Father's Day - The Flip Side...

Last Father’s Day, I had written a sentimental, rather meandering `letter’ to my kids under the title `Father’s Day Musings’. Of all my posts, this received the largest feedback – mostly from my friends and course mates, people like me, in the same boat, who empathized deeply. Been there, done that..

People whom I didn’t even know wrote in, one saying that it had moved him and his wife to tears as they read it together. For those who missed it, or would like to give it a re-visit (as I just did), it is available at

http://hbpuri.blogspot.in/2013/06/fathers-day-musings.html

This post is a bit different. It’s not about kids, but about us dads, on the wrong side of sixty, old, grumpy and cantankerous. That ring a bell somewhere?

Vinita Dawra Nangia’s blog (`How Not To Become An Old Grumpy’) in last Sunday’s `Times of India’ talks of the IMS, `Irritable Male Syndrome’, that afflicts every man once he crosses 60.

Men naturally become grumpy, Vinita contends, because it’s in their DNA! Quoting the American psychotherapist Jed Diamond, she assures us that IMS is as prevalent, and actually much deadlier than the female PMS!

To me, it was a double whammy. Being a Puri, and therefore already a hopeless case of IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), to now be saddled with IMS in addition was scary, to say the least.

I decided to check. Who better to ask than my first born.

“Do you think,” I asked Puja, “that I’ve become grumpy as I’ve grown older?” I emphasized the word in as nasty an intone I could manage, while trying to sound noncommittal.

“Not at all, Pa” she assured me sweetly, and before my Cheshire Cat grin could spread any wider, she added “You’ve always been grumpy!”

Vinita’s reasoning is simple. When working, men are, or think they are, in control. Once they retire into ignominy, that sense of control is lost. Ergo, they become grumpy. Bristling hedgehogs, radiating irritability and impossible to handle as they grow older!

And how do your kids deal with the new you? Not a problem in my case, as Puja so delicately brought out. Or wait - how did we deal with our fathers?

Take the case of course mate Pramod Kulkarni and his better half Ashvini. They had both their fathers living with them for, I kid you not, almost 25 years. Well past their eighties, the `oldies’ must have made the proverbial `odd couple’, and, one would have thought, driven Pramod and Ashvini up the wall! 25 years, phew!

“We played good cop, bad cop” Pramod explained. “While Ashvini pampered them, I was the strict disciplinarian!”

Both passed away in quick succession recently, and Pramod and Ashvini were devastated.

“Is there no sense of freedom, or relief?” I asked Ashvini tentatively.

 “Not at all, it was so lovely!” she gushed, “It was just like raising children all over again!”

I don’t know much about paap-punya, but I’m sure Pramod and Ashvini have earned enough punya to assure them a great place in the hereafter.

Puja lives half way across the world. We miss her bubbly presence. She talks to us daily using Face Time (Thank you, Steve Jobs!). Her American friends are appalled. They barely speak to their parents, if at all.

Thank God for Indian tradition!

Waiting for Aarti….

The Corps of Signals is nothing if not tradition bound. And the oldest Signals tradition, of course, is daughters – plenty of them! My first born, sure enough, was a girl, and it was during our Degree Course at Mhow that we decided to provide her a sibling.

Now since I was a true blue Signaller, and since the `due date’ was 15<sup>th</sup> Feb, which was also the Signals `Corps day’, it was a no brainer that the sibling could only be a sister!

So the planning started early. We had named the first one Puja – though all my friends and course mates knew, and continue to know her as 2T/Tootie/Tooty (take your pick). Her sibling, long before she appeared, had already been named Aarti.

MH Mhow was no Apollo Hospital, but in those days it had on its staff Major Kandoth, who was arguably the most outstanding OB-GYN in the Army. I kid you not – student officers in Mhow actually planned their wife’s pregnancies only after first consulting Major Kandoth’s Leave Plan!

So we patiently waited for Aarti. Well not exactly patiently, because even as close as a month before her arrival, we went on a trip to Mandu - on scooters! The ghosts of Baaz Bahadur and Rani Roopmati (`Aa laut ke aa ja meray meet’, remember?) seemed kindly disposed towards us, as the trip went off without any `surprises’. Aarti handled the bumpy road like a true fauji!

On 28^th January (1981 it was), the wife complained of a severe back ache, and asked to be taken to Major Kandoth. Now I was firmly of the `Iodex maliye, kaam pe chaliye’ school of thought as far as back aches go, but she was insistent. So off we drove (on a scooter, what else?) to the MH.

The hospital, however, was having their Annual Administrative Inspection that day, and the good doctor Major Kandoth was standing outside the Family Ward at ramrod-stiff attention, Sam Browne belt and peak cap in place, boots glistening like mirrors!

But seeing us in obvious distress, he quickly remembered the Hippocratic Oath, whipped off his peak cap, and summoned her into the examination room. He marched out a few minutes later, and informed me that he had administered some drugs to induce labour. “If nothing happens in 30 minutes, we’ll do a C-Section!”

I was flabbergasted! 15^th Feb was a good 20 days away. But Aarti seemed to be in a hurry to make her appearance. So 30 minutes later on the dot, the wife was wheeled into the OT for a C-Section.

Pacing up n down here

I did the customary pacing up and down in the corridor outside. I practiced my welcome speech to Aarti, mentally drafted the telegram I would send my folks `BLESSED WITH DAUGHTER STOP BOTH FINE STOP’. And I waited. For Aarti.

A nurse rushed out of the OT looking harassed. “Anything wrong?” I asked her. She hadn’t noticed me till then. “No, all well” she replied curtly – apparently not one of the `hail-fellow-well-met’ types. And she turned around and swiftly marched off, clickety-click, as only an Army nurse can.

At the door she paused, and turned around. “Oh, by the way” she added, almost as an after thought, “it’s a boy!”

Again, I was flabbergasted! Ten minutes later, she brought the proverbial `bundle of joy’ out of the OT, and walked towards me. My flabbergasted, incredulous expression was still frozen in place. 

“It’s a boy” she repeated, “here, look!” and promptly unravelled the lower part of the bundle, to show me his weenie. “I believe you, sister” I assured her “now can I please also see his face?”

Of course, all my plans went for a six. I quickly had to come up with a name. My favourite pen in those days was a Japanese roller tip (in 1981, mind you!) called Tiku – so the nickname almost suggested itself. It was later corrupted to Tiki, but that was fine.

 

So Puja did get her sibling, only it wasn’t Aarti, but Siddharth. Maybe he in turn may give us an Aarti, who knows?

The wait, in any case, was a joy in itself!

An Apple A Day...

6 pm, Friday, the 29^th of June, 2007. The Menlo Park Mall, New Jersey, USA. A new phone, tom-tomed by Steve Jobs twenty days earlier, is about to be launched. Somewhere in that serpentine queue outside the Apple Store stands a girl desperate to be among the first few to actually hold the phone, and be, as she called it, a part of history.

That was the iPhone, and that was my daughter. To her, Steve Jobs remains the incarnation of God – Brahma, the creator. Since then, Apple has released seven different generations of the iPhone, and sure enough, Puja has been among the first few to hold each and every one of them!

How this girl, who was so `technologically challenged’ at school (maths and science were monsters to wrestle with, and lose to repeatedly) could grow into such a technological wizard and such a gadget-n-gizmo freak is beyond me.

Me, I was quite happy with my Windows PC and Nokia/Blackberry phones, and remained stubbornly immune to her attempts to convert me to Apple.

And I had good reason to. Consider.

I had just about mastered Wordstar, when along came Word Perfect, and I had to unlearn whatever I had learnt, and start from scratch. Having just about done so, I was asked to junk all that and switch to Microsoft Word! Ditto with Lotus 1-2-3 to Excel, and PC Storyboard to Powerpoint.

I was pissed off, to say the least. And now here was my daughter asking me to junk what over 80% of the world was using and switch to something that was reportedly marginally superior, but much less popular. Enough is enough, I said.

Puja on FaceTime!

Then she presented me with an iPhone 4S for my last birthday, and I was stuck. Shifting all my contacts and data from my Blackberry to the new phone was a hellish experience, and took three days and practically all my patience.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m technologically sound - a telecom engineer who had specialised in EDP in the Army, and here I was being goaded by an Arts graduate with a Diploma in, wait for it, Fashion Design!

Since the iPhone quite adamantly refused to talk cordially to my Windows PC, she handed me her MacBook Pro, and asked, nay ordered me, to just get on with it!

And when we visited her in San Francisco (a pilgrimage to Jobs’s mansion in Palo Alto was, of course, a must), seeing me drool over their Retina display iPad, that was handed down to me as well.

So now I have an iPhone, an iPod Touch, a MacBook Pro and an iPad! I have been well and truly converted!

The question that still irks me is what took me so long?? And why is it that a product that is so decidedly superior (and I mean decidedly as in `zameen-aasmaan ka faraq’ versus `unees-bees ka faraq') should actually command such a meagre share of the market.

The answer could fill quite a few posts, but it basically lies in the regrettable fact that Jobs, though brilliant, was also the quintessential asshole! Yes, part of my `conversion tutorial’ was reading Walter Issacson’s voluminous biography of Jobs.

Puja is back from SF, and was yesterday on the MacBook for some documentation. She threw up her hands in despair “You still use Word?” she shrieked “For heavens sake Pa, get Pages!”

Hmm… I think I’ll pass. Surely, I need to draw the line somewhere…

And The Oscar Goes To...

Sentimentality has always trumped merit at the Oscars. That is why non-actors like John Wayne (`True Grit’) and Henry Fonda (`On Golden Pond’) walk away with the statuettes while the O’Tooles and the Burtons are left high and dry.

12 Years A Slave

This year promises to be no better. A front runner this time around is a vapid attempt at a tear jerker called `12 Years a Slave’. In about two and a half hours of mind numbing ennui, it packs in every conceivable cliché on slavery – the mandatory slave auction, a `good’ slave owner, a `bad’ slave owner, a white abolitionist, the journey by boat in chains, the whippings, the bloodied backs.

But for all its efforts to tug at my heart strings, it left me quite cold. Sadly, since it has all the sentimental trappings that the Academy so loves (a black director, the collective guilt that white Americans still harbour, et al), I expect it to win big time. And God forbid, if Chiwetel Ejiofor wins the Best Actor Award for merely scowling and grimacing, I swear I’m gonna pull my hair out!

Bale's pot belly

McConaughey's Gaunt look

The Best Actor category this year is actually all about body weight. While Mathew McConaughey lost about 25 pounds for his role as an AIDS patient in `Dallas Buyers Club’, Christian Bale actually put on the same amount for his role as the 70’s conman in `American Hustle’. To my mind, both would be deserving winners, although I find it strange to see that Tom Hanks hasn’t even been nominated – he should have walked away with the award if only for the last ten minutes of `Captain Philips’!

Meryl Streep apparently just has to appear in a movie to be nominated for an acting award! How else does one explain her nomination for her role as Violet Weston in `August : Osage County’ – her performance has more ham in it than Wodehouse’s Empress of Blandings!

Dubey in the Indian version

`August : Osage County’ is actually a Pulitzer Prize winning play written by Tracy Letts. Since all the action takes place in a single room, the play doesn’t easily lend itself to a credible film script. Incidentally, an Indianised version of the play was staged by Lilette Dubey, which I happened to catch at Poona. Both the play itself, as also Dubey’s performance, outshone both the film and yes, Meryl Streep!

The Best Actress will be a straight fight between Kate Blanchette (`Blue Jasmine’) and Sandra Bullock (`Gravity’). While I know, Blanchette will in all likelihood take home the trophy, I’m still secretly rooting for Bullock!

An aside here. We were taught early in school that the feminine gender for `actor’ was `actress’. Why then do actresses of the day prefer to be called actors? Anybody??

The Supporting Actor award has probably been sewn up by Barkhad Abdi for his role as the Somali pirate in `Captain Philips’. I had mentally given the award to Jake Gylenhaal for the twitching Detective Loki in `Prisoners’ – but he’s nowhere on the scene.

And the delectable Jennifer Lawrence will pick up her second award in succession this year. This time for the Best Supporting Actress in `American Hustle’.

And what of the Best Picture? 

Let me gnash my teeth in frustration as Steve McQueen (seriously?) gloats as he takes it home for the eminently forgettable `12 Years a Slave’. My advice to him? Sir, please read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s most moving ode to slavery `Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ – you’re not even close!

Breakfast at Vohuman's

19^th February was a Maharashtrian holiday (Shivaji’s b’day, what else?), so we decided to `breakfast out’. Sid was away at Bangalore, so missal-pav it was – that being the one Maharashtrian staple he normally gives a wide berth to.

Missal-pav

For the uninitiated, missal (meaning `mixture’ in Marathi) is a mix of sev, farsan, chopped oninions, coriander and a lentil mix of sprouted `matki’ called usal. It is topped by a fiery, watery curry, called, for some inexplicable reason, sample! The piping hot mix is then served with pav, the Indian version of the burger bun.

The mixture, if conjured in the correct proportions, is simply to die for! Now the meanest missal-pav in Poona is served in a hole-in-the-wall outlet called `Shree Uphaar Grah’ off Laxmi Road. There’s no way you can take your car there, so the ubiquitous auto is your best bet.

We reached there only to find the shutters down. Apparently, it opens only after 10! Now what’s with these Maharashtrians, how can they expect to popularize their cuisine if they serve what is essentially a breakfast dish only after 10?

So we quickly had to switch options. The butter masala dosa at Vaishali’s was tempting, as was the prospect of an Irani breakfast at Café Good Luck, both on Fergusson College Road, about 10 minutes away.

But we decide to head back to Camp, and settled for Vohuman’s Café, a popular if slightly down-market joint next to Jehangir Hospital. I was born there, remember? At Jehangir, not at Vohuman’s..

Bun-maska-cheese omelette!

The problem at Vohuman’s is that they still haven’t heard of the cholesterol scare, and the butter and cheese they serve in such copious quantities is enough to make your arteries scream in protest! No wonder they are located so close to both Jehangir Hospital and Ruby Hall Clinic, just opposite the road!.

Of course you have to ignore the cringe worthy custom of its patrons, of dunking their heavily buttered buns in steaming mugs of sweet Irani chai. What can I say, my brother Satish does it, my niece C2 does it, and now Sowmya proves that she’s a Puri at heart after all!

Breakfast in India is what makes India what it is. In Punjab, have your aloo-ka-paratha swimming in butter, in Delhi head to Sadar Bazaar for the best chana-bhatura on the planet, in Bangalore try the steaming idlis off Commercial Street (or MTR), In Hyderabad try the haleem or the nihari near the Charminar, on the Bombay-Poona Expressway the wada-pav rules the roost!

And if it’s a true-blue English breakfast that you hanker for, there’s nothing like `Flury’s’ on Calcutta’s Park Street, complete with the most delicious Darjeeling tea!

Gaymer wa dibis

In Iraq too there’s contrast aplenty. Kurdistan in Northern Iraq has what they call `No-kao’ – chickpea (Kabuli chana) stuffed in buns, served with the chana gravy. Baghdad has what is called `gaymer’, a very thick white cream made from buffalo milk. Iraqi bread, similar to our naan, is dipped into this cream, along with some date syrup, to make `Gaymer Wa Dibis’ – truly superlative!

In USA, there’s the iHop chain of course. My one visit there, and I had to be dragged out physically – another half an hour, and they’d have needed a gurney..

In the end, at my age, and with the not-so-great digestive system that the Puri genes have blessed me with, I’m content to settle for an `oats and muesli’ porridge for my daily brekker.

Dunkin' bun-maska! 

But it’s Shivaji’s birthday, and since the Maharashtrians have shut shop, it’s `Breakfast at Vohuman’s’ for the Puris.

The maska (butter) is everything the doctor ordered you not to eat, the cheese slices on the `cheese toast' are as thick as the toasts themselves, the tea is as sweet and as milky as any Irani chai can be, and even if Sowmya threatens to dunk the bun-maska in her chai, it’s a small price to pay.. 

Mujhse `Fraandship' Karoge??

Whatever the merits/demerits of `The Social Network’, no matter how astronomical the net worth of Mark Zuckerberg, the one albatross that will always hang around his neck is that he forever devalued the concept of a`friend’.

Friends start early in life, and if you’re lucky enough to still have friendships that date back to your school days, you’ll know how cherished these are. Sowmya has her `Gang of St Joseph’s’ and how heartwarming that is!

Sid’s first `best friend’ in kindergarten was a guy called Gagan Porwal. He called him `G-A-G-A-N Gagan’, spelling out the name every time he spoke of him. This was way back in 1985 at Rani Laxmibai Public School at Jhansi, where I was then posted. In those early years, `G-A-G-A-N Gagan’ was the most important person in Sid’s life!

So when Sid got married in 2012, I was very keen that we track down `G-A-G-A-N Gagan’ and invite him. So I messaged the three Gagan Porwals I located on Facebook, asking them if they had attended Rani Laxmibai Public School at Jhansi in 1985. The first politely declined, the second said he hadn’t even been born in 1985, but I managed to hit bull’s eye with the third – he indeed turned out to be the one and only `G-A-G-A-N Gagan’!!

I wish I had met with similar success in tracking down my old flames from Fergusson College, sigh..

Friends in those days were people you shared your lunch money with, people you bonded with over masala dosa and coffee at `Vaishali’ or girls whose hand you furtively held in the darkness of Alaka theatre.

To make a friend, one had to really work at it. To keep him for life was a mountain to climb! Today, you just send a friend request, which he accepts in a jiffy, and there, you have it!

In those days, if you had a tiff, you broke off the friendship by wagging a crooked finger at the `offender’ and saying `katti’. Today you just unfriend him if he has been nasty, block him if he has been really nasty, or merely block his posts if you find them mildly irritating!

You had friends you could count on your fingers – one hand if you were the reserved type, both hands if you were a bit more gregarious. Rarely did you have to remove your shoes to use your toes to count on. Today if you have less than 100 friends on your list, you’re considered gauche. People these days easily have five to six hundred friends, and a Pakistani journo who is on my list has, I kid you not, a whooping 1127! Hell, I don’t even know that many people!

So is this a good thing?

If you track down your Gagan Porwals and re-establish contact, it can be really exhilarating. It’s also terrific to keep track of how beautifully (and how fast) your grand nephews and nieces are growing.

But of course there’s a flip side. People post pics, get likes and comments, that’s how it works. If you take offence at harmless remarks or perceived slights, or if you get into heated political or cultural arguments, you probably shouldn’t be there in the first place.

My take, at my age, and with all the wisdom that nature and the years have endowed me with (seriously?), I’m happy with the plusses. Of course I’ll take a warm evening over a single malt any day, but in the absence of such real bonhomie, facebook friendships, I guess, will have to do.

And of course, the day I manage to reconnect with those old flames of Fergusson College, that’s the day I’ll actually send Mr Zuckerberg a thank you note!

  

More Equal Than Others??

The Brahmins top the table – they’re the ` crème’ de la crème’ of the pernicious caste system among Hindus. The shudras are at the bottom rung. Being a Punjabi khatri, I guess I’m a kshatriya, and figure somewhere in the middle (or so I’m told).

Good or bad, pernicious or otherwise, like it or not, there’s no getting away from the hierarchical, and sometimes tyrannical structure in practically every facet of life – caste, colour, creed or even your social standing.

One would think the Armed forces would be free from this blight. Far from it. And it starts right at the Academy. In the aviary that is the IMA, the birds from the NDA are the `peacocks’ (and even among them, we have distinct school wise layers, with the Rimcolians strutting the brightest plumage!). Then come the Direct Entries, followed by the `Techies’ and finally the former rankers from the ACC! 

One would imagine things reach a state of equilibrium, and water finds its own level once we all are commissioned and join units. There, professional ability, rather than breeding would count – but heck, who are we kidding?

Check out the Air Force, where an extremely rigid caste system is de jure right up the ranks. The fighter pilots are the top guns. (Q – What is the difference between a fighter pilot and God? A – God does not think he’s a fighter pilot!) The transport wing comes a very distant second, followed by the chopper pilots. The ground staff doesn’t even figure in the ratings – they’re as puny as pedestrians viewed from the top of the Empire State Building!

The Army is only slightly better. First, there’s the yawning gap between the Arms and the Services, and even among the Arms, we have the `queen of the battle’, the `king of the battle’ and what have you. Ask any Cavalry man which arm he belongs to, and you’ll get a lesson in military history starting from the American Civil War!

A friend who had served as a `tank man’ once asked me to rewrite his CV in tune with the Corporate world. He handed me his own draft, which ran into, I kid you not, twelve pages! Now the guy had spent his life in a tank, for Christ’s sake, and therefore had no real qualification to speak of. Yet, he had a CV longer than my arm! And in those twelve rambling pages, the words `Elite Armoured Corps’ figured, again I kid you not, a full seventeen times!

An aside here. Flashback to January 1974. Station Artillery Mess, Delhi Cantt. As a subaltern, I sat sipping my rum and coke in the bar, when a gunner and an Armoured course mate walked in. They ordered drinks, and some snacks. As was common in that `mess’, snacks took their own sweet time in showing up. The Cavalry guy, by then pleasantly high, tossed back his drink, and declared pompously “In the Armoured Corps, we have our own snacks!”  and proceeded to chomp on his empty glass. Crunch, crunch. The gunner soon followed suit “Anything you Armoured guys can do, we gunners can do even better!”. More crunch crunch. They both then turned to me. “We Signallers,” I hurriedly interjected “just wait for our snacks!”

Back to the present. Maids, as we know, are hot news these days. Devyani Khobragade, being a VIP Indian, of course had to have her maid in New York! That apart, the most telling symbol of your social standing in the Middle East, is the maid you employ. Those at the top of the social ladder have Filipino maids. (And since Filipino maids have their own client-hierarchy and agenda to consider, none will ever deign to work for us brown skins!). Next come Sri Lankan, followed by Indian, and lastly Bangla Deshi maids (no offence to dear old Heena, Samina!).

As a Project Manager for a Telecom MNC in Iraq, I noticed that the white collars (engineers, project managers) were mostly Indian, the blue collars (drivers, crane operators) were Pakistanis, and the conservancy guys (cleaners, sweepers) were invariably from Bangladesh! We from the subcontinent have not just hogged all the space in this segment, but have also created our own hierarchy!

Are we any better at home? Walk into any beachside shack in Goa during rush hour. Watch the `gora’ tourists being fawned over by the staff. Then take a look at how the same staff treats Nigerian tourists. Get the picture?

In the heart of Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, there's a French restaurant (`La Maison') where, believe it or not, Pakistanis are not permitted!

In the UK or the USA, it’s rare to spot a `gora’ doing any menial job – these are reserved for the skins of darker hues! Even among the brown skins, the local Arabs In the Middle East contemptuously lord it over the sub-continental expats! Walk into any restroom at the Kuwait Airport – or even London Heathrow, and you will only see a fellow Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi slogging away.

Children of lesser Gods? You bet!