Bike and seek..

This might get lost in between the flight training posts, but it's been kicking around for a while, so i thought i'd post it anyway..

Afternoons were a source of trouble and stories when we were children, but this one is from the evening. Given that we had a year-round capability to get into trouble, it was hardly surprising that every now and then there was a rush to the hospital even during school days when we had a mere two hours to get into trouble. Efficient that we were, these two hour playtimes led to stitches, fractures, casts.. all trophies of our heydays. This particular story is about a fracture.

My brother was lucky, he once broke his arm. He was trying something on the gymnastic high bar at school and fell down on his hand, fracturing his wrist (if i remember correctly). This established two things : my brother was a lousy gymnast, and our physician was a lousy doctor. The doc sent him off after checking his xray, saying that he had no fracture. That weekend, my brother fell from a tree and the doctor who checked him this time round, looked at his old xray and said there was a clear fracture. History is witness that my brother then broke the same wrist a few more times just as it was about to heal, and each time in increasingly bizarre ways. Everyone scribbled on his cast, and he used the cast as a weapon against me when we fought. I wanted a cast, but unfortunately never broke any bones, at least when those things mattered.

Hide and seek was a favourite pastime of ours, and we played hide and seek way beyond the age when it was supposed to become embarrassing. The gang in the colony were isolated from other kids for the most part, and we all went to different schools. It wasn't embarrassing to us, though i doubt few ever told people outside that we played hide and seek every evening after an hour of football or cricket at school. There were very strict rules regarding where we could hide and couldnt, owing mostly to irate neighbours who didn't want us running about looking for hiding places on their property. So the hiding zones were restricted to our yard, a neighbours yard, and a few roads nearby. Wooded areas were vetoed thanks to safety concerns from parents, and that left us with very few options. Yet we continued to innovate on where we could hide, so that the game wouldn't get reduced to a running race where the fastest to get back to base would win.

One such innovation involved the use of bicycles, and was played for a grand total of one day. And I'll tell you why. One of the limitations on the size of our hiding zones was the fact that we were kids of varying ages. The smaller ones wouldn't be able to keep up if we were allowed to hide in vast areas, so there were self imposed area regulations. You could go down the road to Rosey auntie's house for instance, but only as far as the tree opposite, not all the way to the end of her property. Some wise guy came up with the brilliant idea that we should play hide and seek on bicycles. The rules were simple, since we had bicycles, we could hide all over the colony, but had to hide the bicycles too. The guy who came to seek us out would also be on a bicycle, and when spotted, we had to try and beat him back to the gate of my house (which was the base) in order to win. Everyone agreed excitedly, and wondered why we hadn't thought of this before. The game was on.

I found a rather nice place to hide, and since it was a fairly big place, i soon had everyone piling up their bicycles next to mine. We sat there waiting for the seeker to come, and after twenty minutes or so, he finally came and spotted us. The hiding place was in one of the farther reaches of the colony, and what followed next was an epic cycle race, with the seeker in front and all of us trying to catch up so we wont lose. Since everyone had piled their bicycles on to mine, I was the last to leave since extricating my Hercules MTB from the pile took time and effort. But I wasn't unduly worried; the rest were all on small BSA champ type bikes, and i could easily overhaul them with my large set of wheels. The ride back would take about three to four minutes, and i slowly started getting to the front of the pack. Soon enough, my trusty Hercules overtook pretty much everyone, and only my brother and the seeker were ahead. As I pulled alongside to overtake my brother with about twenty yards left to go, he did the sort of dumb thing that younger siblings are prone to do. He popped a wheelie.

I have tried many times since to rationalize his thought process. At a moment when he's ahead of the pack, with only one guy to overtake, and with time running out, when all he should be thinking about was overtaking and winning, what the hell would prompt him to pop a wheelie? And that wasn't the worst part, he didn't even know how to pop a wheelie. The front wheel rose in the air, tilted to the right, and fell down in front of me as I was passing him at high speed. I was thrown forward, and I'm told the cycle did a beautiful airborne spin before landing behind me. The number of spins it did grew each time the story was told, reaching as high as 3 or 4 before we realized it was ridiculous. It took a coupla seconds for the pain to kick in, and I realized something was wrong with my tooth. It wasn't the first time, and it certainly wasn't the last time, my tooth had taken the brunt of impact. Top left incisor partially ground off by asphalt. We never played this brand of hide and seek again.

There was a rush to a dentist, some vague talk of surgery, medications, and finally a cap was fitted to cover up the gap in my smile. An Xray of my tooth was taken, and I was given the tiny postal stamp size film of it which showed two fractures. For me, that was the silver lining. This was no wrist or leg, but two fractures in something that tiny oughta count! Despite the pain, I was elated by the whole Xray affair, and walked into school next day with the postage stamp film that carried precious evidence of glory.

Five minutes later, I was deflated when someone pointed out to those poring over the xray that the fractures on my tooth formed the shape of an underwear.

Bah.

Notes on Flying #3 - Ground checks..

Rain

Madhya Pradesh is stunningly, achingly beautiful in the rains. There is a coat of low grass of an intense light green colour covering the ground evenly as far as the eye can see, and this lawn is punctuated by darker trees and shrubs and streams. Hills rise up seemingly in an effort to break the light green sheath of grass, but the grass has covered them all over, refusing to give up. The only place where there is a break in the colour is where man has intervened with his pickaxes and steam shovels, revealing the dark, almost black, soil underneath. Yet even those man made scars on the earth seem to fit in well with the overall palette of greens on the ground, and greys in the sky. It's all very, very beautiful. And y'know what? I hate it.

I have seen a grand total of one take-off from our pokey little airstrip in the eight days i have spent here. The weather's so miserable for flying that even the birds are taking shelter. We have a paper on the notice board that borrows a line from a US Air Force base whose name I forget, and it says 'There is no justification for flying through a storm in peacetime'. So the planes stay put, and everyone's miserable, itching for the clouds to clear away. And judging by the relentlessness of the weather every single day, we're slowly becoming more and more apprehensive about whether the skies will all clear up by september when we're scheduled to take to the skies.

Apprehension

Normally, post-school kids take 6 months to complete their PPL course. Working on the assumption that executives like us have better knowledge and lesser time, this timeframe has been compressed to 3 months for us. And things are whooshing by, while we make feeble attempts at comprehension. The initial pride and cockiness has all but vanished, and there is a crystal clear appreciation of the task at hand, and our handicaps in achieving the same. Everyone is reacting differently to this, and I can't speak for everyone else, but my approach/mantra is to avoid panic. I am a bit of a worrier, and this will be a tough call, but I figure if i put in more time with the books while I'm away from class, I should have things under control. The biggest potential handicap for me, that of not being an engineer, has been a non-factor so far, and I'm kinda happy to report that even after a break of 9 years, technical concepts come fairly easy. It does help that i spent 9 years reading up a lot, though.

Homework, Tests

Homework has been an alien concept for years now. It is a different matter that I often take office work home, but that is usually a matter of convenience more than compulsion. Homework, tests, uniform.. they all add up to a strange sort of deja vu. It is a lot like school, yet there are significant differences. I actually don't mind the homework, I'm proud of the uniform and look forward to wearing it daily, and tests are seen not as a pass/fail monster but as genuine evaluations of progress. Today the navigation prof threw us a surprise test, and i found old ghosts from school haunting me. I used to have a habit of doggedly sticking with solving a problem while sacrificing potential mark-scoring questions ahead simply because I refused to give up on the one that was bogging me down. I missed out on an entire page of the question paper today that was full of sitters, and was kicking myself afterwards. Errors due to carelessness in basic mathematics is another old ghost from school days that I have to fight yet again. There is a lot of progress to be made ahead.

To be continued..

Notes on Flying #2 - Powering Up..

Birthday

Notwithstanding my earlier post about birthdays, and in fact rather reinforcing it, I had an amazing birthday. As if the mere fact that by the happiest of coincidences my flight training started on the very same day wasn't enough, I won a watch in an in-flight raffle of sorts, had two ATR flights which are things I look forward to, and once I got here, the academy folks threw me a surprise party. There is no way I can hope to beat this birthday in the years to come, so I guess it's all downhill from here. I was a bit unhappy that I wouldn't get to celebrate with friends on the exact day (even though we had a good pre birthday party before i left), but the surprise made up for it. There was a cake, and some of it was smeared on my face before the rest was dispatched. The fact that all the faculties in the academy came down made it even better, since we had a good ice breaker session where we got to know each other before classes started full swing.

The Boss, The School.

His voice was dripping with sarcasm as he mentioned the battle with the 'so called West Pakistan'. It was an indicator of his pride in having participated in the war that made the 'West' in West Pakistan redundant. It was a pleasant surprise that the classes started with a lecture on the poetic side of aviation. We were all given a copy of 'Jonathan Livingstone Seagull' wherein the Boss had inscribed,

"I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things" - Antoine de Saint Exupery.

He went on to describe how the mind can become detached when flying, and how that is a time when amazing and beautiful thoughts strike you. This is the fourth time I have been gifted a copy of that book, and it's been a great read every single time. We started off with navigation, and that evening, with the navigation instructor (also e air force) in tow, lost our way back to the hostel. Of course, some of these updates are already on my facebook page, but bear with me anyway.

A friend asked me if I'm sitting at the back of the class. Somehow it seems easy to assume that, I'm told. Unfortunately, I'm a front bencher, and also the annoying geek of the class who goes "Me me me sir, I know the answer, pick me!". Well, almost. These are the most exciting classes I will probably ever attend, so I dont care, I'm gonna enjoy myself.

The highlight so far has been the uniform and the starter kit. We were given uniform shirts and tie, as well as a pilot bag with books, charts, CDs, manuals, noise cancelling headset, and an E6B flight computer. The bag falls into the insanely cool category. I have seen pilots carry those around, but never ever thought I would own one someday. Not even when I got into this course, because I'm headed to be a lowly PPL holder, while the bag is definitely airline pilot territory. Needless to say, we're inseparable.

The place, pilots.

Once the initial romantic picture of rainswept plains lifted, I got a better idea of the place. There is hardly anything around, and this is truly rural India. Not surprisingly, there is a rather feudal mindset amongst the upper class people I've met here, and I'm not entirely sure how comfortable I am with that.

Speaking of uncomfortable things, I have always known that pilots are a vain bunch, and that I myself have had the trait despite not being a pilot (yet), but the extent of that vanity among the kids who are here for their license course is sometimes a bit off-putting. Though, I do like the pilot sense of humour and it feels nice to be among people of that wavelength.

To be continued..

Notes on Flying #1

This has been a long time in the making.

Finally, all the the hoops have been jumped through, all the hurdles cleared, and I'm actually in Madhya Pradesh to begin training at 1030 hours tomorrow morning for my private pilot's license. It's still sinking in, despite the fact that I was told quite a while ago that I'd be going. I had wanted to document the whole experience on this blog, and wanted to start much earlier in the process, especially covering the procedural hoops us flight monkeys had to jump through, but I decided to wait till the training actually began. Part of the reason for this was a slight superstition that I might jinx it by talking about it too soon, and part of it was that in case it didn't work out I'd look rather silly having started a blog in anticipation.

They really oughta stop making propellers from rubber :P

Now, though, I can finally start. The way i plan to do this is quick short and frequent updates, if possible with pictures. I will include a few flashback posts to cover some of the things that have already happened, though this will have to be later. At the outset, though, I cannot begin to tell you, dear four and a half readers, how exciting this is. There are very few things I have looked forward to as much as I've looked forward to this. The outcome is by no means certain, but I guess I can pause for a bit of breath here. I kept thinking some obstacle would've taken me out long before this.

Worried looking Karthik entering the shuttle bus at Hyderabad airport

It is also the happiest of coincidences that I start training on my 27th birthday. It's probably the only birthday I've spent with people I barely know yet, but the fact that tomorrow marks the beginning of an awesome gift makes it quite a lot better. We reached Bhopal after two interesting ATR flights on jet airways. We were supposed to be on 737s on both legs, and on both equipment got subbed and we flew ATRs. Prior to this, I've been on an ATR only once, and suddenly i get two in a row. Lucky, i guess, since I'm always eager to fly on types other than the staple Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s.

I instantly fell in love with Bhopal airport.. its nice.

Madhya Pradesh is beautiful in the rain, it is bathed in this intense green colour. Kerala is green too, but it's a darker shade there on average, and the green stays throughout the year. This green lasts a few months after the rains, and then turns brown. But right now it is green, and I love it. We also joked about how the place is rather flat, at least where we are, which means we have quite the pick when it comes to places to make emergency landings in. The mood in the group is optimistic, and over dinner we were all a bit philosophical. It's almost a given that 100% of us clearing the license in one go is not going to happen. DGCA works in mysterious ways, apparently until a year or two ago there wasn't even a defined syllabus for the pilot license exam. All sorts of rumours are doing the rounds, each more worrying than the rest, but i guess we've come to this realization that it's too late to worry now. We're here, so we might as well give it our best shot. There's this subtle pride you can sense in the group, since we all know we've been chosen for this over others, and we've had to struggle to get chosen. I like that, and I'm beginning to like them, and I hope we all have a good time.

Super fancy palace/restaurant we had lunch at. Food more than matched the ambience.

Safety was discussed too, but that warrants a whole post for itself somewhere down the road. Nothing more to report for the day. Apologies in advance if this becomes a whiny diary down the road. I wont have time to focus on the actual pieces, so I'll just be recording my thoughts at the end of the day.

On a more optimistic note, the ladies hostel is right across the road from our bungalow.

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.

Suffering Catfish..

There were many such afternoons before this, and many after. While the adults were either asleep or watching TV, us kids had all descended on the little bridge over the canal just outside of our colony. I guess the grown-ups were rather happy to have us off their backs for a few hours. We were engaged in one of our favourite post-monsoon activities - fishing. The rains would bring water into the canal, which would first wash away all the bushes that had filled its waterless bed over summer, and then, once the rains had gone, there would be fishes. And we would go fishing.

There were many ways to do this, none of which we were really all that good at. Mammoonju, the local grocer, would keep fishing hooks and twine, which we acquired for a buck and fifty paise. A shrub in the neighbourhood would lose a long-ish branch, and we were in business. Worms would be dug and speared on the hook, a bit of thermocol for a bobber, and all we had to do was wait. We never caught much fish this way, maybe less than a dozen in all the years combined. On the few occasions we did catch one, we never knew what to do with it. The first time we caught one, bigger boys from the colony nearby told us we should put fevicol on its lip over the hook wound so that it would heal and we could keep it as a pet. The only reason that fish lived was because amma's suspicions were aroused when she saw us heading towards the garage with a bottle of fevicol and a bottle with the fish in it.

As we grew older, and dare I say braver, we began to get into the water. We would take old towels from home, stand at a suitable place downstream with the towel stretched across the flow, and someone would chase the fishes from upstream. We would catch many, and were suitably gladdened. But of course, soon we wanted to catch bigger fish. Catfish were the holy grail, because they hid in cracks between rocks. The same cracks also housed water snakes, and that was the main reason why fishing in the canal was a clandestine activity. The adults should never know.

Which brings me back to the afternoon. We had seen the boys from the other colony catch huge catfish by ferreting them out of their cracks and chopping them with long knifes while they were still in the water. They took home their prize to cook. We wanted one for a pet, a catfish would've made a very cool pet. We had spotted one in the cracks beneath a little bridge that ran over the canal, and for the first time, we were venturing under it. The fact that it was almost pitch dark under the low bridge made it even more of an adventure. For at least an hour we searched, and even the kids who normally wouldn't get into the water were braving the possibility of water snakes in search of the holy grail in juvenile ichthyology. Since there was only one towel, the others were carrying plastic covers in desperation.

After an hour, spirits were flagging, and I was looking a bit worried as my brother went further under the bridge than all of us had dared so far. Even that intrepid move did not produce the catfish we were after. Just as we were beating retreat and coming out from under the bridge one by one, I looked at Jeffrey. Jeffrey did not particularly like getting wet in the dirty water of the canal, and rarely shared our enthusiasm for such hands-on fishing. He was standing there in the water, his arms drooping, looking as dejected as the rest of us, when a small fish jumped into the air in front of him. I saw his hand move quick as a flash, and the next thing I know is that the fish was flapping about in the plastic cover he was holding. He had snatched a fish out of thin air! The ecstatic scene that followed was not dissimilar to a football team who had just scored a goal. We had just seen the single most amazing thing in our short lives that far. We did not get the damn catfish, but we went home with grins plastered to our faces. No grown up could be told the story. No one would've believed us anyway.

Merry Sacrilegious Xmas..

This is the Christmas email I sent out to friends, thought I might as well post it here in its entirety, so that I can make 2010 my bloggingest year yet :)

tl;dr just a long winded way of wishing you a merry xmas.

So I was wondering, what if Jesus were born in India? What would we get if we replaced Bethlehem with the idiosyncrasies of modern day India? Well, legend goes that Joseph and Mary had to travel to Bethlehem to pay a special tax. We're right on target then! I admit my version of the nativity story is bits and pieces I remember from school, polished off with a six-year-old friendly version that I read on the interwebs after the idea for this post struck me, but bear with me here. So, Joseph and Mary travel to India where Mary is to deliver the Son of God. Of course, health insurance was a problem, and India being the prime destination for cheap but world class healthcare, they decided to take the medical tourism route. Thanks to an unfortunate booking on Air-India, their travel dates were anyone's guess. A little known story goes that the angel who came to Mary to tell her she would bear the Son of God had to make a coupla trips back to confirm their booking with the local Air India offices. As a result, Joseph and Mary arrived in India the night before her due date. The journey left Mary wishing for a trip on donkeyback, like in the good old days, since the aircraft was even less comfortable than that.

Upon arrival, they were greeted with burning tyres and buses. I guess it was apt that the day before the Lord's birth was a bandh in India. This was of course, strategically timed by the political parties who called for the bandh, so that two productive days would be lost. The birth of the Lord would be a holiday in any case. As a result of the bandh, they were left stranded. Most of the hotels weren't open, and Apollo Hospital was kinda far from the airport. Determined that the Son of God would not arrive into this world at the airports rather apt but unclean arrival terminal, they ventured out. The few open hotels immediately jacked up their rates tenfold seeing that Joseph and Mary were a) foreigners, b) desperate for a room. In the end they bribed the custodian of a Yatri Nivas run by the state tourism corporation and he gave them a semi-passable room for the night. Needless to say, there were bedbugs and mice galore. At this point, Mary is rather ironically telling Joseph that she has seen stables cleaner than this back in Bethlehem. A while later, the Lord is born, and Joseph, having had an overdose of the recently concluded FIFA world cup, names Him Jesus, ostensibly in tribute to Jesus Navas, the Spanish winger.

Now, some wise men arrived by the red-eye flight from the Promised Land. Being wise men, they knew fully well not to carry expensive gifts since they would have to bribe the customs officials to get them into the country, and it wasn't quite worth it. Instead, in their wisdom, they shopped duty-free. I'm not sure of the exact nature of the gifts they bought, considering duty-free didn't stock gold, frankincense or myrrh. The guy at the check-out counter didn't even know what the last two were. I'm guessing they bought at least one bag of Herschey's Kisses chocolate, judging by the purchases of all foreign-returns in my office. They were to follow a star that they knew would rise, but being wise men, they had factored the smog in our cities into their plans, and had brought along a GPS. They ran out of wisdom soon, though, when they discovered that their expensive Tom-Tom unit didn't have much coverage in India. They had more pressing worries though, they had to register themselves at the police commissioners office as foreigners before they could proceed to see Jesus.

In the end they did get there, only to figure out that they were a bit too late. Senior officials in the immigration department had already leaked to the media information regarding the presence and whereabouts of Joseph and Mary in India, and the wise men were beaten to the post by Barkha Dutt who was shouting at the Child, trying to get the first ever interview with the Son of God. Vijay Mallya was there too, since he was tipped off about the water-to-wine capabilities of the Kid, and the folks from Dr Batra's Homeopathics were there since they needed His miracle cures since Homeopathy was shite anyway. Lalit Modi was offering him an IPL team, and the producers of Big Boss wanted to do an Ed TV style reality series on his life that somehow also involved walking on water while carrying Rakhi Sawant. The Kid could do it without a CG budget.

yeah i think i should probably stop.

PS2, if i weren't agnostic, i would say that this has probably assured me of my ticket to hell.

PS3, Merry Xmas y'all. :)

PS4, yeah i know, i missed out on lotsa details, couldn't be bothered, etc.

love, take care, etc.

Clean bike, wide grin..

She sits in the workshop in all her glory. Having been a bit of a hangar queen lately, she seems intent on testing my patience. I think she has a smirk on her face. I remind myself to be a bit less silly, this was a bike after all. Whatever was causing her to throw her little hissy fits, we had to get to the bottom of it and fix it, lest she throws a tantrum en route to Goa. A night ride is on the cards, and a possibility of the bike throwing tantrums on NH4 might not sit well with my mental well being on the ride. I think back and remember that she's not really let me down on a long ride as yet, but as she (and I) are getting long in the tooth, I tend to anticipate issues more often these days. Thus, we're back at the workshop, where she takes centre-stage.

Syed the Reliable, coaxes and cajoles her into revealing what the vexing issue was. She's not easy on us, we have to check and eliminate electrical and fuel line issues before she finally reveals what was wrong. A tiny unreachable sleeve connecting carburettor to engine has given up the ghost. For all of 150 rupees, Syed the Reliable will have to dispatch a minion halfway across town to get a spare. The broken sleeve meant she was taking in an impure fuel-air mixture, which caused power and mileage to drop, temperatures (both hers and mine) to increase, and more importantly, stoppages. I would be doing 100+ on the ring road and for no reason, she would go on strike. And then when I'm on the verge of giving up and calling Syed for help, she would start up again, as if nothing was ever wrong. Sounds a bit like a marriage, I suppose. I wouldn't know. I leave her in the care of Syed and his minions, and walk the short remaining distance to work.

At five fifteen in the evening, I walk back in and see she's getting a wash. Syed has been uncharacteristically tardy, but that's okay, I have all the time in the world. They roll her out of the washing bay, oil up the chain, put on new handlebar grips to replace the old ones I'd lost in the last accident, and she's good to go. She's set me back two hundred and eighty eight rupees, but that's nothing compared to the relief of finally having fixed everything. A thousand couldn't fix her the last time I was here. I thank Syed and Co. one last time, and walk out of the shop, where they have her ready and purring, dripping wet from the wash. From the sound of the engine I figure everything's okay, it's an oddly reassuring sound. I get on, check everything, switch the purr to a muffled roar, and we're off. I watch the water droplets slide and fly off her sides as we pick up speed. I made it a point to ask them not to dry her after the wash. There is only one proper way to dry a freshly washed bike. And that is to RIDE it.

:)

Hush L(a)unch

So there was this little book launch today. Hush (refer previous post) was unofficially launched at a nice little lunch event at this place called 64 in Koramangala. Just a few friends, well wishers and people who worked so hard the bring the book out. i fall into the former two categories, so i was there for the free lunch as well. which was just as well, since i am kinda broke :). I have watched this book come to life while standing on the sidelines, and was proud of the efforts of pratheek, dileep and the rest in having finally brought it out. the future is equally uncertain for everyone, but few dare step up and chase a dream. i had a small toast to make, and had written it down a few days back. in the end i gave the reader's digest version of it i guess, since it wasnt a formal event and all that. in any case, i thought i might as well post the entire text of it here.

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I cannot tell you how happy i am being here, seeing this book take flight finally. I have a small story to share on this occasion. Back in July, pratheek and i had done a roadtrip to kerala to attend sooraj's and asha's wedding. after a rather long arduous and rain-soaked drive on my bike, we reached kanhangad, where we were to halt at sachin's place for lunch and some much needed rest before the remainder of the trip to kannur where the wedding was. It's always been awkward meeting parents of NID folk, at least for me. Parents of school friends were different, since i was accustomed to them, but somehow it's been different with parents of college friends. but sachin's father is the genial sort, and was keeping us entertained with small talk. eventually, he got around to asking us both what we did for a living, which is when the fun started.

prefacing that, he had been on a roll telling us how sachin is working with paper, and i couldn't help but get the impression that his dad wasn't entirely sure of the rationale behind it. what was a trained graphic designer doing cutting up bits of paper? soon he found that i was a trained product designer who was working with airplanes, and that pratheek was a trained engineer and then a trained product designer who was working on a comic book. with an incredulous expression on his face, he asked "why didn't you guys figure this out earlier?". his point was that sachin had been cutting up paper since school, i have always loved airplanes, and pratheek had been a comic fanatic since he was a kid. why didn't we just figure out earlier what we wanted to do and not waste time with NID and engineering and whatnot?

since he was talking as a parent who had to pay for the circuitous academic paths one of us took, i sympathized with him. its not easy for them to understand what three lunatics like us have been doing with our lives. but today, seeing this book come out, things are different. there are times when all of us have struggled with our dreams, and it's moments like these that provide that extra reserve of energy when morale is fading. seeing a good friend making progress is inspiring, and gives me hope in my own pursuits. So, here's to friends and their dreams, here's to long winded but sure footed paths to those dreams, and here's to the relentless chase and never giving up. :)

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yeah, maybe that was a bit stuffy and formal for a comic book launch :P

Hush / Manta Ray

Hush, is here.

This is the fruit of the endeavours of my close friend Pratheek Thomas. Him and Dileep Cherian have started an indie comic/graphic novel publishing house called Manta Ray. Do check them out, and support them. the book is good, i've read it :)

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