Workplace Humour Part II

The first part can be read here.

Part 1

A decent time had lapsed to come with part 2. With the characters we had, and the endless anecdotes that bring a smile to my face on reminiscence, this series might run forever. And after.

No documentation of our steel shop days can ever be complete without the mention of the maddest of them all.

Sanjay Sud.

Most of you must be familiar with this classic definition in Catch-22.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to, he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

Thus if the entry requisite to a steel shop was, that one had to be insane, Sud in fact over qualified for the job!

😊

Melt me if you can

There were two furnaces, named Calcutta and Delhi (the readers must be now familiar with the Alice in Wonderland atmosphere of a steel shop) and this was supplied with a common track that carried the scrap basket.

The scrap basket was manipulated by the carne and emptied into the furnace when the furnace was ready.

On those rare moments, when both the furnaces were ready to receive the scrap, the scrap usually went to Calcutta furnace. The reason was simple. It was managed by one gigantic R.V.Kumar, sadly no more with us, who was simply known as Ravan.

No one messed with Ravan and the Delhi furnace usually waited, incurring a delay, which led to some not so pleasing moments the next day with Mr. Ghosh.

This was before Sud became in charge of Delhi furnace.

The moment arrived. The crane driver was looking down from his cabin to the platform where both Ravan and Sud were waving their fists and directing the crane driver to load their furnace. History had enough evidence that the scrap basket would go to Calcutta.

Sud is unaccustomed to losing without a fight.

He jumped on to the scrap basket and sat on top of the scrap in a Buddhist monk’s penance position and dared both the crane driver and Ravan to go ahead.

You will melt me too was his battle cry.

Ravan was strong but was no match for the sheer lunacy of Sud.

The crane driver, in the meantime, had a small heart seizure and vacated his cabin, unwilling to be part of such madness.

The basket went to Delhi, of course.

Shoulder to shoulder

On another occasion, Sud needed a week of holiday. Unplanned holidays were never encouraged in a steel shop. Knowing that his appeal will be turned down, Sud took to the most hilarious book known to human kind, the logbook.

This is what he had written; I have tried to repeat verbatim, but intervening years may have resulted in a slight deviation from the original

“Dalvi-da, Have I ever let you down?

Haven’t I responded to every need of yours?

Haven’t we fought shoulder-to-shoulder the many battles and the calamities?

And am I supposed to believe, that after all this, you would still not sanction my, well deserved, even if unplanned, holidays?”

Next day, Dalvi-da replied on the margin, in handwriting that was so neat that it could have been mistaken for a print.

“Good rhetoric, leave still not sanctioned”

Check the connection

Time to get back to our beloved Subra.

One of the nightmares of repair in a steel shop is when we had to carry out a repair on big motors. There was a risk that on reconnection, the motor would rotate in the opposite direction. Depending on the size of the motor and its location, the consequences of a wrong connection, could range from a quick rewiring to a major interruption.

Out of the three wires to be connected to their respective ports, one was a given, it was the remaining two that was tricky.

Subra had a cast iron solution to this, of course, as usual.

This is how Subra narrated the correct, foolproof procedure.

“Before switching on, you must first confirm with the shift electrician.

On his confirmation, you must proceed to have it double checked by the shift electrical engineer.

Two checks are never enough and you must call the electrical engineer responsible for that specific job and seek his affirmation too.

Finally, as the last point of confirmation, you must call the Deputy General Manager of the electrical department, specialized in motors.

After all of them agree you must reverse the connection.

Will never fail.”

Chimney’s job is to smoke

Dalvi-da had been to Japan. On return he picked up some goodies for friends back in India. And for Subra, the choice was clear. A pack of Marlboro.

Those days, it was common to have people smoking in almost all places. Inside the steel shop, the various control cabins were always covered in a haze of smoke or at least a lingering smell of nicotine.

Dalvi-da found Subra in one of the control rooms, and offered him the pack of Marlboro. Subra had just finished smoking his Gold Flake. Nevertheless, he picked one, lit and started to smoke.

Dalvi-da was waiting anxiously, and after few minutes of no feedback, asked

“So, Subra how is the taste, Isn’t it better than the ones you usually smoke?”

Subra blew out the smoke and replied

“Dalvi Saab, the job of the chimney is to smoke. It does not matter whether you burn dead branch from a tree or sandalwood”

I have a train to catch.

The job of the melters in the night shift was usually the most difficult. On the days, when everything goes right, it was no issues. But such days were few. People familiar with Bombay know about the criticality of a few minutes in the morning rush hours. After the night shift, one usually ended up travelling towards Bombay, by the local trains and the rush in those trains are legendary. You miss your particular train, chances are that you spend better part of an hour in making it to another train with comfort.

On the nights when things went badly in your shift, you had to face the big task of phoning Mr. Ghosh at the end of your shift and answer all the questions he would hurl at you. Non-performance is not acceptable to Mr. Ghosh. What are reasons for the melter, are excuses for Mr. Ghosh. Even God can’t save the poor soul from the inquisition that Mr. Ghosh conducted over the phone.

It was at the end of one such night. The melter in question was one Rao. Fairly new and not yet ingrained into the ways of a steel shop. But he knew, having experienced before, the extent of wrath that Mr. Ghosh could discharge in the morning. He knew that there was no way he would be able to justify what happened.

Someone said offence is the best defense. Rao took the road seldom traveled. 

He realized surrender is the best defense. But he went about in a quirky way.

He rang Mr. Ghosh, after an exceptionally disastrous night shift, and said this.

“Sir, whatever abuses you have to give me, please finish in the next 20 minutes. I have a train to catch at 7.32.”

Save road tax

The Indian organizations were cleverly designed. From the moment a trainee engineer joins the organization, he can look forward to a promotion every three years. The last structure I remember was something like this.

Trainee on probation, Asst Gen Foreman, Gen Forman, Deputy Manager, Asst Manager, Associate Manager, Manager, Senior Manager, Superior manager, Deputy General Manager, Asst Gen Manager Gen Manager, Asst Vice President, Deputy Vice President, Vice President, Senior Vice President, President

A promotion every three year is designed to address a life cycle of 51 years of active service.

At some point in this cycle one is eligible for “petrol allowance” for a car. This was good money in those days. While you are eligible for the said allowance, it was granted only on actual possession of a car. No one insisted that you ever actually used the car.

Many of us, bought a second hand or a third hand car just to be eligible for the allowance. And some never ever actually drove the car.

One such person, on whose car there was even a cobweb running from the front wheel to the rear window, received this pearl of wisdom from Mitra-da.

“Do one thing, please keep your four wheels resting on some bricks, you do not have to pay road tax also”

Diwali Bonus

Mitra-da never showed partiality. He went around messing up with everyone. 

The annual bonus, a meagerly sum, was always paid along with the salary in the month before the grand festival of India, Diwali. Meagre it may have been, we still looked forward to it.

There was a bus service for the members of the colony, to ferry between the colony and the nearest town, Thane.

Mitra-da and Dada were seated behind Savita, wife of S.V. Panse.

Panse is as cool as they come, having a lazy approach to life, never rushing anything and extremely intelligent. Savita is innocence personified. She trusts everything and Mitra-da never tired of pulling her leg.

On this bus trip, Mitra-da told Savita, that for the first time Mukand had decided to give Diwali Bonus in cash, and that afternoon all were handed envelopes consisting of INR 10,000. It was a sizeable sum then.

Savita was surprised as Panse did not tell her anything when he returned home. 

She cut her journey short and rushed home and confronted Panse about the bonus and why she was not informed.

There is a scene in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly in which Elli Wallach says

“When you gotta shoot, shoot! Don’t talk”

Panse’s replay was equally legendary. He took just few microseconds to process the question, and this was his reply.

“Did you meet Mitra on the bus?”

Grammar, rest in peace.

Back to another episode of N.S. Joshi and Mr. Ghosh.

Mr. Ghosh was making his morning rounds (more a tiger on a prowl) and he encountered N.S. Joshi near the scrap yard.

The conversation went thus.

“Who is the scrap yard in charge?”

“I is the scrap yard in charge”

“Oh , you are!”

“Yes, I are”

PVNR assassinated

It was circa 1994.  I stayed back after office hours, due to a trial procedure that was being tried in the steel shop. I had to wait for about 2 hours to see the result. I could have gone home, but the necessity to return, in case something did not proceed right, was enough of a deterrent to hang around.

I had time to kill. A PC in front of me. The writer in me was never at rest. I started to compose a fake newspaper first page.

It was on a A3 page, printed in portrait, with enough bold face and Type 60 fonts etc.

While I do not have a copy of that “masterpiece” I tried to re-create what it looked like, from my memory.

It looked something like this

Having made it, and printed it out, I completed the act by pinning it on to the notice board in the Steel shop office and left.

A writer needs an audience, right?

I went home and as was the norm in those days, slept for a while, before proceeding to shower and dinner.

Around 9 pm in the night, phone calls started coming in from the shop floor. Most wanted me to turn on the TV and check if our Prime Minister was really murdered.

And if the local trains are running or not!

The Bombay people were always practical. They would mourn the death of the Prime Minister surely, but their first priority is reaching home after the shift, and all they wanted to know was whether the local trains were running or not.

The small joke of mine became a Californian wildfire. People called friends in other shops. And most called their bosses. The intercoms all over the colony was ringing nonstop.

I could not tell anyone that it was not true. While I had no intention to hide my authorship from such a masterpiece, the ensuing hullabaloo scared the shit out of me.

The commotion slowly died off and normalcy returned only when people started reporting for the night shift.

Next day, around 11 a.m. Dalvi-da called me to his office.

“Kishan – next time you want to pull a prank like this, show a little more maturity and be a little more sensitive. How many people were disturbed last night because of this!”

I had not confessed on my own. And no one knew I did it. My first reaction was to disown. I started to put up a feeble resistance.

Dalvi-da cut me short.

“No one else in steel shop can write such good English or without spelling mistakes”

Has there ever been a better compliment delivered to the accompaniment of a resounding slap?

I am not sure if there will be a part 3. There could well be, as my colleagues from those years will refresh my memory with fresh stories.

In closing I want to add one thing, as highlighted by another friend from those days. Anand Athalye. The humor was singularly without malice. We never laughed at someone else’s expense. It was simple, pure, clean and often situational fun.

Most meaningful advices:

Advices are the easiest things. They come to you unsolicited. Often, they are useless. 

They run along the lines of

“Be good to everyone”

“Taste the words before you spit them out”

“Do unto others what you…”

“Respect everyone”

And yada yada yada. Plus, you have all those self-help books that teaches you how to keep friends, influence them, not give a fuck, keep the home tidy, the garden trim, mind free and virtually every miracle that is conceivable.

And we know, none of them ever help.

So, here are the meaningful, results guaranteed advices that are relevant to and in your life.

Never lend your book

If you are observant, you would always hear people saying “I had a library”

Had. Not have! Past tense.

The library loses weight at a rate that you would love to lose it yourself. A library is an inanimate thing. It does not make its own decisions. You, the moron, do.

Everyone can lend a book. Only a certified idiot expects that it will come back. If you want your book , do not lend it in the first place.

It is not that the lendee of your book is cheap or is making some pleasure/money out of keeping your book away from you.

It is just that those who borrow books, do not usually return.

They start and do not complete.

Or, they start and take so long to finish that they forget where they borrowed it from.

Or, there is a misunderstanding. You think you have loaned it. They think they have taken it.

Or, someone else borrowed it from them.

Possibilities abound, combinations are multitude.

In my life I have bought 3 copies of The Little Prince, 5 copies of Animal farm, 2 copies of Sapiens, 3 copies of Catch-22, 2 copies of The world according to Garp, 3 copies of The old man and the Sea.

And guess what!

Right now, I do not have a single copy of any of them.

On the other hand, I have bought Ulysses only once and NO ONE wants it.

Only one thing is certain. A book lent is like a bullet fired. It does not return.

How to eat groundnuts:

Groundnuts were one of the most popular snacks during our childhood. It continues to be one even today. Boiled, roasted, fried with a coating of breadcrumbs or a paste of lentil. Spiced or salted or plain. Whatever its avatar, there is one thing that is universally binding. It is a cosmic law. Qualifies to become a Murphy’s law, if only Murphy had ever munched as many groundnuts as we did in our childhood. The law is this.

“The last groundnut that you eat will always be the rotten one”

There you are content with the endless travel of hand to mouth, slowly depleting the stock of the groundnuts, eyes trained on the TV or engrossed in the book or simply ogling at pretty young things in the vicinity and

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK

The last rotten piece had been bitten into, its sour juicy taste soiling every taste bud in your mouth and there is nothing you can do to get rid of that horrible taste unless you start on the next handful of good groundnuts.

Usually you will not find one. One usually buys only one pack. The next pack is not normally available for a replenishment. The only thing one can usually do is to drink water, assuming that water is available nearby. And trust me, water CAN NOT remove that horrible taste.

ONLY few more good groundnuts can undo the damage.

Therein lies the moral and the guide.

Before you start with any pack of groundnuts, always select and keep aside five or six of the good pieces on visual inspection and then start with the heap.

Never fails.

How to travel by train.

We often need to travel by train. With IRCTC making the train reservation so simple, we must use one of the facilities available to make our journey comfortable.

While we are booking, assuming that it is an overnight journey, we could choose our berth. The most foolish of us all, will end up choosing lower berth.

Unbeatable logic.

It is easy and convenient. You do not need to contort like a Moslem offering  his prayer before entering your middle berth, you do not have to be a trapeze artist to climb to the top berth (and then behave like a Moslem offering his prayer…) and you do not have to curl into a foetal position to accommodate in one of those shorter side berths.

Except in real life it does not play out that way.

The first problem in choosing the lower berth is that you CAN NOT sleep till everyone else has decided to sleep.

The second problem is that you CAN NOT even sit if the middle berth guy decides to sleep. How many mornings have I continued to lie down, even when I wanted to sit and read something, ONLY because the middle berth guy/gal was still deep in his/her sleep.

These are at least consequential inconveniences assuming that you get to sleep in the lower berth.

In 100% of the cases, you will be approached by someone who is travelling with a 70 or 80 year old woman and “would you be so kind to exchange your berth for this old woman?” and “do not worry sir, I will bring your luggage to the new position, oh! You are so kind, thanks” and then you move to berth number 69.

For the uninitiated berth number 69 is the middle berth adjoining the toilet!

The best thing you can do is choose the SUB, the acronym for side upper berth. 

You climb up there and it is your kingdom.

NO ONE disturbs you there. You can sit during the night, sleep during the day, have your meal there and no one passes you by on the way to/from toilet.

Never speak for your children

You know your child well.

Right?

Wrong.

Never ever speak on behalf of your children.

My daughter is not fond of sweets. The sweets made at home are never consumed. We went on a dinner invitation. The food was served. And when it was time for desserts, I told my host that my daughter does not like sweets.

She had three plates of what was offered and asked a fourth portion to be packed for home “if you do not mind please?”

The hostess was of course not minding while casting a look in my direction while I tried to blend into the wallpaper.

Keep your kitten quiet

Those who have had kitten in their home would know what an impossible task it is. They are a bundle of energy. They jump on you when you try to sleep. Pull your hair, shred your finer silks, unspool a yarn, drop fragile things, climb on to impossible places and go Meow till you manage to bring it down, get inside a bottle and act as if it can’t get out, puncture your pillow, scratch a good linoleum top, in general create mayhem.

Unlike dogs, they do not listen to your commands or treats. They take what they want, go where they want, do what they want and finally want YOU to do what they want.

To keep one of those energetic ones, sit in a corner and mind its own business (in its head its business is to trouble you) is unthinkable.

Till my brother came along.

My elder brother was reduced to tears, begging on his knees, seeking few minutes of sleep that he desperately needed. The cat did not bother. It went about with a threatening determination that was bordering on maniacal with a single purpose of trying to get inside his vest and sleep on my brother’s tummy, scratching him with razor sharp claws.

Enter my eldest brother. He took the cat to the kitchen, applied Ghee (clarified butter) on its nose and left him alone.

The transformation was magnificent. The cat lost all its other focus. It had only one purpose. Take the left paw, wipe its nose, lick it clean, wipe its nose, lick it clean, ……….

The lingering smell of the Ghee misled the cat to assume that the nose was not completely clean, and we were witness to this cat at this routine for 12 hours without any stop.

Now whenever anyone in the family wanted freedom from the persistent cat, it was just a dollop of Ghee away!

And I am keeping the best for the last.

Where to sleep when alone:

My cousin, who is no more, gave this most fabulous of all advices when I was 7 year old. Let the impressionable age not steal the inherent grand wisdom embedded in this most original of them all.

“When you are alone in your home, always sleep closer to the front door”

Like all profound wisdom, this one too needed an elaboration.

“Why is that?” I asked in all earnestness that only a 7-year old could summon.

“It is quite possible, that the house could be broken into. A thief targeting a night with no activities during the day is the professional secret amongst break ins. A thief, having monitored the house all day long, will most probably attempt a break in during the night. No thief worth his salt, will ever break in through the front door. He will always make his entry through the tiled roof or through one of the windows”

I was dense. 

Still am, that is immaterial.

“How will that help if I am closer to the front door? How does it equip me to stand against him or hold him back?”

“Are you NUTS? Why will you even nurse such a thought? God forbid!” Here he crossed himself despite being a Brahmin.

“You just open the door and run away – no point in any heroism. Return with help or after the thief had left”

I sleep in the living room with the front door just a jump and run away, even today!

Even when I am not alone 

TV!

TV entered my home in 1982, when I was 17 years old, just entering college. It appeared so unfair, the TV entering my home just when I was leaving home for my college life.

Those days not every household had a TV, and when you entered a lane it was easy to see who had a TV.

There was this massive TV antenna raising many a meter from the top of the roof of the house. It looked more like one of those transmission towers that you see nowadays, erected by the mobile phone firms.

The antenna was much bigger than the TV itself.

It was obviously a black and white TV, small at a mere 17”. (There were smaller ones available, but my father was feeling a bit indulgent) and telecast was twice a day for a total of about 7 hours, if I recall well.

It was mainly news, agriculture, culture and some tepid advertisements.

There was just one state run channel called DD and a few years later a second channel was added, called, DD Metro, and as the name suggests, it was restricted to only Metro cities, and my town was just a tad bit above a village in the pecking order.

There was entertainment too, an hour of film songs on Friday evening, where the living room of my home was taken over by the whole colony.

The TV was the most prized possession of the home then. We had a box to house the TV, the box had a sliding door and kept closed when the TV was not turned on. It was cleaned quite regularly and to an absolute outsider the treatment meted out to the TV had the same level of dedication that was reserved to the Gods.

My grandmother, the original film buff of my family, she used to see at least two films a week, week after week till just two weeks before she died. Those last two weeks she was confined to her bed. My standing regret is that a TV was meant for someone like she, and she never lived to enjoy this.

But one of her daughters, my aunt, substituted her, and we got to see what I knew I would have gotten to see if my grandmother had lived to see the TV. When the TV started showing regional films, my aunt could not be moved even by a tsunami, till the film ended. Those days, Tamil film had a wonderful villain by name M,N.Nambiar, an absolute gem of a man in his personal and social life, but on screen he was villain personified. He destroyed good families, swindled hard earned money from the father of the hero, raped every woman he came across, stole even from temples (sacrilege at its nadir), tortured children, smoked, drank and usually died or imprisoned towards the end of the film before the hero and the heroine slipped into one of the songs that they first sang before the intermission. My aunt who would be seated comfortably in her chair would show first signs of agitation when MNN first appeared on the screen and as his nefarious schemes unfolded one after the other her agitation would rise exponentially and she would leave her seat and take a confronting standing position, and her distance to the TV would decrease, and soon she would be hollering insults and start praying for unspeakable death to strike him. By the end of the film she would be physically drained. And this repeated predictably and without fail.

We were mean. We used to sit back and have more fun watching my aunt having a go at the TV instead of watching what was on TV. Her sister, another aunt of mine, was the same. It must have been coded in their DNA.

TV continued to be a part of my life even after I went to college. My college had a general-purpose room in one of the hostel wings which housed magazines, books and the TV.

My first recollection of that TV taking center stage was in 1986, when Mexico hosted the world cup. That the world cup happened entirely during our study holidays before our final semester did not have any influence. Most of us had secured a job or finalized our post-graduation universities and we were not too worried about the final semester.

We had all crammed into that hall with hardly any standing space, glued to the Argentina – England match. We saw the hand of god goal! And minutes before THE GOAL, the power went off and when power returned we saw that Argentina had scored a second goal. One of our friends, Dayanand, who had sneaked out and listened to the commentary on his radio transistor, came back and explained the inexplicable goal. Those were not the days of instant uploads or YouTube and I saw that goal nearly three years later!

As the years crawled on, the entertainment part as well as the hours of TV time per day, both improved, in quantity and, alas! as was expected the quality took a nose dive. There used to be a “the world this week” a Friday night capsule that captured the world news, produced by two impeccable presenters one of whom would go on to launch the massive NDTV that is one of the behemoths today.

We also had a lovely Quiz Time, hosted by two other perfect hosts. That the woman Kavita Agarwal resembled the woman that I was in love with, who I would go on to marry, added to the spice.

Then came Live Aid and we got to see all the greats that we had heard only on Vinyl or on those TDK / Sony tapes.

There was a lull when TV and I had to part company. I finished college and moved to Bombay for my job and the first 5 years in Bombay was a constant shift from one apartment to another, from one corner to another, a constant see saw. I finally settled into what would be my home for the next decade, just before my wedding, and the present from my friends on my wedding was a 14” B&W TV.

I do not remember the brand now, but the carton had a dancing “Nataraja” on it.

By this time the prime minister and his finance minister launched some daring reforms and opened India to full globalization.

The antenna that was bigger than my TV, could finally go and we entered the cable television era. Still nascent days. But, we had now five channels and 24X7 TV. The TV in our home was constantly playing only MTV.

And I was listening to November Rain seven times a day, seven days a week, week in and week out!

Up till this stage all the TVs I had, were those without a remote. The channels were selected with a series of push buttons and volume and contrast could be adjusted through dials and knobs on the TV itself.

1995 saw the transformation of the next step in our TV association.

For the first time, we had a 25” TV, a color TV, no less and with a remote. By this time the channels have multiplied and the Bruce Springsteen song “there was 57 channels and nothin on” was suddenly apt.

Came 1998, and we all gathered up in my boss’ home, who had gone one up on me, and bought a Sony Bravia 29” color TV, then the meanest and the biggest in our colony, for the inevitable world cup, being played in France.

India, in those days, had only two teams to support. Brazil and Argentina. It was before English Premier League became what it is today. So, all of us had settled in comfortably with something to munch about and more to drink and by the half time we were completely lost. Not many in our group knew someone by name Zinedine Zidane. We were so much in mourning that we hardly watched the second half, and it was only the next day that we found out about the third goal of France!!

We moved cities and soon we upgraded ourselves to a 29” TV too and then came the LCD TVs.

And when we shifted our home for the fourth time in four years we finally decided to get rid of this bulky, heavy 29” TV and brought in a sleek 32” LCD that was wall mounted this time. By this time the number of channels went beyond any meaningful comprehension and added to those channels the local cable operator was playing at least 4 channels mainly focused on films.

HBO entered and started playing English films with subtitles and suddenly our understanding of the films went up tenfold. The worst part of this phase was the blooming of news channels where comperes and anchors were shouting and howling and arguing and provoking and instigating beyond levels that were already deplorable to start with.

Now it was time for us to move countries, here we upgraded ourselves to a 40” LED.

In the beginning, selecting a TV was a simpler affair. Now it has become too complicated. And in the new world of TV, size matters. The present TV in my home can accommodate me within the frame if I try to place myself horizontally along its diagonal. In addition to the sizes, now you have HD, UHD, 4K and on a recent visit to the electronic shop I saw 8K.

The TVs are no longer a straight rectangle. It is now curved. It is getting thinner and thinner. And it is Wi-Fi ready. Most homes now use the TV to watch YouTube.

The worst aspect of these new age TVs is the fact that there is nothing you can do without a remote. True to its name, it is often in some remote places and you spend quite a lot of time searching for the remote.

I can’t operate my TV without a remote, today.

The TV age is probably over. Most of what we need to access, be it news, clips, highlights, we end up watching on our mobile. (There must be another blog about phones soon)

In the last one year I watched the TV only during the Champions League and the world cup this summer. I surrendered the cable connection and I am still stuck with few national channels of Czech Republic, as it is part of my internet package.

My prediction is that TV for home entertainment will soon cease to exist. It will meet the same fate as that of a landline telephone we once had. Remember the Bakelite contraption with a spring-loaded dialer?

All the TVs in the nearby future will be for display in public places like bus stops, train stations, pubs, restaurants, hotel lobbies and airports.  

Irony!

My son shared this picture with me with a laconic caption “Irony”

How true!

All religions and beliefs (not almost all, but all) revolve around the central pillar, holding the precarious pack of cards, of FEAR.

Take fear out, there is nothing left. How do you hold people together, hold them in submission?

Climate controlled couches with buxom nubile babes serving every need of yours, permission to drink from the fountain of youth, walled garden with eternal sunshine and gardens with fragrant flowers; all these are not enough as “promised heaven”.

What will happen when you do not “behave” is more important?

Hades ready to violate you, boiling oil cauldrons, timid looking servants ready to skin you slowly and painfully, burn in eternal fire without losing consciousness, some Bond villain lookalike wielding his cat o’ nine tails, pitchforks, horned demons, vampire leeches, feed to the lions ; now we are talking business.

The “promised heaven” is more attractive, than if it were offered as a stand-alone package, only in comparison to what you will get instead.

No wonder, Blood, Sweat & Tears, rightfully, sang, in their song When I die

“I can swear there ain’t no heaven, but I pray there ain’t no hell!

About heaven he can swear, but when it comes to hell he prays.

Evolution has taught us one thing. You want unquestioned submission, fear is the key.

You do not need to administer real pain, all one has to do is instill the fear that pain is around the corner and submission is offered on a platter.

Take family as an example (with kids)

One parent is usually the loving one while the other is a martinet. The time-tested, good cop- bad cop routine. Always works. Who the kids fear and hence respect. Who the kids love and hence take for granted.

No rocket science.

I have not considered a family with children all grown up, as here the tables are turned. The parents fear the children.

Payback time eh! 😊

Tribal chief, village ombudsman, chief of the warriors, kings, generals, elected rulers, religious heads – they all know that fear works.

And no one knows it better than those that practice religions.

God loves you, by itself, is not enough to have a following. If love and compassion alone is sufficient, then a penniless, vagabond traveler should have a bigger following than the ones that the organized religion commands.

The same God will torture you for eternity, if you stray, from some random set of rules, is necessary and more powerful to have a following. The “following” results in revenue, the real game actually.

One keeps a distance from a snake not from a earthworm. One stays away from lions and tigers, not from rabbits.

Earth’s orbit around the sun 53 times has resulted in me becoming a man who has nothing to do with religion, Gods and all that balderdash, which my children managed much sooner.

In my early years I did not know that I had a choice. I, like millions of others, was constantly bombarded by Gods and rituals almost endlessly. One of the earlier recollections, that never fades away, is my grandmother telling me, I repeat verbatim

“You do this, and the God will come and poke your eyes out” (ummachy kanne kuthidum is how it is said in my mother tongue, Tamil)

It is easy to imagine the terror that statement must have played on the child’s mind and the havoc it must have created.

Swear on God, pun intended, the lasting image of God in my psyche, had always been, someone like a Mafiosi, who would go around poking eyes out of innocent, helpless children, without anesthesia.

I do not think my grandmother mentioned the “no-anesthesia” part, but that is how fear works.

More implied than explicit.

She instilled the fear of Gods in me, so to say.

And that is how it works.

Why fear when I am here is, thus, not an assurance by the stated fact, but a threat more by implication.

Drive me Nuts!

I slowed down as I approached the intersection.

The instructor sitting next to me, on my right hand side, already an aberration I was still grappling hard to understand, was losing it.

“Why do you always slow down on approaching an intersection? Can’t you see that you have priority?” he hollered in exasperation.  “You are causing a great confusion to the guy who is driving behind you, he will see no reason to slow down, nor would he expect you to slow down”

I casted an apologetic look at him and accelerated, marginally, while still looking furtively to my left and right as I passed the intersection, where, to my great amazement, other cars and, wonder of wonders, even lorries waited obediently.

Kalyani Nagar, Tilak Road, Mount Road, Brigade road and more junctions from India flashed across my mind.

Horns, expletives, shaken fists flitted across my memory at the cross-section where the four roads met was a maelstrom of vehicles, positioned at angles nowhere along the direction of roads. An aerial view will have presented a maze of cars, scooters, bikes, lorries and other vehicles locked in unbelievable array.

In India, you ALWAYS slowed when approaching an intersection.

I may have priority.

I might know that I have priority.

But it is idiotic to think that each, or even any, of the drivers approaching the junction from the other three roads would even consider that as a possibility, leave alone as a right. On Indian roads it had always been, to borrow an economic term, to the advantage of the first mover and the time-tested truth, might is right.

20 years of driving in India, had instilled the following mantras deep in my psyche.

•  The road belongs to bigger vehicles and your place and right is proportional to the size of your vehicle – trailers, lorries, tempos, cars, autorickshaws, bikes, scooters and mopeds.

• In a strange subset twist, the scooters, bikes and mopeds gain precious grounds as they occupy less space and hence can zig and zag and twist and gain each square centimeter that is available to be gained. Again, an aerial shot of a moving two wheeler, would resemble that of a swift racer snake.

• The three wheeled wonder, the autorickshaw, defies all laws of physics, gravity and road sense. They rule the road. Even the mighty trailers and lorries sometime stand in awe and give them way. The drivers are dare devils and they have an hawk’s eye to locate the spaces available and an eye-hand coordination that will satisfy a most demanding kindergarten teacher.

• Hence as a car driver, I have been superseded by the bigger vehicles by their size, ignored and pushed aside by the smaller vehicles with their mobility and dexterity.

• And we trust the HORN. It clears the way like no other means can even dream of. We honk when we see a vehicle in front of us, when we see a vehicle approaching us from any side, when we see pedestrians jaywalking on the road, even when pedestrians, the miniscule percentage, that still use zebra crossings to cross the roads, when the signal turns green, when the signal becomes amber, when the signal shows red. Most of the time we do not know why we use the horn, but we use it anyway, and not to be outdone, all the other vehicles use their horn as a reply or as their first act. The pedestrians, as they cannot honk, wave their arms and shout and curse, and jump, run or stop, adding to a general sense of mayhem.

• Signals are present because there is a government department that installs them. To give them more credibility is at the risk of your life.

• And when it comes to signals given by the drivers/riders – there is one simple rule- They are decorative and NOT TO BE UNDERSTOOD as a signal on what the driver/rider intends to do. We never take them on their face value. He may have given the signal to turn right or left on a previous junction and may have forgotten to switch it off. Illuminating signals and hand signals are often displayed simultaneously and you do not have all the inputs to process what he intends to do. Many scooter/bike/moped riders just look in the direction they intend to go and one has to note their head movement in the absence of or along with any light/hand indications. An autorickshaw driver may signal right by an indicator, left with his hand and go straight. We always wait to see the final act, we do not rush into any preconceived opinions based on frivolous things like signals.

• Opening the door while driving to inspect the tyre, to drop something that you do not need inside the car are normal. And any or all doors can be opened while the vehicle is in motion.

• If there are three lanes and a service lane, then the traffic will move in 7 lanes. This is correct. To expect only three lanes to be used and the service lane to be left unused is a crime against utilization of available space.

• When we approach a roundabout, we continue to drive. We enter the round about when we have space. And once into the flow we can always move and leave when we need to. We do not wait before a roundabout. There is no nonsense of “look for vehicles approaching from the left”.

• When we see a bicycle rider on the road, most times we do not, we continue to drive. We might splash some water on him, or make him lose his balance with us passing by, but we do not signal and leave the lane (practically not possible too) and get back again after signaling.

• When there is an unmanned level crossing, we cross and we do not stop unless there is actually a train crossing the road that we are planning to cross.

• When there is an unmanned level crossing, we cross when we see a train approaching. We are good in calculating the relative speeds of the train, that of our vehicle and the distance to be covered.

• When there is a level crossing with a gate, we cross as the gates start to close or while they come down, here again we are good in calculating the speed of movement of the gates and the distance.

• Even after the gates come down, two wheelers cross by ducking under the gate. This is seen purely as an act of goodwill to avoid the traffic jam when the gate opens.

• We occupy both sides of the road, on either side of the gates, and somehow wriggle across when the gates open.

And my instructor expects me to drive through a junction just because there is a puny teeny weeny yellow diamond perched on the side of the road, that tells me I have priority.

Go, tell it to your grandmother!