The Hunt

At the dawn of humanity, man (and I use this term in the old fashioned way, referring to the species representing Homo sapiens rather than a specific gender) was a hunter. The spoils of the hunt fed the tribe and success was key to survival. The hunter needed to be good at picking up the spoor and staying with it till the kill was achieved. It was a science, what with beaters and drummers to flush the quarry out and the hunters to bring it down. Each bit needed to work precisely for success.

Modern times might have precluded the need for hunting to fill the stomach, but atavistic urges remain. These days, the quarry has been replaced by other targets and the 'kill' would be more of a 'win'. A key skill in the hunt, as I mentioned earlier, was following the trail of the quarry and managing the body of the hunt - the beaters - to get the game exactly where you wanted it.

The river of time and the sandpaper of need (or the lack of it) has eroded the ability to track the game, but the primal urges of managing a hunt remain. Where is the quarry? What places does it roam? What watering holes does it frequent? Where is it exactly, now? How do we get it into the open to get a clean shot? These questions still need to be answered for the new self-set targets.

The other day, it being a Saturday, my wife had forewarned me that she had to submit a project report on the coming Monday, so would need some time to finish work. In effect, she gave me explicit instructions to clear off, with our son so she could spend the morning working. Crystal clear instructions issued and understood with no slip between the cup and lip. So, of course, I took the shopping list, took the books to be returned to the library, raked my memory to bring up any suppressed 'to-do' things that had been buried there, found a couple and in this happy state set off with son in tow, whistling Man on the Moon (Tiger does a good chorus to it).

We reached the library and parked. My phone rang.

"Where are you?"

"In the car park."

"You haven't left yet?" she asked, incredulously.

I calmly pointed out that since the advent of the automobile, most cities tout the car park as a symbol of civilization and, in effect, there is more than one totem to progress erected in a city.

If she were within touching distance she would have strangled me. No audible threats to this effect were made, but I just knew.

"Ok, then which car park are you at?" She persisted.

"The one at the library."

"You haven't reached the library yet?" Unfortunately it is Scottie's day off and he couldn't beam me up there - I had to drive.

"Technically I am in the library compound."

"Let Tiger choose books."

"Of course Sweets." That's the purpose of bringing him to the Library.

Well, we went to the library where I let Tiger choose his books. He chose with gay abandon. He would potter over to the shelf (in the children's section the shelves are all just a metre high, so everything is well within his reach) and proclaim, "I want to read the green book!" He would proceed to pull out said book from the shelf, take it to the table, sit himself down and announce loudly to the whole room "TIGER IS READING A GREEN BOOK."

He'd then turn over all the pages, babbling to himself, till he reached the end whereupon, "THE BOOK IS FINISHED!" was announced to all and sundry, the book replaced in the shelf and a new one taken.

We had 'read' half a shelf of books and were just getting warmed up when my phone rang again.

"Would you pick up peanut butter as well please."

"Can you send me an SMS? So that I don't forget when I reach there."

"Honey, I'm working," she chided me gently. "It is just one thing. Put it in the cart now."

"I'm still at the library."

"Why are you still there? Is everything ok? Have you lost him?" She was panicking now.

"No, everything is fine. Tiger is choosing books" I put on my most soothing, 'I'm in control' voice.

"What are you doing there?" She sounded quite incredulous. She didn't seem to have heard the last part of my answer. I thought I had made it perfectly clear. "Tiger is choosing books."

She spoke slowly as if to a mentally deficient individual. "You have to help him choose, Honey. He chooses shelves not books if you let him. Do NOT spend more than 15 minutes there. And get him home for lunch. See you soon."

All the phone calls are checking the advance party and gently directing them to the target - the supermarket.

Shopping for my wife is like a hunt and this time she hunts vicariously. Me and Tiger are the beaters. It is our job to reach the correct place at the correct time in order for the whole process to work. She is the one who pulls the trigger. The fact that she is not physically present is immaterial.

Hmmm...they should now be at the Library, where the second floor has children's books. This is just an ordinary trawl, nothing spectacular yet, still must ask for pop-up books. Have a sip of water. Look at the way the sun is placed, the time to reach the supermarket is in another quarter of an hour. Move up the aisle and ambush the peanut butter - the one with chunky bits.

If the hunters and beaters deviate from the set path, the hunt can go astray. It is crucial to maintain the line of communication to ensure things proceed smoothly.

And she is not alone in doing this. I remember the good old days at Hogwash - once when Jags and I went to buy a watermelon since it was a particularly hot day and we felt like having one. We walked around, looking for fruit, doing market research on the Sunday street market. We spent an hour and had one watermelon to show for our labours by the time we landed back at the apartment. Neets, who had decided he did not want to step out in the heat and humidity for the melon, had directed the operations all the way.

"So where are you?"

Look out of the window - we stepped out of the apartment 90 seconds ago.

"Do you know how to choose? Try the fruit seller at the corner. If he has one - hold it up I can see it from the window and tell you if it is any good."

Sure. We beat a path around it under the cover of trees.

"I can't see you - did you reach the guy?"

Sorry - he was out of melons.

"Strange, I thought he had some - coming in I had seen some, I thought anyway. Now I guess you'll have to send a picture across to me."

I thought you chose melons from the sound they made.

"Yes, you can tap it and hold the phone next to it, but sometimes it can't be heard too well over the phone, especially if it is noisy there."

He has tried it earlier?!

Anyway. We got the melon. The hunt was successful.

Eating & Education

Generally, all men have stories from their younger days about the consumption of huge amounts of food, often involving hapless aunts and mothers, but the true eating story is one that has its roots in a hostel mess or dining hall. Anyone can eat copious amounts of home-cooked food. Doing something one likes is not exactly a task - if humans on the whole liked cleaning shit and wrestling with lions, we would have had the Twelve Cakewalks of Hercules instead of the Twelve Labours. Eating staggering amounts of food in a hostel is special for one particular reason: the food served there inhabited the area just onside of being edible with a hint of recognition thrown in - it looked familiar, but you couldn't quite put your finger on what it was. 

I remember when I was in the hostel, a roommate's elder brother, who was three years' our senior, held the eating record for the hostel. He had managed to consume, in one sitting, 25 of the hostel's chapatis. My roommate was possibly more proud of the record than his brother who had set it was. This record also became his goal to beat, something he managed to do a couple of years later, when he was a year younger than his brother and took the record up by a whole two points to 27. Mind you, having eaten that same food for five years, I appreciate how big those two additional points were. Anyway, he called his brother that evening to give him the good news. The record was in the family and pushed a bit further out of the reach of wannabe eaters.

I guess his brother was proud of him as well. I remember, the juniors in school were. They used to look up to him with awe, especially the newer ones who had yet to reconcile themselves to the food served in the hostel. More than once I heard snatches of conversations:

"Can you believe it! 27 of these...no wonder this place toughens you up..."


In college I was a part of a small group of like minded value-for-money eaters who went together to eating places, ate without care, above their weight class and did not sully the activity by taking petty bets - once in a while, yes, but not always and not with the members of the group. Since money had to go the furthest distance possible, we had a list of eating places corresponding to the funds at hand.
I can remember quite a few nights spent sleeping out on the institute lawns since it was physically impossible to climb the three flights of stairs that would take me to my room. People often thought that we were passed out drunk in the lawn. It wasn't the drink, it was the food. Eating copious amounts of food gives you a food coma: limbs don't function, vision becomes blurry, when people speak to you, you feel as if they are speaking from a place far-far away, movement becomes impossible or nearly so. All you can do is to sleep it off. I remember once a member of the eating crew, upon finishing the repast made the mistake of getting up immediately afterwards. He swooned and fell back onto his seat. We had a very anxious restaurant owner hovering about us asking if all was well. It was. We told him, the eating was good and that this 'fainting' was positive proof that the food was good. He smiled tentatively in the manner of a restaurateur who is unsure whether people fainting in his restaurant after overeating is good for business or not.

This was recreational eating. Serious eating was carried out in the confines of the dining hall. People took pride in the food served in their institutes. The idea was for the food to be as close as possible to the fine line that separates things that are edible from things that are not. The closer the fare served to this line, the more pride folks would have in it. Sample quotes from graduates of some well known schools in India:

"We used to get different pastel coloured food everyday. It tasted the same, exactly the same every day for four years."

"Our mess used to post the menu each day on the notice board. We asked them to post it after meals. We'd then take bets from everyone on what they ate."

"The adopted stray dog refused to eat the mutton."

"We once used a puri as a frisbee. It was smaller, but stung when you caught a fast one."

"We used to get greens every time the grass in the football field got mowed. I started tracking it in my second year of college. After a year, it had a correlation of one."

The key thing to note here is that all this was said with a reasonable amount of pride. Eating that stuff for a few years was supposed to get you ready for anything that life could throw at you. It was a reflection of the person you could be, how you could weather the storms of adversity. It was a reflection of the school you went to, how it readied you for life, how it would not waste time and effort on niceties like food and concentrate on getting you a true education. That a large percentage of students cut classes like crazy didn't matter. Putting up with that food alone would ensure you got a great education.

This brings us to the nub of the matter: Most people who have spent time in hostels (at least in India) seem to believe that there exists an inverse relationship between the quality of food served in the mess to the quality of education provided in the classroom.


You must have heard the old saying especially if you have read Asterix the Legionary "The stronger the army the worse the food. That's what keeps the men in a nasty mood."
Eating lots and lots of hostel food, that, as time goes by becomes worse and worse in our memories (Both quantity and quality appreciate and depreciate respectively with the passage of time) was considered a badge of courage, to be worn with pride and honour. Everyone of course wants to be perceived as 'strong' and food is what wins it for them - it needs to be consumed frequently, multiple times a day in fact, it is essential to one's survival - what better baptism by fire could one get?

Next time you are choosing a school, just eat at the mess. You'll know how good an education you would get.

Uhuru!

How far does a beard get you? Some days mine gets me as far as the living room couch from the bedroom.

I don't have a beard, usually. One of the primary reasons for it is the fact that I like sleeping on my own bed. My wife, you see, is from the anti-beard league.

She says if she wanted to marry a man with a beard, she would have found one. I remind her that she did - I was the proud possessor of a beard till about four days before the wedding, whereupon all sorts of lobbying was done, pressure exerted, diplomatic channels explored to get me to get rid of my goatee. My own mother and bride were the perpetrators, with cousins and even a four-year old niece playing supporting roles. Admittedly, I had grown my beard in the three weeks preceding the wedding, but it was for the express purpose of keeping it there for the big day.

I thought it made me look better, more mature; more bearded, as opposed to collared that some people end up looking like in family function photographs. It lent a bit of sang-froid to my demeanour. There was a little more respect. Except for from my wife. She resolutely stood in the way of all pursuits involving facial hair.

Initially I thought, like most women, she was jealous, for try as they might, getting a beard is beyond the capabilities of most ladies. Try as I might, I could never get her to give me a convincing reason for why I should not keep a beard.

"You look older. I didn't marry an old man" This was one of the reasons for keeping the thing in the first place, besides, I am an old man inside my head. 

"Don't you feel uncomfortable with a beard?" I think I can decide that on my own.

"Isn't it very humid to have a beard?" I don't think so - we have hair on our heads, among other places. Besides, growth thrives in humidity. Have you ever heard of a humid desert?

Or sometimes, it would just be a barefaced threat. "Remove the beard or you will sleep on the living room couch."

"Why don't you like my beard?" I asked her.

"Because if I wanted to marry a man with a beard, I would have done so." And we merrily wend our way through another iteration of that same argument.

That's not the only thing though. She wants me not to want a beard, willingly abandon it. Even if I have grown it. The chief logic there being along the lines of 'How can I possibly want it?'

The more I think of it, the more I am certain that it is much more than just a beard growing on my chin.

It is a question of sovereignty.

Men go into marriage thinking of friendship, companionship, sharing their lives and their space with another person, for fifteen minutes every day, following a standard five day week, allowing for the usual annual leave and sick days.

Women, it seems, get married as an act of colonialism: they want to share 27 hours a day, eight days a week. 'Sharing' of course is doing things the way 'she' wants them done. For men sharing means sitting on the same couch while 'he' watches TV. I think it is very useful. I call it 'Sharing with Space.'

So the question of my beard, I realized, was a question of sovereignty over my chin. Whether it had been annexed or not. I believed I held all rights to my chin, to do as I pleased, for hair to come and go by my pleasure. I was of course, wrong. My rights to my chin had lapsed.

I felt the need to exert some individuality - I quit shaving.

By the end of the week, the couch was my home, my son called me brother bear, my wife was carrying a placard saying "Jesus Lives" and each time my niece and nephew saw me, would chorus tonelessly "PJ Uncle please shave your beard!!"

I capitulated, going by the adage: He who runs away lives to see another day.

But my resolve lives on secretly. The rebels fled to the hills, but their loyalty to the cause remains. Skirmishes ensue.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Recently I ran into a friend of mine - we hadn't met each other for months.

"Wife out of town?" He asked me?

"Yes," I replied.

"Must be a long trip." He said.

"How do you know?" I asked him, genuinely surprised.

"Takes at least two weeks to grow that kind of beard." He replied.