Imli candy and a spoilt brat..

Seat 18A was mine, but I wasn't in it. And I was livid. I could see the little brat in my peripheral vision. All of 3 and a half years of age, he had usurped my seat. His tantrum for the window seat had put me in a spot, and I had to give it to him or else I would've ended up looking like an asshole. The flight was full, and there was no other seat free, let alone a window seat. In a rare occurrence, even the business class seats were full on this Indian Airlines flight, so that ruled out the possibility of using the clout associated with my granddad's frequent flyer card to score an upgrade. I had turned up early, checked-in early, asked for a window seat that would give me a decent view of the wing, and then was relegated to a middle seat. I wouldn't have minded an aisle seat so much. The point is, I reminded myself, that a bonafide aerospace nerd like me should never be deprived of a window seat. And this brat had done precisely that. 

Emboldened by his successful tantrum, he was looking for more things to do. His parents in the row ahead of ours did not seem bothered about his welfare one bit, and I was not very surprised. They probably needed a break. These were better days for aviation, and the flight attendant was coming down the aisle with candy for everyone so our ears won't pop on take off. I cannot remember any flight in the past coupla years providing that simple amenity. I was looking forward to the candy. It was tamarind mixed with sugar and formed into two little balls, within a single wrapper. I was never big on sweets, but this was my absolute favourite sweet in the world. I wanted to shamelessly grab a handful, but stuck to my standard practice of picking three from the tray she held out for me. The kid shamelessly picked a handful, and asked her for more. She said "Beta wait five minutes, I'll get some for you". Pfft. 

True to her word, she was back in five minutes and handed the kid an entire bag of candy. An entire bag. That's never happened to me! In my mind, I was a more deserving candidate for this largesse. The flight was going to be an hour long, and stuck in my middle seat with nothing to do, I decided to sleep. The kid had other plans. No sooner did the take off run begin than he started bombarding me with questions about the airplane. Now this presented a dilemma. I resented him for stealing my window seat and eating all the candy, but I can't resist answering (or at least attempting to answer) when people ask me stuff about airplanes. I relented, thinking that if his curiosity is piqued, he might join the ranks of us aviation fanatics once he's older. After all, it happened to me. Sure, he might grow up to be an obnoxious, candy stealing member of our community, but we're a smallish community so we could use his membership to swell our numbers. 

I started answering his questions to the extent I could. Kids sometimes make no sense, so this was no mean feat. He had his own theories about jet engines and I patiently set them straight. By my estimate, somewhere abeam Daman I lost my patience. He had more questions than I could possibly hope to answer. The kid-o-meter swung to resentment again. The sleep I had forfeited to accomplish an eventually fruitless early check-in was now beckoning me, and I was stuck in an endless barrage of infantile curiosity. In a moment of inspiration, I pointed to a cloud far away and asked the kid if he could spot a plane flying parallel to us near the cloud. Kids are kinda stupid, and he spent the rest of the flight looking for a plane that did not exist, while I slept as best as the cramped seats on the lovely but decrepit old double-bogey main landing gear wala A320 would let me. 

This morning, when waiting at the bakery section of the office cafeteria, I was reminded of the kid and this story. There, under the glass showcase that housed the confectionery, were bags full of tamarind candy. I bought an entire bag, marvelling at my re-acquaintance with the candy in the most unlikeliest of places. I hadn't seen these in years now. The kid must be twelve years old or thereabouts now. I hope he's fine, wherever he is. 

Summer story..

Long-winded childhood story again, kindly adjust :)

A walk around the house is customary every time I visit the ancestral home. As I pass the western side, I always look over at the small cottages across the road, in my uncle's property. They used to be tourist accommodation in our little beach town. The tourists never came in the numbers my uncle had hoped for, possibly because our land was a good three quarters of a kilometre from the beach. They have been rented out as one bedroom dwellings for not-so-well-off families. My uncle, like many others, left for the Middle East, and that was that. As I walk, a story from long ago pops up without fail, every time.

For purposes of this story, we'll call him Mark.

I don't remember his name anymore, except that it began with the letter m, and was short. Could have been Mike, but that's not important. Mark was the first white person I had ever met. Sure, tourism brought lots of white folk to our beaches, and I'd seen many of them before, but Mark was the first one I got to know. It was another of those afternoons when grandad, often for no seemingly apparent reason, would get in the car and head to our ancestral home far away from the city. During the vacations, I would pile on, perhaps my brother and a cousin or two as well. This was not a particularly satisfactory arrangement for my mom and aunt, who knew that their father required more supervision than us kids to stay out of trouble. But the peace and quiet of a day without us during summer vacation, when we were otherwise wreaking havoc on their nerves, won the battle in the end and we were all packed off in the car.

This particular time, though, I was alone. Instead of bringing something sensible along to while away time, like a book or some toy cars, I brought a chess set. Who exactly I was going to play with was a question that would cross my mind only after I reached my destination. Our driver didn't know how to play chess, and refused to learn giving the logic that I was going to win all the games today if i played with a beginner like him, and I couldn't refute that. Grandad had some work, so I didn't even bother asking. But all I had for the whole day was a chess set, and finding a partner to play with was my immediate concern. Our driver, Deepu (chettan -omitted hereafter due to laziness and not disrespect), and I set off to find someone to play with. And that took us to my uncle's tourist cottages.

They were newly built then, and had a weird smell to them. The faint smell of cement and paint, mixed with that generic antiseptic smell a lot of hotels have. We heard he had managed to rent out a coupla cottages to tourists, and we were hoping the tourists brought their kids along, and maybe one of the kids would want to play chess. Not having done advanced mathematics back then, I did not know what long, long odds I was shooting for. The cottages seemed deserted, ostensibly because the tourists had all gone to the beach. Looking around, we spotted Mark.

He had one of those faces with character, the sort you remember for a long time. I remember more of his face than his name today. I asked Deepu if he would go ask him if he wants to play chess. He went over and talked to Mark, while I watched from the distance. I was too shy a kid to approach someone as strange as he was. Deepu came back a while later, and I eagerly asked him if a game was on. He had forgotten to mention chess, and I was quite annoyed. Deepu egged me on and said I should go ask him, he seemed a very friendly guy. After much prodding, and a coupla false starts, I was on my way to ask a mystifying creature, a white man, if he wanted to play a game of chess.

I held out my pride and joy, a small magnetic chess set that would also let you play five other games of which i knew only Ludo and Snakes and Ladders, and asked him if he wanted to play chess in a voice that diminished quickly as i realized how much of a giant he was. "Sure," he responded, "but on one condition. We'll play it on my board." Out came an exquisitely carved wooden chess set, and I was smart enough a kid to realize that if he travelled with such a good chess set, he must be really into the game. As the game started, I worried about this misadventure. As kids, there are specific rules on not talking to strangers, rules the kids in my family flagrantly flouted. But this was different, he was a foreigner. Not everyone in a tourist town likes foreigners, and the average attitude of the populace is that they're a necessary evil. Most people not directly involved in the tourism industry would just mind their own business, and avoid interacting with the tourists. The tourists who came to beaches to party had a particularly bad rep, and we would be told about their drinking, drug usage and generally loose morals, and that we should stay clear of them. I wondered for a second what amma would think about me playing chess with a complete stranger from Australia, which I had managed to find out about him by then.

We played chess and traded stories all afternoon. It wasn't a fair trade, I suppose, I had really lame stories back then. But his story changed my life a little bit. It was his second visit to our town. When he came the first time, he had fallen off the beach facing cliffs our town is famous for, after having had too much to drink one night. As I was processing the moral implications of him drinking enough to fall off a cliff, he continued. He lay there dying, in pitch dark, until a local drug dealer found him and took him to the hospital, thereby saving his life. My mind was trying to wrap itself around the concept of a drug dealer, since I had no idea how drugs were dealt. He returned to Australia, and sent his saviour a large and undisclosed sum of money in gratitude. The dealer quit his trade, and started something decent though i forget what, and was getting along fine until the cops caught him. He was accused of getting the money through selling drugs, and was jailed. Getting him out was Mark's mission, and he had come back to stay and fight his case for as long as it took.

For a child's black and white concepts of right and wrong, this was a major revelation. I could not immediately process this new information, and indeed it took me years before I fully understood it. Over one afternoon of chess, where I was fascinated by his stories and elated over my game victories, I was introduced to the concept of grey. I knew the guy was good, only a good guy would fly all the way back to save someone from going to jail, even if that someone did happen to save his life. I knew from being told that drinking and taking drugs was bad, and even though he didnt mention taking drugs, I somehow assumed he did. Having only met people who were easily sorted into 'good' and 'bad' bins until then, I went home stumped, and years later, was grateful.

Almost a decade after he'd gone, and never having amounted to much at chess and thereby having given up the game long ago, I realized he was probably letting me win that day. I put him in the 'good' bin.

On Beethoven and an Airplane..

This is probably a gratuitous post, so bear with me.





The first of the two is 'An Ode to Joy', by Beethoven. Like Fur Elise, this song also sounds immediately familiar even if you've never heard or paid attention to it before. The first time I really paid attention to it was at Aero India 2007. I'm sure you're not really surprised that there is an aviation connection here as well. I was at Yelahanka Air Force Station watching the afternoon round of flying displays. To be frank, i wasn't paying all that much attention to it since i'd already seen most of the flying routines in the morning, as well as on the day before. The American contingent was flying their F-16s and F-18s, which were doing pretty much routine stuff over airfield, and the commentary over the public address system was droning on with nonsense along the likes of "These airplanes have been the defenders of freedom since 1970s", etc. There was one plane i had missed, the Russian MiG-29 OVT, a thrust vectored version of the standard MiG-29, and i was really looking forward to what it had got to show.

The MiG doing its thing.. :)

The MiG's turn came, and the public address system sputtered back into life again, and started playing this tune. This amazing, vaguely familiar classical tune, timed to the aircraft's flying display. That display, to date, was one of the most beautiful things i'd ever seen, thanks in no small part to the music. The song was improbably slow for an airshow, but it was in fact a brilliant choice for a plane that had amazing slow-speed maneuvers to show off, including at one point stopping in mid-air at the start of a tail-slide. The crowd roared in applause for the lone Russian pilot who flew away from there as the star of the day, and the whole episode left the song in my mind. Yet i had no clue what the song was, for the next three and a half years.

I hunted for it high and low, and while people seemed to have heard the tune, no one could tell me its name. I even tried a website where you could hum and based on the tune the search engine would try and find your song. to no avail, though. until about a few months back, i was at a small party with my friends, and was humming this tune to myself when my erstwhile housemate nikhil, again, recognized the tune but couldnt remember its name. But his curiosity got piqued, and eventually he managed to track the song down for me a coupla days after that. I have posted above the version that is used as the national anthem of the European Union. The original i heard had no lyrics. The day after i finally found the song, i was telling my colleague benjamin the story of how long it took me to find it. Turns out i should've told him a long long time ago, since he blurted out the name the moment i hummed the tune. that song was right under my nose, in the next cubicle to mine to be precise, and i spent ages looking everywhere else.

I love the song, and i like the story, so i thought i'd share.

A borderline atheist's conundrum..

based on true incidents. written about a year or so back for a short story competition.

in two days, i was to leave for America. it is the dream of a good number of people i know, and i was poised to achieve it. i just didn't have the clothes for the mission. a couple of friends came down and decided to help rectify that, and they were more than welcome since i was rubbish at shopping. i roamed the streets of the city's shopping district, full of apprehension. not just about what clothes to buy, but more about what awaited me in three days time. i considered myself quite the traveller and wanderer, but this was far beyond what i'd traversed so far. our efforts stretched from afternoon to evening, and we were now at that twilight phase where the sky seemed undecided about where to go, stay with the day or give in to the night. my thoughts were on similar grounds, since i was headed someplace i was not too keen on, yet was thrilled for the experience of travelling into the unknown. i was confused.

we had come to a popular bookstore, near which there exists a clothes shop specializing in export rejects. by this point i had pretty much all i needed, and my friends were tired of picking stuff out for me so they headed into the bookstore to do some browsing and shopping of their own and left me alone to fend with the choices of t-shirts before me. t-shirts were all i had left to buy. in keeping with my 'hate-shopping' policy, i was done in five minutes, and all my t-shirt needs were addressed. unfortunately, it wasn't the same for my friends who decided to take their own sweet time browsing through books they were unlikely to read anytime soon. i wasn't left with much option but to sit outside on the stairs leading to the street from the building that contained both these shops.

as i sat there pondering over things i should probably not have been pondering about, a girl appeared. she was the sort of girl you couldn't help but notice in an instant. pretty in every sense of the word, commanding the attention of everyone who passed around her on the sidewalk yet seemingly unaware of it. yet she seemed unsure of what she was doing there, and merely stood in the middle of the sidewalk while people milled around her. i kept stealing glances at her while i waited for my friends, and she was facing away from me. i wondered what she was doing here, in the middle of this crowd. perhaps she was waiting for someone? for lack of better things to do, i kept looking and wondering. until she turned around. at which point, the decent thing to do was to look away and pretend i wasn't looking in the first place. which is what i did.

but then i was put into an unfamiliar situation. the girl looked straight at me, into my eyes. i tried looking away, but i was transfixed, to put it mildly. she started walking over towards where i was sitting, and i automatically started going through the usual checklists. i looked around to see if there was anyone behind me, and there wasnt. i looked back to see if she was still looking at me, and i was pretty sure that she was. maybe she suddenly decided to buy a book, or perhaps cheap export rejected designer clothing.. yeah, that had to be it. all these evaporated the moment she stood right in front of me, and said 'hi'. a simple, sweet 'hi'. were i my usual self, i would probably have said 'bond. james bond'. but what came out was a 'bwuuhh?' from my mouth.

she extended her hand, and i timidly shook it. soft hands, yet a firm handshake. it almost seemed like i met her at work and was concluding a business deal. i looked up at her face, and she was smiling. i continued with the checklist. do i know her? have we met at some party where i got drunk and did something so stupid that she remembers me? the latter seemed plausible, but somehow i was inclined to rule it out. i had the good sense to let go of her hand when the handshake concluded, but my senses were thrown off gear again when she said 'd'you mind if i sit down here?' another 'bwuuhh..' gave her the go ahead and she sat next to me. a few moments passed in silence, while i figured out what to say. predictably, i couldnt form a single sentence. anything i attempted to say would surely come out as the now familiar 'bwuuhh.. '.

she put me out of my misery by saying 'how are you'. which still had me wondering whether i have met her before. i wracked my brain in a vain attempt to remember, and despite priding myself on my memory, i couldnt imagine where i possibly could've met her. but on the positive side, i seemed to be regaining my ability to speak, and said 'fine. how have you been?'. this, in the remote possibility that we do know each other. she made small talk with me initially, while the processing abilities of my brain were almost equally divided between responding to her conversation and figuring out plausible reasons for how a girl at least three leagues above me was talking to me out of the blue.

small talk soon developed into a full-blown conversation, which may have lasted all of five minutes maybe, but applying relativity, it seemed like an eternity in my head. i was just as confused as i was at the start regarding why this was happening at all, but was more than happy to just play along. it was a random, free flowing conversation, neither of us knowing the other presumably, until the moment she said 'you looked worried earlier. what's the matter?' since i had been thinking of my upcoming journey until i saw her, i told her i'd been thinking about it and was apprehensive about heading there alone. she asked me if i had any friends here, and i said i had quite a few, mentioning that i was waiting for a couple of them with dubious reliability while shopping for things i needed on the trip. she asked me what i'd bought, and i showed her the shirts, sweater and t-shirts i had accumulated as part of the afternoon expedition. she said she was new in the city and had no friends.

i was disinclined to believe that somehow, perhaps it was her demeanour, but she insisted that was the case. at this point, any red blooded guy would offer to be her friend, but i was more inclined towards saying 'bwuuhh..' again so i kept shut. i wanted to tell her i could be her friend, and show her around town, but i was battling the now all-pervasive bwuuhh. which is when she said, 'would you like to pray with me?' i mustve made an expression of incredulity, because she immediately launched into an explanation. 'well you are worried about your trip, and i am part of the church of so and so (i forget the name).. so i thought prayer would help you'. she took my hand in hers and asked me to close my eyes before i could form a coherent response. once she held my hand, a coherent response was pretty unlikely, in any case.

so we sat there, on the stairs leading to the bookstore and the shop with cheap export rejected designer clothing, while the rest of the shopping public moved along on the sidewalk in front of us, while my friends looked at books they were gonna buy but weren't going to read, holding our hands, closing our eyes, one of us reciting a prayer while the other pretended to pray while wondering how a borderline atheist like him got into a situation like this in the first place. after another eternity, the prayer was over, we opened our eyes and she smiled at me. i smiled back, she let go of my hand, and,still looking at me, pulled out a brochure from her backpack. a fucking brochure, for her church. which was followed by a notebook where she wanted me to write how i found the prayer experience with her, and sign my name. i was too stunned for an indignant expression. i could shoot down pyramid marketing guys before they even took off, yet i'd been had this time. i accepted defeat and signed the notebook, and walked home with one less reason to believe in god.

story of a story of a..

I was writing a story. I still am writing it, in fact. Fleshing it out, so to speak. It started out as a script for a short film since a friend was bugging me to write one for him, but once we discussed it over, it turned out that this was gonna be too long for a short film, but i decided to go ahead and write it anyway, since it's been a while since i tried my hand at stories. the idea had been kicking around in my head since i saw the movie Ghost Rider, but it hadn't quite taken shape until recently, when the aforementioned friend bugged me.

The story is about a guy who, for reasons undisclosed (which means i still have to write a credible backstory for him), decides to die. he decides life isn't worth living, and it made no sense to him to fight all the meaningless battles he had to in every waking hour of every living day of his self-titled miserable life. so he decides to quit battling, quit life. being a coward, he decides suicide isnt for him. so he figured another way. he was going to walk on the lips of death, seeing if they'll open sometime and take him in. so he starts pushing the envelope, so to speak.

since i've already mentioned ghost rider, and since i'm a bike lover myself, you probably guessed that he is going to push the limits on his bike. and since iv already labelled him a coward, there were enough possibilities to play around with the physical courage vs mental courage angle, since it does take courage to stunt on a bike. so our hero starts with simple stuff that was scary to him before, and soon finds himself increasing the danger quotient. pushing the proverbial limit millimetres at a time, he finds himself emerge successful each time, so he pushes it some more. the cycle continues until one day he realizes that he has become good at this one thing in life, possibly the best one earth, evel knievel league. and this all important realization comes to him in the middle of the stunt that will kill him.

as soon as this idea had started taking form in my head, i tried to create this protagonist guy, and it kept falling apart. things weren't fitting where they were supposed to,and i wasn't too thrilled with the road my story was taking. it soon was eating my mind in my spare time, and i had to fix the story somehow. it so happened that one day, on my commute back from office on my bike, i was riding with my mind on autopilot and the story popped up in my head again. stories are good things to ruminate when you're coasting along at 80 kmph.

I am a fast driver, but i am also one to take safety seriously. i mean, i'm not above jumping a red light, but many of those who've ridden with me would vouch for me if i say that i dont like taking unnecessary risks. a crazy though seized me, and i found myself in the mind of my story's hero. so, what would he do?

soon enough, caution was gone with the wind that was washing over me, and i watched the needle climb upwards of 110, in peak evening traffic. i overtook vehicles with narrow clearances, shooting through red lights at crazy speeds, slaloming across a line of cars.. there was a curve on the way home, with a bump at its apex, and experience told me 40 was the speed there. today, it was going to be 70. the roads were damp from an afternoon shower, and my mind was blank as i was briefly airborne, still blank as i watched the bike slide to the curb and miss a car by an inch or so, all in slow motion. the thought that i may have taken this too far did occur for a flash, but somehow the thought of backing out didn't follow it. shooting through a red light, a cop jumped into the middle of the road to stop me, and i played chicken with him, trusting in his cowardice to get him out of my way. one violent turn of the bike was made to ensure he didnt catch the registration.

the madness ended on the lane home, where my cousin met me and we were to figure out where to have dinner. once that was done, i hopped on the bike and started it, only to realize that i had a flat tyre. it had by then been apparent to me that my prior misadventure was a bit much, but now i realized exactly how much. ten minutes earlier, and that flat wouldve been catastrophic. the moment that followed wasnt one of realization, but one of fear and deflation.

maybe stories are better told, not lived.

POSTSCRIPT : the facts.. i am writing a story, i do drive fast, i did get a flat tyre. the rest have been stringed together from incidents that happened to me/were witnessed by me over the week preceding my writing this. yes, this is fictional, just another late night attempt at an idea to get a short film out of my original story idea, but one that might not work considering this isnt easy to film either. nor am i happy with it. and no, do NOT comment on my driving.

an old futile attempt..

A story I'd written for an ultra short story competition back in 2006. I think it had to contain the word message or manoeuvre or something, dont remember now. Found this, and a lot of other writing by chance yesterday. Thought i'd post, considering it's utter crap anyway.. :P

No, i didn't win any sort of prize.

Ever the practical guy, I had a plan. I looked at it again and again and again; it was foolproof. All the elaborate manoeuvres I had devised to pass her the message seemed to work like swiss clockwork in my mind. I could do no wrong. But you see the trouble was, I was convinced of my own genius. I failed to see that the genius itself was the flaw of my plan. And I failed to see the chasm between genius and reality. So, I fucked up.

As usual, detractors might add.

All my elaborate courtship manoeuvres were wasted, falling pitifully short of conveying what was in my heart. Now she thinks I've lost my marbles. Oh well, can't be helped.

I guess its much cooler to be a flawed genius anyway.