The Private Lives of Lifts

Every day I use lifts, though I haven't been able to figure out why they are called 'lifts' because not only do they lift me up, but all too frequently let me down as well. They could possibly be known as Downward-Upward Mobile Platforms, but sadly, DUMP didn't make it. They are everywhere and almost everywhere are known as either lifts or elevators. In that way, they could be said to be uniting the world, creating uniformity. On the other hand if Jonathan Swift were to write Gulliver's Travels today, "Lift" and "Elevator" could quite adequately substitute for where to break boiled eggs from as the reason for the feud between the inhabitants of Lilliput and Blefuscu. Lifts, hence also have the potential to be divisive.

In my life so far, I have come across some pretty strange lifts.

A few years ago I used to live in Bombay. In an old building in a relatively old but posh part of town. The lifts in that building were awesome. In the first few months, I had a rate of lift capture and desired destination achievement of less than 50%. Which meant that in less than half the times that I entered the lift was I successful in getting to where I wanted.

How? You might be tempted to ask. And why, the sharper reader might be inclined to ask did you have to capture lifts?

Let me describe the lifts first. They were old, generally genial, sometimes cantankerous folks, with metal grill doors that one had to physically pull in order to effect ingress to or egress from them. Due to their advanced years, they had memory for exactly one instruction and that too was wiped clean when the grill was opened.

Imagine this:
You get ready to go to work, take your bag and reach the lift lobby. You press the button summoning the lift. In due course protesting and creaking, it arrives, slightly irate at being made to work so early in he morning. You wrestle with the doors and and get in closing the doors after you and start to look for the button for the ground floor. Between this closing the grill and pressing the button you wanted, you chanced fate. If before you pressed the floor someone from another floor pressed the button calling the lift, the lift was captured. No matter how much you pleaded, cajoled or pressed the buttons, it would unerringly take you to that floor as punishment for your tardiness. In the first few weeks, I was captured quite often. Then I caught on and even became a master hunter. Me and my flatmate invented a game by which one would keep score of the number of people captured in a set number of 'takes' each. The person with most captures won. Of course, when you were getting late for office, it took a great deal of practice and hand-ear coordination to both capture a lift and also to ensure that it took you down in time.

That time in my life was particularly fecund when it came to quirky lifts. In my office at that time we had an otherwise nondescript brace of lifts that had been designed particularly peculiarly. For starters, there were two capacious lifts designed to cater to a building that extended to exactly two floors above the ground. And then they quite peculiarly ended such that you had to walk the final half of a flight of steps to reach office.

Another memorable lift I encountered during that period was one that catered simultaneously to two buildings. It had three doors and space for four humans (the rusted plaque said six), sardine style, one of whom was perched on a stool and was the lift attendant. He knew the intricacies of managing the lift. This lift had apparently been built between two adjacent buildings that shared a common wall but were of differing heights overall and differing ceiling heights within floors as well. There were metal grills on three sides and one opaque wall that had the panel of buttons. Years of use had rubbed off whatever arcane symbols had originally resided on those buttons. The lift was also a quadrilateral with all four sides unequal. Between one opaque wall and the smallest grill was wedged a stool on which was perched an ancient, reticent man. He looked not unlike the last surviving caretaker of the Holy Grail. When you entered the lift, you told him the name of the establishment you wished to visit (never the floor, since these things did not matter) and he would press a few buttons and nod and tell you where to get off. Sometimes the entire journey might be a full half-yard, where you would be between floors on one building, seeing only feet near your head and only heads near your feet and be at the proper floor on the other side. I imagined, limbo would be like this - all evidence pointed to you being upside down, but all evidence was incorrect.

This old gentleman was the only person who knew how to operate the lift. Once when he wasn't there, the lift door was padlocked.

Though increasingly I see 'vanilla-cloned' lifts, all is not lost. The lifts in my apartment building have some character. If ever there is a competition for Synchronized Lifts at the Olympics, I am sure the lifts in my apartment building would win hands down.
There are three of them (one being the substitute) that most gracefully descend upon you, the floor marker allowing you to track their stately progress across floors completely in tandem. I can almost imagine them doing gentle, unsmiling, satisfied high-fives on each floor as they make their progress towards you. And when finally they do arrive, the doors open simultaneously, one set welcoming you in and the other grinning coyly at you, winking. That happens when you are lucky, when the grand dames decide to pick you up in the first place. Else they play tag up and down the building while you watch forlornly, trying to fathom whether the four minutes spent waiting for the lift are an investment or a waste and whether you should
Now
Finally
Take the stairs.

I don't even know what convinces them to pick me up on most days.

In fact I have met quite a few lifts that went a long way towards convincing me that they are intelligent beings with a perverted sense of humour. One of the reasons I am convinced that lifts are sentient beings is because just like some other commonly found sentient beings (people) on our planet, each lift is an individual with its own character, its own idiosyncrasies, its own nuttiness. Don't get me wrong, I am not against lifts, at least not so much as I am against people. And all lifts aren't cranky. There are some exceedingly good ones as well.

I can just imagine my lifts saying to each other "So what's the secret word for today?"

"Lilliput." "We'll go once he says that."

Or maybe, they are aliens hiding in plain sight, studying humanity for some nefarious purpose like taking over the world by stranding huge populations of humans on high floors of buildings, leaving the ground relatively easy to take over. Maybe. We'll know soon, one day. I think for a start we need to remove all cameras from lift lobbies.

Cricket and Shopping

The other day, a very weird thing happened. I had never experienced anything like it in my many-many years of happily married life.

The story went like this:
It so happened that my wife needed to buy something, a rather personal sort of gift for a close sort of friend who was sort of getting married. We were to meet her in the evening. The evening was about three hours away. Now my wife is a person who thrives on planning. In fact, she plans so much and so well that if you were to ask her what we would be doing on the third Sunday of September, she could tell you that I would be taking my son for a haircut. Mind you, that is still three haircuts away, but she knows. Now on the afternoon in question this very woman wanted to buy, on the spur of the moment, a present for a close friend. The said present, had not yet been decided.

Till now, there is nothing extraordinary. We all keep wanting things. I want to see the dark side of the moon, my wife wants to buy a little something over the course of an afternoon. There is nothing wrong with wanting, it is what has largely moulded our society into its present shape.

Well, we landed up in the general vicinity of that ubiquitous institution of consumerist-modernity: the mall. Whereupon, my wife immediately wanted to go in and buy something for her friend.

I scoffed at the idea.

You must realize that 'scoffing' at a wife is no joke. And if the wife in question happens to be your own, it is positively something worthy of a gallantry award. It takes a lot of courage, this scoffing at wives.

Early in a marriage, men end up doing a lot of 'scoffing', but as time goes by, they realize that to scoff reasonably and intelligently, one has to be correct. This 'being-correct' gene, nature has cruelly deprived most men of. This leads to another problem. Most men believe that before marriage, they used to be correct about everything. This is an illusion. Before a man gets married, nothing matters very much and most contentious issues are either bets on who can eat/drink the most or discussions about batting averages, both easily resolved.
Being correct is very much a function of circumstance. When it doesn't really matter, anything is correct.

So, as I mentioned, I scoffed at the idea of her buying something with only three hours to go to the dinner. The facts were on my side:

• The 'buyee' was a close friend
• The decision of what to buy had not been taken
• The clincher was that given travel times and the fact that we needed to pick our son up in an hour and a bit from a class meant that we practically had about forty-five minutes in which to make the purchase. That is about the time it takes my wife to rev up her shopping engine, to sort of get warmed up, exchange pleasantries with the staff and tell me where to stand and to be visible.

All the above told me that this was a very good opportunity to scoff at and I scoffed at it.

She said she only needed fifteen minutes. After taking twenty seconds for my patronizing chuckle, I allowed her twenty minutes.

Within fifteen minutes, we departed having paid for and acquired a bit of merchandise that was deemed a suitable gift.

I was stunned, flabbergasted, astonished, shocked, my brain was addled...fifteen minutes? FIFTEEN MINUTES?! That is generally the amount of time my wife can expound upon the relative merits of two heads of lettuce. An avid shopper she might be, but even when she has decided on the the need that needs to be fulfilled and a shopping expedition launched to do the needful, chances are it will not be successful in the first attempt. Or the second. On an average, she requires about four separate trips before buying a non-grocery article. Which is what has given rise to a new term - the Shopping Campaign.

But here I was with very much the same woman, having acquired a non-grocery article in fifteen minutes. It seemed to me as if my entire life till then was a sham - all those years spent in shopping malls could have been reduced to a few minutes. My head swam.

I leant on the car for support.

How could this happen? How did this anomaly in the Universe open up so suddenly? Would this be the norm from now on or was it just a freak incident, against all natural law? I just needed to get an answer.

I am proud to say that after weeks of thinking and evaluating, I have solved the problem.

A few days ago, I was trying to explain test cricket to an American. He didn't get it, but wrapped things up by saying "You must love shopping with your wife."

It was an epiphany. He was right. Shopping has been modeled very much on cricket by wives.

We just watch the game. Women apply it to life.

The more I think of it, the more it seems to me that cricket must appear to the uninitiated much the same that my wife's shopping appears to me. As I have mentioned previously, she is an avid shopper, and shopping for her is not just the purchase, but the entire process is at least as, if not more, important. In fact, the entire approach to shopping is one that seems to imply that it is a test of character.

The similarities between test cricket and shopping are undeniable. To the uninitiated, both seem interminable, boring and pointless, with too many rules to truly understand what is happening and hence enjoy the game. Modern Test cricket, fortunately, lasts for a maximum of a mere five days. Buying a pair of shoes on the other hand might go on for weeks, with buying cabbage, cosmetics, clothes, sundry gifts, exercise ball, these-are-not-those-shoes being a side-effect. You might have only these sundries to show for the efforts over the said few weeks.

Ultimately, one is looking for closure. In Test cricket, closure exists in many forms after playing for seven hours a day (breaks included) for five days: a team might win (with the other losing as a direct, inseparable consequence), they might end up as a tie, where both are deemed to have won and neither lost, or as is the most common result, there might be a draw. It is this aspect that leaves non-cricket watchers flabbergasted and the question "Five days for what?" is often raised. But then cricket is more about the playing than about the winning.

Similarly shopping: It goes on forever, for large parts of it the activity seems pointless and after all that effort and time, one mostly has groceries to show for it.

Next day, repeat the process. A fair number of repetitions will finally give you a win, that is cherished for times to come.

Ever since a game of cricket has started to be played over three hours to yield a result, I have seen distinct changes in shopping patterns of my wife as well. While that might not be the real thing for her, it has resulted, on occasion, in drastically reduced time spent shopping. This respite though is only temporary. Just as test cricket is the real deal, I do not think these small excursions will ever supplant the continuously ongoing campaign to buy a proper pair of shoes for a woman.

Paradise Lost

I suffer from the Calvin syndrome - the Calvin with the tiger called Hobbes - all my real talents are undervalued. I am really good at doing nothing, but no one, not even my own wife, the love of my life (who married me following my tender entreaties involving among other things psychiatrists, loony bins and permanent postings) allows me to fully explore and exploit my talent of doing nothing. She is not really concerned that this talent of mine is getting wasted, in fact, she is fully up in arms against it. She treats it as if it were some kind of pestilence that should be eradicated. Consequently, my backside and our couch have grown further and further apart in recent times, getting to spend hardly any time together.

Things were not always thus, though.

I don't know why precisely it came to be, but early in my marriage, my wife made a rule (unilaterally, I must hasten to add), that when I was watching cricket, she would generally pester and nag me, but with no real intent of making me stop watching. Maybe this rule had its roots in the fact that my father-in-law is an avid watcher, maybe it was formulated because my wife read in a how-to-manage-husbands handbook that this was an essential to make husbands feel 'in control', but the fact remained, if I was sitting in front of the television watching cricket, she would, more or less, let me be.

Cricket is the ideal game for doing nothing. At worst it lasts for three and a half hours and at best for five days. When someone said he thought cricket a form of organized loafing, he never had in mind the millions of people watching it from sundry couches at home. It is a game built so that the 'doing nothing' of men has a structure to it.

Initially, my wife even took interest in the proceedings when I was watching cricket.

"Who's playing?" she'd ask.

"India," I'd say. 

"Who are we playing against?" she'd ask.

"Australia," I'd say and then we'd both settle down to watch some cricket. Me, for the whole duration of the match, she for installments of five minutes. Unless something drastic is happening like us winning the world cup, she finds it hard to sit and watch for more than a twelfth of an hour. She is extremely interested in winning, moderately interested in the game.

This rule of letting me watch cricket was not a declared rule, mind you. I happened to chance upon it through trial and error. I discovered that whenever I was watching cricket, things would turn to "I'm taking the kids out" rather than "You take them swimming" and shopping expeditions would be deferred to later "When the match is over" etc. etc. It was not all smooth sailing though. In reply to "Who is playing?" The answer always had to be "India" first and then someone later. Stuff like Brazil might have worked initially, till she wised up and realized that only about eight countries play at any genuine level of competition.

For the record, I never actually tried Brazil. Even Netherlands was subject to an audit that I barely came out of thanks mainly due to their having beaten England in the recent past.

Once I said that Sri Lanka were playing Zimbabwe. Nothing I said after that could convince her of the supreme importance of the match to the cosmic health of our known universe and alas! I was dragged off the couch.

The pocket of civilization that I inhabit, is one of extreme refinement. I can subscribe to about five different cricket channels, all of which show nothing but cricket or related programmes all day long. They also show repeats of old matches. Old matches can be anything that was played before I was born to something played in the morning today. Repeats, as any sports fan knows are hugely entertaining, more than the actual match on occasion, since the result is already known, you have none of the real time heartburn and threat of imminent crushing disappointment. All you need to do is to enjoy the game, savour the major moments (29th over just watch the cover drive), bask in the glory of victory and salute the game. Most reruns involve our team winning, if you subscribe to the correct channels.

And this is how I spent many a glad evening through my life. After marriage, it changed to watching only matches involving India, and this had a good run too. Till one fateful day. It was one of the happiest days of my life and also the day I can trace the loss of Paradise to.

My team had reached the final of a major tournament in a long long time. The build up to the entire tournament had been special. Me and my wife had watched a lot of these matches together. She could name and recognize players even of the opposing sides. She could name upto five different ways that a batsman could get out. She supported the late night matches all the way till the final. She broke a habit of a lifetime and watched all six hours of the match.

We Won.

Jubilation.

Two Weeks Later.

The euphoria had died down. I was sitting peacefully watching a repeat of the match, internalizing it, savouring it, remembering the key moments, reliving the excitement without thought of impending doom this time when my wife came and sat with me.

"Another match?" she asked.

"Just watch," I said, trying to be a little enigmatic. I was sure she would love to relive the night of glory again. "Sachin is going to hit two fours in the next three balls."

"Didn't we just watch it last week?" She asked, a little unnecessarily, I thought. "You remember every ball!" She said rather accusingly.

"Yes, we did, but it was nine days ago, not last week." I said, settling down peacefully, "Enough time to forget the nuances."

"How can you watch this again? You already know what is going to happen!" She exclaimed.

"Well, yes," I said, "But this time there is no pressure."

"Seriously?!" She said. "Seriously?!" It was maybe a question, maybe an exclamation. I never know. The only other place I have ever heard it on is on American television serials.

We went shopping that evening. And that was the day Paradise was lost.

From that day on, whenever she sees me watching cricket, the first question is "Is there a tournament on?" Followed quickly by "Are we playing?" Rounded up by "Is this match live?"

Sharing knowledge can be a very dangerous thing. You never know when something might come back to be the bane of your existence. Had I been a little economical with the truth and kept my mouth a little shut, one never knows, I still might be watching the second final of the Australian tri-series of 2009.

Paris Mysteries - Wine, Food and Toilets

I just returned home after my second trip to Paris, both visits about two decades apart, give or take. The first time when I landed there, accompanying my parents, I knew four things about France: they fought in the first and second world wars, they ate snails, they spoke French and they had the Eiffel tower and Mona Lisa. Paris was large, crowded and confusing, not aided by the fact that my parents (completely) and I (mostly) were vegetarians. Before going there I always wondered what people who ate snails looked like. I knew the answer before my second trip even began. They looked, well, like me.

Anyway, the week that I spent in Paris this time in the company of my wife, was something utterly diffrerent. It was a truly romantic getaway. We fell in love again and again. With the crepes, the wine, duck confit and various small patisseries. Some things had changed though. The Eiffel tower looked a lot smaller than I remembered it to be as a ten year old, as did the Mona Lisa (Small-ish in front of the other works housed under the same roof).

Having spent a week sampling various types of French food, I came to the conclusion that the French missed out on a business opportunity of staggering proportions. They could have become the preferred outsourcing partner for food of their neighbours from across the channel. Imagine some 60 million people eating three times a day at 3 Euros a meal. The math says it would have been nearly 200 billion euros a year. Even if you discount half of that due to the various Indian-Pakistani-Bangladeshi eating joints, there would still have been a potential 100 billion euros to be earned. That is definitely not a sum to be frowned at.

The English Channel is unique in that either side of it houses arguably the best and unarguably the worst food in the world. I can't fathom how that came about, especially given the intertwined history of both nations over the past thousand years or so. Had it happened early enough in history, the English would have been deprived of one of their most powerful colonising impulses and India might not have got railways till much later. Anyway...what was not meant to be..

My wife and I adopted a tourist procedure that was quite new to us - that of walking around, with no specific direction and only jottings in the margins of hotel notepaper to guide us. It was a most refreshing way of getting to know a city. The first day, we started early, had a huge breakfast and before ten were out in the streets of Montmartre, walking around, looking for a place to eat. The cafes were just opening. The chairs and tables were being set in the very Parisian way where everyone faces the street. I have seen this only in two towns - Paris and Ho Chi Minh City. Anyway, the cafes were opening and what should the first customers do but enjoy a glass of wine or beer. At ten in the morning. And none of them seemed to be in college, in fact far from it. It just didn't seem  right for ten in the morning. But then, these things grow on you and by ten thirty I was sold, having my first glass of beer washed down with my first glass of wine of the day, since there was catching up to do.

We liked the trial of the first day so much that we repeated it every day from then on. Basically me and my wife were eating at intervals of (what now seems be) every twenty minutes. Copious amounts of food. We walked the streets, saw a good place (often the result of laborious research by my wife followed by a less strenuous search for it on the map by me), sat down and ate. We repeated this about five times each day. Considering we were in Paris for about five days, we must have had, by a conservative estimate, about twenty meals. When we didn't eat a meal, we would stop at a patisserie and order something by the simple method of pointing at it in the display cabinet. We ate all sorts of things that we didn't know the names of, but which were all uniformly divine. Well, some more divine than others, but then when one is in the realm of divinity, relative divinity is just petty quibbling.

And if I failed to mention it earlier, or if my previous remarks were in any way unclear, the food was wonderful. Even as I write, the word 'wonderful' doesn't quite seem to convey the 'wonder' that the food was full of.

The people were friendly and helpful and generally well dressed. And thin.

That leads me to the main mystery that we unearthed on our trip to Paris. How can French people eat the food that is served in the country and stay thin? It seems impossible. I have a theory. And it involves the wine and the non-peeing.

As I said repeatedly, not too long ago, the food was awesome. Eating their food and looking at Parisians leads me to conclude that the inhabitants of the city do not eat there. Most people are thin. The food definitely does not in any way possible assist staying thin.

We know a French couple here. One day the daughter asked her mother for French food. She immersed her potatoes in cheese and said Voila! She said the secret to French food was to put lots of cheese in everything. One cannot remain thin eating that food. But Parisians are thin, which leads me to think that there must be layers to this mystery. Maybe the wine is a factor. So, presumably if one started to drink early in the morning and ate that divine food, one would not gain weight.

Maybe. Maybe not.

This brings me to the final element to the mystery. Toilets.

There is an acute scarcity of public toilets in Paris. Acute. There are street signs leading to the nearest public loo, in some cases from as far as a couple of kilometres away. And if this is a free public toilet, it is stated there in big bold letters. And if you are unlucky enough to have to pee and have not been able to find a free toilet, you might end up paying 2 euros for taking a leak. Two euros in the place I live is the equivalent of my lunch on a workday. To top it all, the people I found queuing up outside all these toilets were mostly foreigners. Which possibly means that the French have either decided to call toilets something else as a practical joke or that not taking a leak lets you stay thin.

Imagine what a diet that would be. Start your day with French wine. Eat four meals a day of French food. Do not take a leak and you have lost four kilos in a fortnight.

If my wife permits, I am keen to carry out this experiment. Downsize me! with French food. 

Creating the Mythical Beast through changes in Communication

Marriage is a great thing to be in. There is companionship, there is friendship, there is support, there are children, there is a fly in the ointment. Okay, there are a few flies in the ointment, but today, here, I am talking about one specific fly. Communication. Between husband and wife. We both seem to speak different versions of the same language - supposedly well understood, common words that mean entirely different things to people who have vowed to stay together for better or for worse.


"Nothing," a man says. He means precisely that. Nothing. Zot. Zero. Aught. Cypher. Empty. Blank. Void. Null.


"Nothing," a woman says. I won't comment on what it could mean, but can safely say that if Tolstoy were a woman and decided to write War and Peace, she could just have written "Nothing."


This vast chasm in the meaning of words does not arise, as many people term it, due to a variance in wiring between the female and male brains or due to gender differences arising from distinct roles played during the infancy of our species - hunters versus gatherers, etc., etc. Don't get conned by all this. It is all misinformation. Women can speak and understand the language that husbands, boyfriends, brothers communicate in perfectly. After all how hard can it be to interpret the ideas of a mind that is incapable of keeping more than one idea afloat at a time? And that too a mind that has a total library of some five ideas. 


It very inconceivable. It is unbelievable. It is done for a reason. To keep men in a constant state of bafflement. On tenterhooks. To constantly feel they as if they are treading on eggshells.


Why do women do this? Control is part of the reason.


The major reason is that women in general and Wives in particular have an Agenda. The mis-communication is merely a means to a larger, sinister end. All women actually belong to an ancient sisterhood that is in search of a mythical creature - the perfect husband (pH). Millennia of search without any one in billions getting to say "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" made Wives turn to another avenue - Creation. Like alchemists of yore who tried to turn lead into gold by doing all sorts of things to it, wives try to turn what they have found and married into what they want - a perfect husband.


When I first learnt of this, I tried to figure out what this pH is. The descriptions are fairly misleading. The perfect husband seems to be a normal human male, but if you look at the purported feats of this 'normal' being, from the sounds of it, he should have a hundred arms and legs, a thousand ears, a few dozen heads, no ego (once inside home) and with a brain that runs the birthday/anniversary function of social networking sites on an online jewelry store catalogue platform. And these are just a few of the things that this pH does. 


I concede I do mildly exaggerate, but it is merely to demonstrate the sheer weight of expectation that is piled upon husbands. The wife that I am pledged to, despite having more than a passing interest in baubles, would rather have me be more responsible. How? I ask her. I am already responsible for everything that goes wrong in our house. If I was more responsible, I'd probably be incarcerated.


In all my studies on the matter, I have discovered that there is a philosopher's stone for the alchemical metamorphosis of a normal husband to a perfect husband. It is called "Setting Expectations," or since everything now has to be able to be done, men need to do expectation setting.

This small two-word phrase is possibly the most convoluted two-word phrase that mankind has ever encountered in its short existence of half a million years. On the face of it, it sounds very simple: I simply need to set expectations. And then all would be well. Or at least most would be well.

My literal interpretation doesn't work, naturally. 


Does expectation setting mean that if I told my wife right at the beginning of the year that I intended to forget the anniversary, everything would be all right? Apparently not. This is not expectation setting. This is a recipe for disaster. 
'Expectation Setting' actually means that I need to do what needs to be done, as desired by the wife.

It leads me to believe that a Perfect Husband is ephemeral. It cannot exist for more than an instant in time and this existence is brought about on a deed-to-deed basis, but the legend of these deeds is distorted in the common generational memory of Wives and pinned one one hapless, non-existent creature. And the burden of this memory is shared by all husbands as a collective responsibility. 

In short, between us all, there is a perfect husband around. 

Holi in Indore

Holi used to be my favourite festival when I was a child. For folks who are not familiar with Holi, it entails smearing people with colour, dunking them with water and eating lots of food, all in no particular order. All you do is forgiven and forgotten. And you can pretty much do what you would not on any other day. Even newspapers come up with crazy headlines on that day. The slogan for the day is 'Bura na mano Holi hai', loosely translated as 'Don't mind it is Holi.'

In most places in India, during Holi, thandai is the drink to have - a drink to cool the body and warm the soul, an awesome drink made of milk, sugar, almonds, saffron, black/white pepper and other exotic nuts and spices. It is generally a pale, milky yellow. In some cases it is a milky, yellowish green. This green colour is achieved by adding bhang in the thandai. Bhang happens to be derived from the leaves of a rather well known plant - cannabis. Consumption of bhang during Holi in thandai, sweets and by itself (little green balls) is accepted and in many parts of the country special thekas or shops are set up by government tender with the express purpose of selling bhang during the period of Holi.

In Indore thandai with bhang is a tradition.

It so happened that my short tenure in Indore coincided with Holi.

I used to work in a small media start-up with a very friendly atmosphere and some great people. I reached office slightly early one morning. It was a holiday, but I didn't know that and anyway I could never figure out what one did with off-days till my second year of working. Besides, it was such a nice place to work that almost everyone showed up at office seven days a week, public holidays notwithstanding.

Well, I landed up in office a bit early and found one more person there, Vip. He had in his hand a large, empty bottle of cola and he was frantically searching the office for something. I asked him what he was looking for.

"Bottles," he said.

"You have one in your hand," I pointed out to him.

"Bottle-ss!" he said again, this time emphasizing the 's' at the end.

I knew him well. I dropped the questions and started looking for bottle-ss. It must be important.

We scoured the office and found, in addition to the one bottle he was already in possession of, three coffee mugs and one small running bottle. Not that the bottle was very mobile, but it was to be used while running. Vip seemed despondant.

"This is crap!" He exclaimed at our inability to find more bottles in the office.

I asked him again the purpose collecting these receptacles of water.

"Its Holi," he said simply.

I thought he wanted bottles to dunk people with, in which case I suggested we get a few buckets.

"Good idea, but it is very hard to carry a bucket on a bike."

"Bike?!" I was quite confused now. I had visions of Vip riding a bike carrying buckets of water, dunking people around the city. While not unheard of, such thing were typically done when one is a stupid teenager, not when one is seen as a pillar of a growing and well recognized business in the city.

"What do you want to do with a bucket on a bike?" I asked. I wanted to be able to step in at the right time to stop my friend from doing something that he might regret.

"We need to get thandai. We can't have Holi without thandai. We need bottles, lots of them to bring it over." This was an angle I had not foreseen and it all made sense now. I redoubled my efforts at looking for bottles. Apparently the thekas were eco-friendly places. Bring your own container for take-away or use their glasses and drink what you can on the spot.

Slowly people started trickling into the office. People who were quite aware that it was Holi and who steadily added to our collection of containers. In a while we had eight bottles and the office had sixteen people. Vip did a quick poll of what each would drink. Folks said they'd have one glass or two or three. The total came to about eight litres. Vip doubled the figure. His experience said that those who said one would drink three and ones who said four would drink ten. We would be able to carry about thirteen litres of thandai in the available containers. A bit below ideal, but would need to do.

Wiz and I volunteered to go and buy the thandai from the old city. He took his scooter, I held the bottles and rode pillion. We managed to reach the shop without incident, though in a couple of places folks flagged us down to put colour on us, rather than treat us as a moving target, which potentially could have been dangerous.

It was a small dark shop, consisting entirely of a raised platform about a metre high that served as both the shopfloor and office and darker recesses that presumably served as the warehouse. Outside, by way of advertising, were two ply-wood boards, rather worse for wear, proclaiming to world: "Bhang Theka" and "Thandai" that someone had written in chalk. They were tied up with string and idly swayed in the breeze. Since this was a seasonal business, operating only during these few days of Holi, the boards looked like they saw the light of day only for this week of the year.

On the left corner of the platform sat a man taking orders and ensuring fulfilment. There were no receipts or tokens issued. He simply remembered everything. Behind him, there were people engaged in various activities for making thandai - some were grinding the ingredients using a stone pestle, some were mixing the milk and sugar and finally some were sieving the thandai through a cloth into a large metal container. Till this point, the thandai was a pale, milky yellow. Here, the order-taker asked us how green we wanted it to be. Neither Wiz nor I knew for sure how much so we asked him what he suggested.

"Up to you," he said. "Depends on how much fun you want to have."

We asked him to put two balls per litre. The concoction was sieved once again, this time with the two balls of bhang. Wiz felt the resulting colour of the drink was much too yellow to be considered green. We decided on the scientific approach and sampled the stuff at varying levels of green till we felt that we had arrived at The Real Taste. This remaining half a glass of The Real Taste was shown to the gentleman taking the order and we asked him to create our order in this colour.

We got our bottles filled with the now indisputably green liquid and began the journey back to our office.
This was easier said than done. Carrying eight bottles made of plastic on a scooter is not hard. Doing the same when the bottles are filled with 13 litres of liquid is another matter altogether. We made a sort of nest between us on the scooter and including stuffing a bottle each in our shirts, we managed to account for seven. The eighth Wiz jammed behind his footbrake. Which seemed like a good idea as we didn't intend to stop anywhere on the way back, though it did necessitate us having to glide through three traffic signals when they were red. It wasn't so bad because by that time due to all the sampling we had done, the world seemed to be moving in a very smooth, elegant and stately manner. Wiz had evidently done this before as he switched off his scooter a couple of hundred yards before the office, so we glided in gently and he used the bicycle shed wall to effect a complete stop. By the time we reached office and handed over our cargo for the festivities to begin, everything was positively in slow-motion.

We were accoladed a triumphal parade by our office mates with lots of loud cheering, all the way to the canteen next to office. Everyone enjoyed the food and drink and we played a game of cricket as well in the disused area next to the office. Everything there happened in slow motion as well but with remarkable picture clarity. Finally after feeling ravenously hungry and eating what I only remember as mountains of food (gluttony, apparently, is a side effect of bhang) we all went home. Except one guy who was trying figure out how to eat a kachori since it was round and he didn't know where to get in from.

NP and I were flatmates then and we were sitting in the living room of our apartment, at peace with the world, vegetating after the mammoth eating session when NP looked up and in the inimitable Indore way said "Broyo, I think the ceiling fan is going to fall off."

I looked up to the ceiling. The fan seemed fine to me, but I wasn't sure. "Why?"

"It's askew." he said.

I was thinking of when the lease expired and whether the fan would stay up till then when NP dragged a chair and unscrewed the fan from the ceiling. I don't know if you have ever tried it, but it is very hard work. I held the fan while he tinkered around with the screw and the fan-hook. Finally he put the fan back in and got off the chair. "There! Now it is fine."

Ten minutes later he said, "Broyo, the fan's gonna fall. I know it." He took it off and put it back up again. Three more times. I don't recall exactly how he stopped. I do recall he didn't remember any of this the next morning.

The following day brought forth many such stories from the thandai gang. How one guy went to sleep with a 29 inch TV in his lap watching the plains of Africa saying "I can see it! I can see it!" and another person who ate every cooked thing in his parents house and another bloke who, feeling that everything was much too slow, lay his bike down by the roadside to let it rest and slept next to it. Of course there were a lot stories of people who kept on laughing or kept on crying or kept on shampooing their hair or kept on shaving, but those were the usual stories.

Holi in Indore was memorable.

Rant on Raises and Breaks

I have been working for a fair number of years now. I have often been hard working, sometimes been hardly working, I have been at times happy, unhappy, passionate, unbelieving, looking to move, looking to stay – the usual ups and downs that any employee would go through in a company. But recently I realized that some people have it really hard all the time. My neighbour is one of those people who have been consistently wronged at the workplace. I know now because he told me. In great detail.
This neighbour that I mention is one of those know-it-all people who have a slightly whiney voice, always know everyone (CEO downwards) in any company they have ever worked in, even if all they did there was an internship over summer. In addition to this, such people always know about whatever it is that is being discussed. And not only do they know of it, they are an expert in the field.
Getting buttonholed by this gentleman is sometimes interesting and mostly painful.

You see, he doesn't smoke and doesn't drink coffee (or tea, for that matter). Just because of these two uncultivated habits, he feels he is being discriminated against, economically.

I shall let him present his case:

"A person who smokes has about four smoking breaks during the day, each lasting about ten minutes. This totals up to forty minutes every day. Most people who smoke, drink coffee as well. Add to their already numerous smoking breaks, two breaks for coffee. Now I have seen that coffee breaks are typically longer than a smoking break, lasting about fifteen minutes each on an average. The time spent on coffee drinking comes to another thirty minutes. Now total up these minutes from all the breaks during the day and you have 70 minutes during the workday as break-time. SEVENTY minutes!!! Can you BELIEVE that?! And all this is ACCEPTED break-time."

"On an eight hour workday that amounts to 14.5% of non-working, non-productive break time. Amazing, don't you think?"


It was amazing. I had to marvel at his ability to speak in capital words and to demarcate excalamations in speech. I had never come across a person with such talent. He wasn't finished yet.

"I have also seen that a typical person makes between eight and ten trips from their desk to various parts of the office every day. These could be nature breaks or trips to the printer or to go to meetings, or even to get coffee, for, believe it or not, this typical person refills his mug 2-4 times a day and here is the truly amazing part - this refilling the coffee mug is in addition to the long coffee breaks!"

It was truly remarkable. I had never seen anyone speak in italics before.

"Plus," he went on, "Our office has 'chatty' people and normal people. He said 'chatty' as if it were a contagious disease prone to being the root of epidemics, decimating populations in its wake. A 'chatty' person takes an average of three minutes more to return to her desk from each such excursion than a normal person like myself. Taken into consideration, this 'corridor chatting time' amounts to another thirty minutes. And I have seen that on the whole, these coffee drinkers and smokers and 'chatty' people are the same people!" His voice had now reached what could only be described as a conspiratorial-whining-stage-whisper-crescendo. 

"Now add everything together - the forty minutes and the thirty minutes and the other thirty minutes and you get a round one hundred. ONE HUNDRED! MINUTES!! So their smoking breaks and their coffee breaks and their chatting non-breaks are more than a fifth of the time of a workday. 20.8%, to be exact, of additional break time that normal people like you and me don't get." 

We were getting too pally here I thought. I did not wish to be tarred with the same brush as him, but he was, at that point in time, unstoppable. 

"I am forced to work through the day only because I don't have any such defective habits. What if I decided to label my matchbox collection for an hour and a half every day during office time? How would people feel then?"


I admitted he had a point. I wasn't too sure whether labeling matchboxes was a defective habit or not (what is a defective habit anyway?), but it sure did sound very close to being one. On the other hand, I thought, if I were not forced to watch him do his labeling, I didn't care. 

"So what next?" I asked him.

"26%," he said enigmatically. "Do the math. My next raise should be a minimum of 26%."

I asked him to state his case, as lucidly as he had to me, to the powers that be. 
Someday we might hear more of him, but hopefully no more from him.

The Birthday Party

"Not again. Not next year. Not for my daughter. No." I groaned as I dug my heels in to the carpet to prevent myself from spilling on to the floor. My body didn't want to sit. It was too tired to sit. It just wanted to drip on to the floor in a puddle and then stay there. My whole being wanted to pull the plug and go home. The problem was I was home. It felt as if I had spent my entire life on my feet. And when I did try to sit, I found that my sitting muscles had atrophied. My body yearned for some rest. There was still work to be done, for my wife believed that the house was a mess. I believed we should toss it all and go to sleep. My beliefs did not get much traction.

You see, we had just finished our son's fourth birthday party that day. It was an afternoon of mayhem for us, something akin to jaywalking through the charge of the light brigade with kids volleying and thundering around us. There were thirty of them, give or take a couple, between the ages of ten months and seven years, all with a reactor inside them supplying inexhaustible sources of energy and throats lacking decibel control and arms that waved about while speaking as if they were trying to get both their thoughts as well as themselves off the ground. My contribution to this population of boisterous children was two - a ten month old daughter and a four year old son. The party was possibly my son's idea of how it would be just inside the gates of paradise. My daughter caught the excitement as well and demonstrated it through much of the afternoon by giving considerable voice to her opinions in a language known only to her.

All afternoon we had been smiling, me and my wife. While she is somewhat of a natural - being a serial smiler, such afternoons of being on not even civil but positively convivial behaviour takes its toll on me. My lips were so tired they had curled up and gone off to sleep nestled on my chin.

Birthday parties are as much for parents as for the children - in fact the first two or three birthdays are entirely for parents. The kids couldn't care less. Sometimes, the child has to be kept awake (my eldest lost the battle to remain conscious about half-way through his first birthday) for key moments like cutting the cake or else you would have a very irate one year old, who, incensed at being woken up is now refusing to have anything to do with the cake or the cutting of the same. Sometimes, on the other hand, the birthday child has to be kept away from his own cake since a child is often under the misconception that he has first right over his own birthday cake. In the modern world, the first right is of the camera, and through that medium, of facebook.

Birthday parties follow a set routine: Children enjoy them overtly. Moms enjoy them overtly and covertly. Dads drink beer.

For reasons I have been unable to fathom, I have seen that mothers always find stuff to do at birthdays that is directly relevant to the party itself: Organizing games, cutting the cake, calling order, feeding people, making play dates, in short, running the show. Fathers, in the absence of beer wander about like lost souls in a desert on the lookout for an oasis. The only useful things that I have seen a father do (your truly included) is to ferry pieces of cake around and spring to action when chairs or tables need to be moved. The same happened in my son's birthday party as well. In my wisdom, hence, I had told my wife I would take care of the drinks and so I made sure the cooler was well stocked with beer and wine. An hour before the party she came on her customary tour of inspection.

"Where are the drinks?" She asked me. I proudly showed her the neat rows of bottles and cans in the cooler.

"What will the children drink?" She asked me again.

I was stumped, but I handled it well. "Juice!" I said, inspired.

"Where is it?" She queried. Years of experience have taught me that the words "Trust me" are deemed to exist in the English language only as long as the woman in question had not married me. Ever since our wedding day, "Trust me" has been gobbledygook and that too gobbledygook in an extinct language.

"At the back." I said, praying I would not have to show them.

"Ok." She said and went away to take charge of the food and entertainment section.

I quickly made myself scarce and went and bought juice and cola. Of course I had to think of an excuse in case I was asked where I had been gallivanting moments before my only son's birthday party was due to commence, but the question never came. Here is where smokers win out. They don't have to account for a fifteen minute slot of time as long as they come back smelling of stale smoke. As you can see, even crap has advantages once it is not on your side.

I don't know if you have ever noticed, but a young child's birthday celebration is a study in organized randomness - Adults (almost exclusively grown up women) insist on sticking to a mental schedule of passing the parcel, pin the tail, pulverize the pinata, musical chairs, give alternating dirty and perplexed looks to husband throughout the party while the children follow some sort of 'grouped' Brownian movement. There are always bunches of kids running randomly across the room with their paths impossible to predict. Never is it a lone child. It is always a scattered group. And everybody is in a state of constant motion and constant speech.

It requires great skill to ferry beer across a room such as this, but my wife thinks this talent is overrated.

I spent most of the evening skillfully avoiding collisions while making sure the other dads had beers in their hands constantly. I was also reciting "If" to myself since it seemed to give me hope. My wife was running around as well. She was like a whirlwind - here, there, everywhere. I thought I would offer her some words of wisdom as support. The next time she passed me I said "If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs.." She gave me a funny look. "Nobody is losing their head," she said. "This is how people have fun. I think you are losing your head." She said quite pointedly.

I realized that the only thing that my wife and I had in common post the birthday party was the fatigue. Hers tinged with happiness and hope that this would happen again, mine tinged with relief that this was over for another few months.

Boys and Girls

If you have children, have you ever thought which one has been easier to raise? Let's face it - both kids can't be a dream to raise. Even if marginal, one must be easier to raise than the other. Some people say that parents fuss more over the first one and that everyone fusses over a lot over the youngest one and that the middle ones get short shrift. Some people say that it is a personality trait - some children are alpha children and therefore are more difficult to raise (are all children beta adults?). Some people give the view that every child presents her/his own challenges.

Based on my two children, I put forward the hypothesis that it is not about the first or second or third child, that it is between girl and boy. In my experience, boys are easier to raise. And I have a girl and a boy, plus have seen, in close proximity, two nieces and one nephew growing up. I think that is also the reason why we have 'Mama's boys' and 'Daddy's girls'. Fathers get the thin end of the wedge.

I'll start with an example. My son and daughter both used the same playpen growing up. I remember when he was a few months old and had started to stand up in his playpen, my son would call out when he got bored. I would throw in a ball and he would keep himself busy for the next half an hour. Cut to three and some years later. Same playpen, daughter replacing son inside it. She gets bored, stands up and calls out. I throw in the same ball that has served me so well with Tiger. She looks at me as if I were slightly stupid, but still likable. She bends, picks up the ball, throws it out and looks at me expectantly. I learnt the hard way that this is not the beginning of a game of tossing the ball back and forth. Her tossing the ball out was terminal. It had been dismissed from her presence. She did not want the ball back. She wants to be talked to.

I still have not come to terms with this 'talking' part. My son shows great restraint with language. Just because he can use it doesn't mean he does use it. When he does use it, he doesn't expect too much of a response. I am rather proud of this. My wife says he gets it from me. My daughter, on the other hand, wants to talk. Ever since she was three months old. She still can't speak, but loves to talk. Or loves having me talk to her. I don't know what to talk to her about. We have very few common interests. She doesn't watch cricket. She has not read anything of note. Our musical tastes are poles apart - except for Indian Classical (she likes to sing along with Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan Sahib).

Whenever I hold her, she turns around and looks at me, expectantly. She wants me to say something intelligent. She is usually disappointed. She gurgles, coos and makes assorted vocalizations. Her expression says it is a story she is telling, one that I am hopeless at interpreting or responding to. She reaches out for the mother and complains about me. To her credit, she doesn't give up and tries every day.

Take babysitting. Watching over my son when my wife was away was a dream. If my wife went away for two hours, it meant I needed to toss a ball or some other toy into his playpen between four to six times between her leaving and coming back. She almost always came back to find a happy baby and a happy father. It gave me enough time to take naps, watch movies, surf the internet - enough time to do whatever I wanted in half an hour instalments. And if he wanted to sleep, he went ahead and slept.

No such luck with my daughter. Wife now comes back after a shopping soiree to find a worn out father and a daughter literally pulling my hair out. Yes, because I am trying desperately to get her to sleep. Her favourite mode of sleeping is to suck her thumb while trying to pull my hair out. If she can't get a firm grip on my hair, she can't sleep.

Take feeding. When my son was as old as my daughter is now, all I had to do was put some white liquid in his bottle and he would wade into it with enthusiasm. Buying formula for the son was the easiest thing in the world. Walk down the aisle and pick a box. Any box. My daughter, on the other hand, is picky. She has settled, after much trial and error (blood, toil, tears and sweat for the parents), on one particular brand of formula. All others she rejects by spitting them out. A six month old baby is not supposed to be able to spit. I guess the folks who wrote the book on what six-month old infants are supposed to do did not try the wrong formula.

Take clothes. My boy wears what's on top, unless of course it does not have a car, truck, train or airplane drawn on it. In which case he goes to the next item of clothing and so on till the 'automobile on front' condition is satisfied. Girls choose. Clothes that match. And Shoes. And Socks. And hairbands. And nail colour. And bags. And if what they want is not done, they will get it done. Even if it means war. This is also borne out in life. Go to any shop that specializes in children's clothes. You will typically see three pitiful racks with boy's clothes, including all sizes 12 months to 12 years. The rest of the two thousand square feet would be girls' dresses and accessories.

With boys, I have seen that their major aim in life is how to injure themselves in newer, more innovative ways. There is stress when boys are growing up, but it is a uniform kind of stress:

"What has he done now?" and "I guess I'll pay for that," being common lines to keep in handy along with keeping the family doctor and dentist on speed-dial.

Girls are different. Their objective is to prove that their fathers are 'simple'. I can never forget that at age three my niece knew in numerical terms, more shades of pink and purple than I knew colours in toto, counting any colour that ever crossed paths with me. She would tell me detailed stories about what she did. Even if she went to the zoo, she'd tell me what the animals said, give me a brief character sketch of the individual giraffes and give me gossip that the zebras and lions did not get along. It was she who first informed me that lions were 'tawny'. I thought tawny was a port with lions being yellow or orange depending upon whether you used rich colour settings in your TV or not.

The problem I think narrows down to the fact that Girls Know Too Much. That in itself is not bad, but what really compounds the problem is their willingness, nay eagerness to 'Share' what they know.

I am not against this 'sharing' per se, but I get enough of it top down from the wife. I don't see why I should get more of it bottom up from the daughter as well. And I know that I am not alone.

A few days ago, we went to a park that had a play area for kids, featuring two large slides. The entry to the slides was up in a tree house. My son was busy throwing himself down the slide in various ways, running back up the ladder as soon as his feet hit the ground. There was a gentleman there with his twin daughters, who were about six or seven. Somewhat reluctantly all three of them trooped up to mouth of the slides using the stairs (the long way) instead of the ladder and stood there, uncertainly. The father made ineffectual attempts at getting the daughters to slide down. The daughters considered it, then effectually refused. This gentle tug of war continued for a few minutes till one of the daughters spied some chairs made of driftwood nearby. "Let's have a tea-party!" was the dual proclamation. I saw colour visibly drain from the father's face. He had unwittingly entered a domain wholly unfamiliar to him and one that was likely to remain thus. He had possibly brought his girls to the tree house so he could spend time with them his way and some nutcase had put furniture there. I wished I had a bottle of beer I could give to him to help him through the tough time he was due to face, but I didn't have one. So I did the gallant thing and withdrew.

In another six months my daughter will be walking and talking. I have a good mind to write to the people running the park to get rid of the chairs in the tree house.

Gardens, Mice & Cats

Recently, I changed my job. I had been thinking of 'moving on' as they say, and finally came a time when I could turn this desire into action and dutifully told my employer of my decision. That was when I realized how well the company knew me and cared not only for me but also for what was mine. They knew things about me that I didn't. For example they knew I had a garden. Where exactly in my small apartment on the fifth floor of a building was this garden secreted, I had never managed to find in the two years that I lived in this place, but then two years is hardly enough to truly know someone or something as complex as an apartment. The short of it is that my company knew. In fact, not only were they aware of my garden, but they were also congizant of my neglect of this garden. My garden, as they put to me, had gone to seed. So, to help me get my garden back on its feet, as it were, they decided to help me. I was asked to proceed on gardening leave from six in the evening that very day, for there was not a moment to be wasted.

I woke up the following morning with a very specific mandate: that of tending to the roses. Even though I had never ever set eyes on my garden, I felt inside me, that I grew roses. Or at least should be growing roses.

Sunlight was streaming in through the windows when I woke up (regained consciousness was more like it). From what little I knew of a farmer's life, the day has to begin at the crack of dawn. I would prefer mine to begin at the crack of ice - and that was very nearly how it came to be the previous night, but then one can't have everything. I take no mandate lightly. I sprang out of bed with as much enthusiasm as two-hours-and-a-bit of sleep would allow me and I went outside the room.

My wife of many years was there, sitting at the dining table, wearing a restrained sort of smile, not the sort that prevents general mirth from overwhelming oneself, but one that restrains the user from using other darker emotions.

“Had fun?”

“No, not exactly, just a couple of people...from the office...you know...talking shop..you know...” I offered. It wasn't the strongest explanation, but at the time, it was all I could come up with. And anyway this must have been what happened since I only had a vague recollection of much of the evening.

“You know how these evenings are with the office crowd, you just seem to bring work to a pub.” This was better I thought.

“Four hours after midnight is generally classified as early morning.” She offered as a fact. “Evenings typically end sometime before midnight.”

I must admit she had a point.

“Anyway, now I will not be talking shop for a while. I have been given gardening leave.” I said this to change the topic and to swing things over to my side a bit since I could now offer maybe an additional quarter of an hour to help around the house, for the next few weeks anyway.

“That's what I wanted to discuss with you.” She said. “I am going to be traveling for the next few weeks. You will need to hold fort here. My mother is coming over to help us."

It was as if decreed by God. My gardening leave would overlap almost exactly with her business travel. And for those few weeks, I would be in-charge. 

To help you understand the situation in its entirety, you first have to understand the political environment of our household. It is not simple to explain, but I will try. 

My wife runs the ship and I am the first mate. My four year old son is the leader of the rebellion and I am his lieutenant. My ten month old daughter runs her own free state within this set-up, much like the Vatican, even though enclosed by Rome, is a sovereign nation. If I were to forsake mixing politics and the navy, then in an extremely simplistic manner, my wife is the cat, my son and I are the mice and my daughter is whatever it is that takes her fancy at that moment in time.

Coming back to situation at hand, I was to be in-charge. 

I nodded my head gravely to make her believe that even though the burden was onerous, I would discharge my duties with care and diligence. The ship shall be run as she would have liked it to be run. In my head, I rubbed my hands with glee. I am a closet anarchist and for the next few weeks, I was going to declare our apartment to be the closet.

Day 1 

I awoke to a general feeling of pandemonium in the house. House of course is a misnomer here - we live in an apartment, suspended in the ether, it would have been, but for the column of apartments above and below us that the construction company had thoughtfully made.

As I was saying, I awoke to a general feeling of pandemonium in the house and I found out soon enough that feeling was well justified as pandemonium did reign in the house. For starters it was a half past five. That in itself was reason enough for an excellent day ahead. My son and daughter were awake, clamouring to be fed, comforted, played with and seeking assurances that school was, once and for all, finished. 

"Why?" was my first thought. Then I remembered. Today was the first day.

It is a commonly accepted fact that when the cat is away, the mice shall play and today, as my memory served me, the cat was away. Usually I would be very fine with that - but this time, I remembered to my chagrin, when she went away, she made me an interim cat. 

The day only got better. By late morning, my son had already missed four meals and been late to two schools. 

By afternoon I had torn up my list of things to do while on gardening leave (e.g. reorganize my song collection and create copies in two different formats, digitize all documents and create different back-ups of all data etc.) while my daughter had spent her first nap-less afternoon and wanted to issue her own currency.

By evening I was convinced my wife was running a scam - there was no way a single person could run this show. So either there was crucial information denied to me or that there was more than one of her. I settled on the latter and spent the rest of the evening looking for her clones.

Day 2

Clone search was unsuccessful. The wires I had discovered actually belonged to my own computer. I think my wife has taken her clones with her. Mother-in-law tells me my son was awake for two hours after he tucked me into bed. I think she was being funny. I resolve not to fall asleep in son's bed, especially since he kicked me to the floor very early in the morning. 

Daughter tried to eat my mobile phone. Timely call by unknown guy selling insurance scared her into spitting out phone. She has added demands for a flag along with the earlier demand for her own currency. 

Wrote to wife asking her if she was fine. She wrote back asking me if everything was fine. I hope she doesn't know. I hope she gets a bad dream and comes back home.

Day 3

I need to outsource myself. My son and daughter have taken over the government. Threats that my wife used have ceased to cause any dent in the activities of my son. 


"I will get mama to give away all your toys if you don't finish lunch!" I threatened. 


"But mama is not here..." he countered. He has successfully called my bluff and I had to back down. He has decreed a diet based almost exclusively on chocolate and it's derivatives for four year old boys in the household. 

I was better off a mouse. Being a cat is no good. Worst of all, I need to decide the menu - what gets cooked when. The whole thing is a mess.


I discovered today he has a device inside him that turns mass into energy. He eats a spoonful of something and can run on it - literally run, crawl, jump, shout without a nap for the rest of the day till bedtime. When I go to office, I see him at the fag end of the day for a couple of hours when his batteries are running low. Spending the whole day with him means I nod off before he does when I tuck him into bed. School for four year-olds should be longer than three hours and it should involve 'logging for new lumberjacks' or some such activity that can tire him out when he gets home.


Day 5
I discovered a small something of what it takes to be a cat and regained some sort of governance over the household. I told my son I would give his toys away if he did not eat his dinner. He realized I am very much here and not traveling. Dinner was finished in record time. 
Maybe I can do this stuff.


Met a friend for a drink later when kids were asleep. He told me there is a school of thought that believes one should keep news of gardening leave to oneself and leave for office every day. It is good for one's morale and indexing one's song collection and digitizing all documents.


I thought it felt like cheating.


He countered that it was akin to good cheating, like conning someone into donating to charity.


It still feels like cheating.


Day 6
I am finally getting the hang of being a cat. My son gives me confused, reproachful looks as if I have gone over to the dark side. So now I have to deal with his rebellions as well. My son and daughter have reached some sort of a pact - I am sure of it. He runs me to the ground during the day and she keeps me awake for large parts of the night.


Everything is a blur.


I want to go back to work. Corporate life seems a dream compared to raising children. Wife also manages to do a job somehow. I am convinced there are more than two of her. She should have left a couple of clones behind to help me. A few more days before she is back. Then I'll take a nap.

The Doorbell

When you have young children you realize that each day they grow, they evolve and do something new, something that you might not be aware of that they could do (or sometimes, should do). With a young child you are seeing the most sophisticated learning machine in action.

And this learning machine has but one purpose - how to age you (the parent) in the shortest possible span of time.

By age I do not mean 'Age, verb, to bring to maturity or a state fit for use: to age wine.' I mean the humble 'Age, verb, to make old; cause to grow or seem old: Fear aged him overnight.'

No one tells you it is so. Not your parents, not relatives, not friends or colleagues. Possibly, they don't realize that this is the case (I doubt this), or they don't want to share their discovery with you. Maybe you were a difficult child and grandparents can now revel in payback time.

There is a rule to children that I have discovered and now I intend to share my wisdom with all comers:

No matter what folks might tell you, the time a child has spent on the planet is inversely proportional to said child's manageability.

Simply put, from the day junior is born, it starts going downhill for you. A school of thought puts the acme of manageability of a child at conception, but I have not been able to research it adequately.

You might feel you manage a child better, the older a child gets. In reality you just get more used to it or, eventually, resigned to it.

People will speak to the contrary, scaring you with stories of night feeds and colic and crying and child-proofing and other unforeseen hazards that no one can tell you about exactly, solely due to the fact that they are unforeseen. But, I stand by what I said earlier. Downhill. Day one, onwards.


I will use this piece to debunk a lot of myths that float around regarding children. A lot of people don't do things that they normally would, because they have children. 


Take the case of our friends, who recently became parents for the first time and immediately set about not planning to do stuff. It made for interesting watching - they would 'not-plan' holidays, 'not-plan' trips downtown, 'not-plan' picnics and such activities. In fact, 'not-plan' became the single biggest thing they did. It became a central activity that took so much time that it barely left them with any time to actually do anything. All of this stemmed from the fact that their first and eldest was very young, just a few weeks old.

Someone had given this new-parent-couple a whole lot of conventional wisdom on kids. It must have been true at some point of time, before vaccines and other advances in modern medicine, the invention  of the water closet and of course air travel. The excuse 'She is just two months old, we should really not be travelling' no longer holds water, unless of course by traveling you mean letting her drive the car, since not only would her reflexes not be up to it, but she might also be unable to reach the brake while holding on to the steering wheel.

Now think about it this way. What does a newborn need? Well, I've had two and I can tell you: a newborn needs to be fed when hungry, burped, changed occasionally and be allowed to sleep constantly. If the baby is breastfed, all the better. You can do away with bottles and cleaners and brushes and sterilizers, you just need the mother.

Think of a packing list for a vacation with a newborn:

Mother - check
Diapers - check
DONE.

On the other hand, a packing list with a toddler would read something like:

formula - check
books - check
toys - check
diapers - check
bottled food - check
sterilizer - check
And the list goes on. After age two, even airlines give them a full baggage allowance. And when they grow even older, parents become what one might call an "optional extra" for a vacation as far as they are concerned.

For newborns, just looking at a parent is entertainment. For older toddlers, you need to juggle five balls while standing on your head just to make them stop and listen.

The second big thing after basic needs is mobility. Newborns stay where you leave them. You can leave your precious bundle of joy sleeping on the bed and go and do something till its time for her to be fed.

A few months on and they start to turn. Now you can no longer leave your precious bundle of joy sleeping on the bed. You have to build fortifications of cushions and pillows and quilts.

A few more months on and crawling begins and after this it gets worse alarmingly. Kids can crawl, but either have no perception of depth or believe they can fly. Their sole aim in these months becomes to take a tumble from the bed. Most succeed.

Then comes proper walking. They run into stuff. My son, for example likes to run via sonar. He runs while looking back. He has thus tackled walls, tables, bicycles, neighbours, you name it, he's run into it.

And that is not all. He has become increasingly innovative in the situations he gets himself into. Life is no longer boring.

When my son was a few weeks old, I could leave him in the middle of the bed and go away. An hour later, he's be in exactly the same spot. Cut to three years later. My son calls out, "Papa, I need help!" I go to the living room where the sound seemed to be coming from, but I don't see him anywhere.

"Papa H-E-E-ELP!" The sound seemed to be coming from some way above the ground. I trace him.

The young man had climbed up on the sofa, stepped on to the arm, made his way up the back, using it as a stepping stone, climbed on to the grill of the window that is a metre and a half from the ground and had gone all the way to the top. He did not know how to climb down. That was why he needed help.

Today he is climbing window grills, tomorrow he will wreck my car.

There is another downside to increased reach and mobility. When he hit 100cm, my son realized that light switches were within his reach. So he would switch on every switch he could find. He couldn't switch them off as he couldn't reach the top, but he didn't care. Once, we had gone to visit someone at their apartment. We said our goodbyes and my son and I were standing in the passage outside someone else's apartment.

He rang the bell.

An old lady opened the door, looking none too happy about the intrusion. The way she looked at me was part quizzical, part challenge, she was geared to refuse whatever it was that I was about to ask. I was almost pressurized to try and sell her insurance or my car or to do a market research survey.

"I am sorry," I stammered. "My son rang the bell."

She looked at me. She looked at my son and then back at me, with growing disbelief. She seemed to shelter behind the door partially, the action seemed to indicate she thought I was a potential lunatic, albeit with a child. My son meanwhile had sprouted wings and a halo and had lost a few inches in height.

"He did ring your bell!" I exclaimed, hoping volume would add weight to the truth I spoke.

"Why...?" She croaked.

"Because he has hit 102cm and now he can reach it and then he does these things, he is exploring you see..." I rambled on.

"...WHY didn't you stop him?" She hissed and slammed the door in my face.

And that was that.

He will wreck my car. I am sure.