A Walking Tour

Bangalore (circa 20th century)

 From Sadashiv Nagar to – [Shivaji Nagar or Majestic?] – (Bus number 100 or 104?) – does not really matter but good to get it right.

From Shivaji Nagar bus depot, it is a short walk to St. Mark’s Rd. At the first cross-road, near the street with cheap furniture stores, a man is beating his wife to the ground. He does not kick but his slaps are loud. She is crying loud but she refuses to cower before him, getting up like a nearly KO-ed boxer, giving back with a guttural hoarse tongue. He kept on slapping, not her face but her arms and back. A young man in the gathering crowd, Iyengar says the stamp on his forehead, approaches the couple; to help, to break the fight. The wife turns on him; the husband ignores him; it is not his fight; the crowd laughs, agrees and cheers for the fighters.

On St. Mark’s Rd, there is Koshy’s coffee-shop and there used to be the British Council Library on top. Further down the road, past the oil pump, there is a liquor shop that veterans trust. It is too quiet to listen to other’s stories in the Lib, but it is there at each table and the characters and tales are kept for later reference. Sit for a while at Koshy’s, in the middle or in a far corner never elsewhere, feel the old colonial railway waiting room. Listen to regulars and try to look like them. Hear about the drama guy’s cake-shop and his dogs and his friends; the new steak joint with rare meat and the way to cut and taste the blood; the latest writer, poet or painter, groovy stuff man; and, some look so damn earnest about the damn dams and the bloody poor. Even the regular irregulars there think of trying that lifestyle. Note it all down for reference.

Across the road, at the Bengali sweet shop, a lady of fifty tries to be fifteen. A young couple outside argues, before the impassive magazine vendor. She says I want rosogolla. He says no, I hate Bengali women, they make me fall in love with them, I hate Bengali men they try to be men. She laughs, come on, she says, my Bengali man.

A few steps from there, there’s Premier bookstore with the nice man who will let the poor reader browse for long hours, even whole books on multiple trips, and gives discount irrespective of the buyer’s English accent. On the left, there’s fiction. A girl and a boy definitely not size zero, share the narrow space with one foot on the floor, the other entwined while she looks for du Maurier from M and he searches for Neruda from a misplaced Steinbeck. He reads to her, from Neruda’s Lone Gentleman,

   Young homosexuals and girls in love,
   and widows gone to seed, sleepless, delirious,
   and novice housewives pregnant some thirty hours,
   the hoarse cats cruising across my garden’s shadows
   like a necklace of throbbing, sexual oysters
   surround my solitary home
   like enemies entrenched against my soul,
   like conspirators in pyjamas
   exchanging long, thick kisses on the sly.

She nods with thoughts elsewhere, replies with a glassy stare, from Daphne’s Rebecca,
   Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderly again
They talk, giggle, disentangle and silently promise never to meet again.

Further ahead on Church St., there’s the place which serves light phulka and heavy mutton curry. Before that, a famous video-turned-DVD-no-CD store (Habitat, is it?). Three young men and a lady browse together among those shelves. One man and that lady were desperate to get away, for sex, excuse the French, make love, it is called (right?). Meet them later many years later. They live happily ever after, with cute young kids, married to a rich another from their own different hometowns and religions. There are two kinds of men, the one who thinks about the morning after and the other who does not think. The second man belongs to the first kind. The other three laughs at his story that is yet to begin. Decent man, married, nasty divorce, lost half his pension, fell in love, married again, divorced, lost half of the remaining half of his pension. Well, he is still got a quarter to slice again, they console gleefully. The third man is a hybrid. He picks out three DVDs (Unbearable Lightness of Being, One Fine Day, Private Lessons) for an all-night session holding himself tight.

Retrace your steps, walk up to MG Rd, past McDonald's, now boarded and closed, where a couple discuss their divorce plans and how they should get together. The Spencer’s gave way to another chain. There’s a phone-booth in between where a man screams at his wife on an outdated phone, choose me or your job. Then, there’s that tall building with a pub on the 13th floor. Or, walk arm in arm, like the Wild West, to the cool shade within to steal a kiss or whisper sweet nothings. On Saturday nights, young drunk men shout from a balcony on the top floor, “Why am I with him and not her?” Hear the echoes down below.

Further ahead, near the old Plaza theatre, a married couple stops. She wants to check out new saris at Deepam, she demands her due. He sweats, distracts her and quickly signals to the man in the alley, not now says the furtive signal. The man in the alley hides his package of pornography beneath the second-hand books. Two young men leaning against the railing stare at her sari-clad figure. She notices their stare, she glares, they continue to look from head to toe, lechers, she smiles; her innocent husband oblivious of this whole episode.

At the junction, turn right and go along Brigade Rd. There are pubs on each side-street; each with its pseudo-theme – space-shuttle or hard rock or wannabe cool – with the same draught beer in same pitchers. It’s the same groups – small-town guys wide-eyed losing virginity, B-school guys with their college chums some a miserable reminder of fancy ideals or long hair-n-beard or borrowed philosophy, et al.

Still on Brigade Rd, there are old kids with new jobs showing parents and relatives their brave new world. Some still try out the old small malls, the cake at Nilgiris, window-shopping at the expensive fruit stall, cheap shops with pirated stuff to get something for those who could not make the trip.

On the left, there used to be dancing halls with women with vacant eyes and clothes considered scant in the old days; below, you might meet homely women in traditional Kerala saris and sandalwood paste on the forehead. Do not smile at them, it might cost you. Go past all that and to the left, there are more famous pubs, Karavalli restaurant for a fishy meal with expensive appam for that rare occasion and an ice-cream parlour. And, to the right, there is the old cheap Hotel Empire for late-night food, just do not be a vegan and just stick to the usual.

Back on MG Rd, past Cauvery crafts shop and past the pub where guys dance with each other, it is a long straight road to Kids Kemp at the end or Strand bookshop somewhere on the right (it is after Oberoi, right?). That is past Standard Chartered Bank and the other offices. There is a way to go to Shoppers Stop from there. And, on that road, there is an Indian restaurant famous for chicken legs wrapped in silver. Listen to young working women there for lunch complain about bosses with drifting fingers and promotions in suspended animation.

Before that and the tall building with a theatre and a rotating restaurant, there is a small lane with restaurants that promise to be affordable. Near the bottom of that lane, there is a place that serves Andhra thali; another more exclusive lot, with a common kitchen probably, for Andhra (fish curry and plain rice for INR 120), North Indian (try Sikander Raan), Chinese (lovers croon, “Oh, so shady, so nice”). The scene is not really different – suburbia, young loving couples, whole families, it might appear boring for the undiscerning but there’s a peculiar tale at each table.

The Chinese joint in the middle of that lane serves good Chinese tea. At table one, one young man tells another about unrequited love and the pain that will last till the next day. Far from them, a couple; the man confesses his love, the woman says we were kids then, the man agrees. The woman cries, says she is in love, she does not know what to do, she begs. I love a man of another religion, she admits; I do not know what to do, she asks. The young man seeks revenge and advises her to stick to her love, to go against the odds. She listens to him, cries more. They leave together, like good friends. He is heart-broken and he does not know that there is one on table one, too. She is happy, she calls home, she cries and protests, tells her parents about her affair but for her parents who did everything for her, she will do whatever they have arranged for her.

Now, with a full tummy, catch an autorickshaw and say ‘Sankey Tank’. It will cost twenty five rupees. But save for that luxury return journey. As you fly past the traffic policeman with a kindly face and a big moustache (killed in action, you heard) and the Golf course, you are ready to doze or think about your day spent scavenging for stories.

Author's Note: This is not about Bangalore. It was the same story in Berlin or London or Mumbai or Delhi or Corsica or Trieste or any goddamn place. There's only one comment worth hearing: whose story is it?

First Class Travel

“Your journey starts now…”

The young travel agent said that to Sree in the office of Luxury Tours & Travels and he sounded like a TV compère of a game-show.

Sree, a thirty-year-old handsome man in a well-tailored expensive suit, was inspecting the travel documents placed within a custom-made leather travelling case.

He raised his head to look at the young man. He maintained an impassive face typical of aristocracy. But, he barely managed to suppress the brief smirk that expressed disdain and minor revulsion.

The fare for his trip demanded luxury. The young man’s words; nervous chewing of gum; missing top button and cheap tie; off-the-shelf suit probably used by other staff, too; with all that, the young man appeared sub-standard, if not mocking.

“Where is the reservation for the Ritz?” Sree asked the young man.

The latter made an angry gesture to an unobtrusive secretary. She collected the case in a fluster, went to her desk, inserted the missing document and re-checked the contents. When she returned with the case, Sree asked with an exasperated tone, “Should I check this again?” She tried to apologize but he gave a dismissive wave.

The young man escorted him to an S-class Mercedes Benz even though Sree ignored the other’s presence. A prim and proper chauffeur in a grey uniform opened the rear door for him after greeting him with a polite smile and an obsequious bow.

At the Mumbai international airport, a person was waiting to escort Sree to the special VIP lounge past the security-check zone. He hardly noticed the queues for the economy class and the normal first-class. His baggage, check-in and other requisites would be taken care of, he was informed.

In the lounge, Sree browsed through international journals while a middle-aged man with hennaed beard served him café latte and his choice of snacks. Sree watched that man retire to a corner where he coughed and sneezed a few times after covering his mouth with a handkerchief.

A few minutes later, when the manager of the lounge observed that Sree had not touched his plate or cup, he came to enquire. Sree raised the query, “Do you allow sick people to serve?” The manager apologized before he himself cleared the table and then, served coffee and snacks. Later, discretely but within earshot of Sree, the manager admonished the middle-aged man and told him to take off for the rest of the day.

In the plane, an air steward attended to his needs and helped him settle in the luxury first-class cabin. It was in an area above the normal first-class.

When he went to the toilet, after his first meal, he noticed an air hostess guiding a young boy from the toilets in this section to the lower-classes below. Sree raised an eyebrow at the lady. His steward who appeared then berated her for her lapse. In this class, luxury was not supposed to accommodate mere or dire necessities or even base comforts. She tried to explain some plausible reason for bringing the boy there due to urgency and crowded toilets below but Sree silenced her with a slow look from head to toe pausing at her breast to study her nameplate and her name, Anu.

At London, a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost took him to the Hotel Ritz. Apart from this chauffeur-driven car he also had a Jaguar or a Bugatti at his disposal, he was informed, for driving on his own to the country or elsewhere. At the hotel, he was assigned a suite and a butler. The front office manager escorted him to the lift, “Sir, if there is anything you need, please let us know.”

Dinner on that first day was a black-tie affair. There, he was joined by his companion, a beautiful 23-year-old named Susannah. She was in a two-piece ensemble with a silk blouse and a full satin skirt and it complemented his dinner suit very well.

He was there for four nights and five days. Private auctions and exhibitions, special shows at Museums, concerts for the select few; splurging at boutiques, even allowing a brief stroll with the common in Soho and Oxford Street before moving to the comforting spaces of Mayfair; a dinner at some manor hosted by a business tycoon, an exhibition match for charity with the top tennis players; and, a speedy trip to the Mediterranean, to gamble and party, with her by his side.

Hectic but refreshing, and when it was time to leave, the first class journey seemed like it had never started.


xxx


On the sixth day, Sree got back to Mumbai around noon, the return journey by economy class. There was no one waiting to receive him. He collected his luggage from the carousel, waited in the long line at immigration and stood near the exit, watching people enter taxis and big cars or being greeted by loved ones.

A man, with rolled-up long sleeves and khakis, standing next to a tempo-van in the Parking Area waved at him. Sree pushed his trolley to the van and loaded the luggage on his own. The man got in after him at the rear. There were two long-seats facing each other and Sree sat opposite to the man. A young woman, the man’s colleague, sat next to Sree.

The young woman said to Sree, “We have got the reports from everywhere. You have put on a good show!”

“Thank you, Miss.” Sree replied.

“Please sign this form,” he was told.

The form, on the letterhead of a well-known company, contained:

“We thank you for participating in this research program to help us understand better the adaptability of millions of upwardly-mobile luxury-aspiring people in this country.

We are extremely pleased that you fitted well in the new environment and responded correctly to situations and irritants.

Your services are hereby terminated and as reward for successful completion as per terms and conditions of the program, we give you one lakh rupees.”

Below that, Sree added, “Received with thanks.” He signed at the bottom.

The man then gave him a plastic cover with his own old clothes and shoes. Sree changed into those, put the clothes that he had worn in that plastic bag and handed it back to the man. The man went through an inventory and checked if Sree had returned everything. Then, the man gave him a thin bundle with 100 thousand-rupee notes.

Sree was dropped near his crowded Co-operative Housing Society in Kalina. His father used to work at the airport and most of his neighbours were airport or airline employees.

On the way to his house, he met a middle-aged man with hennaed beard. Sree stooped and touched his feet, “Baba, forgive me.”

“Your father explained everything to me a few days back. I am just sad that you had to do something like that.” They hugged each other with affection.

Sree then proceeded to his house. His mother and siblings greeted him quietly in the small front room. His father kept his head down and barely acknowledged his arrival. Sree slipped the bundle of notes into his mother’s hands. “We can now settle the loan and avoid foreclosure; we have at least that,” Sree told her.

His girl-friend, who had not changed her air hostess uniform after that day’s shift, was standing near the kitchen. She brought him a glass of water. He drank the water, kept the glass on the rickety dining table and told her, “Let’s go out.” They left the house together. He borrowed his friend’s motorcycle and they went to a park at Powai, a reasonably luxurious far-away place for them.

“Anu, I am sorry. I had to be a jerk. It was all or nothing.”

“It’s ok, Sree. I understand. You had to do it, right?”

“Bloody toilet, bloody first-class, bloody luxury…”

They sat quietly, holding each other. He then lay on the grass with his head on her lap. He caressed her face. She lowered her head and kissed him. After a while, she asked,

“Sree, did you…you...women…?” It sounded like a pleading.

“One…Susa…” Anu kept her hand over his mouth not letting him complete. He could have lied, he knew. But, she would have known, he thought.

Anu tried to hold back her tears and she avoided looking at him. But, she held him tighter. He buried his head against her young body, crying out of shame. Was that shame for participating in that program or was it for enjoying the trip, he was not sure.

He wondered if Anu would ever forget it or even forgive him. He knew that they would continue to love each other, marry and live together.

Time might heal or if that cliché failed, he felt that they will try to remember all the good things and try to forget all the bad things. And, some of those things will be common, he hoped.

It may even turn out to be a first class travel.


Author’s note: This is fiction. The author has twisted the existing luxury of real places to suit the non-existing needs of his fantasy.

After I Said ‘Have A Great Sunday!’

Tell me about your best Sunday morning. Let me tell you about mine.

I sat facing the French windows while I had the full English breakfast. Mumbai! This is what I will remember. I can see Marine Drive, joggers and walkers, a few lazy cars on empty streets, maybe even Church Gate, the fishing village, the blue-green sea, the azure sky shaking off early morning haziness.

I heard her open the bathroom door and I went towards her. She was ready to leave. I would have liked her beautiful body next to me for a few minutes more. I indicated breakfast but she smiled and shook her head. I wondered if I should give a tip. I guess that was included in her price.

‘Have a great Sunday!’ I told her.

I heard something crashing outside and a few pop sounds. She opened the door. Both of us stared into the mad eyes of a heavily-weaponed man wearing a balaclava. She screamed.

I saw my future in fast forward. I never think about my death. Alive, a survivor in some tabloid, in the hands of my wife who would have returned from her hometown, with a tale about her man and his woman.

After I said ‘Have a great Sunday!’, there was little left to say.

Author’s notes: This story-line sounds very familiar. If you know, kindly tell me. Did this origin elsewhere? Well, that would be telling, right? Anyway, I have always wanted to write a story where the notes are of comparable length.

Itihasa of an Integral Part

“The word for “history” in Sanskrit, itihasa, could be translated as “That’s what happened,” giving the impression of an only slightly more modest equivalent of von Ranke’s phrase for positivist history: “Wie es [eigentlich] gewesen ist” (“The way it [really] happened”). But the iti in the word is most often used as the Sanskrit equivalent of “end quote,” as in “Let’s go [iti],” he said. Itihasa thus implies not so much what happened as what people said happened (“That’s what he said happened”) – narratives, inevitably subjective narratives.”

Wendy Doniger, in The Hindus, An Alternative History

Location: “If you take the ship departing at 17:00 from Kochi to Trivandrum, you will stop at this island for dinner.”

Background: “We were annexed by a kingdom a few centuries before they were occupied by Travancore (one of the three princely states that formed Kerala). We were never an integral part of Travancore. We are an integral part of India. But, actually, nobody wants us as an integral part except the non-existent kingdom of Travancore.”

Disputes: “83% of this island is disputed territory. Some big guy did some big thing out here long back. The majority wants to recreate those times hoping that the big guy will return.”

Population: “We are followers of the bard M. Jackson. We are black hoping to turn white.”

Language: “Each locality has its own version of the mother tongue. We do not need language to communicate, we need liquor. When we speak English, we sound like the Irish. Have you heard the Irish speak? I have not.”

Food: “A famous person during a visit exclaimed, ‘Holy Cow!’ He heard the echo, ‘Chilly Beef!’ That famous person married for the third time leaving many men and women of this island heartbroken.”

Famous People: “Most famous people here are called Shree/Shreemati 420.The other famous people do not want to be associated with us. They are offended when we are not offended with whatever they say. Also, they cannot find a group to say, ‘A million people here say…’ Five or more people here never say the same thing. The rest of the country tried to copy that calling it section 144.”

Freedom: “We even allow people to say, ‘We will hound them out of India, like what we did to M.F. Hussain.’ I know, it sounds like sedition, right? But, still…”

Judiciary: “This is our strongest department. On entry, ‘Young man, we will take a few years of your productive life.’ On exit, ‘Old man, we deal with faith not facts.’ They alone can show contempt.”

Politics: “We never ask, ‘Who is standing for election?’ We ask, ‘Who was in office till now?’ We try to learn from the mistakes of the past. Every dog has its day, we strongly believe.”

Faith: “We used to be a Buddhist state, sedentary peace-loving egalitarian folk. Then, a group came with karma and division of labour. After relocating people to their respective ghettos, they philosophized that in theory and spirit, but not in practice, people could migrate from one ghetto to the next. Other groups and faiths too arrived on these shores. Some kissed the right ass and progressed. In the 20th century, they even kissed the left ass and tried not to regress. Right through the ages, people in small groups and of the same social class, irrespective of faith still managed to be egalitarian. Altruism is humbug, we all agree.”

Literature: “Nearly 99% of the population read the stories before watching it as a TV soap opera. 99% of the rest copy world literature or pretend to read it.”

Cinema: “We used to make great art movies. People outside without understanding used to call it ‘porn-dy’. The current films can be appreciated only in multiplexes – you have to view 30 minutes of 4 movies to have 2 hours of time-pass.”

Sports: “We used to be athletic. Now, we are thinking of playing cricket at the IPL.”

Social Dynamics: “This society is like a sand-pile at its angle of repose, a critical system. Add one small grain of sand and you can start avalanches of varying sizes.”

Social Fabric: “A mature interacting group behaves like an elastic system. Bend it a little and it will spring back. Bend it too vigorously, you will cross a threshold, defects will stream in to stay forever. We are always in that new plastic state with immature inelastic ideas.”

Relationships: “In the good old days, women wanted men to look at them.”

Industry: “We allow only labour-friendly industries such as tourism and IT-enabled services. We promote migration to countries without any idea about human rights.”

Export & Import: “We import nearly everything.We export everything that we do not import.”

USP: “Best place to simply sit back and enjoy. Most tourists and citizens do that. Most paedophiles and goons also do that here.”

Law & Order: “Excellent…just don’t be at the wrong place at the wrong time…”

Other Important Details: “You should note the following really important points about this integral part of India: (a) …”


Author’s note:

• This is history.

• Everything is fiction.

• This is a commissioned piece, part of a project to record the voices of this integral part before it is silenced forever. There was a strict brief: exactly 897 words [including the title, the quotation and this note (151 words)].

I Miss Competition

I miss competition.

The half-crazy man sitting at an adjacent table in the restaurant, half-turned in his chair, told us that,

“I miss competition. To die a gladiator rather than keep alive a drunken raconteur with false tales of old fights.”

Most of us, customers and waiters, were watching the 2010 Commonwealth Games on the wall-mounted TV hoping and waiting to see the finals of the 100 metres sprint event. But we missed it, didn’t we?

The half-crazy man stood up with disbelief and anger plainly visible on his face. He settled his bill at the counter leaving his dinner barely touched. On his way out, he came swaying to our table and leaned towards me. I could smell liquor and tobacco in his breath.

“How could they do that? Don’t they know what it is like – the 100 metres sprint?”

I remained silent and motionless.

“Ah! Eight at the starting line, wild dogs barely domesticated, flared nostrils, the crouch, eyes focused on the string 100 metres away, the rhythm of the crowd, the thumping of the heart, springing from the starting block, do you remember Ben Johnson’s start, then 9, 10, 11 seconds, for us it is just that, seconds, for them, it is eternity, thoughts of victory, defeat, niggling worries, even domestic problems, drugs, steroids, alcohol, issues, everything, of course, the training of months, of focused thoughts, motion, just twenty, thirty strides, just five, ten breaths, you feel the air more than the ground, and then that string, how you stretch your neck forward to feel that liberating noose…”

Then, he stood up straight, remembered to breathe, turned around and left the place. I wiped spittle from my face and the waiter came and changed the plates, spoons and knives. Then, our meal was served and I did not think about the half-crazy man till later that night.

We went to bed early and I was lying sleepless, remembering

“I miss competition.”

I thought of the competition of my life…not any race or sports…I am not really the sporting kind. I remembered the debates with her.

We competed against each other for five consecutive years, from Std. VIII till Std. XII, in the annual debate competition. That was the only event in our school where boys and girls from the five years (Std. VIII-XII) competed together. There were four houses and each house selected their four best speakers. It was a prestigious event with a trophy named after some big guy. It was held in the school auditorium and the audience was allowed to give a whole-hearted response. A speaker had to be ready for hearty applause, nasty comments, booing and hooting and, the dreaded chants of stop-get-lost.

We were in the same grade but different divisions and we shared the same school bus. I remember that first competition in Std. VIII. I had seen her around but I had had no reason to talk to her (it was not cool, either). She looked like one of those characters in fairy-tales – pony tail, smiling, petite, charming, prim and angelic. On stage, we made the perfect pair, the beauty and the beast.

The topic for that year – corporal punishment – turned out to be one-sided (even then when it was the norm rather than the exception). I was against and her team had to speak for. It was a disaster because the for-side wanted defeat more than the against-side wanted success.

When it was my turn, I had little to do by way of defeating arguments and I could leave reason aside and go for the emotional stranglehold. I took the stance of a defense lawyer, placed the image of a school-child in the dock, pleaded my case against merciless predators and by the end, I had the audience on their feet, baying for cruel teachers’ blood. The members of the staff were squirming in the seat.

She spoke after me. She did not raise her voice. Damn, she sounded like Mother Theresa! She narrated an incident involving the most benign and motherly teacher in school and how even she had to send a student outside the class. Even she, that teacher, made that boy stand a few feet from the wall, bend at the waist and touch the wall with his nose. The whole school knew that it was me. She stuck to reason and arguments after that. At the end she asked softly, “Is there a student here who is like me – who thinks he/she can be a small devil at times and might face corporal punishment from a caring teacher – could you please stand up?” The same devils that had bayed for blood now stood up en masse seeking her endorsement. That’s what the common masses are like!

Our team won that year and I won the best debater award. But, I knew that I had got it for the wrong reasons. I went to her and snarled, “Next time, I will defeat you.”

In Std. IX, the topic was the death penalty with my team for that and she against. Then, my world was black and white without shades of grey. I had no reason or experience to suspect authority nor did I have any idea about subjectivity or relativity and I believed that justice could actually be absolute and true after much deliberation.

During that year, she and I attended the second-language period in the other’s class (mine Malayalam and hers Hindi). The day before the debate, I took her seat during that period. I opened her bag since I wanted her diary or notebook with notes of her team’s plans. On top of her books and tiffin-box, I found a loosely covered pack of sanitary napkins. I closed her bag quickly and left it beneath her chair. We lost the debate that year. Much later, in life, I realized that I used her points whenever I talked against the death penalty. During that competition, I realized that she had opened my bag during that second-language period, looked at my diary and spied on my team’s strategy. I guess she knew that I would close her bag without searching for her diary.

The next year we fell in love. Well, being in love was a different matter then. The phone in my house and hers was meant to be used, like telegrams, for emergencies. Though I tried to write poetry, I was not daft enough to show that to anyone. Her house was out of bounds. There was no way to talk to her in the school bus or at school or anywhere outside. Being in love meant that I did not look at any other girl and that my gang of friends was not allowed to talk about her or comment at her in my presence. She reciprocated my effort with a nod or a smile once in a while.

By the time of that year’s competition, we were madly frustrated and raring to go at each other’s throat. The topic that year: separating the State from religion. I, the believer with nebulous and self-serving faith, managed to win speaking against. She, the atheist, speaking for ended up sounding like a rabid believer. We did shake hands after the event but we shook off all pretense of love, too.

In Std. XI, the topic was censorship. My team had to speak for and hers against censorship of books, movies and what-not. For me, all that mattered was the competition. Ideology and principles came second to that. We were the team-leaders and took part in the toss. When she won the toss and chose to speak against censorship she added, “Only guys like him can speak for that.”

The competition was bitter. Even the audience felt the animosity and remained aloof and silent. My team won that year. I cheered as loud as I could. But her silence was more deafening. I swore to hate her all my life.

During the Christmas vacation, she phoned my house. My father called me to the phone with a surprised accusation, “A girl.” I stuttered to her, “Hello.” She said, “I just called to wish you Happy Birthday.” I replied, “Thanks…same to you.” Well, I was more used to greetings like Happy Holidays and none of my friends ever remembered my birthday. Anyway, she had delivered the message and disconnected.

We resumed where we had left off. I avoided other girls religiously and she smiled. In Std. XII, the topic for the debate was communism. I had to speak for and spoke like Che though my guide at that point of time was Ayn Rand. She spoke with great fervour against communism though I could see her clench her fist behind her back, her nails probably drawing her own blood. We split the audience between us.

The judges invited by that middle-class school tilted towards her side and she won. Since it was our last year in school, we bought cool-drinks for each other at the school canteen. We gargled and spat the first mouthful, trying to remove the bad taste of our speech. Then, we enjoyed the rest in quiet silence.

Does this story end here? Or, did it end when we sat next to the half-crazy man who said,

“I miss competition…”

Online Popularity & Benoit Mandelbrot

Please note: First, I am not an author here; if at all anything, a reporter or a reviewer or, worse but true, a copier. There are two parts.
• The first part gives the summary of a recent scientific study trying to characterize and model the dynamics of online popularity. One of the main conclusions is that the dynamics of information networks is ‘scale-free’. This is typical in a wide range of “critical” physical, economic and social systems, such as avalanches, earthquakes, stock market crashes and human communication. Having mentioned that, it is impossible to avoid the next part.
• Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry, died on October 14, 2010. The fractal geometry he developed would be used to measure natural phenomena like clouds or coastlines that once were believed to be non-measurable. He applied the theory to physics, biology, finance and many other fields of study.


Part 1: Characterizing and modeling the dynamics of online popularity by Ratkiewicz et al. (Physical Review Letters, Vol. 105, No. 15. (Oct 2010), 158701.) [http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.2704]

It is believed that online popularity has enormous impact on opinions, culture, policy and profits.

The authors study the dynamics of popularity of two information networks: (1) the Wikipedia and (2) the web space of Chile.

As popularity proxies they have chosen the traffic of a document, expressed by the number of clicks to that page generated by a specific population of users, and the number of hyperlinks pointing to a document. Given either of these proxies, they study its relative variation in a time unit, that is, its logarithmic derivative. Note that: if x(t) is the quantity being studied at time t, its logarithmic derivative is [x(t) - x(t-1)]/ x(t).

They find that the dynamics of popularity are characterized by bursts in its relative variation or logarithmic derivative (hereafter, simply labeled as f).

Observations:

• Almost all pages experience a burst in f near the beginning of their life.

• Many pages receive little attention thereafter.

• Some pages maintain a nearly constant positive f indicating an exponential growth.

• A number of pages continue to experience intermittent bursts in f later in their life.

• In all cases, they observe heavy-tail behaviour. Such heavy-tailed burst magnitude distributions suggest a dynamics lacking a characteristic scale.


Model:

Researchers have used various models to describe the heterogeneous statistical properties of the Web (with distributions characterized by fat-tails roughly following power-law behaviour) and some models are based on the rich-get-richer mechanism.

The models based on rich-get-richer mechanism have two main ingredients:

(1) We need a growing network. But growth alone cannot explain. When a new node is created on the network, it is not sufficient to assume that it will link randomly and democratically. Though the senior nodes will have a clear advantage (since these nodes had the longest time to collect links and the poorest node will be the last to join), the distributions that result from such an assumption follow an exponential rather than a fat-tailed power law.
(2) We also need preferential attachment and need to discard any democratic (random) character. We attach a greater probability to link to those nodes which are already heavily linked.

The authors of this paper feel that this is not sufficient. They include a third ingredient: occurrence of exogenous factors that shift the attention of users and suddenly increase the popularity of specific topics because of events such as an actor winning a prize, political elections, rescue missions, scandals, etc.

With their rank-shift model, they introduce a new parameter, by which they can shift forward the ranking/popularity of a node.

As a layperson in a network, at the end of the day, the message to take home is: (a) you are part of a growing network; (b) if you are smart, you will believe in preferential attachment and link to those who are very popular; (c) if you want to be smarter, create exogenous factors that will suddenly attract attention of any sort.

Due to selfish interests, I would like to explore: (i) the dynamics of pages that receive little attention and the proximity factor (do friends of friends (of friends of …) contribute to that initial burst; (ii) dynamics of tightly-knit close or ‘gated’ online communities and the formation of such in open dynamic networks; (iii) a symmetric rank-shift model which allows for exogenous factors that could reduce ranking via a burst of unpopularity due to variants of untouchability, blocking and censorship, unpopular views and opinions, democratic decisions of the majority to ostracize, etc.; and so on and so forth.

Part 2: Obituary of Benoit Mandelbrot

On the 18th of October, in the inside pages of The Hindu, I found this column about Benoît Mandelbrot (mathematician, born 20 November 1924; died 14 October 2010):

Date:18/10/2010 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2010/10/18/stories/2010101861860900.htm
Mandelbrot, father of fractal geometry, dead
WASHINGTON: Benoit Mandelbrot, a French-American mathematician who explored a new class of mathematical shapes known as “fractals,” has died at age 85 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, The New York Times reported on Saturday. His wife Aliette told the newspaper he died of pancreatic cancer.
His seminal book, “The Fractal Geometry of Nature,” published in 1982, argued that irregular mathematical objects once dismissed as “pathological” were a reflection of nature. The fractal geometry he developed would be used to measure natural phenomena like clouds or coastlines that once were believed to be unmeasurable.
He applied the theory to physics, biology, finance and many other fields of study.
“Fractals are easy to explain, it's like a romanesco cauliflower, which is to say that each small part of it is exactly the same as the entire cauliflower itself,” Catherine Hill, a statistician at the Gustave Roussy Institute, told AFP. “It's a curve that reproduces itself to infinity. Every time you zoom in further, you find the same curve,” she said.
David Mumford, a professor of mathematics at Brown University, told the Times that Mr. Mandelbrot had effectively revolutionised his field. “Applied mathematics had been concentrating for a century on phenomena which were smooth, but many things were not like that: the more you blew them up with a microscope the more complexity you found,” the paper quoted him as saying.
A professor emeritus at Yale University, Mr. Mandelbrot was born in Poland but as a child moved with his family to France where he was educated. — AFP
© Copyright 2000 - 2009 The Hindu

Please refer to the following obituary in The Guardian for more details:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/oct/17/benoit-mandelbrot-obituary

Here, I do assume that his work has definitely touched everyone. Can you finish graduate studies or any kind of research without encountering the work of Mandelbrot? I can still remember how thrilled I was when I found a ‘Devil’s staircase’ (or, at least, something that looked exactly like that) in a dynamical system some time in the last millenium. [For a definition of Devil’s staircase, please refer to http://mathworld.wolfram.com/DevilsStaircase.html.]

Or, if you have kids, didn’t they ask you at least once, surely: “Amma/Appa, how does a world with a dimension of 0.63 look like?” or “O gee, Pop/Mom! Look at that…it is made out of itself…every small part looks like the big part…is it a fractal?” Well, if they have not, they should go to a different school.

The Angry Man

When his right fist crashed into his boss’ nose, he felt the jolt in his whole arm along with the crunch and squishy mixing of cartilage, flesh and splintering bone in the other’s face. In those few seconds, as in a slow motion picture, he watched globs of blood splattering and his boss’ face registering surprise, pain and slippery consciousness.

Thirty minutes before that, he had phoned his boss from his desk, “I have to go home. It’s urgent.”

“Sure…but, is today’s report ready?” said his boss in reply.

“Yes, I have mailed it to you and Mark.” Mark was their boss in London.

“Oh…you have sent it? I must have missed that mail…” his boss had sounded miffed.

He had breached protocol. He was supposed to complete the work and explain all the technical details to his boss; and then, his boss completes the task as usual by presenting the same details to Mark.

He had tried to rush the matter, “Yes, Mark has already replied…says everything looks great…”

“Oh, really…let me talk to him…could you wait for a few minutes?” his boss had told him.

He was still waiting. He had got three more calls from home during that time begging him to get home urgently. He had gone near his boss’ office couple of times, seen his boss doodling on a piece of paper, feet on his desk, chatting and laughing on the phone. His boss had gestured to him to wait.

Back at his desk, he had clenched his fist and dreamt. He had dreamt of crashing that fist into his boss’ nose. He thought of leaving without waiting any longer but he could not risk losing his job.

Forty three minutes after he raised his request, he saw his boss walking casually to the toilet and a few minutes later, with small talk and a show of camaraderie to the colleagues on the way, his boss finally reached his desk, “Ah…are you still here? I talked to Mark…everything is fine…”

He thanked his boss and scooted from the office.

Half-way to his house from the office, at the junction where he had to cut across the main road, his car was stopped by a policeman.

“You cannot go. A VIP’s car is coming…”

“Sir, can I just cross the main road? It’s an emergency at home…I just have to cross the road, that’s all…”

“No…the VIP is expected in a few minutes…”

Three local youths standing at a wayside tea-stall, smoking cigarettes and drinking tea, laughed at his frustration.

“Oy…look at blackie…blackie cannot cross…”

“Not blackie, man…just brownie…brown faggot…”

The third one sang a song about brown maggots and black crows.

It took him ten strides and three seconds to cover the distance to those youths. He had a jack in his right hand and a heavy spanner in the left. He gave the singer a whack on the head with a left swing; and, with a right upper cut, he cracked the jaw of the second youth. The one who had started it all tried to run but he lunged forward and caught him with a tackle. They landed hard on the ground. He pummeled the sides till the youth lost consciousness. Then, he walked back to the car to wait for the VIP.

He kept looking straight while he saw those images in his head. The boys left the scene after they finished their smoke and concluded that they had had enough fun at his expense. His hands were holding the steering wheel tightly. He wiped sweat off his forehead and armpits.

After twenty minutes, the policeman came to him, “Look, why don’t you park the car somewhere here, cross the road and catch a taxi on the other side?” He took the advice.

On the other side of the road, he did not find a taxi till he reached the next junction about seven hundred metres from where he left his car. The taxi-driver was sleeping on the back seat. He woke the driver and told him the destination. The disgruntled driver got out of the back-seat, leaned against the front door,

“Sorry, boss…problem with the engine…”

“Please, brother…there is an emergency at home.”

“Hey, am I your brother? Don’t call me your brother. Boss, I told you, right? There is a problem with the engine…”

He felt his fingers digging like claws into the driver’s neck; the thumb on one side and the four on the other side digging deep, nearly circling the air-pipe, ready to pull it out. In his eyes, the driver could see the eyes of a duelist, the eyes of a man ready to kill, ready to die, willing to settle for nothing less. He closed his eyes and he wanted to keep dreaming. But, he was too tired, too angry, too worried; even to dream…

The problem with the engine disappeared after he offered three times the usual fare. He sat in the back and tried to avoid the driver’s eyes in the rear-view mirror.

When he reached his house, his young wife came running to him, looking haggard and deeply worried. She was holding their baby tight, their little baby boy.

“I do not know what’s wrong with him. I took him to the hospital this morning for the usual shots and injection…after that, Oh God…he has not stopped crying. I have been carrying him since then but he won’t stop crying…shall we take him to the doctor…Oh God! What’s wrong with him?”

He took the baby, cradling him in the crook of his left arm. The baby continued crying, as if in deep agony; the baby’s cheeks suffused with red; and quite visibly, tired and angry. He looked at his child, at the little bundle in his arms, and felt as if all the barricades made out of strength, will and sense were collapsing within. He did not know what to do.

He held his wife close to him, trying to look calm, and he told her, “Let me change my clothes…let’s take him to the doctor…”

In their bedroom, he laid the baby on the bed, still cuddling and not wanting to let go of the poor little baby even for a minute.

The baby stopped crying and gurgled with relief, looking at his mother and father. His tired parents looked at him worried. The baby gave another gurgle of delight and this time, smiled, too.

“What happened to him?” his mother asked his father.

“I don’t know.”



Author’s notes:

[1] There is one thing I enjoy more than writing - tracing the source of thoughts or stories. About his book ‘Immortality’, Kundera says: “there are fewer gestures in the world than there are individuals,” therefore “a gesture is more individual than an individual.” For me, Milan Kundera’s ‘gestures’ serve as a metaphor for thoughts.
(http://www.kundera.de/english/Bibliography/Immortality/immortality.html)

[2] Given the Mittyesque roots of my story, the source was obvious: one of the best short stories I have read – James Thurber’s ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’ [1941]
(http://www.all-story.com/issues.cgi?action=show_story&story_id=100).

[3] Why did the baby stop crying? Elementary! The baby cried when the ‘new’ parents carried him and lovingly held him tight against them; and, unfortunately, pressed the spot on the bum where the baby was injected that morning.

[4] This is based on a true life incident. I was the baby. I still cry. I still gurgle with delight. But now, I cannot smile.

Sleepless Nights

“Can I sleep with you?” the young boy asked the woman 15 years older than him. She gave him an understanding smile. An onlooker intervened, “There isn’t enough space here – go to your own bed.” The young boy spent a sleepless night without even realizing that he would never ask a woman that question ever again; or that, for the rest of his life, he would never get such an excuse. Later, he realized that that incident had left two lasting impressions. First, that taught him to deal with children as people worthy of being kept at a safe distance. Second, he was troubled by the everlasting doubt, “If I had slept with her, would I have become a writer like Mario Vargas Llosa?”

“Can I jog with you?” the young lady asked the adolescent boy 4 years younger than her. She was fit and energetic, a badminton champion at the State-level. He was a laid-back athlete with a best time of 11.7 seconds for 100-metres-dash and his morning exercise schedule included a casual stroll and long moments of thought. She asked him that question when he had boasted that night about being a regular morning jogger on a 5-km circuit. She took his silence for an aye and told him to wake her up at 5 am. He spent a sleepless night with worry, shame, adrenalin and testosterones waging a cruel war within. For the first and last time in his life, he knocked at a young lady’s bedroom door at 5 am; and, wished that she would not open the door.

“Can we sleep in separate bedrooms?” the young man practiced that question studying his reflection in the mirror. It was the night before the first night. He was not worried about the day ahead: the tiresome wedding, the unavoidable mushy vegetarian feast or the long hours of feigned geniality. He was not even worried about sex or the improbability of that after a long exhausting day. He spent a sleepless night dreading that first night on the following day when he would have to share his own bedroom for the whole night. He had read in great books that the English had, during the golden age when they could afford enough rooms, lived without such worries.

“Can men cause sleepless nights?” the middle-aged man pondered alone. “Yes,” he recollected two incidents.

The first incident took place in Naples. He was invited to give a lecture at the University. Following the custom of academia, he gave a forgettable lecture for which he was paid handsomely and then, collected maps and directions to see the famous city. En route to the nearest subway, he was nearly mowed down by a silver Ferrari. Though shaken, he stared at the beautiful lady sitting next to the driver-cum-owner. Before the advent of expensive motorcars and its drivers, Shakespeare mistakenly thought ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’. The driver felt grievously injured with the divided attention he received and made the universal gesture of the throat getting cut from ear to ear. This shook our hero more than the near-accident. Instead of seeing Naples, he locked himself in his hotel room expecting that driver to pay a bloody visit. He wasted that sleepless night reading a crime novel about ‘a headless body in a topless bar’.

The second incident took place on a campus near Delhi. Three ruffians, with a remarkable resemblance to the Neapolitan driver, accosted him near the staff quarters. A sheet of paper was thrust at him and he was told to sign. He signed without protest. He made out that it was some signature campaign concerning ‘Ayodhya’. The ruffians were not in the mood to explain their position. Later that day, he met another set of ruffians who resembled the former lot. Again, a sheet of paper was thrust at him and he was told to sign. This time, he protested, “I have already signed.” The dark reply was, “Acha, you signed with them…” Neither were they in the mood to explain their position. He realized that he would soon join the long list of martyrs who met their fate with blessed ignorance. On that sleepless night, he read Wilfred Owen’s poem on ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ (a quotation by the Roman poet Horace, meaning ‘It is sweet and becoming to die for one’s country’).

With wisdom fighting a losing battle against advancing senility, his sleepless nights had been a rarity till recently. Seven days back, he wrote to a dear friend, “I am leaving these blogs.” She asked him kindly, “Why? Is it because you have no readers?” He replied with rare wisdom, “No, I have finally read my own blogs.” It had taken less than a day to complete that task. It will take many sleepless nights for him to recover. Introspection is a great theoretical idea but in practice, it is an awful path to self-realization.


References:

[1]"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned"
• The correct quotation is "Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned/ Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned." by William Congreve in The Mourning Bride of 1697.

[2] "Dulce et decorum est" by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
• One of the best known poems of the First World War. Wilfred Owen died fighting for England in WW I, a week before armistice. My favourite lines in that poem are:
• ...
• If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

[3]"Headless Body In Topless Bar"
• The New York Post penned this famous headline in 1983.

The Lady with a Smile

1. Scene of the Crime

The dead young woman had a trace of a lingering smile on what remained of her battered face.

“What could have made her smile?” Inspector Arvind muttered to himself rather than to his colleagues, constables Winston and Kutty. They were on the rock on which the lady’s body had been found at seven that morning.

Arvind looked around from that rock jutting out onto the river. The scene appeared rather poetic though such a thought seemed incongruous at that moment. To him, the river seemed furiously careless; swollen with the recent rains; troubled by eddies, rapids and uneven depths; after being raped and tortured by illegal sand-mining.

A hundred metres upstream, near the temple steps where there used to be wide shallow sandy bathing places, wild green growth had invaded along with impassive jagged rocks marking the route like traffic signals leading the new and unsuspecting to deadly depths. An empty sand-miners’ boat was tied to a tree there.

The green trees, the muddy river and the blue skies mirrored the false calm of the dead body.

Arvind felt, shamefully, that the body completed the scene very well – a once-beautiful lady lying on those rocks, her white sari in place quite correctly. Rather too correctly, he observed. Her right hand still clutched a betel leaf with temple offerings. A smudge of sandalwood paste could be seen on her forehead along with raw flesh and darkening blood.

“Looks like it wasn’t sexual abuse, right?” Arvind asked his colleagues. As usual, they treated it as a rhetorical question. With many years of experience between them, the two kept questions for suspects; and, expected statements and orders between colleagues.

Arvind waited for a while before continuing with his soliloquy,

“Someone left her with care. Of course, after bashing the left side of her face to pulp. She must have been facing her killer and even standing quite close. Same height probably, since the blows are from the side. To get bashed on the left, the killer must be right-handed, right?”

Winston, the baby-faced giant, hitched up his pants above his huge pot-belly and tried to suppress a yawn. The tall scrawny Kutty rubbed his pock-marked face and simultaneously scratched his groin languorously.

Feeling that it was time they chipped in, Kutty said,

“Rajappan the butcher found the body. He reported it along with the barber Sethu. This Sethu says that he was on his way to open his shop when he came across Rajappan in this area. Well, that’s what he says...”

“At seven, on a Tuesday when the barber shop is closed... and his shop is on the opposite side…?” Winston added his own suspicions. “And, Rajappan had gone to the river for a wash…wash indeed....when there are better spots near his house a kilometre upstream…”

There were two plots of land overlooking that area – one, an uninhabited rubber plantation which extended for a few acres; and the other, a small plot with a hut. There was a muddy path between the two plots and this appeared to be the only way from the rock to the main road. There was no point searching for footprints now after the whole world seemed to have trampled on that area that morning. Arvind pointed at the hut.

Winston offered, “That’s Maniyan’s hut, the rubber tapper. A real trouble-maker…we booked him once or twice for stealing rubber sheets. We should bring him in. And his wife…she is one great piece...” Kutty silenced him with a glare.

“Do you know the victim?” Arvind asked turning back towards the body.

His constables asked back together, “Don’t you know?”

Kutty tried to defuse his senior’s stare by adding, “She is…was…Prasad Master’s daughter, Bharathi.”

“Ah!” Arvind looked at the battered face once again. He had seen her at the temple once or twice. He had admired her slim curvaceous young body, with equal portions of guilt and pleasure, while he prayed to the Gods to save him from this rural posting. She had smiled at him. Her smile had seemed a trifle cold, he remembered. Arvind had even gone to her father’s house once, during his first week six months back, but he had not seen her there then.

Arvind’s mentor in college, on hearing that he was leaving for this village, had told him to meet Prasad Master, a retired teacher and ‘a great scholar’. Arvind found the teacher to be a straightforward decent human being, too. Though he was invited to visit at any time, Arvind never returned because he did not want to awaken the ghosts of his aspiration.

Arvind’s father died in an accident a few days after he enrolled for a Ph.D. in literature. Following that disaster, he had to find a job to take care of his family and he managed to enter the police force. On his record, his IQ and athletic strong body were noted as his pluses; and, his below-par height of five-eight and an inclination to ‘think too long alone’ were among the minuses. If he had had some ‘influence’ or money, he could have tried for a posting in some place other than this village police station previously manned by the two veteran constables.

Before his arrival in the village, Winston and Kutty spread a rumour there that ‘Arvind’s specialty’ was ‘terrorist networks’ and that ‘he made even the crazy talk sense’. This helped in a way and the crimes had so far remained petty in the last six months and ‘catch-able if necessary’. On one lazy afternoon, the two constables found Arvind reading a book of poetry in office. From the displeasure or disgust on their faces, Arvind realized that he should consign such books to those beneath his mattress at home. He also decided that visiting Prasad Master would be inappropriate for his image in that village.

“She must have been taking this short-cut from the temple to her house.” Winston interrupted his reverie.

“If she had gone to the temple…it must have happened between 05:30 and 07:00…Who would kill at that hour? Rather careless, that…” Kutty added.

“Uncontrollable rage while killing and then care to cover her body well after the deed…Find out if she had a lover. Ask the tea-shop owner if he heard anything.” Arvind said knowing that the tea-shop is the nerve-centre of the village.

“Also, grab some of those sand-miners.” In his early days there, he had wanted to arrest the whole lot but the common sentiment in the village was ‘it helped a lot of the poor come ashore’, the ‘it’ being illegal sand-mining.

“Those temple ruffians, too…?” Kutty suggested referring to a group of unemployed disillusioned youth who treated the stage in front of the temple as their ‘hang-out’ for card-games, siesta and liquor.

Arvind nodded and added, “Maybe, even the priests…” A young woman walking alone on a deserted path from the temple....

“A thick stick or a rock must have been used to bash her face in. It must be in the river.” Winston said, scowling at the river.

“There is no point in trying to recover, is there? You two, arrange for the rest of the formalities. I will go and inform her parents, what a bloody task!” Arvind left the scene feeling that the poetry had left long back. He took stock of the area while walking past the rubber plantation to Prasad Master’s house, about five hundred metres from the scene of the crime.

Arvind’s ‘task’ at the teacher’s house was painful as expected. The mother collapsed in front of him and her youngest daughter tried to support without breaking down herself. The father lay unmoving in an arm-chair, with eyes closed and tears flowing down his sunken cheeks.

The victim’s younger brother angrily told Arvind ‘to kill the killer’. The elder sister stood quietly while listening to her husband describe to Arvind, rather profusely, about the victim’s activities that morning. When Arvind left that house, he wondered why the brother-in-law knew so much about the victim.

On his way to the police station, Arvind studied the list in his hand – he had ten people and another assorted lot in three groups, too. One of them was most likely to be the killer. Or, was it someone not on the scene at the moment?

2. Questions & Answers


On what remained of that Tuesday, Arvind and the two constables Winston and Kutty interviewed nearly all the people other than the family, allowing the family to grieve in relative peace.

They tried to interview without prejudice or any presumptions. Winston offered Rajappan the butcher stating that the person who discovered the crime usually turned out to be the perpetrator. The other two suspected that a personal grudge was blinding Winston but they did not voice their doubts. Kutty tried to sell Sethu’s name on the same grounds. Winston knew why Kutty raised the barber’s name but he kept quiet. Arvind would have preferred to put cuffs on the brother-in-law because it had to be someone close to the victim; or the sand-miners, because he hated them.

Arvind told the constables to deal with the tea-shop owner. Though he was on pleasant terms with the village-folk, he was still an outsider. He knew that even the constables filtered that which he should hear and that which he need not hear. He had realized that there was something about Rajappan and Sethu that his juniors were not telling him.

Arvind started with Maniyan, the rubber tapper, whose house was near the scene. In the police station, a sullen belligerent Maniyan informed him that he had left his house around five. He had cycled to a plantation five kilometers from his house and after completing on various plots in that area, he had tea at a nearby shop at six forty five. Then, he had started on the second phase of collecting and delivering the rubber milk. Arvind checked out this alibi and did not find anything amiss. Maniyan also told him that he did not work on the plantation next to his own plot. He had fought with the owner, he replied looking quite smug.

“Every day, God-willingly if it does not rain, I work and return to my house only at ten. Everyone knows that...” Maniyan informed implying that Arvind must be a damn fool to waste his time talking to him. He also told Arvind that he had never met the victim apart from seeing her around in the village.

Next, Arvind interviewed Maniyan’s wife at the hut. He waited near the river till he saw Maniyan leave the hut around mid-afternoon, probably for his customary tipple. Arvind introduced himself and she brought out a steel chair for him to sit. He had to struggle hard not to stare at her voluptuous body. She could be said to be pretty if not beautiful, with a small upturned nose and a delicate mouth with full pouting lips, her kohl-lined fair eyes seemed to entice. She was definitely a woman who knew her charms. She stood five steps from him, watching him like a cat.

“Where were you between five and seven yesterday morning?” Arvind blurted.

“Here.”

“Was your husband here?” he checked.

“No, he had gone for work.”

“Do you know the woman who was killed?”

“No, sir...I have seen her around, of course.” Arvind detected a hesitation and made a mental note.

“Did you see her yesterday?”

“No. I did not go near the river.”

“Did you see anyone going to the river?”

“Rajappan went there, around seven. He wanted to take bath, I think.”

“Did you see him before he went to the river?”

“Yes…”

“Where…?” He asked expectantly.

“Here.”

“Here?” Arvind stuttered.

She told him with an amused tone that Rajappan had been there with her from six till seven. Then, she offered to get Arvind a glass of tea or buttermilk. Arvind declined the offer.

“Has she come to this house?” Arvind asked.

Now, it was her turn to feel flustered. She replied, “She came here once…preached to me about morals. I gave her an earful. Who does she think she is?”

Arvind left the hut. He decided that he should talk to his juniors before he interviewed anyone else.

It was around tea-time when he got back to the police station. Winston was out trying to get some of the sand-miners.

Arvind sat on Kutty’s table and asked him, “What’s going on between Winston, Rajappan and Maniyan’s wife?”

Kutty remained quiet but seeing his boss’ tightly drawn face, he did not try to evade the question, “Nothing, sir. Rajappan succeeded where Winston failed, that’s all.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“I don’t know…heard about it long back.”

“Is this common knowledge in the village?”

“I guess so.”

“And, does he know, I mean, Maniyan?”

“Of course… I suppose he gets what he wants. I think even Rajappan’s wife knows. They always get to know such things.”

Arvind was at a loss for words. He remembered what Maniyan’s wife had said about the victim, “…preached to me about morals…” Maybe, there was a gulf, created by small-town morals, between him and the villagers…

Arvind left the station and walked over to the butcher’s shop. Rajappan was cleaning the knives and the shop, and getting ready to close the shop for the day. Standing a little away from the dirty water and the stink of offal, Arvind went through his story. He did not learn anything new. Rajappan told Arvind that he did not know the dead lady personally. He refused to admit that he had been to Maniyan’s hut even after Arvind told him that Maniyan’s wife had admitted the same. Arvind asked Rajappan whether he had touched the dead body or arranged the lady’s clothes after he found the body.

Rajappan replied, “Why should I? I know a dead body when I see one. I touch only dead animals. And I don’t touch the clothes of dead women.”

Arvind went back to the station where he found Winston taking care of some paperwork. Kutty was not in the station.

Arvind stood near the constable, “Winston, why did Kutty pick out Sethu’s name?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“You don’t know, do you?” Arvind’s mood was getting darker by the minute. “Do you know how it is like to get posted far from your village for the rest of your miserable career?”

“I am not sure, sir…I mean, people say that Sethu is a homo. Kutty does not like that kind of people…”

“Was Sethu meeting someone there, near the rubber plantation?”

“There is an old shed in that rubber plantation. I have heard that lovers meet there…”

“Who is Sethu’s lover?”

“I don’t know, sir…”

“Which are the houses in that area?”

“There is Maniyan’s house, of course…then, Prasad Master’s house after the plantation. There are only two more houses after that before the paddy fields. One is empty, they are abroad; in the other, there is an old lady and her servant girl.”

Arvind left the station once again and walked this time in the opposite direction to the barber’s shop. When he opened the swing-door,

“The shop is closed.” Sethu said with his back to the door, sweeping the hair on the floor.

“I will take only a few minutes.”

Sethu looked up and saw Arvind in one of the mirrors. He turned around immediately, offered a chair and said, “Sorry sir, haircut or shave?”

“No, I am here about the murder.”

“Oh, that…”

Sethu told Arvind that he had gone for a morning walk and that he met Rajappan near the rubber plantation. Rajappan had looked shaken and so, Sethu had enquired if there was anything wrong with him. When Rajappan told him about the dead body, he had advised him to report it at the station. He had gone along.

“Didn’t you want to see the dead lady or go near the river?” Arvind asked.

“For what…?”

Arvind left the barber’s shop without asking Sethu about his lover or about any meeting.

Before dusk, Arvind and the two constables gathered some of the sand-miners. They had not done any sand-mining that day, they said, because of the murder, they added like a complaint.

Arvind tried to act tough and roughed up the leader, releasing old pent up anger but all he got back was the retort,

“Sir, are you trying to scare us? If you are really that bothered about what we do, why don’t you catch the big fish?” The leader laughed. “That murdered lady…she also tried the same stunt with us, threatening to finish us. As if she can…”

“But, you did finish her?”

“Sir, have you been watching too many movies? When we do not worry about you, will we worry about such small fry?” There was nothing more to get out of them.

Around six, Arvind walked to the temple alone. As usual, there were a few young men playing rummy, not even bothering to get up or hide the cash when Arvind walked up to the stage. He had seen most of them before. He knew that at least two were post-graduates like him.

The youth were just a shade better than the sand-miners when it came to insolence. Yes, they had seen the lady often at the temple. No, she was not the type they liked, they said and further added, though you seem to have liked her, sir.

Arvind asked them if they had had any confrontation with her. That bitch was itching for a bite, they replied nonchalantly, she had tried to provoke them…said she would report their stealing…or their gambling…or some other stuff.

Arvind could imagine what the other stuff could be. He also knew that youth like these lived to get into trouble, to get at least that attention from their society.

The dead lady seemed to have gone against nearly all that came on her path. Did she go fatally wrong with one of them, Arvind wondered.

Before closing for the day, he met his constables once again.

“Tomorrow, we will tackle the family. What did you get out of the tea-owner?”

Winston replied, “It’s really strange.”

Kutty added, “He told us that nobody talks about her. She must be the only one in the village about whom nobody talks.”


3. The Meaning of Her Smile

On the day after the murder, Arvind woke up at five thinking about his two initial doubts: the smile and the loving hand.

He got ready and left his rented house at around half past five. He walked to the temple. His last visit to the temple must have been a month or two earlier and the two priests looked new to the place. There were two or three ladies praying. He watched the main priest complete the main puja at that hour and while collecting the offering, he requested the main priest for five minutes of his time.

He learned that the main priest and his assistant had joined six weeks back; and, that they were just getting to know the village-folk. They had seen the murdered lady Bharathi in the temple but neither of them knew her any better. Arvind tried to probe further but the priest excused himself stating his temple duties.

Arvind approached the temple accountant-cum-officer who was giving puja chits to a lady in the temple’s office-room. The officer had a perpetual disgruntled look as if he was doing a favour to God by sitting there. Arvind gathered that the officer did not think it necessary to talk to the villagers except to collect donations.

In the temple compound, a lady was sweeping the ground. She was more accommodating. The lady stood at a ‘safe distance’ from Arvind and talked in whispers and, at all times, kept a lookout for the main priest or the officer. From the lady, Arvind learned that Bharathi, the murdered lady, used to visit regularly and that her visits were more frequent before the former priests left the place. She and the former priests used to talk a lot together, she confided. The lady regretfully conceded that she did not know why the priests decided to leave. Arvind thanked the lady and left the temple premises via the temple steps leading to the river.

Arvind followed the path that Bharathi had taken. He knew that police sniffer dogs had been used on that path but without any success. He reached the rock where the lady was found. He looked at the area more carefully. He realized that if the killer had taken the muddy path past Maniyan’s hut, the killer would have been seen by someone.

As he looked around, he realized that a person familiar with the place had another route too. Though treacherous and dangerous, a person familiar with the place could go downstream by hopping onto the rocks that dotted the river at irregular intervals.

Arvind nervously took that path. He knew that he would meet a watery and bloody death if he made a slight mistake in any jump. It seemed to take ages for him but he knew that it would be less arduous for a local. At each rock, he inspected the area for any clue or evidence. He got lucky on the eleventh rock.

He found a handkerchief snagged in a wedge on that rock. There were a few red smudges on that as if blood had been wiped. He slipped it into a plastic cover. When he was about fifty metres from the murder site, he realized that the next step was onto a plot and that it was that of Prasad Master.

“Was it someone from this house or someone from outside?” Arvind asked himself.

It was then close to half past seven. He went to Prasad Master’s house. It appeared empty. The policeman had expected the usual lot of morning relatives and friends or at least the arrangements for the last rites.

He knocked at the door. After some time, the two daughters came to the door together. The elder one told him that their parents had gone to a hospital and that father had not been well. They did not invite him inside. Arvind tried to ask a few questions but did not get anything substantial from them. Arvind felt, rather angrily, that Bharathi must have done all the talking in that house.

The son-in-law then appeared and invited Arvind to step inside. Arvind curtly told the son-in-law to come to the station, at half past eight, along with Bharathi’s brother.

Arvind walked to the station, thinking about all that he had heard so far. Kutty and Winston were there at the station and he told them that he wanted to tackle the son alone. Meanwhile, he wanted the son-in-law to sweat it out waiting at the station.

The son and the son-in-law reported at the station ten minutes before the scheduled time. The son appeared nervous rather than angry that morning. He tried to look at Arvind eye-to-eye. Involuntarily, he kept biting and chewing his lower lip.

“Sethu mentioned your meeting – at what time did you two meet?” Arvind decided to bluff with the opening hand.

“What?” the son pretended as if he had not heard properly. Arvind remained silent, tapping his fingers on the table as if to indicate that he was losing patience. He stopped smiling and started scowling. He remembered that the ragging in his college hostel had been quite similar.

“At six thirty,” the son whispered.

“And, your sister Bharathi knew about it…and she did not like your relationship…” Arvind was hoping that his second bluff would hold, too.

“Sethu should not have told you that,” the young man was on the verge of crying, “after all, she is dead. It is not nice to talk ill of the dead.”

“Did she threaten to expose you two?”

“Yes, but we promised not to meet ever again. That was supposed to be our last meeting.”

“But, the two of you killed her, instead.”

“No! That is not true. You are like the rest of them, aren’t you? For you, our kind should be the killers, the evil ones?” the young man was ready to sob.

Arvind did not bother to correct the young man. He proceeded to get the details about the meeting in the plantation. Then, he kept the son waiting in his office, went to the outer office. He gave Winston the details and told him to corroborate with Sethu’s version. Make Sethu give his version, Arvind told Winston and the latter nodded.

Arvind then returned to his office and questioned the young man about his sisters. He enquired if Bharathi had had any lover. The young man replied that she did not even have close friends. Arvind asked him if the other two sisters were also similar to Bharathi. They are totally different, not so bold or outgoing, the young man said.

Arvind tried to ask about his brother-in-law but he felt that the guard was up. And, though he tried to break the defenses, the young man did not utter anything worth noting about his brother-in-law and sisters. Winston returned and indicated to Arvind with a nod that Sethu’s version matched well. Arvind let the young man leave. He made the son-in-law wait for another hour before calling him in.

“Why didn’t you go with your father-in-law to the hospital?” Arvind asked the son-in-law.

“Father told me to stay with the girls.”

“Of the three, Bharathi seems to have been your favourite.” Arvind was fishing with meager bait, he knew.

“What are you talking about?”

“I have heard that you were more close to her than your own wife.” Arvind lied.

“That’s nonsense. You are new to this place. You should believe only half of what you hear.” The son-in-law sounded agitated.

“So, there is a half-truth in what I said. Tell me, did she accuse you of abusing her or the younger one?”

“Who told you that? It is not true. Ask my wife or the younger one. They will tell you that I treat my wife’s sisters like my own sisters.”

“But, she did accuse you?”

The son-in-law looked at Arvind desperately, hesitating, probably thinking about the right answer to get out of the mess. Finally, he said, “Yes.”

Arvind spent the rest of the morning questioning, trying to get more but the son-in-law’s story was similar to the others.

Bharathi the accuser; and in this case, Arvind was not sure whether the accusation was a lie or true. He also knew that it was impossible to know the truth. People do not reveal such truth and worse, such accusation sticks and stinks; like shit on one’s sole.

The son-in-law had a perfect alibi – he was in the house with the others, he tried to argue. But, without outsiders to confirm, the alibi did not amount to much. Around one, Arvind let the son-in-law leave after asking the final question,

“Was she a pleasant character?”

“She could smile…I will never forget her smile.” The son-in-law said with a smirk.

Arvind did not leave for lunch. When Winston and Kutty poked their head in to check on their boss, they found him staring blankly at a wall. They decided to let him be and attended to other work.

At half past four, Arvind told them that he was going to Prasad Master’s house. He left after telling them that he understood the smile and the loving hand. That was the motive and the clue, he said. Kutty and Winston did not tell their boss what was on their mind; that it was a waste of time to dwell on such crap.

When he got to the house, it still looked deserted. Arvind knocked on the door. It took a while before the youngest daughter came to the door. She told him that her father was lying inside. He went with her to an inner room which served as the dining area. A bed shared the space with the dining table and chairs.

Prasad Master was lying on that bed, staring outside. On seeing the policeman, he tried to get up. His wife came into the room from the kitchen and helped him. The two daughters stood near the door to the kitchen. The son and son-in-law were not there.

“Yesterday, he fainted and his fever got worse,” the wife explained. She gave a sob and went back to the kitchen. The daughters followed her.

“Poor woman…she still can’t call it by the right name…cancer.” He told Arvind that he had been diagnosed with cancer a few weeks back. Then, he asked Arvind if they could get Bharathi’s body soon. Arvind told him that it might take a day or two.

Though he had met the scholar only once before Arvind felt a deep affection for the other. He did not know how to start.

From his pocket, he brought out the only evidence, the plastic cover containing the handkerchief, and placed it next to Prasad Master’s hand. The teacher looked at for a while before saying,

“Ah! You have found that. Where did you find it?” Arvind described the location. Instead of asking questions, he remained silent. Like a student waiting for a class to start.

“When I got to know that I had cancer, I knew I had very little time to correct the problem. One who creates an evil has the responsibility to destroy that, too.”

The teacher paused to drink water.

“Wherever she went, whoever she met, she tried to destroy them with her set of morals and her righteous indignation. I do not know if she realized the kind of havoc she was causing all around her. In her family, in the village, in the temple, everywhere…”

He continued with a choked voice,

“When she was born and she smiled for the first time, I was the happiest man alive…I never realized that I would feel like the most cursed man…to see her remove the smile from others…as if, only she had the right…to smile.”

Arvind knew that he could lose the only evidence very easily. But, he also knew that he would not and that the scholar before him would not allow him to do so.

“Do you know what she did when I confronted her on that rock? She smiled. Do you know the meaning of that smile?”

Prasad Master looked at Arvind, laughed mirthlessly and quoted words which Arvind recognized from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,

“You are my creator, but I am your master—obey!”

Why I Left You

Twenty five years back, a teacher presented to me the novel Roots (by Alex Haley). From what’s given on the cover, I know that the book is about a man’s search for his own roots starting with an 18th century African slave named Kunta Kinte. I have not yet read that book and maybe, that is because I wanted to embark on that personal journey myself without another’s help or thoughts or prejudices.

I started that task when I was in my twenties. I constructed family trees, tracing branches and even pruning when I had to. Each member gave me stories begging to be told but I knew that I could not use them or give them dialogues they had never used.

There were the legitimate and the illegitimate; the aristocrats and the paupers; the educated and the illiterate; the physicians, the farmers, the labourers; and then, the unknown or the crazy or the irrelevant. One day, some descendant might put me in one of those boxes. For now, that life is just irrelevant.

In that massive tree, there were two people who really stood out – the one and only famous person in my family; and the second, the only criminal. One had used his life nearly to the full and the other had wasted nearly all. But, these two had one common feature. They left their wife.

The famous person was a great man, a good man too, a social reformer and a teacher. His students were mostly those who had stepped a few paces away from bonded labour. From the numerous books about him, I learned that he started when he was in his twenties and with remarkable purpose and clarity continued and extended his work for over fifty years.

In the initial phase, he used his education and conviction to give the downtrodden community the right to pray and learn. When he gained the faith and respect of many, he asked them to get rid of damaging beliefs and rituals. He taught philosophy but stressed more on practical matters like the importance of personal hygiene and healthcare and, the need for faith, trust and respect in social institutions including marriage. He laid a lot of emphasis on education and secular ideas based on inclusion rather than differentiation.

In every stage, he tried to make people go beyond what he could teach; to go beyond the idols he had himself installed. I realized why he deserves to be called a Guru. Sadly, very few follow his simple teachings today – even in his, I mean, my family.

There was one incident in his life which intrigued me. When he was about twenty, he got married. His wife belonged to a family of similar background as his. Apart from that, there is very little known about her, not even her age or education. A few days after the wedding, he left his house and his wife. He never returned to that life ever again, remained a celibate and immersed himself in social work.

I searched in many books, essays, biographies and critical studies but I could not find any information about that aspect of his life. In one, there was a brief mention about a meeting many years later. During a public gathering, she came to him to ask for his blessing, just like a student with a revered teacher.

In my mind, I could imagine that meeting. He would have recognized her and they would have shared a look of regret and deep longing. In my story, the man had left his wife because he knew that he had to give up that life for the sake of the society he was trying to rescue. When I am drunk and depressed, and closer to my true nature, I cursed that great man and even abused by calling him an impotent, a cheat or a crazy idiot.

One day, I meet an old lady, a relative of the Guru’s wife. In her house, I try to explain my ‘research’. She tells me that the Guru’s wife stayed in that same house, but died young in a boat accident.

Then, she tells me “There’s a lot of old stuff in the attic (thattu)…stuff which people forgot to discard. Since she did not have any kids, after her sudden death, there might be some of her stuff.”

After two hours in that dusty place, I find a small old steel trunk. Inside, there are some clothes but no books or diaries. Near the bottom, between the folds of an underskirt (pavada), there is a folded piece of paper.

I open it and read the first sentence,

“Have you wondered why I left you and why I have to send this without anyone’s knowledge, to be a coward unable to express his love for you?”

I close the letter and slip it into my pocket. I do not tell the old lady about the letter and I leave that house.

If I tried, I could prolong that dream about meeting that relative or finding a long lost letter. But, even in my dream, I do not read that letter any further. I use it to light a cigarette and let it burn on my palm. I grind the ash in my palm, hardly feeling the burn. It was like doing the last rites. In that dream, I hear my own voice,

“It’s their story…not mine to tell…will I ever talk about why I left you?”

As for the life of the criminal, did I not tell you that that life is irrelevant?



[Words: 933]

The Problem to State

I have to write this quickly. I wish I had the time to tell everything or to write this well.

Did it start three weeks back? Or, when my team was dismissed eighteen months back?

Eighteen months back, I had a meeting with the Minister. It was a brief meeting. It lasted one full sentence.

“Your team is dismissed and the case is closed.”

If he had looked defiant or smug or even apologetic, I would have lost my cool. But when I saw the defeated look on that face, I felt sad and even betrayed. I had walked out without a word.

That case had started as a common case of large-scale corruption. But, the case turned out to be like Hydra of Lerna – for each head cut off, it grew two even more vicious heads. Corruption, money-laundering, the people involved could paralyze the executive, the judiciary and at every echelon of the State including the private sector. The violence and murder was so ruthless and if compared, even the famous terrorists might look like innocent suckling babies.

But, when it was time for the final action, we were dismissed. A few team-mates even suggested vigilante action or about going to the press. But, we knew that it was wishful thinking – that it was an irrational ineffective thought (and embarrassingly sensational, too).

Three weeks back, we re-grouped after another meeting with the Minister. Why did I say that it could have started eighteen months back? When we re-grouped, we were like hungry dogs, snarling and barely leashed. Maybe, the Minister knew that, too.

The meeting with the Minister, three weeks back, was again brief. It lasted five sentences.

The Minister started without any pleasantries, “We have received information from very reliable sources about a problem to State. Large funds, from an unknown source and to an unknown destination, are pouring in to destabilize and cause irreparable and everlasting damage. We do not know the nature of attack or the assailant. All that we know is that we are going to be the victims. Find out the problem and neutralize.”

As for the team, I cannot divulge too many details. The team does not have any fancy name nor do we wear RayBan glasses. I was given the freedom to choose a ‘suitable’ lot from anywhere, viz. any state, any department. It was not some stupid national integration exercise. They are the suitable means to meet the ends. Our job does not require us to be politically correct. Is there any guiding HR policy? I can only give you an anecdote. A senior colleague briefed me about this incident,

“We were in a crowded lift in the Admin block. That guy who joined with me, myself and that new recruit – that female, you know, that chubby friendly thirty-something who calls everyone, even you, beta. The other guy was standing next to her and started groping her. I thought of intervening. But then, I saw her hands caressing his ass, too. At that moment, I felt disgusted with her. But then, I saw her hand jerk upwards and I saw that guy spluttering and coughing, eyes filling up, screaming silently. Boss, she had pulled the hair between his buttocks.” I guess that’s our HR policy. I know that even I would not be spared. There might be a few helping hands too, I guess.

Soon after the meeting with the Minister, the team had a meeting. The agenda was simple, “This is a brain-storming session. I have told you what the Minister said. That’s all we know. In this brief session, I want you to state a problem, your first thoughts and assessment if any, please …” There was silence. I continued, “It must be staring at us on the front page of today’s paper. Come on … what could be the problem to State?”

We were sitting in a circle and started clockwise.

One said, “Cross-border terrorism including nuclear arsenal. The armed forces are prepared for this. Casualties can be large, but is it irreparable and everlasting?”

Two said, “Kashmir and the other areas with such problems. Again, the problem is known and it could be managed.”

Three said, “Same with Ayodhya and such cases. It is not new though it could really hurt. If the State does not know how to handle that, then we deserve to be damned.”

Four said, “Internal power struggles, economic conflicts, the huge rich-poor divide. It is scary if the Naxals are aped in the cities. But jobs or money or infrastructure might do the trick, the rich and the poor think about money equally … probably even the middle-class … anyway, they will follow with no thoughts of their own …”

One entered the fray again, “Credit and banking bust ... large-scale unemployment. But, is that a common problem now? Painful – yes; everlasting - not really; irreparable - no.”

“Come on, what else is there on those front pages?” I goaded.

Five said, “Identity theft and hacking, revenge of the plastic and the chips? I wonder if that will really affect lots or even be a huge security threat in India.”

Three added, “Invasion. China. They are really growing muscle. I wonder why they would want India and all its problems, though.”

Six said, “Break-down of moral values and old institutions, borrowed culture, sex, freedom, divorce, suicide. It is tame, right? Sorry…”

Four came back in, “Global warming, green or anti-green terrorism…but that is a global problem, isn’t it? Sure to be damned but who is bothered!”

Six re-entered, “Hey, there is an advert on the front page. Some new institute… Education, man, how about that, I mean, the breakdown of that? Hey, we know that we are degrading everything, we are chasing mediocrity and we want to be the manager of mediocrity. Who wants R&D, even a proper higher education? Are there teachers who learn and teach? Do we compete with the best? A whole generation is being mutated right before our eyes and every future generation seems doomed…”

Two joined in, “What about good old corruption? Mafia – human traffic, land, sand, liquor… but that’s part of us, isn’t it? That’s just the good and the ugly, il buono il cattivo… we need the bad, il brutto …”


“Come on, ladies and gentlemen, what is the problem to State?”