Experts

The Wikipedia says : “Experts have a prolonged or intense experience through practice and education in a particular field.” By that logic ants and moles are experts at making hills, while beans are experts at giving you a livelier constitution, just as some “blues” musicians are experts at sounding like tortured buffaloes.

Come to think of it, we have experts everywhere, disbursing their expertise on topics ranging from fat caterpillars to El Nino, bombarding our senses with clueless insights, not to speak of weather-men and economists. Ardent students of the last-mentioned two subjects generally come across as madmen or zombies… Show me an economist who has been able to predict even two weeks into the future about “emerging markets” or “developed markets” and I’ll show you a blind soothsayer….

It is these expert economists that laid the framework that caused Lehmann Brothers to go up in smoke, along with a lot of other minor and finer details like your money and mine.

About the weathermen, the less said the better…. Their clueless predictions are nowadays backed up by equally clueless mathematical models, which are again, “continuously updated” with data from some more mathematical models….. Just a few months ago an expert weatherman claimed that the monsoon over this country was impaired because a fellow called El Nino was doing the rounds over the South Pacific, half-way across the globe. His mathematical model said so. The TV channels kept splashing pictures of dry and parched lands, farmers and cattle walking around with worried looks on their faces. (I suspect those pictures were from their archives, but let us not push the issue…)

And then the rains came. Washed away some parts of the country. And, I guess, that expert too, because, after the flood waters had subsided, another expert was called. He talked about La Nina, who apparently caused this. Never knew El Nino had managed to get a girlfriend.  At the end of it all, a third expert summed it up, “We had a normal monsoon.” He followed it up with a sombre nod to drive home the point.

And then, of course, we have this hot topic of global warming. Al Gore. TV talk shows. Videos. And then this summit at Copenhagen. A place where a spot of warm weather is considered a godsend. And where does their data come from ? From the experts at the poles.

These experts at the poles keep watching and shouting that the ice is melting….. I ask you, “What else is the ice supposed to do ?”  What do these experts do all day, day after day ? Burn up tax payers’ money to watch ice melt ? 

That too, during the summer ? 

Why didn’t we have such career options in our youth ?

We learnt in school that ice is lighter than water, and that when ice, floating on water, melts, the water level goes down….Thus the Maldives would be sticking out like sore thumbs after a meltdown, instead of wallowing in the waves like now. But these global-warming experts want you to believe that it is the other way around. And another committee of experts gave them a Nobel Prize for that.

Art experts are bespectacled, bearded, long-haired people with terrible sartorial inclinations, who have detailed knowledge about nothing in particular, and can create abstract flowery prose about a piece of canvas on which a painter had spilt his breakfast…. If we didn’t have experts, Picasso perhaps would not have been the phenomenon he is today… Can you imagine a picture of a person with both eyes to the left of the nose and lips that look like a carpet bug, selling for a million dollars ? Or an M.F. Hussain painting, depicting a horse through a single meandering line with a few distinct huge teeth with a signature at the lower right hand corner selling for equally vulgar sums ?

Take, for example, these handwriting experts. Of course, their art is required to track down the anti-socials, but for their whole life they keep studying the initial letters of language that the non-experts like you or I had learnt along with them in nursery, but diverged with class-difference over time…

Moving on to non-subjects, look at all these experts with a cult following…..like that Baba who spent his entire life doing nothing but breathing exercises, and now does it on TV… It seems that a whole nation with a five-thousand-year-old history did not quite know how to breathe until he came along – the breathing expert.

And now ? They all breathe together. Spread out on a meadow dotted with rectangular mats, you see hundreds upon hundreds of people following the Baba’s every breath. One would think that breath, like death, is a great leveler. Not so for this Baba. There are fences up front, adjacent to the stage that separate the rich-breathers from the not-so-rich-breathers. Short, sharp breaths, long, deep breaths, you name it and he has it in his repertoire. Breathing as a career option ?

Wow !!!  His breath is worth millions in hard cash….. Who, in his or her wildest dreams, could have thought of breathing as a cash cow ?

Duly inspired by all these experts I too, have decided upon a new career path…. I will start sleeping. Most people spend one-third of their lives sleeping, (and that is an expert opinion !!) but will I teach them to sleep better and longer…  

I will first go to sleep for hours, then graduate to days, then do it on TV…. Very soon they will make me an expert on the subject…. Naturally I will have some followers, then some more and then some more, all focused on the single activity…..And one day I hope to put the whole nation to sleep, sound sleep that is, all the while making money…… Anyone care to join me ?

When you travel back in time

They always teach you to look ahead and never to look back;

Life, they say, is about the future, the past is “in the sack”.

And yet it is the past that beckons, with memories sweet and bitter;

The first few friends, the childhood games, the parties, and the glitter.

There is always that wish, to go back there, to reverse the flow of time –

To visit those places where memories hang, forever sweet and sublime.

Did just that after forty years, made a trip to the place of my birth –

The quaint little town, where my childhood was blessed, with fun, frolic and mirth.

The house that I called home, was just the same, beside the Mohua tree,

The yard- trees were old; the people were new, and surprised to meet me.

The garden gate still scraped the ground, and the trees stood dark, like my childhood fears,

The grape-vine that my Father had planted, was still around, after fifty years !!

One school of mine had grown immense, with new classrooms and a hall,

The second one was just the same, with the broken gate and all.

As kids we rode bikes in that town, to places both near and far –

This time the distances were that much smaller because I was in a car.

All the houses of all my friends were exactly in their place,

It is just that after all these years, of those friends, I found no trace.

And then as I travelled those roads again, one thing was clear to me –

The childhood pictures got a fresh coat of paint, but, alas! Only memories will they be.

***

The house & the Mohua tree

MY FIRST DAY AT WORK

With the holidays coming up, I am averaging less than twenty five emails a day and feeling kind of unemployed – thought it would be good to give other people some reading practice.

Some years ago, I completed 25 years of service life and wrote small piece on how I started off on my first day at work. The piece is reproduced below for your reading pleasure.

***

“A quarter century of service life;

Full of surprises, fun and strife.

Has it come too early or late ?

Need to sit and contemplate !!”

To give a sort of background to the uninitiated, I had got the job through a campus interview during my final days at the Engineering College. They had selected 16 people from our batch, but I was the only fellow who finally joined the construction company. Never got to know who the other 15 were. 

Koraput district of Orissa (in India) is sometimes referred to as the “Kashmir of the South”. Most of the district straddles the Eastern Ghats – a long range of mountains and hills covered in dense forests, with gurgling streams and pristine natural beauty. The forests were home to bears, wild boar, cheetahs, pythons and the most dangerous of them all, wild dogs. (I hope those animals still live there).

For the anthropologically inclined, these forests, to the North and East of Koraput town are the fabled “Dandakarnya” forests mentioned in the Ramayana.

When I landed there back in the early 80’s, the local tribal population were the only people around. They had a wonderful openness about them – simple-minded, trusting people, ever ready to serve you food and help in any way they could. They spent the evenings dancing and drinking “handiya” as the local hooch is called, with one significant difference – after a bout of drinking, more often than not, it would be the men-folk who would get beaten up by the wives and thrown out of the house, thus being forced to spend the rest of the night at their own doorsteps.

Between July and September you got to see nature at its most furious – violent storms, rains that continued for days on end without letup, ending in terrible flash floods. It is also the coldest period then, with night time temperatures hovering around the 5-7 degree Celsius mark.

There is a broad-gauge railway line starting from the sea-shores of Waltair (Vishakapatnam), climbing into the hills and rolling on to the plateau beyond, up to Kirandul. Semiliguda, on this line, was once the highest broad-gauge railway station in Asia at about 3600 feet, till the Sino-Tibetan Railway came into being in China. The railway line itself is an engineering marvel, with about 50 odd bridges and 67 tunnels taking the line from sea-level, to 3600 feet over a distance of about 21 miles.

Araku Valley (or Arku) is just beside Semiliguda, where all the migratory birds from Siberia come for the winter nesting. Between the months of December and March, you can barely hear yourself speak in this valley.  It is a wonderful place to go for a first honeymoon or a repeat one, especially during the winter months – between December and March.

***

My hydel project was somewhere in that Koraput district in southern Orissa. The place was not to be found on any map – only the nearest railway station, Koraput town, was shown as a tiny dot high up in the Eastern Ghats. My only guide was the appointment letter stating that my “project site was about 54 Kms from this town”. Remember, India was then a relatively “phone-free” country.

Day One : I boarded the Coromandel Express from Howrah to Vishakhapatnam, accompanied by a suitcase and a bedding (or “holdall” as it is known). I do not know why, but in those days, a bedding seemed to be an integral part of everyone’s luggage.

Even though I was in the first class compartment (I do not think they use them these days anymore), my sleep was rudely interrupted at regular intervals throughout the night by coffee vendors… The jarring sound of  “ey – Kaffeeee” emanating from their throats, like someone polishing a hollow metal bucket with sand paper was enough to keep one awake for a long while.

Day Two : Reached Vishakhapatnam at about five in the morning. My train to Koraput – the “Waltair – Kirandul fast passenger” – left at about 10 in the morning, and almost immediately started its climb into the hills. When we started, there were about 20 odd people in the only first class compartment on the train.

Halfway through the journey, there were just three of us, all going to Koraput – no wonder they called this train “the fast passenger...” And to top it all, those two gentlemen who lived in Koraput, had never heard about my project. The journey through the hills was indeed scenic, but bereft of food and water supplies; had biscuits and tea for lunch. And then more biscuits and tea... When the thirst overpowered me, I would get off at some of the innumerable stations on the way and partake of a pale, reddish fluid that dribbled out of the “Drinking Water” taps.

The train reached Koraput from Vishakhapatnam, six hours late, at about 11 o’ clock at night. The only food that was available nearby consisted of stale dosas, and some violently sour sambar. No one had told me it could be so cold at night in what is almost southern India.

Had to spend the night alternating between shivering and paying urgent visits to the loo – the dosa turned out to be murderous…

So here I was, a greenhorn fresh out of college, about to enter service life, 1000 Kms away from home, shivering on a dimly-lit railway platform high up in the hills in the middle of nowhere, with the geographical location of my destination undefined, while that assassin of a dosa continued its assault on my intestines… If I wanted to turn back, I could only do so two days later, when that “fast passenger” train would wind its way slowly down the hills once again...

Day Three : Emerged from the railway station in the morning, bleary-eyed and still shivering. Visited all the tea-stalls trying to figure out a way to get to my destination. No one seemed to know where my project site was. A huge Sardarji at one of the tea-stalls took pity on me, told me he was a bus-driver, going to a town called “Jaipur”… (I always thought Jaipur was in Rajasthan at the other end of the country), and perhaps, my site was near that town… (Much later I came to know this one was called “Jeypore”)

I boarded his bus, a typical red-and-yellow contraption belonging to one of the state transport corporations, where the windows on the side had rolled up canvas sheets instead of glass, and the whole vehicle made more noise than five hundred baby-rattles put together. Sat on the first seat, right beside the engine, parallel to the driver’s seat. He kept up a steady chatter, but the engine was louder, so all I could hear were certain words or snippets of the conversation he was trying to make. He slowed down at every road sign on the way to allow me to identify the road crossing that would lead to my project site. My co-passengers were a mixed lot – goats, vegetables, with people in tow.

After about an hour or so, when we were so deep into the forest, that sunlight could be seen dancing only on the treetops, we came upon this sign saying “Upper Kolab Hydel project – 15 Kms.”  The Sardarji jubilantly stopped the bus, helped me to get out with my suitcase and my bedding, and set me up on a small concrete block beside the road, that, I think, was once used for survey purposes. He told me I would definitely get some vehicle to reach the project site. And then the bus left for Jeypore.

It was about 9:30 in the morning. I was stuck in the middle of a dense forest now, with my suitcase and my bedding, and a lot of invisible chirping crickets for company, unable to move forward or return home. And that dosa of the previous night was not yet done with me, even after all those visits to the loo. Any thought of trying to walk that distance was quietly obliterated from my mind by that huge bedding sitting beside the suitcase…

The sound of crickets chirping was presently overcome by a huge tractor – trailer combination hauling cement bags. As it came closer I could see five people on the tractor, apart from the driver. I waved it to a stop and asked if they were going to the project site. They said no, but also said that I would not get any vehicle here, I needed to go to the next crossing, as that was the road used by the project people.

The only option was to get on the trailer. They helped me, my suitcase and the bedding on to the trailer, and we were off again…. “Some progress” I thought to myself.

They dropped me off at the second crossing, some 7 Kms and thirty minutes later, but still deep in the forest. My suitcase and bedding were white with cement dust, and I could only imagine how I must have looked…

The sign here said “Upper Kolab Hydel project – 10 Kms.” “I’m getting closer” – I thought.

This crossing had a small hut with half the roof missing, which perhaps, served as a roadside tea-stall once upon a time…. There were a couple of logs set up as benches, and a decrepit mud oven, in which a cat had made its home. Well, I at least had a cat for company now, as compared to the previous halt….. The cat woke up, viewed me disgustingly with half-closed eyes, as only cats can do, and went back to its slumber.

A couple of hours later, a white Ambassador car came along and slowed down as it was turning into the road that apparently led to the project site. The driver looked at me, then stopped, and asked if I was supposed to go to the project site. I answered yes and showed him my appointment letter. He cast a disbelieving look at me, helped me put the suitcase and bedding in the hold, and then laid a towel on the seat, saying “You have cement all over, please sit on the towel.”  I asked if this was a company car and he said yes. That was a comforting thought, indeed.

Well, after an uneventful 10 Kms, I reached the Project office, was greeted with incredulous looks from the people around, and taken straight to the Project Manager. He took one long look at me, drew a deep breath and asked, “Why did you not come in the car I sent for you?” 

 “Which car ?”, I asked.

“It was waiting for you at Jeypore bus-stand since 10 in the morning, and returned a few minutes ago”, he replied. “Never mind, now go to the officer’s mess, wash up, have lunch and come back.  I can barely make out your face through all that cement.”

It dawned on me that had that enterprising Sardarji just allowed me to stay put on his bus till it reached Jeypore, my travails would have been that much lighter…

In all my travels thereafter, I have never ever carried a bedding with me again, and I make it a point never to have a dosa for dinner either – their benign façade can sometimes hide a vitriolic backlash.

I have also always steered clear of enterprising bus-drivers ever since.

***

I am so lonely

This is from my archives.... composed April 17, 2012

***

I am so-o-o lonely

Road surfaces like scrambled egg on toast –

With random speed-breakers, sans traffic lanes;

Crazy signal sequences and harried cops trying to make sense of it all,

Who will tell them how roads and traffic rules should be ?

Who will explain what is disciplined driving ?  

I could, but they do not ask…. I am so-o-o lonely….

Walking along the streets watching people young and old,

Glassy looks, plastic smiles or a frowned brow with downcast eyes…

Blue-toothed boys and ear-plugged girls,

Cocooned off from the world they live in now –

Who do they talk to ? What do they listen ?

My phone remains silent… I am so-o-o lonely…

Evening parties all over the place,

Weddings, anniversaries, birthdays and other pricey dates;

Formal suits and brilliant dresses, sparkling jewelry and all

Women measuring other women carefully, while the men too,

Keep looking at them intently;

No one looks at me….. I am so-o-o lonely….

We created Time, and got enslaved by it;

A perfect continuum of life chopped up into pieces

Of pre-defined periods where work is ordained and one cannot rebel;

Life has become a clock-work; you live by the minute,

And dreams too, lie like a fractured mosaic within those boundaries…

With time came the realisation…. I am so-o-o lonely…

You feel the same ?

***

Flying the grand old airline

I have been plying, or should I say, flying, the domestic routes in India for well-nigh three decades. Back in those days there was only one carrier option and fixed price tickets for all sectors. They served food, which almost always made me sick, and the tea or coffee that was served, tasted the same – like dishwater. Cabin crew comprised of saree-clad aunties – remember, I was significantly younger then – who were quite curt if one complained about anything.

The aircraft kind of creaked and wheezed as they took off, forcing the most atheist among the passengers to look up to the sky at least once in a while... Some of these flights had screaming babies too, who started and stopped their routine along with the engines, with desperate parents trying to hide themselves.

The pilots frequently went on strike for one thing or the other, stranding passengers and upsetting schedules all over the country. An exasperated management roped in retired Indian Air Force pilots to make things work. With flying skills honed on fighter aircraft, this breed handled the creaking passenger planes the same way. It was like asking F1 drivers to run a city bus service.

Most runways back then were more suited to racing cattle than speeding aircraft and we poor passengers bumped along them for a while before taking off at a forty-five degree angle to meet the clouds, engines screaming. Landing was equally traumatic – most often it was on left pod, then right pod then nose wheel, before coming to a shuddering stop – the way they landed fighter planes loaded with bombs. There was thin, very thin, line between crashing and landing… Many atheists among us those days turned outright religious – we were always this close to meeting our Creator.

And then the skies opened up to private airlines – who offered cheaper fares – and one of them pioneered the art of serving alcohol on domestic routes !! It was a paradigm shift for a populace that till then, were deprived of almost all the good things in life and were used to long queues for purchasing anything, from food to two-wheelers.

It was hilarious to watch executives in ties and suits gulping free alcohol on an early morning flight and then being taken out of the plane at the destination, on wheel chairs, too sozzled to even stand up. God knows what happened to their days’ schedules.

It was immediately obvious that this could not continue, and the grand old airline, which was losing business to these upstart newcomers, went crying to Uncle of India, who put a complete ban on alcohol on domestic flights. The airline that started it, also passed into history, planes, bottles and all, and a new breed called “budget airlines” entered the scene.

These newbies really cut out the frills and offered cheaper tickets, seats with hard… I will be condescending and call them “firm” cushions, food for on-board sales, served by attractive young ladies in skirts (no frills there, either), but most importantly, brand new aircraft that did not creak or wheeze while taking off or landing.

The advent of these players was a welcome change for many, including me…. But as time went on, they added more rows in the cabins, reducing leg-space to the point where you wish you had penguin-feet, to be comfortable. I really pity the six-footers who travel on these planes !!  The windows are rarely clean – they fly these like buses – with no time to clean the exteriors….

***

On one recent occasion – the one that prompted me to write this piece – we found that the full-service ticket of the grand old airline was actually cheaper than the “no-frills” ticket of the budget airlines that have hard seats designed for penguin-feet.

I took this flight on the grand old airline after a gap of almost fourteen years. What a welcome change !! The aircraft was fairly new, the seat cushions soft, the leg-space adequate to push a hand-bag down below and sit comfortably, the air-conditioning did not leak water (did I mention that before ?) and the windows were clean.

The cabin crew comprised of air-hosts – (I know they are supposed to be called stewards, but prefer to call them what I did) – glum-faced men in white shirts and red ties – and the aunties were gone !! The food was nothing to write home about, but I did not fall sick again. We did not have to buy it either, they served with grace.

The best part was that we left and arrived on time !!!

Over the decade-plus period of budget airline travel, I have rarely arrived on schedule. The carriers not only fail to apologize, they have the gall to lecture the suffering multitude about the “virtues of being on time” !! The delays are never “their fault” and on the rare occasion that they serve complimentary refreshments to irked passengers, they make sure that the menu on offer is enough to turn away all but the ones deranged with hunger.

The classical Indian mind of double-think, double-talk, and double-speak…

***

Dear Readers, next time you fly, check all fares – the budget airlines are beginning to take people for a ride – other than the planes, I mean…

***

The Age of Deletion

Email entered my life about twenty five years ago…  For those of you who are familiar with the computers of that era, we wrote our stuff on VT220 or VT320 terminals. The snazzier ones among them had black screens and amber/gold characters….  Nevertheless, most of the work was still done over phone, and emails were used to record the conversations, at best. Then came the GUI – or graphic user interface and the mouse, and our lives changed forever.

Over time, particularly in the last decade or so, mobile phones, internet and emails have invaded – (I was about to say improved, but will stick with “invaded”) – our lives, to point that it can be called pollution, or technically, e-pollution. As we keep moving “forward” with our civilization, banks, mobile phones, identity cards, email accounts, shopping preferences, brand preferences, dietary inclinations, and perhaps medical records will become inextricably linked like an unholy mass of spaghetti topped with some gooey sauce. One will need to find one’s way through that, putting to shame all the adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Indiana Jones.

Now everybody and “everything” have begun to send emails or SMS. Auto-mailers, alert systems, “human-free” marketing campaigns, digital signatures, “green initiatives” eliminating paper, location-based services (LBS) on phones mean that one is bombarded throughout the day with some message or the other. Like persistent rain that refuses to intensify or go away…

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp only serve to add to the total confusion with messages, videos, links, and comments from the entire bunch of people you have come across in life, and would not necessarily prefer to be in daily contact, as also from people who are contacts’ contacts of the people in your contact list…. Like a bunch of trees in a forest that have all chosen to intertwine their branches. You can very well imagine what will happen to the forest floor.

The upshot is that you have to learn the art of deleting. I have followed a simple rule on emails for very many years : F-A-D, or File – Answer – Delete, on a daily basis for all my email accounts, both personal and office. Now that is spreading to my mobile as well.

As mobiles become smarter with larger storage capacities, the capacity to store any and everything has increased, while operational stability has not. Thus to keep the mobile in basic operational health, one will have to keep removing stuff on a daily basis. Of late I have been deleting about thirty videos and fifty-odd pictures along with countless messages, each day. And then Google automatically backs up your phone on the cloud – which means you need to go up there clean that space too !! Sometimes I wonder, why does one need to share a selfie ? We know how you look !!

If you switch off the Wi-Fi, there is no respite. They will be crouching like tigers in cyberspace, to flood your phone with an e-vengeance as soon as it is connected. Happens every morning and after every flight.

I have realised that we have reached THE AGE OF DELETION !!

We do need to read, or at least skim through before we hit the delete button. And it takes time !! We are beginning to spend the better part of our waking hours reading important / unimportant messages, baseless trivia, unwanted information on people’s vacations and daily chores, and then deleting them, or worse, forwarding them to others, to spread the clutter.

Of late I am averaging about two to three hours each day deleting messages from my multiple inboxes and mobile phone, and by the time I am done, there are some more lined up for the next day !! We need to build an app for that – one that will skim through the incoming avalanche, filter stuff according to my preferences, and automatically delete the rest.

What is happening ? As we get enmeshed in this digital world, the plethora of passwords, videos, pictures, messages – both genuine and contrived are becoming a burden on the average mind and memory. There is no time to “stand and stare”; no time to contemplate, no time to look within….

***

From the dawn of civilization, we have lived in the “age of creation”.

Shakespeare wrote about thirty plays, one hundred and fifty-odd sonnets and some more poems in his lifetime. Wordsworth wrote more than three hundred and fifty. R.N. Tagore composed two thousand plus songs, seven dance-dramas, set up a university and became an institution by himself. Nazrul Islam composed about three thousand poems in a short span before an illness rendered him speechless and partially paralyzed.

I wonder if any of them would have been so prolific with their creations if they had to spend the better part of their days deleting stuff that they did not want in the first place….

No wonder we do not have great, original, contemporary thinkers….

Now that you have finished reading this, let’s go back to deleting stuff… I have started already !!

***

"D" in Discipline

A short story written by my son the other day....

***

"D" in Discipline

Long ago, but not so very long ago, I was a kid.

"Discipline e abar D?", (Another "D" in discipline ?") my mother sighed every time. 

It was easy. All you had to do was stand as dumb as a dolmen, wait for people to share their piece of minds, a few crocodile tears and you'd be done with it.

"Discipline e abar D?"(Another "D" in discipline ?"), the lady sitting beside me sighed, admonishing her child. 

I looked up.

"Ei dada ke dekhecho? Kirom shanto?", (Look at him !! What a nice and quiet boy he is ?) she went on. 

The kid glanced at me. I glanced back. 

I tried saying something. I couldn't.

I smiled. I couldn't help it.

Maybe for the first time in his life, someone didn't have a problem with him getting a D in Discipline.

After a moment of silence, he smiled back.

***