Ravi's Work Ethic

Summer of '07 I was working in Chennai in a customer service role. Three days of the week, I would travel close to 60km  to a client factory to watch over our products being used in their assembly lines. My only companion during these travels was the driver of the company car, Ravi.

Chennai summers; if you haven't lived it, you have no idea what it's like. We never talked much. Exchange of pleasantries was a long abandoned exercise, there was a mutual understanding that these weren't good days for either of us. My role was dealing with unhappy customers (neat graphic on customer service here) and Ravi had to wait in the heat, in the uncovered parking lot of the factory, till the end of the day.

Still there he would be, every morning,  in his sparkling white uniform, flashing two rows of sparkling white teeth in his sparkling white Ambassador.

One day, towards the end of summer and the close to the end of my stint in that role, both of us were uncharacteristically loquacious. I asked him, "Ravi, how come you are so cheerful every morning?"

I will always remember Ravi's reply, "Sir, every morning while I put on my uniform, I tell myself, today nobody will be unhappy because of me, nobody will reach their destination late, I will drive safe and I will come back to my wife and kids for dinner. With every minute I spend at this job I am buying my family food and security. My father taught me this and I have been doing this for ten years now."

Flash Fiction-From Archives

I have always felt shorthanded when it comes to writing fiction and the tiniest of achievements makes me feel good. Around October '08 I had participated in the "Caferati-LiveJournal Flash Fiction Writing Contest" and my story had made it to the top 100 out of 1052 entries. Inspite of frantic voting by friends and family (thank you guys!), I couldn't make it to the final 10. Lately, I have not been updating this blog as often as I would like to. Untill I find something better to put up, here is my entry. Inspirations being Arthur C. Clarke's History Lesson and the Terra Nova Expedition.

The Journal

The objects lay on the table, exactly as the Scout had left them two days ago. The Researcher had delayed analyzing them. The lethargy in him had been well fed by the warmth of his chamber and the excruciatingly slow progress he had been making in the past four months. Every discovery just tangled it ever more.

He had been tracking the movements of his subjects, following a trail of excavated objects that was distinctive to the species. It was known that this particular patch of land had been their last refuge against an increasingly belligerent climate, what he hoped to contribute was the beginnings of this island, how and why had they chanced upon this land mass.

He picked up the fossilized bone first, and tossed it aside with a grunt. It was useless, there were many more he had found, they belonged to a later time. The second was a moss covered object, slightly large, about the size of his palm, the moss on it was patchy. He was doing his routine check of scratching the moss out, something was different this time, a darker more uniform green shone underneath.

He was sure the object had a purpose, unlike most of his finds. It stood on his table, cleaned, it was dark green, and reflected the sunlight. When he put it up against the sun, and it sparkled even more. The Researcher had just managed to get his first smile of the day looking at the green sparkle when he froze. In the next few moments all he could feel were the flies buzzing in his chamber, his heart beating and the dripping of moist air condensing on the glass walls. There was something cylindrical inside it. It moved around as he shook the green object, which he now understood to be just an outer covering.

Excitement mingled with frustration, he banged it on the table, it made a tinkling sound and shattered to pieces, and the kernel dropped to the floor. It seemed organic. The Researcher picked the kernel with his forceps and put it inside the Date Machine. A number popped up. The researcher could hardly believe the figure that showed up. It was possibly the oldest man-made object he had found in these parts. He picked the kernel out from the machine, and inspected it. Its surface had dark smudgy inscriptions, it rolled open to become completely flat and the edges were rough and looked like it fitted into a larger whole. The inscriptions belonged to one of the broad categories that had still not been translated.

The Researcher sighed, those little squiggly marks possibly told a story of the genesis of civilization on this part of Earth, but it also meant another dead end to bang his head against.

He ran his fingers through the marks, it was written,

“Damn you Amundsen”

He looked out of the walls in exasperation at his inability to understand the script.

The sun continued on its incessant circular path an inch above the horizon, its rays cutting across dense fauna.

The Next Wave

Yesterday I realized that a large portion of my friends -and these are people I interact with on almost a daily basis, not distant acquaintances-are to be found doing something in the field of education.

J is part of a start-up creating ITES solutions for schools, colleges and the government.[Link]

R is repairing OLPC laptops in a small school in Nasik. [Link]

H is a Research Associate in Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab which does impact evaluations on education and other sectors. [Link]

and,

N is a fellow at Teach for India, managing an exceptionally 'energetic' 3rd grade. [Link]

If you had met these people not too long ago they were respectively a computer science student, an electrical engineer, an oil & gas field engineer and a fashion designer.

Is it happening to you and people around you too?

History and Us

You know what kind of history I like?

As much as the stories of kings and their architectures and Marshall and his plan are important what really interests me is the slice of life kind of history.

History like this:

"Finally the Tuscany reached the Gangetic delta in September 1833 to great reception. There was a reason for this enthusiasm: they were finally getting rid of the Hooghly slush which was the ice equivalent. To make Hooghly slush, boiled water was poured in earthenware and placed in shallow pits filled with straw. The cool air froze the surface creating a thin film of ice. These pots were then collected and stored in pits for sale during summer. This Hooghly slush was expensive and it was slush. The slush was available for six weeks at a rate of 4 pence per pound and now pure Boston ice was available all year around for three pence a pound." (Full article at varnam, possibly one of the best blogs on Indian History I have come across.)

History which is ordinary with respect to the people involved and at the same time is a beautifully detailed piece of the bigger picture.

During one such discussion with a colleague about his grandfather, a law student in Pune who was jailed for distributing pamphlets during the Quit India Movement, I realised that Pune was quite the hub of student activism during that time, and that some schools would only give you admission after you had signed an agreement stating  that you "...would not participate in anti Crown activities..."

Gets me thinking, 50 years later, when people talk about the single greatest thing that happened in India during our time, what would it be and would we have played a role in it?

The Choice

Was lying in draft box for quite sometime, watching it echoed in Up in The Air inspired me to put it up.


Once in your life come close to killing yourself,
When death is but a moment away,
When you are way beyond the thought of fear and pain.
Beyond the thought of all the strings you have tied yourself to,
Beyond the liabilities and compromises you have piled on top of yourself,
Beyond everything.
And at that moment, choose.
Realise that living is not about being true to the weights you trouble yourself with
Life is the choice you make every moment, to live.

Do not be concerned, not depressed and never really tried killing myself, just a thought experiment.

One thing about my mom's sisters that never stops, come misfortune or high weather is the telling of a good tale. Having them as siblings more than aunts to me during my growing years, I owe a lot of this blog, my skills as a raconteur and the habit of using humour as a stress relieving mechanism to them. This trip home was one in difficult circumstances but I was cheered up at every moment by their stories, all true, all slightly irreverent and all fun in a charming Malgudi Days kind of way. Three of this times best were:

1. The Vote

2. The Dancing Instructor

3. The Peeping Tom

I shall recount the first one here the other two are for my own memory. I beg pardon if the humor doesn't translate into English, for the true flavour of these stories is to be found listening to them being enacted while you have a cup of tea with bara-piyaji waiting on the paan your grandmother is trying to make in between fits of laughter that punctuate every tale.

The Vote

Around 25 years ago, in a tiny village separated from Cuttack by 23 kilometers of paddy fields and the river Mahanadi, the great Indian election process is underway and my grandfather, the bastion of literacy and lover of world history in this little post colonial serfdom, has registered all his eligible children to vote. And one by one they come back from the voting booth and prance around, proudly displaying the mark of the indelible ink like it was something from the Nizam's treasury. One of their cousins didn't have a constitutionally inclined parent and watched around sulking as her compatriots discussed the importance of a ideology in choosing your representative or some such topic. My youngest aunt, lets call her Aunt M. saw her and decided to do something about it. 

Now, in those days you didn't have the election voter ID, what you had was a tiny chit with your name, the polling booth's name and the date printed on it. This was like a voting ticket that you carried to the polling booth. Of all my aunts one had recently got married and her ticket lay unused. Aunt M. stepped up to her cousin and asked her, "You want to vote?" Watching the vigorous nodding of two blue ribboned pigtails melted her heart. Now, the one telling me this story is Aunt M. herself and drops her voice into a most conspiratorial whisper and tells me, "But no one in the whole village could know about this." So the cousin and my aunt walk over to the polling booth. The cousin goes in casts her vote and has all but come out when one 20 something old election volunteer stops her just outside, "Hey! I am in your class, this is not your name on the chit!"

Now imagine two 21 year old village girls ganging up to this guy holding his collar and going, "Listen kid! If anyone gets to hear this, be very afraid passing by the pond with all the eels in them, you can swim can't you?"

The guy has better sense and lets them go. 

That single vote might not have changed the course of history but I love this story, because I have spent many vacations in the setting, I have walked frightened beside the pool with all the eels, I have played hide and seek in the now ramshackle building that served as the polling booth and have seen my aunt and her cousin as older responsible women. This tale reminds me that everyone was a kid once and Voting ID cards were little chits. Sort of gives a sense of history to a part of my childhood. This is possibly one of my longer posts. And I know reading such a long post is too much to ask of a reader and if you have lasted this far with me, thank you very much!