Big boys carry their own bags

In my Chennai neighbourhood I see parents  carrying bags,  as they walk their daughters/sons to the school bus.  Wonder when or how these school-goers would grow up.  At times ,  I want to  tell these kids they are big now, and  making mom or dad carry their schoolbags made them look small,  weak and helpless.   But then my wife,  more sensible of the two,  holds me back.

As parents,  we have all been guilty of pampering our children in varying degrees.  But I don’t remember carrying our only son’s  bag, not even in  his pre-school  year .  My wife usually took him to the nursery school.  What I do recall is,  when he started college, we travelled  with him to BITS, Pilani ;  stayed in his hostel for a day, tasted the mess food;  and  met a couple senior ‘wingies’ (staying in his hostel wing).  My bright idea was to persuade them not to subject our son to the kind of ragging  we witnessed on the campus.
But then,  as I later heard our son say,  the  wingies  I had met targeted  our son the moment our backs were turned on the Pilani campus.  So much for my bright idea.  Now I know, how  parents can help, if they stop being their children’s  baggage-keepers.

After first and second  semester  holiday,  on his return to Pilani  my wife and I  used to see  off our son at the Chennai Central Station. That most other students on Delhi-bound TamilNadu Express  made it to the station on their own wasn’t lost on our son.  But there was no way he could stop us from dropping him at the station.  On one of these train trips, I believe,  after the second semester,  a Pilani girl had her berth next to my son’s,  in 3-tier sleeper compartment. My wife, fussing over our son,  got down to setting his baggage for him, securely,  under the seat. The girl did this, for herself – arranging her baggage. What’s more, no one had come to see her off.  That was when our son put his put his foot down,  so to speak.  No more bag-carrying for him.  That was the last time he allowed us to see him off.  For the next three years he spent in Pilani, our son’s train to Delhi  left the Chennai Central, without our presence at the station.  The girl  on the train  was Anu Hasan.

Sheila Hailey’s  I Married a Bestseller   devotes a chapter on bringing up  children .  Shiela,  insisting that her children  helped them around the house,  assigned daughter Jane to dust daily Arthur’s study,  empty his wastebasket,  and set her  author father’s table  as organised as he wanted it,  using a checklist to get it right.  When she reached 13 Jane was given a monthly clothing allowance,  and was taught to sew.  Jane was made to realize she could get more out of  her monthly allowance, if she made the clothes  herself.
Steven,  at age 10,  maintained the family swim pool, testing chlorine and acid levels,  adding chemicals when necessary,  and backwashing the filter.  Mom urged him to work for an allowance,  and Arthur encouraged his son to use tools at an early age.
Hailey who authored Airport,  Hotel,  Wheels  and several other bestsellers made it a point to  dine  with his children – aged ten, eight, and six -  and often shared his thoughts on the  book he was doing.  For children family dinner gave an opportunity to discuss with parents what they wanted to do in class and off-school.  The whole family spent quality time, feeling  relaxed.

Christ didn’t live in OMR neighbourhood

Naren Satya (centre) and Mitul manning the security desk at Mantri Synergy main gate on OMR.

I don’t suppose a gated community is designed to promote good  neighbourly relations.  That residents in my apartment complex barricade themselves behind an iron gate, manned by security staff, 24×7,  shows that  we don’t think much of neighbours,  of  our neibhourhood.  I am not suggesting those in gated communities  loath their  neighbours,  but they  don’t love them either.  And  Chennai’s OMR,  where I happen to live,   is mushrooming with gated communities.

Our residential complex,  Mantri Synergy,  has come up next to Hindustan University campus at  Padur,  an urbanising village.  And Mantri’s residents  aren’t  friendly with students as well as villagers in our neighbourhood.  Our security staff at the main gate are accustomed to dealing with boisterous  college guys  from next door  zipping through our driveway in noisy motor bikes; or creating a scene with the security staff at the main gate.

More recently,  we had a protesting group of neighbourhood villagers trying  to gate-crash into Mantri’s, bad-mouthing us for discharging effluent  from Mantri’s sewage treatment plant (STP) into the main road, raising  a stink in the neighbourhood. Our real-estate developer  didn’t provide for proper pipeline to carry excess flow from STP, and this  has resulted in the effluent discharge in  our neighbourhood.   Affected villagers, I gather,  have threatened to protest-dump their solid waste on our road-front.
‘ Love Thy Neighbour’  isn’t the ground rule in our gated community.  Which is why, I guess , Jesus H  Christ wouldn’t have been our neighbour on OMR.

Lesser mortals, however,  opt to live in a gated community because it gives them  a sense of security.  And every residential community in OMR  evolves its own security procedures.  At Akshayas,  they say,  a visiting tradesman or service technician  gets an entry pass to be signed by apartment resident, and returned at the gate on exit.  Elsewhere,  a plastic visitor’s badge is handed out  on entry, and collected  back after the visit,  at exit gate.

Our AC technician Rahim,  who has been around places says the security  routine at Mantri Snergy  is fairly cumbersome, clerical, and therefore time-consuming.  Idea is,   complicated procedure makes residents feel  more secure.  It took Rahim over 20 minutues, and a run-around in mid-day sun – from the gate to my D block apartment, and then to PropCare -  to complete the security requirements . And , by the time he was through with the security routine we had a power shutdown.   Rahim and  helper Suresh had to come the next day to service our air-conditioner,  and, presumably, they went through the security drill,  all over again.  No servicing guy can get his entry form stamped  at PropCare during lunch hour – 1 and 2 p m – and no one  is allowed in after office-hours,  6  p m.

A service technician declares his  name, cell number, flat owner’s name and number at the main gate. Details are entered in a  ledger, and also filled in on a printed permit form, which is  rubber-stamped at the gate and handed over to the technician for signature of the apartment owner.  The  permit form is then taken to PropCare -  Mantri estate maintenence office at the clubhouse – where it is rubber-stamped again.  Rahim was allowed out,  after his job was done, when he handed back at the exit gate  the permit paper – twice-stamped,  and signed by me.

The permit form Rahim brought for my signature  contained an undertaking that read:  I hereby authorise the above personal to work in my flat …..I will completely abide by the ‘interior guidlines’. I take full responsibility of (should read ‘for’) their character, incidents & actions. And below the dotted line on which I signed was this  punchline, in bold letters – SAFETY IS IN YOUR HANDS.

Oh God, ‘have we overstayed ?’

Australian player Luke Pomersbach of the Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) team was arrested Friday for allegedly molesting an American woman in a five-star hotel…..

IPl chairman Rajiv Shukla said: “We are not responsible for behaviour of individuals in hotels …

Shah Rukh Khan, co-owner of Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR),is banned by MCA from entering Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium over his alleged misbehaviour at the ground Wednesday night.

These lines are excerpted from an IANS report that  summed up IPL-related happenings on a given day.  An edit-page  piece by academic Mukul Kesavan  reckons the business model adopted by Indian Premier League (IPL) celebrates decadance of cricket with ‘contempt for convention and procedural scruples’. Glitzy costumes, chorused countdowns, TV commercials that breathlessly talk up individual players,  blur the distinction between competitive sport and Hulk Hogan-style entertainment,  according to Kesavan.

And then my schooldays friend,  S Balakrishnan,  sent me the other day  his take on cricket ,  in  free verse.

The need for this rhyme
Is that in my time
Cinema, cricket and crime
Never were the news prime

Seeing a 7-column front page
Devoted for cricket coverage
In all the Dailies of the new age
It is difficult to suppress my rage

I and my friends are dismayed
Dear God, ‘have we overstayed ?’

When Tsunami lashed Japan’s shore
Our leaders asked, ‘What’s the score ?’
When houses and cars floated like match boxes
Our media lamented for lost matches
And missed catches

They  shout, ‘Over’
When it’s never over!

When crushed by burden of loans
Our farmers commit suicide
For fallen wickets our media moans
And for every run we take pride

Our Appalling moral rot
Illiteracy,  poverty, dirt and squalor
Appear to matter not
So long as our ladies can visit beauty  parlor

What is all this ?
Here everything is amiss
Dear God, ‘have I overstayed’.

Overstayed?  My friend,  at 73,  is  a practicing  Supreme Court senior advocate. We belong to the era of  Vinoo Mankad,  Marchant and Hazare (Vijay).  Though I haven’t known him touch a bat or ball,  Balu closely followed the course of our Madrasi School team in Delhi. And even offered advice, off-pitch, to our captain and mutual friend Kasturi Rangan.  Even without Balu’s guidance we  managed to come close to the bottom of the chart in inter-school tournaments. But then, as Balu would put it,  it’s the spirit of the sport, not the score , that counted in cricket.   Balu still calls me by the nick name – Mankad -  that I acquired,  not so much for proficiency in cricket,  but because I was the only left-handed bowler  in our school team.

‘Satyameva’ Khan, Sunday ke Sunday

Wonder what goes through the minds of perpetrators of abuse and excesses when they watch Amir Khan’s  Satyameva Jayate.  Would they feel guilty ? Would they fathom the  consequences of the  cruelty they perpetrated ?   Short of naming them,  the victims  appearing on the show profiled  their oppressors and their acts in such graphic terms that they should  fall steeply  in their own eyes.

Maybe,  one of these days we get to read in the papers  about one of these guys taking his own life  out of remorse. Maybe someone guilty calls Amir Khan to  apologize on camera. Maybe  I’m daydreaming.

Anyway,  the Sunday 11 a m TV show anchored by film actor/maker Amir Khan is watched by almost everyone I have met.  Having missed the first two episodes,  I found myself conversationally inadequate in any gathering of  friends and neighbours,   who seemed to have  nothing else to talk about for a day or two after an episode.  If you live in a close-knit gated community, as I do, you simply can’t escape  Satyameva chat among residents you run into,  at the clubhouse or the grocery shop in our Chennai apartments complex.

The last straw was my son’s weekly call from California. And he talked about….you guessed it.  When he heard my wife and I  hadn’t watched either of the two episodes   our son promptedly e-mailed the YouTube link to the Amir Khan Shows -  about abuses on women and children.  Now that I have watched them on YouTube I feel updated ;  and  can’t help talking about the  episodes I just watched , while others,  having had their say, are waiting for next  Sunday’s episode.

I don’t know if Amir Khan was inspired by anyone,  but I see a  touch of Oprah in his show.  Both score high marks  on being thorough in their approach to any issue they take up . The format covers  case studies,  victims interview,  relevant research or govt. committee report,  expert comments,  and a summing-up.  At the end of the hour,  I was  left reasonably rattled by the revelations – that 53 percent of our children fall victim to some form of abuse;  that culprits are usually someone known to the victim and trusted by her/his family.  In many cases he is part of family – an uncle,  grandpa or someone so close as that.  There was this case where a schoolgirl falls a prey to indecent advances made by  a teacher who comes home to coach her in maths,  history or whatever.

Girls raped at tender age   by live-in relatives,  and married women forced into abortion for carrying a female in womb suffer in silence.  In rare cases where child victims gather courage to speak,  their accounts are hardly believed or their complaints taken seriously,  more often,  by their own parents.  Victims of abuses get trapped in a  ‘can’t talk, aren’t believed’  syndrome.

Amir Khan has got some of them talking , on camera;  and their gut-wrenching stories prompts  us to  re-define relationships within extended families,  re-draw lines of permissibility. Vulnerable children and,  particularly, their parents can’t be faulted, if  they start   looking over their shoulders,  so to speak ,  at friends and relatives with penchant to get too close to their young ones.

We have had just two weeks of  Satyameva Jayate  (SJ).  It would,  perhaps,  take 20 more episodes for  Satyameva Jayate to become an unfailing  weekly habit . And then,  every  Sunday, 11 a m,  would the  Amir Khan Hour,  nationwide.  Undoubtedly,  Amir Khan is on to a good thing.  My concern is,  if a busy celebrity of his stature would continue to  find the time and energy to sustain the weekly show, at a reasonably high bench-mark he has set for himself in the initial episodes.  Would he re-visit topics he has covered,  in later episodes ? For issues such as female  foeticide and child abuse couldn’t be wished away with a single celebrity show.

As Khan says,  the magic wand that makes things happen is within each of us.  We could do our little bit to put our shoulders to the conversational wheel Amir Khan has set in motion, nationwide. I don’t know  if  Cindrella and Harish Iyer would consider opening  a Facebook page  to encourage others who have been through such hell  to come out of their closets to talk out their past. The Amir Khan Show has got the country talking about issues we have till date  refrained from mentioning even within the confines of our living rooms,  let alone on national television. And bloggers could keep the talk going with their posts,  reviewing what Amir Khan brings up in his weekly episodes.

Books in Search of Readers

Some friends have expressed concern about safety of books on the Read & Share shelf placed at D block lobby in our apartments complex.  What, if people forget to return the books they take away for reading.  Admittedly,  there would be some forgetful book-takers.  But I wouldn’t let them defeat a community reading initiative.  We call it,  Books in Search of Readers (BISOR). I got the idea from Bookcrossing,  a website dedicated to “the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.”

Bookcrossing may not work in our town,  where many of us treasure our books.  We are so fond of seeing them sitting on our shelf that we hesitate to  loan our prized titles even to friends,  if only  because those who borrow books rarely return them.  But then we also have books,  not so indispensable,  taking up shelf-space,  simply because we can’t find interested readers.  A book-lover prefers to donate  rather than dispose of unwanted books as ruddhi.

So we thought of  Books in Search of Readers – an idea that helps donars find readers in Mantri Synergy,  a 9-block apartments complex  that account for over 700 family units. The R & S shelf placed in D block is  an experiment in open-source library.  If  it works, we could put  up a book shelf  in each of  the other eight blocks. Viewed in the perspective of giving and sharing books, the idea of BISOR isn’t so bizarre  as it sounds.  Or is it ?

We have had some people ask  why we need to have a book shelf  in lobby,  when we have a decent,  air-conditioned library at the clubhouse in our complex.  A library,  with its membership constraints ,  is a place where the interested,  and only the  eligible members  go,  looking for books to read.  At BISOR we have books looking for readers.   An open-source book-shelf is designed to attract anyone passing by the lobby or waiting a few minutes  for a lift.

I don’t know how many people visit our clubhouse library;  I suspect they would be fewer than those going to  the gym. Book-reading isn’t a strong favourite  as  a past-time for most in today’s generation.  Maybe, if we place a book self at the gym, we could get some interested in  books.  BISOR is a modest attempt to make books reach out to those who don’t usually visit a  library.  BISOR and Mantri Synergy book group can promote each other, and ,  hopefully,   generate  interest in books and reading in a close knit residential community.  Those leaving books on R & S shelf can list donated titles;  and readers browsing R & S shelf can interact online in our community book group.   Mantri Synergy book group can do with a lot more members than its current membership of three.

Internet is fun, but not on ‘fone’

I thank  IndiBlogger and Vodafone.  For they set me thinking of  god,  saithan,  fun and the Internet,  all  in the same thread.  I think the Internet is  God,  if only because  I don’t understand either.  Moreover ,  the Lord,  they say, works in mysterious ways.  So does the Internet.  Our God,  we believe,  is omnipresent;   so is e-mail network.  And then isn’t  it  a godly attribute to produce miracles ?  By my book,  the dot com can do us  wonders.

It  had me reconnected with a friend I thought I had lost over 50 years back.  The Web facilitated  my  blog-to-blog  dialogue  with T R Kini,   aging  friend ,  ailing,   and living way away on another hemisphere.   In our younger days we  had  spent a couple of years in London of the 60s.   Kini is  now down with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.  Bound to wheel chair life can be excruciatingly confining.  Kini’s window to the world around  is his  Net connected computer screen.  We blogged about the years we spent together,  about the Swinging Sixties,  our travels overland when hitching rides  was the youth’s preferred mode of cross-country  travel.  My friend Kini, who hitched rides through Pakistan,  Iran, Turkey to Paris and beyond,  wrote of his vintage experiences in our blog-to-blog.

I re-discovered  Irshad via a blogpost I did after watching a movie on TV.  Featured in this German movie  I recognized a friend I had lost way back in 1960s in New Delhi. We used to meet on a daily basis at Janpath coffee-house.  It was quite a thrill, discovering your coffee-house friend on a TV screen.I wanted to get in touch. Googling Irshad Panchatan produced a Wikipedia entry that didn’t help much.So I blogged -  Irshad  Mia, where are you?   It was my way of sending a message in the bottle, hoping my friend,  Net browsing, might happen by my blog.  He didn’t,  but Irshad’s daughter did -  find my message-in-the-bottle and conveyed it to her father in Berlin. Internet can be fun,  even for those uninitiated into live chat, video games,  web streaming and what-have-you.  I read about a Vizag-based web-casting agency that  streams live a wedding in your family.   Sharing a family event live with out-of-town friends and relatives is fun.

Early earthlings  worshiped  the  Sun, the moon,  rain and wind.  Ancient Greeks had god or goddeses for earth and the sky,  beauty and fertility,  war and violence. If we have a  goddess for fun,  we would call her the Internet. Not an unmixed fun,  perhaps.  For the Internet also serves  miliants as an instrument to promote terrorism . Terrorist training manuals in PDF format in German, English and Arabic,  were among the digital documents  they recovered from Osama bin Laden’s safe house in Abbottabad,  Pakistan. Terror plots relating to Mumbai-style attacks targeting European cities,  and al-Qaeda road map for future operations were found in digital storage device and memory cards.  And mobile phone,  far from being a source of fun,  can be lethal in the hands of terrorists.  Bad guys in movies use cell phone as trigger device to blow up places.

A mobile,  going by promos and Vodafone  commercials,  is no longer used for basic communication  by way of a telephoic talk. Instead,  it is marketed as a fun,  in-thing,  with which you listen to music, take photos, play games,  send  SMS, check mail, and trade missed calls with those you want to avoid talking. Writing on the death of the phone call ,  Clive Thompson reckons this  generation ‘doesn’t make phone calls,  because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways:  texting,  chatting,  and social network messaging’.

Gone are the days when we engaged in conversation the  people we met  at railway platforms  ,  we  made friends on travel.  In buses, during train travel, we find youngsters into their own trip,   meddling with their mobile  to check mail, watch video ,  play games and whatever else they do with that thing in their palms . Even elders on morning walk  nowadays seem to have forgotten the old world  grace of greeting those  walking by,  or  the art of striking a park-bench conversation with strangers.  Instead,  we keep our ears plugged in to mobile music mode.

The internet on mobile  isn’t just a no-fun thing ;  it is unsociable to plug  in  your ears to a  mobile,  utterly unconcerned about the happenings around you.  If  Internet is  fun,  do we need to have it on call,  and round the clock ?  In our addiction to the digital kind we may well be losing out on the fun we  can stumble on,  in real world,  at the park,  on our way to work.    I am all for fun on the Net, but a mobile  shouldn’t be so packed in with  ‘fun’  features that we lose sight of  real  point of a mobile -  to make/take  a call on the move.
The Internet,  in my book,  isn’t fun on any  ‘fone’.   And I wouldn’t fault Vodafone,  if my post is considered off-topic,  for the IndiBlogger contest on   ‘How Internet is fun on your mobile’.