Observations while Spring Cleaning

• If I am sent to prison in the near future for past crimes, be sure that it will be for unreturned library books.
• After resigning, my psychology teacher in school (who is now a rabble rousing comrade, but I digress) gave each of us a personalised good-bye card (even though it should have been the other way round). She seems to think I was a nerd.
• When I hunted for my photo in the school magazine, it didn’t appear in the sections where my friends were listed for having some kind of talent-singing, dancing, writing, public speaking, social service, membership of Africa/ Palestine/ UNESCO/ Elocution/ Environment etc. clubs but for being a top scorer. Which is sad because if you went to school, you were supposed to be studying anyway.
• In spite of the above I don’t think I was a nerd. In a diary entry, I had written that the Unit tests were beginning in two days from the day of the diary entry and that I hadn’t studied anything. My present self panicked a little at that but assumed that the kid-me was also feeling pangs of guilt and would presently start studying. Turns out she had to stop the entry after two lines because DDLJ was coming on Sony and she had to watch that. My present self prayed that the first Unit test was English.
• Did the fact that I was writing about Unit Tests at all, make me a nerd?
• I addressed my diary as ‘Cordelia’ (or ‘Cord’ or ‘Li’, as my mood permitted) since…I don’t know…’Kitty’ was too childish? I also seemed to think that the diary was a person. At the end of a very long entry, I wrote, “I will stop writing now. You must be tired.”
• During the post-Board exam break I took to writing an illustrated description of the IPL’s first edition. After giving out the basic facts of each team, I put in “My View”, possibly inspired by the Times of India’s then-new editorial practice. Under that section, for Rajasthan Royals, I wrote that I didn’t want them to win, because, and I quote, “I don’t like Shane Warne”. Yes, sounds like me.
• When anybody asked me who my favourite cricketer was, I always said Dhoni. But secretly, I had given my heart to Robin Uthappa.
• A card my colony friends had given me for my birthday described me as “Moti, Moti, Tu hai moti, fuvvare jaisi hai teri choti”. If you had known me as a child, you would know how accurate the second part was.
• My college friends gave me a ‘Welcome Back’ card when I joined them after skipping classes for more than a week during my sister’s wedding. Besides being the funniest and sweetest thing I have ever received, it is also proof that capitalism can make us happy. 

Of Face-book Friends and Childhood Foes

(This was written four and a half years ago. But I didn't have the heart to edit it (or maybe I was just too lazy). Kindly bear with the wordiness.)

I was facing an unenviable prospect. A 2000 word article on the viability of complete Capital Account Convertibility for India is never an easy task. That, at 11 o’clock at night, and with an hour left for the deadline to expire was impossible to achieve. Especially when I still had 30 of a 56 page RBI paper to read before I could commence writing. I decided I needed a break- procrastinating for another ten minutes could hardly hurt. Accordingly, I turned to the one source of relaxation that, as I had recently started appreciating, never failed to provide succour. Facebook.

My account showed that a certain Sanjri Mehta wished to add me to her already burgeoning friend list. I stared at her profile picture for a good 35 seconds out of pure surprise. I knew her, from school. She looked different now, much thinner, but with the same angelic smile that unfailingly melted the heart of even the most hardhearted of disciplinarians. It was no surprise then that all the children of Nursery A fell in love with her the moment she entered the monochromatically green classroom for the first time. It was not long before I learnt one of the most fundamental truths of life- looks could be deceptive.

That day, I waited patiently for my chance at the swings (patiently for a three year old in any case) while Sanjri took what seemed to me like her 18th turn. No longer being able to control myself, I told her to let me have a go as well. In response, she stuck out her pink little tongue while her minions (yes, in kindergarten) shrieked in delight at their leader’s wit and presence of mind. I appealed to my class teacher, but not wanting to be labelled a complaint cock (in nursery A parlance), omitted the part involving the tongue showing. Eventually I could enjoy the pleasure of the wind blowing in my face while my toes pointed at the sky, for all of three minutes but it still seemed a victory to me.

Of course, the victory was even more short-lived than I had imagined. When we trooped back to class after the PT period the teacher stood in front of us and extolled the virtues of sharing-our books, toys, food, even the swings and then went on to reward my adversary with a chocolate for having shown the that particular behaviour in the playground. Appreciating the unfairness in the world, I decided to drown my sorrows in the nimbu pani with which my mum had filled my Little Mermaid water bottle that day. But I had only to take the first sip when I found out that the cool drink had metamorphosed into sand-the kind that prevented kids from getting hurt, when they fell in the playground. I looked up to find Sanjri and her three friends pointedly giggling in my direction.

It all came flooding back- all the memories of kindergarten. Of having been teased mercilessly for having oiled hair. Of losing my favourite crayon and being scolded for that even as I was certain that it had been pilfered by my devious foe. Of never being allowed to captain a team during an intra class kho-kho match because it was invariably always Sanjri and one of her friends. You might call me immature but at that moment, I felt a certain power. With one click, I could ignore her friend request- the ultimate snub in the virtual world – and that would be my revenge for all the injustices heaped on me during my childhood. After all, Sanjri was an important reason for my premature loss of innocence, responsible for making me realise early in the day that the world was evil even though my world was confined to the toys-filled corridor outside the classroom.

I recalled the gigantic dollhouse in the centre of the same corridor. It had a big and ugly doll inside that we named Martha, after one of the Nursery teachers. She was soft and cushiony and immensely huggable, the doll I mean, and I remember slipping out of class with my best friend, Madhulika, on the pretext of going to the washroom (truancy at three) to play with her.

Madhulika’s dad was a journalist, the free lancing kind (which I did not understand then), so he generally made the time to pick her from school in the afternoon. At times, he took me too, and dropped me home in his car, after treating the two of us to ice cream at Nirulas’. I always chose the 21 Love flavour while Madhulika tried a new one each time. Uncle sometimes had a Banana Split, which I thought was a disgusting combination but I could not be sure since I was too meek to try it. I also loved their car-my parents did not have one then, actually not until much later, so the little doll that hung from the rear view mirror of the white Maruti800, and made a squeaking sound every time the car crossed a speed breaker never ceased to amuse me.

Their house was another novelty, very unlike the boring government quarters that I lived in. It was not big. Just a small whitewashed bungalow, I am not sure where, but with a tiny garden in front. They did not have a drawing room with stuffy sofas, like my house did, where you couldn’t even sit with your feet up. They just had some mattresses and lots of colourful cushions and Madhulika and I could mistreat them in any manner. Her mother was always too occupied to reprimand us, and naturally, we took full advantage. They also had a room with three walls covered completely with books, all kinds- thick, serious ones and the ones with a lot of pictures as well. Her mum told me I could borrow any when I learnt how to read properly. That made me pay a lot of attention to what the teacher used to recite in class, and the stuff about the alphabet that my mother regularly tried to drill into my head. What they did not have was a television set so Madhulika could not watch All The Best or Super hit Muqabla on DD but besides that, she did not miss much. I, for one, could never understand my parents’ enthusiasm for the Sunday Matinee Show. It only aired old movies anyway, that invariably ended in a fight sequence and a death (never of the hero or the pretty girl he intermittently hung out with, on screen) but generally of the hero’s mother or friend (who had had a thing for the pretty girl too).

When things became more interesting with cable, Madhulika’s parents might have got her a TV, I never knew, because sometime after kindergarten we stopped being friends. It was not a squabble or a fight, just that we were shuffled. While she went to II-C, I remained in A section. We might have cried and sulked for a while but soon made new friends and forgot all about each other till our citation ceremony in 12th standard when Madhulika (now predictably called Maddy by her commerce classmates), overcome with emotion, gave me the tightest bear hug. For that moment, it seemed like we were back in the green classroom and the 14 years that had passed when we had last been there, all but vanished. She promised to call that day and I likewise vowed to keep in touch. I did keep it- I occasionally comment on her status on Facebook and she posts a ‘Wassup’ on my wall every now and then.

I was about to visit Madhulika’s profile for the same ritual, when my phone lit up- a message from the editor reminding me that my article was not in yet. The clock on my computer screen showed that it was 11:35 pm. Sanjri’s pretty face was still grinning mischievously from the screen. I looked at it one last time, then clicked on the Confirm Friend Request button and logged out.

Of old friends

Manu da sat across the room from me, at the door of the balcony, under the sun, rifling through the newspaper supplement. Every ten minutes or so, he would look up to stare at his shut bedroom door and sigh wistfully. He had a mug of tea at his side, yet untouched. I sipped mine in silence. I had winced at the first taste, and shot an accusatory look at him. He had orchestrated an elaborate bow at that indictment of his culinary skills. Then reverted to his ritual of staring at the bedroom door. Malini di was getting ready inside, before they stepped out for a winter afternoon date on a Saturday. The door had closed exactly hundred and two minutes earlier. I knew because I had begun dressing at exactly the same time, and emerged within ten minutes.

“How much more will we have to wait for her? Should I just go?” I asked half-heartedly.

“What time are you supposed to meet them?” he asked.

“Half an hour back”, I drawled.

He smiled. “If you had any talent, you would make a wonderful artist. Reclusive and people hating. The media would love you”.

I protested. It wasn’t people I hated. Just the stepping out to catch up with people I knew long back in school, and who had gone all weird on me.

“Weird, how?”

“One of them got married.”

“That is the worst”, he dead-panned. “The other?”

“She is an MBA. All ambitious and everything. She is probably earning pots of money”.

“So, you are jealous?" he wondered out aloud, his eyes narrowing. (I could see them because he had recently got a haircut, so the famous curls didn't cover them anymore.)

 "Well no”, I answered. “But she will wonder what happened to me, how I lost all my drive”.

“So don’t tell them the truth”, he answered, matter-of-factly.

“What do I tell them?”

“Whatever suits you”.

He was right, I thought to myself, as I made my way to Warehouse Cafe in CP, an hour later than planned. The place was dark, there was loud music and I missed my step and stumbled. A waitress came to my help but she said “Ma’am” in the disapproving tone my mom adopted when two minutes before the school bus arrived, I would start a frantic search for ‘chart paper’ for the SUPW class scheduled that day. It was ominous.

I spotted them at a corner table, both fashionably thin. I walked towards them and both saw me at the same time. And then something happened that I hadn’t for a minute thought out in my head. They spontaneously called out my name while breaking into the happiest of smiles and I mirrored them. And while we hugged and talked at the same time, I was glad to be there.

As it turns out, you don’t mind when school friends point out that you have gained weight (maybe because they don’t worry that it will hurt your chances in the marriage market). You can call them snobbish and forgetful without hurting their feelings. You can say elitist trash that comes to your mind, which you would filter out in different company. Everyone gets less ambitious and less serious and less intense as they grow up. Marriage does not cause personality makeovers. It might actually help people open up more. You can be honest about your career plans with your school friends. They knew you before you started understanding yourself better, so they understand what could make you happy. They ask about your family, and you genuinely care about how their kid siblings are doing. You want to know about what their old colony friends are up to, the ones you used to hear about all the time. Friends’ husbands don’t necessarily have to be people you don’t like. When they walk you to the metro station before they leave, it can leave an incredibly nice feeling in your stomach (especially after your relentless independence). And even though you are now more different from each other than you ever could have imagined, you know that you still have some solid friends.

Moving house

                                                

I looked determinedly at the pile of rubbish lodged into the loft. Used high-school textbooks, old broken toys stuffed into polythene bags of unseemly colours, a torn worn out Spiderman school bag, all stored away by Renee to preserve the memories of her childhood. This sentimentality seemed unnecessary to me, especially since I, as the eldest among four siblings had been used to passing my things forward to the younger ones. Often it was a prized object, a doll or a favourite illustrated book, handled carefully to be of use to the subsequent owner. When the youngest had outgrown it, my mother would pass those on to relatives with younger children or to the domestic help. With a large family, space was at a premium. Though Renee, as the only child had more of that to her disposal, a government flat in South Delhi did not afford any more room than a bursting-to-the seams bungalow in North Calcutta.  And now, that we were moving to an even tinier flat to the suburbs, after my husband’s retirement from work, I had put my foot down and insisted that we rid ourselves of all things we did not need. Renee grudgingly agreed when I told her over the phone. I could have had my way even if she did not-she was away studying in Mumbai.

It was taking longer than I had hoped. While I was mechanically taking things out, dusting them and passing them out to my husband for him to sort into boxes, even the slightest scrap of paper seemed to evoke a string of reminiscences from him. The book that Renee had won for being a class topper at the annual day in school, the answer sheet for the first geometry test she had flunked, a ‘magazine’ she had made as one of her holiday projects. And when he discovered an art book at the bottom of the first pile, I found myself, squatting on the floor beside him, and looking through her childish drawings.

The men seemed to have square bodies, the women unnaturally long hair, and a rainbow marked the background for most of the pictures. She was six I think, when her class teacher suggested that we encourage her towards art, because she seemed to have a certain flair for it. Ever the dutiful parents, we hunted for one until we concluded that the good art teachers were either too expensive, or lived too far off for us to take Renee to, every week. Then Ghoshal Da, my husband’s senior colleague and neighbour suggested that we let Abhijeet, his twenty-year old son, be Renee’s mentor. I was not averse to the idea. Apart from the convenience of the set up, Babu (Abhijeet’s nickname) also had the credentials. He was a student at the Delhi College of Art-enough credentials for an aspiring artist anyway. Plus Renee, not the most agreeable of children, seemed to like him.

Every Sunday, she would wait eagerly for her Babu Dada to arrive and sit beside her, while she first drew a line, than laboriously erased it, then drew again and repeated the procedure with the eraser, progressively dirtying the page. It was only when working with crayons, that she showed any sign of the flair her teacher had noticed. Babu taught her to stay within the lines, use colour and shades, and she learnt fast. My husband was happy because the only ‘fee’ Babu charged was Sunday’s breakfast, and I did not really mind cooking. For one, Babu relished whatever he ate, and was generous with his compliments. Sometimes, if his mother were not home, he would come for lunch after college, and show us his drawings. And even though I was his ‘kakima’, I got along better with him than with his parents. I enjoyed our conversations, for he was aware and well read and could talk about politics as intelligently as he could about cricket. His idealism was contagious, and I remember how he persuaded me to go vote in that year’s general elections (his first), when my husband said he would not because all politicians were corrupt anyway.

Another neighbour in the colony that Renee and I both loved was Meeta. She was married to Ranjan, a young engineer from IIT, Kharagpur- and a poster boy for affirmative action.  The perfect example of how a poor boy could ensure a better life for his parents and future generations with the help of more opportunities. Meeta herself was from the same town, but not as educated as her husband. She was frail when I first saw her as a newly-wed, and three years in the city, albeit with much better means than before marriage, did very little to help. Kharagpur may be more than a sleepy little town now but even the Delhi of the nineties, before the Metro and before the malls, with its traffic, pollution and people, intimidated her. I empathised with her, because even though I was from a metropolis, I too had battled unfamiliarity with the language and the culture, when I had first arrived. I knew Meeta looked up to me and I enjoyed showing her around. I familiarised her with the shops, with the Hindi names of the vegetables, and the markets where fish could be bought. Renee loved Meeta’s cooking. The mutton and the prawns she made were brilliant no doubt, but even her rajma, a hitherto alien ingredient for her, eclipsed mine. And every time she made something new, or something she knew Renee liked, a bowl of it would unerringly sit on our dining table.

Meeta and her husband, the Ghoshals and we, were the only Bengali families in the colony. Naturally, since she knew very few people in Delhi, and certainly much fewer Bengalis, I introduced Meeta to Mrs.Ghoshal. The latter was cordial enough but presumably with her job and domestic chores, found no time to reciprocate the visit. Babu saw Meeta sometimes at my home and showed her some of his paintings. She liked most of them, especially the landscapes, but the two of them did not really get along as well I had thought they would, which surprised me since she was only a little older than he was. Admittedly, their interaction was limited, and their backgrounds disparate, so I resisted any further attempts to get them and their families better acquainted.

Babu was still a favourite with Renee though, and their art lessons continued through the year, until one day when Mrs. Ghoshal called to ask if I could accommodate Babu for lunch. Normally that would not be a problem at all, but I had made only pulses that day, something I could hardly serve to a guest, even if it was Babu. My own daughter had been making dissatisfied noises at the menu. Meeta was at my side when I attended the call and she immediately offered to get me some of the fish curry she had made. I protested half-heartedly, but she waved those off, happy to see Renee jumping around, celebrating the favourable turn of events. After dutifully dropping the bowl of the deep brown coloured curry off, she left, just as Babu came in, giving him a quick smile. I went inside the kitchen to heat the food, hearing Renee excitedly tell Babu how good the curry looked. I could not agree more but when I took up the bowl to serve him the fish, he sheltered his plate with his hand and said he did not want any of it.

“What will you have then? I have only made daal! I thought you liked fish!” I exclaimed.

“I do”, he replied, “but I don’t want anything she has cooked”.

For a second I looked at him in disbelief, then regained enough composure to rustle up an omelette.

The following Sunday, in the most uncharacteristic manner, Renee refused to come in front of Babu. My husband was embarrassed. Babu was after all his senior’s son. He tried to scold Renee into complying, but she started sobbing into his arms. He held her and melted immediately, assuring her that she didn’t have to take art classes any longer.

“But why don’t you want to colour any more with Babu dada?” he asked Renee later, when she had regained her calm.

“He doesn’t like Meeta aunty”, she replied simply.

As I smiled at those drawings fourteen years later, my husband looked at me sideways and suggested that we could save some of Renee’s old things.

“At least those that nobody else would have any use for”, he hastened to add. I agreed.

Countdown to Blog Birthday-Day 4

Since it's my blog's second birthday this week (26 April 2014), I have decided to blog every day up to it. However short. However frivolous (which of course goes without saying).

Read about Day 5 and Day 6 here.

I am going to recount a childhood incident again. Not because I have nothing else to talk about (I have lots actually), but because there is nothing else I can coherently post about, in very limited time.

I think I was in 5th standard when we first performed a play in my colony.

It was Christmas. And my first attempt at writing something that did not involve rhyming 'cat' with 'mat'. I did a terrible job-the 'play' was essentially a bunch of kids mouthing facts about Christmas traditions in English.

But since parents insisted on encouraging mediocrity (and English) we were much appreciated.

So the next year, before Diwali, we decided to stage a 'Modern Ramayana'.

I don't remember who wrote it-it was essentially a bunch of bad jokes strung together-Ram looking for his Ray-bans before Vanvas, Hanuman being mistaken for the Monkey-man, and so on. But we were at an age when Kaho Na Pyar Hai counted as a piece of art.

The casting was very controversial for that play. There were three major male roles- Ram, Lakshman and Ravana and we had three male actors. Those roles went to them unquestioningly (though Ram and Lakshman had major ego hassles between them).

There were a bunch of girls and one coveted female role-Sita. (I can't for the life of me remember whether we had a Surpnakha). 
I decided not to audition for Sita, but claim the role of Hanuman instead. That's because I knew the only other role was for Jatayu (who dies midway) and the Vanar Sena. Which is what all the people rejected as Sita were relegated to.

The play itself was a little bit of a disaster.

You would think scientists wouldn't be very God-fearing. But someone from the cast blabbed about what we were doing to their Scientist (or spouse of scientist) parent. And they objected to the mockery of religion.
Half an hour before the performance, we decided we would change the names of the characters to Ashwarya (Sita), ShahRukh (Ram) and Salman (Lakshman).

Most of us forgot that 3 minutes in.

And the audience couldn't figure out why Shah Rukh asking for Raybans before a Vanvas was funny. Or why he was going for a Vanvas in the first place.

Some of the audience also heckled a dying Jatayu. So Jatayu got up from the dead and went off-stage.
Ram and Lakshman (sorry, Shah Rukh and Salman) forgot their ego hassles and ganged up against Jatayu to berate her.

Jatayu promised never to play with us again.

Countdown to Blog Birthday-Day 5

Since it's my blog's second birthday this week (26 April 2014), I have decided to blog every day up to it. However short. However frivolous (which of course goes without saying).

Read Countdown to Blog Birthday-Day 6, here.


Hindi films always make a song and dance (quite literally) about jawani (youth).

The best part of my jawani (till now) have been my three years of college.

The best part about college was that it was so uneventful.

My childhood on the other hand was legendary.

One year my (then) best friend and I pooled in our books (which weren't many) to open a library. Our patrons were our playmates in the colony. Often, they also donated to our book collection.
We returned the favour by charging them for a monthly membership (Rs. 2/-).
Worse, we made them sit in the library (a common room in the colony, otherwise used for dance/music/art classes, rehearsals for Durga Puja and kitty parties) for half an hour every week to read.
Once this kid (who was a year older to me) came to my house and asked to be let off 'library class'.
I refused. The rules didn't allow for it, and he had promised to abide by them (by signing a form, whose master copy had been typed on a type-writer. We were too cool for computers.) His mother approved.

The power apparently went to my head though. Allegedly in one year, my friend and I appropriated Janmashtami funds to build our book collection.

We haven't been forgiven for that yet.

There has been a lot of incredulous snorting at Raghuram Rajan’s speech to students of his almamater- Delhi Public School, where he said that his parents could not afford a blazer for him, during his high school days. The contention is that his father was an IFS officer, who sent him to a famously elite school. Surely, they couldn’t have been poor. I have no idea whether Rajan was fibbing for dramatic effect or not. I do know however, that at least till the end of the 90s (and certainly when the current RBI governor was growing up), you didn’t have to be poor to be unable to afford a blazer. You simply had to be middle-class. Which you could easily be if your family had only one (self-made) earning member on a government salary, many familial responsibilities and a (home) loan to pay off.

And lots of middle-class people sent their children to elite schools. Mine did-borne out of the belief that a better education could guarantee a better future.  And the entire family made some sacrifices for that-my parents the most, my sister and I, relatively few. No we didn’t go hungry (we ate as much non-veg as any self-respecting Bengali family would), and I certainly did not study under the light of a lamp-post. We just ate out less frequently, and never at a really expensive restaurant. We bought all the textbooks and the “essential extra-reading” (Panchatantra, Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix, A Study In Scarlet, Oxford English Dictionary, a children’s Encyclopaedia), but for anything beyond (and I read a lot of that), we used the library at school or the government one near home .  We used public transport (gasp!) and didn’t have a personal computer at home. Frequently, my clothes were hand-me-downs from my sister. And I didn’t have any fancy birthday parties like some of my classmates did (I had the regular ones-with cake and puri-chhole). Our holiday destinations were dependent on the availability of an accessible government guest-house there (and no, we never travelled abroad).

Honestly, these didn’t even seem like “sacrifices”. In fact, were it not for the hard-thinking we did before making a big purchase then, our relative financial independence now, would be much less fun. Would I feel as happy as I now do when buying a book (which I do quite frequently, these days) if it weren’t for those days of thoughtful rationing? Or as delirious with excitement, when a flight with me sitting in it, takes off? Would my parents feel as proud as they do now when my sister treats them at a fancy restaurant? 
Of course, there are some drawbacks-like I am the least willing among my friends to continuously upgrade to more expensive versions of phones and laptops and other gadgetry. 
I guess being middle-class was more educational than the over-priced, elite school I went to.

Who I Wanted to Be

Who I Hoped I Would Be

Who I thought I Could Be

Who I am Expected to Be

Who I Actually Am

In the News- 19 June 2013

A study finds that Harry Potter fans are less authoritarian, more tolerant of differences, and more politically active than non-fans.
The article doesn't discuss the methodology in too much detail but two points-
1) correlation does not mean causation (which the above article acknowledges)
2) Kids who read more in general (and hence have a greater likelihood of reading Harry Potter) may be less authoritarian, more tolerant of differences etc.
Moreover, it's possible that kids who relate more to the themes of equality, justice, tolerance underlying the seven-part series are more likely to recognize themselves as fans.


But, let's not nitpick too much, okay?

At the Bookstore

The Shiva Trilogy by Amish Tripathi.
No but what if I don't take to the genre.

Khaled Hossieni's And the Mountains Echoed.
Not in the right mood for a certified tear jerker.

Dan Brown's Inferno.
 Too formulaic.

Vikas Swarup's Accidental Apprentice.
 I don't know if it's any good. Plus I will finish it in a day, then what?

Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.
Classic. Everybody under the sun has read it. I haven't.
Hmmm... do I really want to read it. Will I go home and tear into it?

Satyajit Ray's Complete Feluda Stories.
This I will definitely tear into. But what if the translation isn't good enough?

So I end up buying...

Aaah, the comfort of familiar pleasures...

My Favourite Textbook (as oxymoronic as that is)

In India after Gandhi, Ramachandra Guha (2007, p. 529), describes Indira Gandhi's behaviour during the Shah Commission's investigation of the excesses of the Emergency:

Three times she was called to the witness box; three times she came, and chose not to answer questions, claiming she was bound by the oath of Cabinet secrecy. A journalist victimsed during the emergency saw this as an 'outrageous attempt to make a mockery of the proceedings of the Commission'...

When I read this, the first image that came to my mind was one I had seen more than five years back in my NCERT Political Science Textbook for Class XII (2007 edition):

Cartoonist: R K Laxman for the Times of India
On Indira Gandhi's confrontation with the Shah Commission

I went back to the book, then realised what a glaring omission I had made in the list of books that defined growing up, for me. The book was simple, unbiased and liberal. But what made Pol Science my favourite subject, were the references to the relevant films of the time, the snippets from newspapers, and of course the cartoons. At worst these served as mnemonic devices. At best, they managed to place the textual information in context, also allowing students (at least me) to gain real perspective into current issues. If you don't believe my rambling, here is some visual evidence. These would make a better point (not to say a more entertaining blog post).

Cartoonist: Ajit Ninan for India Today
On the rise of coalition politics

Cartoonist; Sudhir Tailang for HT
On the V.P Singh Government being supported by the Left and the Right

R K Laxman for the Times of India
On the Emergency

Cartoonist: Kutty
On the manner in which State CMs were being chosen

Happy Janamashtami

The Composition period was a weekly fixture for about six years of my school life. They were meant to encourage creative writing among young students in both English and Hindi, but often their purpose was defeated, due to the lazy selection of topics. The year (especially in the Junior classes) invariably started with “Myself”, a pedantic account of who we were (age, class, physical description, parental occupations) and our interests (with studying being a most ubiquitous hobby). As the year progressed the teacher asked us to write on “Rainy Day” and “I wish I were...”.  And then, there was always the Indian calendar, crammed with festivals and national holidays to fall back on. However, I am quite sure Janmashtami never came up in all of those six years. Pity, since it was always my favourite festival (okay no, but it did come right behind Holi).

The fun started the night before, where we (a gaggle of ten 10-12 year old girls) would get together to strategise about our jhanki- a static representation of the scene of Lord Krishna’s kidnapping by his evil uncle.  And his subsequent rescue by someone else. I am still a little sketchy on the details to be honest. The meeting would involve taking stock of all the toys we could get to decorate the scene, besides the indispensable baby Krishna and his Uncle. People would volunteer to get earthen dolls, generally hand-painted to look like men and women from the Indian countryside, though sometimes an American Barbie would also make her presence felt. I am certain one year, someone said that they had a miniature version of a hand-pump that we could use.  We agreed. Mostly though, we tried to be historically accurate (more than some younger children, at any rate, who were not even shy of placing a car or two in the background). There were other bells and whistles too-if an old shoebox were available, we would fashion out a cradle (a reliable crowd puller) out of that.

The meeting was also important, in order to zero in on the best spot for our jhanki, among the ones available, in the colony’s courtyard. To prevent the favoured spot from being usurped by the other groups (especially our arch rivals-the boys in the same age group) we would solemnly promise to assemble at the crack of dawn, which at least some people claimed they took literally. I of course would saunter in a good 3 hours after everybody had set to work, and then immediately find fault with the way the mountain in the backdrop had been constructed. That would invite dirty looks from the others, and in some years, righteous angry words, or worse, the silent treatment. Of course, my tardiness would be forgiven and forgotten as soon as someone picked up a fight with the rival groups. These generally started with a Rohit making an uncomplimentary remark about our work. Padma would retaliate with a ruder assessment of theirs. Rohit would have disappeared by then. Arjun, who lacked the mental agility to come up with an adequately insulting repartee, would resort to mocking her Telugu accent. That was enough to open the floodgates of personal insults and sometimes even physical fights.

The evenings required sprucing up for the Puja, mainly conducted by one or two of those people in the group who knew a few devotional songs. The less spiritually inclined amongst us would stand at the back and mumble the words through, mind strongly focussed on the wonderful prasad that Akanksha’s mother would rustle up every year. That, and the afore-mentioned cradle were extremely important to bring in the crowds, as well as their donations.  My favourite bit, then, was when we counted all the money, inflated it by a certain amount and then made public to the rest of the groups. Since this creative accounting was quite popular among everybody, it didn’t matter much in deciding who the ‘winner’ was. There was a lot of preening involved if we won, but even if we didn’t, it never mattered. We distributed it amongst ourselves (with the exception of one year, I am regularly reminded), and then spent in on ice creams, while recounting the fun we had had during the day. I would promise at the end of the night that I would be the first person down, the next year. Someone would let out a disbelieving snort and raucous laughter would resume.