and put in a good word to that teacher to help me with that subject. Poems were never taught, she'd bring them alive in the classroom. There was a poem with the title 'clothesline'. She brought in a rope, used wooden clips and asked a few of us to hang our handkerchiefs there. Then she composed a tune and we sang to that tune. 31 years later, I can still recall the lyrics although I can't remember what I ate for dinner yesterday. It went 'hand in hand, they dance in a row, hither and thither and to and fro...'

Few months later, All India radio wanted to bring together students from all over vizag to sing patriotic songs to be aired on children's day. All 3 of us, my elder brother, younger sister and I got selected for the school choir, a group of about 20 students. This teacher introduced a Marathi folk song to us. She was herself a tamilian, the group was cosmopolitan with hardly one or two maharashtrians, but in 15 days time, that song was learnt.  It was for the competitive section of that program and our school ended up winning it. What's more, the 3 of us, have sung that song at various fora, and have collected a smattering of prizes at different schools (thanks, in no small measure, to dad's frequent transfers). She told us mythological stories during free periods when other teachers would bunk their classes. At other times, she would break us up into teams and hold inpromptu general knowledge quizzes. Until then, I would only read the sports page; she kindled interest in the others. 

We moved to Hyderabad in 1985 and teacher herself followed her husband who was transferred to Vijayawada. We kept in touch sparsely over inland letters but eventually lost touch. The school she joined in Vijayawada won a national level televised school quiz and it wasn't difficult to guess who was behind it.

In 1988, dad was transferred again, this time to New Delhi. We joined a govt aided school as we were told that school not only produced good results but also focussed on instilling good values. I chose the commerce stream. Imagine my surprise when the same teacher walks in to my Class 11 as subject teacher for economics ! 

Once again, she stood out. The average score of the class in statistics and economics was much higher than all other subjects. She continued to engage the students across the school in music, quiz and added dramatics to her repertoire. She wrote a satirical piece on elections, with the theme being that Sage Narad became curious to find out why there was sudden frenzy in India and discovered that elections were round the corner. His observations were backed by content juxtaposed with popular Hindi film songs. With no make up, except a hurriedly wrapped dhoti below my school white shirt, I played Narad. It was an instant hit and there were encore performances over the next year or so. Content was king. I didn't need to slog it out in economics in higher studies thereafter as she always taught us to learn with graphs and write in our own words. 

I'm sure there are many who would have experienced great teachers. But I can't imagine so many qualities in one teacher. 

She had her quirks too - if she found the class boisterous, she would simply put up a glum face and walk back to the staff room and refuse to come out until we all apologized. Can you imagine doing that in high school ? But we did and she'd come back and give us a long lecture. She was also not shy of using the long handle when it was absolutely necessary. 

I met her in 2010 after 20 years but have again lost touch with her. She's retired now but is influencing much younger kids through teaching them music and bhajans. 

Salute, nay, shastrang pranams, to Nalini Padmanabhan madam, fondly known as Nalini teacher to generations of students at DTEA janakpuri school. And to all those selfless women who put careers of youngsters ahead of their own lives and speak proudly of their wards even today. 

The 'Om Namah Sivaya' weekend

There comes a time when you want to try  something you have never done before, when self-doubts arise along the way, and happy with the result, you wonder what took you so long ? Well, people do it all the time, I've often scoffed at relatives who did; now I realise there's nothing to lose and much to gain.

I decided this last Friday would be an ideal time to take a day off from work. Thursday was Mahasivarathri day, a day custom prescribes that you fast through the day, engage in prayers through the night and break fast only the following day after daybreak. 

I shopped for fruits and juices and decided to try it out. I also decided to use  multimedia to support the attempt at staying up all night.

Through the working day on Thursday, I survived on fruits and liquids. May not sound like much to most readers but consider this. If I get delayed on any of my meals by more than an hour, I get a splitting headache. I never really liked fruits - the odd apple or banana here and there are fine but I never believed I could eat fruits for breakfast or lunch. I usually have my breakfast around 815 am, lunch around 2 pm and dinner around 8 pm. I don't indulge in snacks in the interim except a few cups of tea here and there. By 7 in the evening, I'm usually hungry, 745 the stomach starts growling and by 8, it starts to sound the bell for dinner. Not the ordinary bells, more the fire engine type - the hunger better be extinguished immediately or else Siva-thandavam happens. If stuck in office, I can devour a full pack of cream biscuits in no time ! 

Not only did I survive on fruits, I never really felt hunger pangs. What's more, I had absolutely nothing after sunset except water.  

Sleep is another aspect that I've had difficulty controlling. When most people are preparing for dinner, atleast my north and East Indian friends, I'm usually done for the day. It takes a compelling event, something like a live cricket match, to make me stay awake. On Sundays and holidays, I like to have a heavy lunch and then take a snooze. 

It must be some divine intervention that I never really felt sleepy that night. I had prayer scripts to read and some peace chants to do, but would it last me the whole night ? It didn't, but there's plenty of religious material on YouTube that can keep you company during the wee hours. 

What happened the following morning was an anti climax. The plan was to take an early bath, have a sumptuous breakfast and then switch off for the rest of the morning. Didn't happen. Despite being tired, I simply couldn't drop off to sleep. 2 days later I still feel somewhat jet-lagged !

I know that the deeply religious fast quite regularly - Hindus, Muslims, Jewish, et al.  I don't feel deeply religious - atleast not yet - but I liked this experience and I'm inclined to try more often. 

Being Ishant..

Ishant sharma has today become the best Indian bowler on New Zealand soil in terms of figures for one test match. That's a huge record considering that there have been many big names representing India in that country over a long period of time.

If you looked at ishant's one day record over the last 10 one dayers or so, he easily has the worst economy rate. When someone gets stuck into him, Ishant loses control completely, runs in harder, starts spraying around and when the ball disappears over the ropes, breaks into a sorry smile and looks to Dhoni seeking to be forgiven.

Tests, especially on bowler friendly overseas soil has been another matter. You can't say he's all class, but you can't fault him on effort. He runs in hard, all day and keeps trying his best. When he lands it right, the best in the business are tested. One does feel that if he were to trim his hair a little, he might be able to see what he should be aiming at, but we'll keep that for later. He has become Indian bowling unit's favourite whipping boy and we need to rein it in a little today. 

Well done Ishant, stay fit, and hopefully we can soon see you spearheading the Indian new ball attack soon with success.   When that happens, I'm sure you'll find a hairstylist who can cure your fear of looking less menacing if you trimmed your hair.

A Bibliophile’s Tribute

 

It’s been a year since I enrolled myself as a member at justbooks.com. The experience has been rewarding at many levels. I have a considerable collection of books, accumulated over the best part of the last 3 decades. My first real passion was (perhaps, is?) for cricket and I read a lot of cricket autobiographies and biographies through my teens. Secunderabad Club, of which my dad was a member for a few years, had a fantastic collection of cricket books and I read books by Neville Cardus, Don Bradman, Dennis Lillee, Clive Lloyd, Fred Trueman, Richie Benaud and whatever else I could lay my hands on those days. After that phase, I lapsed into classic whodunits – books by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, a bit of Alistair Maclean. I tried sundry fiction written closer to modern era, but apart from Frederick Forsyth, did not really like much else. Into college, and I only read Wodehouse. A great stress-reliever, you have to place a heavy piece of fabric like a towel, between your clenched teeth if you happen to read Wodehouse while on a train or aircraft, lest people question your sanity levels. When I began my working career, I decided I better get a bit more serious now, and started reading management and business books. Every now and then, I would get back to some light reading and that’s when I started collecting RK Narayan’s books. I have almost the entire collection and if you like your books to relate to the middle-class Indian life, there’s no one better than RK Narayan. I happened to move to Singapore a few years later. One of the best parts of the Singaporean life is their public library. You get to become a library member for a song, are allowed to borrow 4 books at a time, have the entire world’s literature at your disposal, can pick up and drop your books at any of their completely digitally tagged, almost unmanned libraries across the country - luxuries that you can’t find anywhere in the world. There, my favourite section was world history : books of the world wars and characters from that era like Churchill, Hitler, Anne Frank etc., biographies of world leaders such as Che Guevara, Charlie Chaplin, Kennedy and so on… Back home, I developed a renewed passion for Indian history and started accumulating books on Indian leaders, especially those by foreign authors and their perspectives of India’s struggle for freedom. By now, the shelves had started splitting and furniture acquisition to accommodate books became necessary. I never tried Kindle as I always liked to hold books in my hands and often fall asleep with them by my pillow. It was by chance that I dropped into a justbooks.com outlet, got hooked and have read rather vigorously over the last year to derive best value out of the annual membership fee and the allowance of reading 2 books at a time. They have a system similar to Singapore, albeit at a smaller scale; just pick up your books from any of their libraries and you can return them anywhere else. You don’t have to speak to anyone – it’s ‘e-nabled’. I must have read atleast 26 books, this last year, drawing from all of my favourite subjects. Short stories, which I must have read fleetingly earlier, now form a central part. But this piece isn’t about my favourite books or justbooks.com.

 

I’ve just said I’ve started really liking short stories. Difficult to say ‘why’. Perhaps I have reached that stage of my life when I would rather read the whole story at one go, than chew it in parts. Sports biographies do interest me, but I already know the stories. Management and business books typically talk down to you and you end up feeling ‘why can’t I do that’. It causes more stress than relaxation. They need you to concentrate when all you want to do is to read for the pleasure of reading. Humour is, well, not serious enough. Short stories must be told crisply, must maintain the readers’ interest right through, and give you a ‘twist’ within that short span, usually right at the end. But this isn’t just about short stories.

 

I’ve just read, rather breezed through, a translation of short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto. Born and brought up in India, torn away to Pakistan after partition, died a miserable, lonely death at the age of 42, but in those young years wrote over 250 stories in Urdu, some of them deemed so controversial that he was tried for blasphemy and obscenity several times. His writings mostly conveyed an overhang of depression, ridden with melancholy, reflective of those turbulent times either side of partition, when the unsuspecting common man gained little and lost much from this violent, mass-uprooting from either side of what became national borders. His stories glide easily and provide you a mental landscape without attempting to paint them for you, certainly different from most other short story writers. It would seem that neither India nor Pakistan really promoted Manto’s works much; most of the attention to his work has come posthumously and that too closer to his centenary year, a couple of years ago. But this isn’t about Manto either.

 

Aatish Taseer is the author of this translated selection of works of Manto that I just finished reading in less than 2 hours. 158 pages in fewer than 2 hours is a personal best for me. Normally, I tend to read one or two stories and then take a break, but not with this one. Apparently Aatish has written a couple of novels and has also written for Wall Street, Times and other leading journals. He must have, it would be a colossal understatement to say that he writes very well. What’s really praiseworthy is that he, urban bred and brought up on a diet of Queen’s English as we all have been, learnt Urdu to really appreciate poetry of those times by literary greats, none lesser than his own grandfather Dr. MD Taseer. We would not know if the translation did justice to the Urdu original, but then there’s nothing that we can complain about, it’s an outstanding piece of work. But, this isn’t about Aatish Taseer either, atleast not entirely.

 

Aatish confesses that he learnt his Urdu from one Zafar Moradabadi and dedicates the book to him. Zafar, obviously a literary great in his own right, agreed to teach Aatish Urdu for a modest fee to keep poverty at bay. In post-partition India, when Hindi promotion became all-consuming, Urdu found few promoters, save perhaps the Bollywood dialogue-writers and lyricists. Zafar, not cast in that mould, was condemned to take up an accounting job to make ends meet. (Coming from a professional accountant that seems blasphemous ?) When computers trampled over his rather rudimentary skills, he undertook writing PhD theses for students for small fees so that they could do well in their careers. His own modest accommodation in a nondescript locality of Old Delhi had but one room where a family of 5 could hardly fit themselves in physically. This is about people like Zafar Moradabadi. And, about Manto at some level. People who get little or nothing for their talents when they are alive, but get celebrated years after their death from which their families gain little or nothing. Subramanya Bharati, the great Tamil poet is another who got similar treatment when he was alive. Zafar is still alive; Aatish has paid an enormous tribute by dedicating his book to him. This piece is an attempt at a tribute to people like Janaab Zafar Moradabadi, who’ve kept our multi-cultural traditions alive, who are victims of our times, gifted and talented, but living, unfortunately, despairingly, in the wrong era.

I said it !

When Chris Gayle mentioned that the dance moves he essayed evertytime he celebrated throughout this tournament was inspired by the current Youtube rage ‘Gangnam Style’, I logged in for a dekko. I must say I rather prefer Gayle’s all-grin version to the original. There’s something contagious about calypso celebration and one can’t help bu join in. 

The world T20 final is but a few hours away. The best two teams, Sri Lanka & West Indies, have made it to the finals and none of them are from the “Group of Death” where the pundits believed the favourites of the tournament were all-locked up. They plan an endearing brand of cricket that may be described as naturally aggressive or aggressively natural. Their captains have shown immense maturity and restrain in dealing with their talented men. Yet, it’s Sammy that one is rooting for today. May Gayle, Samuels, Bravo and Pollard drench the stadium with sixes and fours. May Narine and Badree bind the Lankan batsmen and may their fielders delight their spectators with their natural abilities. 

It’s not that I like Gayle or Samuels more than I like Mahela or Sanga. In fact, just the opposite.  In this day and age and for this version when England prefer axe-wielders like Luke Wright and Eoin Morgan over purists like Trott and Bell, Sri Lanka are blessed that they don’t need to make any drastic changes to their line-up in any form of the game. Where others go crass with their cross-batted hoicks or tangle themselves in scoops, Mahela continues to persuade the ball to all parts of the ground without ever appearing to actually apply power. He does try the odd hoick or a scoop but when he does try them, they appear, mysteriously, elegant. Exactly the same for Sangakkara although one has not seen him at his best in this tournament. Ajanta Mendis will surely baffle the Caribbean line-up, for most of them don’t bother watching his fingers at the point of release and will try to pick him off the pitch. That will be difficult. Malinga, may well continue to bowl his 4 overs at less than 24 no matter who the opposition. That will leave Gayle & Co., little choice, but to go after the others.  

Cut to the other camp. When they do well, there can be no team as entertaining or as effervescent as West Indies. Sri Lanka play spin very well, so Narine, Badree and the rollers like Samuels and Gayle, won’t have it easy against them. West Indies quicks these days are not as quick though Rampaul is very well capable of surprising everyone. But it’s their batting that is cause for joy. Johnson can hit them clean; Samuels has been consistent over the last year or so. When Bravo archs his back to drive or pull, you involuntarily feel for your own. Pollard can destroy effortlessly but tends to ration his brilliance. But it’s Gayle – if he goes well as he seems determined to, West Indies can rest assured that they will get atleast 160 if they bat first and chase whatever target if they bat last. 

There are pundits in every walk of life - Guys who bless themselves. You hear ‘I told you so’ everyday of your life – from stock market analysts, from the political arena, from teachers, from children, from your colleagues, even your maid servant. I stake no such claim. However, I did write a piece a few months ago hoping that Windies will win the world cup. When I hit my bed tonight, I hope to be able to quietly say to myself, triumphantly, ‘I said it’!

Life begins at…

There’s more to come…

 More responsibility,

More stress,

More concerns,

More to deliver,

More men to lead,

More to grind,

More long term, more work on strategy

More finesse required

More grey hair (& less hair),

More health concerns

More walks than runs

More sprouts, lesser potatoes

More candles to count,

More fluids, less solids

More aches, more pains

More pulls, more expectations

 
More books to read

More music, movies to enjoy

More landscape, less portrait

More to meditate,

More money to manage

More investments,

More candles to count,

More to conserve, less to spend

 

A lot more to give than to be given,

A lot more to learn,

A lot more to understand and be understood,

A whole lot more to look forward to… 

Beginning tomorrow…

Suresh Saraiya R.I.P

“Bob Willis is on top of his mark now at the far end. He’s got 3 slips, a gully, a cover, an extra cover, 6 on the off as he turns and runs in to bowl to Gavaskar, right arm with the ball, swaying back and forth, past umpire Swarup Kishen now and he bowls to Gavaskar and that one is pitched up and coming in, oh and what a lovely shot that is by Gavaskar. He leans in and drives it away elegantly between cover and extra cover, Gower and Lamb are after it, they’ve taken one, Gower gets to it first, just inside the deep cover boundary and he turns and flings it back to Bob Taylor at the top of the stumps, but not before Gavaskar and Vengsarkar, have completed two runs. There was not much power behind that stroke, just pure timing and placement. Gavaskar knew exactly where the gap, was as only he can, and he played that drive dissecting the two fielders and timed it just well enough and far enough for him to be able to come back for the second and take the strike again. And those two runs take Sunil Manohar Gavaskar onto to 30 and the score is 52 for the loss of one wicket. Baavan ek wicket ke nuksan Par.”

From a plain reading of the above, one would never be able to match the emotions that one would have felt had one heard these words from Suresh Saraiya over the radio in the early 80s. Listening to this live was as if Willis and Gavaskar were playing before our very eyes. I became a Sunil Gavaskar fan long before I saw him in action, thanks to Suresh Saraiya’s running commentary. Even if the batsman did not play a single stroke and left each ball outside the off-stump alone through to the wicket keeper for a maiden over, Suresh Saraiya had a different description of each delivery and the batsman’s technique each time. I imagined myself playing like each batsman or bowler that he had described to us over the radio. The radio would be turned on long before the match started; just to hear Suresh Saraiya seeking expert comments before the match from past players like Pataudi or Jaisimha. The disturbance in the signal would create a feeling that the spectators were making noise in the background. At home, we didn’t have a particularly good radio; that meant that one had to sit right next to the in-built amplifier with an ear strained to its cover to catch the commentary. Every now and then the radio required a little tap or a shift in position to get a clearer reception. Not only for the Test Matches, you could hear Suresh Saraiya’s commentary for all major Ranji Trophy matches and you built an opinion about a player’s technique and whether he could eventually break into the Test side. One such player was Mohinder Amarnath and when you heard Suresh Saraiya describe his batting, you could not but get angry at the selectors for leaving him out. That, Lala Amarnath, Mohinder’s father, was one of the expert commentators for radio, had nothing to do with Suresh Saraiya’s comments. Those days, it was fun taking notes and keeping the score and checking R.Mohan’s report in The Hindu the following day.

As I grew up and we made progress to television, we saw for ourselves what Suresh Saraiya was earlier describing for us. From him and Bapu Nadkarni, we progressed to Narottam Puri and Sushil Doshi and then further to the Tony Greigs and Richie Benauds and we never returned. Although Suresh Saraiya continued his ball-to-ball commentary over the radio, we could hardly ever listen to him for a full session – except when one was travelling and the transistor was the only source of catching up with the cricket.

The era of professional commentators is over what with retired cricketers progressing seamlessly into a career in the media. But Suresh Saraiya will remain etched in memory; it was he who inspired a generation of youngsters to love the sport. Mr. Saraiya, R.I.P.