Black Slate to Black Robe

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I am starting with a fullstop....coz it now seems that my school life is finally over ! I prefer calling it school and not the boring 'university' !! It was the school that introduced me to benches, blackboards and chalk pieces...it was the school that introduced me to friendships, the chit-chats, and all the mischeifs....oh..those class-notes, homeworks and exams ! And boy ! Hadnt it been such wonderful 20 years... My longest love affair so far !! Starting from a black slate and ending in a black robe with all the beautiful colours in between...

Now its back to responsibilty, ownership and paycheques.... :) And this affair might just beat my previous one's record, though they say first love is always the best !

Jodha Akbar

There is a lot of talk on who Jodhaa actually is !? Is she a wife of Akbar? or Is she the daughter-in-law of Akbar? I watched the movie yesterday and the movie was so appealing that I got tempted to conduct my own secondary research on the subject.

The name Jodhaa Bai is not from the literary manuscripts of those days. This was first used in 19th century by some historian (Tod) in one of his works. Akbar had primarily 4 wives, Ruqayya Sultan Begum, Salimah Sultan Begum, Mariam-uz-Zamani or Maan Kunwar
and Sakinah Banu Begum. He had married some more who were of not much historical significance. Out of these, Mariam-uz-Zamani was the closest that comes to the story of Jodhaa Bai that is shown in the movie. She was a Rajut princess by the name Maan Kunwar who later converted to Islam post-marriage. She was the daughter of the King of Amber (the present day Jaipur). She was the mother of Salim or Jahangir. We dont see the names of the queens in the popular literature like Ain-I-Akbari and Akbar-Nama because it was not appropriate to mention the queens' names as per the Islamic customs. Whatever we know therefore is from other not-so-popular sources.

Historians argue that Jodhaa Bai is in all probability actually the wife of Jahengir. As one of his wives had a distant connection with Jodhpur and thus she earned the nick name Jodhi Bai (not Jodhaa Bai). The Jodhaa-Akbar combination was first made popular with the blockbuster Mughal-E-Azaam. Bollywood is anyday more powerful than Age-Old History Text books and thus the popular belief is that Akbar and Jodha were indeed lovers.

Ashutosh should have actually followed the factual history rather than popular history and call the movie Kunwar-Akbar and not Jodhaa-Akbar. Many of the other facts were indeed represented correctly, for Fathepur-Sikri does have one part which has elements of Hinduism where Kunwar/ Jodhaa might have stayed. The first war sequence shown in the movie when Prince Jalauddin (later Akbar) was 13 years old is the Second Battle of Panipat (between Mughals and King Vikramaditya alias Hemur). Adham Khan (the brother of Akbar, aunt's son) indeed murders the Primeminister and enters the harem where Akbar was staying to assassinate him. He was given the exact death penalty as shown in the movie. Akbar's aunt Maham Anga was indeed shrewd and manipulative and hoped to rule herself by proxy through her son. Akbar indeed abolished the jizya and the pilgrimage taxes with which he became quite popular. The final fight sequence between Akbar and Sharifuddin Hussain (Akbar's Sister's Husband) must be pure Bollywood Masala as I couldnt find much evidence of it anywhere.

And a short note on the movie itself..The sets are grand and I got transported back to 16th century. The sword-fights, hand-to-hand combats, Bow-Arrows , Wild Elephants, Horses, Fantastic Costumes, Armored Suits, Elaborate Dances are some of the elements that will make one want to live in those ages. The love story was subtle and Ash was sporting her best looks..One would fall in love with the songs esp after they watch the movie as the piturization was out of the world. Akbar's tolerance for Hindus and Hindu customs was inspiring and should sure give a lesson or two to all the religious fanatics.

PS: The movie would have been great with English subtitles as half the movie was in Urdu! One has to otherwise put all his human instincts to exertion and interpret the dialogs from emotions of the characters!!

Motorcycle Diaries...

Your friends wont lend you their bike for learning if you dont know bike-riding and You are not allowed to buy one until you learn bike-riding...! This has been an eternal deadlock I been facing all my life...and one needs to break the chain boldly if at all one wants to really own a bike eventually...

So there I was one fine day, boldly asking one of my friends to lend me the bike as I had to go out ...I went to the bike but was unable even to start it ! I realized I needed an unselfish guru who can teach you not minding the prospective damages to his own bike. Thus came along my Guru - Mr. Anil Babu who took the biggest risk of teaching me the Fundamentals of Bike-Riding. It did not take many days for me to learn as I was very comfortable with gearless bikes already... 5 days passed and my guru was relieved to find that his bike was safe and sound with no depreciation in the capital asset.

Then I started venturing out on my own... !


Bike Ride 1: It was a solo act just to test out my prowess in handling the machine without instructions pouring into my ears from behind...I had no destination in mind...All I wanted was to survive the next 20 minutes. I started the bike with some effort (the bike was totally reluctant to move a bit u see... it was more afraid than I) and lo! I was on the road all by myself...The bike stopped exactly after 1 minute of the ride. It said 'Dude,this is too funny! We both gonna die if you drive this sane'. Cant give up on the first ride! I persisted till I eventually managed to reach a petrol station to fuel it up. When I came back to the hostel, I had to count my limbs and fingers and Thank God! they totaled up fine.

Bike Ride 2: I became more adventurous.. This time I claimed to my friend that I am an expert rider. So he allowed me to do the honors and he sat on the pillion seat. It was 12:00 in the midnight. The destination was India Gate - A place where you can reach at 1:00am and still have some good time pass(oh.. that kaala-khatta there !!). The bike stopped once or twice in the middle but we reached the spot :) I did it again. My first successful night travel.

Bike Ride 3: I now thought I am really an expert, so this time I ventured much further and proposed to a dear friend who was another bike-novice that I will take him till Sangam Theatre to buy the first day-midnight show tickets for Jodha Akbar. This I got to admit must be the worst bike-ride ever for anyone !! The bike stopped atleast 20 times at various crucial junctures (surely understating)...A Prado was right at our rear, and the driver started honking as if it was some kind of a honking contest..I felt as if an elephant is just gonna trample upon me. Then again it stopped at every single traffic signal! You stop at a traffic signal and you would get to hear so many beautiful gaalis in so many different native tongues. If one has to see the true diversity of India, it is at the traffic signals. Man! No orchestra can beat the kind of honks and gaalis you get to hear. My confidence got blown into smithereens this time. But mind you, Manugarras of the world are not among those who give up so easily.


Bike Ride 4: This was the first time I took courage to actually offer a girl a ride till Priyas. I knew that if anything like the ride before happened again, my morale as well my reputation as a reliable bike-rider would be put to rest and sent off to the nearest mortuary. I was too cautious not to let the clutch slip off from my hands and surprisingly managed a very safe and successful ride!! She was impressed. May be it was my guardian angel who actually rode the bike this time.

Bike Ride 5: Confidence restored, this time I offered my another friend, a ride till the nearest market. He got flabbergasted when I told him this was my Ride No-5. He seriously suspected something funny would happen and that he would find himself falling off the bike with my stunts. Nothing funny of that sort happened, but this time the bike stopped right in the middle of the road when I was taking a U-turn and an auto-rickshaw had to apply sudden brakes to stop just inches away from me. My heart took a small leap out of its bearings. He started swearing in the names of all the Gods he knew. I just smiled at him.

Its amazing how this world is still such a safe place with expert bike-riders like me loose on the roads.


PS: Commuters Beware! The next time you see a bike approaching wildly at you, do your prayers, it could very well be me ;)

Testimonial for Bobby Fischer ...

A Genius, A Mastermind, A Maverick, A Psycho, An Eccentric, and arguably The Greatest Chess Player Ever – one epithet wouldn’t suffice to describe Bobby Fischer. A school dropout with an IQ of an astonishing 180, he became US Chess Champion at the age of 14!! This was the guy who ended the Soviet domination of Chess and perhaps may have been the harbinger for Chess to become popular world-wide (all while he kept becoming more and more notorious).

Every sport produces a rebel. A rebel whose mind is wired completely different compared to their peers and one who gives two hoots to what the world thinks of him. If Tennis has John McEnroe, Football has Zinadine Zidane. It used to be a Herculean task for the organizers to make Bobby participate in a tournament. He demanded humungous prize amounts and stipulated hundreds of conditions which often ran into paragraphs and pages. Conditions unheard of before like, children should not eat chocolate while watching the tournament (because the wrappers produce rustle), the size and color of the squares on the chess board, that he should be allowed to wear dark glasses (so that the opponent can’t see his eye movements), to the extent that even the lavatory seats must be at a height that he wanted them to be!! – things if implemented would truly create the ‘Perfect Conditions for Playing Chess’.
He had a lot of objections with the format of Chess itself – the player playing with White pieces always begins the game giving that player a very slight positional advantage. To eliminate this advantage, Bobby proposed randomizing the positions of all the pieces behind the pawns. Then there would be 960 different starting positions for the chess pieces forcing the player playing White come out of his pre-prepared opening variations. Also, it’s very common that a better player may sometimes lose to a weaker player because of Time Pressure (while playing with a Chess Clock with each player given say 2 hours of play time). He patented an electronic Chess Clock which adds a few seconds to ones kitty after a player makes his move – a gem of an idea. This has now become an accepted international standard and is called the ‘Fischer Clock’.

He did crazy things like ‘bunking’ the inaugural ceremonies before tournaments, turning up late for the rounds and running away god-knows-where in between the tournament. He once called Garry Kasparov a ‘Dog’ ! He was also chased by the FBI for he was to be captured for some petty offences like tax evasion, and violating US sanctions (he played a tournament in Yugoslavia, which was under US sanctions) etc. The world didn’t knew where he used to live, whether he was alive or not, for more than 20 years since he won the World Championship after crushing the then soviet Champion Boris Spassky! The day he won the world championship title he even went to the extent of joining the Doomsday Cult – the Church of Worldwide God. There is a rumor that he once came online anonymously on the Internet and defeated Nigel Short, another chess prodigy, badly in a series of online chess games! He even appeared on radio sometimes in praise for 9/11 and addressing United States and Jews in all the possible abusive words including the f-ones!! He was once arrested for a short time in Pasedena, California and was made to face extremely uncouth police officers and underwent third degree of physical torture. He could never go back to US because he had a death penalty in his name.

I am quite poignant to write the article in the past tense as this ‘King of Chess’ got check-mated in life on January 17, 2007 due to a kidney failure. It’s quite saddening to the Chess World that we can no longer hear any more of his fascinating idiosyncrasies.

Classic !

The movie "A Roman Holiday" a 1950's romantic comedy, which I watched yesterday was simply out of the world. The movie is about a princess who gets totally bored with the royal life she is living which is full of schedules, meetings, interviews, fake smiles and appropriate gestures. She runs away from this world for one day and has an romantic adventure with the world outside the palace walls keeping her identity anonymous. The princess is the beautiful Audery Hepburn.......!! Hmm....Eh...where was I? sorry.. lost my thoughts for a sec..! yaa .. and then you have Gregory Peck who is a press reporter, who chances upon to meet her and longs to make a big story out of the Princess's misadventures. The movie is full of pranks and laughs that leaves one in a surreal dreamworld. A world seen through the eyes of an charming innocent girl.

The movie gave me the thought that - as much as we may crave for a luxurious life sometimes with having high-level meetings to having servants to wake you up and serve tea etc - that life is not all that beautiful. We do not cherish some of the little events in our lives and consider them as mere ordinaries. One should sometimes, give oneself a moment to ponder about the innumerable good things that happened in ones life - a life which in actuality might be far better off than any royal life !

Theory of Everything ...

We spend most of our time in mundane things like eating, sleeping, gossiping, watching movies and may be hanging out with friends. Some of us indulge ourselves in the comforts of this world. Yet some others cherish fighting under misguided principles and blind faith. We see news of cities getting destroyed with strife and terror. Others lead a much simpler life of waking up everyday, going to work, coming back, spend time with family and going to sleep. It feels so strange even to imagine that we are but a puny figment in the vast unimaginable universe? Lucky ones amongst us may live up to a hundred years. Our planet itself has been around for a 4.5 billion years and our life-time can be approximated to a zero when compared to it. The age of universe is 13.7 billion years !!

Recently I read the book "The Theory of Everything - by Stephen Hawking" and it took me into a world of stars, galaxies and black holes. There are a lot of things in the book which make you wonder who created this marvellous universe? The whole of the universe grew by a factor of 100 billion trillion trillion in 10 to the power of -32 seconds !! A gargantuan rate which we never can contemplate. A lot has happened in those nano nano nano seconds (dont know how to phrase such a miniscule number !). Within the first 100 seconds, the temperature of the universe cooled down to about a Billion Kelvin !! Aint kiddin :)

There are so many unanswered questions. What was the cause of the big bang? What used to exist before the big bang? Even if the velocity with which the particles flew away from each other was a billionth of a fraction lower than what it was, the whole of matter would have collapsed due to gravity. Who ensured that the velocity was just sufficient for the universe to continually expand and not contract? Why should gravity make things get attracted to each other rather then repel them from one another? The second law of Thermodynamics seems to run the whole universe. This law states that the Entropy (or disorder) of a system always tends to increase. That is why a tea cup gets shattered into a thousand shards rather than the thousand shards getting united to a single cup. The direction of Time was set to the direction of Entropy ensuring that we never see things like shards joing to a form a cup. Who set these directions? Since time moves forward, we see our past clearly. If only it was the otherway round, we would have taken birth (or got undeathed?!) from the graves and got younger everyday and go back finally in to the wombs of our mothers. Chandrashekar Limit decides the amount of mass a dying Star should shed so that it doesnt collapse into itself. And stars do exactly this, shed the right amount of mass in order to survive longer. Blackholes...now this is another big fascinating area where even time slows down. Are all these the works of GOD, even so, who created GOD in the first place?

Sometimes, when I think about these questions, it makes me feel that the whole world might be conspiring against me by hiding the answers to the questions. Am I a part of one big experiment that God is conducting? It gets very creepy to even think about it. 'Experiment' reminds of the HGTHG, in which in earth, the second most intelligent beings are actually humans, the first being 'rats' which are actually using humans as experiment objects which we never realise !!!

Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy has humorous answers to each of the intriguing questions. The creatures (not people!) in that book create a super duper computer ("Deep Thought") which is feeded the Ultimate Question. After about 4 million years to compute the answer and another 3 million years to check the answer, the comuter finally comes up with a numerical answer of "42" !!!!! When the creatures, who got flabberghasted, ask Deep Thought what the Ultimate Question was in the first place, it says it has no capacity to provide the question but that it will design a yet powerful computer to find the "Ultimate Question". This supercomputer turns out to be our dear planet Earth. And after 10 million years of waiting just before the Ultimate Question was getting unveiled, one fine day, earth just gets bulldozed by some species called "Vogons" because earth was a hindrance to their plans of an inter-galactical expressway !!

For now, I dont know the ultimate question but will suffice myself with the answer "42" !

Killing with PPTs !!!!

Of the countless woes that are borne by a hapless B-School student (who erringly tumbles into a B-School thinking that something funny called value-addition will occur...) "PPTs" or for the benefit of a naive reader, "Pre-Placement Talks" are perhaps the most distressing ones.


Our Father of the Nation, would have been proud and speechless if he had gotten an opportunity to sit in one of these rituals and see Ahimsa being delivered in its purest form. Germans too, had not really employed their best minds when they ended up inventing a mere Gullitone as a torture device. If they had thought out of the box or applied the six-hats thinking techniques they would have perhaps invented PPTs long long ago.

A PPT, in my own definition is a "non-violent means of subjecting helpless bunch of ambitious guys to a torture of an unknown degree".

The ammunition in this case are something called 'slides'. When someone starts a PPT with the first slide, that signifies "Hands-Up!!". You cant move, you cant SMS, you cant yawn, you cant read a newspaper from under the table ...You are under arrest! The rest of the slides come one by one leaving you either half-dead, or sedate you to the extent that you start snoring without a care in the world.

The funny thing is they dont stop if you fall asleep. They contrive to wake you up using a lot of tactic. They employ something called as "Ads". Ads are supposed to wake one up from slumber so that he has to endure the to-come-slides. They sometimes get to be really interesting and you do get up...

After a zillion PPTs however one gets immune to the treatment. One wears a bullet-proof jacket called "indifference" which will save one from any PPT. Others end-up getting stomach aches at the right time to help them avoid confrontation. Time goes by, and one fine morning, we all know from deep within that we would be conducting the same ritual...and PPTs therefore are like most other beautiful things in the world hmm...Immortal.

:)






PS: Apologies to all the PPT-Lovers if any, that is... :D

Taare Zameen Par :) :) :)

Excellent movie. Very well conceptualized, directed and acted.

Aamir Khan comes out with a 'gem'. The story takes one back to their school days when one used to do all the "naatak"...making fun of teachers, making the school bus/ auto wait a terribly long time for you, writing fake absent letters, not wanting to change the uniform once back from school, playing with mud, insects and what not !!!

The central message that 'every child is special' has been potrayed beautifully with young Erhaan, who apparantly seems to be a total misfit in the whole scheme of things (as he is suffering from dyslexia and no one is aware of it), manages to turn the things around and come out in flying colors, towards the end.

Also the message that, every parent must understand that its foolish to expect his/her child must be a class topper has been brought out very well...every child is special and must be given the freedom to enjoy the great moments of childhood rather than being put in a pressurized cage...!

The movie is a must watch for everyone ! :)

PS: Came to know that Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Alva Edison were also dyslexic through the movie :)

Chronicles of Kerala :) :)

Kerala has always been one of my fascinations from childhood but it always eluded me till a few days ago. I (along with my family) had a nice long vacation exploring most of the treasures it had to offer to a tourist.


Any tour to a new place is a discovery. I saw many fascinating things in Kerala. If one has to state five things which are most visible in Kerala, they gotta be coconut trees, banana trees, men in lungis, CPI (M) flags and posters of Mohanlal !!!. No place on earth I believe can boast that they have many of any of the above if they see Kerala.

Most of the residences are constructed in a typical style that is used by any child when asked to draw a house (You draw a triangle and a square beneath. You extend lines from this to give a body to the house). The roof tops are usually made of the red clay tiles (a bit of research told me they are also called Spanish Tiles). One feels the towns to be very homely as the streets are narrow (unlike the 4 laners), people are extremely friendly and there are no high-rise buildings as in the case of the cities.


Our trip also included a visit to Kanyakumari (‘1’) which falls in Tamil Nadu. For the first time in life, I had to wear a dhoti to enter into a temple (Suchindrum ‘2’)! This is the dress-code at the temple. I never had the foresight to carry this costume so had to purchase one there itself. Shirts & banians are also not allowed!!! Ladies, unjustly have no such dress-code and sarees were perfectly fine. If you are in a chudidaar, all you need to do is to rent one towel and wrap it on top of your dress. It was kind of amusing to walk in the public wearing a towel over my shoulders with a precarious dhoti below. Amusing for others, I mean. In a way, it’s good because you then tend to feel like a pure devotee ;)

We visited Vivekananda Rock Memorial and Thiruvalluvar (‘3’) Statue which are on islands at Kanyakumari. One had to take a jetty to reach the places. The sight of the vast stretch of sea from atop these structures was gorgeous. Swami Vivekananda used to visit this rock to meditate and he was at this rock at the time of his demise. One should not miss the sun-set & sun-rise at Kanyakumari. It’s very rare that you can watch both, at any place, because the east and west wouldn’t be both sea-sides.

Trivandrum offers good beaches like the famous Kovalam (which is an international beach- where one can see the foreigners basking in sun), and Shanmugham. The Ananthapadmanabhaswamy temple here again gave me the experience of the dhoti-dresscode :O











The icing on the cake of a trip to Kerala is however a boat ride in the back-waters at Alleppy. I strongly recommend one to hire a ‘shikara’ boat and none other than this. This boat is a private boat just for your family and is small and low so that you can even put your legs inside the water. The 3 hour trip is amazing and after this I can call all other boat rides I had in my life as mere rides masquerading as boat rides. Alleppy is called the 'Venice of the East'. If one had seen Venice in any of the movies like the Italian Job etc, one must have come across water bodies on which boats can traverse with shops, houses, buildings etc on either sides. This was amongst my wish-list of places to be at and this trip at Alleppy gave me a similar experience with shops, houses and even coconut trees on either sides! William Wordsworth had spent most of his time with Daffodils…but if only he had seen these backwaters, we would have been reading poems about it !!!

Talking of sobriquets, Kerala also has Guruvayur which is called the 'Dwaraka of the South'. It has the temple of Lord Krishna which again needless to say again required taking out the dhoti and donning it :O

No trip to Kerala is complete without visiting Munnar, which has got the highest point above sea-level in South India (Anamudi -2695m, Doddabetta comes second with 2623m). The home-made chocolates available at this place were delicious!! One gets a chance to walk into the rubber plantations (where I collected some rubber from a tree which can actually rub away pencil marks!! it smells weird though!!) and tea-plantations. The scenic beauty of this place can only be paralled by perhaps Manali.

Kerala as they is God’s Own Country, a statement I will no longer contest :) :)

Footnotes:

1. Kanyakumari - It is believed that the image of Kanyakumari was installed and worshipped by Parasurama, who is credited with reclaiming Kerala from the ocean, and building several shrines. Legend has it that the demon Baanaasuran wreaked havoc on the inhabitants of this world, and that Mahavishnu requested the Gods and the humans to request primeval energy Paraasakthi to vanquish the demon. Answering the prayers of the oppressed, Shakti appeared as a young virgin girl (Kanyakumari) and commenced penance with the desire of marrying Shiva at Suchindram.

2. Suchindrum- Suchindrum means the place where Indra attained ‘Suchi’ i.e., purification. The Sthalapurana has it that Indra suffered a curse from sage Gowthama, when he stealthily cast amorous glances at Ahalya the wife of Gowthama. Not able to suffer the mortification brought about by the curse. Indra had to seek immediate redemption. He came to ‘Gnana Aranya’ as this place was then called and offered worship to Lord Shiva. Relieving Indra of his curse, Lord Shiva granted him of his wish that the place where he attained purification should henceforth be called ‘Suchindrum’.

3. Thiruvalluvar: Thirukkural was written by Thiruvalluvar, who is believed to have born 30 years before Jesus Christ. The Tamil Calendar is dated from that period and referred as Thiruvalluvar Aandu (Year). Thirukkural is the masterpiece of Tamil literature.


4. Guruvayur: The most prominent legend regarding the temple's statuette ('murthi' is preferred) relates to Guru Brihaspathi and Vayu, the Wind God. At the start of the current yuga, Brihaspathi found a floating statuette of Lord Krishna. He and Vayu installed the statuette in this temple to help mankind in this kal-yuga. This legend forms the basis for the names of both the statuette (Guruvayurappan) and the town.

On Computer Games ...

Shocking! Revolting! Criminal! Inhuman!

I happended to witness a couple of computer games, the kind of which many of todays' youngsters play with great zeal. During my childhood, I used to play a lot of prince, alladdin, mario, pac-man etc. These games are vastly good natured in the sense that they donot involve much of violence except for the fact that you would be majorly killing some bugs/insects or at the maximum some evil guys. Later I had played quite a bit of NFS, Age of Empires etc which are racing/ war / strategy based games. These are also vastly good natured.

But the kind of games I witnessed today were shocking. I am talking of games like Road Rash, San Andreas etc. In these, you kill innocent people. You just ram into them on a road remorselessly. You shoot the cops and revel in seeing their blood. No amount of police force can catch you or restrain you. You can enter into a casino and gamble. You shoot the manager if you dont win. You can kill em all!! You have access to the kind of ammunition that even the cops dont. You can just rob any shop. You can even maintain 6 girl friends and romance with them!!! Argh...

The games are so absorbing for the youngsters of today that some of them even get caught up in this world of fantasy crime. No wonder that we increasingly read news about kids shooting their pals. The makers of these games are largely to be blamed. These are no concepts for games meant to be for kids!! For that matter, these sort of games are no good for any normal human!!!! Does the parents even know whats the content of the games they are purchasing for their kids??

Parents ... Wake up !!!