Another attempt at an alliteration

So, this New Year started off with more excitement than previous ones. For one, it didn't include the obvious disappointment of NY 2013 that came with Dec 21, 2012 turning out to be a fake apocalypse. I mean, seriously, after all that hype and excitement, it was a letdown in the league of the Indian team’s performance outside the sub continent. *keeps chanting “Rohit Sharma is the future of the Indian cricket” over and over again with a mild twitch*

  But personally, it meant moving to a new city and a new job, and that’s always exciting. So we (my wife and I) made the trip from Chennai to Bangalore. The house we’d rented was in a place called Kaggadasapura, and learning to pronounce the name of that locality kept us occupied through the road trip. Now, as a person with very little time on his hands (my wife prefers to call me lazy), I’d decided to get a fully furnished apartment. That way I figured I wouldn't have to do much. Right? Wrong. Still had to get a million other things that a house is supposed to have but may never use. Like food plates. I’ve never understood why you need a food plate when the obviously more efficient way of thulping food straight from the cooking vessel exists.

  Nevertheless, I started getting things for the house in the order of importance, and went after the most vital item on the list; the one item that was as essential as the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the clothes we wear – I am, of course, talking about the Wifi connection. The tragedy in this regard was that no one else could pronounce the name of my locality either, so all the Internet Service Providers conveniently told me that they aren’t available in my area. On the verge of having a nervous breakdown, I even tried the one thing I promised myself I would never do – no, I am not talking about dancing in front of other people – I tried to get Airtel broadband also. Feeling as terrible about myself as I did when I had to support Manchester City for the premier league title so that Liverpool won't win, I called the Airtel guys up. I was slightly happier when even they told me even they didn’t provide in my area. The salesperson instead suggested I take a dongle. After laughing a full two minutes and then asking him to take a hike, I hung up the phone. Afterwards, I got back to the task of actually finding a proper connection and scoured the internet like a fish trawler in the Bay of Bengal trying to cater to the West Bengal fish market on a Sunday. I cried for help on Facebook and Twitter, all to no avail. Then my wife had an ingenious idea. It involved speaking to our neighbor to find out what connection they used. Since it involved actual human face-to-face interaction, I let her handle this one. She found the local provider who did pronounce our locality name, and actually gave us a good plan. If I hadn’t made her my wife by then, that would've been the day I proposed to her.

  After that, we had to get some insignificant stuff also. Like a gas connection, which, according to popular opinion, is like an Apple product. That means that you can start looking for sick and rich people who are willing to buy your organs. Thankfully for us, India is filled with that variety. So, after pledging my entire life savings to get a gas cylinder, I literally watched my money go up in smoke. But I’ve got to say, when you spend that much on a cooking medium, the food does taste like it does in a 5-star hotel (or in other words, bland and in desperate need of Tabasco sauce).

Venkateswaran was panicking by now. The flames were shaking their head vigorously and pushing forward, like that just hatched snake he’d seen on National Geography that struggled to get out of its shell.

He had always loved the ambiguous shape of fire. In a world where everything had to be defined, here was a basic element that couldn’t be contained, and in his eyes, didn’t conform. Here was everything Venkateswaran wished he could be, but couldn’t because “why can’t you get first rank? Aren’t you ashamed a girl got more marks than you did?”.

He always went to the puja room to see his uncle chant hymns, not so much driven by his fear of a distant and presumably omnipotent entity as his need to be present when the aarathi was lit. Predictably enough, the lighting of incense sticks and camphor didn’t satiate his need for the spark, and he started smuggling matchboxes to the only place a kid in a large joint family could get an ounce of privacy - the bathroom. Bath time increased exponentially as he lit matchsticks one by one and threw them into the sink just as the flame started to kiss his bulky, nail-chewed fingers. The thrill he derived from this exercise had to do as much with the nervousness about the thought of getting caught as with the actual power he thought he held in his hand. The world was within his grasp as long as the flame was burning. No grandmother could show her contempt at his report card, no father his refusal to sign it, and no cousin could say “I got way more in science when I was your age”. But, as all good things, this exercise came to an end when his father found the burning smell after Venkat’s bath, and connected the dots after finding the matchbox in the dustbin. There was a sound reprimand in front of 10 other family members including a couple of sniggering cousins as a teary eyed Venkat promised to never touch a matchbox again in his life.

Except of course, promises are never meant to be kept. The perfect chance presented itself during the summer holidays when he got the chance to go to his grandma’s house, which was in the same city but visited only biannually by his mom because she couldn’t find “a reason” to visit her mother’s house except to take her son. Three days of bliss when his mom got to take naps in the afternoon along with grandma, and he was left alone to his daydreams. Until of course, he found a matchbox. Here was a house where there was vast backyard, and a motta madi (terrace) that was all his for his experiments. And experiment he did! The trees that arched their way upwards atop the terrace shed their leaves there, and they were just piled up just a day before by the housemaid. He started lighting his matchsticks, took individual leaves, and set them on fire. Oh, to see the fire consume the leaf, it’s appetite heightened by the lack of moisture! Magnificence was soundless bar a few crackles. And the embers… they remained as a record of the transaction. He delighted in his miniature arson till the matches ran out, and then went down to scout for another matchbox. To his misfortune, in doing so, he let another element get up to its tricks. The wind blew the embers that refused to die out onto the pile, which was very quickly ablaze.

Venkat didn’t even have to come back up to realise what had happened, as the smell of the smoke, a scent that always reminded him of good times, now raised alarm bells. He ran up the narrow flight of stairs and gaped in horror as his creation stood before him - a monster that seemed to reach out to devour its master. He ran back down and alerted his mother and grandmother and they ran back up with buckets filled water and sand. To Venkat, this was very much like Captain Planet, only here the wind and fire were up against earth and water. The former was brought under control, but not before it left a tangible dark mark on the floor and terror in the hearts of his Amma and patti .

“Tell me Karthi, why should I continue being a burden to you all? What is the point of surviving like an invalid?” asked my grandpa, the bitterness and frustration evident in his voice. I struggled to think of a convincing reply, but could find neither a logical nor an emotional riposte. I just ended up muttering “Nothing like that, thatha. You’re the head of this house,” in an unconvincing tone. It was over two years since my grandma had passed away, after a marriage that lasted more than 65 years. And even though he liked to think otherwise, she had been the rock on which he built his life. For a man who had started working from the age of seventeen as a labor officer in a government-controlled enterprise, retirement had been particularly difficult. He spoke to very few people, and I happened to be one of the few with whom he opened up. His relationship with his sons and daughters was, to put it mildly, strained. I could only watch helplessly as he fought with any of his children who wanted to spend some time with him, as if on a personal mission to build a wall around himself that no one could breach.

When not bickering with his family, he tried occupying himself with a geriatric’s last refuge: politics. He had a love-hate relationship with the media, and even though he spent much of his waking hours watching news channels, he was caustic in his comments on their sensationalism as well as the national political scene. His dry wit always managed to make me smile, and I often wondered what might have been had he became a writer instead of pursuing the “safe government job” when he was young.

Many a times, I visited news websites and posted comments in his name. His satire was always well-received by other viewers, and this made me wonder if I could show him a more engaging way to spend his time. One day, I walked up to him and said “Thatha, I am going to open a twitter account for you”. I was met with a quizzical look. He had never sat before a computer in his life, and didn’t seem intent to start now. But I had other plans. I asked my cousin to get an iPad from the US, and opened an account for him in the name of @grandpakrish. Next, I got over his objections (You can’t teach an old dog new tricks) to make him understand the way twitter works.

I felt that after a long time, I could actually connect to him in a way I had forgotten in my adulthood. Like a little child watching a magician at work for the first time, he was wonderstruck at the simplicity and ingenuity of the technology that enabled millions of people to collaborate and share opinions seamlessly. I was amazed at how quickly he was able to grasp what I was telling him, and soon, he was asking me questions related to the technology platforms that I needed to search on the net to find answers to.

Finally, he started tweeting. Like a typical Tambrahm (Tamil Brahmin), his first tweet was a Tamil verse which translated to “Every word that I write is at God’s behest”. He kept tweeting about the political scams that occurred daily, and was gathering followers on Twitter slowly as more and more people started enjoying his invective yet polished language. The inflection point came during the 2G scam. His witty word-plays with politicians’ names and his new found love for using trending topics to help him reach a wider audience combined to increase his followers exponentially. For more than ten thousand followers, his quips were nuggets of gold which ran around the internet through “retweets”.  His daily routine changed drastically. He didn’t have time to even talk to anyone in his family, let alone bicker. Instead, he spent almost his entire waking hours on twitter, reading, replying and re-tweeting. In fact, his popularity reached such a height that we even had marketers contacting our home to have him endorse his products on Twitter.

July 7th, 2001

Guna sipped nervously from the cup. He hated being the object of attention, especially in a new surrounding. That was why he'd brought his friend and fellow PT master along. Taking a few more sips for confidence, he placed the cup on the table in front of him, took a deep breath, and looked up to see an array of very similar-looking faces. Amongst them, one young face, belonging to a boy on the cusp of adulthood, peered expectantly into his.

"Aditya is a very good player ma'am", he told the boy's mother.

He addressed her in the same way he addressed teachers at the school where he was coach of the cricket team. He tried to ignore the other sets of eyes that were set upon him, as if all he had to was convince this one person he was conversing with; as if the others were part of the furniture; like the words of a woman would be heeded by others in a deeply patriarchal family. Of course, he had no such illusion, but he found looking at all of them discomfiting.

"He's got a real future in cricket. Please don't ask him to stop playing the game", he continued.

"He is like Dravid for our batting line-up. He comes in when we lose an early wicket and makes sure he stays through the innings. He is also our opening bowler", added Guna's companion.

Both of them eagerly looked to Aditya's mom for a response, but she averted her gaze and was now looking at her husband and father-in-law. The grandfather's chin was resting on his fist, like he was trying to articulate his thoughts in a manner that wouldn't offend anyone. He took a moment, and then responded.

"Gentlemen, we've always known of Aditya's talent. Why Dravid? I know he can bat like Tendulkar. He can become a great success. But there is lot of politics in cricket. You just have to see the kind of average players who make it to the Indian team to realize that. There is just too much uncertainty in that field. We have decided to get Aditya to concentrate on getting into IIT so that he can become like his father. So Aditya will not be attending coaching from now on. Very sorry about that."

After his coaches had left, Aditya crept up to his dad and asked, "Dad. They have sports quota seats in colleges. Why can't I play cricket and get in that way?".

His dad gave him a weak smile and said,"That's a big risk da. We can't afford take such a risk with your career."

November 14th,2008

As he sat down to make the call home, he felt a sharp twinge of pain below his back. His classmates sure knew how to show their happiness for him. He might not be able to sit properly in class for the next week, as had happened on his birthday last month. His mom picked up the phone.

"Mummy(he still called his mother that), I've got into a leading FMCG company for internship. I am the first person in my college to get placed," he said proudly.

"Oh! Is it in Chennai?" she asked. "No mummy. It's in Bangalore. I will also be required to travel throughout Karnataka for that period," he responded.

He could only hear silence for a minute. When she finally spoke, the tone conveyed no happiness. "Hmm. Ok. I was so looking forward to having you home. Anyway, here, talk to your father."

Aditya was sure his father would understand. "Dad, this opportunity looks great. If I do well, they would give me a pre-placement offer..." he started, but his father cut him short. "Adi, are you seriously going to work as a salesman? Is that why I made you join an MBA? Even if it was a similar role in a tech company like HP or Dell, I would have understood. What are you going to do with your career? Go around villages selling soaps and shampoo packets? This is not what I want you to end up doing. Do this internship, but don't take up their offer without consulting me, alright?".

"Alright, dad", mumbled Aditya. He was nonplussed. Everyone in his college told him this was a great opening. His professors had been extremely happy about it. But dad always knew what was best for him, right? He headed HR in such a large firm. How could he not know? 

It was his grandpa who spoke to him next. "Adi, great news! Seems you got into FMCG? Very good."

Aditya's mood lifted immediately. "Yes thatha," he said with a smile.

"Is it Lever or Procter &Gamble?", his grandpa asked.

"No thatha, it's an Indian company. Actually it's among the largest Indian FMCG companies around", Aditya said.

"Oh! Why did you get into that, then? I want you to work with the best brands possible. These small companies are no good Adi. See if you can turn down that offer and sit again when some big brand comes in," grandpa suggested.

Aditya was feeling lost by now. All the euphoria he had experienced an hour ago had vaporized. He just mumbled to his grandpa that it was not possible, said a quick good night, and went to sleep. The pain in his bottom seemed to have numbed. Along with the rest of the body.

In the years that came, Aditya always asked himself why he had told that FMCG company he didn't want to work with them after his internship.  He had told them he wanted to work at a more 'strategic role', and indeed, got into a strategy research job at a multi-national. He hated his job, but at least his family was happy with the brand he was working with. And even prouder when he went to a bigger brand name.

And of course, his cricket coach had got it completely wrong. Aditya was no Dravid. He didn't have the perseverance that allowed him to bat for days, holding an innings together. He didn't enjoy the struggle that came with batting against a battery of fast bowlers.