Mumbai trip - part 1

"Where can I do Mootravisarjan ?" asked Debrup . The waiter in the bar was bewildered , I was in fits of giggles and Dias had a sly grin on his face. On my trip to Mumbai, I took photographs under the Gateway of India, boozed in Leopold Cafe , lost my love for Vada Pav , played cricket in Juhu Beach and traveled in a rather empty local train . But the reason I had fun was because I was with my friends again.

Dias has a lot on his mind . His mother is unwell but he is handling it very practically.I hope she is alright soon. Dias is bitten by the love bug , so he has to devote a lot of time and attention to his mobile phone. He could still point out my flawed basketball shot taking methods in a sports bar . Dias is well liked by almost everybody in the universe . My Aunt after meeting Dias for the first time expressed surprise on how a dull person like me could be friends with such a charming boy like Dias .

In a conversation after being over drunk, with genuine concern he asked me why I don't write anymore . I know that he thinks that what I write is like a pile of shit but he would always support me because he knows how much I enjoy writing. Later when our discussion changed course I asked his opinion on what kind of a girl would I be happiest with , he replied without a hint of sarcasm that she should be really intelligent to be able to handle my over-worrying and easily irritable self. He is seriously considering starting his own business by the end of this year and has made it perfectly clear that I am not going to be a part of this venture.

Debrup and I used to speak like Taporis in Kerala and it was fitting that we should be together in Mumbai. We became friends because of our common love for cricket and he is as good a host as you will ever find one. Life is like an extended comedy show when Debrup is around. He would make really boring people look like funny clowns. It is impossible to be talking anything grave when he is around . He made a motor cyclist question the whiteness of his clothes by singing "washing powder nirma" to him.

(To be continued ....)

I've been jogging almost every alternate day in the apartment park. I try and run for at least 20 minutes and it takes all my will power . I find a lot of weirdos there. These include some snickering kids who are too small to be playing cricket with an actual cricket ball, an old masked Jain guy who does some outlandish kung-fu like exercises , a middle-aged woman who does some kind of laughter yoga thing as though it's some tedious routine and a watchman who sits in a corner smoking beedis. They must however think that I'm the one who is cuckoo . After all they would have never seen any one sighing , heaving and panting like I do.

We have started recording our everyday expenditure in the house . It helps us know how much we spend everyday and sometimes the results are terrifying . But it doesn't stop any of us from doing any extravagant spending. My mother is obsessed with buying plastic utensils . The whole kitchen has been revamped in the last month or so . She is mad at me for having forgotten a couple of her prized plastic dabbas in my office.

Dad who is getting bored with watching TV all day has started reading books. He wanted a book on the mind and soul. So I gave him a book on His Holiness Dalai Lama's ideas which I have read earlier . I hope he finds it enlightening .

I got to put a check on my eating habits. Especially the deep fried bread pakoras that I overindulge in every evening with my office buddies. I also need to control my caffeine intake. I drink about seven cups of tea/coffee everyday . All the running in the morning will be meaningless if I continue with these foul habits

The curious case of Abraham Joshua Sumanam

What I used to hate the most about my room in YMCA was Abru's dirty pile of clothes . On his bed , on a rope tied from one end of the room to another , his clothes were sprawled all over . He had more stinking clothes in the room than what I would ever own in an entire lifetime .Even in the bathroom he had buckets full of clothes, kept for days on end .untouched, generating an odor so abominable that one day the housekeeping woman went mad and bellowed that he deserves be to walloped with a stick.

Abraham Joshua Sumanam was one of my roommates in YMCA .He was two years my junior and doing his electrical engineering .Despite the fact that he could talk quite well in English and I was never comfortable with malayalam, we never really got along well . Within days of my arrival in YMCA, he had pissed me off by installing counter-strike on my computer . Abru had a treble quality to his voice which made his voice resonate and echo in our offensive smelling room . A giant, well over six feet three inches tall, Abru was a ferocious basketball player . Any person playing against him who valued his life would keep a safe distance from him because Abru could mortally hurt anyone. He was a regular basketball player , which meant he always had fresh ammunition to add to his pile of garbage, that was our room .

My other roommate Savio was a definite antithesis to Abru . I have been a terrible slob all my life but Abru made me look like a prince of tidiness . The only conversations I used to have with Abru during my six months in YMCA were about all the decaying clothes in the room.The other inmates of the hostel suggested that I and Savio take all his clothes which by that time was being refered to as ' weapons of mass destruction ' and burn them one by one to teach him a lesson .
Joe who had come for combined studies one night did the unthinkable . He took a nap on Abru's bed on top of all that litter . He developed an itch . He was lucky not to have contracted ringworm or worse. Stupid joe.

I and Savio left YMCA soon to join Joe and others in Souparnika. It was not because of Abru but that is what people conjectured. In the following year YMCA was shut down. That too was not because of Abru. He happened to be one of the last people to leave YMCA .

His dad who is super rich helped many passed-out students in my branch get employment.

The Project Outing

When we were flipped upside down for the first time ,I heard Nikhil curse loudly.For a moment, I was surprised to hear him curse . In our acquaintance over the last six months or so, this was the first time ever that I heard him swear. We were seated on a ride called 'Flip Out' in Adventure Island, a theme park in Rohini and being twirled upside down forty feet above the ground. I was hanging on to the harness because my life depended on how tight it was wrapped across my chest. As the ride got over , relief was etched across all our faces. There were six of us from my office who had taken this ride together but once it was done no one wanted to give it another shot. The fact that we had taken lunch just before taking this ride and nobody was forced to do projectile vomiting in mid-air was nothing short of a miracle.

It was a pity that this was the only decent adrenalin pumping ride in the theme park . The theme park was the venue of a long overdue project outing . Barring the flip out ride all the other rides were meant exclusively for the enjoyment of little kids. I find my daily ride in the cycle rickshaw to the bus stop more thrilling than most of the joyrides in Adventure Island.

I couldn't help but compare this theme park with Veegaland in cochin. More than twenty of us had gone there in our final year of college and had a phenomenal time. The rides were grand and there were some really funny incidents. Like Sid crying for Mama when he was being whirled 360 degrees in the twin flip monster ride and all of us making fun of Saif losing his hair in the middle of the free fall .

While here in rohini we had some senior guys leaving early because they were missing office dearly. One lasting image I have from this trip is of my immediate manager after he had finished his turn on a stupid aeroplane ride. He was heaving a sigh of relief, wiping some sweat from his brow as though suggesting 'that ride was something' when 8-9 year old kids were finding the same ride mighty boring.

The Jaundice experience

Recollecting the horrors of the week, when I was diagnosed with jaundice ,quite frankly still gives me the shivers. It took the doctor five days and a blood test report to conclude that jaundice was the reason why I was vomiting whatever I was eating and why my piss was the color of gold.
Apparently some god-damned liver enzyme counts had skyrocketed leaving me all weak,crazy and yellow.

I had a persistent headache for close to two weeks . Headaches have never bothered me much hitherto , but in those two weeks I almost lost touch with sanity. To make matters worse I was also ravaged with grumbling stomach aches .

My stomach had become a fortress guarded by a force which was refusing the entry of almost everything I was eating ,past the alimentary canal.I had zero appetite and when I was forced to eat something by my parents, in a matter of minutes most of what I had eaten was puked away.The food which would make it past the stomach would then lay there undigested and cause me stinging pain all throughout.

The very frequent runs I had to make to the bathroom to vomit in this condition didn't make life any easier. I was experiencing pangs of nausea arising from the pit of my stomach which were so freaking painful and seemingly well capable of snapping some blood vessel in my body and possibly choke me to death.

I was glad I was hospitalized after some experimental ayurvedic treatment in the first week. In fact, it was my idea to seek allopathy because the ayurvedic arishtams (medicine) forced down my throat were increasing the frequency of my run to the bathroom to vomit. The disgusting arishtams tasted far worse than what sewage would taste like .

My sense of taste was severely debauched by the taste of these arishtams and puke . I remember brushing my teeth repeatedly in spite of how weak I felt , to get rid of this bad taste in my mouth. But their effect was so strong that I used to end up with a minty flavor to the arishtam-puke distasteful combo .

I took me six weeks to convalesce and the latter four weeks were quite relaxing . My hospital stay had ridden me of all aches and with just weakness to deal with. I read books and watched lots of TV. I also feasted on two rasgullas a day as prescribed by the doctor because it is supposed to be good for the liver.

Good job Bindra

Hello readers
For the last four weeks I've been down with Jaundice. When I was diagnosed after a blood test ,my eyeballs were fiendishly yellow , my stomach was on the verge of imploding and I had almost completely lost my mind. So, I was hospitalized .It took me four days in the hospital to regain my appetite and some degree of composure.

I was eventually discharged . The doctor prescribed four more weeks of complete bed rest and a truckload full of medicine. So, at home , pretty much bedridden , on a bright Monday morning ,I switched on the TV to checkout how India is faring in the deciding third test match between India and Sri Lanka. I saw a breaking news scrolling on a news channel ,saying that an Indian shooter named Abhinav Bindra had qualified to the finals of some 10 meter event.When I switched to DD sports I saw a table which showed the results of the qualifying round and Bindra's name was fourth on it.

I sat up with excitement. This was a great opportunity for Bindra to make history. I also had my doubts because, as we all know very well ,our athletes have a history of screwing up when it matters the most.Two names which come to my mind are Milkha Singh and P.T Usha. Bindra was fourth on the list and the points from the qualifying round were to be carried on to the final event , so to entertain any likelihood of a medal, he had to outperform his qualifying efforts .

I didn't have an inkling of an idea about the rules of Shooting, so thanks to the DD sports commentators ( I find the lot very irksome on most accounts) I understood that there is a board with concentric circles on which the shooter is supposed to aim . If the shot hits the board inside the smallest circle then the shooter would get a score between 10.0 and 11.0 depending on how close to the center the shot lands. In the final event all the shooters who had qualified were allowed ten shots each .

The final event began and after the first four shots Bindra had crept up to the third position. After a couple of more shots he was second and after the eighth shot he was on top of the list. All his shots were marked above 10.2 which showed remarkable consistency. He was followed by a Finnish shooter called Hakkinen at second position and by a Chinese shooter at third . Bindra's ninth shot was a meager 10. 0 , a major setback by the high standards he had set, right through the final round . Hakkinen, whose ninth shot was marginally better than Bindra's drew level . At this juncture they both had equal sum of points.

There was one shot left, and because of my skepticism as regards Indian athletes I had my reservations on Bindra not doing something silly. He proved me wrong and shot a fantastic 10.8 which was his best shot in the entire final round. At the same time Hakkinen messed up his last shot with a paltry 9.7. Not only did he lose the gold medal , he also squandered the silver as the Chinese shooter had shot his last shot well and ended up overtaking the Finn.

It was quite phenomenal to behold Bindra's uncompromising resolve and absolute focus in the final round.He reserved his best for the last and didn't ever look slightly nervous. Had he settled for a silver or a bronze, he would have still been heralded as an icon by our berserk media . The government which had almost no contribution in his success would have still offered him Crores of rupees as bounty and all kinds of medallions for being the saving grace for India at the Olympics . Instead he tarnished India's 28 year amazing feat of zero gold medals in the Olympics.

Afterward as he stood on top of the podium ,there wasn't any animated show of emotion from him ,just a sly smile as he was handed over a bouquet of flowers first and then an accolade which no individual Indian athlete has ever accomplished before ;an Olympic gold medal. And by the way the Indian cricket team lost the test match the very same day and it almost went unnoticed by the media and most cricket fanatics like me.

The beggar with the drum

Hello readers. I am going to give an account of a wacky happening which in my reckoning is one of the most bizarre incidents that I have ever witnessed with my own dear eyes. A passing thought about it ,still brings a smile to my face and even to this day if it is shared with some of my family members ,who were co-witnesses , it is usually followed by shrieks of laughter .

It was a languid afternoon in may 1998, in Kerala, and I along with my mother, granny,aunt Bhadra ,my sister and three little cousins Vaishak, Vishnu and Jishnu were watching a humdrum mallu movie in the living room of our abode ,Bhadralayam. I and my cousins were biding our time, waiting for it to be evening so that the elders would let us venture out ,to play cricket. Suddenly the spell of indolence was broken by loud sounds of chenda ( a cylindrical wooden drum like instrument played in southern India) emanating from the front lawn of our habitation. As the sound reverberated through Bhadralayam, its inmates were drawn outside to the source of the unpleasant banging.

What we saw was quite a queer sight. A dark-skinned ,beanpolish,eccentric -looking and bearded beggar who was dressed in black from head to toe was beating away on a chenda and creating quite a racket . His rather tall frame and the fact that his countenance was uniformly dark made him look frightening. Such was his appearance, that in my opinion he could have made a lucrative career with the Ramsays as a permanent bhoot in their horror shows. There he was , drumming away with raw energy on a day which was so hot that it kept an outdoor crazy, thirteen year old (your's truly) and his three insolent little cousins- indoors watching a forgettable movie.

Little Vishnu ,however felt the drum-beats to his liking. What was loud and incoherent banging to the rest of us , was soulful and rhythmic music to the little lad. He didn't waste much time before beginning an insane version of pandi dance(it 's a weird dance form seen in south Indian movies , if you have not seen it yet then switch to sun-tv sometime to have a good laugh;nobody does it better than Chiranjeevi ) . This paved the way for Vaishakh and Jishnu to drop their inhibitions and join the little fellow . The troika even started humming a tune , which gelled quite well with the drum beating.

As the mendicant ,who was quite immersed in beating his percussion instrument , recollected his wits , I could guarantee that he was shell shocked to see the three kids dancing away to glory.In other houses he would have intimidated the younger ones, sending shivers down their spines and making them hide under the farthest tables and closets out of sheer trepidation. Here, these juveniles were requesting a once more. He collected the 50 paisa coin , his bounty offered by an elder so that he could go away and the kids would stop embarrassing the household .

After this freak incident ,I don't know if the beggar was traumatized because his main weapon- exuding fear didn't work at all here or super-happy because of the appreciation received for his music. But he was never seen again in the neighborhood.