My Secret Theory

This is not a secret theory (no shit, emblazoning it on my blog) so much as a theory about secrets.

What you need:

-Your deepest, darkest secret

-The most selfish and self-absorbed person you know

What to do:

-Tell said person your secret.

Results:

-Telling your secret to someone will be very liberating for you and help you take a load off.

-You will not have much interruption or annoying psycho-analysis from your audience.

-Most importantly, your secret will never get out because the person you told is so self-absorbed that, if at all they listened to what you said, they will not retain it long enough to repeat it.

Who's Judging?

"I'm not judging or anything..." "Don't judge me..."
How often have we heard phrases like that? We've made "judgement" the dirtiest word of our time. But after all, what do judges do? Look at all the facts, listen to all the evidence, put it together with logic, and come to a conclusion. I can think of worse ways to go. The judge doesn't even go so far as to say whether the accused is a good person or bad. Judges merely judge if the accused is guilty of a particular act or not, based on all the facts, the evidence, and the application of logic. They may then award punishment because it is in their power to do so.
But call the guy who lounges around in bed watching TV all day every day lazy, and he will accuse you of judgement, a far greater sin than sloth. I, personally, fail to see the active and ambitious person trying to get out. I do judge him to be lazy, and I'm not afraid to say so.

The Secret Treehouse in Christ

"They're on in 20 minutes!"
I put down the phone and burned rubber to Koramangala. When I pulled into the parking lot in Christ I could already hear music pounding out from somewhere.
Maya came running out of the milling crowd of students yelling in my ear, "Come on! They haven't started yet." She grabbed my hand and we ran into a quadrangle with 3-storey classroom blocks all around and a makeshift stage up front from where the sound was emanating. There was a seat for me in the front row with Maya's friends, where we insensitively made fun of the PUC boys who were playing.
Rahul's band was playing that afternoon in the Western Electric competition of the Christ College fest. They took the stage. Our brother Rahul played lead guitar. In his "lucky" camouflage pants. They started tuning up, relaxed and laughing unlike the earlier bands. It was just before Christmas and Rahul broke out a Santa hat before they burst into a rendition of Deep Purple's Highway Star, the song that "made them famous" in all the city college competitions. Rahul grinned at us and we went wild with pride during his guitar solo.
Satisfied in the knowledge that they'd bagged first prize, we joined the slow, light-hearted exodus of kids drifting out into the other quad. This one was a big lawn--the pride of Christ--under a huge, white, billowing canopy. As you watched it soared impossibly upward and came plummeting down at you in the breeze. Kids were sitting on the grass, sprawling, lying down. Chilling.
Thermal and a Quarter, Christ's flagship alumni band, were tuning up on the (much more respectable) stage. Their sound check was taking forever but strains of a funky, bluesy sound were escaping from it.

When it was over, Maya and I, hidden in the crowd, made our way out. The secret treehouse was apparently so secret that even her best friends didn't know about it. We passed by some classroom blocks and down a long, tarred drive. We stopped and looked up at the sky because it was fading slowly to pink and a long double line of brilliant white jet exhaust was slowly streaking across it to the west.
Soon we were walking by a fence and down on our left was a small, presumably man-made, lake. It looked green and cool and it was surrounded by rocks and foliage and it had stork statues and tiny islands in the middle. Maya said nothing.

We burst through the fence off the road and there was a low, spreading fig tree with a stone embankment around it and a ladder against it.
We climbed up to the secret treehouse. It was incredibly neat, well-made, unpainted wood, big enough for at least three people to sit in. There was even a stool for one. Someone had rigged a Christmas star around the bare bulb that hung from the pointed wooden roof. The western sun shone through the gaps in the slats making sun stripes on the opposite wall and on us as we sat looking down at the lake.
We ducked out of view, just in case, whenever one of the "lay brothers" from the Dharmaram College friary came wandering out. They clearly knew about the treehouse. (What's a treehouse when you're in on the secrets of the Universe?) In fact, it belonged to them and was unpublicized because they didn't want students coming out here to get stoned. We sat a while on the low stone wall by the lake where the tall reeds grew out of it.
Later, we were sitting in the stands bordering the not-so-secret football ground, eating pop corn in front of the canteen with the last of the students in the dying light before the guards started blowing whistles and throwing everyone out.
"Wow, I never thought I'd say it but I wish I was back in college. And a real college, not the tight-ass joint I went to."
"But you had good times in college..." Maya suggested.
"Sure, but no thanks to the college. All the good times I had were in violation of the college."
"Yeah, I'm actually sorry it's over this year."
It was dark now and they had lit a huge fire behind us with all the garbage from the canteen.

The Gravity Sand Filter

We weren't allowed on the roof of our hostel in Manipal. I was lying there, spreadeagled on the rough concrete floor in the shade of the water tank in the afternoon. Just the closeness of that water tank made it all cooler. All you could see were the tops of the gently swaying palm trees and the blue, blue South Canara sky. I was lying perfectly still, willing the hawks and kites that wheeled overhead to come close to me, listening to their occasional soporific cries.
There was some sort of workman going in and out on the periphery of my vision. He kept coming out onto the roof and climbing up to the water tank. That was the reason the terrace door was open in the first place. He climbed down the aluminium ladder from the tank. He was tiny, with a round head and grey crew cut hair that made his ears stick out. He had the typical labourer's clothes, shorts and shirt with a cloth slung over his shoulder. He disappeared into the building and went downstairs for, like, the fortieth time.
Curious, I went to the wall on the hostel side and looked down. He emerged at the bottom and went around the building to the back, where it was all muddy. He squatted and started collecting stones in a shallow metal dish. The block security guard wandered out into the open then and looked directly up at me. I ducked out of view a second too late with a curse on my lips, still picturing the old man's skinny frame hunched under the weight on his head, trudging up four flights of stairs. And he'd been doing this all afternoon.
He came out onto the roof and addressed me in Kannada, "Little sister, the watchman says you have to get off the roof."
"Okay, Pop, I'll just hide here a while longer."
"Okay, then." He asked me as he went back to work, "You study here? How much does it cost to study here?"
But I was embarrassed to tell him. Blowing up hundreds of thousands learning how to arrange cutlery while he hauled stones up four floors to fix our drinking water system. "Too much," I sighed. It was past 4:00 now, and something occurred to me. "Would you drink some tea?"
I ran down the stairs to the mess, where there were steel cups and tea on tap. Of course we weren't allowed to take a cup out of the mess. I took two, and made my barefoot way back upstairs. I handed the tea up to him and and he looked at me like he hadn't expected me to come back at all. His eyes crinkled up and he laughed an indulgent, throaty, old man's laugh just like my grandfather's. A mist of good feeling settled over me. We sat down to drink our tea, he on top of the tank. He fired up a beedi, savouring the unexpected break. He told me I was just like his daughter and that she'd been married a while ago. He told me about what he knew best, the agriculture in his home district, Shimoga. They grew peanuts and rice and coconuts.
I saw him again briefly the next day. He came back to the hostel to finish up. I smiled at him. He didn't smile back but his eyes crinkled up in recognition and he left. The terrace door was open again. Mr. Stanley, our Engineering/Maintenance teacher and butt of all jokes, was out there overseeing. "Come look at our new gravity sand filter." We were studying those that year. He smiled graciously, inviting me to climb the aluminium ladder.
I climbed and stood barefoot on the improbably cool tank in the glare of the overhead morning sun. I peered into the dark square of water rippling over the stones below. The tank outlets were opened for their routine cleaning, and one by one the cascades started to gush out of them, slowly covering the floor with light-catching water.

Andrew and Tania's Psycho-Battle

Tania says psychology is an exact science and legitimate field of study. People's motives can always be categorized and their abnormalities measured. Tests, questionnaires and background studies can always pick out the child-molesters and potential alcoholics.
Andrew contends that psychology is too subjective and infinite an area to be studied in an organized way. If you were to categorize motives and abnormalities, there would be as many categories as there are people in the world. If you're good with people, you know everything there is to know about psychology. And if you aren't, well, no amount of studying the subject is going to get you anywhere.

Madheshwara Homestay

The occasional bicycle or bullock cart or fork-tailed bird are all you'll see on the long road leading to the Madheshwara Temple & Home Stay, Chikyelcheti, in the MM Hills area.

The house and temple are at the end of a mud road on the edge of the forest, land marked by a huge and ancient peepal tree, and an unnamed lake. Behind the house, Mr. Subbanna's urli field stretches away in the afternoon sun, randomly punctuated by sunflowers. There are haystacks, calves, goats, and theirs are the only sounds and smells in the air.

Mr. Subbanna takes us deep into the forest, into stream beds and ravines, down paths only he knows. We see wild flowers and peacock feathers; tiger tracks, elephant dung and bear claw marks in tree trunks; the remains of tribals' campfires. We stare into the twilight for elephants on the distant blue-green hills.

In the guest room, the roof is only partial, made of red Mangalore tiles. The rest is a canopy of bougainvillea flowers from a twisted tree growing out of the earth floor, and the starlit night sky beyond. With the feeling of having slept in the pages of A Midsummer Night's Dream, you wake to the smell of woodsmoke and the sound of roosters calling.

Goa Poem

The tide must be calm and receded

From the lonely beach under the moon

The saudade is back and it has to be heeded

The memories as fresh as last June

Step on it harder

Across the state border

I can't get to Goa too soon

At this time tomorrow

I'll be in the vaddo

Writing in three-foot letters in the sand

Informing the shacks

That, "I'll be back"

And the coastguard, too, if they give a damn

At last it won't be just a waking dream

When I see the tall palms at first light

And the glowing rice fields by the Seventeen

I've been driving to Goa all night

Twisted Hysteria

A couple of stray dogs mauled a kid in a neighbourhood in Bangalore the other day, and an infuriated mob then hunted down and killed 20 stray dogs in revenge. It got me thinking, when innocent women got beat up on Rest House Road a few months ago, and the whole "moral police" campaign sparked off incidents of violence against women around the city, no one in the crowd ever lifted a finger to help them. The intent to spread hatred and disturb public order was pretty clear in those incidents of violence, while the dogs were probably acting out of natural instincts like hunger. Where were they, that same outraged and proactive public, when those girls got beat up? Probably somewhere valiantly meting out justice to something weaker than themselves, like dogs, that they know don't stand a chance against them. Running scared from anything resembling a real threat.

"When I was a young boy / My father took me into the city / To see a marching band"
[My Chemical Romance]

That was the song stuck in my head, and a marching beat, when I walked around the corner and down the street to the supermarket. Still playing as I roamed the aisles in a kind of reverie that supermarkets will put you in. Still, as I stepped out of the cool, humming shade of the store and stood transfixed at the top of the steps down to the footpath.
He came into sharp focus, everything else blurring into the background. Impossibly, incongruously, coming up the footpath from the Cambridge Road end. In a blue coat with epaulets and tassels and brass buttons catching the sun, blue pants with a silver stripe down the side, a blue peaked cap tucked under his arm, and black polished shoes.
It would be wrong to say he caught my eye. He just had it all along. As he passed by me, his face changed into a strange, knowing, half-polite, half-evil smile. I smiled and stayed, staring after him, till he walked on up the road out of sight.

I'm in a BlogSpot!

I always thought making a Blog was somewhat pompous and presumptuous, but now that I've been compelled to make one, I must admit I don't mind the pomposity and self-indulgence quite so much. It's like having my own little island out in cyberspace. (I'd rather have my own island in the Bay of Bengal, but with that, I probably wouldn't have a bunch of templates to choose from and the certainty of abandoning it as soon as my assignment was done.) Vet bloggers would have me believe there's no looking back once you've been down this pier. So here I go.