Vantage point

My Long Personal Essay on Zohran Mamdani

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 19:49:00 +0000

I sit outside my Manhattan building on this pleasant November Saturday day watching employees of my hedge fund landlord Blackstone gather and bag a big pile of dead oak leaves.

They are mostly pointed multi pronged brown colored oak leaves, which by now I can classify as pin oak or Northern red oak. I will never confuse them with each other or with white oak leaves. They look so different.

One of the guys gathering leaves notices me, pauses, and smiles. We've chatted for years, like many long term New Yorkers do, without knowing each other's names, nor caring about it. A lot of NYC friendships are like that. Close but anonymous. He makes a fist out of his right hand, punches his chest on the left twice and cries out "Zohran! Zohran, papi!"

The reason I can tell different oak leaves apart every Fall is also why I was boosting Zohran Mamdani and predicting his success months before most people had even heard of him.

I have lived here a long time and I pay attention to the city around me more than my phone screen.

This will be a long rambling personal essay with several tangents, so please brace yourselves. Just remember, this is my unfiltered personal essay for myself, to note down all my thoughts this historic weekend in NYC before old age erases most details.

Where do I start my Zohran story?

I could start it in the summer of 2023. The guy I voted for was President. Joe Biden. And he had invited a guy I did not like for a state dinner. Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And that invitation had been partly at the behest of Ro Khanna, an Indian origin Congressman I used to think of as less beholden to wealthy donors than he ended up being.

If you scour the archives of my blog, you'll know that my dislike for Modi is quite old. I was 22 when the Gujarat pogrom happened. I remember those February and March days in great detail. Excruciating and horrifying detail. Even just following from far away through television and newspaper.

I've made my peace as much as possible with the fact that he is the democratically elected Prime Minister of India. At least the first time.

But a state dinner? Really?

The guy openly campaigned with Trump in 2020 and his online army was completely working for Trump on Twitter and Facebook. Indian uncles were being told VP Pick Kamala Harris is "anti India" which nowadays means anyone who isn't a Modi lover. And in 2021, Modi tried to falsely blame the brand new Biden administration, still completing a transition, for India's vaccination shortages.

Why exactly is my party and my President giving him a state dinner?

Most Indian origin politicians, much like Ro Khanna, jumped on board, looking for invites to the dinner or allied events. Some maintained a diplomatic silence.

One guy popped up on my Twitter feed in full throated opposition. This New York state assemblyman I had started following a couple of years ago for the one and only reason that he was the son of my favorite director Mira Nair. He posted a scorching letter opposing the warm welcome Modi was getting.

He did not care about the trolling, the inevitable anti Muslim insults from right wing trolls, or how some Godi Media (that's the term for Indian media that's in Modi's lap) anchors might make him out to be a villain. He said his truth.

Soon thereafter, he stood on stage at an event and read out loud notes from prison by Umar Khalid, arguably Modi's top political prisoner. He's still in jail without bail or without charges for five years and counting. Indian courts have pretty much rubber stamped his status as a long term political prisoner at every opportunity instead of thinking habeas corpus.

That impressed me even more!

This guy had nothing to gain from talking about Umar Khalid in the fall of 2023. He was a state assemblyman from Queens. Where no one else knows Umar Khalid but a lot of Modi loving uncles might get upset. Potential voters and donors.

But he still took these "pangas", always excoriated by BJP IT cell online for it. It showed me that this was a guy who was just very opinionated and wanted his opinions known. A lot like me. Even if they are unpopular. Especially if they are unpopular but correct. Satyamev Jayate.

That was around the time I thought, wow, Mira's little boy has what old time Americans would call moxie! And Delhi uncles would call jigra or gurda. A fight over flight instinct. I know NYC local politics very well. He had absolutely nothing to gain by taking those positions other than satisfying his own conscience.

A personal tangent here, just to explain why that resonated so much.

You see, I live a nice comfortable life in NYC where if I choose, I could just completely ignore whatever is happening in Indian politics. Ignore what Modi is doing to unravel the basic fabric of my birth country.

Most progressive Indians my age that have become naturalized US citizens have generally taken that path. They just shut out news from India. It's either "too depressing, man" or "what is the point?". And I envy them. I wish I could do the same.

I can't. I physically, mentally cannot stop following what is happening in Indian politics. Nor commenting about it on social media with my full name, drawing trolling from thousands of Modi supporters.

I sensed the same in Zohran.

I'm sure someone in his life told him, why are you taking this random panga? You are nicely settled in an assembly seat at such a young age. Just keep your mouth shut, build a resume, plan for higher office strategically. And it would have been valid advice.

But I could sense in the guy that he physically, mentally, could not stop himself from speaking up against Modi and in favor of Umar Khalid. It came from a lot deeper than political calculus or career planning. It's something he had to do.

Oh yes, here I should take a flashback to when I really truly first heard about Zohran Mamdani. Pandemic time.

I had made a tweet about some Mira Nair movie and someone said, do you know that she now lives in NYC and that her son is running for state assembly?

I said I do know she lives in NYC but had no idea her son is running for state assembly. Really? Not Congress like AOC or Suraj Patel? State Assembly? Important but very unglamorous job. But hey, it's nice that a second generation Desi kid is getting into local politics.

I saw his videos. Very cute. But my reaction to it was still more along the lines of, oh how great is this drawing, I'm going to put it up on the refrigerator, sweetie variety. Not that he's a politician to be taken seriously.

It was around October 2024 that I next took note of Zohran. I saw in Twitter that he was planning to run for Mayor, challenging the incumbent Eric Adams. It was not surprising that the deeply corrupt Adams, under federal investigation from an administration of his own party, was being challenged by many people. My initial reaction was again, aww how cute.

I'm quite in tune with and involved with local politics. My partner Rupal is a community board member and we are both quite involved with local Democratic politics.

At that time, my very informed read on the NYC Mayor race was as follows.

Everyone knows Andrew Cuomo is running. He won governorship 3 times, carrying the city by huge margins. He has networks and loyalties and donors no one can imagine. He was, at least in his first 2 terms, a competent and popular Governor. He offers an obvious safe alternative to a city sick of the Adams dysfunction.

I didn't like him personally in 2024, though I had voted for him as governor twice in primaries and of course general election. Yes, even against Cynthia Nixon and Zephyr Teachout. Sorry, Cynthia and Zephyr. I was wrong. But the nursing homes deaths plus the sexual harassment cases that precipitated his resignation meant he was never getting my vote again.

My choice was Brad Lander! Who I thought was a quixotic choice, a protest vote of sorts.

Brad Lander was.... No no is as I type this.. The Comptroller of NYC. That might seem like a dorky inconsequential post but it is very powerful and acts as a counter weight against the mayor.

I had been impressed with how Lander challenged the corrupt Adams and undercut his corruption whenever he could. Brad was also part of the Bernie wing of the party. Tho I never supported Bernie himself in either of his runs (that's a different essay), I'm generally very supportive of the candidates he inspires and endorses. Brad also had a bold aggressively progressive agenda. And he genuinely is a very nice guy. At least from what I've seen up close. Like I said, I'm very involved in local politics.

I thought I would support Brad Lander. Against Cuomo. Of course Cuomo would still win, because who can beat a Cuomo in New York? But our Brad will get name recognition and campaign experience. And maybe he could be a senator cos Schumer and Gillibrand will or should retire soon.

So even though I knew Zohran was running for mayor, I was supporting Brad Lander, whom I fully expected to lose against Andrew Cuomo. Because really, who can defeat Andrew Cuomo in New York? That's October 2024 me, hehe.

It was after Trump won again and started acting right away like he was emperor that I first took a serious look at Zohran Mamdani as something more than just the cute kid of my favorite director.

I saw his tweets, his videos, his website. And I was genuinely objectively impressed! Especially about his Free & Fast Buses proposal! I've been a Free Buses guy for years, and not just for New York City, but every city on the planet! And I saw his #RotiAndRoses hashtag which I found very clever but it didn't have scalability so I understood why he later stopped using it.

It was mid November when I felt comfortable enough to share on Twitter and my group chats that I am now supporting Zohran Mamdani. Knowing a lot of responses will be "who?"

Saib Bilaval, whom I know only through Twitter, was the chemistry textbook catalyst in making me go from Zohran-curious to pro-Zohran. I've always found Saib extremely intelligent, courageous, and funny on Twitter, and he makes the best food and has the best cat. But most importantly, Saib has always seemed to me like the kind of Indian young man India could use a few million more of.

If young Saib is so excited about Zohran, knowing how much he'll get trolled by Sanghis and JNU folks who consider him not leftist enough, what am I waiting for? I can feel it in my fingers, I can feel it in my bones that this Zohran can actually beat Cuomo if more people get to know him.

So yeah, in November & December of 2024, I decided, Brad will get my #2 but I gotta throw my lot behind Zohran Mamdani. Sure, Cuomo will probably thump him by double digits. But we'll make him a known name at least.

On January 20, 2025, as Trump was about to be sworn in a second time in a very underwhelming ceremony, I made my first contribution to the Zohran campaign. And tweeted it, saying this is the kind of leadership we need to take on Trump. I also added that my contribution isn't just for a protest vote candidate. I'm picking my next Mayor.

Late winter and early spring were an interesting time. Trump acted like an emperor. Cuomo acted like his chosen satrap. Adams celebrated as he got a pardon from Trump from his crimes. Zohran kept campaigning and meeting people and his numbers kept ticking up up up!

He was against a pretty daunting field. In addition to skeazebags Cuomo and Adams, he was also up against serious locally well known politicians like Council speaker Adrienne Adams (no relation to corrupt Eric Adams), former comptroller Scott Stringer, current comptroller Brad Lander (my first choice).

But he kept campaigning and rising in the polls as 2025 ticked on.

May 10 is when I made a "Bookmark this" tweet that he would win.

I make tweets saying "Bookmark this" when I'm confident or extremely cocky that I've read the data better than the usual crowd and my prediction will come true. And I will randomly gloat about it in the future for a little bit of dopamine.

What did I base my prediction on, at a time Cuomo was leading Zohran by 35 points?

The individual donor data! From publicly available data, I saw that tho Cuomo had raised more money than Zohran, the latter had more than 5 times as many individual small donors. And the map showed them spread across the city, not just in historically Berniecrat hipster places.

To me, individual donor count is a huge indicator of results. Especially when so geographically spread out.

This is also when Cuomo and the Democratic establishment and national media and Twitter finally took notice of Zohran. And promptly denounced him and otherized him and started throwing insults at him that even Karl Rove would have found beyond the pale.

Here was a happy smiling guy running on affordability and working class struggles and wanting more Norway Sweden style socialism. And they were calling him a Jihadist Communists?

What the fuck is a Jihadi Communist exactly? Leonid Brezhnev would like to meet a few thousand of them. There exist people who believe in both "la ilaha ilallah" and "religion is the opiate of the masses"?

And then there was the Gaza genocide.

I think Kamala Harris lost to Trump because of Democrats blindly supporting the Gaza genocide. She recently said as much. About 5-10% of Biden 2020 voters stayed home in 2024 because they were disgusted by the Dems supporting Netanyahu's genocide. And cracking down on campus protestors. And calling anyone who felt empathy for Gazans an anti semite.

Zohran took what I thought was a very mainstream liberal position on the events in Palestine. And they turned him into some bogeyman. Only because of his name and his religion.

I'm not Muslim, but that pissed me off extra and made me campaign for him even harder.

So that's May. Let's call this Part 1 of the essay.

To be continued

My First Watch

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 04:37:00 +0000

My first watch was made in Switzerland! And I hated it with the short-sighted stupidity only a teenager is capable of!

Turning 13 in 1993, I think I was the last generation in which the top gift demanded by a teenager was their own watch. After Windows 95, it was the computer. Then cellphones. Then gaming consoles. Then smartphones, tablets, etc.

But when I turned 13, it was watches that were the status symbol at school. Every other day, someone was showing off their new watch. Often digital. This is also when manufacturing of digital watches became cheap enough that digital watches were now for the common consumer, not just the tech savvy high income person with the high end Casio watches.

I demanded a watch from my parents and grandparents. Ideally a digital watch because that was the peak of technology for us back then. But my parents weren't ones to buy stuff for us that easily.

So my grandmother gave me a watch the was once owned by my great grandfather. A genuine Swiss watch. Henri Sandoz! I can still see and feel it! It was a winding watch. No batteries. You just wind the tiny knob every night.

The stupid entitled teenager that I was, I treated the watch with derision! What is this nonsense of winding it every night when one small battery the size of a button can keep digital watches going for years? Are we in the stone age?

Finally a year or so later, either I wore my parents down and they bought me a digital watch. Or I saved money from grandparent gifts and bought one. I forget exactly which. But soon, I was the proud owner of a plastic digital watch with fancy futuristic gray screens instead of that archaic old fashioned windup Swiss watch.

I wonder where that Henri Sandoz watch is today. Probably in some forgotten corner of a drawer or shelf.

My Fossilized Meal

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Thu, 20 May 2021 13:38:00 +0000

This is a short story. My attempt at a bit of sci-fi.

------

It is rare for me to have three burners going when I'm cooking just for myself. But I was feeling a bit more tense than usual and cooking a lot relaxes me. Paying attention to all 3 dishes cooking at the same time helps take my mind off everything else.

So the ringing doorbell was an unnecessary distraction. I was not expecting any deliveries or visitors so this had to be someone selling either a religion or a political candidate. Notice how hardly anyone is selling anything commercial door to door these days? It's either religion or politics.

I thought that just ignoring the bell would make the person go away and kept tossing the ingredients in my wok while keeping an eye on the simmering poaching broth.

But the ringing was persistent and it got too annoying. So I took the four steps from the kitchen to the front door and opened it, ready to slam it shut soon.

It was a young woman, very eager and keen looking.

"Mr. Naik?"

"Yes?" I said tentatively, also worried about the hot wok.

"May I ask you a few questions for my homework please? I'm what you might call a graduate student."

Huh? This was different from religion or politics or even vacuum cleaners. This was something completely new, right down to the accent. Living in New York, you hear almost all accents possible, but this one seemed strangely alien.

"Listen, could you come back in a while? I'm cooking!"

"Oh so very good!"

And this wiry tall young woman, about 6 ft 4, just stepped inside my apartment and stared at my kitchen fascinated.

"It is truly so good to see this, Mr. Naik. Is that garlic burning?"

It indeed was! I rushed past her towering but lithe figure into our tiny Manhattan kitchen, unsure about what to make of this unexpected visitor. She did not seem dangerous or deranged. She had more of a girls scouts selling cookies type personality. But still, here she was, in my kitchen, staring at me trying to salvage the noodles.

"Are you new to the building?" I asked, sniffing the poaching broth and gently pouring oil in the 4 holes in the thalipeeth.

Our building doormen did a thorough job of enforcing the no soliciting rule. So if she was here, she was either a thief or a resident.

"It's so much fun to see this kind of fire." she stared at my burners with fascination.

"You have an electric coil? Induction?"

"No." she distractedly replied, while tapping her forehead with her right index finger every couple of seconds.

"Then?"

"Oh I could not possibly explain to you how we cook, Mr. Naik. It's almost impossible in such a short time!"

"Why not? I'm an intelligent man, they tell me. Try me. And also please tell me why you are here. Ah fuck!" I could smell that some garlic was indeed burnt. I opened the window and started the exhaust fan.

"How would you explain..." she tapped her forehead a couple of times "...An iPhone to Queen Victoria?"

That question was bizarrely specific enough for me to ignore my food for a few seconds.

"Are you calling me Queen Victoria?"

"No, I'm saying I'm from the future!" she impatiently crowded into the kitchen with me and started noticing and murmuring the ingredients while tapping her forehead.

"You're from the future? Well that explains the accent, haha." I tried some humor.

"Exactly." was her earnest response.

And then she just kept looking all over the kitchen and making mental notes, literally! I thought she would give some fantastical explanation. But she really was more interested in inventorying my kitchen.

At this point, I thought about turning the stove off and calling building security, maybe even 911. Sure, she seemed harmless enough, but this was a young woman of indeterminate ethnicity and a strange accent claiming to be from the future. In my apartment. Saying she was from the future.

"So when in the future are you from?" I asked.

"What pancake is that? That's the one my assignment is stuck on!" she was pointing at the thalipeeth.

"Bajri.... pearl millet." I was having trouble keeping up with her rapid topic transitions.

She repeated what I said while tapping her forehead. I later told the men from the government that it might have been like an implant for her to look up or note information. Like invoking Siri or Alexa but from the future.

"Oh, thank you. It's a grain native to....Asia, right?" she was staring at the thalipeeth fascinated.

"Could you move a little?" I clicked my tongue in annoyance, because I had to flip the thalipeeth and I didn't want to splatter hot oil on this weird new neighbor.

"Oh, sorry." she said, and kept tapping her forehead. At that time, I thought, someone with a disorder of some kind, but harmless. I now think she was taking pictures for her assignment.

"You didn't answer my question. When in the future are you from?" I tried to get her back on track.

"I could tell you, but it won't work." she said, peering into my box of Indian spices.

"Try me." I said.

"Okay." She said. Then her lips moved but I only heard

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!

"How did you do that?" I was stunned enough to stand there holding a ramiken with a raw egg in my hand.

"Do what?" I could hear her again.

"The beep sound! It sounded like on TV when something is beeped. But in my ear! How did you do that?" I was barely able to keep my wits about me at this point. It did not feel like a dream. But what was that?

"That's not me, Mr. Naik. That's the Time Travel Censors." she shrugged and stared at a black cardamom pod on the counter.

"What?"

"I'm so sorry!" she suddenly turned and said. "I have been so distracted by your kitchen. I should have told you this before. I'm a graduate student here for a research approved project through chronal causality proof time travel, regulated by the Time Travel Censors."

I keep a small foot stool in the kitchen. I sat on it as I felt a little light headed.

"Sorry, the first realization of time travel existing can cause that. But please let me finish. I'm working on a research project on ancient meal fossils found in major cities at the time of global crises. This meal you are cooking is one of the fossils assigned to me."

I stared back at her wondering if I should be freaked out more by her imagination or her equanimity. She was telling me all this like it was today's weather.

"Our chemical analyses were inconclusive about the pancake. So I applied for a CCPTT ticket. We can make strictly regulated and censored time travel trips of limited durations for research purposes. And the systems make sure we are staying true to the past and not altering the future. My present."

This made the sci-fi nerd in me come out.

"But by just telling me that you're from the future, haven't you altered it?"

"Nah, that's what the censors are there for."

"I'm sorry, you keep saying censors. Do you mean sensors?"

"No, no, censors. Who will make sure that I can't give you any information that you could use like a..." she tapped her forehead a couple of times "..a Biff Tannen. I don't know what that means. Do you?"

"Back to the Future?"

Tap. Tap.

"Yes. So anything I say that could alter the timeline is strictly regulated and censored. The information flow can be only one way. Like me learning that this pancake was not actually indigenous to North America, but was something made by an immigrant from across the globe! Thank you! This is going to be big at our presentations!"

"Glad to be of help."

She suddenly shuddered, frowned, and smiled.

"Mr. Naik, that's my 2 minute warning. Thank you for your help. If you have any questions, I can answer them. And the censors will decide what you hear."

She tapped her forehead once, held it, and blinked. Was this real? It felt real. I should tweet this!

"What if I tell people about this? Post it on social media?"

"Oh you will. You have to. Or I could not be here!"

"What do you mean?"

"The Time Travel Department only approves travel to instances where historical archaeological social media databases note someone mentioning a visit from someone from the future. The only way my visit here was approved was if you posted...Or will post... Something on social media about this. If historical records have no mention of a time traveler, those moments are off limits."

"So wait, you came here to research this meal which is.... fossilized? So I don't eat any of this?"

"Well, not exactly, it's just that BEEEEEEE..Am I beeping again?"

"Yes!" I put my pinky in my ear to get rid of the ringing.

"I guess they are really thorough about not wanting to tamper with the timeline."

"So what am I supposed to post on social media that will let you know in the future?"

"I don't know. I didn't see your posts. I just said this is the fossil I have, from this person, and the brain searches the databases and if you made a record, it's approved. They also have the chronolinnaeus records."

"The what?"

"Oh right, early 21st century." she blinked hard. "Okay, I'll be going soon. Thank you for this info. Could I maybe get a taste of that bajri pancake? I don't know if it's allowed but it smells so good."

"Sure." I turned around. "OWWW!"

I burnt my finger as I pulled it off the stove. I turned around. She was gone. My door was still locked. The apartment empty.

How do I post on social media about this without sounding like a nutcase? It would be a paradox if I did not. But if I do, how do I get anyone to take me seriously? If I don't, how will there be a record for her to get approval in the future?

Maybe I should write it as a short story on my blog and tweet about it!

The Pointless ATM

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Sun, 16 May 2021 00:25:00 +0000

Haven't blogged in years. Breaking the silence with a short story from one of the many unfinished novels on my google drive. Hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Cranked this baby out in half an hour! Though it did mean I don't use any quotes. Blame it on Cormac McCarthy!

------

This ATM is so pointless! I said to my wife on the phone.

What do you mean? How can an ATM have a point or not?

Haha, no, sorry, I'm a little high.

I figured, she giggled. Anyway, why is the ATM pointless?

I knew she was humoring me for humor. She loved hearing my high ramblings. But I still felt compelled to explain my profound insight to her, like only someone really high would.

Okay, so there's a Chase bank branch across the street. Right across the street! A proper full fledged bank branch! Big parking lot. Lots of cars. Let me count. 22 cars! Across the street!

Okay, she patiently said like only a spouse of over a decade could. And I read it to mean, yeah, honey, I love you, but I'm hungry, so get to the fucking point.

Why do they need to put a drive through ATM here across the street? Why not incorporate it into..... Excuse me? I'm sorry?

What?

No, honey, there's someone here asking me something.

Do you have some cash on you man, he asked. He was a tall skinny white dude with tattoos, riding a kids' bike. He was in a tattered tank top and jeans, and had sunken cheeks.

Umm, no, sorry, I said, I'm talking to my wife.

He opened his mouth and I felt like he moved his hand towards his waist, but then stopped, and put it back on the handlebar. Cool, he nodded and rode off.

Sorry, it was a guy asking for money.

Ah okay, she said nonchalantly. We live in New York.

Anyway, so what is the point of putting just this one drive-through ATM in this property that could easily fit a convenience store? You have a big-ass property right across the street! Put it there!

You should call David Chase, she said tartly.

Chase bank is not run by David Chase! That's the guy who created The Sopranos!

I know! You sound as deranged as Tony right now. Hahaha. Okay, honey, I love you, but I'm hungry and I can't eat and talk at the same time. So unless there's anything else...

Nope, nothing! You don't stay married to a woman that long without knowing never to keep her away from food, no matter how many more high insights you have.

Bye. See you tomorrow!

During the last few sentences of the conversation, I had noticed that skinny dude circling around near me, almost like he was sizing me up. I didn't want to alarm my wife, because I was just a few feet away from my motel door. Even if the guy was, in the rarest of possibilities, a mugger, I could just run to the door and be safe.

Or maybe I should just give him whatever cash I have. He looks emaciated! Oh, but I need to leave a tip for the motel cleaning staff. At least five bucks. No, maybe ten. Yeah, I could keep ten maybe. Excuse me?

You sure you don't got any cash? His voice definitely had a menace to it as he pulled up between me and the motel door. His hand now swiftly went behind his back, as if to suggest he had a gun there.

I knew he didn't. He had been sizing me up. I had ended up sizing him up without meaning to. When I get high, I observe everything in insane detail. I had noticed his butt-crack over the waist of his jeans as he rode away. There was nothing there.

But I was high, I was in a happy generous mood, practically swimming among the clouds.

How much do you need?

Don't you fucking stall on me, you raghead!

Raghead? Is that really necessary?

Give me everything you have, asshole, he pushed his bike between my legs.

So I don't know if I mentioned this before. But I was high. And I reacted to this mugging in the following order.

First, I was very much amused and excited that holy fuck, after all these years in America, I'm finally on the receiving end of a genuine honest to god mugging! How cool is that? And in a dark motel parking lot too! Almost like something out of Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul. He even looks like Jesse Pinkman. No! Skinny Pete!

Who the fuck you calling skinny, asshole?

CLICK!

Suddenly I'm staring at a gun! Where the fuck did that come from? I still have no idea where he had stashed it if I could see his butt-crack a minute ago.

Okay, yeah, just a second. Here, well, I have umm...Hmm.... I'm thinking to myself... Will he kill me anyway? He called me a raghead! But nah, it's not worth it. Here is 38 bucks. I was hoping to leave ten bucks as a tip.

Fuck that, he growled and snatched the cash from my hand. Get your tip from the ATM, he pointed towards it with his head and laughed. And then he suddenly stopped and stared at my wallet. My Chase card was right up front.

Maybe because I was high, it felt like I read his brilliant plan ages before he even thought of it and started cracking up a bit. Not advisable against a gun-toting mugger.

The fuck you laughing at? Get some cash from the ATM for me, dipshit! Walk, or else!

Okay, okay. I raise my hands and start walking towards the ATM. I can't control my laughter. Fuck, I'm high! LOL!

Fucking stop laughing, he half punches me, which amuses me even more. I could have easily taken him if not for the gun.

I'm sorry. We reach the ATM machine. He's holding the gun between us, to hide it from any cars driving by. I'm still giggling.

Put it in!

Title of your sex tape!

You're really starting to get on my nerves, you know that? This time he pokes the gun deep into my side, and for the only time that night, I genuinely fear for my life.

I'm high, I confess impulsively.

He looks taken aback and unsure of how to process this new information. Just get the cash, he says.

I put the card in. The PIN prompt pops up. I instinctively give him a look that is meant to ask for privacy. He, bizarrely, looks away!

I enter the right pin. The menu shows up. And I started laughing again.

What the fuck do you keep laughing at? He really pushes the gun hard into me. Title of my sex tape?

You see there over that?

What?

Sorry. I'm high. You see that over there? The small camera? Every ATM transaction is recorded. That's what I'm cracking up at. You could have just walked away with 38 bucks. Now you're on candid camera!

He noticed the camera and I saw a look of panic flash across his face.

Listen, buddy, relax. I have an idea. Listen to me. Sometimes I shock myself with how persuasive I can be. He actually listened!

Just give me ten bucks for the tip, take the 28 bucks and walk away. I won't say anything to anyone. I won't call the cops, I swear to Jesus! I swear to Jesus!

There was a cross tattooed on his shoulder. That's why I tried the Jesus angle.

I continued speaking. To the cameras, it will just look like two friends talking. See, let's look up at the camera and smile.

And he actually did it! He took the 28 bucks, left me with a Hamilton for the tip, and rode away. I was still laughing.

I took my phone out and with great effort, managed to stop laughing. I don't think 911 operators would take a giggler seriously.

I don't believe in Jesus. And he called me a raghead!

xoxo

Home Cooking Tips for Indian Grad Students Abroad: Chapter 1 Using the oven for Indian style vegetables

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Sun, 10 Feb 2019 15:34:00 +0000

I decided to start with this topic because it's one learning I am very proud of. And have gotten good responses about on Twitter and even in a podcast.

For a time-strapped young desi abroad, the quick and easy home meal is dal-rice or khichdi or some version of it. Pressure cook in bulk, temper, and done for a few meals. Vegetables are good for you, but making a sabji/bhaaji, standing there, sheesh, so time consuming. You have deadlines to meet.

I am here to share with you a simple and time-saving technique that approximates well the taste of home-cooked desi style dry sabji. Roasting it in the oven. The oven, which is standard in any kitchen in the US, goes mostly un-utilized by desis, unless it's for occasional baking. My own oven gets used regularly for making sabji.

In my personal opinion, oven-roasted dry sabji tastes even better, but more on that later.

You might say, what's so revolutionary or novel about roasting vegetables? We have all had roasted vegetables. Big whoop.

I am saying that go beyond the typical Westernized Food Network-ish roasted vegetable dishes. Go beyond the asparagus, the green beans, the baby potatoes, brussels sprouts, etc. Try it on your other favorite or even daily vegetables. And use your favorite Indian spices. Put mustard seeds and/or cumin seeds in it. And it works perfectly.

But but but what about tempering/tadka/fodni you ask? We will come to that soon.

The broad recipe is very straightforward and adaptable

- Preheat the oven to at least 425F (higher if you like more char).
- Chop your vegetable the way you would to cook it on stovetop (my favorites are cauliflower, okra, eggplant, easily available in non-desi stores).
- Spread as flat and evenly as you can in a roasting pan or baking sheet.
- Add chopped onions and chilies if you cook it that way.
- Add salt, and whatever desi spices you would use on a stovetop. Sprinkle mustard/cumin seeds if you like.
- Drizzle with oil. Not butter or olive oil Western style. Any other oil will do - peanut, coconut, mustard, sunflower, canola, grapeseed, even bacon fat if you prefer.
- Mix well, ideally with your hands so the oil and spices coat all the surfaces of the vegetable.
- Put it in the oven.
- Now relax for about 10 minutes or so. Then take out the mix and stir it.
- Return to the oven
- Most vegetables will be done in 20-30 minutes. Depends on the vegetable and the size of the pieces
- (Optional) End with a 5 minute high broil. I do this because I like the crispy char. But you can skip it if you like.

What you get will be almost exactly like the stove-top stir-fried dry/sukka sabji, if not better. Cuts actual time spent in half. And is particularly brilliant for cooking okra. More on that later..

The Tadka Concern

Whenever I have mentioned this alternative method to desi friends, the most common objection I get is what about tadka? Without tempering, how will we get the same flavor? Tadka is awesome, they say, tadka is irreplaceable, they insist. To which I very politely say, pish posh. If you use the oven, you will get the same, if not better flavor, without the tadka.

To do that, we need to go through a small chemistry lesson. And I am explaining this as an amateur food science enthusiasts, so any experts or scientists reading this, please correct me.

What is tadka exactly? You heat oil until it's very hot, then add some solid stuff (mustard, cumin, chilies, whatever), then add some spices (hingi, haldi, mirchi,....), stir for a minute or two, and then add your vegetable.

Tadka brings out flavor, they say. Correct. But why does it bring out flavor? Because a lot of these spices, whole or powdered, release or transform flavor-imparting chemicals only at very high temperatures. The kinds of temperatures that only oil can reach, not water. And the vegetables we eat are mostly water, so the highest temperature they can reach is roughly the boiling point of water, if that.

So the tadka, at high temperatures (about 400F or higher), extracts the flavors. Then you add the vegetable and mix. And the average temperature of the whole thing in your pot goes down. And then when you keep heating, it goes up slowly as the vegetable cooks. Until it reaches somewhere around 200-212F (the water limit). And that's how you get cooked vegetable with the tadka-extracted flavors.

If you follow the oven roasting method with a temperature of at least 425F, and an oil with a high enough smoking point (which is why I said no butter, no olive oil), you get the same basic effect. The spices, mixed with oil on the surface of the vegetable and around reach the same temperature as in a tadka. And roughly the same flavors come out. The end result is more or less the same as cooking the whole thing on stove-top, unless you have a really particular palate.

I personally think this method results in "better" sabji, at least for me. I like my vegetables crispy and with some char. Getting that char in a pot on a stove isn't as easy. It takes time and a lot of stirring. In the oven, spread out over a larger area, bigger proportions of the veggie's surfaces are exposed to the hot oven temperature. And that process happens easily and faster. Especially if you follow that optional broiling step in the end.

If your tastes lean less towards crispy or char and more towards softer and cleaner skin, adjust temperature or time accordingly.

The Okra Bonus

Bhindi is the most annoying sabji to cook on the stove. Because of the gooey sticky thing is releases, so you have to keep stirring forever until it dries. There are some tricks you can find online about how to reduce the mucilage, but none of those completely eliminate it.

The advantage about roasting okra in an oven is that you skip the mucilage phase completely. Even when you stir in 10 minutes, there will be no mucilage. And to understand why, here's another chemistry lesson.

The stickiness comes from a mix of sugar residues and glycoproteins present in the okra. As heat is applied to the okra, the viscosity of these chemicals, mixed with water released from the okra, starts increasing at about 120F. It keeps growing. Remember that pot-heating is not uniform. As you stir, the temperature of the whole thing slowly increased. As does the viscosity of the mucilage.

Until the temperature crosses a certain point, about 180-190F or so. At this point, the mucilage starts hardening. So the chemicals are still there. They just harden and add to the crispy texture. Which is why as you keep cooking and stirring okra, eventually that sliminess will go away.

Enter the oven. Or rather, let the okra enter the oven. Which is already at 425F. Pretty high! Those mucilage inducing chemicals released cross the viscous phase and hit the solidifying phase of 190F within seconds. The slimy phase still happens. Just happens too fast for you to realize.

And what you get is crispy and well-done okra.

Conclusion

So that's my first real "cooking tip" here. Use the oven to cook dry vegetables Indian style. Whoever I have suggested the technique to, among friends, family, and on Twitter, have given universally positive feedback. On the ease of cooking as well as the end taste.

Home Cooking Tips for Indian Grad Students Abroad: An Introduction

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Sun, 10 Feb 2019 14:27:00 +0000

A cousin of mine recently came from India for grad school. She was talking to me about the thinking and effort involved in cooking "wholesome" Indian food regularly at home when living in the US. I said, I hear ya sister. I was in, and fresh off the, same boat over a decade ago when I started my PhD. And I started sharing some tips and tricks about cooking I have learned over that period.

And I realized, damn, I have a lot of wisdom to share. Not just cooking, but even shopping for desi ingredients, and suchlike. Instead of leaving it all confined to a whatsapp chat with her, I thought of starting a series of posts summarizing my main learnings.

Most people who come from India to the US, either for grad school or to work, have never cooked at home regularly. Many have never cooked at all, and learn the basics before coming. This is because you either live with your parents and eat from their kitchen. Or you can very easily hire a cook to come home everyday. Or you can subscribe to a tiffin/dabba service.

Then you come to the US and it's a completely different world. And there are many issues. Obviously, you cannot afford a cook here on your income. Except for a couple of rare exceptions like New Jersey, Bay Area, and maybe Dallas, Indian tiffin services are either unavailable, or expensive. And of course, grad students and most professionals have a time crunch. So the time left for cooking is very limited.

Then there is the problem of sourcing or shopping. You may not have easy access to an Indian grocery store at all. Even if you do, its selections might be limited. Even if there are big well-stocked desi stores nearby, maybe you don't have a car. So on and so forth.

Even if you do manage to do the basics at home like dal, rice, veggies, chicken curries etc, sometimes you have hankering for specific dishes that you grew up with. But which you won't get the in the typical Tikka-Masala-Garlic-Naan or Idli-Dosai-Bisibelebath restaurant nearby. For me, coming from Maharashtra, it ranged from vadapav to Marathi fish like surmai/pomfret to matki usal to dadpe pohey to manchow soup.

This series of posts is going to be me describing my learnings and my experiences, as a Maharashtra-raised guy who has spent 13 years in the US and is the primary cook in our household. Some of it will be more general. Some of it might be specific to the Pune-Bombay palate and cravings. It will be very open-ended.

Just so you know where I am coming from, cooking-wise, here is my initial story of dealing with these issues when I moved to the US. It includes details of my background and tastes. It will provide a better context for my posts.

Firstly, I have been cooking since I was something like 11 or 12 years old. My father taught it to me and I had a couple of childhood guy friends who also loved it. From then till age 26, I cooked on and off. Either alone or with friends. But it was mostly like a hobby. It was recreational. And it was usually something "special" or "unusual", the kind of stuff you would think of as a feast - biryani, kheema, paneer makhni, stuffed parathas, pizzas, burgers, kebabs....you get the idea.

I had never really cooked daily "wholesome" food (which in my community means mostly vegetarian and non-heavy meals). I lived at home till I was 22, so it was mostly mom who cooked. 22-24 I was in MBA school so it was the campus mess. 24-26, as a newly earning professional in Bangalore and Bombay, it was a LOT of eating out. And at home, either a cook or a tiffin.

Secondly, I love all kinds of foods and all kinds of meats and other animal proteins. No food restrictions whatsoever plus an adventurous spirit to boot.

So for the first 6-8 months in the US, I was happy to eat out at "budget" type places. It was all new and exotic for me. For a few weeks, my daily lunch was a BLT sandwich in the school cafeteria, because this was my first exposure to quality bacon. Even when I cooked at the home I shared with other grad students, I got all kinds of exotic (for me) meats and seafood from the nearby store and cooked them. So much beef keema....so many burgers.....so much tandoori turkey leg....and again so so very much bacon, you won't believe it.

It was only after I had gotten all that exploring and experimenting and bingeing out of my system that I started craving the simple pleasures of what for me was simple daily "wholesome" food. I put that word in quotes because what is wholesome for you might not be wholesome for me. But it will have a lot of commonalities across the pan-Indian palate.

So, this is my series sharing the lessons I learned as a cash-strapped and time-strapped grad student. Many of these lessons took years to learn. I hope it is useful to people.

Indian-Americans and Spelling Bees: Adding some nuance

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Sun, 29 May 2016 14:28:00 +0000

It's that time of the year again. The only night of the year when desi people dominate ESPN primetime in the United States. The Scripps National Spelling Bee. Yet again, the winner...or rather co-winners..came from the families of Indian immigrants.

This has been happening for over a decade now, and every year, the aftermath of the Bee in Indian media and Indian and Indian-origin social media follows a similar pattern. There are a few think pieces about why Indian-Americans are so good at spelling bees. Some folks go all uber-patriotic extolling the superior virtues of our intellectual tradition and what not (cue...Bhaaaaarrrraat maaata kiiii.......). And some folks sneer, indulging in a mild form of communal self-loathing. I don't have kids but my close Indian-American friends who do are very emphatic about how they will not make...or even let their kids participate in something as nerdy and inherently uncool as a spelling bee.

Through Twitter I came across this post that quotes Varun Grover's interview in the excellent excellent documentary I Am Offended (do watch if you haven't) which references spelling bees. That blog, and Varun in that documentary, are making a larger point about how the Indian education system is centered around rote learning, stifling creativity and basically preparing "middle managers". And that the success in spelling bees is a symptom of that.

While I agree with Varun and Auctorly on the larger problem, I don't think it is correct to link spelling bees to that problem. I see where they are coming from, and the reason for that is a couple of myths about spelling bees in general which merit some attention.

Myth #1 Spelling Bees are all about memorizing thousands and thousands and thousands of words, and regurgitating them on stage.

I used to think the same way, but it's not really that way. A few years ago, I had a long chat with a student of mine (I am a college professor) who in her school days had participated in the spelling bee. She didn't win, but talked to me about how much fun it was, and ended up giving me a different perspective on this activity that I too once sneered at. Then I read some more about it, watched the documentary Spellbound, talked to some more students over the years, and I think it is necessary to add some nuance to how we view the "sport".

Spelling bee as a contest is more about pattern recognition than just rote memorization. Don't get me wrong. Of course it is important to know and remember many many words to participate in a spelling bee. But the same is true of scrabble. Or crosswords. Or trivia quizzing. Heck, memorization is key even in chess. A serious chess player will have thousands of moves and games memorized.

Just like all those activities/sports, spelling bee is about, yes, having a memory bank of relevant information, but at the top level, it is often about recognizing patterns, working out clues, and then formulating an answer by accessing the relevant information from your brain.

You know how the kids ask for meaning, language of origin, use it in a sentence etc etc? It is not for theater. It has important information, and many times, can even help you make an educated guess at the spelling of a word you've never heard of by using what is basically pattern recognition.

Let me give you an example about how I, without memorizing any words, was able to correctly guess one of the words in the final this year. The word was chremslach. When it was first uttered, I thought it would start with "Kr" and maybe end with "che" or "kh". Then I heard that the word was Yiddish. And the meaning was a kind of passover pastry. Instantly I thought of a pastry that a Jewish deli near my house excels at - rugelach. The end sounded the same. So it had to end in -lach. And the different pronunciations of the starting syllable suggested chr not Kr. The repeated usage by the moderator further confirmed what I had in my mind. A pattern emerged and voila. There the spelling was.

I felt thrilled at having worked it out before the contestant answered. It was a thrill similar to the one I get as a trivia quizzer when I crack a cleverly framed Final Jeopardy style "workout-able" question. Or the thrill I get when I crack a particularly cryptic clue in crosswords.

The aforementioned student kept stressing about how much fun the whole thing was for her. She said it was a form of solving puzzles. And I saw what she meant. I asked her, isn't it boring to memorize thousands and thousands of words. She said no, she LOVES words (sidenote - she always wrote the most well-crafted and thoughtful term papers in my class). And again, I see her point.

When you enjoy any activity built on pattern recognition so much that you want to seriously compete in it, you don't think of the underlying memorization as a drab chore. I like to play scrabble semi-competitively, and it is fun for me to have those cruel 2 letter words memorized so I can gain advantage on the board despite not having great tiles. And I'm sure poker players don't think of probability calculations as mundane.

Myth #2 These desi spelling be winners will most likely end up as middle managers, code coolies, cogs in the corporate machine....just total drones.

Although it seems like Indian-Americans have been winning the bee for ages, in reality, it's been less than two decades that it has been happening consistently. So the sample of winners is not statistically significant, but from whatever I read in "where are they now" type stories, I saw very few, if any, ending up in those drone type jobs.

A lot of them were in some form of research, which to me, as an academic researcher, makes sense. Research is like the rigorous grown-up impactful form of pattern recognition that is built upon a deep memory bank of knowledge about a subject. A bunch of them were doctors and lawyers. One was a professional poker player (again, pattern recognition and memory). And so on. I even googled a few names of winners and always found that the person was doing something really cool.

Maybe a systematic study will throw up more details.

Myth #3 We Indians are just awesome at English and we are such brainiacs and we have the bestest education-centric culture so we are awesome at Spelling Bees

While the first two myths were in the self-loathing category, this one is in the uber-patriotic category. I have no problem with Indians or Indian-origin feeling proud or elated or whatever at this dominance, although I am personally from the Bill Hicks school of thought when it comes to patriotism.

But let us dispel with this notion that there is something really inherently culturally genetically special about Indians that our kids just go to America, show up at spelling bees, and start winning them left and right. There is actually a pretty strong and well-organized training infrastructure that is making all this possible. Remember that these contestants train with the rigor and discipline of athletes. It is not done in isolation, but requires broader support like with any sport or activity.

What you see on ESPN is the culmination of a year of smaller contests, local spelling bees, practice bees, and other such events on the local circuits. And there's a kind of feedback loop that forms. Successive generations build on the success of previous generations. Legacies and even "dynasties" are created and inspire some to adhere to it. I could keep going, but I came across this article that explains the quasi-institutional reasons behind the dominance in more detail.

If some other community starts taking such a deep interest in the sport and organizes in such a serious grassroots way, other communities could start dominating too.

One thing to note is that the winners have all been kids of Indians who migrated to the United States. Recent Indian immigrants, much like recent immigrants of other communities, tend to socialize more with their compatriots and do so in a very community-based way, with associations and groups and mandals and so on. But second generation Indian-Americans are more assimilated in the American mainstream. So when they grow up and have kids of their own, they are not as plugged into the Indian-American groups and associations as their parents were.

So you don't see many (or even any?) third generation Indian-American children winning the spelling bee or even making it to the national finals, because they don't have automatic access to that community-based infrastructure.

The best way to end this post is to quote a now-grown-up Nupur Lala, the star of the Oscar winning documentary who arguably started this Indian-American phenomenon.

“Having watched Spellbound, I realized that several of my competitors weren’t any worse than me ability-wise, but they didn’t have the same advantages—economic privilege, educational background, family dynamics,” she says. “I know that played a big, big role in my success. As a 14-year-old, I really thought I was one of the best spellers out there. In hindsight, I think, yeah, I was a very good speller, but I also had some of the best preparation and resources out there. I had a mom who had a graduate degree in linguistics. Parents who have literally hundreds of books in the house, and who were very motivated to help me succeed.”

On IIPM "Shutting Down"

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 16:56:00 +0000

Recently a friend pointed out that next month would be 10 years since I made a post titled "The Fraud that is IIPM" on my little-read blog. He asked if I planned to make a 10 year anniversary post of sorts. I said I'd think about it. And now comes the news that IIPM is shutting down their campuses.

When I met Rashmi Bansal (who owned JAM whose post I linked to) in Manhattan earlier this year, she mentioned the possibility of something like this happening. She said the relentless bad press is taking its toll and some campuses were being closed even then.

It is difficult to put into words the full range of emotions I feel hearing this news. But the foremost is that this "victory", if you call it that, belongs primarily to people like Rashmi Bansal, Maheshwar Peri, and Anant Nath. They actually WERE sued by that odious company and they fought the legal battle without choosing to take the easy way out. They paid a lot, monetarily and emotionally, to expose the fraud.

I really didn't do too much. I wrote a post linking to a JAM story by Arjun Ravi on a blog that was read by maybe 2-300 people. When IIPM sent me a standard email they sent to threaten all bloggers who wrote against them, I ridiculed it on my blog. And when IIPM sleazily tried to drag my then employer IBM into it, I quit my job.

The "IIM dude quits IBM" factoid made for a catchy headline and the news went viral. Mainly because IIM and IBM are such huge brands. But the development didn't really "harm" me in the way a cursory reading of the headlines might suggest. Yeah, I quit that job, but within hours, I had two dozen interview calls and a few job offers, all of them unsolicited. Let's be honest. I was (am?) a privileged upper caste English speaking male in India with a prime resume painted as some sort of a hero by the media and the blogosphere. I was bound to land on my feet. And I did, really fast.

Eventually, as Arindam said last year to Shivam Vij on a news show, they chose NOT to follow through on their threat to sue me. If they had, I most certainly would've fought the case. Some reputed lawyers had offered their services pro bono if it came to that. And even if I had to do it on my own, I would've. As my mom and wife will tell you, I am very stubborn. smile emoticon

But it didn't happen. So other than the few hours of mild uncertainty after resigning from IBM, I came out of the experience unscathed and more or less smelling of roses. And with this "giant slayer" reputation that has continued since, and which has always made me very uncomfortable.

I took up a well-paying part-time job with IMS at an office 5 minutes from where I lived, making it clear to them that I'd be leaving for a PhD soon. The PhD plan is something I had made way back in my MBA days (in fact my IIML yearbook even mentions it). The IIPM threat just made me advance it to 2006 instead of 2008 when I had originally scheduled it for.

I got into a great PhD program at Penn State, and moved to the US, starting a new chapter of my life. IIPM became just a thing that I'd get emails and text messages about whenever they were in the news because of their latest PR disaster. Yes, I still got an occasional email threatening a lawsuit or an arrest (the last was in 2010 i think), but I just ignored them all and nothing really materialized.

Meanwhile, Rashmi, Maheshwar, Anant, and many wronged and cheated students fought on. They were made to navigate the complex and sometimes corrupt labyrinth of the Indian judicial system, responding to complaints from remote locations like Silchar! They kept the battle going.

So this news today of IIPM essentially shutting shop is their win. They deserve the credit, the kudos, the accolades, and everything else. In 2015, I'm as much of a bystander as the rest of you.

"The Flight" Chapter 2 of Apurvai, a travelogue by P.L. "PuLa" Deshpande

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Sat, 18 Apr 2015 17:04:00 +0000

Many years ago, I translated chapter 1 from the 1960 book. You don't HAVE TO read it to follow this chapter, but it is recommended. Unlike my other translations which were done from audio files of PuLa narrating his work, this one has been done from the actual book. So even Marathis who've never read the book will find something new here.

To set the stage a little, in this chapter, PuLa describes the experience of his first ever international flight. Based on the references to the Suez Crisis, I'm guessing it happened in 1956 or 1957. So almost 60 years ago! I was surprised to learn of the sheer number of stopovers flights had to make in those days. It is indeed a different era. But so much of what he writes resonated with me in terms of my experiences with international flights. Which is why I chose to translate this although it isn't as ROFLMAO funny as the previous chapter.

Usual caveats - Much of PuLa's humor comes from how he played with the Marathi language, and it can get lost in translation. But his observations and descriptions stay relevant even 55 years later.

Our flight to London from Santa Cruz airport was scheduled for 11 PM on August 20th. It wasn't my first time flying, but it was the first time I was flying to another country, that too on a huge airplane. I had been told to reach the airport about an hour before the flight. Even if I hadn't been told this, I would've gone there two hours before. Because even when I am taking an M.S.M. train (or as you kids today call it, Southern Railway), I go to the station an hour early. Even if I have a reserved seat.

I find it convenient to allow that buffer for unforeseen but predictable events like getting on the wrong train, not being able to find my compartment, taxi to the station breaking down, heavy rain causing waterlogging, forgetting some important stuff at home and realizing it halfway to the station, forgetting to fill the water bottle, and of course, panicking every few minutes thinking that I have either forgotten the ticket at home or lost it.

And of course, Indian Railways regularly contributes with unforeseen but predictable events of its own. Just as you've spread out a sheet on your berth and laid down, a railways employee comes and says the compartment has some problems, so we need to shift to another one. It takes about 45 minutes to find a porter, find the replacement compartment, and move all the luggage. It turns out that if you turn the lights on, the fan stops working, and if you turn the fan on, the lights stop working. Finally both are fixed, and when you go to the bathroom, there is no water in the compartment. So you have to stay awake till Lonand to find a guard and complain about it. If you're lucky, it'll get fixed by the time the train reaches Nira. Or then wait till Miraj at 5 AM so you can use the bathroom on the station.

So even if you go very early to the station, there's no guarantee that your rail journey will be pleasant. I wonder if we are destined to ever get railways that take the responsibility of passenger comfort seriously. Until then, there are only two ways to travel without any problems - on foot like Vinoba Bhave or by air.

Or so I thought.

When I bought my tickets at the Air India office, the lady behind the counter had told me to reach the airport at 9 PM. And then, flashing me a disarming smile, suggested that I call the airline before leaving to make sure the plane wasn't delayed. So just as we were about to leave, I remembered that smile and mentioned this to the huge contingent of friends, family, and neighbors gathered at our house to bid us farewell.

"Haha, don't be an idiot! It's a plane, not an ST bus to be delayed. Airlines operate with second-by-second precision!"

A friend, who had never traveled an inch north of Malad or south of Kala Ghoda, said making me feel like an idiot in front of everyone. This guy has always had this publicly dismissive attitude towards me. I don't know why I am still friends with him. When I told him I was being sent to England by Doordarshan, his first reaction was,

"You??? Why??? Looks like the government has too much money to waste!"

When I first wore the suit mentioned in the previous chapter, he laughed and said I looked like a trumpeter from one of the Dhobi Talao wedding bands. Totally unnecessary snark. But he can't help it. So even though he had no first hand experience on the matter, he stayed true to his nature and ridiculed me for wondering if I should call the airline to check the flight status.

My wife called the airline office anyway. And we came to know that because the incoming plane from Tokyo hadn't reached yet, our flight was delayed by two hours.

I winced. The idea of sitting in Mumbai's humidity for two more hours wearing a three piece suit, that noose-like tie, those damned expensive Chinese shoes, the nylon socks bought after the Middle East cooled down, and a thick coat meant for England's cold weather, was unbearable. I was tempted to take off all my clothes (except for one) and cal the whole thing off.

"So....will the plane depart exactly two hours later than scheduled?"

Someone from the annoyingly large farewell contingent asked, and that question suddenly made our house explode into a pointless deliberation that made it resemble a legislative body debating a useless resolution.

"Will the plane leave two hours later or do you go to the airport two hours later?"

"But does two hours really mean two hours?"

"But what does a plane coming from Tokyo have to do with an Air India flight going to London?"

"Let's say the plane reaches earlier than estimated......will it still leave two hours late or earlier than that?"

"Let's say that Tokyo flight is delayed by four hours instead, will your flight leave two hours late or four hours late?"

"Someone told me that last week a flight scheduled for midnight eventually departed after dawn. Is that true?"

"Are you sure it's a plane from Tokyo? Maybe it's Kyoto."

"I just called a friend of mine who works in a restaurant at the airport. He says there is some mechanical problem in this plane, and the Tokyo plane thing is just an excuse."

"So the flight might get cancelled?"

"Do they have a replacement plane? How many planes does All India Radio have anyway?"

"It's Air India, not All India Radio."

"Yeah, same difference."

"Mechanical problems......that's scary!"

"You both have life insurance, right?"

"Remember the plane that crashed at Cairo five years ago? My boss' nephew was on it. His wife got two million as compensation!"

"I've heard you can buy life insurance at the airport."

All this nonsense from people who had nothing to do with our travel whatsoever. I prayed to god to rescue me from this plane chaos by sending the plane he sent for Sant Tukaram.

"I'm telling you guys. Instead of spending the two hours sitting at home, spend them sitting at the airport. Let's say they repair the plane early and it leaves before time. What are you going to do? It's not like you can catch it on the way. It's not the Barshi-Pandharpur passenger train. Hehehehe!"

So finally, following the over-cautious traditions of my train journeys, we reached the airport at 9:30 PM for a plane that was scheduled to depart at 1:30 AM. Some of my other friends and colleagues were at the airport already to see me off. They either didn't know that the plane was delayed, or even if they knew, they were aware of my over-cautious traditions.

All my friends at the airport made me feel very awkward and also emotional by showering me with so many garlands and bouquets, that the airport officials thought I was a politician. And I had an epiphany at that moment - the greatest wealth in my life is my friends. If wealth were to be measured in friendships, I am probably richer than Tata-Birla combined. I have so many dear friends in so many walks of life! And so many of them had come late at night and out of the way to the airport to see me off.

I felt touched but also embarrassed. Firstly, I still wasn't sure I could pull off the suit-boot look. Having such a huge audience for it felt weird. And then there were these garlands and bouquets. I was overwhelmed. I have gotten used to getting such attention at functions and award shows and suchlike. But on this occasion, I was feeling like I had an emotional debt to pay off. Just popping by to say goodbye is one thing, but these guys had come all the way to the airport!

My embarrassment was compounded by the fact that I hadn't really done or achieved anything to deserve all the attention that night. When I get such attention after a successful theater performance, it's okay. At least I gave them some happiness, and they are appreciating it. But that night, my wife and I were just flying to England like thousands of people do everyday. And yet my mob of friends at the airport had made me feel like I was doing something special. With a luggage full of such love and good wishes, I started feeling confident that even if all the engines of the plane failed, I could fly anywhere I wanted.

The crowd of friends and all the flowers being heaped on me made the press photographers hanging around think that I was some big deal. They suddenly started snapping our pictures like paparazzi. In all this chaos, one of my friends went to the airport officials and convinced them to open a "VIP Lounge" for me. A sturdy fellow in a crisp uniform politely asked us to follow him to the VIP lounge.

At that moment, my wife looked at me happily with an expression that said - "all these years that I have put up with you are finally paying off!"

As we were led into the imposingly plush VIP lounge, I started feeling even more awkward. Given our colonial history, I know that "England returned" has a certain halo attached to it. But I had no idea that the halo starts appearing even before you leave India. I started feeling worried about the possibility of a real VIP showing up and frowning at how our raucous farewell contingent had made the VIP lounge resemble Khandke's chawl.

Even in all that chaos, I overheard one of the uniformed guys whispering to the other,

"Nowadays, any random person can become a VIP."

His colleague responded,

"Hoga koi Minister ka baccha nahi toh jamai!"

and walked away.

So I tried to appear and act as VIP-ish as possible. I went around folding my hands and solemnly thanking all the people who had come to see me off. Then I started giving away the garlands and bouquets to kids and being unnecessarily nice to them. Basically, emulating every aspect of VIP behavior that I could remember.

A few of the professional photographers kept taking pictures of all this, and then offered to send them to me. They helpfully quoted a "professional" rate for it that was ten times what it would cost to get a photo taken in my neighborhood studio. But I was pretending to be a VIP and had to play the part. Once I parted with all the advance payments for the photos, the expression on my face finally came to resemble something that actually deserved to be photographs. I have no idea where those expensive photos are now, by the way.

Eventually there was an announcement that the customs check process had started, and we finally prepared to leave that VIP cell....I mean lounge. While leaving, I handed a generous tip to the uniformed guys standing at the door. The astounded expressions on their faces made me realize that real VIPs probably never hand out any tips. They hand out only two things - promises or threats.

We left the lounge and walked straight to the weighing scales near the customs area. I put our bags on it one by one and felt relieved when each of them were a pound or so less than the 44 pound limit. My wife on the other hand seemed a little disappointed and said,

"Hmpf, I guess we could have taken a few more papads then."

I ignored her and walked to the customs booth, standing in front of the officer with an appropriately guilty expression on my face.

This was the second time in my life that I had faced a customs officer. A few years ago, when returning from Goa (then a Portuguese territory) I stood in front of a customs officer for the first time. Everyone in front of me had been questioned extensively and had their bags checked thoroughly. So I was already terrified. Even though there was no reason to be terrified. In the entire crowd there, we were probably the only ones returning from Goa without as much as a tiny piece of chocolate. But customs booths are one of those weirdly imposing places where I feel nervous by default.

Some people are scared of a dentist's chair. Not me. I have been to dentists many times. One dentist actually turned my simple complaint of an aching tooth into an imperative to extract it with the glee of a professional sadist. It hurt so much, I think I actually saw a few angels waiting to welcome me into heaven. But even then, the next time I went to a (different, obviously) dentist, I went with the ease with which I go to Kulkarni's restaurant to eat bhajiyas. No fear or worries. But put me in front of a custom's officer and my heart starts racing.

There are many random entries in my list of "people I am irrationally scared of". For some reason, I am terrified of every liftman. Not afraid of the actual lift, mind you. It's not like I am scared that the lift will plummet to the basement or anything. I am just scared of the liftmen, at least in Mumbai, where almost all of them seem to have a cold blank expression on their face. I am also terrified of waiters in fancy restaurants. If one is standing next to me, I feel so nervous that I invariably spill something. I was never scared of male teachers, but female teachers always petrified me. And I can slap a doctor on his back and sing songs with him even when he is in the middle of surgery, but when it comes to nurses, my hands start trembling even if I am handing them a note. I have no idea why I carry these bizarre fears in my heart.

That customs officer I encountered when returning from Goa had insulted me rather painfully! I still shudder and shed a tear when I think about it.

When it was my turn, he asked me my name, address, and profession. Those days, I earned my living in a college fostering deep hatred for literature among the students. As soon as I told the officer that I was a Professor, and that too of Marathi, he just looked straight into my eyes, and with an expression conveying immense pity, said,

"You can go."

He didn't ask to search my luggage, didn't ask me if I was carrying any contraband, didn't even ask me if I had anything to declare. With utter conviction that I lacked the ability or the means to smuggle in alcohol, gold, cigarettes, or anything like that, he sent me on my way. I have never felt more humiliated. I would've preferred it if he had instead put me through a two hour long interrogation under a bright lamp.

So that day in Mumbai airport, I was wondering if the customs officer in charge of examining departing passengers would be more respectful. He looked at my bags, then glanced at my face, and then wordlessly made some chalk markings on the bags and waved me through. Rude, isn't it?

Next my wife and I went to Passport Control. Our passports had been issued two years ago and were valid for three more years. But one of my friends in the farewell party had authoritatively said,

"Ohhhh.....just three years validity left? That might create problems. Good luck!"

I nervously handed over the passports to the officer. He glanced at them for a nanosecond and returned them to me. I was less worried about the validity and more worried about the passport photo. But the officer had evidently discovered some similarity between my passport photo and the way I actually look. Once we were done with that, a health officer quickly made sure we had taken the necessary vaccinations and we were done.

Once we got the "worthy of traveling abroad" certification from Pandit Nehru's people, all we could do was wait for the plane to leave. It was past midnight. The departure area at Santa Cruz is decorated and furnished in a very modern way. There are lots of comfortable couches and chairs for passengers to relax in. But my wife and I were sitting there uncomfortably, feeling out of place.

There was a European couple sitting in front of us. They seemed confused by Indian currency. These were the days when paisa coins co-existed with anna coins and the poor visitors had no idea if the many coins they had were worth five rupees or five annas. Hoping to give them a happy memory of Indian hospitality, I jumped in to offer unsolicited advice and ended up compounding their confusion even more. Finally my better half stepped in, sorted the whole thing out, and informed them that Indian women have a much better understanding of money than Indian men.

The European couple left for their flight and I started looking around at other fellow-passengers. With a parochial mindset, I went around to see if there were other Marathi folk there, and soon met a man named Patil and a student named Joshi. I was there representing the Deshpande name. All we were missing was a Kulkarni. If we had found one, we would have had Patil-Joshi-Deshpande-Kulkarni, the four pillars of the ancient Marathi administrative set-up. Sadly there was no Kulkarni on that flight, but it did end up having a pilot named Nadkarni. Nadkarni is essentially the South Kannada version of Kulkarni, so I guess we ended up with the full set eventually.

Around 1 AM, the plane's wings must have fluttered because suddenly, there was a lot of activity around us. The crowd started walking in one direction, and we went along. I looked at the glass barrier at the customs desk and saw our contingent was still patiently waiting. The elders had tears in their eyes and the younger lot looked like they were cracking stale jokes at our expense and passing them off as new.

When we eventually reached the gate, I confirmed three times that it was the right plane. Or else we'd wake up the next morning in Cochin instead of Cairo. I still carried emotional scars from the night at Pune station that I got on a train to go to Kolhapur and woke up the next morning to find I was in a compartment parked in the Pune railway yard. I have always had the kind of luck where I take a girlfriend to watch a movie on the sly and run into a nosy old relative who decided to come watch the same movie. And I couldn't afford to let that luck mess up international travel.

There was an air hostess standing at the door, welcoming us with an unnaturally wide smile. The rest of the crew, dressed in crisp dark trousers and skirts and blindingly white shirts, sporting wing shaped lapel pins and painstakingly groomed mustaches, was darting about doing their work. We reached our seats and stared out the tiny oblong window at the terminal, wondering if our friends and family were still there.

Once I was in the seat, I assured myself that despite all apparent obstacles, it now seemed like I would definitely go to England, and fastened the seat belt around my stomach. The engines started humming and the fans started rotating one by one. The plane got going. After zooming along the ground for a mile or so, it slowed down and stopped at the other end of the runway.

As soon as it stopped, I started fearing the worst. The plane had already been delayed by mechanical problems. I wasn't sure if they had fixed the problems completely or had postponed some repairs. Maybe now they'd discover more problems. I also carried emotional scars from bus drivers who'd make passengers board on a scorching hot day, bake them in that tin box for an hour while they waited, and then open the bonnet of the bus to examine what's wrong with the engine.

Luckily, nothing like that happened. In a couple of minutes, the plane started moving again, then sped up, and eventually left terra firma in a graceful glide. I watched the airport rapidly disappear from my view and before I knew it, Mumbai started resembling a gem-laden ornament below us. In that ornament, four million people were probably dreaming as they slept, while I sat with wide open eyes, realizing my childhood dream of foreign travel.

And next to me was my soul mate and my life partner accompanying me on this adventure. Over the previous twelve years, we had built many castles in the air together, while never feeling tempted to build a house on the ground. We never stayed in one place for more than 2-3 years anyway. We had in common a huge appetite for new challenges and new experiences. And the latest one was to be living in England for 5-6 months.

Our flight had been in the air for a while, and the plane was completely dark as was the sky outside, but I still couldn't sleep. The plane was completely packed and experienced travelers were already snoring. Our air-hostess was Japanese. She was promptly and efficiently offering candy and nuts to travelers with a studied smile straight out of the training syllabus. Her walk was brisk and her voice had the crispness of springtime.

I was feeling really hot. That damned suit on my body started feeling like clunky armor and I again cursed myself for wearing it on the plane. I looked around and was taken aback when I noticed at an Englishman sitting in front of me. Here I was, wearing a brand new three piece suit because I was going to his snooty country. And this dude was sitting there looking very relaxed in khaki shorts, a flannel shirt with some twenty five pockets, and a flimsy felt hat that did not match.

So I discreetly looked around at the other white people on the flight. Not a single one of them was dressed even as remotely formally as I was. Sitting there overdressed in that damned suit in the middle of the night, I started feeling like even more of a neophyte than I already was.

Suddenly the Japanese air-hostess appeared with a small wet towel on a plate. I eyed the towel suspiciously for a second. I had no idea what purpose a wet towel was supposed to serve at two in the morning. But I was brought up never to turn a plate away, so I picked up the towel and thanked her. I looked at my wife to see if she had any suggestions, but she was fast asleep. I slowly glanced across the aisle and saw that the guy there was gently rubbing the towel on his face. I did the same, and the cool cologne scented fabric gave me some relief from the intense heat I was experiencing.

Our massive jumbo jet was slicing through the darkness leaving cities and mountains behind. I was finally feeling a little drowsy. Almost everyone around me, including my wife, was already asleep. That Englishman with the khaki shorts was in fact trying to drown out the noise of the engine with his own booming multi-octave snores with his mouth open. The ex-subject of Her Majesty's realm inside me felt relieved to observe first-hand that even the English can snore with their mouths open. Because once our travel plans were made, I was a bit worried about that.

You see, I am one of "those" too. But over the course of my life, I have come across some impressively loud snorers. My grandma says that people with big hearts and minds snore the most. I don't know if there is any correlation between big bodies and big hearts and minds - I won't mind if there is. I started thinking a lot about snoring and hearts and minds. I do remember that I spent a lot of time thinking about it. But I don't know for how long, because the next thing I knew, I was waking up to the dawn's early light.

Our plane was flying over a huge desert. I noted how different this dawn was from any other dawn I had experienced in my life, thousands of miles over a limitless desert. This experience, coming right after I had experienced a darkness so different from any other darkness I had experienced in my life, spurred some philosophical and metaphorical thoughts. It felt like I was witness to the dawn of a new phase of my life. I thought about my recent years and realized that I hadn't really experienced real dawn in years. In Mumbai's fast-paced hectic life, by the time my day ended, it was usually well past midnight. So by the time I usually woke up, dawn would have given up on waiting for me and slid away, making way for harsh sunlight.

Our Japanese air-hostess, still looking as fresh as a dew-kissed flower, was making the rounds with hot fortifying beverages for the morning. I have never found those beverages particularly fortifying immediately after waking up, so I politely declined her offer of tea or coffee. Instead, I got up and headed to the bathroom. Taking care not to wake up or bump into any of the other passengers, I tiptoed my way to the front, and slowly opened the door to what I thought was the bathroom. Instead I found myself face-to-face with the fine gentlemen flying the plane. It was the cockpit door! I guess the expression on my face gave away what my need was because the co-pilot, without saying anything, pointed me to the correct door.

I finished my morning ablutions and returned to the seat to find the "fasten seatbelts" sign flashing. By the time I was able to find the belt and buckle it up, the plane had started its rapid descent. I looked out the window and saw that we were headed to a desert island surrounded by more desert. I assumed it was Cairo, our first stopover. I started looking around the landscape in the hopes of spotting some pyramids. By the time I spotted a bump that I thought was a pyramid and was about to point it out to my wife, the plane was touching down, and before I knew it, it was standing stationary in a foreign land.

I looked at the dinky terminal outside the window and was a little disappointed that a city as renowned as Cairo should have an airport that looks more like an ST bus stand. But once we got off the plane, I learned that we were not in Cairo, but in some place called "Bahrain" instead. I felt a bit like Columbus who reached land confident that he was in India but then discovered that he was instead in some strange land he did not know anything about. And I felt relieved that I had not pointed out those supposed pyramids to my wife.

I had never heard of Bahrain before and had no idea where the hell it exactly was or why we were there instead of Cairo. But we walked into the terminal and headed for the restaurant. I learned that there were oilfields nearby and that Bahrain is a small island nation that is known for its oilfields. That was pretty much all we learned about the place.

We sat in the restaurant, ordered tea, and waited while the plane was refueled. The tea arrived after a long time. One sip of that concoction and I was convinced that in Bahrain, they used dried date palm leaves in lieu of tea leaves and the milk probably came from a camel instead of a cow. Over the course of my life, I have tasted many different kinds of tea......except of course the spilled tea from Mongini's mentioned in the previous chapter. Tea served in small glass tumblers in Mumbai, tea served in mud bowls on the banks of the Narmada, tea served in metallic cups in Madras, masala milk tea, railway station tea flavored with charcoal, tea without milk, tea without sugar, and even Chinese tea made from jasmine flowers. But I will never EVER forget that horrible tea from Bahrain airport. I will happily drink the bitterest castor potion than drink that tea again.

Well, at least the tea was free, because it was paid for by the airline.

Pretty soon, the plane was ready and we all climbed back into its belly. The plane took off soon and headed for Cairo. The flight from Bahrain to Cairo was essentially just desert after desert after desert. Once in a while, just as a change of scenery, there would be a small strip of water. But otherwise, totally barren. Not a single glimpse of green.

And that's when I really understood why the green flag of Islam came was hoisted in these deserts first. The prophet was very clever in choosing the color green for his flag. It is obvious why millions of Arabs enthusiastically followed that rare pleasant colored flag. I'm sure that the green flag was as instrumental in the spread of Islam as the Koran was. Add to it the moon that the desert dwellers probably equated with the relief provided by night, and I felt I had to applaud the prophet for his grasp of semiotics.

It was about 8:30 in the morning. I was staring at the desert out the window hoping to spot a camel train. But in vain. I did spot a lot of dry river beds though. Soon the sun got really bright and the glare made it difficult to keep looking outside. Soon our plane moved from the sea of sand to a sea of water. Being geographically challenged, I first decided it was the Red Sea, then the Caspian Sea, then the Black Sea, and then the Dead Sea. I still have no idea which one it was.

A while later, there were murmurs all around that we were flying over the Suez Canal. All passengers looked out the windows, identified the first strip of water they could find, and assured themselves that it was the Suez Canal. Again, no idea if any of those were actually the Suez Canal. From the height we were flying at, every strip of water looked as tiny as the Fergusson College canal in Pune. But in one strip, I spied some dots that seemed like boats and I silently convinced myself that it was indeed the Suez Canal. It was hard to believe that this tiny strip of water was responsible for almost starting World War 3 and almost sinking my travel plans.

When your plane is flying so high that you can only see the sky and clouds above you as well as below you, you can't help but get philosophical. You forget any fears you have about the plane crashing. Looking at creation from a height that makes even seas look like saucers of water makes you realize how insignificant you are in the whole scheme of things. As our plane flew towards Cairo, I couldn't help but realize that I was looking at the cradle of civilization. These deserts were where the Babylonian, Sumerian, and Assyrian civilizations had once bloomed. Where the library of Alexandria was once home to millions of of books that were burned. I'm assuming some Big Four or Big Five must have had a summit even then and decided that burning books was in the best interests of the world.

As impressive as the sights of great oceans, great skies, and great lands is while flying, one look at the great space when flying above clouds make them all pale in comparison. And you start wondering what the whole point of creation is, and whether you make any difference to it whatsoever.

Our plane was about to reach Cairo soon and I started thinking about it. Egypt is an ancient civilization, much like India. Historians have discovered that trade and cultural links between Egypt and India date back millenia. This is the land that saw rich culture flourish for millenia even before Christ was born. And when Christ was born, the bright star that shone was above these lands too. This is the land where Jews, Christians, and Muslims found their faiths and then unfurled the blood-soaked flags of those faiths.

I was in the middle of these thoughts and didn't even realize when I dozed off. The next thing I knew, someone was yelling "KAHIRO!!!!", waking me up.

The first sight I saw at Cairo airport was of battle-ready fighter jets. Next to them were imposing anti-aircraft guns with their barrels pointed to the sky. The stage seemed to be set for the next big war. The only question seemed to be which actors would enter the stage first and who the director would be. Actors from dozens of countries seemed to be ready, with war-paint on, or make-up on. Who knew when the final act would start and when it would end.

When I read a big sign that said, "WE WELCOME YOU TO EGYPT", I felt like someone had sprayed a stream of cold water on my face on an oppressively hot day. Why shouldn't all human beings be welcomed heartily all over this little planet of ours? Although as long as there exist things like passports and visas, built on an assumption of distrust of fellow human beings, can we really expect true expressions of such humanity? The sign that said "WE WELCOME YOU TO EGYPT"....to any "you" who reached there, regardless of race, religion, gender, creed.....why shouldn't such signs and more importantly sentiments, be displayed everywhere?

The funny thing is, this "WE WELCOME YOU TO EGYPT" sign was right next to the massive anti-aircraft guns and the irony endemic to human existence tickled me and troubled me in equal amounts.

We headed to the restaurant inside the terminal. The waiters there were very friendly and polite, and served us some divine Egyptian coffee. Compared to Mumbai airport, I thought Cairo airport was small. There was a lot of new construction happening around us though. Egypt is currently in the midst of writing a new chapter in its history. Everybody is watching carefully to see which way their new statesman (Nasser) takes them.

It was in Cairo airport that I first encountered Egyptian people. And as I examined their appearance carefully, I wondered how many Egyptians there might be in Mumbai too. Because in terms of appearance, I didn't really see any major differences between Egyptians and Indians. Beyond the facts I had memorized in my childhood to score 2 marks in the history exam, such as pyramids, mummies, pharaohs, and the Nile river, my knowledge about Egypt was as barren as their desert. I had never even thought about anyone living in Egypt other than Cleopatra, General Najeeb, and now this Nasser fellow.

Suddenly, I was overcome by a profound sense of ignorance and curiosity as a foreigner in a foreign land. And sitting there in the Cairo airport, I started thinking about how day-to-day life in Egypt must be and how I knew nothing about it. How do school teachers, lawyers, and bureaucrats here dress? Is it similar to how those folks dress in India? What is the most popular item in a typical restaurant in Egypt? Do wives here refer to their husbands by name or is there some tactful pronoun that has been coined for the purpose like in India? With each passing second, the expanse of my ignorance about this fascinating culture seemed to exceed the expanse of the desert.

Then I started thinking about the people who worked at that airport. For them, a typical day consisted of interacting with travelers from dozens of different countries, for maybe an hour or two at a time, before they went on their way and were replaced by a different set of foreigners. Do they feel the same sense of curiosity and note their ignorance about other cultures? Or has it become just a mundane feature of their lives by now? Do they actively notice the multi-colored lattice of different races and nationalities or does it just pass by in the blink of an eye like a frame from a cinema reel?

I spent the rest of the time in Cairo thinking about all this before we were called back to the plane. The next stopover was Geneva in Switzerland. As our plane surged through the clouds, we gradually left the desert behind and were soon traveling over Europe. Specifically, Italy, as the pilot informed us.

While I was almost entirely ignorant about Egypt except for its ancient history and contemporary politics, I at least knew more about Italy thanks to all the books I had read. Names like Rome, Venice, and Naples started swimming around in my head. I decided that if the plane had to crash right now, I would want it to do so near Naples. I had read that Naples was home to some of the most awe-inspiring sculptures in the world. So if my plane crashed in Naples, I could drag myself to those sculptures, see them first hand, and then die happy.

Yes, I know it is morbid to keep pondering the possibility of the plane crashing but that's how I am and be honest, aren't you too?

But the plane kept going. I kept looking at the Italian landscape underneath and we didn't see Naples or Venice. But we did fly over Rome. It was hard to miss. As I looked at the distant but clear images of various buildings and cathedrals in Rome, I first felt a great sense of satisfaction at seeing them first hand. Then I compensated for the unfamiliar bliss by berating myself for still not having read Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" even after buying it years ago. I made a mental note to read it as soon as I returned home.

When you're flying over different countries of the world, you think more about what you haven't read about those lands than what you have read. In another hour or so, our plane was flying over the gorgeous alps and I realized we were in Europe's Eden.

Soon the plane touched down in Geneva. I had heard a lot of cautionary tales about how the cold in Europe is way worse than anything I might have experienced in India. I experienced it first hand as I walked into the Geneva airport and felt like I had walked into a massive refrigerator. And this was just August! So I shivered a little and prepared for six more months of this inhumanly cold weather. No wonder these white folks ran away and captured our warmer lands.

As soon as I stepped into the chilly Geneva airport, my brain initiated a flashback from 20 years ago from my college days in Pune. I had grown up in Mumbai, where it never gets even remotely chilly. Then in Pune in the winters, every so often, I would wake up to such a chilly morning. It felt more bracing than oppressive, making me feel like running all the way across the world. I had always thought cold weather would make me feel like a shriveled old man, but instead, it made me feel like a daring young man, ready to achieve anything!

Anyway, we walked into the restaurant at the Geneva airport and it looked more like a flower shop than a restaurant. The faces of all the staff members were fresh and enthusiastic like recently bloomed lilies. There was a spring in their step. It didn't look like anyone could ever age, and everyone looked like they were in their 20s even though they probably weren't. We were served coffee in a very elegantly crafted glass cup. And it tasted divine and almost intoxicating. I wondered that if even the coffee here gets my pulse racing so much, what will stronger beverages do? I had heard that Switzerland is a place where extreme beauty and extreme pleasure is the default and my experiences at their airport confirmed it.

I didn't even realize when that stopover at Geneva ended. It was cold, but I was surrounded by beauty, human and non-human, and I felt more alive than I ever had. Before I got back on the plane, I turned around and took a 360 degree mental picture of all I could see of Switzerland from that terminal. The tall trees sheltering cute little houses, the snow-covered peaks of the Alps kissing the deep blue sky. I promised myself to return for a more leisurely visit. When the plane took off, I was looking at a meandering little river as it flowed through the verdant Swiss countryside, when suddenly, our plane ascended above the clouds. And those fluffy white things that a few hours earlier had seemed gorgeous, now seemed like villains for blocking my view of the Swiss landscape. Our journey continued.

The next stop was to be at Dusseldorf in Germany, It had been over 20 hours since we took off from Mumbai. The hands of my watch had already been rotated many times by then. Every hour, the pilot made announcements about how high we were flying, what the temperature outside was, what the local time was, and so on. Passengers around us were saying random things in response to those announcements like, "Oh! 18,000 feet? That's nice! Very high!"

We were flying through clouds at that moment, so I personally couldn't tell the difference between 18,000 feet and 18 million feet. Honestly, this whole thing of estimating distances has been a challenge for me, whether I am in the air or on the ground. Whenever I read about some witness in court say stuff like "the accused was 19 feet away from me", I feel jealous of his ability to express distance so precisely. Because I absolutely suck at it. I can't even remember the inches in my own measurements for shoes, hats, collars, socks, and so on. When a shoe salesman asks what size I want, I just give him the chappals I am wearing then and ask him to figure it out. I have immense respect for people who go shoe shopping and say stuff like "Bring me Number 8 pairs".

And when someone remembers the precise date on which something happened, I feel overcome enough with admiration to go hug them. When I hear someone say stuff like, "I remember it was July 17th...", I am amazed. I suck at dates too. Which is why I always sucked at history in school. Even now, I remember only three dates - Shivaji Maharaj died in 1680, the 1857 uprising happened in 1857, and using multiple reminder mnemonics, my wife's birthday. Other than these three, I have no idea of any other dates. You can ask me when India gained independence and I will try to hedge between 1947 and 1950.

Anyway, the point is, I am horrible with anything that is expressed numerically. So even before I could figure out how high 18,000 feet exactly is, our plane was touching down in Dusseldorf. Before I knew it, we were surrounded by cries of "Achtung! Achtung!" and "Gut! Gut!". My wife and I walked to the terminal, now sick of this sequence of stopovers. Yes. I was in Germany with its rich history and culture and intriguing contemporary split between East and West, but I didn't give a damn. The aforementioned Joshi and Patil left us here and we sat there hoping that we'd reach London before we died of boredom.

Why does the final stretch of the journey always seem to last the longest? Even when I am traveling from Pune to Mumbai by train, it is the same. The time from Pune to Thane or Kalyan seems to breeze by in a happy procession of vada, omelets, chikki, etc. But from there, Mulund, Bhandup, Vikroli, Dadar, etc seem to take an eternity to pass by. Very annoying! It's the same with other trips too. When you're taking a train from Mumbai to Delhi, everything seems great until you reach Mathura, and then after that, things seem to slow down. If you're going from Mumbai to Nagpur. it is Wardha that is the tipping point after which it is all yawns and polite curses.

The flight from Dusseldorf to London seemed similarly annoying and yawn-inducing. Finally, after about the hundredth yawn, the plane started barreling downwards. All the passengers around us seemed to have perked up as the plane continued descending. Finally there was a bump and the plane started slowing down. And a few passengers around me echoed my thoughts,

"Ah! London!"

What Jon Stewart Means To Me

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Wed, 11 Feb 2015 17:59:00 +0000

August 2006, I wrapped up my life in India and moved to the United States for a PhD in Marketing.

I left the country I really knew and moved to a strange new land, with its strange new customs, and strange people, and strange grocery aisles! I had a tough time fitting in!

Okay, no I didn't.

The thing is, I moved when I was 26 years old, as opposed to most other Indian grad students who move here right out of college, having not seen any of the "real world". Thanks to blogs and internet forums and American TV shows and second hand stories from close friends who moved there four years before, I more or less knew what to expect from America. To me, almost everything ranging from grocery aisles to the way the people talked and behaved to the local "customs" seemed familiar.

The one thing that wasn't as familiar was the news cycle. I have always been a huge news junkie, especially interested in politics. Although I followed the basics of American politics even when I lived in India, I did not really "know" the scene too well. Sure, I had followed the 2004 primaries, seen Howard Dean's howl, slept through John Kerry's speeches, and more or less knew why Florida or Ohio are so much more crucial in the Presidential race than Tennessee or Indiana.

And I knew America's comedy scene well enough, having been a big fan of Jerry Seinfeld, Tim Allen, and of course, George Carlin.

And yes, I was vaguely aware of this funny guy called Jon Stewart who combined politics and comedy. When I was in India, CNN used to air a half hour compilation of the best bits of his show once a week. Not quite the "Daily" show but whenever I came across it on TV, I watched it and chuckled. To me, it seemed like a funny enough show with a political context.

And then in August 2006, I moved to America. I fit in quite easily in most ways, ranging from food to socializing to academics to day to day chores. One aspect where I felt lost was the politics. I realized that I knew about American politics only peripherally. So I started reading more blogs, watching the big three cable news channels, reading newspapers, etc.

The first time I watched The Daily Show was due to jet lag a couple of days after I arrived. I had slept through most of the afternoon and evening and in the wee hours of the night, I found myself as alert as a watchdog. While my roommates slept, I plonked myself in front of the TV and started flipping channels. And I came across the slightly familiar face of Jon Stewart. It was 1 or 2 AM so obviously, it was the repeat telecast.

As I watched, I found myself drawn in instantly, maybe because of the Indian connection. The segment was about how Republican senate candidate George Allen had referred to an Indian-American staffer of his opponent Jim Webb as "macaca". What I loved about that segment was that it combined facts, opinion, and humor perfectly without taking cheap shots at anyone. I made a mental note to watch the show again the next night.

And I loved the show again. And then I watched it again. And I kept watching every night. It taught me about aspects of the US "midterm" elections that I had never really fully understood sitting in India. It contextualized the red-v-blue battle in terms more nuanced and pithy than I had ever read on any blog. And of course, it made me laugh, especially with the hilariously quirky George W Bush impression.

I still remember that hilarious song about the midterms

"So just remember this November that your vote will count,
A very very very very very small amount!"

Jon Stewart helped me seamlessly blend into the American political discourse the way thousands of hours of reading blogs and news sites never had. He has that uncanny ability to zero in on the most consequential news items of the day and in 22 short minutes....14 if you omit the interview...present a perfect blend of analysis and irony.

Within a few days, the 11 PM time slot on my daily calendar....or at least Monday-Thursday calendar was earmarked for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He chuckled, he made faces, he did impressions, but above all, he managed to be that guy inside us all who is just utterly baffled with the absurdity and sometimes cruelty of the world around us, but tries to cope with it using humor.

Jon Stewart helped me through American political milestones from the 2006 midterms to the 2014 midterms, not ignoring other events worldwide. One of his and his show's greatest qualities has been the ability to strike the right balance in expressing resentment about something. Many comedians have gotten in trouble for crossing the "line" of tastefulness. Which is why many comedians steer clear of troublesome topics.

But Jon has somehow always been able to address tricky and even tragic topics with the right balance of sensitivity and respectful humor. And occasionally, just straight talk. His post 9/11 speech is the stuff of legend, so I won't talk about it here.

But as a former Bombayite now living in the US, my most memorable and personally relevant example of this uncanny knack of addressing tragedies tastefully is the segment he and John Oliver did after the 2008 Bombay attacks

The Daily Show
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It was just so perfect!

Watching Jon Stewart has been a part of my life from the very first week I moved to this country 9 years ago. He's been an integral part of my life.

I have attended two of his show's tapings in person and was blown away by how nice he was even off-camera. I went to DC with 250,000 other people for the Rally to Restore Sanity that he and Stephen Colbert organized.

And now he's announced that he's leaving The Daily Show. Given what a permanent fixture he's been in my life in this country, this is a BIG change. But I understand why he needs to do what he needs to do. Rosewater has shown that he's capable of much more and who can fault him for wanting to spread his wings?

I'll miss you Jon, and 11 PM Monday to Thursday just won't be the same after you leave.

Identity is not always Community

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Sat, 15 Nov 2014 19:02:00 +0000

A few days ago, Rajdeep Sardesai, generally a liberal, reasonable and likable voice in the Indian TV media, tweeted,

Big day for my goa. Two GSBs, both talented politicians become full cabinet ministers. Saraswat pride!! @manoharparrikar and Suresh Prabhu.

I cringed. And not just as someone who, through the random genetic lottery, was born in a family whose caste label reads Goud Saraswat Brahmin (GSB). I was particularly disappointed that an otherwise progressive voice was echoing such medieval sentiments. I tweeted back my disagreement and gave in to the hashtag impulse, labeling it #SaraswatShame. The hashtag was half in jest, half in disappointment, and not exactly accurate, but we'll come to that later.

I was not the only one who found fault with his tweet. Many people pushed back, with the responses ranging from outright abuse to expressions of disappointment. Rajdeep doubled down, responding,

proud GSB, proud Goan, proud Indian. No contradiction.

And yesterday, he defended himself at length in a column in Hindustan Times titled Identity is not always destiny.

The title of the column is perfect, because identity may not always be destiny, but identity is not always "community" either. In fact, the core of my disagreement with Sardesai lies in conflating caste with community, and placing caste identity in the same bracket as being from a state or a country.

I hate writing stuff like "Oxford/Webster's dictionary defines community as....." so I'll leave it to you to look up exactly what the definition is. But the way I see it, a community is shaped and defined through some common experience or attitude/outlook.

I consider myself a part of many many communities. I am part of Indian, American, Indian-American, Punekar, Mumbaikar, New Yorker, Maharashtrian, Marathi, etc. communities as a result of sharing geography or language and/or nationality with others in that group. I am part of Engineer, IIM, MBA, PhD, Penn State, Academia, Marketing, etc, communities as a result of sharing my education or career related experiences with others in that group. Thinking test cricket is the best sport ever makes me part of the test cricket puritan community. Loving the Pittsburgh Steelers team and cheering it on every season makes me part of the Steeler Nation.

I am not sure what experience or attitude or outlook would or should make me consider myself (and with unabashed pride) part of the GSB community, at least in the 21st century. I can understand caste being considered a source of community identity a century or two ago, when people lived more or less segregated into those castes. But then we all generally realized that the caste system isn't the best topology to adopt if we want to build a good society, because the system seeded and engendered discrimination on the basis of birth.

Almost all Indians I know think (or at least say) that the caste system is a relic that should be relegated to irrelevance in an ideal society. Then a good start would be to think of caste as irrelevant, not as a specious source of pride. And that's where Sardesai's tweet had a problem - by perpetuating that which should ideally be irrelevant.

Sardesai drops a lot of names, from Sachin Tendulkar to Deepika Padukone, when enumerating the "enormous contributions" of our supposed community. But what exactly do Rajdeep or I as GSBs have in common meaningfully with Sachin Tendulkar as a GSB, that we don't with Ajinkya Rahane, also from Mumbai and not (as far as I can tell) a GSB? What have we as GSBs shared with other GSBs other than simply the label of being called GSBs?

Is it the most commonly defined culinary feature of GSBs - we have religious sanction to eat fish? Heh! We do not have religious sanction to eat steaks but clearly both Sardesai and I enjoy a good slab of succulent cow meat.

I don't really consider myself part of the Saraswat "community" and so don't really feel #SaraswatShame in Sardesai's bizarre views. I know being Saraswat is a tiny irrelevant trivial part of my identity, but it's no more defining of me than my identity as a guy with black hair. And I am surprised that someone like Sardesai is conflating such an irrelevant expression of identity with community.

What is the basis of defining this community other than just the label identifying ourselves as such?

Shared history? I won't go into the specifics of the problems with the history-based argument Sardesai makes in his column, mainly because Kaustubh has done it splendidly already.

But history brings me to the other problem with the "Saraswat Pride" sentiment that Sardesai espouses. And that's the history of the privileged and powerful position that brahmins in general, including GSBs, used to hold in the caste system with legal sanction until recently. We had a monopoly on education and on running the religion. We were the "haves" in a system that perpetrated the vilest atrocities, violent as well as insidious, on a large swathe of the population we defined as lower caste or caste-less.

As Sardesai notes a little fallaciously

In this political milieu, the Brahmins have usually lost out because their numerical strength doesn’t justify greater political representation. Which is why it is significant that Parrikar and Prabhu made the cut.

This is a point on which I recently had an argument with some fellow Marathi Brahmin friends as well. This weird self-pitying victim mentality that many Brahmins have about not being uber-dominant in politics the way we are in almost every other aspect of Indian society, from industry to academia to entertainment. Never mind that the proportion of Prime Ministers, Presidents, Chief Ministers, and Governors over the years from the Brahmin community is probably at least 3 times the proportion of Brahmins in the general population (caveat - I haven't crunched the numbers, but I strongly suspect this to be the case based on what I could remember).

But we still love indulging in this weird victim mentality in the "political milieu". Never mind that both guys Sardesai mentions have held positions of political power in the past. Parrikar was the Chief Minister of Goa and Prabhu was a cabinet minister in the last BJP government as well.

Regardless of all this, even if you grant the factually questionable premise that Brahmins are deprived of political power as a result of caste-based politics prevalent in many parts of the country, this cannot be viewed as divorced from history, especially in a democracy. Autocratic rule allowed higher castes to monopolize power, resources, and education for centuries. If 6 decades of democracy has resulted in a backlash electorally, well, suck it up.

Related to this, someone asked me online, "Why do you have problems with Sardesai touting Saraswat pride but you have no problems with people celebrating historic Dalit or OBC achievements in politics?"

I couldn't believe that I had to actually explain it, but here is what I said. Dalit or OBC leaders achieving a position of power after centuries of discrimination and systematic disenfranchisement is actually bucking the trend of history. Righting old wrongs in a way. In terms of a sports metaphor, it's like cheering the underdog. On the other hand, when people from a caste that held power, enjoyed monopoly over intellectual resources and were complicit in perpetuating discrimination until recently start gloating about their achievements, it almost suggests they are implying supremacy again.

It's like.......so many commentators, black and from other races, expressed pride and satisfaction in a black man becoming President of the United States. In the historic context, it makes perfect sense. Your expressions of community pride, to not seem distasteful, have to gel with the historic context.

Let's say the next President of America is white. What Sardesai tweeted was the equivalent of a white news anchor like Brian Williams tweeting "White pride!" in response. And responding to criticism with "Proud white guy, proud Jersey guy, proud American! No contradictions."

Because identity is not always community.

Thoughts on Haider

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Sun, 05 Oct 2014 13:37:00 +0000

Watched Haider. Liked it a lot. But it certainly isn't Vishal Bhardwaj's best as some reviewers have suggested. It wasn't a masterpiece like Maqbool and Blue Umbrella were. It had its problems. And the problems weren't fundamental, but cosmetic. Which makes the problems all the more annoying.

It seemed like Michaelangelo's David wearing underwear because its creator didn't want some people to blush. Or the Mona Lisa with eyebrows penciled on at the last minute because Leonardo didn't want to deal with "but where are the eyebrows?" questions.

You can see that there was a masterpiece hidden in there, but was robbed of its true form due to lack of total conviction or concerns about propriety. Ironically, it seems like Vishal had his own "to be or not to be" struggle about how much to push the envelope. And ended up undermining the end product. Not too much, but just enough to make it fall short of greatness.

Here are some disjointed thoughts about the movie.

1) The "Anti-Army" charges

Many self-proclaimed nationalists on Twitter have been bashing the film as being "anti-army". Haider isn't nearly as anti-army as Maqbool was "anti-police". Vishal cast two corrupt police officers in the role of the witches from Macbeth, and gave them a lot more mischief to do. Heck, Haider isn't even as anti-army as Hum Aapke Hai Koun is "anti-stairs" because if not for those damn stairs, Pooja would've been alive and Nisha and Prem would've gotten married without Tuffy having to exert himself.

A lot of this "nationalist" outrage against Haider is a by-product of the mass delusion that most Indians have willingly been a part of and ardently sought to perpetuate. The delusion that the idea of India is more inclusive and benign than it actually is. That if some folks in Kashmir or in the North-East don't consider themselves Indian, it's just stupid, their fault, and totally the handiwork of Pakistan and/or China. And....most importantly....that our army can do no wrong. It can't do anything dishonorable or horrible.

But our army sometimes.....often.... does dishonorable or horrible things. Mostly because as Shivam Vij explains, that's the army's job in situations like 1990s Kashmir.

If you watch the movie without having this naive hyper-nationalized romanticized notion of what the Indian army is, Haider actually seems to go somewhat out of its way to be respectful to the army and justify its perceived excesses. When a home is blown up, it is because a bonafide terrorist really is hiding in it. People are are tortured either are or are strongly suspected of being terrorists trained by Pakistan. And if innocent people are being incarcerated or killed, it's not the army's fault. It is due to misinformation from the conniving two-faced Ikhwan types.

2) Excessive Soapbox Usage

Vishal has so far occupied a level higher than other Indian directors because of how nuanced, layered, and yet powerful his scripts are. You're not hit over the head with blatant exposition of irony, tragedy, or even humor.

Haider was a bit too "speechy". And I don't mean the soliloquies that Hamlet is famous for. In fact most of those were excised. I mean speechy in the sense that Vishal and Basharat Peer seeme to be almost compelled to give us a preachy soapbox exposition of almost every political perspective in the Kashmir issue.

So you have the speech about Nehru's betrayal, and the speech about Kashmiri Pandits, and the speech about how violence isn't the answer, and the speech about how "azadi" is synonymous with joining Pakistan, and the speech about.......about about about......

To make matters worse, not only were the speeches utterly banal, but they also served as speed-breakers in the narrative. They were less Vishal Bhardwaj and more Mani Ratnam or Aaron Sorkin.

The most poignant points about the whole issue were actually made in several vintage Vishal scenes, either sub-textually or organically. The chutzpah-AFSPA dialog for instance or the scene in which Basharat himself has a cameo.

All those soapbox scenes, the movie could have done without. I couldn't help but feel that they were there for Vishal to hedge politically. Every one of those scenes was meant to mollify or assuage one of the stakeholders in the Kashmir issue. It's like Vishal had a checklist and wanted to make sure everyone got their spiel in and nobody felt left-out. The end result ironically is that you will find several Indian nationalists, Pakistanis, pro-freedom Kashmiris, Kashmiri Pandits, and so on who think the movie is unfair to their perspective.

3) Shahid Kapoor

Shahid put in a solid effort. He tried hard and stretched himself to the maximum. But it simply wasn't good enough. Especially in the second half when Hamlet in the play really comes into his element, Shahid Kapoor seemed instead to be channeling Sridevi from Sadma.

The movie would've been better served by casting not Shahid, but an actor who won accolades for playing a guy named Shahid - Rajkumar Rao. At several points in the movie when Shahid's earnest but inadequate emoting was making me cringe, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine Rajkumar Rao in the same scene.

Advice for International Masters Students Cold-Call Emailing Business School Professors

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Thu, 25 Sep 2014 16:31:00 +0000

It is that time of the year again for me as an assistant professor in an American business school. August-September, the start of the academic year. When I get at least a handful of emails everyday from just-arrived international Masters students, typically from India and China, asking about Research Assistant (RA) or Teaching Assistant (TA) positions. I usually send a prompt reply telling them I have no positions available and wish them luck. Most other people in my place in business schools just ignore the mails and/or delete them.

This post is meant to explain why I almost always send summary rejections and why most others ignore or delete the emails.

The key to this explanation is the almost unique nature of the microcosm that are business schools. Specifically, research-oriented business schools that co-exist with prestigious engineering schools in the same university such as mine.

Research in business schools is very different from research in engineering schools. In engineering schools, research has a lot to do with winning 6-7 figure grants and patents. That is the nature of the engineering world. In business schools, the incentives for tenure-track research professors are different. The nature of our field is such that there are few, if any, opportunities for patents and big grants. In our field, research productivity is measured by publications in top level journals.

The other aspect of business research is the cost element. The reason we don't care as much about grants is that our research is nowhere as expensive to conduct as engineering research. We don't need expensive equipment, months long experiments, and suchlike. Most business research is conducted using secondary data or individual behavioral experiments. The most expensive equipment we need is limited to powerful computers to do our analysis.

We don't have as many conferences to go to. In each of the sub-fields of business (such as Finance, Marketing, Management etc), there are two, maybe three MUST-ATTEND conferences each year. Our conferences aren't as selective as engineering conferences in terms of who gets to present. Obviously, "conference proceedings" are a non-factor in tenuring decisions when it comes to business school faculty. What matter are publications.

Basically, our research doesn't cost that much. That's the cost side.

Now on to the revenue side. Most business schools have MBA programs that charge tuition way higher than the average program. Most MBA programs don't offer any funding. MBA programs earn business schools a lot of money. Then there are undergraduate programs. Undergrad business programs are very popular in most schools in the US. So business schools get a decent chunk of change from the universities for that. Then there are endowments, consulting fees, and other revenue opportunities.

So to summarize what I have said so far, business schools in the US have a higher revenue than other schools, and have lower research costs than other schools. And, to reiterate, faculty research is measured in terms of publications in top journals, not patents, conference proceedings, or grants. Not that there are that many business-centric grants anyway.

As a result, here is how the typical contract for a typical tenure-track faculty member in a research-oriented business school works. We get a salary. And we get a research budget from our business school that is roughly $10,000-50,000 per year.

These amounts might be relatively paltry for engineering professors who need to buy expensive equipment and need to hire several grad students to take care of the equipment and run experiments. But in business schools, that amount is plenty.

Then there's the unique nature of business school PhD programs. They are geared exclusively towards academia. Which means the program is designed only to send graduates into academic positions, NOT industry positions. 99.9% of marketing PhDs will become marketing professors, not work in marketing jobs in the industry. 99.9% of management PhDs will become management professors, not work in management jobs in the industry. And so on.

PhD programs in business schools will also have a tiny intake compared to engineering schools. In a typical top-50 or even top-100 research business school in the US, the total incoming PhD class size every year will be about 15, with 2-3 students dedicated to sub-fields such as finance, marketing, management, etc.

In business schools, these PhD students are fully funded and paid a stipend by the business school. In return, they have to work 20 hours a week each for tenure track professors.

(Sidebar: the most "privileged" international grad students in any school are business school PhDs. They are assured of tuition waivers and stipends for at least 4 years from the school itself, and not tied to any Professor like in engineering schools. They also get academic positions relatively easily without having to do postdocs.)

Now, each department will have a roughly 1:1 ratio between tenure track professors and PhD students. Part of each tenure track professor's contract is 10 hours or "free" RA work from an assigned PhD student. Free as in, the professor doesn't pay the student. The business school does. And the business school pays for the tuition.

So now we come to the main point. Most of us business school professors have a PhD student assigned to work with us without us paying anything. Our research budgets, given by the school not from grants, are in the 10-50K range to buy computers, buy data, go to conferences, etc....generous but not enough to fund a grad student, which including tuition and stipend, will use up the entire budget.

When a Masters student from engineering or quasi-engineering (Information Systems, Technology Management etc) fields sends a cold-call email to a typical business school professor, he is making a pitch to someone who has neither the requirement nor the budget to hire him.

That's maybe 99% of business school professor. The 1% who might have RA/TA positions for you are the rare minority of business school professors who got a grant or got an extra endowment for a research lab or something. They might just have positions that Masters students can fill. They tend to advertise their positions well in advance. But even if cold-calling works for them, it needs to be very specific.

Many international students make the mistake of composing one utterly general boilerplate email and sending it to all professors. See this for instance.

In this case, even if I was a professor with an opportunity for this student, I wouldn't contact him. Because the email is so general. If I want to hire a Masters student, I would like that student to be genuinely interested in what I am doing.

So even if you do send cold-call emails to business school professors, make sure they are individually customized and reflect their particular research interests.

And of course, make sure you really are interested in the research of the professor you are pitching your services to. We professors do talk to each other, you know? If during a coffee chat, we discover that Masters Student XYZ sent an email to me saying "I am really passionate about Marketing and hope to make a career in it", and also to my Finance colleague saying, "I am really passionate about Finance and hope to make a career in it", it not only gives us something to chuckle about, but also destroys your credibility in our eyes forever.

I'll end by saying that in general, the strike rate for an engineering or quasi-engineering MS student getting RA/TA positions from individual professors in business schools are low. And I hope this post informs incoming Masters students about this and saves them some wasted effort.

Antu Barva by P. L. "PuLa" Deshpande

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Thu, 12 Jun 2014 18:09:00 +0000

Fourteen years ago today, Purushottam Laxman Deshpande, arguably the most influential and beloved person from Maharashtra, died at the age of 81. He left behind a gargantuan legacy in the form of his books, plays, songs, movies, essays, social work, but more than that, the lasting impact he has had on Maharashtra. Every couple of years, I translate one of his essays or short stories on this blog. This time, I have chosen Antu Barva, a fictionalized life sketch that he created as an amalgam of several people he knew in Konkan. It is not exactly LOL funny, but is light-hearted while still tugging at your heart-strings. It is meant as a depiction of the tough life in Konkan in the middle of the 20th century, and the sort of complex and poignant characters such a life spawns.

But as somber as the basic subject matter is, PuLa manages to inject humor into it, even if the humor is dark. When I first read Antu Barva, I just read it as a slightly humorous life sketch. As I have re-read it and re-heard its narration over the years, I have come to recognize it as something beyond just that. It is one of PuLa's best allegorical social commentaries in my opinion. He was duly recognized for Vyakti Aani Valli, the book that this sketch appears in, with a Sahitya Akademi Puraskaar. In that book, I think this is THE most impressive and multi-layered sketch.

For years, I considered translating Antu Barva here but was too intimidated given how nuanced it is. PuLa gave Antu a specific Konkani "voice" (in text form as well as when he narrated the sketch for TV) that is impossible to translate. No matter how well I tried, I thought I would end up doing injustice to the original work. This is in addition to the usual difficulties in translating PuLa's wordplay and nuanced observations. So it is with a great sense of trepidation that I am even attempting this today. A LOT will get lost in translation. But I hope PuLa's fans will forgive me any errors. Because I think this particular piece is one of the greatest literary achievements from an Indian and it deserves a wider audience.

Miss you, PuLa. Bhool-chook maaf kara.

Ratnagiri's middle lane has been home to some towering personalities over the years. God used a unique formula when creating these people. These people tend to be a metaphorical amalgam of Ratnagiri's most famous products - sweet mango, rough jackfruit, hard coconut, irritating colocasia leaves, and intense betel nuts whose one bite will make your heart jump up your throat.

It is in this unique Ratnagiri soil that Antu Barva grew and ripened. Actually, Antu's age doesn't really justify people casually calling him just "Antu". When I first met him 12-14 years ago, not just his stubble, but even the hair on his ears and chest had turned white. His teeth had mostly gone "Annu Gogtya".

Going Annu Gogtya = falling.

This is an idomatic phrase that Antu Barva coined. A lawyer from Ratnagiri named Annu Gogte has been standing in the local elections for many years. Standing and then falling. Repeatedly, without even coming close to winning. So even if a bucket falls in a well, Antu asks "has the bucket gone Annu?"

When someone is talking about old Antu, they just refer to him in the singular casual "Antu". As it is, characters from Konkan are quite singular. But no one calls Antu just "Antu" to his face. They call him Antu sheth!

True blue Brahmin Antu got this trader caste suffix "sheth" decades ago. After all Antu himself had committed a sin justifying this demotion. During the first world war, Antu started a shop near the docks. It failed spectacularly even before the Treaty of Versailles. But that short-lived stint as a shopkeeper was enough to turn Antu into Antu sheth.

After that, no one remembers Antu doing anything specific to make a living. He manages to somehow score at least two square meals a day from somewhere. He has a little plot of land with a garden that has a couple of dozen coconut and Alphonso mango trees, sprinkled with the odd jackfruit and tamarind tree. He has a little single-room shack on that land. He has the right to draw water from the nearby well. Antu sheth manages to get by on all this.

I first met Antu at Bapu Hegishte's store. I had gone there to buy some cigarettes when Antu's face peered out from behind a newspaper. He slid his reading glasses up his forehead and said,

"You're Lawyer saheb's son-in-law, right?"

"Yes" I replied.

"Ahha! I recognized you right away! Please, have a seat, please. Bapu, some tea for our jawaibapu (a respectful term for son-in-law)!"

I had no idea who this guy was, suddenly acting so familiar. Antu sheth himself explained,

"Your father-in-law is a good friend of mine. Tell him Antu Barva said hello."

"Sure."

"Hmmm....when did you come from Pune?"

"Two days ago."

"Of course....the first Diwali after you got married....haha...ask him for a Ford car!"

"He is your friend. Why don't you tell him?"

"Haha, you're from Pune after all. Can't get the last word with you." he laughed. "So...staying long or just a flying visit?"

"Just a short trip. I'm leaving in a couple of days."

"Excellent! It's always good to keep such visits short. Familiarity breeds contempt and all that. Don't end up like that Kasopkar's son-in-law. He set up camp for six months. Finally Kasopkar lost his patience and made him plow his land! When a son-in-law stays with you for too long, he starts feeling like a pain in the neck, right?"

"You're right." I nodded.

"Bapusheth, I hope you recognized our lawyer's son-in-law. We are both your father-in-law's clients, jawaibapu."

Bapu Hegishte smiled and folded his hands in greeting.

"Welcome. Would you like to have some tea?" he asked.

"No, it's okay. It's really hot right now."

"Of course, it's always going to be hot in Ratnagiri!" Antu jumped in. "You can't sleep in a cowshed and then complain about the stink of cow piss! If Ratnagiri had cool weather, they'd have called it Shimla, not Ratnagiri!"

Before I could say anything, Antu continued,

"But the heat is way worse in your neighborhood with all those houses next to each other. Come to my garden near the beach. My garden is...how do you say...."aircondition"!"

Antu sheth said the last words in English and laughed, and then added,

"That's our country joke, jawaibapu!"

Then he addressed Hegishte again.

"Bapusheth, did you know our jawaibapu here is a writer? Writes plays and movies and what not. Behave properly when he is around or he'll write a hilarious farce about you."

The pride I felt on my fame having spread even to someone like Antu Barva was dashed by Bapu Hegishte's next question. Bapusheth looked me up and down carefully for a few seconds and said,

"What do you do?"

"What the hell do you mean what does he do?" Antu thundered. "Are you insane, Hegishte? Take out that pile of raddi old newspapers and open them. You'll see his name and picture in dozens of places! He makes movies!"

"Movies!!?? Really??" Hegishte's expression changed to one of wonderment and he looked at me as if I was God.

"Jawaibapu, speaking of movies, can I ask you a question if you don't mind?"

I could see the naughty expression on Antusheth's face as he asked me this.

"Sure, go ahead."

"How much money do you make from one movie?"

This wasn't my first trip to Konkan. So by now, I had gotten used to dealing with such intensely personal questions.

"That really varies from movie to movie." I deflected.

"But still....I mean I have read that you get like a million or a million and a half."

"No way! There isn't nearly that kind of money in Marathi films."

"Yeah, but still. Even if you don't get fistfuls, you must be getting at least 2-3 pinchfulls?"

"You get it sometimes, and also lose it sometimes." I stuck to being vague.

"Well of course, it's a business after all. When it comes to business, you win some, you lose some. It's all part of the game."

Antu sheth got philosophical. But only for a moment.

"Can I ask you one more question? Only if you don't get angry."

"What's there to get angry about? Go ahead."

"Well..you know....whatever we read about these film actresses in magazines and all....is that real or is it fake like Gangadhar Basthe's "real" Belgaum butter?"

"What do you mean all this about film actresses?" I kept a straight face and pretended to not get what he was saying.

"Quite a skillful guy you are, jawaibapu. Skillful! You'll make a great witness in court!" Antu sheth was having none of it. "All this about film actresses as in...the whole index finger nostril thing."

I didn't immediately get what he meant by the whole index finger nostril thing. So Antu sheth gently tapped his index finger against his nostril and winked. Fortunately, before I had to say anything, a waiter arrived with the tea Hegishte had ordered.

"Looks like all the cows in Ratnagiri are still pregnant, Jhampya!" Antu made a sarcastic remark to the waiter on the color of the tea. And then he poured the tea in the saucer and started slurping it.

Actually, Antu sheth could have just said to the waiter in plain words that the tea was low on milk. But he preferred the "all the cows are still pregnant" phrasing. Why just Antu sheth? Almost everyone from that middle lane in Ratnagiri spoke in that sarcastic obtuse way.

By now, Antu sheth and I have become good friends. In the last decade or so, whenever I have gone to Ratnagiri, I have spent time with him. He always included me in his group of friends, taught me the ganjifa card games they played. And over the years, I heard a lot monologues on the odd philosophy of life that those men in their 60s had developed.

I even learned all the idiomatic phrases the group had come up with. They all dressed similar. A cotton loincloth from the waist below, a small cotton scarf on the shoulder, worn-out sandals, one hand holding a walking stick, and the other holding a jackfruit. Dressed like that, Antu sheth would roam around in the neighborhood calling his friends to join him every afternoon.

"Govindbhat! Wanna play a couple of hands?"

"Paranjape? Are you awake or have you turned into a python?"

I too became a part of their card game gang. If once in a while, the card game wasn't really panning out well, Antu would put the cards down and say to me,

"Jawaibapu, why don't you sing a Malkauns or something? Godbolya, bash a little tabla with our guest. Khaju sheth, open your decrepit harmonium."

And then we'd have an impromptu jam session for a bit at Antu sheth's orders.

"Jawaibapu, your pipes are kick-ass!" he'd compliment my singing in his unique way.

Every other year or so, I'd visit Ratnagiri and attend Antu sheth's court. But with each visit, the court seemed to be getting smaller.

"Antu sheth, haven't seen Damu kaka around." I asked once.

"Who? Damu Nene? He is living it up! I am told Rambha is rubbing oil on his bald head, and Urvashi is airing him with a fan!"

"What????"

"What do you mean what? Damu Nene got transferred from Ratnagiri!" and Antu Sheth pointed to the sky.

"Oh!" I finally understood what he meant. "I am so sorry. I had no idea."

"Why would you have any idea about it? Do you think that they're going to announce on the radio that Damu Nene has croaked? His family did pay for an obituary in the newspaper though. Heh, they wrote he was loving, caring, friendly, pious, and what not. What do the newspaper folks care? As long as you are paying, they will publish any nonsense."

Antu continued in his characteristic manner.

"Damu Nene and loving? Hmpf! Even when he was lying dead on the pyre, the furrow on his brow was intact! One day he decided to sleep outdoors because it was too hot. They found him dead the next morning. Lucky bugger. Died on Ashadhi Ekadashi too! So there were two processions from Ratnagiri that day. One for Lord Vithoba and another for Damu Nene. Damu died on Ashadhi. And then on Dussehra, Dattu Paranjape crossed the border and did seemolanghan. The first guy croaked, the second guy croaked.....now waiting for the third. They say things happen in three."

Antu looked at me mischievously and shrugged.

And that's the essence of Antu Barva for you. Standing at less than 5 feet, bronze-fair complexion, small pockmarks on his face, small gray eyes, creased skin belying his advanced age, half his teeth fallen....or "gone Annu"...leading to a new habit of poking his tongue through the gaps while talking.... and with all this, weighing in at barely 100 lbs.

Every aspect of Antu Barva's earthly existence was getting worn out with each passing year except for two - the nasal booming voice and the slick intelligence fed by decades of rubbing coconut oil on his head.

It wasn't just Antu sheth. Almost all the men his age from that part of Ratnagiri were of a similar bent....which was a crooked bent. Their language was unnecessarily complex and their attitude exceedingly cynical. They didn't feel happy if someone did well, and didn't feel sad if a tragedy befell someone. There was no joy for births, no mourning for deaths. Most of them apart from Antu didn't really like music, but didn't dislike it either. And when it came to food, the taste and flavors didn't matter, as long as their belly got filled. The engine of their life never really faltered when it ran out of steam, nor did it go fast when it did have some steam. But the road their lives took was like every road in Konkan- serpentine.

That's the hand life had dealt them. Even though their lives were full of the wholesome coconut tree, their fates and thus their tastes leaned less towards the sweet creamy inside of the coconut, and more towards its tough shell.

One summer, a second-rate theater company from Mumbai was touring Ratnagiri staging Ram Ganesh Gadkari's famous play Ekach Pyala. I went to watch it. The production was barely competent in the first act. At intermission, I walked outside to the hissing clinks of soda bottles being opened. Under a Kitson lamp, I saw Antu sheth's diminutive form. He was talking to the fur-cap clad manager of the theater company.

"So....how's the attendance?" Antu sheth asked.

"Not bad." the manager gruffly replied.

"Not bad? Most of the chairs seem empty. Why don't you let me in for half price?"

"No way!" the manager shook his head rudely.

"Why are you brushing me away like a lizard? I heard the first act from out here anyway. The guy playing Sindhu doesn't seem to be very good."

[aside - in the early-to-mid 20th century in orthodox Maharashtra, it was taboo for women to perform on stage. So much like in Shakespeare's days, female parts were usually played by men. The legendary Bal Gandharva excelled at this and one of his most famous roles was playing Sindhu in the first staging of Ekach Pyala.]

"The guy playing Sindhu doesn't seem to be very good." Antu sheth said. "He sang 'lage hridayi hurhur' like a squeaking mouse. Did you ever hear how Bal Gandharva sang it?"

The manager got pissed off.

"I'm not begging you to come watch it!" he thundered.

"But the town is full of your advertising boards begging us to come watch it." Antu sheth instantly replied. "And yesterday your people were going door to door with fliers. As it is, it's mainly empty chairs you are showing this play to. How about four annas?"

"Four annas? What is this? A monkey performing on the street?"

"That's better than this! They perform first and then circulate a plate for money. Why don't you try that? If the next act is better than the first one, I'll pay you an extra four annas!"

The people standing around them started laughing and the manager got even more upset. That's when Antu sheth noticed me.

"Namaskar, jawaibapu! How's it going? How's Ekach Pyala?"

"It's okay." I said.

"I'm sure you got a complimentary pass. You're from the same community. I have heard that barbers don't charge each other for shaves."

"No, nothing like that. See, I bought a ticket."

"Then why a wishy-washy response like "it's okay"? You've paid hard-earned money for this, haven't you? Assert your rights as a paying customer. Call it what it is. Utter crap. Especially that guy playing Sindhu is totally useless!"

"What do you mean the guy playing Sindhu? It's a woman playing the role." I told him.

"WHAT??" Antu sheth looked genuinely shocked. "You're kidding me! That voice and that built! If she decides, she can lift Sudhakar up like a baby! Sindhu indeed.......more like Sindhudurg!"

"So you watched the play after all?"

"For a few minutes. Moved the curtains from the window and had a peek. Hmpf! Even gypsy performers are better than these idiots."

Antu sheth spat out another unsolicited opinion and walked away.

But that's pretty much what his life was - spitting out unsolicited opinions. I knew Antu for so many years, but I never found out much about his family situation. Once Anna Sane from Antu's court had let slip a mention of his son.

"What? Antu sheth has a son?" I asked.

"Of course he has a son. Not only that, his son is a Collector!" Anna Sane nonchalantly said.

"Collector???"

"Yup. He's in charge of collecting tickets on Byculla station." he deadpanned without letting a single muscle move.

"Doesn't look like he helps out his father financially."

"He does sometimes. When he can. He has his own family. Besides, a Western Railway compartment has been attached to a Central Railway train."

A PhD student could do a dissertation on those guys' peculiar idioms and phrases. I was well-versed in the language by now but it took me a few moments to realize that this was code for an inter-religion marriage.

"So you see, Antu sheth has trouble with his post-bath rituals at his son's place. Plus apparently his son is also into some other Anglicized habits if you know what I mean. So how can Antu sheth spend too much time there? Still, once Antu sheth swallowed all the insults and went to Mumbai to see his grandson. Came back looking like he had messed up a math problem."

"Every Dussehra and Diwali, Antu gets his son's love in the form of a money order. Not much, maybe 5-10 rupees. For a few days after that, Antu acts like he's won the lottery and splurges as much as he can. Which isn't much."

"Understandable." I said. "After all, how much can a ticket collector's pay be?"

"Yeah, the pay is pretty meager. But one hears that a ticket collector can also make a little more on the side, especially in holiday season if you know what I mean." Anna said. "Nothing wrong with it of course. If he has an opportunity to make some money, why shouldn't he? You know how it is in this country. If you get caught taking a ten rupee bribe, they put a striped cap on your head and send you to prison. But if you get caught taking a million rupee bribe, they put a Gandhi cap on your head and send you to Parliament! Democraticaly elected people's representative!"

Politics was the most favorite topic for Antu sheth and his buddies to express their unique opinions on. They had profound thoughts on every politician and party. One year, there was a famine in Konkan. Konkan is always facing a famine as it is. But this particular one was so bad that in Antu sheth's words it had "been approved under the Famine Act".

Nehru was touring the famine-hit parts of Konkan. He visited Ratnagiri for a speech and the whole town was caught up in Nehru-mania. One evening, someone asked Antu sheth,

"Antu sheth, I didn't see you at the speech?"

"Whose speech? Nehru's? Hmpf!" Antu sheth's disdain was obvious. "What nonsense. There's a famine here. Stop giving speeches. Give us food! This is like seeing a man drowning and instead of saving him, reading from the Quran to ensure that he doesn't end up in hell. Utterly useless. But everyone else is stupid. Oh, Nehru is here? He is giving a speech? He gives great speeches! Let's go! Bloody lemmings!"

"And now that Nehru is in Ratnagiri, what did they do? Idiots took him to show the house, room, and bed where Lokmanya Tilak was born! Morons. Tell me, did god appear in Gangadhar Tilak's dreams and tell him that your wife is going to give birth to a great leader? How would anyone even remember what bed Tilak was born on? But who cares? They just showed Nehru some random room and bed and bluffed - this is where Tilak first went WAAAAAAAAAA."

"Morons! Where's the proof? Where's the proof? Did they get the midwife from Tilak's birth to certify the bed? Hmpf! Forget Tilak. It's been a 100 years since he was born. You tell me. Can your own mother confidently identify the room and the bed where she gave birth to you? Go ask her and then tell me about Nehru and Tilak."

And so ended the rant.

I always wondered if there was anything or anyone in the world that Antu sheth and his friends had respect for. If they ever had a polite dignified response for anything at all.

Somebody's son became a Professor. And Antu's response,

"Professor? In a circus?There used to be this Professor Chhatre in circuses performing magic tricks."

Someone opened a new store. And Antu's response,

"Tell him to have a bankruptcy form ready. It'll save time when the inevitable happens."

Who knows what school of philosophy these guys followed. More than half of them survived on money orders from children and relatives. They saved money from that and file lawsuits for the strangest reasons. Every lawsuit is stuck in delayed hearing dates. These guys have a big beautiful sea coast, coconut trees, gardens, everything you could reasonably hope for to be happy. But that apparent prosperity gets punctured by an occasional bout of misfortune and all that remains is an impenetrable shield of gallows humor.

Somehow the topic of Gandhi came up. And Antu sheth got on his soap box.

"Gandhi? What Gandhi? Traveled all over the world, but never came to Ratnagiri! Because he was smart. He knew that here, no one gives a damn about his loincloth or his walking stick. We are all just as naked and just as skinny. And his obsession with spinning khadi. It's all useless. Our own Shambhu sheth. All his life, he followed Gandhi's teachings and spun khadi for his clothes. Forget the British government, even Ratnagiri's Collector Gilligan didn't fear his "civil disobedience". And you're talking about Gandhi."

"Then there are all his hunger strikes and fasts. Half of Konkan is hungry and fasting, and not by choice. Someone who is well-fed will find something remarkable about hunger strikes. What do we care? Don't get me wrong. I am not saying Gandhi wasn't a great man. He was. But in our books, under what column should we make an entry for his greatness? And if you are talking about independence, then that had nothing to do with Gandhi, or Tilak or Savarkar."

"So did independence just fall out of the sky?" I asked him.

"It's up to you to find out where it fell out of." Antu replied. "One thing I am sure of is that the Brits left because they got bored. What more was left for them to loot? Their Raj business started making a loss, so they effectively declared bankruptcy and went home. The potter left with his pottery, and we sit here cradling his leftover broken pieces. This is all just a cycle of life and bigger than anything we can comprehend. It's not British rule, nor is it Nehru's rule, nor people's rule, nor anyone's rule. It's the creator's rule."

"So how did your creator end up siding with the British?" I asked.

"Don't be silly. The creator is sitting pretty on his throne. He just played a small game."

"A game that translated into 150 years of slavery?"

"It's 150 years for you and me." Antu sheth was steadfast. "The almighty's wrist watch doesn't move forward by even one second unless a thousand years go by for us. In his eyes and on his scale, all this is just a minor game that lasted barely a millisecond."

When these emaciated old men started spouting this philosophy on the front yards of that impoverished middle lane in Ratnagiri, with dark shadows formed by the dim light of their age-worn oil lamps dancing on their wrinkled faces, my heart couldn't help but shudder.

"Socialism? What socialism? All nonsense, I tell you. Not even two mango leaves are alike. And these guys want to pretend all men are equal. In the creator's eyes, each individual is unique. How are they going to have equal opportunities or equal outcomes? But everyone is just blabbering....socialism is coming. Just like that Ratnagiri's legislator is saying...Konkan Railway is coming, Konkan Railway is coming. Sure, Konkan Railway is coming. And it's tracks are going through where one-armed Pandu Gurav's toilet used to be. Even if it does, is it going to make Pandu's shoulder stump sprout an arm? What difference will it make?"

"And without an arm to plow his field or pick his crops, no matter what you do with that damn railway, what good is it going to do him? He is still the same. Just because India became independent, does not mean that Hari Sathe's lazy eye got fixed. Nor did Mahadev Godbole's paunch disappear. Nothing really changed. Even in the fabled Ram Rajya, Ram didn't uproot Hanuman's tail and attach it to his own ass. No. Ram stayed a man, and Hanuman stayed a monkey."

At such times, it almost seem like the Goddess of Wisdom Saraswati is sitting on Antu sheth's tongue.

"You're right." I said.

"Don't just say I am right for the heck of it to be polite. If I am wrong, say that and correct me. You might be younger than me when it comes to age, but when it comes to education, you are my elder, jawaibapu!"

Once in a while, Antu sheth will say something genuinely from his heart, without any sarcasm. But there is always some burning issue close to his heart underlying what he says.

The last few years, I could not go to Ratnagiri as often as I used to. In the meanwhile, Ratnagiri finally got electricity, its own college, tar roads, and all other features of 20th century life. When I met him after that, I said,

"Antu sheth, your Ratnagiri has now become posh! Electric lights and everything. Did your house get an electric connection?"

"No, not yet. But it's good that it's dark. Tomorrow even if I do get electricity, what is there to look at in that bright light? A penniless life? Who needs electricity to look at chipped walls and leaking shingles? It's better that my poverty stays hidden in darkness."

And then he laughed loudly for a full minute like it was a joke.

This time I saw that his teeth had gone almost completely Annu Gogte. I also learned that a couple of more friends of his had passed on and that the card game court was emptier than ever. For a change, I spotted a sense of love, longing, and kindness in the way Antu sheth spoke. I guess the empty seats at his card games were starting to make a place in his heart.

"Joglekar's son got a big promotion and moved to Delhi!" Antu sheth voluntarily shared some pleasant news without his customary sarcastic rejoinder. "Took his old man to Kashi, Haridwar, Vishweshwar, Hrishikesh and all. Fed a 100 brahmins there. Old man Joglekar was thoughtful enough to get me a small sealed pot with water from the Ganga. When you come visit next time, jawaibapu, you'll probably see that the seal has been broken and the water was poured down my throat if you know what I mean."

The next time I visited Ratnagiri, fortunately Antu sheth's Ganga water pot was still sealed.

"Wow, jawaibapu, wow! Congratulations! I heard you're going to England! Congratulations! Have a great trip. Just one "request" for you. Now I have to speak with you in English. So a "request"."

"What request?"

"Go see the Kohinoor diamond once. For some reason, it's an obsession I have always had, the Kohinoor diamond. I can't go see it, but you do it on my behalf. And then come back and tell me how it looks. See all the sights in London and Paris and everything!"

For some reason, I was overcome with a desire to touch his feet, something I had never done before. Right there on the street, I bent down and touched his feet.

"Live a long life!" Antu sheth touched my head gently. "You are a good person, which is why you are so successful."

I said goodbye and started to leave. I had barely gone four steps when I suddenly heard the familiar

"Jawaibapu!!!"

"Yes, Antu sheth?" I turned around.

"Forgot to ask you one thing. Are you going alone or with your wife?"

"Both of us are going."

"That's good. Don't mind me, I just had a nagging doubt, so I asked. You are going far away to learn something new. So I was reminded of Devayani's tale from mythology. Hahaha. Convey my blessings to your wife too. I am telling you, your good fortune is all because of her. That's all life is eventually about - the right woman."

Antu sheth paused and continued.

"Let me tell you something. Just between us. My wife passed away 40 years ago. Since then, the alphonso mango tree near my door has stopped flowering. When she was around, the tree yielded hundreds of mangoes every year. But since she left.....you know....fate can take really strange turns. Sorry, I am rambling. Anyway, safe travels. So when are you leaving from Ratnagiri?"

"Tomorrow morning by bus."

"Direct Ratnagiri to Mumbai?"

"Yes."

"Good call. Once someone completes that journey, then even traveling around the world seems easy in comparison. The other day Tatya Jog made the trip. He is still trying to locate all his bones. Told me some 7-8 bones are missing!"

And he started laughing hard with his mouth wide open. I noticed that there was only one tooth remaining that hadn't gone Annu Gogte.

The next morning at 5 AM at the bus stand, I again heard the familiar cry,

"JAWAIBAPU!"

Antu sheth approached me and gave me a small paper pouch.

"I know you don't believe in god, jawaibapu, but do me a favor and keep this in your pocket. It is holy ash. It will keep you safe. You are going to London by air, so this small pouch shouldn't add too much weight to your luggage."

I put the pouch in my pocket. As the bus got going, I saw Antu sheth lift his shirt and gently wipe tears from his small blinking gray eyes. In that dim dawn light, seeing his bony chest and his concave stomach which had all but touched his back suddenly tugged at my heart.

Just like Konkan's jackfruit, it's people taste sweet only when they ripen for a long time.

xxxxxxxxxxx

Typology of the Indian Fan in the context of the FIFA World Cup.

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 14:46:00 +0000

I don't really follow soccer*. So I don't know much about soccer. But I follow a lot of Indian soccer fans. I view them with mild amusement mixed with scientific curiosity. I study them. I try to find patterns in their bizarrely enthusiastic behavior. And I love doing pop-socio and pop-psych analysis of their behavior and their attitudes towards a game where India ranks even lower than countries smaller than my apartment building in Pune.

So I present here a typology of the Indian Fan in the context of the upcoming World Cup. The typology is arranged according to which country they support or bet on to lift the cup.

BRAZIL: This one is a no-brainer really, so let's get it out of the way. Everyone loves Brazil. It's a country that has won the cup the most often. They always have some of the best players, a style of play which is considered exciting, and wear really eye-catching yellow-and-green colors. So even someone with or without the most rudimentary knowledge of the game feels comfortable saying "Brazil of course!" when someone asks "Which team do you support?" It's like picking the Patriots at the beginning of the NFL season.

But it goes beyond just how good the team is on average (here comes the pop-socio and pop-psych). Brazil is "nice". Brazil is "safe". Other than soccer, what is Brazil associated with? Carnivals, pretty people, beaches, being part of the fashionable BRIC block, and again, carnivals. If countries were brands, Brazil would be like Linux - not really that relevant to your life but easy to love. It's the kind of country that if you visit as an Indian, you expect to love.

So might as well support them. Plus they are the hosts this time. Western media is being mean to them just like they were mean to India in the run-up to the 2010 Commonwealth Games. They have messy social inequality issues just like us. Yes, Brazil is safe to support.

BEST 2 EUROPEAN UNION TEAMS: At any given time, at least 2 of the 3 objectively best teams in the world are from the EU. So the self-proclaimed "knowledgeable" soccer fan from India will be telling anyone willing to listen that one of those two teams is SURE to win. One of the two is always ALWAYS Germany. And the other is some country whose economy Germany has bailed out or will be bailing out soon. Right now it's Spain. A decade ago, it was France. In between, Italy took a break from electing Caligula-esque Prime Ministers to occupy that spot.

So Germany and "Another EU country" are the best bets for Indian soccer pundits who want to set themselves apart from the bandwagon Brazil supporters and maintain a chance for gloating when the dust settles.

ARGENTINA: Ah, Argentina! The most bizarre underdog-favorite combinations in the history of sport. I say this because some of my friends who support Argentina are genuinely convinced that Argentina is THE best team, regardless of the FIFA rankings. These verbose justifications start with "Messi is...." and then meander into incomprehensibility. Other friends supporting Argentina are steadfast about the team's underdog tag. "I always support an underdog, yaar!"

The media helps in whipping up support for Argentina too, given that Argentina is to FIFA what Notre Dame is to college football in America. Every damn year when the college football starts, there will be pundits in the media saying "OH NOTRE DAME HAS A FINE FINE TEAM THIS YEAR!". Most years, they stay in the rankings for three weeks before dropping out. Once in a couple of decades, in the vein of a stopped clock being right twice a day, Notre Dame will indeed have a great season. And then the pundits preen. And Hollywood makes an atrociously weepy movie starring a hobbit. But I ramble.

So it goes with Argentina. Call it the continuing halo effect of bad boy Maradona. Or maybe the current halo effect of some guy named Messi who's done diddly-squat in two World Cups, but apparently does great in domestic soccer matches in Europe.

HOLLAND: The Dutch team is for true-blue underdog supporters. Again, I don't know much about soccer. But from what I am told, this team has choked more times than the South African cricket team, the 1990s Buffalo Bills, and Ivan Lendl combined. Which makes them particularly alluring for people who just love supporting an underdog in the faint hope that they will be proven right. Last time, these fans were rewarded by having to wait as long as the finals to have their hearts broken.

But still, for these folks, it is HUP HOLLAND HUP. A friend of mine says that the bright orange jerseys appeal to the latent Hindutva tendencies in some Indian fans, but we'll put a pin in that for now.

ANOTHER EU TEAM: The previous four categories take care of 90% of Indian soccer fans. Which brings us to self-proclaimed "knowledgeable" fans of the game who don't like being lumped with the conventional wisdom. They need to cogently claim that a different underdog is actually going to take home the cup, but the heathen masses are too blinded by media tropes to see it. So they pick a team which is ranked somewhere from 4th to 8th in the FIFA rankings and which has a player they have watched in one of the domestic soccer leagues from Europe.

"Of course it'll be Portugal yaar! That Cristiano Ronaldo I tell you...."

For the last 3 World Cups, the top choice for these people has been Portugal, thanks to this Ronaldo fella. Never mind that he and his team have shown the poor judgment of associating themselves with the New York Jets to practice for the World Cup. That anyone can think that a guy who voluntarily decided to learn something from Rex Ryan has any chance of winning anything shows how little soccer fans know about real football. But I troll. And I digress.

When it's not Portugal, it is some other European country that yes, Germany will also have to bail out.

ENGLAND: Don't ask me why. Seriously don't. I know very little about soccer but even I know enough to know that the chances of England winning the cup are only negligibly higher than an Indian winning the Olympic 100 meter gold. And yet a few Indians will be steadfast in their support of England.

One guy I knew used to base his support on the supposedly "under-appreciated talents" of David Beckham. This was before Beckham became known as the guy who sells underwear on giant hoardings in Times Square. These days, I suspect the support for England is driven by the fact that so many Indians spend so much money on low quality made-in-Bangladesh jerseys of teams from the EPL, that they feel obliged to go all the way.

But seriously Indian supporters of England soccer, what are the chances that an England cricket team will win an ICC title AND a notionally English guy will win the Wimbledon AND England will win the FIFA World Cup, all within 5 years?

USA: The only Indians who support the US are a) Indians who live in the US, and b) follow only cricket and/or American sports. Yes, this includes me, ok? The rest of the time, we are happy with our WillowTV subscription, our NFL fantasy football leagues, out March madness brackets, our opinions on LeBron and the Heat, our love or hate for the Yankees or the Red Sox. We look at MLS ads and go "lulz". We see European soccer matches on our cable guide menu and go "WTF?".

But then once every four years, this damn World Cup thing comes along. And everyone is talking about it. Not just CNN, who will usually talk about the most vapid things. So what do we do?

USA! USA! USA!

We google furiously to find out who our players are. We try to figure out what the hell "Group of Death" means. We practice our pronunciation of Klinsmann. And we set a countdown clock to the start of the NFL season.

* "SOCCER? IT'S FOOTBALL BRO!!!" you say? Read this.

"Khana Mat Khao" or In Telugu, Rice = Food?

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 20:25:00 +0000

Thanks to the harsh winter we are having, I have been battling cold, cough, and fever for over a week now. Last night, during a particularly phlegm-infested sleep cycle, I had a dream. A nostalgic dream, I dreamed of something from 28 years ago in Andhra Pradesh. Something that had baffled me for years.

In 1986 when I was 6 years old, my dad was transferred to Rajahmundry in Andhra Pradesh for a year. A couple of months after we move there, I fell ill. Fever, cold, cough, same as now. My dad took me to the neighborhood doctor (the neighborhood was Aryapuram, if memory serves). The doctor was a native Andhra-ite with a very rudimentary grasp of Hindi. We were Maharashtrians who spoke Hindi but with very little knowledge of Telugu. So we spoke in Hindi.

The good doctor examined me, wrote up a prescription for what I assume were antibiotics (that's the trusted way to treat the flu in India), and then proceeded to give me some dietary advice in Hindi.

Doc: Teen din ke liye, khana mat khao (For three days, don't have any food (or so it literally translates))
Dad: Kya? Kuch bhi nahi? (What? Eat nothing?)
Doc: Nahi nahi, khao. Bread khao, roti khao, dal khao, khana mat khao. (No No, you must eat. Eat bread, roti, dal, but don't eat food.)
Dad & Me: ???????????????????????
Doc: (also confused, but repeating) Bread khao, roti khao, khana mat khao (Eat bread, roti, but don't eat food.)
Dad: Lekin........ bread aur roti bhi toh khana hi hai. (But.....bread and roti is also food)
Doc: (looks at me and dad for a few minutes, thinks, and then suddenly smiles) Rice! Rice mat khao! (Rice! Don't eat rice!)
Dad: Rice?
Doc: Haan, bread khao, roti khao, rice mat khao (Eat bread, roti, but don't eat rice)

Now, the medical validity of the doctor's dietary advice aside, for almost three decades, this incident has been stored in my memory banks. I occasionally remember it and am confused. Today after I had dreamed of it, I thought of an explanation. Maybe in colloquial/spoken Telugu, in some parts of Andhra Pradesh (especially Rajahmndry), the word for rice is similar to the word for food/meal. The good doctor wasn;t exactly fluent in Hindi. So maybe it was a translation error.

So I turned to twitter for answers. Based on the responses I got, the verdict is mixed. Half the people say that the words are indeed used interchangeably. Others disagree.

I don't know. But it was fun to get a humorous blast from the distant past.

Halloween and Uncle Leo

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Thu, 31 Oct 2013 19:10:00 +0000

Seven years ago this day was my first Halloween in America. I was a fresh PhD student still struggling with how much tougher the coursework was than I had expected. I had been in the country for a little over two months. That evening, after I finished my Stats homework at school and got on the bus to go home, I saw people in costumes all around me.

Ah, it's Halloween, I realized. Until then, most of what I knew of this country came from TV shows, movies, and books. So I knew that this was the night when kids accompanied by their parents roam their neighborhoods, knock on doors, and demand candy by yelling "Trick or Treat!!!". Oh great! So I will be expected to buy candy and hand it out? What a scam! But when in Rome, right?

Not wanting to be seen as a rude or clueless foreigner, I decided to take the necessary steps. I got off the bus at the stop in front of the grocery store. Bought lots of candy. Took another bus home. When I say "home", I mean a 3 bedroom row house I shared with two other Indian grad students who were both out of town that night.

At home, I put the candy in a bowl, turned the TV on and waited. The hours ticked by. Not a single knock on my door! I looked out the window. There were groups of kids and their parents dressed up in costumes knocking on doors around my building complex. So I guessed it was just a matter of time before they came to my door. But another hour passed by and there was no knock on my door. Before I knew it, it was 11 PM, the streets were deserted, and not a single person had come to my door trick-or-treating! All the candy was sitting there in the bowl. Except for the dozen or so that I had polished of watching TV.

The next day, I felt a little hurt. The neighborhood trick or treaters had ignored me! And as is the instinctive reaction for many of us, my first thoughts went to racism. It was because I was brown, I decided. These racist white folks didn't want to take their kids to an Indian guy's house. How shallow they are. And how bad I have it! I spent several hours indulging myself in the victim routine when everything that does not fit your expectations is due to racism. I became the Indian version of Jerry's Uncle Leo!

And then I got a reality check. I mentioned my shunning by the trick-or-treaters to an American friend, trying to sound as wounded as I felt. She seemed confused and initially a bit apologetic. Then realization dawned upon her.

She: Did you have a pumpkin outside your door? Or some sort of Halloween decoration?

Me: No.

She: So your door was completely bare?

Me: Yes, same as always.

She: Ah! That's the reason. In our town....and in most of the country....there's a simple code. Trick-or-treaters only knock on doors that have some Halloween decoration. That's the way a household signals that they want to take part in the candy thing. If a door is bare, it is meant to signal that you don't want to be disturbed.

Me: Really?

She: Yep, so kids and their parents saw that your door was bare, decided you didn't want to be disturbed, and went to the next house.

Me: Oh!

And there it was. A simple explanation for a phenomenon I had been too quick to put down to racism or xenophobia.

This is not to say that racism doesn't exist. But sometimes we need to stop being Uncle Leo and ascribe everything to racism.

Conflicted

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:54:00 +0000

Something happened today that has left me conflicted. If you read this post months or years later, remember that "today" is three days after the Boston Marathon bombings.

I got on the 33rd Street PATH train at Hoboken (the starting point of the train) to head home to the city, and found the compartment mostly empty as usual. There was an old white man at one end and a young black woman at another. I sat down on a seat in the middle of the compartment, opened a magazine, and started reading.

A minute later, some more people walked in. An East Asian woman, two young white women, and a desi (South Asian) looking guy. The desi guy sat across from me about 10 feet away, slipped his backpack off, and pushed it under the seat. He then took a pair of earphones out of his pocket, put them in his ears and sat there listening to music.

I stole a few more glances at him and the backpack. It is not common, at least in my experience, for someone in the NYC area to push their belongings under the seat. On the seat next to them when the train is as empty as this one was, sure. On the floor between their legs, often. That's where my own backpack was. But under the seat, very rare. At least that's what I told myself was the reason for looking at him more than usual.

Soon the train got going. I tried to read the magazine, an article about HBO's new show Vice, but found myself glancing at him and the backpack every so often. The thought "what if the backpack has...." kept looping through my mind without completing itself.

Eight minutes later, the train reached Manhattan and stopped at Christopher Street. I looked at the guy. He was still listening to his music. There was one more stop to go before I got off at 14th Street. I found myself thinking, "I hope he gets off after me". For two completely opposite reasons, which are obvious.

A couple of minutes later, the train stopped at 9th Street. He got up. I dropped any pretense of stealing glances and stared at him. He didn't seem to have noticed. He took a couple of steps towards the door. My throat went dry as I saw that his backpack was still under the seat!

Shrill alarm bells rang in my head and I was about to spring up from my seat. I was just trying to decide if I should scream and tackle him or go press the Emergency Speakerphone button that every train compartment has.

Before I could make up my mind, he stopped mid-stride. He mouthed what seemed like "Oh shit!", quickly retracted his steps, and picked up his backpack from under the seat. He then turned around and sprinted out before the doors closed. The train started moving again.

I sat there, feeling conflicted. And have been conflicted ever since. Was I paranoid or just vigilant? "If you see something, say something!". Was I bigoted against brown people.....which as a brown person myself would make me self-loathing I guess. After all, I didn't look twice at any of the other people in the compartment. Or was I just being rationally cautious? Was it because I once possibly escaped a commuter train bombing because I was feeling lazy and cancelled dinner plans? Or do I harbor the same prejudices based on skin color and race that I usually abhor in others?

I am not sure. Conflicted.

Problem with Seth MacFarlane - He Insists Upon Himself

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 21:08:00 +0000

Last night was Oscar night. For a couple of weeks leading up to it, I was tweeting about how choosing Seth MacFarlane to host the Oscars was a horrible mistake because he was overrated, unfunny, and by and large a talentless hack who just got lucky getting the right breaks when he did. Many people, especially Family Guy fanbois, responded with indignation.

But then, last night was Oscar night. The mainstream press reviews as well as the overall twitter feedback was unanimous - Seth MacFarlane sucked!

And he was bound to suck. Because he is an overrated, unfunny, and a by and large talentless hack who just got lucky getting the right breaks when he did.

Here's the problem with Seth MacFarlane.

Apart from being overrated, unfunny, and a by and large talentless hack who just got lucky getting the right breaks when he did.

His jokes are just a manifestation of his immense self-indulgence and a meta-idea of how funny his jokes are supposed to be seen as.

His jokes aren't funny because of their content or humor quotient. He thinks his jokes are funny BECAUSE he thinks he is being so cool and edgy and counter-cultural by the virtue of the topics he is addressing. So it isn't so much what the joke is saying that is supposed to amused us, but the topic of the joke itself. Seth thinks that we should find any joke he makes about topic X funny only because most straight laced people wouldn't dare joke about topic X, and he was cool enough to do so.

Except, that's not what makes jokes funny. Or that's not all that makes jokes funny. Yes, there is an edgy appeal to tackling subjects that most straight laced people wouldn't dare joke about. But the jokes themselves have to be funny and clever. Let me give you an example from last night.

Talking about Lincoln, Seth said, "”I would argue that the actor who got most inside Lincoln’s head was John Wilkes Booth.”

I yawned. And when he got a lukewarm response from the audience, Seth's reaction was "too soon?"

No, Seth, I don't personally think joking about an assassination that happened almost a century and a half ago is "too soon". The problem isn't that your joke was "too soon". It's that the joke was simply way too lazy, pedestrian, and something you expect to hear in 3rd rate comedy clubs with 2-drink minimums. It's an oh-so-predictable use of the "getting into one's head" metaphor and the fact that Booth was an actor.

When I find something funny, it's because someone made an observation and phrased it in a way I never would have thought of myself. And I wish I had. This joke was just lazy and stupid. If MacFarlane chooses to believe that he got a poor response because the joke was somehow edgy, politically incorrect, or whatever, he is just deluding himself.

And that's the problem with Family Guy too. For the first 3 seasons, Family Guy was a reasonably funny show. It had amusing and reasonably novel storylines supported by quirky characters, and frequent pop-culture references.

Then maybe MacFarlane ran out of story ideas. The show just became consumed by those pop-culture references. So just making a joke about topic X was supposed to be the amusing part, forget what the actual joke was. Family Guy decided that it was somehow the premier voice of wise-ass counter-culture. Which, well, it could have been. If it had written funny jokes. But it didn't.

MacFarlane decided that a joke would be funny just because it used a random topical or pop-culture reference. And 4th season onward, you could see these randomly unfunny jokes coming a mile away. The writing process itself got distinctly lazy. Something that South Park accurately spoofed -

To use Family Guy and Peter Griffin's own poorly phrased words, when it comes to making topical or pop-culture jokes, the show "insists upon itself".

And essentially, that's what MacFarlane did at the Oscars. He insisted upon himself. He insisted that by the virtue of who he was and the topics he was tackling, he should be hailed as a comedic genius. It was as if manatees were picking up random supposedly controversial pop culture references, and adding random nouns and verbs to make it a joke. And if we didn't find his jokes funny, we were just moldy curmudgeons who were too stuck up to get the jokes.

Seth MacFarlane doesn't realize that whether someone finds the selection of topics too risque or not (and I never have), his jokes simply aren't funny anymore. And that's what led to him bombing so badly at the Oscars. He thinks his limited fake voices and accents can inject an illusion of humor into his lazy jokes.

But all he does is, he insists upon himself.

Why I Threw Away My Ferrari Gear

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 15:34:00 +0000

I used to be an ardent Formula 1 fan. And an ardent Ferrari fan. Over the years, I lost interest in the sport. But occasionally I would still catch portions of a race on TV and in my heart, I was always cheering for a Ferrari win. On a recent trip to Europe, I bought some Ferrari gear to occasionally display my support.

This morning I threw all the Ferrari gear in trash. Because of this.

The background story in a nutshell is this. Two Italian navy sailors killed two innocent Indian fishermen in Indian waters (the Italians dispute the jurisdiction). India arrested and charged the sailors. The Italian government has been supporting these murderers. So has the Italian media. Note that they're not denying that the sailors killed those innocent fishermen. They still want the Indian government to let the sailors go. Why? The reasoning is flimsy and convoluted and in my opinion can be summarized as "Because!". The arrogance and the racist undertones in Italy's stance are obvious to me and many others. To me, the subtext is, "yes, our boys killed two guys by mistake. But they were just a couple of brown fishermen. Let our boys go! Give them back to us and we'll give them a slap on the wrist. You Indians have no right to try someone who killed your citizens". Do you think that if the fishermen had been Americans killed off the coast of America, the Italians would dare be this brazenly arrogant?

And in a sickening display of further arrogance and willful insensitivity, Ferrari decided to inject itself into the situation. The Formula 1 Indian Grand Prix is this weekend. Ferrari has announced it will carry an Italian Navy flag specifically in support of the two murderous sailors. It's not like Ferrari has been carrying the flag throughout the season. They're doing this only in India. They're not even using the pretext of just supporting the Italian navy in general. Their statements specifically mention support for the murderers. To me this is a small scale version of a British team carrying the flag of General Dyer's regiment only in India to express solidarity with his actions in Jalianwala Bag. Or some other European team supporting one of their fellow citizens who has been locked up in Goa for abusing street kids.

Ferrari is wrong for needlessly wading into this debate specifically during the Indian GP. But more importantly, they are absolutely wrong in supporting those two murderers whose crime, I repeat, is not even in doubt.

As an Indian, I find Ferrari's stance reprehensible and I cannot in good conscience support them in the slightest. So I threw away my Ferrari gear. I hope Indian fans who go watch the race on Sunday are not so slavishly beholden to the team and so morally bankrupt and insensitive as to wear caps or t-shirts supporting these proud backers of murderers.

Translating a Raj Thackeray Speech

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 17:06:00 +0000

I don't agree with Raj Thackeray's stance against immigrants from UP and Bihar. I can sort of, kind of, see where he is coming from, but I don't agree with the conclusion. And I find his forcible and occasionally violent methods to have his way (especially against powerless shopkeepers and job applicants) abhorrent.

However, as a Marathi person, I find the gap between what he says in Marathi and what is reported in the national media to be suspiciously wide. There are two problems. First, they wrongly translate a lot of what he says. Second, they seem to pick and choose the most provocative bits that can be spun into an attention-grabbing soundbite. I have written about the dangers of this phenomenon before.

Today Raj Thackeray led a rally to Azad Maidan (without permission from the police top brass) as a protest against the August 11 incident. He gave a speech there. Again, I marveled at the difference between what he was saying and what the national media was reporting he was saying.

So I had an idea. I have translated PuLa Deshpande's work before. Surely I can translate a speech. So here it is, the speech in Marathi, and then, what I think is an objective, unbiased, and direct translation in English. This is not an endorsement of what he said. Just a translation for illustrative purposes. I agree with some parts, and disagree with some. I'll leave you to judge it for yourself.

Note - I am translating it in a bit of a hurry. So please forgive any typos or inadvertent grammatical errors.

When it's an institution from Maharashtra, be it a police department, a media company, or anything else.... even just a person from Maharashtra....we should demonstrate the strength to ensure that no one ever looks askance at them again with the intention of harming them.

For the last two days, this has been going on... police officials come to me and ask, how will you take the rally from Girgaum chaupatty? I told them we'll walk.

(crowd laughs)

Then they're like, you can't go from here, you can't go from there...all these efforts at putting obstacles in our way have been spearheaded by Police Commissioner Arup Patnaik. I found out the other day..... in fact a few police officials told me this...that they'll try to stop our cars, and try other things to stop us. I called the Chief Minister right away, and asked him, what is this? What happens or doesn't happen (at the rally) is something we can deal with later. But can't we express our protest in a democratic way with a rally?

Why stop us at every point? I assured them at our rally will be a peaceful one, and they still refused us permission for it? And they had no problems giving permission for that Raza Academy rally? But here we are, with a rally to protest what happened the other day right here, and they refuse us permission?

Then there's (Home Minister) R.R. Patil who says - we won't spare anyone who threatens the law and order of the city. Really? So what happened that day? Was his tail between his legs?

(crowd laughs)

The other day he calls up (MNS MLA from Mumbai) Bala Nandgaonkar and says, "What could I do? What was I supposed to do? Was I supposed to take a big stick and stand there?"

(crowd laughs)

There is this one boundary line....one border....one line that cannot be crossed. I have never crossed that line, and will never cross that line. Never raise your hands against the police.

(crowd applauds and cheers)

If you demoralize the police to such an extent, then where will the common man go with his problems? Where will he go? If this keeps happening, tomorrow even the police will say "we don't want to get involved here, do whatever you want".

Is this how a state is run? And this Police Commissioner Arup Patnaik. The cops caught the guilty people. And what does he say to the DCP who arrested the guilty people? He says, "You bastard, let them go!" He tells him to let the criminals go!

Our policewomen sisters were tormented here... they were pulled aside and beaten up and molested......all these guys, our Marathi police constables, were getting beaten up... and they weren't getting any orders?

Oh, and these (police head honchos) knew everything from the beginning. They knew that there were trains full of these goons coming for the rally. And they had choppers, and rods and everything else... tell me, are there ever any rocks lying around here (in Azad Maidan)? Where did the rocks come from?

These people had advance warning of all these facts, and they still ignored them. And they refuse permission for my peaceful rally? The other day, when some police officials came to meet me, I told them. I told them that the 11th August rally at least had targets. That mob knew that it was supposed to target the police and the media.

Who do we want to target (in this rally)? I have already declared our targets. Arup Patnaik, resign! R.R. Patil, resign! I declared this in the beginning itself.

We have not come here to destroy cars or set something on fire. We don't even wish to do all that. Even if we were to, whose cars would we destroy and whose property would we set on fire? Our own? Those belonging to our citizens from Mumbai and Maharashtra? This rally isn't for such purposes.

But how else are we supposed to express our anger? They won't let us express our anger at whatever happened. And they say, please respect democracy. This is democracy?

Go and look at the track record of Raza Academy and its rallies. A few years ago, this same Raza Academy had a rally in Bhiwandi. This bhadva (translates to 'pimp' but pimp doesn't have the same punch :)) Abu Asim Azmi went to that rally. He gave a speech there, that too an inflammatory speech. And they're sending me notices - "don't make inflammatory speeches". That Abu Azmi went there, made an inflammatory speech in Bhiwandi. You know what happened next?

The mob killed two police constables by bashing their heads in with big rocks. Then they cut off their private parts and threw their corpses into burning buses..... the government had no problems with that. And they refuse me permission for a rally?

Whoever came here (on 11t August) had no connection with Maharashtra. They all came from outside Maharashtra.

(crowd applauds and cheers)

After everything that went down here that day, this passport was found, a Bangladeshi passport...

(shows a Bangladeshi passport to the crowd)

This was found right here. Single entry passport (I assume he meant visa). Needed only to come into India. No intentions of going back, so it was thrown away here...

(throws it away)

There are countless such people coming into Maharashtra... they are all setting up their bases in Maharashtra. Tell me something....they say 'coincidence'....what coincidence?

In 1992 when the Babri Masjid was demolished, where was its retaliation felt instantly? In Mumbai! There was no violence anywhere else in the country (GS: this isn't true...there were riots in many other cities)...only in Mumbai! And when this incident happened during the rally on 11th August, its reaction happened in Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh. So something happens in Uttar Pradesh, there's a reaction in Mumbai, and something happens in Mumbai, there's a reaction in Uttar Pradesh. Doesn't India have any other states???

The reason is, all these people are coming here from there. All these Pakistanis and Bangladeshis who have infiltrated and set up bases in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and Jharkhand, they're all coming here by the trainfuls. And the bases that they are setting up here in Mumbai, those are going to create trouble for us in the future.

Otherwise tell me, this Abu Azmi is elected from two different constituencies in Maharashtra. Two different constituencies? Should any politician from Maharashtra get elected from two different constituencies? He gets elected from two constituencies because all the people in those two constituencies have all come from outside, and they vote for him.

That day, it finally came to the police (couldn't understand the word he said here despite re-playing it many times, at 12:20)...then they had to do it. While doing that, the guy who died, Abu Azmi announced 1.5 lakh rupees for him. So why not for our policemen?

(crowd applauds and cheers)

Even the state government hasn't announced anything yet. No announcements from the state government that they are going to provide compensation for those who were hurt or troubled in those events. Nothing. Nope, just get beaten up.

Why didn't R.R. Patil speak up then? He threatens us.... anyway, what's the point in threatening us? It's almost time for us (and him...a pun) to leave now.

(crowd laughs)

They don't think about anything that has already happened or what may happen. They don't do anything useful. Just get the cops beaten up. Anyone will come, drag our cops away, and beat them up?

The other day when they had that rally in Uttar Pradesh, rioted, destroyed property and all. The ones who did that were also all from outside - Pakistani Muslims and Bangladeshi Muslims. They all poured out into the streets. And what did they do? They defaced a statue of Gautam Buddha. Everyone saw it. Everyone saw pictures, saw it on TV.

Where is Mayawati? Where is that Ramdas Athavale? Where is R.S. Gavai? Where is Prakash Ambedkar? Why are they all silent? All they're obsessed with, as if possessed by a ghost, is Indu Mills Indu Mills Indu Mills Indu Mills. Don't they have anything else to do? What do they want to build in Indu Mills - a bungalow?

Why aren't they talking now? But no one will talk about these things now. They're not ready to utter a word. It's been so many days since the (11th August) incident. But there has been no statement about it from Ramdas Athavale. No statements from R.S. Gavai or Prakash Ambedkar or Mayawati, or anyone else. Nothing. Cat's got everyone's tongues.

This Mumbai Police Comissioner.....he has a "favorite" (that's the word he used) officer Dhoble. The other day, he takes a hockey stick and goes to that...what was that..juice center bar... juice center something...where did he go?

(crowd prompts)

Yes, Amar Juice Center. Is that a place to take a hockey stick to? Take your wife, your kids, I can understand, but a hockey stick? He takes a hockey stick there and beats up innocent people with that hockey stick? And what's his defense? He found drugs there....then why didn't he shut it down?

And this idiot...Police Commissioner Arup Patnaik....what's his explanation? He says Dhoble was on his way to play hockey and stopped over at the juice center. Tomorrow, if someone has gone for his honeymoon. So will he just turn up there naked?

(crowd laughs and cheers)

So Patnaik will go out of his way to protect Dhoble! Because Dhoble is his "favorite". And here (in Azad Maidan) when cops were waiting for orders to tackle the mob.....if not firing, at least give us orders for a lathi charge.... at that time Patnaik had nothing to say. And when our police officers were catching the guilty culprits, Patnaik abuses the officers, calling them "bastards"? He is demoralizing cops to such an extent?

This won't be allowed to happen in Maharashtra anymore. I only want to say one thing to R.R. Patil and Arup Patnaik. Even if you have a little bit of shame left...even a minuscule amount of shame left.... then resign. If you have even the slightest bit of shame left.

For the last two days, some newspapers have been saying - "Raj Thackeray's Maharashtra Navnirman Sena is now moving towards Hindutva". Whoever raises his hands against a cop, whatever his religion, he should be bashed up wherever he is.

When my own party's MLA was bashed up....Harshavaradhan Jadhav.....is he here? When Harshavardhan was bashed up.... I gave the orders for him to be bashed up... would he have been bashed up otherwise? When I gave a speech at that time, I said the same thing. Harshavaradhan, no matter what happens, you DO NOT raise your hands against a policeman. Never raise your hands against a cop.

This has nothing to do with religion. All the constables who were here, all my policewomen sisters...the female cops... I consider them all my Marathi brothers and Marathi sisters. I have come out on the streets here for them.

The rally that day (11th August) was organized by Muslims and today I have organized a protest rally against it.... so immediately they're jumping to the conclusion that I am "moving towards Hindutva"? I only understand...this Raj Thackeray only understands one religion...and that is Maharashtra religion. I don't understand any religion except that one. No one dare cross this Maharashtra religion. No one dare think of harming it.

And today's rally is only to boost the morale of the police and to provide wholehearted support to the police. Along with them, we have people from the media here. Media vans were attacked, burnt, photographers were beaten up.... this rally is to express support for all of them too.

I thank you all for the tremendous response to this rally. If ever such events reoccur, we must stand together in strength like this.

When you're going back...all of you, when you're going back...keep in mind and make absolutely sure that you don't indulge in any sort of untoward activities. Go back in an orderly and peaceful manner to wherever you came from.

I hope that in the future whenever I call upon you, you will return with the same enthusiasm. And now I take your leave.

Jai Hind! Jai Maharashtra!

---------

The Indian Collective Conscience's Blind Spot for Racism/Discrimination

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Mon, 14 May 2012 16:37:00 +0000

A 2009 issue ~~The latest issue~~ of Outlook has this cringe-inducing article by Diepiriye Kuku, an African American (and presumably gay) PhD student in Delhi. There's nothing new about stories of discrimination faced by Africans or African-Americans or North-East Indians in major Indian cities. These instances are real and shameful. But for me, the most hard-hitting portion was not the one where Kuku describes the specific instances of discrimination he's faced (as shameful as they were), but this

Outside of specific anchors of discourse such as Reservations, there is no consensus that discrimination is a redeemable social ill. This is the real issue with discrimination in India: her own citizens suffer and we are only encouraged to ignore situations that make us all feel powerless. Be it the mute-witnesses seeing racial difference for the first time, kids learning racism from their folks, or the blacks and northeasterners who feel victimised by the public, few operate from a position that believes in change.

Bingo! Kuku has put in words an issue I have been discussing with friends for several years now.

When I tweeted this story, I got a few responses which said "yes, but Indians are also discriminated against in the West" and "Blacks face discrimination even in America, not just India" and "Discrimination is a universal human trait, so why single out India?" That last bit is valid. Discrimination or xenophobia is indeed a universal trait. We have all heard of people discriminating against outsiders or minorities all over the world. India is definitely not unique in that regard.

Where India is unique.....well I shouldn't say unique....but different from societies at least in the West, is the way its collective conscience views racism, or more broadly discrimination against those belonging to groups that aren't part of the "mainstream". We have a major blind spot there.

In the West, yes, everyday there are instances of discrimination on the basis of race and sexuality. But in the West, the collective conscience, or the social discourse recognizes that this is wrong. People use the term "politically correct" like a pejorative. But in the West, it is not considered politically correct by the society to come out and say that some races are inferior. Or that gays are inferior or abominations. Yes, some nutcases say that but in the West, the mainstream collective opinion holds the ideal of equality very dear.

That is largely missing in India. There is no general understanding that saying someone is inferior based on their race or sexuality is wrong. It does exist, in some degree, when it comes to caste. While casteism is still prevalent in India in various forms, the general collective discourse recognizes that saying certain castes are inferior is wrong. The opponents of racism using "merit" is often a code for implied inferiority, but even the use of that code is a "thank heavens for small mercies" byproduct of that Indian collective conscience as least recognizing casteism as wrong.

But when it comes to racism or homophobia, the Indian collective conscience still has a blind spot. Most Indians feel no compunctions in saying that a particular race is inferior or that gays are "unnatural" or "sick" or "disgusting". We humans may never be able to completely rid ourselves of xenophobia and discrimination, the way we may never be able to rid ourselves of murder and rape. But we can take a step in the right direction by at least getting our collective consciences to recognize that xenophobia or discrimination is wrong, just the way murder and rape.

India is yet to take that step. It is lagging behind the West by some decades. The West's conscience wasn't always enlightened. Before the 60s, it was perfectly acceptable to say in public that blacks are inferior and so should be segregated. Even until the 70s and early 80s, it was perfectly acceptable in the West to treat gays as abominations or mutations. But that isn't the case now. The Western conscience has moved and continues to move in the right direction.

I hope India's collective conscience does too. And soon.

Recipe for Egg Salad Sandwich On Toast - Slightly Indian

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Thu, 10 May 2012 20:24:00 +0000

When I moved from India to the United States in 2006, I encountered a multitude of food items I had never tasted in India. I could readily understand why I had never tasted most of those items in India, due to Indian conventions, habits, and availability of ingredients, such as ribs or steak tartare. But there was one item whose sheer simplicity astounded me. And which, by rights, should have been really popular in India. That item was the egg salad sandwich. I couldn't figure out why I had never encountered it in India.

The egg salad sandwich is so simple, even minimal. So elegant. So tasty. And so ideal for spicier Indian variations. And yet, almost completely absent from menus in India. Why? I have no idea!

Most chicken sandwiches you get in India are cousins of the egg salad sandwich - shredded chicken mixed with mayonnaise and mustard, served on toasted or untoasted bread. Another popular item in India, the Russian salad (which results in Russian salad sandwich or Rusian salad roll) is also similar. So why is the egg salad sandwich not available in India? I have no idea! But I hope it becomes popular.

Here's the most basic recipe for an egg salad sandwich. Take hard-boiled eggs. Shell them. Mash them. Add mustard, mayo, salt, pepper. Make a sandwich using toasted bread. Enjoy!

Another reason this sandwich should, by rights, be extremely popular in India, is the fact that you can easily add quintessentially Indian spices and make it more flavorful. You can also add different veggies to it, to play around with the texture. That's what I do. I love experimenting with the basic egg salad. I have tried various combinations over the years. Here is my favorite recipe for what is (for me) the perfect Egg Salad Sandwich on Toast:

Recipe (makes 2 sandwiches of 2 toasted bread slices each)

Ingredients:
4 slices of bread
2 eggs hard boiled
1 tbsp mayonnaise
1 tbs mustard (I prefer Dijon, but french mustard works well too)
1 tbsp chopped onion (optional)
1 tbsp chopped bell pepper/capsicum (optional)
Paprika/cayenne/red chili powder (to taste, optional)
Cumin powder (to taste, optional)
Black pepper (to taste)
Salt (to taste)

Directions:

Egg salad is among the easiest sandwiches to make. You don't need to be an expert on cooking by any means. Even the novice-est of novices can get it right.

The first step is to hard boil eggs.

The perfect timing and technique for this varies based on the freshness of your egg (surprising fact - slightly stale eggs when boiled are easier to peel than fresh eggs), its size, and how hard you like your egg boiled.

Peel the egg. Put the peeled eggs in a bowl.

Now we need to mince the eggs. There are different ways of approaching this. You can just crush a whole egg with a spoon or a spatula.

Or you can use an egg slicer to first make elegant slices and then mince the egg.

Eventually, you mince them with a spoon or a spatula. Go to town on 'em. Crush them the way Assad crushes protesters in Syria.

Now whether you want to go as far as Assad or dial it back like Mubarak depends on your taste. I like to leave some pieces of the egg white intact, roughly 1 cm in size. Personally, I prefer slightly chunkier versions to an egg salad where the entire egg is minced like keema. So my ideal minced eggs look like this.

From here on, it's as easy as silencing protesters in Bahrain. Let me tell you about the basic ingredients first. You first add 1 tbsp each of mayonnaise and mustard.

Then you add salt and pepper. Nothing like a pepper grinder to bring out the freshest flavors!

At its most basic, this is egg salad. You can mix the whole shebang, put it between toasts, and you're good to go. But I also like to add onions. And red or green bell pepper (aka capsicum). This time, I added red peppers because that's all I had at home. They tend to be slightly sweet.

I also like to add red chili powder (or paprika or cayenne depending on your taste) because I like a little heat in my egg salad. Not too much. Just a pinch. I also add a pinch of cumin powder because based on all my experiments, I think that's a spice that goes best with egg salad.

Then you mix the whole thing together. Stir it, stir it, stir it, stir it, like a polaroid picture! And this is how it looks.

I know, not very appetizing. But as Shrek said, don't judge me before you taste me.

Next, we toast the bread. You can use a toaster, but I prefer toasting them on a pan, girdle, or as I have done here, a tava. I like 'em nicely browned and crisped!

Done toasting? Now take a toast, and add a generous helping of the egg salad.

And when I say generous, I mean really generous! It's egg salad not butter. Lay it on as thick as Fox News. It should be a thick layer, well thicker than the bread itself. Cover the bread entirely, without letting any salad spill out the edges. Like this. The spartan toast should look overwhelmed by the rich gooey mixture.

But don't worry about the spartan toast. Its Leonidas is on its way (when the heck did the Arab Spring similes turn into Ancient Greek similes!??). Put the other toast on top. And make sure the egg salad layer is thick like this.

Next, you can either pounce on the sandwich like the Persians pounced on the Spartans at Thermopylae. Or you can cut the sandwich in two, like Xerxes wanted done with Leonidas.

There it is. Beautiful, tasty, simple, and nutritious Egg Salad on Toast. Enjoy! I like to position my diagonally cut sandwiches like in the image above and imagine it is the globe from Pacman that I Binky, am attacking. As you can see, all my cooking similes and metaphors have to do with wars and bloodshed. What do to? I am Gandhian that way. Anyway, enjoy the sandwich.

Oh, and if you're like me and savor licking remnants of food off utensils, don't forget the bowl you made the egg salad in. See this?

Don't throw it in the sink. Long after you've polished off the sandwiches, working on the remains of that great civilization in the bowl can bring you greater please than archaeologists relishing Greek ruins.

Why EPL is Soccer and not Football: The Definitive Answer

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Mon, 07 May 2012 17:51:00 +0000

I have been in America for 6 years now, and will most likely spend my life here. Like almost all Americans, I refer to what is played in the NFL as football, and what is played in the EPL as soccer.

I don't like soccer. Have never liked soccer. Even as a kid growing up in India, decades before I even heard of the Superbowl or NFL, I found soccer an extremely boring sport. But this post is not about why soccer is so boring. This post isn't about the banality of a "sport" that features 90 minutes of ambling around, kicking around a ball, and scoring on an average just 1-2 times during the whole excruciating period. This post isn't about a sport where it is not considered shameful to feign injuries, where convincing playacting wins games, and where referees seem even more willfully clueless than the fake referees in WWE pro wrestling. This post isn't about the utterly fallacious argument "Soccer is the #1 sport in most countries in the world, so it has to be awesome", that could also be extended to say "denying women rights and dignity is a practice prevalent in most countries in the world, so it has to be awesome".

No, this post is about the name nonsense. You know, what the "real" football is. That what's played in EPL is the only sport that can and should be called football. That churlish notion is what this post is about.

In my academic, professional, and personal life, I have gotten to know about a dozen or so Europeans and a couple of South Americans well enough to call them friends. I have had countless conversations with them, over the course of which, I have referred to Europe and South America's favorite sport as "soccer" and not "football". No eyelids were batted. No corrections were demanded. No moronic "Call it football!!!" suggestions were made. I am sure all of them think of the sport as football. But they were normal people who had better things to do in life than split hairs over the name of a game.

But I have lost count of the number of Indians who have, rather rudely and ignorantly, interrupted me or corrected me with the occasional use of profanity, and demanded that I not call the sport soccer. As they say, the newest converts are the most extremist. And most Indians who follow soccer are the archetypal new convert extremists. India is currently ranked 165 in FIFA rankings. Snowmen have a better chance of surviving months long cruises in hell than India does of qualifying for the FIFA World Cup in this century. India's club soccer landscape is so dismal, that a documentary about it would look like Dystopian science fiction set in sub-Saharan Africa. I'm sure the bottled water budget of the newest IPL cricket team, the Pune Warriors, is more than the overall budget of all soccer tournaments played in India. Forget cricket, which is the king of sports in India. I'm sure that the revenue from the sales of Manchester United jerseys in Bombay is way more than the overall budget of all soccer tournaments played in India.

Despite the abysmal ranking and the tragic club scene, India has millions and millions of soccer fans! Or, as their hubris would force me to say, "football" fans. Now a non-Indian might wonder, how is it that a billion-strong country with millions of soccer fans is ranked lower than countries that don't even have populations close to a million? Why don't these Indian fans of the game go and watch local club soccer, support their teams, affect change and improve the fate of soccer?

The answer is simple. An overwhelming majority of self-proclaimed soccer fans in India are not really "fans" of the "sport" the way most people elsewhere are fans of sports. Scratch the surface and you'll realize that Indian soccer fans couldn't care less about the actual sport. They're just taken in by the aura surrounding the brands that European soccer has managed to cultivate and export. It's more about basking in the borrowed glory of Manchester United, Barcelona, etc. by paying ridiculous amounts of money to buy their jerseys and hats. Most Indian soccer fans couldn't tell you the difference between a banana kick and a banana split, or explain the offside rule. But they could identify the colors, logos, and brand endorsements of the top European club teams, and could tell you the keyboard shortcut to type Barca (the way any English-speaking person would type it) as Barça with that weird tail under the C to convince themselves they really know their stuff.

Well, they don't. Some do. A very few do. But most moneyed upper middle class Indians are just latching on to clubs from random European cities they couldn't even pinpoint on the map because they don't realize how completely they have been taken in by well-crafted marketing campaigns. These Indians spend more than a slum dweller's annual food budget on overpriced (but usually made in Bangladesh) jerseys, display logos on their facebook and twitter accounts, and go by nicknames like "gooner" as an expression of their utterly shallow new-convert extremism. Little wonder then, that despite dozens of European soccer clubs playing the game, 99% of Indian fans swear by one of 3 mega brands - Manchester United, Barcelona (sorry, Barça), and Arsenal.

And these Indian soccer fans are at the forefront of ignoring civility and rudely telling someone "y u call it soccer da? Call it football no macha!" and "LULWUT? y u watch rugby/NFL/AFL da? Dem no be football ra. Dey be hand-egg ra!" And of course, lazily forwarding this oh-so-cliched hand-egg picture; perfectly representative of Indian soccer fans' sporting ignorance and tendency to bask in borrowed glory - they can't even come up with their own clever rebuttals! But their ego grows a few precious microns as they do all this.

So then, which sport can stake claim to the name football? There's a short answer and a long answer. The short answer - Meh, who cares? A rose by any other name and suchlike. To give you an analogy, at any given moment, I can't tell you if I'll call India's biggest metropolis Bombay or Mumbai. I am Marathi, and in that language, we call it Mumbai. But I also grew up when the city's "official" name was Bombay and that's what we called it when speaking in English. In my mind, the names are synonymous. But there are a bunch of folks as self-important, deluded, and rude as Indian soccer fans who can't abide by that. If they live in Shivaji Park or Goregaon, making someone say Mumbai instead of Bombay is the greatest Maratha achievement since the Battle of Wadgaon. If they live in South Bombay, making someone say Bombay instead of Mumbai is the greatest act of civil disobedience since the Salt Satyagraha. But the real answer, the short answer is - Meh, who cares?

The long answer is this. About soccer/football I mean, not that Bombay/Mumbai boondoggle. Rude soccer fans for some reason think of "soccer" as a word the Americans coined, and "football" as the pure true holy name that the noble Brits gave the sport. The long answer is vastly different. The answer steeped in history and etymology, not fallacious vapid logical shortcuts. Indian soccer fans simplistically say, as that hand-egg cliche denotes, that soccer is a game involving kicking a ball with the foot. NFL/Rugby/AFL involve carrying the ball by hands. Hence, FIFA/EPL is the "real" football. Done. Proved. Settled. QED. Elementary, my dear Watson!

Ah, Watson! Sherlock Holmes! Perfect segue!

Have you read the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter? Not one of my favorites, but useful here. Published in 1904. The captain of the Cambridge rugby team asks Holmes to locate a missing player on the eve of a crucial match against Oxford. In that story, the sport is referred to as just "football", sans any qualifiers on three separate occasions. It is also referred to once....only once as "rugger" (as opposed to.....soccer? But more on that in a while). And as rugby, zero times.

So in the la-di-dah home of the sport, England, as a story written by one of the most famous English writers ever suggests, "football" was a term used to referred to rugby. The fact is, "football" was a generic name for a bunch of different sports, including rugby, gridiron football, soccer etc. Football was not exclusively identified even in England as the sport that is now played in the EPL. And although there isn't complete consensus on this, most scholars agree that the term "football" comes, not from kicking the ball with the foot, but the fact that the sport was played on foot. So rugby was football and soccer was football.

In fact the name soccer also originated in England (not in America!) - soccer originates from Association, because that variant of football was called association football. So soccer is the name the English came up with to explicitly distinguish the EPL/FIFA type from other types of football in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Across the pond in United States, once English colonies, they played mainly English sports in the 18th and 19th century. In fact, cricket was very popular before the civil war, and a team of top cricketers from England toured North America in 1859 and played in front of packed stands in Philadelphia, Hoboken, Rochester, Hamilton, and Montreal. But my cricket-loving mind digresses.

The point is, they played a lot of English sports in America those days. Including football - different types of football. If you look at the history of football, the basic point seems to be tolerance for variations. Why go into history? Even today, rugby union is markedly different from rugby league. So that kind of football, where you are on foot but carry the ball in your hands, got tinkered with in America as well. That tinkering led to what I think makes American Football so awesome - the forward pass. The pioneers were colleges who played each other in the 19th century. Finally in the early 1900s, an innovation on the scale of what IPL seemed in 2007, was made. The first ever Rose Bowl (known then as the East-West Football Game) was played between Stanford University and University of Michigan in Pasadena in 1902. That is, two years before Doyle wrote his story about the missing three-quarter.

So we can see that in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the term "football" was used in America to describe what is now played in the NFL, and by AC Doyle to describe what we know as rugby. I am sure there are also instances of people using "football" back then to refer to what is now played in the EPL. I didn't look it up. Even reading about soccer makes me sleepy. But I am sure people used football to refer to soccer as well. That's the point. It was a generic term.

The 20th century progressed and progressed fast. For socio-cultural reasons I'd rather not go into, the football that became most popular in Europe and elsewhere was the variation that involved kicking the ball around. The football that became the most popular in America and somewhat popular in Europe (under the name Rugby) was the variation where you hold the ball in your hands and run. They're all football.

Except!

Well, the thing is, it's the Europeans who invented a different name for their kicking game - soccer. FIFA governs a sport that has two names, like the Bengali bhalo naam and daak naam if you will. Both names coined by the Brits. In America or in Canada, "gridiron" football was just called football. If you're in America, football is what's played in the NFL and Canadian football is what's played in the CFL. If you're in Canada, football is what's played in the CFL and American football is what's played in the NFL. By rights, Aussies should call AFL football too, but they call it "footy", maybe for the same bizarre reason they call barbecue "Barbie". Americans didn't need a second name for their favorite game the way Europeans needed it for their favorite game. Europeans who were into soccer were probably the ancestors of Indian soccer fans, insecure and unsure, and so came up with two names.

Why do I refer to the game in the EPL by the name soccer? In the immortal words of George Mallory, "because it's there!" The name soccer is out there, put out there by Europeans, and is understood worldwide as referring to the game that involves pretending to be hurt while taking leisurely strolls, once in a while prodding the ball into a disgruntled-looking net.

So why is the sport played in EPL/FIFA soccer and not football? Because if someone says football, it could mean one of several things. But if someone says soccer, it means only one game. The game where the highest trophy shouldn't be called Golden Boot, but Golden Actor Holding His Shin Pretending To Be Hurt.

TextsFromHillary for Mamata Banerjee

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Sun, 06 May 2012 22:32:00 +0000

Today Hillary Clinton is meeting Mamata Banerjee. I imagine these are the texts they are exchanging.
Obviously, inspired by Texts From Hillary whose creators Hillary didn't arrest, but LOL-ed with. Mamata Banerjee on the other hand...