The Charm of the Written Word

I am told that it is not that kids of today have completely moved away from books. Somebody I knew had read it somewhere. I hope it is true. For I for one, believe completely in the age old maxim of "Books are a man's best friend".

A lot of what I am today is because of the kind of things that occupied my mind and time during my youth and reading happens to be one of the chief activities that would keep me busy then. And boy, did I love reading? I used to have a voracious appetite for books, ever since I recollect - and this was for all kinds of things readable - books, magazines, newspapers and later e-books etc - I have never discriminated against any medium of readable information. The use of them however was dictated by the availability, weight of the wallet, ease of reading etc at different times.

As a kid, I used to go to my grand-parents's houses regularly during my school vacations - both sets - paternal ones in Patna and the maternal ones, a little yonder, in Bhagalpur. Both my grandfathers had a healthy appetite for books and they, thankfully, transferred their genes on to me, albeit in different ways.

My paternal grandfather would spend hours reading the morning newspaper (in fact, later, when we used to stay with him and I was much elder, there would be a fierce competition in the house regarding the primary possession of the morning newspaper between me, my father and my grand-father !!) and would regale me with stories and events from there and from the works of various other authors, of which he had considerable knowledge. As a kid, the newspaper fascinated me - it seemed to me, a mysterious fount of stories from all around the world - it was through its pages that I learnt of the splendour of Angkor Wat and Borobudur, it was through those pages that a certain Diego Armando Maradona kindled my love for football, it was through them that I first heard words like glasnost and perestroika. In fact, the habit of spending at least sometime in the morning, come what may, going through the pages of the daily newspaper is something that I have strictly adhered to over the years, since I was a 7 year old boy. The sections that aroused my interest have expanded - but the order has remained constant through the years - sports, headlines, world news and then the rest. As a kid growing up in Kolkata, THE STATESMAN was regarded as the finest epitome of the Queen's English and we were asked to go through its editorials religiously in order to improve one's vocabulary and spellings. I am not sure how many of those weighty articles really caught my fancy at that age, but I must say that the sessions have not been in vain.

My maternal grand-father, on the other hand, had bequeathed a fine set of tomes for his descendants, for he was, unfortunately, no longer around when I really began reading earnestly. I hardly have any memories of him that I can draw up, but I owe my interest in a plethora of esoteric subjects completely to his collection of books. On countless afternoons in Bhagalpur, when the rest of the inmates of our house would rest in slumber, I would take apart those weighty tomes - page by page. There was one book especially that I cherished the most - LIVING TOGETHER AS WORLD NEIGHBOURS - Don't remember the author , but I do recall Macmillan as the publisher - but I recall reading with rapt attention the description of the peoples , cultures and histories of the whole world. It used to have lovely photographs of different cities of the world - most of them in B&W - but they seemed to light up the world for you in front of your eyes - the minarets of Kremlin, a long liner passing through the Panama canal, two-humped Bactrian camels loitering in the vast steppes of Central Asia, a Russian family sitting down for breakfast in their traditional Cossack costumes (I still remember, how surprised I was at seeing the quantity of food they had at their breakfast table), students milling around Heidelberg University, regarded as one of the oldest and grandest seats of learning in Europe etc etc. It had also a spectacular set of maps of each continent (in fact, the maps in that book with vast swathes of colonial Africa with names like Belgian Congo, Rhodesia, Nyasaland, U.S.S.R etc would seem perhaps, to be completely from a different planet to a kid of today) and this book was singularly responsible for my keen interest in maps and geography, something that I retain, to this day.

Of course, there has to be constant encouragement from parents and a lot of interest from their side as well before any habit is really ingrained in the children. I have imbibed my love of reading and knowing things - all kinds, all over the world - from my mother (who, having been raised up in small-town Bihar, has never ceased to amaze me with her knowledge of global events and her keen enthusiasm of learning about things even now - guess, my grand-father is to be credited) and my father, who used to spend so much time explaining to me such diverse topics as the structure of the United Nations, stories of different wars, dictators etc.

Kids today have a much larger and mind-boggling variety of entertainment options to choose from. I am not sure whether the Famous Fives, Secret Sevens, Enid Blytons etc form part of the consideration set of kids these days. But I hope that they do - books maketh a man. Very true.

The First of Many?

Marcus Trescothick’s international career as an England batsman may well be over after this latest bout of stress disorder that forced him out of the Ashes series. As a keen cricket buff, who has followed the ebb and tide of English fortunes in the cricketing field over the years, I am disappointed. England may well have turned the tide in the last year and half, topped by the famous Ashes triumph over the old foes, and perhaps much of the credit for that has gone to the young guns – Flintoff and Pietersen, but it was the solidity that Trescothick gave at the top of the order that had paved the way for many a win in recent years. The show, however, as they say must and will go on – a new star would arise over the horizon to take Trescothick’s place, sooner or later. I am optimistic on that count.

But, it is as a simple cricket lover, that I am despondent over the future of cricket. As with some other sports, cricket has now gone beyond the realm of a game – cricket is now a global business with its own set of sleaze and muck. The innocence and simple fun associated with a game is beginning to fade away. The game is run by administrators, who I am sure, are well-meaning people with innovative marketing ideas, solid administration experience etc, albeit coupled with a lot of love for the game; but most of them lack one crucial criterion – they have not played the game. Consequently, they fail to see the cricketer as a human being – they look at him as a resource to generate the moolah that has transformed cricket today. The Malcolm Speeds, Lalit Modis and Sharad Pawars have never been on extended trips to places far away from home, away from family and friends with the expectations of as much as a million people burdening you and millions analyzing your every damn movement to expose chinks in your armour. They are busy making jazzy presentations to all kinds of parties not integral to the game – sponsors, media barons, ad agencies – devising a more and more packed schedule of matches, finding out newer and newer places to play the game. Not that cricketers are above any kind of blame – the lure of money tends to overshadow all kinds of objections to its pursuit – but individually, a cricketer has little option – it is a fiercely competitive world these days and one chance slipped away may mean the end of your career.

Trescothick may well be an exception – you can always say that you have to grow up and be counted as one of the big boys. My only concern is that he may be one of the first to succumb to the greed of the modern game.

Welcome to the Gowda Circus

Mr. H.D. Deve Gowda likes to call himself the humblest farmer in India. His son, Karnataka CM Mr. H.D. Kumaraswamy professes to live by the ideals of Simple Living – High Thinking. His son, Mr. H.D. Nikhil Gowda obviously decided that he had had enough, living in the shadows of his illustrious forebears and decided to step out into the limelight in his own inimitable way.

And what a grand entry he has made – if you happen to stay in Bangalore, you must have noticed news about him and his deeds, screaming at you from the front page of news-hungry papers. From what we read of him in the newspapers – and never mind that it constantly changes course on a daily basis – we know this much – Nikhil Gowda is apparently a college drop-out. Thus, the academic route to greatness being closed on him, Nikhil chose to test his future as a politician by debuting on the surefire anti-social plank.

The event as it seems to have occurred, without the many twists and turns inserted later, is as follows:-
Last week on one of the weekday nights, Nikhil Gowda and some of his companions (I am starved of a better noun, for reasons explained later) decided to have a gala time, stooped in drunken revelry. When the party wound up at around the wee hours of the morning, Nikhil et al found out that they were so busy drinking, that they had forgotten that their stomachs had been grumbling for some time now. So they trooped over to Hotel Empire International on Church Street in Bangalore and demanded Ghee Rotis and Chicken Kebabs at 0330 hrs. For want of the financial muscle that Nikhil and his ilk can flex, the poor kitchen staff at the Empire International are not the ones who can party similarly. So they had done their bit for the night, closed the kitchen, swept the floors etc and had peacefully dozed off. Nikhil of course, would have none of it. He was the C.M.’s son – that gives him the right to kick people out of their sleeps at whatever time he wishes and order Kebabs and Sherbets. So it was that when the Empire staff pleaded helplessness, the Lord Nikhil Gowda decided to teach them a lesson for their insolence. He and his henchmen decided to vent their ire on the furniture and equipments inside the hotel premises and they ran amok. The hotel staff to their credit, showed considerable spine in fighting off the ruffians and in the course of this fight, Nikhil and his cronies, being outnumbered, decided on a quick retreat. Finding that physically they are not up to it, they decided to put their well-oiled connections to use. So the gang went to the nearest Police Station – Cubbon Park and filed a complaint of assault and bodily harm against the Empire hotel staff. And then they decided to get in touch with their underworld friends, whom they carefully groom for such occasions, and pressed them into action. Faced with the might of the professional goondas, the staff at Empire International succumbed this time and could only watch helplessly, as their place was thoroughly ransacked and some of their colleagues were sent to the cleaners. Incensed, their GM – one Mr. Junaiz went over to the same police station and filed a complaint against Nikhil and his cronies. He also claimed that the CCTV at his hotel had recorded the entire incident and this would be the clincher.

If you liked the above story, I guarantee that you will love the parts that will follow.

As expected, this incident created a storm – the Opposition parties conveniently forgot their own track record and lamented that complete breakdown of law and order in the city and decried the C.M. for encouraging his kith and kin to throw their weights around. Our simple living-high thinking C.M. however had a novel explanation for all this – he claimed that his son was not involved in this incident at all and it was all the handiwork of jealous opposition politicians who wanted to vilify him through his family. He lamented the fall in moral standards in politics that enabled some unscrupulous characters to use innocent kids like his sons as pawns for their political gains. Former PM Deve Gowda said that “Boys would always be boys” – as if that explained and condoned everything that had happened.

All this had happened in the morning after the incident. The media hawks would have none of this and ridiculed the C.M. To bolster his case, Kumaraswamy claimed to have overheard a secret conversation in the Assembly a couple of days earlier, in which two politicians were hatching a plot to unseat him through a scandal involving his family. Peculiarly, he claimed to have proof of this conversation – methinks, Kumaraswamy is perhaps one of these James Bond kind fellas, who moves around with tiny radio antennae fixed to his wrist watch, recording clandestine conversations – and more unusually, but in tunes with the recent trend of political dramas, he refused to make it public, saying that he will do so at the opportune time. The Empire International owners were also lent some friendly advice – pronto, Mr. Junaiz issued a press statement that the complaint he had filed in the Cubbon Park P.S. only named unidentified assailants, as in the dark, the hotel staff had not been able to identify the miscreants. The Police Station officials duly agreed with this version of the story. So what happened to the CCTV tapes and all the evidence – we were told that unfortunately the CCTV at the hotel had gone kaput that very week and had thus been rendered useless. How nicely convenient!!

More was to follow the next day. This time, Mr. Junaiz stated categorically that Nikhil Gowda was not involved as he had been a regular customer at the place and had he been involved, all the hotel staff would have instantly recognized him. He stuck to the anonymous goonda theory. The C.M. decided to do his own bit to clear the increasingly murkier air – he said that Nikhil actually had been sleeping in his house, when some of his acquaintances decided to pay him a courtesy call in the middle of a night and dragged him to some party – yeah, the C.M. claimed that his doodh peeta innocent bacha was dragged to a party. Actually, it was conveniently discovered that one of the guys named was somebody called Syed Ehtesham, who had a prior criminal record and also had some Congress connections (C.M. Kumaraswamy is from the rival JD-Secular party) – all fingers were immediately pointed towards him and this guy became the scapegoat. Kumaraswamy claimed that he had been planted by rival conspirators – Nikhil too, lost no time in disowning Ehtesham, claiming that he had not known him at all and they just had some common friends, perhaps. The Hotel staff was roped in to corroborate this story – Junaid claimed that Nikhil Gowda was actually standing outside when the entire melee happened and Ehtesham was actually the villain. It is more dramatic than the average Bollywood potboiler – methinks Junaid and his staff were struck by lightning and they suddenly remembered that the hitherto unnamed guys were Ehtesham and his cronies, while good boy Nikhil was just a mute spectator.

As I write this, public focus has been shifted to Suvarna Karnataka celebrations – Kumaraswamy has decided to don the mantle of guest editor of the Times of India in Bangalore for a day, where he has handpicked articles on subjects close to his heart (as claimed by the newspaperJ) – social justice, equality for all, development of the poor and the trodden etc – you guys know the list.

I? I just love this country. Where else would you get so much entertainment for free??