You Cant Always Get What You Want

The papers have been reporting a furore over the outcome of yet another reality show on television. The losing finalists have alleged that the result was unfair and have filed a police complaint against the TV channel.(http://www.topnews.in/rakhi-abhishek-files-written-complaint-against-star-plus-29894)
The fondness for 'reality shows' is symptomatic of a world in which it is believed that everyone is entitled to win; that anyone can become a star. That isn’t a very realistic belief, but it is fostered from an early age.
Parents allow their children to win every game that they play against them. At children’s parties they ensure that every child wins a prize for something or the other. No one is left out when the goodies are handed out. Losers don’t have a place in today's world. Winning is so important that it is facilitated in the make believe world, every time.
But it doesn’t stop there.
There are schools where every child wins the 'Best Student' award -- by rotation. Children who take exams and don’t get the marks they expected accost their teachers and demand a review of their work. Parents often join them in heckling the teachers and the school authorities. In one extreme case, the parents of children who'd failed an examination gathered outside the school and refused to let the gates open until the results were 'reviewed'. The school gave in and promoted half of the failed students. (http://publication.samachar.com/thetelegraphindia/northbengal/thetelegraphindia.php)What would those young people have learnt from this experience? That they are good enough to decide what they deserve and then get it by any means?
No one is willing to be judged by their capabilities or their limitations, but everyone wants to be accepted at their own valuation. How is it possible?
'Judge not, lest ye be judged' has given way to, 'Judge not me, for I am judge enough'.

Surely the adults who grow out of this kind of childhood will have expectations of winning everywhere. We are a civilization that is waiting for prizes, freebies and goodies at every corner; because we think we are entitled to them. We are unable to handle disappointments, or worse, defeat. Take a look at the raging mobs that take to the streets after lost elections or lost cricket matches. Take a look at the numbers of disappointed students committing suicide after exam results are announced. Take a look at the rising numbers of cases of depression.

The older religions preached acceptance. At its worst, their outlook was fatalistic, and human beings were perceived as helpless victims in the hands of the gods -- who were very often personifications of the elements. Life on earth at the time when these beliefs were taking shape, and indeed even much later, was a daily struggle for survival : for food, for shelter, and for medicine. Human endeavour often met with defeat. Tragedy strengthened the human spirit and the resolve to fight and win.

In an age when every material thing appears to be so readily available and within reach, it becomes difficult to accept that there is still much that can’t be bought or had for the asking.
Expectations are big, and so are disappointments. The new lifestyle gurus preach the old mantra of acceptance, equanimity and austerity. Will we ever learn?

Rover:Circulating Library

When I met one of my great nieces, a charming three year old, I thought she was just the right age to have a pet dog or a kitten. Jaisri, her mother, told me how much she'd like it too, but she also said it would be very difficult to keep and care for a pet in their flat in London. It would be even more difficult to find someone to care for the pet when they went away on holiday.

Now that is a point. Who would take on someone else's dog for a few weeks?We had a friend, Dada, who kept a Great Dane. Dada's leave was due and he went to another friend Joy's place to ask him if he could take care of his dog for a month when he was away. Over drinks and dinner, Joy, a really good natured chap, agreed. Dada invited Joy around to make the necessary introductions. Joy took one look at the valued pet and told Dada that he, Dada, could stay with him for a month, or two, or even six, but as for the dog, well, why didn’t he just send the dog on leave instead? Joy told the story with great enjoyment, stretching his arms out wide to show us how large the Great Dane was!

There are some people who dislike animals and some others who swear a home with a cat or a dog smells distinctly nasty.It isn’t easy for dog lovers to understand how anyone can dislike, or worse, actually be afraid of dogs! I was terrified of dogs and swore I'd never have one, when I was in my twenties. My husband, Mohan, who doesn’t believe in wasting time with words, simply brought a pup home one day and made me forget my fear of dogs completely in a few weeks’ time. That was really gutsy of him -- had the experiment backfired, I wouldn’t have let him forget it in a hurry. It isn’t possible to do things like that in a big city where living space is limited, where all the adults go to work, and where a family travels a lot.

My Dad once propounded the idea of a sari library for ladies who believed in never repeating a sari to a party. That was a very long time ago. His term 'Sari Library' was a hit, and I remember how tickled his listeners were! Why not a Pet Library? How wonderful to be able to borrow a dog! To take a dog home for some time every day!

First, there would be training; in this case not for the dogs alone but for the people who wanted to take them out. A trainer would teach you the basics of caring for dogs, and you might have to clear a test before you became a regular member. There could be a short term issue scheme, where a dog could be taken out for the evening, just to play with, for a few hours. Then there could be a scheme – for advanced readers -- where a dog could stay with a family for a few days and nights. It could be brought to their home every day first, and then be fed a meal, in its own bowl, over there. It could then be moved in, with its own bedding, for the number of days settled upon. A trainer from the Library could look in once a day to see that all was well.Experts would be on the lookout for additions to the library, and they would pick up little pups to train to go 'visiting' once they were old enough. (Even the new additions to this library would be, well, dog-eared!)

The Pet Library could also work well for people who wanted to find temporary homes for their pets when they were away on holiday, and for those who just wanted someone to walk their dog in the evenings!

I hope someone is enterprising enough to pick up this idea and make it work!I can only foresee one problem and that is of a child, or children, refusing to return the pet to the library! How would one explain the idea of temporary ownership of a dog to a child? That would call for some thought. Parents, work your way around this one.

Reflections of an Evening

In Delhi, in the seventies, we used to look out for sunsets in the monsoon and post-monsoon months of August and September without fail. In a big and dry city like Delhi, rain was incredibly energetic. It was always a bonus; it brought high spirits, and it spelt romance. Spells of rain never lasted too long, and when they ended by evening, we got the additional treat of a sunset to enjoy and remember.

Evening curfew for a young girl like me in those days was lighting-up time. As soon as the street lights came on, I had to be home. What lovely late evening twilights we had. The light would fade slowly and grandly out of the sky, lingering until the clouds and trees were dark silhouettes. In my imagination, those banked up clouds on the horizon, black and purple masses, were mountains. The return home at the street light hour was followed by prayers in the back verandah. The puja was in the store room that opened off it. The back verandah would be lit only by the fading daylight and the storeroom was beautiful in the dark. It was comforting and yet exciting, and there were many smells that filled it: the sharp smell of the scrubbed brass villakku or the smoky smell of burnt oil wicks, the scent of goodies stored in big biscuit tins, and agarbatti, which dominated, and then took over my senses with its calming effect so that my troubles -- homework undone or a test the next day-- would be washed away. Only the comfort and the safety of my parents' home would remain.

It was remarkable that one could connect to nature in such a profound way in the heart of Delhi.

That was a long time ago, and the habit of enjoying a few quiet moments gathering one's thoughts at the end of the day remains. On some evenings, the day seems to die, and it has a melancholy feel. On other days, there is only a feeling of peace. Today, I was sitting outside our house and looking at the Bhutan Himalayas, purple and black masses against the Northern sky, and I dreamed they were the clouds of my Delhi childhood. One peak stood out sharply defined, perfectly symmetrical, and in the foreground, a gulmohar leaf swayed in the silent breeze. It could have been a calendar picture of Mt.Fuji with a leaf etching in front.

It rained all afternoon after an incredibly hot and sticky morning. The thunder was deafening and it was a really dramatic, high intensity storm. It cleared the air magically. By four o'clock, the sky was washed blue and the hills stood out in clear relief. I walked down to the National Highway -- a straight road leads to it from my house - at about five o'clock, with my head turned right to see the hills. They were silhouettes; I couldn’t see the trees on them at all, but I could see the ranges layered out distinctly. Where the sky met the hills, it was a lighter blue than anywhere else; almost whitish, and luminous. The silence that settled around this spectacle made me imagine it was a pre-dawn scene, as if something big was about to happen soon.
Back from my walk, I sat outside on a swing, with our patient and undemanding dog Simba at my feet. There was a gentle breeze blowing. Birds had returned to their nests and fallen silent. A truck rumbled past on the highway, but it wasn’t an unwelcome sound.

The sound of children playing somewhere in the distance was missing today. It is a typical evening sound. Once I was among children who played in the evenings out in the open, watching anxiously for the lights on the lampposts. Then, as a young adult, I remember sitting and daydreaming on the front steps in the evening and listening to a sad song about a lonely man watching the children play. I sit alone now and the children who played in this garden when they were little have left home. Home and childhood may seem very far away to them too. The complete tranquility and simplicity of those childhood years is lost for ever, but at moments such as these, one can recapture traces of it.

One Day in Ancient Greece

So, King, the soaking
Philosopher in his tub
Puts you in the shade.

Same Garden, Some Other Time

(Diary Entry for March 19th -- A Thank You Note to Raja, my garden's patron/sponsor, which never got completed or sent. No doubt I was lazing in the sun gawping at the flowers.)

This year I've felt as if I lived in Buddha Jayanti Park, with the abundance and profusion of flowers around here. The Phlox, Calendulas and Snapdragons are each one and a half times the size of normal blooms. It is a garden of enhanced sensory delights, with everything bigger, better and brighter than its everyday self. It’s like 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, or 'Magical Mystery Tour', or some garden Lewis Carroll may have created where a flower could turn around and stretch its limbs luxuriously or even growl if we get too close.

Keats was a great guy for descriptions and I think he must have imbibed some of the stuff that gently assists the imagination. He could sit for hours and stare at a patch of sunlight on a wall, perfectly entranced. This was in Italy, where he went for the sunshine when he was dying of tuberculosis. I learnt all this at Mrs Malathi Verma’s lectures in college.I listened to her with my mouth open I’m sure.

Keats has captured the stupor that arises out of satisfaction. That comes to mind when I roam around a garden which is full of overpowering scents as well as the slight, not unpleasant smell of the first trace of rot that sets in with fulness. 'Ripeness' was an idea that Keats loved. The beauty of excess is one of a kind. He talks of trees whose boughs are bent with the weight of fruit. To watch the profusion of flowers overflowing from pots and boxes, to see stalks that are bent over with the weight of their over ambitious and utterly voluptuous blooms is a delight to be savoured in the same spirit; in the atmosphere of self indulgence.

His 'To Autumn' is all about the beauty of a natural idyll where every growing thing in nature has reached its prime and is just moving past it. The word that comes to mind is 'surfeit'. There is this marvellous sense of having over indulged.The bees themselves in Keats' poem are opiate and drowsed.The repeated cold spells we've had through late February and early March have kept our blooms alive and bursting out of their beds and borders. Had we had normal weather, the plants would have been scorched by an already relentless sun. Funny to think that that is really the reverse of what happens in Keats’ poem, where extended sunlight is a bonus!

Idylls in the Park

The best ever, the garden where I wrote this piece

Anyone who has access to a garden or a park is lucky.

I think of a garden as a thing of wide open spaces, trees, shrubs and flowers. Only a lucky few own such places. A walled patch of grass with a few rigid flower beds is no substitute. An ideal garden should not be perfect. The mind must be as free to wander in a garden as a body is. A garden must nudge the wanderer’s imagination, and not overwhelm the mind with impressions. It must not aim for perfection, or it loses its individual character.

Jane Austen uses the analogy of gardens most effectively to illustrate her ideas on morality and human nature. In Pride and Prejudice, the gardens at Rosings, the stately home of Darcy's forbidding aunt Lady Catherine de Burgh, are monumentally artificial and reflect both snobbery and sterility. On the other hand, Darcy's home, Pemberley, is a place where the natural order prevails and where Nature takes precedence over design. Pemberley becomes a metaphor for all that is good in England and in society. Jane Austen abhors artifice in natural surroundings as much as she does in human nature. In all her books, a perversion of the natural order reflects a perversion in human nature.

Indian Sage makes up this beautiful border

Of course, there are anomalies inherent in the very idea of a garden – it is something cultivated after all, and it requires skilful cultivation to preserve the appearance of the natural. In all fairness, human nature must be similarly 'cultivated' with education and good manners.

A good garden should have nothing artificial in it. Fountains, bridges, walkways, arched gates, and so on simply ruin a good garden. I would exclude ponds from this list if they are water-lily or lotus ponds and are in use as such. A garden, I feel, should follow a strictly natural course; that is, it should have in abundance the vegetation that is natural to the region.

Experts who have studied the trees of Delhi have discovered that a large number of alien species were imported over time by successive rulers. However, the 'sarkari' roundabouts, gardens and parks of Delhi are good examples of sensible selection and planting.

All of North India has a cold season, the season of flowering annuals. Gardens everywhere display bright and beautiful blooms, starting with chrysanthemums from mid-November, and going on to dahlias, calendulas, asters, pansies, phlox petunias, and sweet peas, that bloom till March. I stop with a few names because I could go on in a breathless litany. When I was younger, I lived for the cold weather season, when I could start planning and planting my favourites, including some flowers I remembered from my childhood home like hollyhocks, sweet sultana and verbena, and linums and Californian poppies that reminded me of the gardens in school.

As the years have gone on, I have begun to appreciate the true value of 'native' vegetation in profusion in the ‘off’ season – say during the height of the monsoon when flower beds are empty. Ixoras, hibiscus, musandas, cannas, ground orchids, arum lilies, portulacas, coleus, begonias and sanchezias, stray balsams and crocuses in huge batches of pink, white and yellow simply grow without any assistance. The 'common’ variety of gardenias that are used for Puja fill the bushes with white blooms and we don’t miss the hibiscus and frangipani that grow only when there is sunlight. Heliconias and tiny ornamental bananas grow like a small forest without any help at all.


Unseasonal chikoos were the sweetest surprise of this year’s monsoon, and huge green limes added colour and flavour to dull grey days. There were guavas, but the parrots in our garden are as bright and lovely as the fruits, and they get to them before we can. I like the idea of the garden being a home to birds and other creatures, as well as a refuge and source of delight to human beings.

Where Simba ran free and was laid to rest in 2018

The Guilt Hormone : An appeal to women to stop revelling in guilt!

(Published in The Statesman, 6 February 2006. Copyright Gowri Mohanakrishnan)

Why do we women feel guilty about so many things? We almost seem to enjoy taking the blame for anything that goes wrong, and we constantly try to appease those whom we imagine we have wronged. Invariably, these feelings arise in connection with our husbands and our families!

I just spoke to a fifty something grandmother who is an amazing woman, mother and sister -- my sister, in fact. She is brilliant at her work and at home, and she makes new friends every day--and keeps them. She built her career from scratch, starting to work full time for the first time at the age of thirty-six. She is now an expert in her field and works six days a week when she's not working seven, for about ten to fourteen hours a day. She travels extensively, inside the country and out, and sometimes does four trips a week if the need arises. Her work centres around cancer patients, and she brings hope, happiness and very often a chance of life to thousands of people. She was feeling guilty that she doesn’t spend enough time at home!
As someone who hasn’t worked full time in the last twenty years, I've always admired her drive, her energy, her discipline and her sense of commitment. Also her confidence and her complete lack of vanity. She can do with three hours of sleep in a night if someone--friends, family or anyone connected with work--needs her. She keeps in touch with patients over the phone and answers every call with a smile in her voice, no matter what time of the day or night the call comes in. And there are scores of calls in a day.

I'm amazed at the complete absence of the self congratulatory in her character, but I am stunned at the way she pulls herself up when she feels she has hasn’t done enough. I sometimes think that if she'd been a man, she'd have come home grouchy, stomping and yelling at everyone to keep quiet, switch off the TV and answer the damn phone for a change! I can’t understand why she feels guilty about anything. Once, she told me she felt bad that she didn’t make all her Diwali sweets at home as she used to before she started working. I asked her how many women she knew who made their Diwali sweets at home had done even a fraction of the things she did, and how many women made Diwali sweets at all when you could go out and buy them. And were Diwali sweets that important anyway?

It isn’t silly or funny that cooking-- or not cooking--is one of our greatest guilt trips.
I have apologised to one or the other of my children at the end of a meal which didn’t really taste just like mother (and gosh, in some cases my mother, not theirs) usually makes and I have actually promised to make it up to them! Now the important thing here is that the guilt doesn’t arise out of an accusation, it comes from within. What gives birth to it? Generations of voices in our blood, telling us we have to be good, we have to take care of home, husband and children, and put ourselves last? Possibly. The woman I'm talking about is loving, caring and competent and doesn’t have anything to reproach herself with. But the guilt has woven itself into our characters and really, life seems to lose something without it!

Guilt alone is pardonable (Oh great, now we have to feel guilty about feeling guilty!) If we feel a twinge of it, we can pull ourselves up and tell ourselves to snap out of it and quick. It's appeasement we've got to watch out for. Sometimes you slave and kill yourself over something that nobody really wanted or expected. And you end up feeling that no one appreciates what you do. That leads to a whole new set of complications.

Some solutions:
Tell yourself -- and others, when required -- that you are a person, not a service.
Remind yourself that no one is paying for the service, it is all about caring and sharing in a family.
If it must be called a service, well, then somedays service can and will be lousy; it tends to be in so many places. Everyone is entitled to make mistakes.
If some people are impossible to please, stop trying to please them.

And last, put your feet up once in a while and reflect.

Samsing

Copyright Gowri Mohanakrishnan

We have some beautiful old bungalows in the Dooars. Not all of them are cared for as they should be, because they belong to gardens which have, sadly, closed down.

Living in tea as we do, we tend to let ourselves be ruled by a code. It's not 'done' to barge in to a garden without informing the manager beforehand, not if you're going to take a look at a bungalow on his property. But what do you do when there is no manager? You barge in anyway. I first heard about the beauty of Samsing Bara Bungalow soon after I got married, twenty years ago. Someone asked my husband to be sure to take me there, as it was 'One of our best bungalows in the Dooars'. Samsing had belonged to Duncans, the company for which my husband then worked, and it had been sold a short while before I came to Dooars. People I met from Duncans spoke as if they'd lost a limb when they spoke of its loss. Soon after, however, the GNLF agitation took off and Samsing was one of the hotbeds of trouble. Perhaps Duncans was better off without it anyway! No one spoke of it now. Samsing borders on Darjeeling. Now that I've seen that border for myself, I realize that crossing over from Darjeeling District into Samsing Tea Garden would have been the easiest thing for the troublemakers to do.

To my surprise, our driver knew how to get there. My brother, who is a keen traveller and who shares our love for the Dooars, was with me. Within an hour of leaving home we were at the garden. I felt a little foolish, not at the thought of going off just to see a bungalow and not someone living in it, but at the thought of having lived so close to this place for so many years and never having been there! Chulsa subdistrict is one of the prettiest places in the Dooars. The Dooars wind from the banks of the Teesta eastward, bordered on the North by the Himalayas. Darjeeling District ends when you cross Chulsa forest, and the hills to the North are then Bhutan hills. Chulsa's gardens are up on a hill, and you get a lovely view of the plains from many of them. I'd been told that Samsing offered something even better, a view of the Darjeeling hills.

Once we entered the garden we started climbing downhill. I'd imagined we'd go higher and higher and probably find the bungalow on a peak. We wound down until we were just a few hundred feet above ground. We saw a large number of happy looking schoolchildren on their way home from school. There were signs of life and occupation everywhere, and it didn't look like an abandoned garden. We found that we'd reached the bungalow sooner than I expected. Like many Bara Bungalows of old, it presented its rear to approaching onlookers! There was a lovely old set of gateposts, solidly built, and surprisingly, freshly coated with choona. The gates were locked but were opened as soon as the driver uttered the magic words, 'Bagaan ka Memsaab aaya hai.' The road wound up from the gate, to bring us to the front of the bungalow.
It came as a shock. We were at the edge of a precipice. The front lawn just fell away into a gorge, and this huge hill loomed in front of us. What a location for a bungalow! It seemed to stand at the edge of the world. Ahead, there was this beautiful hill, with one face sloping down into the plains, covered in tea, and the remaining area terraced into paddy fields. We were quiet, and struck with wonder. That hill in front of us must be a part of Darjeeling. The bungalow servant who'd been sweeping the compound confirms this. The garden on which we look out is Kumai, which is at one end of Chulsa forest, but falls, interestingly, in Darjeeling District.

I turn to face the bungalow. To my relief, it isn't a crumbling old ruin. Far from it. It is a chang bungalow, and there are beautiful arches supporting the structure, no ugly stilts. The lower portion is covered in a beautiful dark green creeper. Grand steps lead up to the verandah and the house looks majestic. Its proportions are pleasing to the eye. It is majestic, but not pretentiously imposing. In short, it looks like someone's house, where you might live or visit, and not just a bungalow.

If you could allow yourself to see the house in your mind's eye as it might have been many years ago, with its roof freshly painted and potted plants all over the verandah, you'd think what a proud hostess the lady of Samsing would have been.

The house must wait, while we walk out on the lawn, towards the edge of the compound. Mercifully the compound isn't fenced in. There are blooming bougainvilleas there instead, and what we in North Bengal tend to call a 'Bhiew Point'. When we reach the middle of the lawn, we hear the river. I wonder what it must have felt like, for all the lucky people who ever occupied this house, to live in the Dooars and look out over Darjeeling, and to have the Murti river flowing in a gorge hundreds of feet below you, at the edge of your own garden!

We reach the view point and look down into the deep gorge and see the lovely river rushing past. Again, I get the feeling of being at the edge of the world. There is nothing now but the hills and their silences, and the gurgling music of the river. It is a moment of perfect peace. I wish I could hold this forever. That is not to be, of course.

Here is the eighty five year old mali come hurrying out from somewhere at the sight of visitors. He wants to talk about old times. The words, 'bagaan ka memsaab aaya' have worked their magic again. He is delighted when my brother greets him with a smiling namaste and congratulates him on his lovely garden. The old man shows us the camellias he'd planted and tended. There were so many colours then, he said, and now all the bushes have been pruned and never bloom at all.

With a silent apology to the spirit of the house for intruding, we climb the steps and enter. We cant help stopping to gaze at the lovely view again. But there's much to look at in the verandah, too. The tea table is lovely, large and circular, with beautifully carved legs. There are matching chairs. All they need is a bit of restoration. The floors are wooden, lovely and even, with no sign of warping or damage, even though they haven't seen a tin of polish in many years! A TT table stands in the verandah. One can imagine what happy afternoons children would have spent here. We could see the steps that had been cut into the lawn leading to the tennis court on the right. All that's left of it is one wall.

In the drawing room, we ignore the torn curtains and sagging upholstery and look instead at the beautiful French windows. We come across another delight—a chest, which a Chinese carpenter had made. The former paniwala who's showing us around opens it for us with some pride and shows us that it used to be a liquour cabinet! The dining room has some lovely old pieces which , we are told, were the work of the same 'Chinia Mistry'.The French windows in the drawing room and master bedrooms must have filled the house with light and air, and there must have been so much to look at, out in the compound.

Each room has a fireplace and all the bedrooms have skylights. The skylights are interestingly constructed, and no direct rays of the sun would have entered the rooms. Each skylight is carefully covered in wire mesh from the outside—surely to keep out bats and birds! The chimney stacks on the roof are beautiful too. We were pleasantly surprised to see that all the walls were freshly painted. This was done courtesy a film unit, we are told, which was stationed here some weeks ago to shoot a Bengali film.

The kitchen, at the end of the house, is beautifully sunlit. What feasts must have been prepared here for catering at Chulsa Club! What grand parties Samsing would have hosted! It looks like a house where people lived happily. There is a sense of its being ready for occupation again in spite of the shabby curtains and unpolished floors.

We in tea are a little behind the times when it comes to evaluating the riches that we hold. In a world that's raring to buy nostalgia, aren't we sitting on a gold mine? 'Shall we buy this house?' asks my brother. Just the house, not the troublesome garden, of course, he adds. Well, just suppose we did. And we had a tea bungalow running, you know, for tourists who'd be willing to pay a packet for the entire tea experience, with all its ceremony and style.

Breakfasts at nine, complete with fruit and juices from a newly invigorated Mali Bari. Carefully planned lunch menus, curries alternating with cold spreads. Bearers in spanking new livery, with the Samsing crest. Someone dressed up as Burra Saab coming stomping in and changing out of his kamjaari shoes, eating his meal and entertaining the guests with tales of the leopard in Section No.6. Only to dash off in his jeep again, to cool his heels and rehearse the dialogues for his next appearance, at tea time. English tea, presided over very correctly by a very proper Burra Memsaab, but served with Indian hospitality, nice and warm. Can you picture it all? We laugh at the way we let our ideas carry us away, but we realize there is a market for this kind of thing, and that it could well save Samsing!

I wept for a lost world when I stood at the view point overhanging the Murti. Sometimes a place can do a lot to you. It doesn't really need people in it.

Tee Time Tale

(Published in The Statesman, December 26, 2005. Copyright Gowri Mohanakrishnan)

In all my forty three years, I've never won a prize at games. And today, a beautiful November Sunday, I won at golf (category: Novices and Beginners). It amazed me and it has stunned my family into a respectful silence.

I spent my entire school life trying to get out of the way of basketballs, soft balls and cricket balls that classmates aimed at me. With one hand holding my spectacles in place, I would run to a corner of the field and look out anxiously for missiles. There was a reason why I didnt get into trouble with the PT and games teachers. One rainy July morning when we were in Class V, PT had to be taken indoors in a classroom. The teacher gave us a dictation test of sports related words. I was the only girl who could spell 'Calisthenics' and 'Eurythmics' in a class of forty. That didn’t actually win me exemption from the dreaded ball games, but the teachers tolerated me and ignored me until I passed out from school. It was a great relief to me.
I'm no sportsperson, and I'm a terrible traveller as well, which is why it is hard to believe that the prize that was awarded to me was for the best Long Drive.

I didnt play the match. Those who did played 36 holes over two days. I only entered for the long drive, pitch and putt competitions at the insistence of friends who wanted me to do it for a lark. I wasn't so sure. Go and make a fool of myself on the golf course in front of all those people? I said yes, anyway, getting carried away by all the high spirits and good natured fooling that always goes on at Ladies’ Meets. My old friend Lizzy has a kind heart and she knew I was really feeling terrified deep down inside. She took me aside, pressed a club into my hands and spoke to me calmly and patiently before sending me out into the field. Her words played over and over in my head. 'Eye on the ball. Forget everything else. Just keep your eye on the ball.' My guru's advice paid off.

It was Wodehouse's stories that first attracted me to golf. His golfing stories capture all the beauty of the links: the expanse, the sense of leisure and the silences. The golf courses in the Dooars, where I live, are all located below the foothills of the Himalayas, and two or three of them lie along riverbeds. There is a sense of nature in repose on these courses and I have enjoyed many walks on them. Needless to add, when there were no golfers sending balls whizzing around me.

There is a woman in a Wodehouse golf story who is a tennis player. The hero, a strong, silent four handicapper worships her, but vows to make her a golfer before he weds her. On her first session on the course, she tees off without a care. To her amazement, her ball sails away for yards and yards. She is hooked to the game for life.

I too hit the first ball without a care. After all, I had nothing to lose. Everyone knows I'm no golfer. I saw it sail away into the distance in a perfect arc as if it had a life of its own. Disbelieving and filled with wonder, I attempted the next shot. And went to pieces, trying to live up to my own performance.

Shot number 2 was disqualified. At number 3 I pulled myself up a bit -- with friends yelling encouragement -- and managed to achieve contact; a feat in itself, and distance, if not direction.Direction -- yes, I have a sense of one as of today. I have an answer to that question that all unemployed people dread, 'What do you do ?' I shall say, 'I play golf'.

A Late Reading of Henry James' The Portrait of A Lady

(Copyright Gowri Mohanakrishnan)

Isabel Archer is a woman of high intelligence who meets a series of people who feel that she has a great future. She hasn’t the means or the opportunity to make this happen. She doesn’t even desire it. A number of people, who begin to love her after they get to know her, become providers and facilitators. She lacked exposure; she is taken under her aunt's wing and she travels abroad. She lacked means; she is bequeathed a fortune. She lacked opportunity; a number of well endowed patrons and suitors offer her all they have. She is empowered.

None of her friends, relations or acquaintances believes she has a fault. Her creator, however, distances himself (and the readers) from Isabel and we see her with all her faults. This is the strong point of this novel. Isabel is wilful, opinionated, misguided and blind to several things which are obvious to characters with far less intelligence. She has lofty ideals and her goal in life is an idealised abstraction of perfection. She loses touch with reality, transferring her perceptions to other people's minds. She isn’t so much the innocent abroad as the self deluded victim of her own flawed, blinkered vision. However, these are only aspects of her character.

In spite of every opportunity and sufficient means, Isabel proceeds to make a horrible mistake and marry a fraud who only wants her fortune. She makes errors of judgement and befriends all the wrong people. A few years after a brilliant future was predicted for her, her young life is a mess, and all prospect of happiness ruined.

There are people who do things, and there are people to whom things happen. For the first time, I saw this novel as the tragedy of the people of the second kind. Could Isabel have prevented the disaster which overtook her life? Can anyone control the direction which life takes?It isn’t just the flaws in her character which lead to all her suffering. It is also the series of unfortunate events that follow one after another. Things 'happen'. Besides, the world is full of 'other people', and their actions affect every individual. No one can control the entire world around them and if things go wrong, it isn’t always for want of trying.

And yet, at every point Isabel had a choice and made the wrong choice. Would the right choices have guaranteed that she lived a life without sorrow? That's too metaphysical a question for this train of thought! The people who care for Isabel feel betrayed by her unrealised potential and unfulfilled promise. The seeds of greatness are gone to waste. There are many Isabels in real life. There are artists and performers, or sportspersons or leaders who never quite make it to the top or anywhere near there. For those who watch them with a sense of expectation, it is tragic.

Of course, both greatness and tragedy are perceptions, not absolutes. Isabel was perceived to be great. Readers of the novel perceive the conclusion as a tragedy. The character herself may think otherwise.

Cricket : Only Make or Break?

Why does cricket bring out the worst in our characters? Why is there such a disproportionate involvement in the outcome of the World Cup matches? Why is there such an exaggerated display of public idolatry? It is matched only by the equally huge waves of hatred against fallen idols when they fail to perform. Why does the public need icons whom they can love and hate at the same time?

The miserably tasteless and jingoistic TV commercials in the run up to the World Cup are followed by an outpouring of wrath and hatred against team members at the first defeat that they suffer. Everything is larger than life. The emotions, from euphoria to rage, are unnaturally overplayed and expectations from the players are exaggerated. Undoubtedly, the players should do their best; they should play honestly and honourably, and above all, for the sake of the team and the country. Let's pause and remember that it is a game, and that victory and
defeat can surprise any of the teams!

There is this tidal wave of hatred and violence against the absent cricketers and sometimes there are attacks upon their homes. The burning of effigies and posters has now become such a thing of routine that it is almost considered acceptable behaviour! Scathing and vituperative remarks are aired everywhere about the volume of earnings of each player from endorsements. Allegations that a player's attentions were all diverted towards his endorsement campaigns are aired freely and resentful comments are made about the 'lavish' lifestyles of these 'stars cricketers'. It reflects very poorly on the Indian national character.

Why do the television news channels give so much coverage to the screaming, outraged men who burn effigies and posters in a wild ecstasy of rage? It is a frightening image. There is an ugly aggression in the men as they turn upon symbols of the absent targets of their emotion. These are probably men who brawl and beat their wives, or terrorise all the members of their families in their little tin pot kingdoms at home where their victims shiver and shuffle around them, dreading their displeasure and submitting to the misery of routine oppression.

A cricketer who plays for the Indian team does earn a lot of money but the public doesn’t pay for it all. Why not turn this inner rage and frustration against those who must learn to fear it? This anger is dangerously destructive and it betrays an inner sense of inadequacy and under achievement. It should be sublimated into a positive energy which is directed against evil forces that can and should be eradicated from our social and political environments. I'm talking about those who are elected to public office, who promise to work for the public good, and who are paid from taxpayer's money. Why doesn’t the public react with righteous rage when these 'stars' cheat and rob and fail to perform at every occasion?

Reign of Error -- or, Rule of Flaw ?

(Published in The Camellia, April-June 2007. Copyright Gowri Mohanakrishnan)

The number of people who speak bad English with ease never ceases to amaze me. They are often as fluent as their language is flawed; they are confident and completely unselfconscious. Many of them are on television and FM radio, addressing thousands and thousands of listeners, and they are either unaware of the mistakes they're making, or they just don’t care. This is in contrast to the many who still bother to check up with a reliable source every time they're in doubt over the meaning, pronunciation or usage of a word, or have to use some new or unfamiliar word.

And then, there is the amount of badly written English that is all around us. Our newspapers and magazines provide scores of examples every day. Do you grit your teeth or wince every time you read the words ‘Whole Seller' , 'inspite', 'despite of'', 'as because’, ‘ more better' or 'Wel-come'? I even came across ‘the latter of the three'. Sometimes the repeated instances of wrong usage confuse me and make me wonder if I'm the one who's in the wrong. The most recent example of this that I've come across is 'calling it quits' which now seems to be used to mean quitting. Doesn't it mean the same as 'bury the hatchet'? But when errors abound around you, it is easier to assume that you are mistaken and that everyone else is right. And eventually, the mistake which irked us at one time simply passes into daily usage and nitpickers like me carry on collecting new examples to share with fellow sufferers!

Whatever anyone's response to the incorrect use of the language, there is a question which comes up : how important is it to speak and write perfect English ? Secondly, what is perfect English? Is it-- or isn’t it -- enough to make yourself understood, to communicate facts and convey information correctly? Must we condemn Hinglish or Punglish, and then Japlish, Chinglish and Spanglish as well? Purists are a tiny minority and the English language has relaxed its rules so as to become more inclusive. It wouldn’t proliferate or evolve if it didn’t. It is a most democratic language today.

English is everywhere around us, not only in recorded forms of speech and in print, but on shop and road signs and packets of products of soap, salt and biscuits. So even people who have never been taught to read English identify these products with ease and learn to read these names, at least. It is quite a remarkable thing when you think of it. Suppose one of the by products of the Freedom movement had been an eradication of all the signs written in the coloniser's language?

There was a time when English was only for the privileged classes. Members of the privileged set received a good education and a good deal of exposure to the culture of England. They developed to some extent an English outlook arising from their familiarity with English books and ideas. So there was this Indian self, and an English sensibility that many people developed. In British India, and for some decades after, there was much confusion in the minds of educated, thinking, individuals. V.S.Naipaul has made this conflict of dual identities one of the key issues in his wonderful novel, A House for Mr. Biswas, which I read again and again in my youth. I would have died before I read a Tamil magazine, however. An entire world is now shut out for me because of this refusal to learn to read my mother tongue. As youngsters we were dedicated enthusiasts of Western Music as well. (And that is where America displaced England in our hearts.) It shocked me when I realised some years ago that this post colonial conflict of identities is a complete non issue in today's world. By the time my children grew to the age when I wanted them to read A House for Mr. Biswas, I realised there was nothing there that they could relate to or find relevant.

Besides, it is America, and not England, the country of our former rulers, that has become the centre of the English speaking world.

The use of English, correct or incorrect, doesn’t interfere with anyone's sense of ethnic or national identity any longer anywhere in the world.

We Indians have a very deep love for this language. There's a sense of national pride in the numbers of English speaking people in the country, as opposed to countries where the majority of people speak only their own language. People who speak in English in our country are still a privileged lot, in a way. They are trusted and respected. They command instant attention when they speak. They’re considered 'smart'. Knowledge of English is seen as the gateway to a better life, generally.
That is why there are generations of children of uneducated parents who attend English medium schools. They receive instruction in English not only as a subject of study, but as the sole medium for learning about and understanding the mysteries of the universe. I have taught children like these and they often submit essays where every sentence is a set of correct words strung together incorrectly. At every step, the child thinks in the language which is spoken at home, and then translates. It is a laborious process and it makes for laborious reading. It is foolish to try and teach them the Queen's English. We must hope for simpler and more functional versions of the language for the sake of children like these.

I wish I could forget my days of English Language teaching and completely ignore all the mistakes that just leap out and scream for my attention every day.

P.S.
16th March, 2007
I was happy to read the piece below in today's 'TheStatesman'. It makes an appeal for an easy to learn brand of the English language based on the needs of the students. Here it is :

‘Teach Hinglish & Chinglish’
Press Trust of India LONDON, March 15: Newcomers to Britain should not be taught English but cultural mixes such as Hinglish, Chinglish and Spanlish which should be part of the curriculum, a think tank suggested today. The Demos think-tank considered “Imperial” English out-dated and believed it should adapt to the global reach of the language. It said the English taught in schools should have a much more global flavour. It said the government’s call for newcomers to learn standard English are misplaced. “Instead, they should be encouraged to learn blends such as Hinglish (Hindi/Punjabi/ Urdu-English), Chinglish (Chinese-English) and Spanglish (Spanish-English) which is widespread in America, where it is also called Tex-Mex.” Earlier this week, Commons leader Mr Jack Straw said Asian women should learn English before being allowed to settle in the UK. Without it, he said, they would find it impossible to integrate or work. But the Demos report said the language is no longer the preserve of the English, who are “just one of many share-holders in a global asset”.

Jubilee Joy

(Copyright Gowri Mohanakrishnan)

In the Picture, l to r: Twerps/Kumar, Baggy and Kit-Kat of Eng Hons Sec A, 1980-83.

Last year, 2005, was a double jubilee for some of us. As LSR turned fifty, we, who first entered its gates in 1980, could recall happily that it was all of 25 years since we joined college. Five of us from English Honours (Sec A) 1980-1983, got together in Delhi after many years and made a trip to LSR in the blazing heat of a June afternoon. The university admissions were on, and we knew we'd have to make another trip to meet friends and faculty. For the time being, it was enough to say hello to the well-loved buildings, to chant the college prayer in front of the auditorium, and to run on to the lawn. We ran, as we did 25 years ago, because that lawn always made us so happy.

Possibly an earlier generation had had its thoughts shaped by a coffee house. For us, it was the lawn. We spent every moment of our free time there. The 'teachers' on the lawn were our seniors and friends. Our gang would engage in serious or utterly ridiculous debates on topics of diverse nature. There were occasional musicians with guitars, putting in some serious practice between classes. There were 'SPICMACAY types' who went around advertising afternoon 'baithaks'. My first lessons in singing seconds were on the lawn.

There were demonstrations on 'How to Divest Yourself of Irksome Inner Garments Unobtrusively in Public if The Winter Afternoon Sun Gets Too Warm'. There were serious Eco Honours types who waited on the lawn until the Reading Room opened at 2.30 p.m. They were not always serious about everything. Some of them were always good for a rendition of 'Chapel of Love' with seconds. I wonder now why we chose that maudlin 60s number for our lawn and 'special' (we sang it on the bus as well) anthem. It probably started off as a parody in the first place. (One of the things that shocked me when I visited Delhi last year was the discovery that there are hardly any 'U'specials running now.) Sometimes there'd be a game of Scrabble, and the Hindi Subsi class for which we had ostensibly stayed back would be forgotten completely.

The lawns taught us acceptance in a big way. No one, just no one, could be elitist. If they were, they just didn't have any friends. And in our youthful arrogance, if sometimes we showed off, we were first ignored, and then firmly made to shut up.

We were like children in a garden. There were a few unhappy souls in the college -- impossible as it sounds -- and these people were absolutely disgusted with our lack of dignity. It didnt bother us. We never let go of our childhood, except in our Discussions on Life. They were often very intense and always left us in need of sustenance. Some eight or nine of us would pull out 20 paise each to buy a community masala dosa from the canteen. One bite to each contributor, and one for Subramaniam, the canteen dog, thus named because of his very obvious love of dosas. Whether we were dayskis or hostellers, we were always ready to eat, and eternally short of cash. The Canteen, as it was known then, had a pretty limited menu, and the food wasn't always great. Yet, we were always ready to eat there, especially when someone else paid. Some people actually talked of doing Canteen Honours.

Irreverence was a way of life with us. I think (Sangeeta) Kumar/Twerps summed it up succinctly when we were musing together about our days, 'We were so attitude-less!' The teachers accepted this irreverence even if it exasperated them at times. On occasion it was actively encouraged as a source of creativity. It was understood that irreverence was not the same as disrespect. I guess they knew that we knew where to draw the line.

We would wait mercilessly for the editors of the weekly wallpaper to pin up their offerings on the main notice board. They, poor things, waited until there was an afternoon lull in the corridors, but we lurked, pens uncapped and ready, to add our comments to every piece of writing in the space provided for feedback. 'Spellingses' we once wrote, 'ar hiley orriginle and inspyring.' I don't think we had any intention of being nasty. We were just celebrating the freedom of expression. Even today, I'd say that's the biggest thing LSR has given me; the urge for self-expression.

We did conform to some things, and the fashion code was one of them. Youth always conforms to its own norms. Our designer wear came from Janpath or from the State Emporiums. FilmSoc types wore paintbrushes through their artistically twisted 'jooras'. Serious academic types wore jeans, with oversized men's shirts which must have belonged to their fathers and hawaii chappals, and they carried jholas and registers and had pens tucked into their knotted hair. Ethnic was in: pretty cotton skirts were teamed with Kolhapuri chappals, payals and danglers in the ears. Interestingly, the make-up look of the day was the no-make up or the natural look. It was symptomatic of the spirit within that was free -- especially free of artifice.

What could embody that spirit better than the 'Fresher of the Year' competition? It wasn't a Miss LSR contest. The young women of LSR were wise beyond their years. Instead of saying anything about beauty or brains, and without resorting to trite phrases like 'woman of substance', they just held a contest where participants were given a free rein. In our year, the theme was 'Your Favourite Character from Fiction'. Not one of the participants saw it as a chance to 'dress up'. The girls were remarkably original and outrageously hilarious. Shalini Subbarao chose to be Jughead, and, in the manner of true actors who strove for verisimilitude, tearfully chomped her way through a burger filled with nothing but sliced onions -- the only filling the canteen could provide at 2.30, when the contest was held!

The following year, the theme was The Age of Punk. I remember Promilla Puri expressing her anguish to our class over the choice of something that sounded so decadent. And yet, no objection was voiced by any member of the staff. The girls had decided on a theme, and they could go ahead with it.

I also remember a couple of freshers coming to us and asking if we had any feathers to loan them: they had chosen to interpret Punk as 'Pankh', the Hindi word for feathers, and they were planning to go as birds!The winner that year, Meenakshi Rishi, symbolised the uninhibited, freethinking and wildly imaginative LSR girl. She turned up on stage in a dhoti and shirt, a huge twisted turban, a curly moustache, and carrying a solidlathi. There was a blanket thrown over her shoulder. She said she was the official representative of P.U.N.K., or 'Phaltoos Under territories of Nangia and Karnal'!!

Twenty-five years ago, the Silver Jubilee celebrations were held. There was excitement in college from Day One of the academic year. Princi, Dr.S.M. Luthra, wanted everything to be perfect. Mrs. Indira Gandhi, then Prime Minister, was to be the Chief Guest. On the first day of rehearsals, Uma, my friend and fellow Students' Union member and I were dispatched by SML to 'Call Meenu'. The college President Minu Dhand was sitting with SML, so we correctly interpreted that to mean that we were to go to the staff quarters, where Meenakshi Gopinath, lecturer in Political science, who was then on study leave, lived.

As we walked there, Uma told me how her mother, herself a senior lecturer in the University, had always said that 'young Meenakshi' would one day become the Principal of LSR. And Meenakshi has been the Principal for over seventeen years now.

We rang the doorbell and felt a little foolish saying, 'Ma'am, Dr.Luthra sent us.' Ms Gopinath smiled and asked us in. The house was fragrant with sandalwood and tastefully decorated with little pieces from Kerala. Meenakshi herself was dressed in a Kerala mundu. She came back with us and took charge immediately. She was competence itself: it took her less than two days to train a choir to chant Sanskrit shlokas. She split them into five sections and positioned them at different places and elevations in the audi. The effect was quite awe-inspiring and the acoustics were amazing.

SML knew how to get the best out of people. She couldnt be bothered with appearances. To use Kumar's words again, she was 'totally Attitude-less'. We were probably more deeply influenced by her than we realised then. There was a child like quality in her, an impulsiveness that was so endearing, and this complete enjoyment in everything that she did. No wonder we could be so free and fun loving ourselves; the Princi herself was so happy to be in LSR! She loved a good laugh. Someone did a take on her one College Day. The sari, the hair-do, and the Punjabi accent, the 'Thought for the Day' which she read out on Monday mornings at assembly: everything. I can't forget the look of pride (in the performer) and sheer enjoyment on SML's face as she watched.

She admitted to pampering our batch because we were young enough, she said, to have been her grandchildren! I wish SML had lived to be a part of the Golden Jubilee celebrations. She would have loved it if the Principal had sent a couple of Students
Union members round to 'call Dr.Luthra'.

Are We Dead Meat to the Media?

A PIA plane carrying forty-five people crashed yesterday and there were no survivors. Along with reports of the tragedy, we have another set of gory photographs appearing in the leading dailies. Pictures of charred bodies, barely recognizable as human beings after the fire has consumed them. Worse, there are pictures of body parts. Death by fire must be incredibly tortuous and painful. Whenever we hear of accidental death we tend to put ourselves in the place of the victims. This could happen to us, too, because it could happen to anyone, we think. The utter helplessness of the victims is disturbing. And what the victims' families have to undergo during the process of identification preys on the mind. We don’t need photographic reminders of the horror of untimely and accidental death. But this horror is laid bare to the public repeatedly by our print media and television networks. Why?

Can you imagine the impact on little children who see these images on television or in newspapers and magazines? Wont they have nightmares? The images are enough to disturb the peace of the strongest minded. In the interests of gathering fodder for news, and in competing with rivals to be the first with breaking news, is not the media losing sight of basic human decency? Is this sympathy for the victims? Or is this voyeurism and violation of the worst kind? Is nothing sacred or inviolate any longer? Apparently not. We are just dead meat for the media.

The dailies and television networks, which carry these pictures, have no right to divest the accident victims of dignity in death by publishing pictures of charred, broken and mangled bodies. They may be bodies today, but they were loved ones yesterday. I ask you to recall with what ruthless regularity we see pictures of dead bodies of terrorists, criminals or their victims--alas, equal in death--which are blood soaked, mangled, gruesome and horrific.

Death is the ultimate reality in life and there is no true wisdom without accepting this fact. On the one hand, people today seem to be obsessed with the idea of fighting death as the natural end to life. It is as if we want to seek a cure for death. In many cases, the elderly long for death as that natural conclusion to life's labours; a long wished for and well earned sleep. Today's life prolonging therapies offer an extension of life, but they do little enough to alleviate physical and mental suffering. Death is natural, whether it comes suddenly or expectedly. We have to learn to accept death as a fact of life, but that doesn’t mean that we become blasé or brutal about it, either. We must pay the dead the respect due to them.

We cannot permit this violence of the lens to continue. I appeal earnestly to all who think alike to join me and to use their influence where possible. There must be some moral code, some ethical guidelines that our editors and television programmers must follow.

The Road to Destruction

We are going to attend a condolence meeting to mourn the death of yet another tea planter in our district. Young Tirtho Das, around thirty odd years old, father of two adorable little girls -- the younger just a baby, just one and a half years old -- and husband of Sanchita, was killed in a car accident on the National Highway near Mal Bazaar two days ago. Yet another young life extinguished in an instant on a highway where nothing goes as it should, or stops when it should. This highway isnt wide enough to accommodate the kind or the variety of vehicles that travel on it.
It is a narrow road with dense vegetation on either side, for most of the way. There are no road dividers, and what should be a single lane serves as a double lane. Cattle, goats, stray dogs, and very often elephants are frequently encountered hazards. Two wheelers, rickshaws, pedestrians, cars , buses and heavy vehicles of every description are forced to vie for space. We do have jams, even though we dont have a heavy flow of traffic on a regular basis, now and then. This especially happens at the congested, ever growing towns through which the highway careers on without a bypass route.The highway has claimed the lives of many friends from our district, and many of them young. In the last two years, we've lost three young boys from gardens in the district. There are other victims whom we knew who were not from the tea community. There were others, tourists and bus passengers and pedestrians, an entire marriage party, and even a school-bus load of children who lost their lives and of whom we came to know through local information channels or the next day's newspaper.
It is horrifying to think of the numbers of people who are killed in road accidents, not just in our Dooars or the Darjeeling and Sikkim hills near us, but in all of India. When will something be done to control the occurrence of these terrible collisions of traffic? Are we Indians manufacturing too many lightweight and high speed cars? Do vehicle designers and manufacturers keep in mind the conditions of Indian roads and the volumes of traffic on these roads? Is there no chance of traffic ever being regulated into smoothly flowing lanes and divided by categories, so that all the vehicles can safely move together? Is there ever a chance that we will have a government that takes serious steps to pass legislation against drunken driving? Will we ever have effective police posts manned by officials who take in offenders and test them for alcohol levels instead of reaching out to accept a 'small something for chai-cigarettes'? The image of the drunken cop on duty who waved us ahead majestically at the Matelli Police traffic check post while we were coming back after a late night in the Western Dooars last week keeps haunting me. Let him not be the face of my India in the future.
All the horrors of our unsafe roads come crowding into our disturbed minds whenever there is an accident.
Tirtho was driving along what he thought was a clear stretch of road near Mal Bazaar at a good speed. It was nine o'clock in the morning. Most unexpectedly, a truck backed on to the highway. The collision was inevitable. There was no chance that the driver of the smaller vehicle could survive the impact of that crash, and we are all grateful that Sanchita did, sitting in the passenger seat as she was. Today, she's still in the ICU, after having been operated upon -- a procedure that took around eight hours -- for a broken jaw, broken teeth and a fractured knee and elbow. Merciful God spared the little children from any major injury or worse.
We at the club are all intensely distressed. We are all in a state of mild shock and disbelief, and deeply disturbed by the suddenness and unprepared ness with which this very nice young man met his end. Would he ever have abandoned his family so suddenly if he'd had a chance? But that was just what he didnt have, a chance. Lucky are those who are offered one. I wish we would each one of us count our blessings and thank the Almighty for every good fortune we have ever experienced, because good luck is as little under our control as bad luck. Not one of us knows what fates await us or those for whom we spend sleepless nights praying and worrying. Apart from our grief for this young family there is the grim fear that enters all our hearts : is anyone ever safe? Does anyone ever know what happens in the next moment?
There is an added trauma to the loss Sanchita and her little girls must face. They must vacate the home where they have spent what surely must have been happy years. The family was happy, without a doubt. Even the baby never did anything but smile and laugh when meeting strangers who pinched her cheeks or tickled her chin at the club! Their older daughter goes to primary school and now she must move -- school, home, friends, all will be left behind. Sanchita will leave behind all the dreams that she and her husband would have shared, including maybe dreams of being in really grand bara bungalows some day.
My friend Raj said something so poignant on the phone the day after the accident. 'We all depend so much on our husbands in tea, Gowri.' We do, indeed. The planter husband is a provider. He carries a lot of responsibilities which no one can share. When a planter marries, he undertakes to supply a home and to fulfill all the needs of the family. His wife's responsibility is to manage the resources which he provides. At most, a woman here can have a career which provides a supplementary income and the 'treats' that it can buy. Of course, this doesn't apply to the women who live and work in cities and only visit their husbands on the garden. They have another home in the city. Here, as in many sad cases in the past, husband, father and home are lost in one stroke. Every woman who marries a tea planter knows that it could happen in her life too. What a terrible thing, that so many losses should be borne together.
I know Tirtho worked for a good company and that the good people there will never let his family know want. Whatever happens, though, they will have to move out. I can only hope that our collective prayers will in some way help this young bereaved girl and give her strength, and that life may have some joys in reserve for her and the children.

Those Ringing Bells

When I moved to a tea garden twenty years ago, it dawned on me that life as I'd known it would change for ever. We had no telephone, to start with. There was no way I was going to be able to hear my parents' voice, for who knows how many months! That is something to think about in these days when we have daily chats with children who live far away.

 

In 1986, Rajiv Gandhi was the Prime Minister of India and he was farsighted enough to realise the role and importance of telecommunications. What we have today is definitely the result of a process initiated by him. Still, it all took some time.

 

In 1986, our little Birpara town, the town closest to Birpara Tea Garden where we lived, had a telephone exchange, and one or two telephones in each garden in the district. The Manager's bungalow had a phone with a two digit number. So did one of the Assistants' bungalows. It was something we all marvelled at; a telephone in the Assistant's bungalow. The number was 86. That phone never rang. I dont think anyone ever put a call through it during our three years in Birpara. It had an extension in the Joteswar bungalow which was located furthest away from the factory, where the Assistant who looked after the Joteswar Division lived. The extension phone was, in one sense at least, a cordless phone! 

 

Many years ago, a Division Assistant who'd grown fed up of Burra Saab's habit of giving him repeated calls on the extension line yanked the instrument good and hard, and pulled it out of the socket. And there that phone lay ever since, with not a cord connecting it to anything anywhere in the bungalow. One could carry that phone around and use it as a stage prop. It speaks for the remarkable solidarity among the Assistants who came on transfer to Birpara that not one of them ever attempted to get that phone fixed.

 

I survived about a year of garden life without a telephone. I didnt actually lose my mind or start hearing voices in my head or anything. Our elder daughter was born in Delhi, where I spent some months. The news was conveyed to a clerk in Birpara Tea Garden office over a crackly trunk line and he sent a note to my husband. We could not speak to each other over the phone at all. We wrote letters, those days, maybe four and five in a week.

 

The day my father died, the news that he was seriously ill was conveyed by telephone  from Delhi to a shop in Siliguri which acted as a receiving centre for news for all the company's gardens. They sent a messenger to Birpara and the senior assistant rode around the garden on his bike until he found my husband and told him what had happened. We took the next plane out of Bagdogra, which was the following morning, without any telephone communication with home at all, not realising that we would reach Delhi only after my father's funeral. The news that he'd died twenty four hours ago was something I heard when we called home on arrival at Delhi airport.

 

Our next garden, Bagracote, offered a slightly better deal by way of telephone communications. We had graduated to three digit numbers by then. We could go to the garden office, which was Oodlabari 254, and wait there for trunk calls which family would make to us.

 

By 1992, STD had come to stay. The most modern exchange in the Dooars area was Banarhat, and our friend in that area had an STD phone in his bungalow. He actually chatted on it with his sisters who lived in America. We could not get over the audacity of it.

 

I was hospitalised in Siliguri for a week early that year, and the family, spread all over the world, was grateful, in those moments of anxiety, that Siliguri had STD. Cheerful Malayalee and Nepali nurses at the hospital would happpily carry messages to my bedside from America, Singapore, Chennai and Mumbai. The further the place where the call originated, the more chirpy the messenger would be!

 

In 1993, we moved to the first ever Manager's bungalow of our experience. It had a phone that worked, with only a three didgit number, true, but a number that allowed us to make trunk calls through the exchange. For the first time in seven years I could call family and chat. Over a real, working, cordless phone.

 

Mal Bazaar, the closest thing to a metropolis in our lives, was a forty five minute drive away. It had a five digit number preceded by an STD code. We'd sit in the cramped first floor area over Abhinandan Stores and make a twelve rupee call to my brother in Singapore to tell him we were 'there'. At which he'd say 'Hang up' and call back at once so that we could chat with him and with my mother.

 

Ten years ago, 1996, was the year of our first STD enabled phone. Which meant we could receive calls from friends and family all over the world at home.Ten years on, we have the STD telephone, plus internet, and almost one mobile phone per family member!

 

What irritation I experience when I cant download all my mail in the morning.How I rage at the display on my mobile phone that reads 'Network Failure'. How lost I feel if I take a trip to the bazaar nearby without my cell phone. 

 

We got by alright without any of these things. That's how it always is when you recall those good old days that sound so good in the recollection. We got by, we managed or we just accepted our limitations. We went on long drives and couldnt call to let anyone know when we'd be back. We drove through miles of elephant ridden country and terrible roads with our little children to meet friends who might be out. We didnt worry so much when we waited at home for someone who was expected back late. We just had a little more faith, and maybe a lot more patience -- I certainly seem to have less now. Is it just me, or have we all become more difficult as life has become more easy?

Thoughts in a Garden

(Published in The Statesman, 22 March 2006.Copyright Gowri Mohanakrishnan)

I have begun to believe that the world is made up of two kinds of people: those who grew up in a house with a garden and those who didnt. I say this because anyone who enjoyed a garden as a child grows up to be a lover of nature.
Anyone who grew up in a house with a garden will remember the smell of a freshly mowed lawn; the heaps of cut grass, so aromatic, so tempting to jump into, and so surprisingly and painfully full of stinging insects. The garden hose pipe, with air bubbles rushing along in their race with the water. Those endless December holidays of my childhood in Delhi, when we would sit on the lawn listening to music or the cricket commentary on a transistor radio, while eating oranges and peanuts. We would chase the warm sunlight into the last corner of the garden before finally giving up and going indoors, shivering.

In the summer, we would carry our charpoys and spread out our sheets by eight o’clock to cool them by the time we went to sleep. The laburnum tree outside the house would be in full bloom then and the street lights would make the flowers look like luminous golden grapes. Oh what freedom it was to sleep under an open sky. The faithful transistor kept going, at low volume now, considering the late hour, and played sentimental hits like ‘Puppy Love’ and ‘Sealed With a Kiss’ on Forces’ Request. The summer nights were too exciting to sleep ever, and while the rest of the family awoke at dawn, when chilly jasmine scented breezes blew, I would lie there fast asleep with a sheet over my face as a protest against an increasingly hot sun.

We children were only allowed out into the garden in the evening after five-thirty, when the heat and the glare had reduced. Then it would be fun to water the plants, and to listen to the hiss that the hot concrete walk made when it was hit by water from the pipe. The smell of that water evaporating off the hot earth or flower pots made us feel like tasting the earth or at least biting into the flower pot.

One doesn’t see oleander trees now like the ones that grew in all gardens then. We children would pluck two of the long leaves and, holding the ends together, we’d bring them close and snap them back to make a loud noise. There was a lovely creeper jasmine with very dark green leaves and flowers that were whitest white on a pale green stem. We’d pluck them when they were still tight buds at five o’clock in the evening, and my mother would bind them into strings for our hair without using a needle at all. She’d then invert a katori over the neatly coiled strings, and within an hour the blooms would open, with a maddening fragrance. We had enough jasmine strings to distribute to most of our neighbours. We’d make a habit of counting the number of buds we plucked, and often it exceeded a thousand!

At fifteen, I sat with my history book open before me, supposedly studying for the Board Exam, but actually looking at the phlox, sweet sultanas, petunias, verbenas and hollyhocks that thrust themselves out of the earth so boisterously! And every bird in the world seemed to be singing in that garden of my childhood, mocking at me who sat indoors!The Delhi in which I learnt to love nature has changed beyond belief, and though I sometimes regret that I’ve left it so far behind me, I'm glad that my daughter, at fifteen, has the same distractions as I had at her age in the place where we now live. 'Ma, I cant study, there's too much to look at in the garden!' she wailed. She will pass it on, I know, this love of the flowers, the seasons, and the rhythms of life.

If you have ever lived in a house with a garden, even one tree, whether spotted out of a car window or during an evening walk ; one flower, one bush in the park, or one bird's song, will bring it all back, all the wonder that you ever felt as a child!

A Letter to my Teenage Daughters

(Published in The Sunday Statesman Magazine, June 5, 2005.Copyright Gowri Mohanakrishnan)

My dear girls,
Do you remember how in your essay about yourself you said you hate South Indian food? Another time you said you hated being corrected for making fun of the Tamil language. How it annoyed you that something that can so simply be called ‘Alu’ becomes ‘Urulakayyangu’ in Tamil. It is not a crime to dislike what you are force-fed. Or spoon-fed, literally, like sambar.
It is quite natural to rebel against these things at sixteen and seventeen. I guess you cant imagine your mother in the same role, but at your age, every time my 'Paattu Saar'--that's the music teacher--went away after a class, I had to play the Rolling Stones' 'Jumping Jack Flash' at top volume on the record player. I made sure he heard those rocking, mocking opening chords before he reached the end of the road from our gate. My purpose was two fold. One, to rid the air waves in the drawing room of the reverberations of my halfhearted vocal exertions. Two, to get back at the teacher who took an unnecessarily malicious pleasure, in my view, in complaining to my mother about my faulty Tamil pronunciation and my absolute inability to read or write the language.

I had to carry on taking the singing lessons, however little I enjoyed them. However, my mother never stopped me from playing the Stones record at the end of the session. She was really a very wise lady even then!

In time, I came to love Carnatic music. What I really learnt of musical appreciation was definitely from the parents, certainly not from the 'Saar', though I still have the registers he filled in his crabby hand with lyrics (in Tamil) And I can belt out any of those songs at a moment’s notice.

Our culture, according to the edifying extracts in our school textbooks, was a legacy. It was handed down to us from the generations before us. Our culture represents who we are. This is not something to scoff at, I learnt later in life. On reflection I realise that in addition to being 'Good South Indians' we were also taught at home to be 'good Indians'. Above all this there was a culture, which we were taught to value, and that was the importance of being good human beings who practiced and upheld good moral values. If I had to give it a label it would be Liberal Humanism. These values are tied up with everything I ever learnt as a child, whether it was learning to walk, learning to feed myself, or learning to read. I choose these examples because I can’t remember when I learnt any of these things, and I cant forget or un-learn any of them either. Being good, law abiding, tolerant of other people and respectful of their freedoms was at the heart of this cultural legacy whose packaging may well have been South Indian food, language and customs. There was truly liberal thinking here, live and let live.

When I was young, it was considered important to marry within the community and carry on the traditions we'd practiced. I don’t mean my parents wanted me to marry a cook (ensured supply of ‘kootu’ and rice) or a pundit (who would chant correctly pronounced Sanskrit verses at me) or a Carnatic musician who would cure me of my fondness for Jumping Jack Flash!
Now that brings me to the real point. Jumping Jack Flash was as much a part of the education I imbibed at home as Madurai Mani Iyer's 'Seethaapathey'. More than two cultures could and did coexist without cancelling each other out. I didn’t realise that until I was older (and I hope, wiser). Wodehouse, Georgette Heyer, Woodstock, My Fair Lady, Archie Comics, Mad Magazine. The Beatles, Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, Kumar Gandharva, K.L.Saigal and R.D.Burman --we were exposed to all these at home. There was a harmonious coexistence of different cultures. Harmony, as you both know, is something that runs parallel to the melody and enhances it. You can have many things running together in your 'cultural heritage' and I think you'll find that you do have them. The more there are, the richer you will be. Even the hard to please music teacher would borrow books from my Dad's Wodehouse collection and enjoy them thoroughly.

I hope you understand that it would be possible for any of us to survive in surroundings where there was either no South Indian --or any Indian-- food or language or music, no Tamil New Year's Day and no Diwali celebration. But it would be impossible to survive without any language communication, any music, any books or any conversation.

And it would be very difficult to live amongst small-minded, selfish, ungenerous or uneducated minds all our lives. So remember that when we speak of our culture we are speaking of something very big, yet something basic, which you'll find among all civilised people. It is something inclusive and evolving. It doesn’t exclude ideas or influences; its existence isn’t threatened by anything new. You could find that you share something of this with someone in Finland or Tirunelvelli or in Assam or Japan. A shared fondness for sambar has nothing to do with it. It's all about not letting your dislike of sambar get in the way of someone else's fondness for it. Dislike it as much as you please, but understand that someone else can like it. Live and let live.

Love always,
Ma.

Visitors

I've had some interesting people visit me from time to time . I'm not talking about friends or family but about strangers, who've come to see a tea bungalow and a tea garden for the first time in their lives. I've received them in my role as chatelaine of 'Bara Bungalow'. I don't feel like a rare species under study when this happens though people do tend to marvel at the rather unique living conditions here. I also enjoy receiving visitors from places I've never been to. It gives me a window into other worlds, which I've never visited myself.

It is sometimes nice to meet strangers who will probably pass out of our lives without any commitments or expectations on either side. It reminds me of the friendships that are formed on long train journeys. Tea garden life is very lonely, and the sameness of our situations makes it rather boring and predictable for the same small community to meet again and again. We welcome people from the world outside most enthusiastically. If they are communicative and interesting, all the better, as we have new things to talk about amongst ourselves for a while!

One such visitor was from the U.K., Donald. He was over seventy years old, a concert pianist and a complete Indophile. His mother was born in Rawalpindi, and his grandmother in Allahabad. He first 'came out' as he put it, in '91 or '92. He has visited India almost every year after that. He sponsors five children at a residential school up in the hills. The school is a hundred years old today. It was set up as an orphanage to house the offspring of British planters in the area, mainly those who were illegitimate and of mixed parentage.

We'd invited Donald and our friend with whom he was staying to my favourite meal : evening tea. Evening tea remains one of the quaint ceremonies that has survived in tea gardens, possibly because we have the time to spare for it! There are beautifully laid out tea trays featuring pretty china and starched linen. There are cakes, sandwiches, tarts or biscuits, pakoras and chutney. After a meal like that all one can do is lie back, digest and maybe experience a little regret at overindulgence. Or else, engage in good conversation over a drink or two.

Donald, while recovering from the disappointment of having been served bland fare (everyone here in India makes that mistake when they hear there's a Brit coming, he said with a sad smile) loved what the called the '1930s atmosphere' – the colonial bungalow, the potted palms in the long verandah outside, the high ceilinged drawing room, and 'the bearer bearing whisky' as he put it. To add to it all, there was a Scott Joplin CD playing in the background. That's when he told us about being a pianist himself.

Our young friend, his host's daughter, asked him if he was now able to visualize how his ancestors must have lived. She said that they as British saabs and memsaabs in the heyday of the Raj would've have had far more luxury and elegance than we did today in similar surroundings. Donald laughed out loud, 'My ancestors! Oh no! My ancestors worked in the Railways. Quite the wrong side of the tracks, I assure you. Tin shanties would've been more their style!' We just loved him for that!

He felt he had roots here in India and he said he found it difficult to keep away for more than two years at a stretch. I wondered what it was that brought him here again and again considering he made his first trip to India so late in life. His desire to bond with the past was very strong. I was reminded of a friend's sister, who was visiting India after twelve years, and was on a plane which got diverted to Guwahati before it arrived here in Bagdogra. She took permission to get off the plane there to 'touch the soil of Assam' where she was born. My sister once spent hours at Trichur, where my father lived as a boy, just walking around and soaking up the atmosphere.

Donald's love of India doesn't just limit itself to his India trips. He enjoys the taste of India in London, at his favourite haunts that don't skimp on the spice! He attended the first night show of 'Bombay Dreams' there and loved it.

He brought with him such an air of old world charm and dignity, and he kissed my hand gallantly when he said goodbye.