Communities and Affiliations

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I was wondering if I should write this at all. Everybody's talking about it and I'm not sure if one more piece written on the Mumbai attacks will change anything in however small a way. But I feel like writing about it because I'm interested in the psyche of the indignant. There's certainly a lot of indignation involved here. We're indignant as a nation that a bunch of boys could walk in and blow up our national symbols with such apathy. We're indignant as a society that politicians have Z category security while we have none. We're indignant as humans that harmless people were shot dead for no fault of theirs other than the fact that they were present. We're indignant with ourselves that we have such short memories and we will forget this and get on with our lives- not because we have resilient spirits but because well...what else are we going to do? There's indignation worldwide on the Mumbai attacks- Israel is indignant that the Indian government refused its offer of sending Israeli commandos. Pakistan is indignant that the Indian government is choosing to 'play politics' over this issue. The Americans are indignant because nobody gets more indignant about 'The War on Terror' than they do. It's their baby, after all. The terrorists did this because they were indignant about the victimization of the Muslim community. Their specific targeting of Americans, Britons, and Israelis has made that much clear. There's a lot of indignation doing the rounds globally at the moment.

Why does one person want to kill another? Self-defence and personal grievance are simple enough to understand. But communal grievance is a lot more complicated. I'm tired of hearing people make statements like 'Terror has no Religion'. Of course it does. To say that it's got nothing to do with religion is to bury your head like the proverbial ostrich in the sands. Recognizing the fact that terror has religious connotations does not make you a fundamentalist- Hindu, Islamic, Christian, or whatever else. These terrible acts of violence that are performed with chilling frequency are done in the name of religion and to dismiss them away as political gimmicks alone is dangerous escapism. The Gujarat riots happened when I was in Stella. In our 3rd year, Rakesh Sharma, the man who made Final Solution, a documentary on the riots, came to our college for a screening and discussion. Rakesh was very candid with his audience, upbeat despite the threat calls he kept receiving from Modi's cronies. The film was scary. There were first person accounts of rape, eye-witness accounts of lynchings, interviews with gravediggers on the nature of wounds on the bodies of the dead, openly fundamentalist speeches by saffron volunteers, children narrating their experience of the riots- it was horror that redefined for me the limits of human violence.

And yet, after we watched the film, a friend of mine snickered that Rakesh was uninterested in the Sabarmati Express. He was a pseudo-secularist who'd never make a film on the Kashmiri Pundits. Why didn't he talk about dead Hindus? Why doesn't he talk about Muslims who killed Hindus? This line of argument usually pisses me off. Another friend in our group is Muslim and we routinely fed on her college lunch without any Hindu-Muslim hatred simmering over the heavenly paneer rolls she brought to college. I got angry because it seemed so thick and hypocritical to match one atrocity against another. I was already disappointed by a number of seemingly intellectual acquaintances of mine who spoke for social justice and equity in their term papers while routinely using words like 'para' [pariah] in non-academic life. Feminists who hate Periyar for his anti-brahminism [Periyar was anti-brahminism, not anti-brahmin, a distinction that many people choose to pass over], never mind if he did more for women than did any Acharya. Families I thought I knew who had no qualms at all in making shockingly communal statements by normal way of discussion.

Maybe I was finding all this bewildering because I was brought up in a family where the only connection we have with religion is the Marxist sentiment that religion is the opium of the masses. We don't have a puja room at home and we've only ever visited temples to admire the architecture. My dad is a funny kind of atheist who swears by dharma, karma, and kurma [compulsory for Deepavali breakfast]. He doesn't believe in God, but he believes that good will happen to people who do good. If the Chinese legalized God tomorrow, my dad might pray a bit under the red flag. It's a brand of atheism that values self-belief but also has a sneaking hope in destiny. My mother is a weird kind of atheist who sounds like the Bhagavad Gita even during normal conversations. She doles out philosophy like peppermints. Her theory is that if at all there had been a God, the person's dead now since babies are being burnt in Iraq. 'God is Dead' as Nietzche would have it. My brother is a scientific kind of atheist. He's a physicist and has sufficient explanations I don't understand to prove the non-existence of God. I don't know what I am, though. I'm not religious, I don't pray, I don't identify myself as Hindu [I used to say I'm a pantheist when I first discovered that word], I don't think God will help me in a crisis situation, I don't think good will happen to me if I do good. I used to be a tight little atheist throughout school because my family was atheist and I had no problems challenging my classmates to make God appear before them if He [I wasn't a gender theorist then] really existed. Now, I'm happy being a skeptic, I'm agnostic. I don't know and I'm happy not to know. I think my atheism shook for the first time when I saw the Himalayas. It seemed implausible for something that beautiful to come out of nothing. I also think tiger stripes couldn't have just come from a silly little cell you can't even see. I'm not always rational and I like the romance of the Brahma's dream theory. That we're all absurd little characters in Brahma's dream...and one day, when he wakes up, our lives will end abruptly. It ties up with my love for Becket and every other existentialist laughing sadly over the human predicament.

To my family, religion is a lot of bullshit. We all reached someplace in life because of hard work and brain cells, not by praying frantically before exams or donating money to Tirupathi. And though I'm not a staunch atheist, I find rituals and ceremonies useless. Charming, yes. Quaint, yes. Romantic, yes. But in essence, useless. So I suppose, it's much easier for me to be objective about religious communal violence- purely because I have no affiliations towards any religion in particular. I don't feel hurt when someone says something abusive about the Hindu community. I don't care if someone makes fun of Nairs because my caste means nothing to me. The only time I was ever interested in it was when I discovered that Nairs originally came from Tibet [I was doing a term paper on a novel about a Nair family and this research was necessary]. But this is not to say that I have no affiliations at all. I get super pissed when North Indians complain about the lack of Hindi knowledge in Chennai. Why can't you learn our goddamn language instead of sticking to your national language refrain?- is my instinctive reaction. Note that it's 'our language' though Tamil is not my mother tongue. I identify myself as a Chennaiite- genetically Keralite, but strongly, very strongly rooted in this city I've grown with. I can read and write Tamil, I cannot read or write Malayalam. I think Tamil is a prettier language than is Malayalam. Abuse is fuller with the hard vallinams of Tamil than the nasal mellinams of Malayalam [Malayalam theri is a lot of fun, but it doesn't give one the satisfaction of abuse, it's more comic than angry]. I speak more Tamil than I do Malayalam. I get pissed when I go to Kerala and people ask me how come my Malayalam is decent though I'm running around with unbathed 'annachis'. I'm irritated by the way they stereotype Tamilians, because hey...Kerala is not my home. Chennai is. I get wild when people saying 'karore' and 'thurty thoushand' mock South Indian accents. None of this is personal, mind you. I get pissed when someone asks me why I don't have a South Indian accent- it's meant to be a compliment. But I bristle because it's an insult to my community. I get bugged when auto drivers think I'm a North Indian because of my nose ring. I make it a point to speak to them in propah Madras Tamil to prove my affiliation. When my friend and I got our nose piercings done, we did it on the right side because South Indians pierce on the right. Apparently, Mallus don't pierce their noses at all, but who cares about that. I'm happy to be identified as a 'Madrasi' though a lot of non-Tamils get pissed off- I'm a Madrasi wonly.

Outside India, I will defend my country to any nose-in-the-air First World citizen. I'll get properly angry with Hayden for calling India a Third World nation. I will talk about the melting pot that is India. I will celebrate all its festivals in conversations I have about its secularism- a secularism that does not annihilate differences but embraces them. I will pooh-pooh France's idea of secularism and congratulate the Indian Constitution. As the only Asian and non-White in my MA Gender Studies class, I was the spokesperson for squalor and chaos. I made my country endearing though I've been frustrated by it. But I wouldn't stand up in a class and speak ill of my country to people who don't belong there. Patriotism is a funny thing. With my friends from other Third World nations, I had no problems laughing about our Third Worldness. Nigerians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis- we all bonded over our respective poor country's currency exchange rate in relation to the GBP. Don't get me wrong, none of my Gender Studies classmates were racist- I got along better with them than I did with my Indian flatmates. And yet, it was somehow not-done to make fun of your 'community' [here, the Third World] to 'outsiders'. Same way I make fun of Mallu and Tamil accents with my Mallu and Tamil friends.

Communities are funny things. They provide you with a sense of identity that's essential to existence. You can't be a nothing. Even if you think you are a nothing, you still belong to a community of people who think they're nothings. There are rules you have to follow to be a nothing. A constitution exists to be a nothing. Communities are integral and are prone to give in to indignation. Because what you say about my community, no matter what you personally think about me, affects me. I'll defend PSBB KKN to a PSBB Main alumnus, Stella Maris to a MOP alumnus, South Indians to a North Indian, Indians to a non-Indian, humans to an alien. What happens when there is a conflict within the communities you belong to? The statement I keep hearing after the Mumbai attacks is 'We're all Indians'. I remember after 9/11, Mohammed Ali said, 'I'm an American Muslim'. Which affiliation do you privilege? Which identity do you hold dearer to your heart? Or must you choose at all?

Indoctrination camps- whether Hindu or Muslim- push one identity up over another, making it absolutely essential to make a choice. Either this or that. Communal grievance becomes a compelling bond. Your community versus mine. That is why it does not matter if a two-year-old Isralei child is orphaned in India- it is evened out by the fact that a two-year-old Arab child was orphaned by Israelis elsewhere. When we close our eyes in terror and wonder from where these demons rise, remember that they rise from a very normal human tendency- this tendency to belong. I am, in no way, justifying terrorism or even trying to make these dastardly acts remotely alright. I'm merely trying to point out that by making these acts seem inhuman, we're distancing ourselves from the possibility that we, or anyone else we trust, could indulge in them. That we're immune to indoctrination. Such a belief would be escapism, too. We're all prone to communal grievance, communal violence, communal instigation, communal provocation- if we lay ourselves open for these sentiments to be churned and seized into frenzy, we might...we just might...pick one identity and erase all others with ease.

Communities are irrational. I didn't know I was a Malayali Indian in Chennai till I was told I was. I didn't care about my identity when I came into this world yelling my lungs out. But now, this is my community. I wasn't born with that knowledge, but that knowledge is who I am today. These are my affiliations today.These are the identity marks I will defend. All this is human...sadly, insignificantly, common. We're all matryoshka dolls. One community inside another, one identity encapsulating another. What does your smallest doll look like?

The Week That Was

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Vaaranam Aaiyram was devastatingly boring. The only good part about the whole movie experience was that A and I got to bitch about several things in the film which were so fake. For instance, boy goes to Amrikan university in search of girl and wears university sweatshirt in memory of her. That's bs. What happens in real life is that this arrear writing local mechanical engineering boy goes to the US, watches university football for two minutes, buys university sweatshirt of university he's not even student of, does extensive football research on university team on wikipedia, bores the crap out of the girl talking about football games she doesn't give a rat's ass about. She dies, but that's just by the way. Boy weeps the next day because the football team lost the game. We also bitched about some large people with large popcorn tubs walking like Thai elephants during the interval. Then we spent some time analysing the group dynamics of 4 male and 2 female mallus who were sitting before us. Who is seeing who? Who is hitting on who? Making ominous predictions of when they're all going to breakup. If the hero had been the severely unbathed Vijay, it would have been unbearable. Surya is good eye candy though. Some compensation for the overworked. Poor Simran's become old.

I was also sick the day before Vaaranam. So I didn't eat Satyam chicken puff. What a remarkable show of restraint. The Satyam loos are eerie. They're so Hollywoodian, I keep thinking am going to end up getting murdered in there.


It's been raining like a madman this whole week. Good ole Coleridge and his water water everywhere. Some funny auto drivers thought I'd pay 200 bucks to go to office. There were people on Sun TV who were sitting on boats on the roads looking very silly and amused.


I watched this terror attack coverage on all the channels. I don't know what to think about stuff like this any more. I wish they'd take off rediff message boards on at least topics like Karkare's death. It's so annoying to see some ridiculous saffron idiot posting messages like he got what he deserved. This terrorist who's been caught is apparently 21. He looks like someone I could know. I'm glad the media has not gone on and on about the spirit of Mumbai this time.


I re-read all 3 Salinger books I own this week- The Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey, and Nine Stories. The first I read at least twice a month- too much has already been said about it, so I'm going to shut it. I love how Holden says "It killed me" for everything. The second was my companion during all those crazy government trips I had to make. It's my depression-means-you're-intelligent book. I love the world-weariness of that book. I love the mental disintegration of its characters. It's not at all raving . It's so logical and intelligent. I could be Franny with people falling off pedestals in all directions. Nine Stories is my rainy season book. It's mournful in an utterly can-do-nothing way. My favourites from this book are A Perfect Day for Bananafish, For Esme- with Love and Squalor, Teddy, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, and Just Before the War with the Eskimos. I love Salinger. He's the bestest.

I went for a friend's wedding today. Funny how we totally got the order of marriage in our class wrong. People who should have had five babies by now by our calculations are flying to Australia to do MBA. We went to buy a gift at Shoppers' Stop. What a godawful place. We made fun of several ugly clothes which were priced over a thousand bucks. What sort of lunatic buys all this.

Tomorrow, I'm going for a 'family' event. That means I have to wear ironed clothes and jewelery. Also, I have to not make bored faces and pretend I've got a call by playing my ringtone. I have to write three more chapters for this serial story I'm writing in the magazine and I'm stuck. I want my bloody Sunday!!

The Emperor's New Clothes

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Kidex got over. Yahoo. Kidex is an exhibition for children organized by CII and so on and so forth. We had a stall there and apart from this, we also had 'young journalists' covering the 3-day event. Every time the bossman called me in to talk about Kidex, I'd think about JEDDIX and would want to laugh very badly. It's good to carry forward a giggly juvenile strain into adult life. If there had been CCTV in office, I'd probably lose my job for being mentally unstable since I tend to laugh hysterically all by myself in the bathroom or in the pantry for no apparent reason.

These 'young journalists' were a bunch of 8th/9th standard kids from 3 city schools- 2 English medium and 1 Tamil medium. Their job was to bring out a newspaper each day, covering the previous day's events. We did a 3-hour workshop for them on journalism a week before the exhibition kicked off. How to interview people who won't talk, how to interview people who won't stop talking, how to interview boring people and make them interesting, how to use your Press card to get past Security, how to appear knowledgeable when you have no clue as to what's happening etc etc. I've never had a job as a journalist as such, but journalism had been a part of my profile when I was in the development field.

I've done interviews of all sorts of people- brusque cops who are nervous about their English, doctors in remote areas who write their medical records under the streetlights, oily government officials who'll try to charm you with gallons of tea, children on ART medication who don't know why they have to miss school for hospital, men who cry because they passed on the virus to their wives and kids, transgender women who are more interested in my nose ring than in my questions, sex workers who are tired of being pushed into rehab- it's been a busy life, alright. More often than not, people will talk to you if you show them that you aren't going to pass judgment on their stories. That you won't cringe and run away in embarrassment if they tell you about their lives. And though they're scared, ashamed, and beaten, they'll talk to a stranger who comes to them with the promise that s/he will write their stories for the world to know. Many of the interviews I did were for government clients. Projects funded by UN agencies. Has the state of the poor improved. Have the disabled become happy. Has discrimination ended. Has harassment reduced. Have balloons made up for sexual abuse. So on and so forth. And often, I'd have to make my reports sound optimistic because I was writing this for clients who wanted to create change without doing much. Give a man with no legs a goat. Let him feed the goat and sell its meat when it grows big enough. Yippie- we've emancipated one man with no legs. "The differently abled man thanks the _____ Project for its timely intervention in providing him with a goat." My clients loved my vocabulary.

And so, under my experienced and pep-it-up brand of journalism, the kids did a great job in covering the exhibition. They made Surjit Singh Barnala, the Honourable Governor, who cut the ribbon and inaugurated the exhibition, appear terribly dynamic. The man went around in a golf car surrounded by several safari-suited men who were doing a Jaragandi-Jaragandi with the crowd. One child, barely five or six, excitedly declared, “That’s Manmohan Singh!” Another shook his head at this ignorance and gently broke the news that this was actually Abdul Kalam. One lady told our journalist team that children were not allowed to take pictures of the Governor and would they please put their cameras away? I wonder if this is really a law etched somewhere. I had to intervene and explain as to why these children wanted to take pictures of the Governor. Normal children don’t care about the Governor, really, but these were journalists. The lady relented grumpily and said they could take photographs, but no autographs. That broke the children’s hearts obviously, since they’d learnt the man’s name only that morning.

This was a children’s exhibition, so the Governor was cordoned away from children. He was the exhibit of the moment. When this hullabaloo which lasted for approximately three minutes ended, the kids went off to cover the stalls which were marginally more interesting than a turbaned man who mumbled something in between smiles.

When the newsletter came out the next day, one officious young man from the organizing committee asked us why we’d put the Governor on Page 2. I told him that this was because Page 1 had the Editorial. But the officious young man informed me that this was a heinous crime because the Governor was Page 1 news. Apparently, this would lead to several complications. I wished him all the very best with the complications and continued eating my Nissin Cup Noodles with great relish. This was supposed to be a newsletter about a children’s exhibition written by children. If they didn’t think the Governor was interesting, he wasn’t. None of us adults find the Governor and these tremendously boring ceremonies interesting either. We tolerate them because nobody will be amused if I suddenly roll on the ground and yell saying I’d rather watch Pogo than this man in a golf car. But if we had a choice, if we could just walk away, if we could spill juice all over the floor and make flower patterns with it, if we could loudly command- MAKE IT STOPPPP- many of us would.

The kids had a blast. I was shocked by the number of parents who took the trouble of dragging their progeny to such a crowded place when it was raining cats and dogs outside. The place was full of kids eating candy, popcorn, and noodles. When I went to the bathroom, there was a Malayali lady who was loudly berating her child for eating so much. She kept asking this three year old who had just finished puking and was calmly regarding her with a mild interest, why it had to do this in every exhibition it went to. I was deeply moved by this lady’s relentless courage in bringing this child to exhibitions year after year.

There was a drawing competition going on and several middle-aged, graying fathers were seriously completing the artwork of their impatient children. The kids had decided they’d had enough after making a few crayon marks on the paper. But the daddies plodded on to finish the paintings, braving the punches and head knocks that their kids gifted them with.

The young journalists team also got a chance to go for a Press Meet with Vishy Anand and they were totally kicked. They even asked him five or six questions- more than any reporter from any other channel did! The team brought out two reasonably good newspapers on the exhibition and went home feeling highly accomplished. I went home thoroughly exhausted by 3 days of non-stop noise, yelling (at DTP people, Production people, Printing people, Delivery people), and responsibility.

Today is my compensatory day off. And I’m going to watch Vaaranam Aayiram tonight…at last.

Writer, Reader, Respect

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No big surprise that Arithmetic figures nowhere in my 3Rs. For a long time now, I've been wondering what is it that I really want to do professionally (spiritually, I want to be a bananafish). There's always been a long list of things I didn't want to be ever. I knew I could never do anything that required me to do things with numbers. Biology was appealing for a brief period because we had a wonderful teacher who taught us Mitosis-Meiosis and why cacti are fleshy in a most fascinating way. I considered Medicine, but the thought perished when I realized I'd have to study Physics, Chemistry, and ooooh la la Math, in 11th and 12th.

I never wanted to be a lawyer- and I said this when I was five, mind you- because lawyers have to wear the same dress every day and I loved colour dress. I wasn't into sports because my mother was complexion-conscious. I liked reading and I liked writing. The school magazine carried my article from my class every year- it's an amazing record which has been recorded nowhere but inside my head. I won quite a few prizes in all these school culturals for writing, and I even remember a teacher picking me over a school senior because she was sure I'd win- and I did. What a historic moment it was. I realized that this was the only thing I cared about. I was happiest when I was forming rhyme schemes inside my head (yes, I wrote poetry that rhymed, but all this is past tense, see?). I was extremely proud of myself when something I wrote got published. Didn't matter if it was only the school magazine and the only people who read it were my parents, my brother (to laugh at it), and hapless relatives who were forced to do so. I was on the editorial of the school student-run magazine (the other one was run by teachers and was therefore full of news students didn't care about) and I loved the whole thing. Chopping text to fit the word count. Adding text to make the piece fuller. Searching feverishly for funny quotes from the internet for sidebars. I was probably the only moron who cared about it so much because everyone else would ditch PSBB Times any day over lab class. Me, I never had lab. I was in the useless Commerce group and delighted to be in it, too.

I was the only one in my entire batch in school who did an Arts course. The other Commerce people either did B.Com, VisComm, or law. The Science people are probably having a grand reunion either in the US or in CTS. I loved my course, really. I whined, complained, and wrote sarcastic posts during my three years in Stella, but I absolutely loved my syllabus. We were quite an impassioned bunch, never mind if we sat right at the back and made a great show of never listening. I loved writing assignment essays, and when I read them now, I can see quite a few flaws, but I can also see the energy that drove me to write those. Oh I was all afire, I was. I used to turn pink when I did seminars on texts I loved because I felt so strongly about them. I loved exams because I loved what I was studying and what I had to write. There are some classes from my BA course that I will never forget because I was so moved- like Sharada Bhanu teaching us Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold. Her forlorn voice stopping for a second over "Ah love!", breaking all our hearts with the bittersweet twinge of things that might have been. Or Meghna teaching us Marxism, her wild hair framing her serious, rebellious face. There are books we discovered in college that changed our lives. I remember how enlightened I felt when I first read A Room of One's Own. I couldn't believe I didn't know everything Woolf had said, already. Waiting for Godot was another- a play by a Frenchman which is really about my life. I was so amazed that someone could steal thoughts from my head and write something like this in a country far far away.

Our bunch never took notes in class- we invented. I've invented critics in my exam papers. People who don't exist who said things I wanted to say by a happy coincidence. I'll grant Stella this- we were always free to have our opinion on texts, except in CR's classes, of course. Even Shakespeare wouldn't be able to disagree with CR on what she thought his sonnets were about. But otherwise, we were privileged as readers to disagree with writers; we could sit judgment on Shashi Deshpande and trash her soppy novel, never mind if she won the Sahitya Akademi for it. I'm going to be one of those eighty year olds who start every sentence with "In my days..."

I've realized that professionally, the only thing I want to be doing is writing. Like every good kid of my generation who wants to save the world, I did my bit. I ran around the country documenting children dying of AIDS, interviewing disabled people who thought I was a ministry official, analyzing data about police perception of transgender, hating redtape, hating bureaucracy, hating corruption, hating the system, hating IAS officers, hating my job, hating the way I was becoming the poor little rich girl cliche. And then I realized that though I felt sad and bad about a whole lot of mad things happening on the planet, I was feeling pissed off because saving the world left me very little time to write. I felt holey. This was my handful of dreamdust not for sale.

So I quit. I decided to do something which would keep me happy. Because you can't save the world feeling like shit. I had been freelancing for the magazine even during my RGNIID days- I got the job after I tore apart a story they'd put up on the site which began with "Once there was a king who wanted a son. So he married thrice..." And when I got a full-time offer, I thought why not?

Writers are a sensitive lot. I spend a lot of time wondering who from Milan visited my blog today. Why did this person stay for only 1 minute on this page? Did he/she not like what they read? It makes me happy to see my brother visiting my site every day (come out of denial, Mr.Stanford University). I watch the red dots on the map and squeal that people from other continents read what I wrote. I am overjoyed when people comment. I don't care that I sound like a loser with no life. I'm happy when someone says they liked what they read. It makes my day, alright? I feel sunshiney. I feel like a queen. When I distribute the magazine to kids and they stop to read a page I've written, my heart skips a beat. I want to shout "Yahoo!" When children email the boss-man saying they loved a story I wrote, I want to kiss the child who didn't stop with liking the story- it bothered to tell us about it. I love this feeling and I know every goddamn writer who cares does, too.

But I'm also an editor. I tell other writers their stuff is no good. I tell them politely and professionally, of course. But what I really want to say is "This is awful." I sometimes have to chop mercilessly to make the story fit the two-page slot it's been assigned. I have to add a word here, delete a line there to ensure that the design isn't disturbed. It's what I have to do and a lot of writers hate me for it. Because who am I to touch their work. I'm the goddamn editor, that's who I am...yippie. I have my tastes, I have strong ideas about what a story should be like. I will remove gender, caste, class, race stereotypes. I will not allow didactic writing. I will shoot down pedagogy. I am not part of any Venerate the Veterans club- if your sentence is clumsy, I'll chop. And that's ruffled some feathers in recent times. But being hated is the professional hazard of being an editor.

I did a creative writing workshop for children yesterday. I loved every minute of it. The kids were a very enthusiastic bunch and they participated in all the activities with full gusto. When I asked them what a story should have, one of the things they said was "A Moral". When I asked them what their favourite stories/books are, everyone either said Enid Blyton, Harry Potter, or Roald Dahl. None of these stories are moral stories per se; they were not written to drill a particular moral like a nugget down the child's throat. If the kid learnt to love dogs from Famous Five or learnt about friendship from Harry Potter, in the process of reading, wonderful. But if they didn't and they read the books for the joy of reading them, I say capital. It's sad that our children (so profound I sound at this moment) think this is the answer that will please us most. I didn't study literature to become a saint. I studied it because I was entertained by it. I studied it because it made me happy. If that's not a value, I don't know what is.

If you become a famous writer, then everybody is in awe of you. You become hot overnight. But the process of becoming, ah that process of running behind publishing houses run by people who just happened to have the money, ah that process...I can't make this poetic in any other way than by adding more ahs. It sucks. You don't win their respect because they think you can survive only if they take you to the world. You're stillborn if they choose you to be. It doesn't matter how great you think your work is. A bitchy editor is reading it distractedly while chatting on Gtalk. Spilling coffee on your manuscript and losing it in the auto when he/she gets back home.

It's a vicious circle, this.

Now all of you, especially this person from Milan who I don't know, please comment. I'm going to watch my stat counter all day at work tomorrow. And read some manuscripts while at it.

Chapter 4: Order, Order, Order!

It's been a good week. A lot of kids mailed saying they loved the November issue; one kid even said, "May you live forever!" I feel blessed. May you live forever, too, Meryn...whoever you are!! There was another who said, "I can't find fault with your magazine at any cost!"-wheeeeee! At last, something close to joy on the job. Changing a 61-year old magazine without losing readers is a tough ask, but Change looks good globally at the moment....and here it is...the inevitable Obama joke- Yes We Did.

But if there's one place on the planet where Time stands still and expressions like "It will take an age!" or "It will take forever!" are not in the least exaggerations, it is RGNIID. We are on the threshold of a momentous event- the conscientious Gounder Brownie taking over the mantle of Training Officer. When Mr.Chandrabeku asked me to report for duty, I was so overjoyed I could have told him "May you live forever!"

The 1st of November 2007: My father drove me to Egmore railway station and described in great detail what trains look like, what compartments look like, and what ladies compartments in particular look like. When he was sure that my tabula rasa mind had registered all of this terrifically complicated information, he asked me if I had my train pass. I was requested to duly produce this from my wallet for proof. He had, of course, filled the train pass to his satisfaction and stuck my photo [with the right amount of gum in proportion to the paper's thickness- it's an elaborate ritual which my father performs like a High Priest]. I could win the Booker tomorrow and I would still be unable to fill a form to the fullest satisfaction of my father. Once I got clearance that I was ready to board a train all by myself at the tender age of 22, I placed my fragile footsteps on the train to Guindy.

From Guindy, the RGNIID staff bus would pick us up. We'd listen to Suchi Sabha religiously as the bus wound its way through all the traffic. Most of the staff would be fast asleep in their assigned seats, in full preparation of a hard day's work ahead. If you are a senior member, you got a two-seater all for yourself. The lesser mortals would sit two per two-seater and the lesser than mortals would sit right at the back. This was an arrangement as delicate as ikebana and even a slight change in the order would maul the design completely. On my first day, I sat on a seat which is usually occupied by an FH. After the Director, a Faculty Head is the highest post in the institute. If the faculties of your head are somewhat not all there, you get this much coveted post. And since IAS is three letters, Faculty Heads need two letters- Dr. This ensures that the Director's sense of importance is not disturbed while pulling one up on the lesser mortals who have just an initial as an alphabet that goes with their name. Sitting on an FH seat is a total no-no, so I vacated with an expression of complete reverence.

When we reached the institute, I was informed that I'd have to sit in the library till the Director called me. So in I went to Thiruvarasu's territory. He was mildly pleased to have a visitor, so he spent an hour telling me why I should not work in RGNIID if I wanted to work. Apparently, in the good old days when the BJP was in power, the staff members could afford to come daily, drink tea, sign attendance and leave since the BJP was least interested in anything with a Gandhi in its name. Now, however, with the Congress in power, they had to keep up pretences and do programs occasionally so they could submit reports. Poor Thiruvarasu was emotionally disturbed by the strain of all this deceit. I countered his arguments by stating Rang De Basanti fluff. Thiruvarasu, the dear man, had no idea about the power of youth. The quality of youth is not restrained; it droppeth as furious as Vijaykanth in Captain Prabhakaran upon the bureaucracy. Our stimulating conversation was disrupted when the driver and cronies made their arrival. Thiruvarasu was terrified of the power they exuded and therefore retired to the back of the library for a dignified nap.

I was thrilled to see a section marked Gender and began reading a book by some Pakistani writer. However, the driver and the cronies were playing Enga Veetu Pillai on one of the computers and that was way more interesting than the number of honour killings in Pakistan. They cheered and cried with MGR and it was a Kodak moment for everyone concerned. But as all good things have to come to an end, the film reached its moving conclusion. By this time, I was starting to feel antsy. Why hadn't the Director called me in yet? I put the question to Thiruvarasu who had just emerged, tired from having slept continuously.

He informed me that the Director hadn't called me in yet because he wasn't in office yet. The clock struck 12. Cinderella hour. I was hoping the Director would appear in a pumpkin coach and somehow put an end to this queasy feeling in my stomach. I tried reading a few more books, but the Director's peon was having an animated conversation with his wife over the library phone. He was calling her names for not having answered the phone within the first three rings. What did she mean by sleeping in the morning? Did she think she was RGNIID staff? I am always interested in expanding my vocabulary, so I carefully made notes of the new terms and epithets he was spewing. There are men of few words, but this remarkable man was not among them.

I waited the whole day, but the Director did not turn up. By 5.45, everyone was on the staff bus. RGNIID members could beat the Japanese in punctuality any day. So what if work gets over only at 6? The early bird gets the worm, mister.

On Day 2, I was once again asked to sit in the library. True, Thiruvarasu is a charming man, but I was staring to resent this library ghetttoization. I was mentally singing Eef you Come Today to the Director. Today, however, Mr.Chandrabeku walked in hours later and handed me a sealed envelope. "Congratulations!" he beamed. Finally, I thought. Here was my appointment order. In Government offices, pen is mightier than the sword. If something is not in writing, then it doesn't exist. So if you want someone to fix the bolt on the door, you first have to prove that there is a door. Write an Administrative Note to the Administrative Officer stating that since there is a room, there is a door. Since there is a door, there is a bolt. Also state when the room was constructed and when the door was installed. Further, provide documents to prove that at least 3 price quotations were obtained for the construction of the said room and the installation of the said door to avoid any charges of corruption. The bolt in question has been giving trouble since such and such date and I, therefore, humbly request your gracious self to kindly obtain 3 quotations to buy a new bolt. The Administration will then lose this Administrative Note, as is the procedure. You will next produce another Note summarizing the details of the previous Note and making another request- this procedure is repeated until you learn to survive without a bolt on the door. This keeps everybody happy and ensures that for want of a bolt, the door was not lost.

So it was now in writing that I was a Training Officer in RGNIID, I thought. Gleefully, I opened the letter. It said "This is to inform you that since you don't have the necessary qualifications or work experience, you are not suitable for the post of Training Officer." I wondered bleakly why Mr.Chandrabeku had said 'Congratulations'. Besides, the letter calling me for interview had said, "This is to inform you that since you have the necessary qualifications and work experience, you are requested to attend interview for the post of Training Officer." If I hadn't got the job, why was I asked to report for duty?

Unmindful of all the questions raging inside my head, Mr.Chandrabeku offered me tea with a beatific expression on his face. I asked him what all this meant and he cheerily said, "Nothing! Oh, it's alright!" He took me to Dr.N's room and told him that from today, I was part of SHANU division. SHANU stands for Social Harmony and National Unity, in case you were wondering if he is some relative of Bunty and Pinto. My designation was to be Training Assistant and I would train to be a Training Officer by assisting. Mr.Chandrabeku was being very genial, and though I was considerably miffed by this debacle, I decided if that's what it took to be GoI Jane, that's what they'd get.

All I lacked was a lasso, such a swashbuckling countenance it was, otherwise.