Islam, Muslims and Islamic Muslims

The faith, the people and a few faithful people...


The 6^th century Arabian desert land was one of that middle of nowhere points on earth with its sun hammered lands of drifting sands and rubble waste. Its redundant landscape of never ending dunes stretched miles after miles and remained untouched by humans for eternity. With dry storms raging day after day sending sand scurrying the earth for a thousand miles, this landscape had more in common with the surface of Venus than to the planet it truly belonged.

Life was largely out of sight, barring a few rare sights of Bedouin nomads who moved about nervously in search of water, people and life. These were a herd of godforsaken people who perhaps went astray on their way out of Africa and lost themselves forever in this sea of never ending sands and scorching sun. While civilizations rose and fell elsewhere in the world, these men lived lives that specialized merely in the essential animal art of survival in conditions barely tolerable to others and enjoyed the safety of the undesired.

Over generations there were only more and more of these helpless souls moving about the sands now as hostile nomadic tribes and fighting each other ferociously over the non existent resources they had been cursed with. A privileged few became merchants and braved the desert to reach far off lands to trade their humble consignments of dates and palm for real world goods that they never knew existed.

The aggregation of these nomads along the banks of the red sea lead to the rise of small yet bustling caravan towns, the people of which were some of the most occult in their traditions. In one of these towns called Mecca where Abraham built the first mosque for the worship of his "One God" several centuries before, now lived people who worshipped a different idol on every new day of the year and performed nude ritual fornications that included the sacrifice of human beings to please their 360 gods! Female infanticide was rampant and woman were traded as commodities. A few rich merchants controlled the town and entangled the poor into a vicious slump of usury.

Born in this time of moral despondency and despair was the orphan child – Mohammed. Although born into comparative poverty he was raised by his paternal uncle into a just and charismatic young man. His wisdom and reputation as an honest trader had become legendry across Arabia. Though he eventually became a wealthy merchant he spent most of his time in solitude into the mountains of Hira trying to transcend human pettiness, searching for the meaning of life and what it really meant to be human.

He was forty years old and it was the fifth consecutive year of his retreat to Hira when one night angel Gabriel embraced him and commanded "read in the name of the Lord who created man from a clot!" as he was chosen to be the messenger of God to all of mankind. As a petrified and profusely sweating Mohammed trembled to ask what he should be reading, he in avertedly spurted out by himself the words "In the name of God that there is no god but the only God" – the opening lines of the Quran! This profound experience changed him forever. The merchant returned to Mecca a changed man and began to preach the fundamental tenets of human life.

Over the next 23 years as the Quran was revealed to him verse by verse he fiercely fought the detrimental forces of society and eradicated the gross injustices of the time. He painstakingly strived to not just preach but rather put into day to day practice the extraordinary ideas that were envisioned in those poetic verses. In the process he evolved a composite lifestyle for every practicing individual and an ideal social structure for a society of such individuals that transformed the message of Islam from being a spiritual state of mind into a practical way of life. He liberated and empowered woman by instituting rights of property, ownership, inheritance, education, marriage and divorce upon them. He prescribed modesty and discipline for both men and woman as the sole means to a moral and just society.

By the time of his death, he had effectively united the 200 hostile tribes of Arabia into one political unit unified by their fervent belief in their one God. By doing so, for the first time in history Prophet Mohammed united the tattered tribal strength into one formidable force and liberated them into a movement that became legendry for its might. This eventually led to a united desert tribe swarming out of the peninsula in single strength and embarking upon the most astonishing series of conquests in human history that held a cultural and political sway over most of the world for over a millennia.

By the 8^th century the Islamic empire stretched from Spain in the west to the borders of India and China in the East. With the ascent of the Abbasid Caliphate with its capital in Baghdad the period know as the Islamic golden Age (from 8^th to 15^th century) in world history was formally inaugurated. Inspired by quotes such as "The ink of a scholar is more holy than the blood of a martyr" of the prophet, the Caliphate championed the cause of knowledge. By establishing 'The House of knowledge' in Baghdad the caliphate effectively became the intellectual centre of the world at that time, where scholars from across the world were brought together to consolidate the knowledge gained from the great civilizations of Roman, Mesopotamia, Indian, Chinese, Persian, Egyptian, Greek and Byzantine. 'The great translation movement' soon followed, during which all the world's literature were translated into Arabic first and then into Latin, Hebrew and Persian. The Chinese innovation of paper which remained a closely guarded secret was brought into mainstream and improvised to suit large scale use. The world's first public libraries, degree granting universities, hospitals and Research institutes were established. Significant advancements in Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Astrology, Cartography and Medicine were made. Poetry, Arts and Architecture flourished. Trade routes to Africa, India and the Far East were established and a few unsuccessful trans-atlantic missions were also pursued.

The flourishing trade links and the resultant merchant economy laid the path for the first ideas of proto capitalism and free market economy during the medieval Islamic period often called 'Pax-Islamica'. The foundation stones of capitalism were laid by a vigorous monetary economy on the basis of the expanding levels of circulation of a stable high value currency - the dinar. This was further strengthened through innovations such as contracts, bills of exchange, partnerships, cheques, savings accounts, loaning, exchange rates, bankers and money changers. These concepts were then adopted and further advanced in medieval Europe from the 13^th century onwards.

By the early years of the 12^th century, Europe had already begun redeeming itself out of the dark ages (which it had slipped into with the decline of the Roman Empire in the 5th century) and unified forces under the banner of "The Crusaders". The holy army that was formulated to curtail the growing influence of the Arabs in order to protect its own culture and faith. Though these rising conflicts from the west had significantly dented the supremacy of the Caliphate, the final death knell was sounded by the ravaging Mongols. A devastating military force that originated in central China and took the world by storm in the 13^th century, building one of the largest empires the world had ever seen. As a combined effect of these two forces the Islamic caliphate had declined out of its Golden Age and was confined back to the largely dry and harsh east & central Asia and North Africa by the 16^th century by when the Great Mughals in India were also on a decline.

And just as it always happens with history - When civilizations clash, the loser is obliterated and the winners write the history books – books that glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. And it is this fabled partial history that becomes a part of our legacy while the rest of it buries itself in the sands of time.

This in essence is the story of Islam – which was in effect a spiritual idea that brought about a radical social change in 7^th century Arabia and eventually manifested itself into a political movement that held a cultural sway over most of the world for almost 8 centuries that followed. But to understand Islam in its present context, it is perhaps more important to know the rest of its story.

In the years that followed the decline of Islamic powerhouses in Europe and Asia, the tattered Muslim community spread itself thin across Central Asia and North Africa where they formed small territorial kingdoms and controlled the mostly arid lands of the region living in constant threat of invasion by the colonizing powers emerging out of the European renaissance. With no means for agriculture to develop and the trade routes via the Persian gulf being increasingly influenced by the Europeans these tiny kingdoms of central Asia and N Africa over the next few centuries turned into some of the most under developed countries in the world with the poorest of human development indexes. This remained so until the end of the second world war as the reigning super powers of the era were pre-occupied with power struggles in greener pastures in India, South East Africa, Australasia and the Americas.

Post World War II as the new world order was being scripted and the international boundaries were being re-drawn, most of the colonized world gained independence and the world aligned itself behind the two contemporary but complementary ideas of the time. And thus was laid the foundation for the Third and the most deadly installment of the World Wars – The Cold War.

I call this the deadliest of the three wars simply because unlike the two previous editions that were fought over political supremacy this one was fought over intellectual supremacy. And was therefore essentially driven by mind wars of sinister propaganda and conspiracies, resulting in staggering long term rifts within humanity the consequences of which have now proved to be more lethal than the "small boy" and the "fat man" dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki!

It was during these times, the so far non-consequent kingdoms of central Asia and Africa along with a few other pastures in South East Asia, Africa and South America gained significance as the venues of these proxy wars. They turned into practical laboratories where these warring ideologies could be tested on the ground. In most of the cases, the states were beginning to endorse communism and this was being resisted by injecting capitalism into local rebels and insurgent groups that destabilized and eventually destroyed the state. It is perhaps ironic that some of the bloodiest of world battles were fought on the pretext of promoting peace and equality through intellectual ideologies such as 'Democracy' and 'Communism' on immature societies. And this was because the powers that evolved and promoted these ideologies failed to acknowledge its essential character of self evolution and practical relevance. It is through centuries of arguments and experiments that these ideas evolve as an extended outcome of mass empowerment movements such as an agricultural or industrial revolution and not as an overnight change. Therefore any attempt to enforce these ideas on societies that lacked these fundamental tenets and the intellectual wisdom to comprehend the nuances of such a system could only fail.

It was also at this time that international terrorism as a phenomenon emerged on the world stage. Several parts of Europe and the western world witnessed a surge in terrorism and violence as a result of the unrest within the Jewish immigrant community that remained scattered across the region in the aftermath of the holocaust, on its eternal search for a homeland. This phenomenon was only on an escalation until the UN (United States) intervened and established that craved homeland. But this was done at a cost, not at a cost to the forces that were originally responsible for the ravaged status of that community but rather to a set of people who had little idea of the excruciating pain that was inflicted upon that community. This juxtaposed two distrustful societies vehemently charged with their own versions of the idea of justice at the geographic centre of the world where the three major faiths on Earth are said to converge and quite ironically created a permanent rift between them.

These two contemporary events only prove one fact, that terrorism is in a sense the war of the weak and the obliterated and a War is in effect terrorism by the rich and the powerful. And no matter on what pretext these are propagated, they are both essentially two sides of the same coin of human pettiness. Therefore it could only be naïve to believe that it is the pretext that in essence drives the violence.

During the inglorious years of the cold war, the communist Soviet Union managed to make some inroads into the underdeveloped heart lands of the world such as Afghanistan and the numerous other -stans in the region and established its political influence. To counter which men from a dozen hapless states in central Asia (Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo along with similar regions in North Africa) were aggregated under the banner of Mujahedeen (or freedom fighters) and deployed into Afghanistan and the region as 'islamic' freedom fighters to curb the growing influence of the Soviet Union as a counter strategy by capitalist America. And by the late 80s these insurgent mujahedeen groups were sufficiently strengthened to drive communism out of the region.

In the years following the Russian defeat in Afghanistan some of the now notorious veterans from the Soviet war in Afghanistan had been left with an army without a cause from which evolved the dangerous derivatives of Al Qaeda and the Taliban that eventually cut loose and wrecked havoc in the world in the name of championing the cause of Palestine independence and other imperialistic influences – the one cause that could undoubtedly send emotions souring across the Muslim world and give these groups long term political relevance and empathy. But the issue of Palestine was essentially a political one with no religious significance whatsoever. It was only a matter of co-incidental detail that a majority of the people displaced in Palestine were Muslims. But it was this very matter of detail that was brewed up into the actual-point-of-contention by the champions of this propaganda to give them a larger support base and created this whole Jihad for Islam frenzy, which was unheard of until the late 20^th Century.

Ever since, these groups have only grown more lethal and sinister in their objectives and capabilities. They have successfully turned a regional political conflict into a clash of civilizations and potentially endangered the lives of the billion people in the region and the world at large. And the United States on its futile attempts to curtail the Frankenstein's monster it had once created has already destabilized several nations in the region and thereby only alienated its people creating more hot beds for the monster to thrive on. This has been a dangerous on going phenomenon that only proves one point, Any society that legitimizes violence from within will always be prone to violence from the outside!!

This downward spiral cannot be stalled or even controlled unless the so called guardians of world peace and harmony come to terms with the fact that the concept of a structured society does not exist where it is most needed. These men did not wake up on one fine morning of the 1990s and realized they were Muslims and therefore felt compelled to be suicide bombers as it is being made out to be! Extremism is an endemic phenomenon that thrives on misplaced nationalism and resentment to foreign interference. Terrorism is the extreme form of frustration that is spewed out of utter hopelessness created by generations of living in war ravaged nations and refugee camps, And it is a purely socio-political phenomenon that has no Islamic fundamentals whatsoever. Islam is only being abused by these groups to give their 'cause' a larger support base. And these ill planned global wars on terrorism are only playing into these galleries and creating greater scope for these groups to flourish. Any serious attempt to install global peace should only begin with solving long standing injustices such as the inhuman blockade of the Gaza strip and disproportionate acts of violence in third world countries by global military powers.

Yet another disturbing trend in recent years has been the escalating incidents of 'Islamophobia' in and around the western world, that have brought the fear psychosis from the idiot box to the dinner tables of western households. The ground zero mosque being the most recent of them all. The quintessential guardians of Liberty in France could only think of a much publicized "Ban of the veil" to liberate the 'oppressed' muslim woman from a practice that was more Arabic than Islamic in origin. The print media in Denmark could only resort to a rather insensitive gesture of depicting the prophet as a dog to assert their freedom of expression. And if this was not enough, the parliament of the ever-so-tranquil state of Switzerland passed a resolution to bring down all the minarets that had mushroomed in the country – an act which was in no way different from what the Taliban decided to do with the statues of the Buddha's of Bamyan in Afghanistan which outraged the world! These events are especially concerning as they are for the first time beginning to alienate main stream Muslims who live in civil societies far away from the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan and worse still fuel a fear psychosis in the minds of an average Westerner against the concept of Islam.

All this has only transformed Muslims into a clan that is perceived to be on a collision course with the world, through countless protest marches and demonstrations expressing their displeasure about the numerous acts of insensitivity against them and tirelessly demanding a ban on each of them. Little realizing that a ban of a vicious idea does little to actually cease its existence, at best it merely is a restriction on its expression which is of little value as long as one is aware the idea exists.

Somewhere in between this ever escalating acts of violence and counter violence in the name of Islam and against it, on one side and Islamobhobic propaganda symbolizing it to be the single largest threat to civil society on the other, is lost the true spirit of the idea of Islam and its universal message of equality of all mankind in front of that single force that creates, drives and destroys it.

Like all major faiths in the world, Islam too originated as a result of man's attempts to find answers to those two fundamental questions that has kept us pondering for centuries, the question of origin of life and the question of its culmination which in turn is linked to accountability during the intermediate phase. While providing a robust explanation for each of these questions, Islam also provided an ideal social framework for individual characters and societies to be built upon.

Islam like any philosophy and therefore every other religion has its share of spirituality and ritualism, and as one gets more sophisticated intellectually the proportion of spirituality dominates the ritualistic trait and vice versa. So it is ultimately the actions of the professing individual that seems to determine the greatness of the philosophy rather than the philosophy itself. And in this context has lead to the acts of Muslims defining what Islam is rather than Islam determining who a Muslim should be. And the true Islamic Muslim is simply lost in the maze.

- An$ar Za!nul

(c) Copyrights reserved.

The Rainbow Notion

CAUTION

Sexually explicit content, viewer discretion recommended. (Nothing serious really, just trying to enthuse more kids to read my blog)

Do not complain of feeling offended. (You never told me you were gay:-)

With green flyovers and florescent foot over bridges Chennai is definitely one of the more colorful cities around. But watching the rainbow colors coming alive and marching down its beaches in full strength was a bit of an over dose even for its standards.

If there was a Nobel prize for being conservative the intellectual capital of India might have also been the city of Nobel laureates. When this city notoriously infamous for being conservative woke up on yet another seemingly normal Sunday to a whiff of freshly brewed filter kaapi and suprabadam it was largely unaware of the rude shock that was taking shape on its beloved shores of marina.

It was the band of reluctant joggers thrown out of their beds by their ruthless moms/wives (different variants of the same problem) on a Sunday morning who were on the first line of fire. Men and woman who grew up on a staple of Indian cinema romance (or the lack of it) coupled with moral science lectures on how you could not cuddle or hold hands with even your spouse in public were greeted with the sight of lip locking man couples and cuddly female ones boldly showcasing their sexual disorientation. Cross dressed men and manly woman painted themselves in rainbow colors (as though they were already not horrifying enough) and held placards to make a statement on their right to do what they do and still be part of civil society.

The Rainbow pride march that set off from the shores of Marina on the 30^th of June this year threw the city off its guard and its people out of their wits. But why the poetic little rainbow out of all the things they could have chosen to symbolize their delusional state of mind? I thought. Agreed that it is a very colorful state of affairs, but the rainbow could have still been reserved for a better cause. But apparently the rainbow pride is meant to symbolize their unique ability to understand and appreciate the many colors that they say exists between the mundane black and white, the two natural sexes. Intellectual gays I thought.

Meanwhile the forever starved media rose in jubilation for having found the story of the season and The NEWS spread like wild fire and set off a series of events that activated the dead spirits of the argumentative Indian like nothing before and triggered a domino effect that culminated in a political hot potato for the newly elected government. Overnight India was elevated to a state that I like calling ‘the Rainbow nation’ and the LGBT community had become the mango man (aam admi) of the season.

Even the otherwise fragile secular fabric of India seems to develop strong bonds in moments of perceived national exigency. Amar, Akbar and Anthony made their faithful co-appearance on national television and even brought Banta Singh along for company this time to demonstrate their unity in adversity. “This is against all our faiths and the holey spirit!” they sang in unisonJ. Baba Namdev and a battery of other CEOs of Hindu Inc enterprises cried foul for going against the Art of loving. Some even went a step ahead and prescribed medicines and oil therapies for the alleged patients.

It always happens with our media, cometh a new story and they all go into a tizzy. For the next few days the only people on the road are journalists, reporters, news anchors, cameramen and as though that was not enough, these men are now going around like Draculas turning even citizens into journalists! (And the idea of 1 billion journalists haunts my dreams ever since). All the rest are at home glued to the idiot box that just got a little stupid. Not a soul on the road that can stand on its feet is spared, everybody gets interviewed and everything gets aired. And then a day or two go by, the news hungry ‘we’ finally get bored and so does the generous media and suddenly the TRP of big boss begins to rise out of nowhere. Most sensational stories end here. But then there are a few that wouldn’t let go that easily. These are stories that make a second homecoming at this stage with a series of events that pushes the tizzy media into a bottomless pit of jingoism. And that is it, there is no return to sensibility for a few weeks after that.

In this case there were two such events. The first being Dr Baba Namdev – the psychotherapist’s antics. It is agreeable that the sudden disorientation is more a state of the mind than a realistic way of life that it is being made out to be and logically one should be able to meditate and reorient his way out of the situation. But this may be acceptable to our intelligentsia if a scientist winning the Nobel Prize for medicine suggested it in his acceptance speech. Anything coming from baba’s and bawa’s is meant to be ridiculed and considered antagonistic to common sense and is therefore given the welcome of a uncommon nonsense. The artificial intelligentsia arrives out of nowhere rubbing their hands in glee to punch as many holes as they could in the Sadhu’s enterprising explanation of the subject.

This whole spirituality vs morality in the laboratory thingy goes on for sometime. Talk shows and social debate programs play out to packed galleries. Of them all, the most ridiculous one was the show on which the anchor thundered “Who decides what is natural and what is not moral?” well.. maam.. Nature decides what is natural and perhaps each individual should decide for oneself on what is moral. Her’s may well be a great argument and excellent prime time material but please for gay’s sake get real. These people may definitely help make your beach colorful on a random Sunday but they definitely wouldn’t help in the endurance of the human race or fit anywhere in its social setup. They are an exclamation mark followed by a full stop on the family tree. Spare a moment to think of what the world might have looked like if Adam and Eve went on a rainbow parade after biting the forbidden apple! Funny people really J

The second event was perhaps the more significant one. The Supreme court’s ruling against article 370 (the lone anti rainbow law in the world’s longest constitution) was received with a standing ovation. The law obviously doesn’t say “catch the gay and hang him by the pole until dead”. It simply is a legal prohibition on perpetuating the idea of homosexuality on unwilling individuals. And the judgment was against an attempt to misuse the provision. Consensual relationships between adults perhaps would never reach the public domain let alone being convicted or reprimanded and that is precisely the way it should be. Mumbai has always been home to a much larger LGBT community than London and Paris put together. But this has always remained outside the public discourse. Even the thriving morality and culture police of the city have largely ignored them and these men and woman have carved a space for themselves in this exhaustively diverse society to live in peace and tranquility. It is best left this way. Parading them into public space or scrapping laws in their honor is not going to help the cause in anyway.

Lets get it straight - Alexander may have been The Great gay, Elton john might well be the singing gay and MJ may have been neither or a bit of both, yet there is nothing glorious or poetic in being one. It is merely another complex manifestation of the confounded human mind which has shown over years its ability to stoop down to dingier lows. It may certainly be a complex state of being but there has never been a need to glamorize or dramatize it. Any attempt to do so would only pave the way for even more outrageous ideas that are now creeping into the grey fringes of society to follow suit and claim mainstream space. It is important to understand that we today are what we are as a result of the metaphysical combination of what we want to be and what the world wants us to be. And it is often the latter factor that ensures the end product remains more or less human and it is absolutely critical to ensure these checks and counter balances in society remain, after all man is the ultimate wild animal.

Well that reminds me, there is these days a clan emerging as a distant cousin of the rainbow people who have taken the adventure to an all new level by daring to venture beyond the human race. At this rate the day may not be far off when taking your dog for a morning walk might qualify for a speed date and MNS volunteers would celebrate Valentine ’s Day vandalizing the offices of Blue cross and PETA(People for Erotic treatment of Animals) for a change!

- An$ar Za!nul

(c) Copyrights reserved.

Ohhh…..Mmmm…..eRRRR !!!

Having still not found a job that could get me kicking out of my sleep, doing a mini-dada-ballet on my bed with a swiveling t-shirt and yelling “Thank god it’s Monday! ”, I usually stick to the more mundane style of waking up to the week. The usual kicking and throttling of the alarm clock is followed by some unsuccessful negotiations with the less dominate-able biological alarm clock - my mother, on my fundamental right to sleep for another ten minutes. And eventually like always the second alarm clock has its way and the ever growing burden of man being a civilized animal is bestowed upon me. The series of morning chores that have emerged as ugly by-products of our evolution begin to take turns to haunt me and all through this while my obnoxious little mobile phone would be crying for attention. It is perhaps the only creation of man that could challenge god’s super creations - woman in their ability of getting into your life and gobbling up all your time. And in either case, one has to eventually give into the temptation after dodging for a while. I reluctantly pick it up (the phone:-) and explain to my furious boss how I was just driving past all the landmarks around my office that he knows and could be there anytime. At this, I finally decide to leave my house and set out on my daily voyage to OMR - Chennai’s own Information Superhighway!!

Old Mahaballipuram Road might sound more like some haunted by-lane named after a legendry unforgiving goddess of death or something, but ironically it is meant to symbolize the surging exuberance of a new and youthful India that is to inhabit it. The almost 50 km stretch from Adyar to Mahaballipuram was slated to house some of the world’s greatest technology giants and some of India’s finest young minds and provide them with world class infrastructure. When I say world class infrastructure I obviously don’t mean some under the sea over the sky roadways or any earth shattering metro rails, I simply mean a simple plain road that doesn’t feel like you are on a mountain safari on a Monday morning and is built “exclusively for the use of vehicles” unlike most other roads in our country(more on this later!). A dream project hatched in the turn of this millennium to put Chennai firmly on the international IT roadmap.

It was rather an audacious vision for a man who had lost his own vision several decades ago. Any other government employee might have completed two cycles of retirements by now. Like all ‘sarkari’ dream projects this one too had its share of early hiccups and excruciating delays and by the time it took off the ground ‘The Mummy’ returned and brought it all to a grinding halt.

For the uninitiated, as a thumb rule in the politics of this state, all projects and proposals good or bad alike need to be turned on its heads and halted the moment a new government is elected to power as a thanks giving gesture to all their voters. I often wonder how we actually managed to get so far to be one of the better developed states in the country despite such hopeless traditions and weird practices and what on earth could be possibly happening in some other parts of this country who lag even behind?

To make matters worse in the case of the big Mummy, most government decisions are made on the basis of some ‘scientific’ predictions made by her notorious set of astrologers who perhaps prescribed halting work on OMR as a remedy for her constipational problems. And thus was halted the work on the OMR for the next five years. Until 2006 when the dead old man made yet another comeback from the grave.

As somebody who has been driving through this mess for the past two years, I can’t help but notice how this forever incomplete project has taken some shape from the original heap of mud and dust that it was not too long ago. The strategy was simple, take five village panchayats and the haunted road that connected it on the outskirts of the outermost suburb of the city and turn it into one weird eco system where farmers and software engineers co-existed in harmony. Where BMWs and water buffalos languished symbiotically. Where the ‘shining’ India would come face to face to its not so shining reality. And all this would be held together by this never-going-to-be-complete super highway. A truly audacious vision!

By now, I have managed to navigate my way through the by-lanes of alwarpet and adyar and their numerous pot holes to reach the beginning of the end – Madhya Kailash, the mouth of the OMR. Today has been a surprisingly good day, this first 3kms of my voyage has taken me only 30 mins to cover which considering the usual standard can be called 'at break neck speed'.

As you make your way into this superhighway you are greeted by some insanely large railway terminal complexes, ridiculously painted foot over bridges and a large welcome arch proclaiming your arrival. At first impression this road could be deceptively appealing. With well landscaped bushes and some dramatically designed bus stops seemingly awaiting the next space ship to land over it or something, you almost begin to believe in the surreal. As yet another train hisses past over your head and a few more insanely large train stations and ridiculously painted foot over bridges pass by, you are mesmerized by the charm of the OMR.

Often adding to the charm is our good old man himself along with his better behaved son taking poses at every corner waving at you and playing the perfect hosts. In the beginning you almost forgive them for their absolute lack of humility and let them take some credit for a project they actually 'completed'. But it is when they insist on doing this right through your journey and appear after every second bush morphed into some funny looking suit, that they get on your nerves. But on the brighter side these poster boys help keeping the crows away from the bushes.

By virtue of going through this treatment twice everyday for all days on both ways I have been numbed to immunity by now. I have now learnt to look away from them and be lost in better thoughts, thoughts of the days when the OMR existed only in newspaper articles and our dreamy articulations. ‘It would have 6 lanes’ declared one minister on one day, ‘It would be completed in several phases’ proclaimed another. As though they were building the Great Wall of China or something like that. And all of us startled at them in awe, little realizing that these buffoons were actually counting on both sides of the road…lol :-) and even lesser realizing what they actually meant by ‘execute the project in phases’. It is only today that I realize the real wickedness of that statement. As you drive by the OMR, one thing that you cannot miss noticing is the phased depreciation in quality and sophistication.

The first 3kms is the most flamboyant with flying trains, over landscaped bushes, over styled bus stops, glorious fountains and other artistic statements. This is phase one for you. As you start making your way into the second phase of it, the bus stops begin to disappear and share autos replace trains. The bushes go dry and the third lane almost disappears into oblivion. Just to remind you, this is only the second phase of the “Super IT expressway” and it almost feels like we are on just another city road. The third phase as you may have guessed is a revelation, but for the little bit of tar blue to its appearance there is nothing really in it to be called a road let alone calling it ‘The OMR’. Perhaps our ‘honorable’ ministers should have taken up the naming of the road in phases as well, or should have simply added a ‘V’ ahead of the name for every subsequent phase of the road after phase 1. So that phase 2 could be called V-OMR or very old mahaballipuram road and the third phase could become VV-OMR or very very old mahaballipuram road and so on… and set the souring expectations of the commuters straight. But expectations are funny things, the more you have them the harder someone somewhere is working to ensure they are never met. :-)

As you drive to the end of the vv-OMR you begin to see some early signs of ‘one of the most dreaded and hated’ structures of the world which is coming your way. If you guessed ‘Auschwitz’ you were probably close but it actually is the ever-so-annoying ‘Toll Plaza’. But unlike the Auschwitz there is no statement of warning engraved on it. Perhaps somebody should take the initiative to put up a suitable statutory warning such as ‘Auto Arbiet Macht not Frei’ meaning “Driving to work is not free!” or something like that so that the un-suspecting motorists trying to drive through it is well aware of its consequences. For the un-exposed readers curious to know what exactly happens in these plazas, here is a brief…

In a country of over a billion people which is shamelessly run on the tax paid by a miniscule of its huge population, the tax paying minority is always appreciated only by being subjected to more tax, taxes in so many different names and forms but all directed towards the same helpless lot and his meagre salary. And this is yet another variant of it where the poor tax-payer is taxed some more so that he could reach his destination where he can earn some more money so that he could pay some more tax. Can’t a road that is meant to cater to a population which has one of the highest proportions of tax-payers in it in the city be built at government cost as an acknowledgement to their tireless service day and night to bring in those billions of dollars into its coffers? It is understandable in the case where some large inter-state highways which need tremendous investment in a nation as large as ours where the government has no option but to toll the users to make ends meet. But is this not a ridiculous extrapolation of that logic?, where people who have just managed to emerge out of their poverty struck roots to spearhead the nation’s growth story are being charged an unreasonable sum, much larger than the daily wages earned by a majority of our nation just to drive to their work place on a daily basis on a road that was built with their own tax money!, Is our government really so cash strapped that it cannot fund road construction even within city limits, a limit that it set all by itself? It would be interesting to see, if the same logic is applied to the construction of the ambitious new assembly complex building and a toll plaza is setup at its gates to tax every single MLA and minister who uses it. That day, I promise to stop complaining.

At the end of all this, the road fails to impress anymore and all you can see in it after this is its flaws and your toll money. But the greatness of the OMR does not confine to just the road, it lies in the eco system that is built around it. It lies in the idea of turning this marshy crocodile and hyenas inhibited land into the hottest selling real estate in the city overnight. Billboards on both sides read “Come live in paradise in the midst of nature” (and get eaten up alive by leopards and crocodiles you may think) But you may be surprised by the sheer magnitude and scale of the construction activity happening here. It’s a concrete jungle draped in glass and steel that is taking shape here.

Another peculiarity of this ecosystem is its dominant species – Software Engineers. You find software engineers on OMR like you find china-men in Chinatown. Hanging around buses, bulging out of share-autos and jumping over meadian walls – they are just all over the place. All geared up in power suits and killer skirts to code the world. Coming a close second to them are the farmers and the villagers from those half a dozen village panchayats still buried behind the glass and steel structures who come out on that occasional stroll and often take position on the medians in groups as though they were Olympic swimmers ready to dive in for the 100 mts butterfly style dash into the road. But it would be more appropriate to call this “frog style” considering what they would look like if they happen to come under one of those large water lorries that ply on this road. As I skillfully dodge these men and navigate my way out, my body’s reflex system reacts quicker than I could realize and gets me to jump on my breaks and brings the car to a screeching halt.

All this in the interest of the innocent water buffalo that has just strayed into my path from its usual position on the medians where it sits all day and feasts on the glorious variety of flowers that are being grown there for it to feed on. I see the face of the man at the toll booth in the eyes of that buffalo. Isn’t this grossly unfair by any standard? To be expected to confront a buffalo on your way to office on a road that you pay for every single day through your nose just to see it built and maintained! If there is a list of the ten biggest atrocities in the world, this must be right up there at the top.

This is not all, any road in India and this being no exception is the urban equivalent of the equatorial forest in terms of the diversity of the species that ply on it. There are cars, buses, autos & lorries and then mini buses, share autos & mini lories and then tractors, bullock carts, tri-cycles & rickshaws and a few more unclassifiable vehicles that look like cycles but are powered like cars and loaded up like container ships! If this was not enough, there are the ever so notorious kids, less notorious but equally annoying grannies and an assortment of wild and domestic animals walking the road in all possible directions. But the king of this jungle is the most interesting and intimidating of them all – The garbage trucks. They stink like how the Beatles sing or Shakespeare writes poetry or the way Nepolean fights his wars! Simply un-beatable. When they drive by in all their glory, buffalos faint on the road and unsuspecting humans run for cover. And the bustling road comes to a complete standstill.

A few minutes later I regain my senses and continue my journey slowly, cautious not to catch up with that beasty creature once again. By now I’m in the final leg of my long and eventful journey from the heart of the city to the middle of nowhere. I can see tiger woods waving his golf club at me at a distance. The billboard reads “Shozhinganallur town panchayat welcomes you!” – One glance at that and my dead spirits are all awakened once again. This place with a name that sounds more like what you would get when somebody makes you type the capital of Kyrgyzstan on a keyboard with your boxing gloves on is actually my destination. The mid point of OMR where I disembark everyday.

I get all excited, step on the gas for that final lap and watch my speedometer go from 40..to 50.. 60.. and beyond and my reflex system acts out of sync yet again and brings the car to screeching halt. Nahh its not the buffalo this time its much worse than that. A notorious set of traffic cops on OMR who have a pretty weird pastime. They have this funny looking instrument that looks like a kaleidoscope through which they keep looking at every passing car hiding behind the bushes all day long awaiting that eureka moment. The moment they see the majic figure of 50 on it, they start jumping around in joy and fall in front of the car like a bunch of high school kids who have just knocked a mango down from the tree on a boring Sunday afternoon. And I’m the bakra of the day as you may have guessed, caught just a few meters ahead of my office and my day is never going to be the same again. “Even if we were to build a Champs Elysee in Chennai someday, somethings just would’t change” I think to myself as I pull over to the side to these men’s absolute ecstasy.

- An$ar Za!nul

A Dream called India !

 

Forward: It is perhaps impossible for someone to have grown up in this nation to not be dazzled by its charm. The only more impossible thing could be to not write about it when you know you can!

Here is my take on India – The ancient , the present and the eternal

 60 yrs ago in the dawn of history, at the stroke of the midnight’s hour when the world went to sleep one man famously proclaimed the awakening of a civilization. As the news of the ‘land where all the castes of the world were once born and are still alive’ breaking free from a 300 yr long colonial rule filled the air, a few hundred million people sprung up to a new dream. A dream called, India.

 Though, it was not all that a dreamy awakening as it is being made to sound. There was more to it. The questions and challenges ahead of infant India were perhaps as profound and glorious as only the rest of her history. The very idea of ‘India’ was too complex to survive. To bring together an ensemble of 500 odd princely states, the people of which worshipped a few million gods in a few thousand different languages under one nation which was also sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic and yet republic was more of a nightmare than a dream. But it was the ingenuity of the men who hatched this grand scheme that turned it from a political nightmare into a dream but yet a near impossible dream.

 At this very moment, history also witnessed the emergence of another infant nation. A nation that was formed as a result of the tremendous cosmic activity that took place at the culmination of a bloody revolution in its parent nation at the verge of independence. A nation, less complicated and more viable than its parent. A group of people with a new found sense of unity and long craved autonomy. People bound by a single language and faith. A fairy tale situation just like when the youngest kid of the house got a room all for herself which she could re order in the way she wished while the rest of her large family struggled for coexistence in the rest of the house. All the great challenges that the parent faced at this hour seemed to be this off spring’s boon. Yet, it was not to be the way it was thought to be.

 Half a century later as one nation goes on to capture the imagination of the world and inches towards super-power-dom the other is still limping towards democracy at the brink of bankruptcy. A baffling anti climax. A strong statement that history makes to mankind, that still  refuses to learn from its mistakes. If you are still unable to reason this remarkable phenomenon that makes history sound like a higher form of science, you are required to get into some analysis.     

 To start with, the very idea of ‘Pakistan’ was wrong. An idea, that was sowed at the very beginning of the colonial era as the heart of their partisan politics and from then on brewed by several groups of men at different times to meet their own individualistic goals. The lack of a well defined idea laid the foundation for the absolute lack of inspiring leadership, the key to prosperity in a political system. This vacuum paved the path for some opportunistic leaders who made hey when the sun shone but soon died leaving behind a nation without any fundamentals. It is this lack of fundamentals that eventually lead to a nation full of helpless people whose aspirations were deceived by the dreams they were shown and a leadership whose dreams forever deceived the aspirations of its people. Both of these are held together by destiny as a ticking time bomb. But what needs to be understood here is that, the failure of Pakistan is a political one and not a failure of a religion as it is perceived. Pakistan is the consequence of a larger political fallacy in history where Islam was just the pretext.    

 The building of a great nation could only begin with a dream and visionary leaders and not end there. It required the leaders of independent India to take some difficult decisions and decisive steps that would decide the fate of a little under a billion people for centuries to come.

 It required them to be categorical about the orientating of the growth trajectory this civilization turned nation would take. Which way would India go? What India have they imagined and how are they going to get there? If it was going to be a democracy, how would that be squared with the injustice of the caste system, the oppression of the landlords and the in-equality of women?  Were the questions that haunted their dream. Even a semblance of inefficiency or lack of sincerity in these men would have catastrophic repercussions for the whole of mankind, not just India. And India was truly fortunate in this respect to have been blessed with ‘a league of extraordinary men’ to accomplish this gargantuan task.

 It was truly a remarkable ensemble of great statesmen, exceptional leaders and good men. Jawaharlal Nehru was a prime minister par excellence, if India was a dream, he was the dreamer. A vivacious orator no other leader of independent India has ever since been able to match up to. Sardar Patel, the man who single handedly accomplished the draconian task of turning 500 unruly princely states into one nation and in the process was rechristened as “the iron man of India”. The legendary first home minister of India also set up the administrative back bone of India. The structure that has ever since been holding together this near impossible dream through her unending quest filled with the grandeur of her success and failure and her strive through the good and bad times alike. Dr Ambedkar, the master craftsmen who built into the system of India the most sophisticated judicial mechanism of our times. A mechanism as robust and exhaustive as the system it was built for. The author of the world’s longest constitution, written for the world’s largest democracy. The rebellious law minister of independent India. And to top it all off, the reclusive Maulana Azad. Who symbolized the new democracy’s guarantee that his co-religionists could remain in their homeland in security and dignity. A man who was a far more representative leader of the minorities than the beacon and sausage eating westerner Jinnah, he dismissed the Muslim league’s policy of political division based on religion as manipulative opportunism. The man who went on from being the president of the Indian National Congress during the decisive years before independence to become the first education minister of independent India in the most impressive cabinet ever assembled in Delhi at a time when the nation’s literacy rate was a paltry 18% !

 It was in the hands of these men that the orphaned people of India felt safe at a moment they had just lost their father to rightist fanatics. At a time when the resurgent rightist fundamentalism threatened to throw India’s new found democracy out of its guard instable leadership would have spelled doom and might have turned this nation into another lost cause. But, that was not to be.

 The tale of the last 60 yrs has been a triumph of this democracy that these men painstakingly installed. It is the hallmark of the institutions these men established. From a sovereign Army to the judiciary, from the not so efficient but effective PSUs to some world renowned educational and research institutes, these are institutions that have stood the test of time. Even more remarkably, institutions that with hold the value system that has been a part of the 10,000 yr epic called India. A civilization with the unique distinction of never invading into a foreign territory in its 10,000 year history and at the same time has been constantly renewing its gene pool by being receptive to new ideas and yet tenaciously holding on to that essential vision, that has been the soul of India.

 In these 60 yrs we have grown from being a single party state to a bi-party state politically, have transformed from an under productive granary into the super productive back-office of the world economically and have come a long way from the ages of the doordarshan into being at the epicenter of the information age technologically.

Each of these would have a profound influence on the way “the dream” is weaved in the 21^st century and beyond.

 To begin with politics, the first 50 yrs of a single party rule was one of the biggest stabilizing factors Independent India had, an asset not many infant nations enjoy. Sparing a few stray events now and then the political history of independent India has been largely devoid of any massive power struggles or political tug-a-wars and this contributed immensely in keeping the focus on the one point agenda of nation building. But 50 yrs of political autonomy could easily deter the efficiency of the most idealistic of systems and so it did. That was the time for the political makeover. And at the turn of this century the history of India took another decisive step towards prosperity by turning into a two party state. Having said that, the nature and political agenda of the second front is also of great significance. A booming capitalistic economy or a teeming cultural democracy cannot be lead by the outdated leftists or the divisive rightist fundamentalists who for some strange reasons have always looked at every national crisis as great political opportunities. And thus was lost the hard earned political change that did not last too long and India soon returned to its political monopoly, but this time with a renewed sense of insecurity which has been the only net gain from all this circus. This is significant in order to keep these political sacred cows on their heels and the foxes away from the ring until a more resilient white tiger arrived.

 Economically, we have finally managed to breakout of the communist cocoon and march towards capitalism. But in this process the significance of our communist ways on the slow but definitive growth during our early years cannot be undermined. Especially after just breaking out of the imperial bandwagon to keep the doors wide open for capitalistic intrusions would have been suicidal. And by doing that all that we could have aspired to achieve is some more economic disparity in between our already far apart masses and classes. Yet again India’s strange share of luck steered her away from this catastrophe and we remained a closed self sufficient economy for most of our independent years. But at the end of the cold war years as most nations of the world switched from the ageing communism to the surging capitalism change was inevitable and the only way to move forward.

 Like all great civilizations, India has always been conducive to change and growth. This time, it changed from being a predominantly agriculture driven economy to a technology and services driven economy. While this was party time for the treasury which was ticking by a billion every other day and the stock market which was riding on the raging bull it was not exactly the same for the rest of India. This was because, as India moved on from being a 60% agriculture driven economy to the more lucrative services driven economy it failed to carry along with it the over 60% population that was still fundamentally dependent on agriculture for its livelihood. And this is recipe for disaster. Specially given that the rampant corruption and the sieved distribution mechanism would ensure that only a big fat NOTHING reaches these people through the much hyped trickle down approach. Any growth that is non-inclusive is not sustainable, and so is ours. To fix which, we would require to re-visit our ideals and re-think our agendas. We need to start looking for the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid while we are still building on to its top.  And the one factor that could drive this is Entrepreneurship.

 We need to understand that the current economic buoyancy that we enjoy is completely driven from the outside. It is the FIIs and entry of MNCs that is driving it. While the increased cash inflow has finally managed to turn us into a consumer economy and make us feel seemingly rich, the lion’s share is still enjoyed by our external drivers. Tomorrow in the unlikely event of the Chinese finally managing to learn English or the Filipinos learning to code we would be faithfully returned to our good olden days. This cannot be resolved until there is a truly pan Indian entrepreneurial revolution happening amongst us. Great Indian MNCs need to emerge from fields beyond the IT space. Indian manufacturing, FMCG, retail and financial companies should also go on to capture the world. And at the same time well thought of social entrepreneurship ventures must emerge that could effectively catapult the great Indian lower class to its moment of glory.

This is immensely critical because, as we toil every living day to build larger pyramids we tend to forget the mathematics behind it. You don’t have to be Pythagoras to know that as the pyramid gets bigger the larger gets the base and further away goes the apex. In simple terms, more growth means more disparity and bridging this disparity would be the next big challenge for every nation in this new century. Therefore if Globalization and drilling across was the mood of the last century, “Inclusionization” and drilling down is the need of this century.  And we in India have the greatest opportunity to lead the way for this cause.

 Lastly, coming to the technology and information revolution. We have for long basked in the glory of the technological advancements made by our ancient fore-fathers. This could only be an inspiration and not a pretext to lazy around in its glory. The need to nurture indigenous innovation has never been as pressing as it is today. Our famed knowledge power houses such as the IITs and IISc have to graduate from their lesser mortal roles of being feeder schools for research institutions abroad to becoming the true home of thought leadership and fundamental research. On the downside of the IT revolution, a generation of engineers have been enticed away from the greater cause they were built for into being self satisfied cronies driven by easy money and opportunity. All this casts a cloud of suspicion on our credentials to claim super-power-dom in the near future. We cannot climb to the apex piggy-backing on opportunities that are ‘offered’ to us by the power houses of today simply because they always have the option to not offer(as Mr Obama keeps reminding us :-). It instead has to be seized from them by redeeming and reinventing ourselves as true mascots of change. Remember, the 19^th century Europe and 20^th century America seized the world by staying ahead of the curve and not by just managing to drift along with it. We need to redesign the wheel if not re-invent it!

 The Europeans expanded the world and its glorious possibilities, the Americans flattened it and it is our turn now to inclusionize and stabilize it. We have with us the unique opportunity to pioneer the science of drilling down the fruits of today into the roots of tomorrow for a less disparate and more inclusive world. And only by doing this will the dream called India reach its pinnacle where the aspirations of its people would determine the mood of the world !!

 -         An$ar Za!nul

Maranam Aayiram ...!!!

PRELOUGE: One week after the film, The author is still terrified at the sound of the word “Daddy”. He prays for justice to be done upon him.he laughs heartily till he cries inconsolably....he seeks divine intervention..he laughs again..he cries again.....!

 The film opens with an elderly man walking around the house spitting blood and speaking in a voice that sounds like he had just swallowed a scew-driver. No he is’nt a Dracula or something (common this is a goutham menon and not a steven speilberg film) this is our very own Mr Krishnan aka naina Surya the cool old screwed man playing his part flawlessly. A perfect exotic start for an audience so frustrated with their own life’s realities who came looking for a dreamy utopian world full of 6 pack suryas and sizzling hot sameeras. 

One look at the man and you feel he just ran out of a middle school fancy dress competition with his weird beard and a funny wig still sticking on. He is flanked by three woman who look anything but English but for some strange reason cant speak anything but English! Yeah, even when their captain courageous is well on his way to his heavenly abode. The point that some of this movie’s staunch defenders who call this a reflection of the “upper middle class urban Chennai” lifestyle seemed to have missed is that we are tamil speaking people who tend use English at times and these are English people who tend to use a word or two of mispronounced tamil at times! This becomes a dangerous reflection of reality because even the less than 5% of the audience at whome all this circus is aimed at fails to relate to it.

At the end of this gruesome death sequence of the unusual English man the screen flashes out and flashes in back as two overloaded helicopters struggle to take off from some god-forsaken corner ofIndia. On this very copter is Major Surya on his 3hr and 45 mins jolly ride to a rescue operation which he very effectively utilizes to recollect half a dozen love stories, a little over a dozen songs and oodles of romantic interludes. True to the theme of the movie he starts off with his dad first. The man whose greatest accomplishments in life was to have successfully wooed a pretty woman, ensured she lived a horrible life all through and motivated his son to do just that. How much more inspiring can a dad get? And to top it all off he calls his 25 yr old over grown army major son a ‘kido’! 

At this point the screen goes blank again, just when the audience start looking at each other anxiously fearing if this was the end of the movie or something the dracula surya alias Krishnan strikes back with vengeance with his ‘inspiring’ love story.

This is perhaps the fastest part of the movie, Scene 1 – surya sees simran and falls in love. Scene 2 – simran sees surya and falls in love and scene 3 – both start running around trees singing “mundhinam partheney…” . Wow!! That was a text book definition of a “breezy love story”. But gautham needs to be given some credit for a couple of things here, the detailing of the 80s set and the obviously more challenging accomplishment of turning simran and surya into a teenage couple and still making sure Sim does’t look like his akka. 

At this, Goutham(or may be it was the producer who thought the unnecessary flash back was getting rather too expensive who) pushes the fast forward button and brings us all back to 2008. But even after 28 yrs of fast forwarding Mr and Mrs Krishnan don’t seem to have gotten out of their hangover. The wise old man goes darling… darling for anything and everything and the good old lady can just not get finished with her own narration of how a man actually managed to fall in love with her and sustain the odd feeling for 28 long yrs! Aww struck by his mom’s inspiring bed time stories, Surya develops the ambition of his lifetime “to be able to find a woman more beautiful than what his dad found and successfully woo her into his looser life”, Sounds too soggy to be a hero’s lifetime motto? Try its latin version“Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur”. Cool huh? For some strange reason we are all so used to believing that all latin motto’s and Chinese proverbs carry a very deep meaning in them. 

Loaded with this ambition and a couple of other useless advices that his father gave him while dropping him off , Surya enters his 4 yrs of college. This is when the movie once again starts running at a breakneck speed as though it was on steroids. Before you even realize it is song 1, song 2 and boom, end of college. When college life ends so quickly in a movie you obviously know Surya has had no luck with his ambition. But according to his ‘inspiring’ dad, by virtue of being his son Surya should be ‘lucky’ with love. So there is just one last train journey back home before this virtue turns into a paradox. So it is imperative for our hero to find a hot looking gal and fall in love with her overnight to prevent his life from turning into an unsolvable paradox. This could have been a great suspense point to break for interval but the director some how seems to have missed it and struggles for the rest of the movie to find another such situation.   

Burdened with this thought Surya reluctantly boards the train. This is when you start wondering if this was some loverboy equivalent of Hogwarts express going to Gonmonaland or something! Wondering why I’m saying this? Sample this, what is the probability of finding a stunning hot girl sitting right in front of you on a train from trichy to Chennai who blushes everytime you ogle at her ??? 1/10^infinity I guess. Its like finding Pamela Anderson on a MTC bus going from mylapore to nochu kuppam! But before you realize all that, you are mesmerized by “nenjukul paydhidum maa mazhai…” taking you to the second high point of the film and you become almost numb to Goutham’s stupidity for the next half an hour or so. 

This marks a showcase entry for the ravishing Sameera, the saving grace of this movie. Off late you get a feeling that tamil directors are all turning masters at this craft of showcasing actresses. Aishwarya Rai in Jeans, Shreya in Shivaji , Kajol in Minsara Kanavu and Asin in Gazini were all arguably the best portrayal of their careers.  I guess it must have been a realization of sorts for these woman themselves to discover this stunning side of them revealed so artistically by our very own brand of directors. Its perhaps the frustration of growing up in Chennai that turns these ordinary men into masters in this craft. How I wish these guys could do something about the girls in my college as well J  

 The next 45 mins of the movie is a breeze. The director all of a sudden transforms from “Memoirs of gheisha” mode to “Fifty first dates” mode. For a moment you feel the poet in Goutham has over powered the sadistic story teller in him. He actually takes you into a utopian world where people build successful business and large mansions overnight. Lover boy surya suddenly turns entrepreneur over a period of one song (For the uninitiated “the period of one song” is a popular unit of measuring time in tamil cinema. One unit of “period of one song” falls somewhere between one year and one light year units. This is typically the time taken for a protagonist to go from rags to riches, riches to rags, coma patient to Olympic runner, shepherd to industrialist or simply lover boy to entrepreneur as in this case). This is not all, after making loads of money its now time to make some love. Off goes surya to San Francisco where over a period of a couple of more songs avar matter ah mudikiraaru ! (sorry guys, just couldn’t find an English equivalent as precise and fitting as this ;-) 

 Just when you think all is well about this movie, the sadistic story teller strikes back again and strikes hard this time. With one mighty blow to the sceenplay he takes away all the happiness from the lives of both Surya and the audience. But thanks to some “revolutionary thinkers” like bala and ameer, tamil audiences these days have kinda become numb to tragic climaxes. We have started accepting it as a way of life in cinema where some director’s like goutham build their female lead’s role so skillfully that beyond a point they don’t know what to do with such a goddess of a character that they have built and end up killing it for the sake of convenience. But the real tragedy is yet to strike. Just when you are trying to come to terms with tragedy part1 but at the same time are quite satisfied to have watched a reasonably good movie considering the kinda crap that you are forced to watch these days and are waiting to see the “The End” coming up on the screen you are surprised with the tragedy part 2. The screen reads “Interval” ! You get bamboozled, you clinch in your seat wishing this was some sort of a spelling mistake or something. But hey, nowhere in the world do they misspell ‘the end’ as ‘interval’ no, not even in China. Then what the hell is this all about? Is the director not done yet?  What more does he have to say? And how could he … what the.. common… ahhhh…!!! By the time you come to terms with yourself its end of the intermission(you have just missed your golden chance to escape unhurt) and Surya and Goutham are already back to haunt you once again.

This is when you get reminded once again that Surya is presently on his way to a pani poori shop  errr..!! I’m sorry a rescue operation in his overloaded copter and still has several hours to go and several stories to tell. Goutham shows some ingenuity here by characterizing his terrorists as very patient human beings eagerly awaiting Surya’s arrival to shoot them all down. This gives our hero enough time to recollect some more soggy stories from his and his father’s life. After “memoirs of gheisha” and “fifty first dates” its now time for the doping act. 

Surya calls back home from SF to announce “operation success but patient dead!” and he is now on his way back. Enter, the bald ‘good samaritan’ who gives up his business class seat from SF to India for a seat next to our depressed hero so that he could have some free entertainment over the long boring flight(how sadistic!). He is one of those signature Goutham Menon characters that you would find only in his movies but surprise surprise his name is not Ezha Maaran or Anbu Chelvan this time. And glad there is no “kavalai padathey saghodhara ….” type song on the plane. This helps Surya save some precious time to get home and get back to business quickly. Not the company that he once started, that has now been abandoned for the sake of convenience. This time it is the doping habit that he has just acquired. This is the moment when the movie starts sagging. Though the portrayal of Surya in these sequences is laudable and his acting commendable this could well have been a movie by itself. By the time we get done with all this trauma the audience is dead and out. They need to be on steroids to be able to sit up and watch anything after this. But our director is far from done yet. 

An unnecessary trip to Kashmir, child abduction in Delhi and all this followed by Surya busting a child trafficking network there in a very childish manner pushes our ability to sustain crap to an all new level. There is a whole new ‘Mahaanadi’ dimension added to the movie all of a sudden. Somewhere around this time I fell asleep and woke up after a while to find Surya doing some army exercise routine! I thought this was the second interval and they were playing the trailer of Goutham’s next movie which looked more of a sequel to Kaakha Kaakha (the military equivalent of it). To my horror I discovered this was all a part of this very movie. Though Surya is in amazing shape and he seems to have done a great job turning his family pack into a six pack and fits this new dimension to his role to a T, this is all unbearable after 3 hours of soggy story telling. This could well have been another movie by itself. To add to the mess is another romantic interlude with Ramya which feels anything but romantic. By now we have watched 5 different movies under one title and are not done yet.

All this is frantically topped of with the rescue mission that major Surya had set out on several hours ago where a caricature of Burkha Dutt is being rescued from the clutches of some Kasmiri militants (remember: those patient men we spoke about). This is followed by the quintessential home coming and reunion and with this the four hour long roller coaster ride finally comes to a grinding halt.

When the lights come back on the theatre looks more like the rescue operation site with people looking traumatized and distressed with what they just went through. You see in their eyes the longing for another army commando to rescue them out of this mess they have put themselves into. No, not Surya once again for god’s sake, anybody else would do. Yeah yeah even captain vijaykanth is fine.

This is like watching the entire Lord of the Rings series along with the matrix trilogy back to back. It is the cinematic equivalent of a rain intercepted test match. Perhaps the tamil cinema equivalent of a psychometric test where the ultimate mental ability of a person to take shit is plotted against the control he has over his emotions to determine his sustainability to mental stress. This a movie straight to the brain rather than a movie straight from the heart as Goutham fondly describes it. There is no one really who can defend the second half of this movie, nah.. not even the Indian Army!

The Lalu Express

A politico-economic saga on the Indian Railways ~ A comedy of errors !

11 AM on a super hot summer morning, traveling in the second class compartment of an Indian Railways train across the heart of South India is definitely not one of the most poetic set-ups for someone to feel like writing. But I still felt like doing it, not because the ambiance around enticed me to feel like that but simply because I felt like screaming on top of my voice to vent out the anger that was building into me for the past few hours and this was the only way I could do that without getting reprimanded.

As the temperature soured past the 40 degree mark and the man and his wife sitting next to me had just managed to conquer another quarter of my seat, I sat there hopelessly frustrated about not having an eject button and a jet pack on me to escape this insanely infuriating situation I was in. That man perhaps felt like he was 17yr old Alexander the great trying to conquer the world as he skillfully took over my seat inch by inch thereby making more room for his lazy wife to spread her legs and sleep and in the process almost successfully pushed me into the aisle. At the end of that exercise I was supporting my ass with one leg, one inch of seat and a lot of air!
But the truth of the matter was that sitting on air was far more comfortable than sitting on that seat which had a cushion that was skillfully crafted to feel a little harder than the steel frame that supported it. Talent is’t it? This is only one of those many rare talents that Indian Railways has not just developed but also mastered during its last 157 years of existence. Some of its other talents include designing fans that rotate at high speeds and yet don’t give any air and even more amazingly monopolizing train travel in a vast land where it is the only medium of transport for over 90% of its population and yet making loses for 153 of the 157 yrs of its existence !

If that was not remarkable enough, there is more to it. Here is a train which is one among eight trains that shuttle between the two most developed cities of South India everyday but yet looks like it was year 1947 and this was the last train to Pakistan. It is loaded to at least thrice its capacity i.e. excluding the business travelers. Business travelers here does not infer an elite class of travel or a bunch of corporate honchos on their way to a board meeting. But it instead refers to a unique segment of the Indian economy that thrives in the second class compartments of Indian trains. The aisle almost transforms into a mobile ranganadhan street. There is nothing really you cannot buy here, from pirated DVDs to nursery workbooks you can get them all.Giving the passengers a travel experience that even luxury trains have not been able to provide.

If all this still leaves some space to walk , it is rightfully occupied by the community that is easily the single largest majority in a country of such grave diversity, the beggers. They come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from a couple of days old infants to 100 not out senior citizens. Men, woman and the third sex. This is perhaps the only profession where the third sex not only get a fair representation but also enjoy being market leaders. You better be ready with some bucks to give them unless you belong to the rare species of people who actually enjoy being licked, cajoled and seduced by a eunuch in public. If you still insist not to budge you better be prepared for some horrific XXX entertainment at your own risk and loose your mental peace for the rest of your life as that horrific image flashes every time you close your eyes then on.

In short a train in India is its mini eco-system on the move. Except for a small glitch, the train reservation mechanism is yet to be influenced by the other reservation mechanism that rules this country. We can perhaps hope to see that taking place once Arjun Singh becomes our next railway minister. But it will be
Interesting to see if at least that reservation applies to our business travelers and beggars as well.

By now the train had lazily covered one half of the 7 hour long journey to Bangaluru and I was just about half dead. So the balance seems to be impeccable. By the time I reach my destination I should be finished I thought. I started desperately looking around for some alternative methods of killing time as I was too bored of analyzing the people around me by then. I decided to fight boredom with music. Thought it would be the best way to make my awful situation a little better. Desperate for something to sooth my ear after listening to all the jarring noise from the grumbling train and the support chorus from its passengers, I wore my ear plugs and played some music from my cell phone. I was hardly 10 minutes into listening when I realized A R Rahman was not in the kind of magical touch he used to be at one time and that frustrated me more than the train, my neighbor , the fan, the seat and all the beggars put together ! I started growing even more restless and desperate. I punched my hand into my bag and started moving it all over to catch hold of something that could be my accomplice in killing time.

It was at this time that I got my hands on a book. A novel that I had bought just the previous day in anticipation of the disaster that was to follow today but had forgotten about it in my state of frustration. I pulled it out like I had just found Bill Gates’s credit card. It was a yellow black book and the cover read “The 3 mistakes of my life” by Chetan Bhagat . At that moment to find a book which on its very first page proclaimed that its author had already made three big mistakes in his life while I had made just one (boarding the train that is) was nothing less than a million orgasms. Excited and thrilled at the same time I started reading through the book. There are few things in this world that can match the excitement of finding someone who you know for a fact is a bigger looser than you.

The next two hours were killed quite effortlessly with the lethal book that I had found. By then I had realized that the one leg that was supporting my rather large body had become num. Five and a half hours of sitting still in an awkward position can num even certain parts of a woman’s body that are otherwise quite sensitive. It was crying for some movement (I mean my leg ;-). That was when I took a major decision in my life, to actually plough through the human mass that separated me from the restroom that was just 10 mts away in distance but considering the travel complexity was almost half a universe away. But the governing law of the universe is “necessity is the mother of all fuck-ups”.
And this was just yet another variation of it.

I gathered all the mental and physical strength I could and set out on this voyage within the voyage. After a grueling 10 minutes of walking on people and squeezing through some odd bulks of mass I reached my destination. No, not Bengaluru but the obnoxious little toilet at the end of the compartment. The expression on my face when I entered the toilet was the same as that of Ali Baba's when he entered his cave of treasures.

The thrill of reaching the toilet dint last a second after I entered it. I was horrified by what I saw. I had just discovered the only part of the train which offered a bi-directional view of the world. You heard me right, a passenger in the toilet can actually enjoy both the usual side view and also a rather unusual bottom view !!!! In other words the world’s largest railways still had the world’s most out dated human waste disposal mechanism!!!!

That sight had more impact on me than what a cover page of a playboy magazine could have aspired to achieve. It threw open a pandora’s box full of questions in my head. To the extent that I never even realized I had already ploughed through the human mass to reach my seat and meanwhile even the train had managed to touch Bengaluru City ! For the next two days my head was running a slide show of these agonizing images and therby forcing me to give this some thought .

If this is still the state of this organization, then what is all this buzz about the historic turnaround of the Indian railways by the great Lalu Prasad Yadav all about?, I thought. Did he travel all the way to Harvard on this pretext just to brag about how his organization “historically” made one million Indians shit on railway tracks every day ???? Is this the kind of service India’s now second highest profit making PSU provided to its 6 billion travellers with its 1.6 million strong employee strength which is more than the number of people required to run a nation, let alone running this inefficient railway system.

This is in-efficiency at its best, I quipped. The very fact that it took an uneducated milkman politician from Bihari heart land to turn this hugely loss making enterprise into a profit making one speaks volumes of its in-efficiency. I obviously do understand it is easier said than done to run an organization of this scale. Its in many ways like riding on a wild dinosaur, too difficult to control and maneuver but once you get it oriented in the right direction the impact of the success will be un imaginable. If a failed chief minister of India’s most backward state can churn out 16 billion dollars in revenue from it in just one year what could a Mukesh Ambani do to it ??

This success was not achieved by the managerial ingenuity of the railway administration but by simply piggy-backing on the booming Indian economy. Had there been some efficient governing coupled with these other factors, its success would have been far more profound. These facts kept gonging in my head and raised a trickle of hope for this god foresaken organization.

All is not over yet, I optimistically look forward to the days when this “goldmine” of an enterprise is run in true corporate style. With its 6 Billion strong and still growing customer base and wealthy employee and capital strength this sleeping giant can give any of the fortune 500 companies a run for its money !