Omad, 2mad, nomad and other forms of madness

Through my life, I recall someone or the other pestering me to eat healthy, starting with my mother, then my vigilant wife. Now of course, there is Youtube…

But through this journey, the crux was always about what to consume. The “when?” question was never considered worthy of scientific enquiry. In fact “more the healthier” used to be the conventional wisdom in my younger days. Eat 4 - 5 moderate meals a day, snacking now and then is OK. Those were the good old days when hunger was a sensation you could swiftly and mercilessly act upon. And given the very elastic interpretation of what moderation meant to different people, it was pretty much the dietary utopia.

 

Alas, a happy equilibrium is not meant to last in the internet age. Into this garden of Eden, a bunch of nutrition experts started intruding nastily. Having exhausted all permutations of what one can eat, they now came in with a new trajectory of attack. Namely, when you eat and how often you eat! Evolution had not built man, they proclaimed, for so many meals a day. In their jaundiced view, breakfast-lunch-high tea-dinner (with a bunch of snack breaks thrown in) was an artificial construct, brought about by modern living. So what? Would these blokes shut down their Youtube channel and use cave paintings to get their message across?

 

It’s terrifying to see the rapidity with which the absurd gets mainstreamed in the digital world with sundry influencers perennially hunting for the next new thing coupled with the relentless pressure their followers are under to conform to what their role model suggests.

 

I was rudely sucked into this vortex when my wife, having chanced upon one such reel, issued some clear directives. No more snacking between meals. Further, dinner will henceforth be treated as the last meal of the day in letter and spirit, she ruled. 

 

While that was a constraint, I consoled myself that I could live with it and in fact, over time, was able to accept a snackless existence as some kind of a new and a healthy norm. This kind of living, I told myself, would extend my life. OK, the extended life will exclude snacking but the trade off, while dubious, felt like I was at least doing the right thing. My body is my temple, I kept reminding myself, while trying to keep away intruding images of laddoos and similar prasadam items that the metaphor spawned…

 

Cut to a recent reunion of my batchmates. Inevitably matters turned to how someone was so fit and someone else still possessed that full mop of hair and the like. Many were touting something called “intermittent fasting”. I was not initially impressed. The thing sounded suspiciously like the fast of our Tamil Nadu politicians on the Sri Lanka issue or the Cauvery water issue. The modus operandi is that our noble lawmakers have a heavy breakfast and proceed to Marina beach at 930 am. There, a Shamiana will be set up to shield their sensitive skins from heat exposure. Some half hearted sloganeering will follow and by about 130 pm the ritualistic consumption of a glass of OJ will signal the end of the fast, to be followed by a sumptuous lunch. Sheer genius, ticks off so many boxes. 

 

Intermittent fasting though, as I subsequently learnt, was designed to be a little more intense – essentially, two meals a day. 2mad. In one fell swoop, the number of meals is halved, accompanied by a liberal dose of science to suppress voices of alarm and dissent. Autophagy. Fewer Glucose spikes. Lower Insulin resistance. Plus, one evidently has to give one’s gut microbiome some rest and downtime. Seriously? Who would have known that these gut bacteria chaps were also agitating for work life balance! What next? A four day work week or something?

 

I should have steered clear. But making grand pronouncements is a universal frailty and in an unguarded moment, I announced to my family that I was moving to a 2mad plan. I was temporarily gratified by the admiring looks from my family members, but with time, I sobered down and realized I was stuck. I had to make 2mad work for me. Or risk my family’s derision.

 

As I peeled the specifics of this transition from 4mad to 2mad, I realized with a sinking stomach that it comes with very rigid rules. You have to go all in. The slightest transgression will qualify as a meal rendering my 2mad regime null and void. No biscuits, slice of bread, nothing in between the two meals. Not even coffee, unless it is black, no sugar. You see the slippery slope? I observe the growing list of sacrifices with despair. Snacks, coffee, cookies… With each denial, I can feel my life getting robustly extended but without any accompanying sensation of achievement. In fact, the only physiological sensation I feel mostly is that of a growling stomach. And emotionally? They say the gut is connected to the brain, which is probably why my mind feels empty most days as I move around like a zombie counting the hours till the next of my two meals. OK, I lie. Far from being empty, my mind is actually full of thoughts of onion pakodas and jilebis… 

 

Things hit a peak when my son recently announced over the phone that he is toying with going omad. One meal a day. It is incomprehensible to me, but it is apparently a thing with his generation. Where is the world going? From omad to nomad is a short step. But I’m willing to bet that’s going to happen. Nomad is too cool an acronym to let go! Surely it  will be interpreted in a workable manner into our diets! 

 

Many of us were puzzled when India was ranked 102 out of 123 countries in the World Hunger Index. Below even Burkina Faso! Now you know the answer. In fact, I would postulate that in interpreting this index, availability of food to consume is a distant second factor to the degree of traction this number of meals a day scam has achieved in that country…

 

Anyway, adaptation and survival being second nature to man, I have been able to overcome my initial dismay at 2mad and its cruel limitations. Following a short period of crankiness that naturally accompanies unwarranted abstinence, I have now resorted to underhand methods. My house is of modest size, but it has its nooks and crannies where I can create secret spaces safe from my family’s gaze, all capable of storing cookies and murukkus and the like. Plus I have started maximizing official breakfast and lunch meetings. The trick is to ensure no single individual is around for all your meals of the day, so that nobody knows exactly how many meals you’ve consumed. That way, you can maintain the illusion of 2mad to the world, while the true score is known only to yourself. The net upshot is that I’m eating and snacking like before, sometimes achieving 5mad and even 6mad on a good day…

 

I’m not really sure if this is all good or bad, but I’m strangely unperturbed. I have absolute certainty on one thing. They say the world is circular. Food science is even more so! Something that induces cholesterol yesterday is a superfood today. Just ask the much maligned ghee. Bread has been ill-treated too, albeit in the reverse direction. Coffee, chocolate and wine are good or bad depending on the study being quoted. I am positive that someday in the future 4mad will again attain its erstwhile status as the gold standard diet norm. It’s not a question of “if”, just “when”. That day I’ll come out of the closet. Till then I’m prepared to live a life of subterfuge. OK, gotta go. Feeling snacky…

 

 

****

Matrimaami.com

My son just got married. A blissful event for us though not quite a typical big fat Indian wedding. It was of average bigness and fatness, maybe marginally overweight in parts, given we got over-enthu now and then, but generally, as I said, a happy occasion. Even as we’re suffused with the warm afterglow, I cannot but help reflect on some key learnings that I want to share for those who sit on the threshold of embarking on a similar endeavour. Actually, make that one key learning…

 

Before I just throw it out there, here’s some context. It was a hybridized arranged marriage in the sense that my wife initially spent some time looking for profiles on a matrimonial site online. You could say this is where the story begins… 

 

When the topic of enrolling in the matrimonial site came up I, as is my wont, did a quick scoot and it fell on my wife to take charge of proceedings, which she did with some initial grumbling. The process seemed quite tedious and the grumbling progressively gathered intensity to the point that on certain days, the entire household was on orange alert. Surprisingly at some point, the decibel levels of the complaints reduced and soon altogether stopped. Very curious. Assuming it was one of life’s harmless mysteries that one should not prod and poke much, I moved on with life.

 

One of the following evenings, when we had a vigorous ideological collision on the subject of disposal of some furniture, I sharply asked her to not raise her voice and in the heat of the moment she retorted that the gentleman she spoke with earlier that evening had just complimented her on her sweet voice, so I apparently needed to get my ears tested…

 

That stopped me in my tracks. Which gentleman? That evening she was home, the doorbell hadn’t rung even once, so if gentlemen were complimenting her it could only have been someone serenading from the balcony or something…

 

The alarm bells were ringing. Promptly and on a suo moto basis, constituting a high powered one-man SIT, I got to work. Turned out that it was some Maama who had called for a potential alliance for his daughter and they had ended up spending half an hour exchanging origin stories of their ancestral villages. And finally, after delivering the “what a sweet voice you have, Madam” compliment, had promised to call again after matching horoscopes.

 

Digging relentlessly further, I started unearthing further case facts. It turned out that there was a veritable truck load of Maamas who had been calling ostensibly for a marriage alliance, but ended up chatting about everything from Chennai weather to the latest Vijay movie. My wife, a conversation junkie, was clearly captivated by the sheer variety of conversations she was having with all kinds of Maamas who, while quite diverse in all respects and backgrounds, seemed to be unanimous about one thing – my wife had a sweet voice and they liked talking to her!

 

It got to a head when one day her phone rang and I attended it as she was otherwise occupied. It was some random Maama on the other end who had called to follow up on a previous conversation with my wife. Despite my constant assertions that I was the potential groom’s father and as such, was duly authorized to speak on his behalf, the Maama was indignant and demanded to speak only to my wife. It felt like one of those days when the client refused to talk to me while asking for my boss to avoid wasting any more time…

 

I further ascertained that my wife had signed up with multiple matrimonial sites over the process. While she steadfastly maintained that it was to cast the bridal net wider, the upshot of it was that she was getting acquainted with a growing number of sundry Maamas. Frequently I would overhear vibrant conversations from “which is the most powerful Hanuman temple” to “the most effective and bio-available form of vitamin D3” to “the likelihood of a cyclone forming over the Bay of Bengal the coming week”. Yes, now and then, also some horoscopes and stuff…

 

It’s always a trifle unsettling when a horde of smooth talking Maamas, equipped with a lot of free time and infinite perseverance keep hitting on your wife. I must admit the green-eyed monster was beginning to rear its ugly head. Nothing very serious, not a vivid, intense green, rather a mild, marginal, you could say a light pastel green eyed one, but still, I was a little torn. Should I intervene actively (empirically a bad choice) or just let things play out in the hope that compliments about her voice and way of speaking will eventually start wearing thin? 

 

Ultimately, lessons learnt during management school were hard to shake and I decided to adopt a wait and watch strategy. The fact is, I was noticing that the process was slowly but surely beginning to tell on my wife’s patience. She’s a busy lady who, when she feels the weight of idle time, would manufacture some pointless work to keep herself occupied. Leisure as a concept, she abhors. It was dawning on her that all these Maamas were generously endowed with free time and possessed excessive knowledge on a wide swathe of topics, which they were keen to share with her. And their inclination to chat interminably was starting to impact her work productivity…

 

During all this while, I found myself ruminating over a puzzling fact. Most men I know would delegate the task of handling this process to their wives. Before you take umbrage, I am not being sexist. We men are just not equal to the rigors and the socialization quotient demanded by this exercise. For instance, my son’s father in law, I subsequently learnt, had delegated this task to his wife with even more alacrity than I! So how is it that so many Maamas were calling? Why didn’t they delegate to their wives? Are they genuinely on the website for a matrimonial alliance or are they just looking to have general chats with random Maamis in the hope that, if they cast the net wide enough, chances are that one thing would lead to another?

 

If so, I must grudgingly concede that it’s a pretty smart scheme; a very disarming way to reach out to Maamis of all hues with an iron clad alibi. And going by any law of probability, if you have sufficient patience to make an infinite number of phone calls, at the very least you’ll have an impressive digital rolodex of phone pal Maamis…

 

Anyway, finally for us, all is good. My son’s wedding went well. My wife and I stay happily married, I guess none of the Maamas had it in them to create disruption in the nest. 

 

Though, I have to confess that I have silently taken note of this genius strategy.  From my vantage point, my son’s wedding has been a huge missed opportunity. At some point, when it is time for my daughter, assuming she assigns the task of looking for a groom to us, don’t be surprised if I leap at the task and take full ownership of the process...   

***

The Evolutionary Quest for a Slender Finger

No, that was not a typo. I didn’t mean slender figure…

 

Before I clarify further, I need to take you on a minor Darwinian detour to get into the skin of this thing called evolution. Since Man first came to be on earth, he has been continuously evolving in keeping with the times. For instance teeth and jaws have shrunk as vegetarian diets proliferate. Light skin and blue eyes came about in places with less sunlight exposure. Brains enlarged to cope with the increasing complexity of making decisions from a multitude of choices, for example which OTT series to watch next, notwithstanding the fact that you would probably go back in the end to re-bingeing on Brooklyn 99 or The Office…

 

But here’s the nub - most of these changes were forced upon us by nature and were not man made, meaning we could go about the process of evolving at a glacial pace that sometimes spanned millennia. The technology era is however imposing a huge challenge on the need to dramatically speed things up. Will humanity be able to cope? How can we suddenly up our game and dramatically accelerate the the evolutionary process? 

 

You may be a little bemused at my disquiet. Why do we need to evolve rapidly, you may wonder. Is it the AI revolution I’m alluding to? And where do slender fingers enter the equation? Stay with me while I walk you through the precarious situation that you’re already in and probably haven’t quite realized yet. 

 

If you are an “abbreviation person”, phrases like LOL, ROFL, OMW are probably part of your active lexicon. But I find it incomprehensible that the one thing that we need to say most often has not yet been abbreviated by humans. I am talking about DBM. Or its cousin, DBE. Dialled by Mistake. Or by Error. 

 

Think about it. How often, when you finish a call and then casually swipe the screen to close it, has your clumsy finger accidentally triggered another call? Or you want to select a number from a list on the touch screen, but your index finger inadvertently selects the adjacent one and you don’t even realize it sometimes till the strange voice on the phone jolts you into facing up to the fact that you had DBMed…

 

And don’t get me going on how frequently I see a whatsapp group call being initiated by some poor soul whose fingers seem to have a mind of their own? Infact, have you ever seen a bonafide whatsapp group call? It’s almost always a case of DBM. 

 

Lest you run away with the superficial insight that this is about wrong calls, I would urge you to stay and hear the whole of it. I next point to the phenomenon of the 2 second voice note in whatsapp groups! Clearly triggered by some errant finger pressing on the mic button unintentionally. The note, if you’re lucky, will probably be blank, but it could just as easily trigger world war 3 if you were verbally indiscreet during those two seconds when your finger was playing the dirty on you. The worst case scenario here is of course when you suddenly notice on your phone screen that a call is actually in progress for the last 40 seconds, thanks to your errant finger having dialled your boss…

 

In the good old days of the manual typewriter, there was so much space between the keys that I even remember my fingers getting stuck in between keys while typing! In the relentless thrust of miniaturization, the keypad became progressively smaller as we graduated to PCs, then laptops. Now with the mobile phone, we have hit rock bottom, with the keypad being compressed into such a small area that the average button area is 0.5 square cm (source : the omniscient ChatGPT). The same Omniscient One also tells me that the average thumb area which is in contact with a mobile phone button is 1.5 square cm. That’s 3 times the button area!!! So mathematically speaking, there is always a 66% chance you don’t press the right button! 

 

What really drives me up the wall are some of these evil websites that I get directed to. You land on their page unsuspectingly, but soon enough there are a bunch of pop ups containing ads, cookie notifications and the like. To read or see what you primarily wanted to, you have to go through the excruciating step of closing each of these popups by pressing a microscopic “close” button which will typically be 0.01 sq cm in area, with your 1.5 sq cm sized thumb! To make things interesting, this has to be sometimes achieved while the page is loading jerkily, making the already miniscule bulls eye a moving target on top of it! I never get it right, and sure enough, the next thing I know is that I’m being asked to confirm the payment mode for an annual subscription to some random service. 

 

Make no mistake. Finger obesity is rapidly becoming the next health epidemic. I am sure, over generations, our fingers will slowly adapt and evolve into slim, reed like structures, but this transition is simply not going to keep pace with that of technology’s relentless and rapid march towards miniaturization. 

 

Mankind, having obsessed about hearts, brains, livers and even kidneys, is waking up sheepishly to the fact that it had collectively taken this appendage rather for granted. That the size and shape of our fingers would play any role at all in our lives has been a rude surprise. Take my dad, for instance; slim and dapper for his age, he has an unusual handicap. He has stub-like thumbs, completely out of proportion to his frame. The number of times he DBMs me or my siblings is legendary in family circles. It’s actually a miracle that he has not yet been snared into supporting some large Nigerian family’s lifetime expenses on account of his uncontainable thumb.

 

People of my vintage marvel at how even very young kids are seemingly so adept at the mobile, displaying no discomfiture whatsoever. For simplistic minds, this constitutes a paradox, whereas I present it as living evidence of my theory. Just give them time. Let their tender bodies and thus the fingers grow larger and we’ll then see how they start fumbling…

 

Let’s face it, we are helplessly caught between the mismatch of the rapid speed of technological disruption and the more unhurried and generational evolution of nature. Probably not going to happen in my lifetime. But being an eternal optimist, I googled “exercise for slender fingers”, and was absolutely thrilled to get about 17 million hits! After much tortuous navigation of these websites though, I figured out that the top two suggestions were “avoiding sodium” and “drinking lots of water”. Clearly, not the beginning of the solution that I’d hoped for, more a dead end… 

 

There it is, then. Chances are, till we evolve into lean-fingered versions of the homo sapien species, we are doomed to miscommunicate whenever we set out to type words, that much is clear. The only upside of this is that the wide prevalence of this problem makes it a very credible excuse even when you type exactly what you wanted to, but feel it politically wise to retract. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it – I typed (or dialled, or pressed) by mistake” has the potential to be a very valid get-out-of-jail-free card whenever you want to get out of a tricky spot. I would go as far to say that in the all-time list of undebatable excuses, this one can occupy the top spot, in the process dislodging the latecomer’s legendary “sorry, Mumbai traffic, you know…”.

 

*****

Proof of Life

The whole thing started when my daughter, post a retro music event, remarked that the music piece played at the beginning was kind of catchy in a cute, quaint way… 

 

That’s all the opening I needed. I explained to her that it was the title music of a movie called Sholay that was released almost 50 years ago. With evangelist zeal, I suggested we catch it together on OTT, as it had been almost five years since I had last watched it for the 23^rd time, only to have suggestion summarily scorched…

 

That cut me to the quick. You see, for many of my vintage, responsible parenting comprises inculcating habits like good table manners, making the bed and being respectable to elders; watching Sholay would comfortably qualify to be part of this list. I realized I had been remiss… 

 

That was the mission then, should I choose to accept it. Make her watch Sholay. End to end…

 

Of course, in an endeavour like this, proper planning and foundation laying are essential. Step one was cunningly suggesting to her that we should make it a thing to watch movies on OTT together now and then. This was received with some initial suspicion, but eventually we got the ball rolling. To begin with, I had to yield to her choices to conceal the true purpose of the entire scheme. So I suffered through a ton load of tripe like Beast, Retro and even Pathan. Pure agony! But I soldiered on with nary a protest. 

 

Eventually, after demonstrating adequate commitment to the dad-daughter bonding exercise, it was my turn to pick. I won’t bore you with the details, but I had to really work at getting Sholay into the playlist. A combination of emotional blackmail, sulking and when nothing worked, some ungainly begging got things to the point finally where we settled down to watch Sholay, popcorn in hand. The popcorn was my touch, I was leaving nothing to chance here.

 

It was an excruciatingly hard journey. All the calls that my daughter would ruthlessly ignore during Leo and Retro were suddenly calls of critical import! The first 20 minutes were so stop and start, she kept losing the thread. About half an hour into the movie she just walked off claiming she had work to do and maybe we could watch it the next day…

 

I was a disturbed man that night. Couldn’t sleep. What does this say about my daughter’s character, was the thought running feverishly through my mind as I tossed and turned. Is she the kind of person who would not like Sholay? Where did we go so wrong in her upbringing. I confided in my wife over coffee the next day, but was rather disappointed with her lack of reaction. Her casual remark , “so what if she doesn’t like it”, was a rude reminder to me that she herself had seen Sholay only twice. Sometimes I wish I had popped this question to her early during our courtship, but anyway, that ship has sailed… I realized with a despairing heart that I was alone in this quest. 

 

Not the kind to give up easily, I confronted my daughter over dinner the next day on her abrupt walk-out. After some tenacious pushing and prodding I got to the root of the issue. Apparently, she found the film very patriarchal. She couldn’t understand why Jaya Bhaduri had to be such a sad character dressed in all white just because her husband had died. That Basanti had to be a stereotypical female chatterbox was deeply offensive to her gender sensibilities. Ironically, all through her diatribe, I’m sitting there unable to get in a word sideways…

 

Out of sheer despair, I decided to go all in. A weekend trip to Pondy if we watched it to the end. I know, shameless bribing, and I’m not proud of the example I was setting, but sometimes, the means are a distant second to the end, especially when the end is so noble…

 

So off we went again. In about 30 – 40 minutes of watching another of her important calls came up. Apparently it was going to be a long call so she called close of play. But by this time, Gabbar had had a chance to show up on screen, more Sholay things had happened. I was not certain, but something seemed to suggest that the filmmaking was beginning to make a dent on her defenses. 

 

That night, I was still disturbed, but for the first time since I undertook the mission, I detected a glimmer of hope. Not wanting to get lulled into a sense of false security, I lay awake into the wee hours of the morning, meticulously formulating my further course of action. 

 

The next few days, I didn’t explicitly mention the movie, but kept dropping some hints of about beaches and sunsets. Unfortunately, it seemed like it was falling on deaf ears. Or was I being too subtle? My heart was sinking again. How did this happen? I found myself critically examining her early childhood to figure out how this situation had come about. Was it that time when she, at the tender age of two, fell off the cot head first on the floor? Was it in her seventh year, when she was chased by a bunch of stray dogs and was so traumatized that she became a lifelong cynophobe? 

 

In the meantime, we had gone back to binge watching Brooklyn 99 and The Office. Hope had died a tragic death. And then one day, magically, she mentioned that we might as well finish watching Sholay. Moving like greased lightning, I booted up the movie and we settled down again. 

 

By now, Gabbar was doing his thing, Amitabh was being all tall and sardonic, Thakur’s grippingly tragic back story was laid bare for all to see. Mehbooba landed with a thunderous impact. As is my wont whenever I watch Sholay, I do a parallel delivery of every dialogue of every character. While earlier, she had tolerated this with a roll of her eyes, now she was actually shushing me. Bliss!

 

The rest of the way to the end was super smooth but it was her glowing closing comments that were sending me into raptures. I compiled a brief mental checklist and ran through it.

 

Did she cry when Jai died? Check.

Did she start randomly saying “arre o samba”, for instance when she wanted a second helping of sambhar during breakfast? Check.

Did she ask indignantly why there was no Sholay 2? Check.

Did she talk about wanting to visit Ramnagara near Bangalore sometime in life? Check.

 

Her reaction to each element of the movie was all that a parent could have asked for, leaving me quite mortified at my needless self flagellation. She liked Sholay! Her heart is in the right place. The sun shone through. Surely now she would go on to become a fine and upstanding adult who would contribute her bit to the world. 

 

In fact, expanding the boundaries of this point a bit, I would suggest we make this the ultimate test of proof of character, nay, of life itself. Seriously, corporates should do away with expensive psychometric tests like Myers-Briggs and just ask the question that matters : “Did you like Sholay?”. If the answer is “No”, you know you need to delve deeper into the darkness that lurks somewhere deep within the unfortunate soul. 

 

Or take the case of the overrated captcha. Recently, I was finding a particular captcha so indecipherable that I had to, in what could be called the supreme irony, take ChatGPT’s help to decode it. Maybe the way forward is to replace captcha with the same eternal question – “Do you like Sholay?”. And if the answer is negative, block, block, block. It’s almost certainly a robot. Or a warm body with a black heart. Either way it doesn’t deserve access…

 

India vs England : The true man of the series

OK, the hysteria behind Siraj is probably justified. Shortly, as the intoxication wears off, the pundits will hasten to claim that this is a team game and that this victory belongs to the whole team. Hell, some of them would even rush to credit the people who worked behind the scenes like the team masseur, the backup coaching staff and so on. True, they do deserve some credit. But the real casualty in all this euphoria is that the one person who worked tirelessly for the victory will continue to be unrecognized and hence, unsung. Who, you ask? Well, not to crow about it, but with all the humility at my disposal, I put up my hand as the unsung one.

 

Any lay cricket enthusiast will only know that Siraj bowled a good yorker and got Atkinson. Most Indian fans, in their utter naivety, will probably attribute it to various factors like Siraj’s fighting qualities, his never say die spirit and the like. Little do they know…

 

Seasoned sports writers will dissect the match, every session and indeed, the whole series. The sad thing is my contribution in the whole episode is not going to be recognized by anyone – not even my near and dear ones.

 

Take the critical first session of day 5. For the first over, I sat cross legged on my bed, not moving an inch, forcing myself to have an ever so small sip of water almost metronomically after every delivery by Prasidh, with my mobile phone face down to my left and at a right angle to my A/C remote and generally did all the other things that I knew would send the right energy to the Oval. But it didn’t quite work with England scoring 8 runs off the over. It was going to end very soon unless I nimbly changed my approach. For the next over, I moved to the living room and watched the match with the A/C at a setting of 24^oC and the fan at medium speed. Bingo! Siraj struck right away! Jamie Smith was history. 3 more to go…

 

Gratifyingly, a couple more overs down, the 8^th wicket went. And then, a slight drizzle. That was not good. I had to ensure that the rain didn’t pick up to the point where the match had to be suspended, even while guiding the course of the match. Much like Spiderman (the Toby one) who had to hold the cable with a hand to prevent MJ from falling down while fighting the Green Goblin with the other. 

 

This clearly called for another quick shift in strategy, leading me to watch the rest of the match on my mobile sitting in the balcony, facing the direction of the Oval (roughly 32^o North of East from where I sat). And shortly thereafter, and quite inevitably, the fat lady had sung! 

 

But before you run away with some simplistic take-out, let me expand a little. The “sitting on the balcony chair” thing channelized the Chi only for that point in time. Sometimes, results improve when I watch the match on the move, sometimes I have to completely refrain from watching the match to bring home the bacon. I must confess that in my enthusiasm to provide tailwind to our team, I sometimes tend to go overboard. On the first day of the last test, I watched sitting in a Padmasana pose on the floor in my study with all the lights off (a tactic I use only in extreme cases), resulting in a nasty shoulder injury to Woakes. OK, that was testing the boundary of fair play but cricket is a tough sport and I believe in competing hard. 

 

It is not just about the room or the position, sometimes even random things like working on a presentation during the match helps in generating positive outcomes. Word and Excel though, I avoid. Empirically I’ve found them to be quite disruptive and harbingers of bad energy. You’ll never believe this one - through sheer trial and error, I have established that I can unfailingly change the course of the match when I use this contraption that I have for inhaling steam. I just switch it on, inhale the steam for a few minutes, all the while watching the match from above the rim. It delivered solid results on day 5 of test 4, when I held firm like a wall between the Englishmen and the Jadeja – WaSu partnership.

 

I serendipitiously discovered this faculty of mine during IPL 2010. When I realized that my leaning on the cupboard in my son’s room while balanced on one leg had led to that over where Dhoni hit Irfan Pathan for 18 runs in the last over at Dharmasala, I knew I had the gift. I have since become somewhat of a specialist in reading the signs and doing the needful for CSK. That CSK are one of the most successful franchises in IPL is a matter of utmost pride and gratification for me.

 

By now you would have gleaned that the approach has to account for the tournament, the opponent and so on – multiple and complex factors to contend with and I confess I do sometimes get it wrong. Like with CSK over the last two years. I have just been unable to  find the right combination of device, room, chair, posture, diet and all the other small things that would have ensured victory for CSK. I try to take solace in the fact that everyone goes a bad patch, but one can’t help feeling miserable, especially when an entire franchise and all its fans are hoping for good results and one is just not able to do enough to bring it home…

 

I realize, at this stage, some of you may be a little incredulous. To the sceptics, I’ll point to chaos theory which postulates that when a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo, it could lead to a tornado in Tennessee. In all humility, I’ll not claim to be the only one who can pull this off. The story goes that when India won the famous Eden Gardens test match against Australia in 2001, nobody moved in the Indian dressing room when Dravid and Laxman were at the crease. Though, as an expert practitioner I must say that simply not moving sounds like beginner level stuff. 

 

Anyway come September, we have the Asia cup in the UAE. I’ll be a little tired from seeing Sinner through to the finish line in the US Open just before that, but hopefully will have enough juice to ensure a good outing for team India as well. I only hope Gill and Gambhir adopt a bit of strategic continuity. This constant chop and change of tactics has me, in turn, moving tack continuously and frankly It becomes a little tiresome. Especially when I am destined to go through my lifetime without any sort of reward or recognition for the favourable outcomes I engender…

 

 

Dedicated to all the ardent Indian fans who refuse to see their role as mere spectators of a sport and instead consider themselves as an integral part of the team, venting their angst through social media posts, breaking things in the room or, from a more utilitarian standpoint like me, doing all they can to channel the right energy to our boys…

 

 

My Long History of Outrage Over Gender Identity

OK, chances are, after reading the title, you’ve already cancelled me. But I implore you, lend me your ears for just a few minutes. 

The truth is, I am actually quite indifferent to the current raging debate on  gender confusion, identity and so on. If you are female, fine with me. If you are female and identify as male, I hope that gives you happiness. If you think you are something in between, it excites no great reaction from me other than a mildly benign hope that your confusion gets resolved in your mind sooner than later. In short, I tolerate. I would even go further and say I accept.

 

But there is an aspect of gender identity that has got my goat ever since my primary school days, when CBSE had mandated that Hindi would be compulsory learning for all. No escape. It was smooth sailing for a while, as the initial phase was marked by a degree of leniency arising from a creditable degree of pity as my Hindi teacher saw us struggling with a new language that was imposed on us by governmental fiat. But soon, a major reality of the Hindi language hit me.

 

Up until then, gender was not something that had caused any confusion in me. The concept seemed quite simple and definitive. However, the Hindi language suddenly transported me to the realm of gender confusion with a jolt. Not my gender. But about everything else’s gender.

 

You see, Hindi is a language where everything has a gender. Including inanimate objects! I can deal with the gender of a living thing. As I said, I am open to accommodating any view human beings have vis-à-vis their gender. And this courtesy and tolerance I would even extend to the entire animal kingdom. But a chair? A light bulb? A house? A mountain? An idea? What do you do when each of these have their own gender? And it is irrelevant whether it’s a man’s house or a woman’s house. In the Hindi language, the House stands proud with its own gender that cannot be superseded by yours!

 

I think back on the early days of Hindi and how this would have evolved. Must have been a pretty radicalized bunch who decided that everything is binary, gender-wise. To me, it seems like the conservative world’s first ever strike at the gender spectrum. A clear refusal to consider a more fluid definition of gender identity. I frankly think they went too far by labeling even inanimate objects as “Sthreeling” or “Pulling”, but it was probably a cry of defiance provoked by early signs of challenges to the human gender binary by the liberal side of the mix. The question of the neuter gender was ruthlessly suppressed, virtually neutered! There are a bare handful of neuter gender words in the entire Hindi dictionary.

 

At an ethical level, in today’s world, it poses some disturbing questions. Why is a House masculine? Why should all Houses be masculine. Why can’t some be masculine and some feminine? Every time there is a renovation, why should the House not be in a position to reevaluate its gender? It’s a disturbing and toxic imposition of gender on an object which has no wherewithal to contest the gender that’s been foisted on it. It goes against every liberal value we would like to teach our kids…  

 

So I have a huge challenge. Is it “Mera office” or “Meri office”? “Tera Gaadi or Teri Gaadi”? The process of my speaking Hindi involves multiple sequential steps starting with idea construction in English, followed by the painstaking task of identifying the right words, structuring basis Hindi language grammar, ultimately leading to sentence construction. By this time, my mental faculties are already straining under the load. On this, you overlay the gender question and my brain is just about ready to hand in its resignation with immediate notice.

 

I complain to my Hindi speaking friends, but their response is a usually a little patronizing. How can you figure it out, I ask. You just know, they say, with an unfathomable look that is normally reserved for the backbencher who always brings up the tail in the class tests. A few make an attempt and put out some feeble explanation. OK, anything ending in the vowel “aa” is male. “ee” is female they say, carefully feeling their way around as would a person trying to explain the science of how to breathe to another. OK then, explain why it is “Meri disha” and not “Mera Disha”, I say. At which point, the conversation, rather than diving into the perversions of the originators of the language, veers rather defensively in the direction of my Madrasi accent…(incidentally, “Madrasi” is masculine, not feminine, even if you meant a Madrasi woman – there you go, two strikes already on the “aa” / “ee” rule!). 

 

What complicates things is that two different words for the same object can have two genders!! So, “Saayaa” means shadow and is masculine. “Chhaayaa” means shadow and is feminine! “Jung” and “Yudh”, both meaning war, are feminine and masculine respectively. Figure that out!!

 

I try to reimagine the thought processes of the early creators of the Hindi language and cannot help but feel that they were either viciously sociopathic or were smoking some high quality stuff and consequently were in the mood to really let the fun times rip. In either case, the sufferers have been the succeeding generations of people who try to learn Hindi after getting conditioned to another language. I’ve heard about the dead rolling in their graves, but these creative forebearers of the language must be Rofling in their graves!! 

 

It's all so patently unfair. What the hell, I slog at learning the language,  expand my vocabulary, learn the grammar, even work on my Madrasi accent, only to get tripped up by some inane gender identity problem. I have universally loved each of my jobs, including during my time when I was located in Hindi speaking cities, however, The Speech was the one event I absolutely dreaded. Conventional wisdom has it that you get the audience to relate to you when you address them in their language. I’m ashamed to admit that I allowed myself to frequently subscribe to this dubious principle. However, from the sniggering that usually occurred during my Hindi speeches, I guess getting the gender wrong is probably the eighth deadly sin that got lost in translation…

 

I recall when CBSE relaxed the compulsory Hindi rule in my High school, I quickly shifted to French. Picture my state of mind when I got to realize that French is one of the few languages in the world that has the same gender identity problem that Hindi has!!!

 

It’s actually not very different from the “Exclusion through Jargon” strategy. Most of my business school education and a lot of what I learnt in my corporate life was that you had to unfailingly use the appropriate corporate lingo to be included. And to prevent unworthy infiltrators, new jargon keeps getting invented, so you have to be updated. I think the gender concept is the Hindi language’s M.O. to keep the club exclusive and outsiders in their place. You may be able to speak, but I’ll always keep you in the zone of discomfort through the gender card, Mother Hindi seems to be saying…

 

Anyway, I’m not making a case against Hindi here. I benefited much from learning Hindi. Clearly, anyone aiming to make a career that may take him or her or any other thing (told you I am tolerant!) to different parts of the country will be well served by learning the language. Just keep your objectives simple, don’t attempt mastery of the language, that will be a futile effort. There are too many words in the Hindi dictionary and each of them has some arbitrarily assigned gender.

 

Just go with the flow, develop a thick skin and make an apologetic half smile a permanent facial feature whenever you set out to speak Hindi…

 

*****

Friend turned Foe : The Treacherous Ceiling Fan

Along the journey called life, I have had my share of friends and foes as I’m sure you have, too. Some friends, over time, become foes and vice versa. It’s a part of the grand cycle, we accept it as our reality and learn to deal with it…

You would however think that such emotions are reserved for living beings, that it is not possible to feel strongly one way or another about inanimate objects. Before making up your mind however, I urge you to listen to a story about me and a device. A device which used to invoke pretty cordial emotions in me, but which I nowadays view with an extreme degree of hostility and even trepidation.

 

I am talking about the ceiling fan. Or indeed, any fan for that matter.

 

In my younger days, where air conditioners used to be the marker for luxurious living much as owning a Lambhorgini is today, the ceiling fan gave me many moments to savour. I still remember the bliss of returning from a cricket match in the scorching Chennai heat and plonking down under the ceiling fan. Or the thrill of using a ball point pen through the grill to manually start the fan in the train compartment. Or jostling for the seats directly under the fan during general class in school. I wouldn’t be going too far in saying that the fan had always been a life saver. 

 

One would have thought that over time, with A/Cs being quite prevalent, both the need for fans and the emotions they provoke would have moderated. Which was the case with me as well for a while. Of late though, fans are intruding into my life in a very nasty, unwholesome manner and causing substantial distress. 

 

Here’s the thing. Whenever man sets out to create anything, there are always ramifications. While the primary purpose of a fan is to circulate air in the room and cool the skin, which are both noble objectives, the process inevitably involves forcefully blowing a fair amount of air in different directions. Now we come to the nub of the issue… 

 

Till a point in one’s life, one’s hair tends to withstand a certain amount of disturbance. Simply because there is enough of it. Hell, wind ruffled hair after a bike ride even used to be a thing in my younger days. However, with the irrevocable coupling between between advancing age and receding hairlines, the sheer quantum of hair on one’s scalp tends to be a very natural casualty. Now, to drive the point home through an analogy, picture a strong banyan tree with lots of branches and leaves, proudly holding its ground in a storm and then a small, frail plant trembling under the onslaught of the same storm. The banyan tree carries on through life post-storm with scarce a stutter, while the small plant will need to go through the process of rebuilding its tender structure…

 

And so it has come to be for me! Just creating order in my hair is complex given it is nowadays a weakly held edifice with poor support structures; support which had been earlier provided through sheer strength in numbers, much like how stability is achieved in a jam packed Mumbai local train. So now, every time I pass under a fan, I need to hold out my hands protectively around the contours of my hairlines to prevent mayhem in the painstakingly established arrangement atop my scalp. And whenever my hands are unable to rise to the task of self-defense, utter and complete disorder is the usual outcome. The good old days of just running my fingers through and smoothing my hair are a distant memory. So now the entire formation has to be reconstructed from the beginning. I used to smirk with contempt at people who carried around a small comb in the back of their trousers in the 80s. Such a filmi thing to do, I thought then. Now of course, I feel like I’m some poster boy for Karma… 

 

Obviously, while the ceiling fan is the principal target of my ire, causing similar aggravation are all forms of the appliance fraternity that blow air with some degree of force. So much so, till a while back, the one thing I used to hate most was the painful security check process at the airport. Not anymore. Now I am petrified of the air curtain when I enter the terminal building. This is an evil device that blows a vigorous jet of compressed air directed from upwards and designed to land precisely on your scalp, from which there is no escape. And since I’ll normally be carrying some luggage, my hands will not be able to rise to protect the carefully constructed house of cards. Result, ruination! I can actually understand how embarrassed and exposed the Red Sea would have felt when Moses parted its waters without consent or warning, laying bare its naked seabed…

 

Hell, recently, there was a group photo being taken during a reunion. Technology having arrived at the advanced station it has, apart from a human being with a camera desperately exhorting us to say Cheese, there was a drone that was flying perilously close to us as it took candid pics from all kinds of angles. And soon enough the cry “Dai, Mudi Parakuthu daaaa…” (“My hair is flying!”) rung the air from multiple corners with the blades of the drone, rotating at a furious RPM, leaving destruction in its wake…

 

The lesson has been internalized to the extent that, while taking a helicopter ride had always been on my bucket list, I recently had to regretfully scratch it! Those rotor blades are so damn powerful, they may not just rearrange the hair, but may actually uproot and create irreparable damage…

 

I have observed there is something about thinning hair and the pathway to baldness that evokes scorn in the fairer sex, who seem to have got off lightly in this department. Nature, which has burdened the female of the species with menstruation, child bearing, unreliable domestic help and various other constraints has, in one fell swoop, over compensated through accelerated hair loss of the male! 

 

It's bad enough that you are forced to face this gradual erosion on a daily basis when you stare into the mirror. However, even close friends seem to feel like they are under some fraternal obligation to bring to your attention the fact that you’ve lost hair since they last saw you. Same with my hairdresser. Each visit leaves him more visibly shocked at the ravages wrought by time on my scalp. He recovers quickly though, and indulges in some aimless conversation that drags out the session, but I am conscious that the mix of work and talk is significantly veering towards less work and more talk with each passing visit. One of these days I am going to renegotiate the rate for my haircut which increasingly seems to consist of randomly snipping the scissors in the air and talking about the world hunger problem…  

 

I even considered shaving my scalp and going bald. I’m told it has some advantages. Ostensibly, you take the hair out of the mix. Very specious reasoning, though. For someone who faces up to the chore of shaving one’s face with resentment, I think dealing with stubble on the scalp is a whole other level of aggravation!

 

Anyway, at this stage of life, we men are children of a lesser god and we are reconciled to it. Just so you know, we are not looking for sympathy, we just want to be understood. The next time you see us weaving a circuitous path from point A to point B, don’t immediately assume the worst and jump to the conclusion that we’ve downed one too many or are trying to achieve proximity with some hot looking thing through the detour. We may just be charting a path that doesn’t put us in harm’s way from some sinister appliance that’s spouting out a gust of air…

 

*****