Have decided to try out Medium for my future blogging needs. It’s not that I don’t like WP but just trying out a new, well, medium. Also I seem to read a lot on Medium and love the minimal aesthetic look of their UX, so I figured I would take a shot at writing there as well.
If you follow me on WP and have liked/loved what I have written so far here and would like to keep following my writing on Medium, please head on over to – https://medium.com/@cmehendale
Thank you!!
Lately I’ve been thinking about inevitability. About things happening that we (seem to) have no control over. I’m not talking about things happening around the world disconnected from us – like civil war or trade tariffs or currency valuation or even the latest toyboy band to darken the horizon – but things happening to us, around us, things happening as a result of our own choices and actions. And sometimes despite them.
Like when sometimes a result or outcome of a similar set and sequence of choices and actions may be entirely different for different people and it is difficult to see why. Health freaks suffering premature cardiac arrests while chain smokers live to be a hundred. Obviously there are more variables than just choices and actions, but for the sake of argument let’s assume all, or most, other things as being approximately, or seemingly, equal. Now it may be exactly this approximate inequality in everything else that produces those different outcomes, but on the face of it it all seems so random and chaotic. Indeterminate. For example, out of the seemingly countless people taking selfies in potentially dangerous situations, only some of them result in accidents and death. Or take the case of people going to a nightclub and being shot by a mad gunman. What are the chances of that? Why those particular people? What particular set of choices or actions in every moment leading up to that particular moment resulted in this outcome? What if they’d decided not to go there that evening? Would the outcome have been different or would they have simply died at home from a caved-in ceiling?
The way I see it, there are two broad schools of thought that seem to exist to explain this.
Fatalism – that the universe is just a series of random events and what you do has limited if any effect on what happens to you (aka – God works in mysterious ways and your destiny is already written)
Free will – that with each choice and action in every moment you are being directly instrumental in shaping the immediate next set of options that open up for you to choose from/act on, and so the cycle continues …
… until #1 strikes. AKA “$h!t Happens (TM)!”
But what if, like light being a particle and a wave at the same time depending on who is observing under what circumstances, both of these are actually just different manifestations of the same thing?
Maybe there are an infinite number of possible destinies (or events) that are already written and the choices you make and actions you take out of your own free will determine which of those destinies get precluded from the list of available destinies and which still continue to be available. And maybe, further, even the choices you make and actions you take (supposedly out of your own free will) are also already written down somewhere as part of a set infinite possible destinies. And so on ad-infinitum. Like it’s not you making the choices but just executing the choices that have been already made for you in that series of destinies. Turtles all the way down.
It’s not like if you believe in free will you will necessarily abstain from going sightseeing in Syria or if you believe in fatalism you will jump off from the nearest cliff. And because you don’t know what are these possibly infinite set of destinies (or events) that may have been written for you, it is as good as free will or as bad as fatalism (depending on how you think of it). And you just seemingly try to take the best choice/action available to you as it appears at the time you take it. But this may not necessarily have been the best choice/action to have been made overall, as subsequent outcomes may indicate.
In short, I most humbly submit, free will and fatalism (or the combination/amalgamation as described above) are possibly just constructs you have defined to allow yourself to, respectively, assume self-importance for the choices that prove to be good and be absolved from the responsibility of choices that prove to be bad.
And all the while the universe is just sitting there, quietly chuckling to itself. Because it is not just death that is inevitable, it is also life.
Another Independence Day has come and gone. And with it the usual outpouring of platitudes and (possibly token) gestures of patriotism. I deliberately say possibly because it is also possible that not all of the outpouring was mere tokenism. I am sure there were quite a few genuine misty eyes and lumps in throats and goosebumps as the Tricolour was hoisted and unfurled and the National Anthem was sung.
Independence. Freedom. What does it mean? (I am using the words interchangeably here although I am sure some purists will probably take paints to point out that they mean entirely different things – Aso).
I know for me it has meant different things at different times. As a kid it was probably about not having homework or being allowed to cycle to my aunt’s place in a locality that in those days must have seemed to be in a different town almost. I was in the 7th standard when I first ventured out, alone, to cycle to her place. And I still remember the feeling of utter freedom and independence that it gave me. It was like a magical world had opened up where I could do anything I wanted, take any road I wanted even if it was not necessarily the shortest path, stop where I liked, go when the fancy suited me (except when the signals were red – I still followed traffic rules). And when I reached my aunt’s place without being kidnapped and crippled and sold into beggary (as apparently my parents had feared – a fear which, I am sad to admit, is not entirely unfounded as there are any number of children who do suffer that) I was feeling on top of the world. It was the same kind of feeling I had when I finally finished school and started college and figured that I could bunk classes without requiring an explanatory note from a parent. Imagine! In general, I think, to me independence or freedom has always meant a complete lack of restrictions. No straitjacket. No confinement. No limits. No rules. And growing up gave me all of that. It wasn’t that I wanted to do bad or sinful or dangerous things, but it was good to know that the option existed. And that’s also probably (hopefully) when I first imbibed the idea of responsibility.
Because freedom and responsibility always go hand-in-hand. Freedom without responsibility or responsibility without freedom, both are equally problematic. Better people than I have said this before so I won’t belabour the point here. I do realise that it was the luck of my circumstances that gave me all the freedom I wanted and maybe destiny it was that gave me whatever sense of responsibility I seem to now have. But not everyone is so lucky. The obvious examples come to mind – whether based on race, gender, religion, caste, economic status, even nationality, there are just way too many people who seem to have been dealt an unfair share of responsibility without any compensatory upside of freedom. And there are enough entitled brats who seem to have all the freedom without any shred of responsibility. I don’t know how to fix this imbalance and so I’m not going to offer any homilies or pithy advice here except to say I sincerely wish it were not so. Which I know is about as effective as wishing an asteroid strikes the school before a Math exam.
Still, personal freedom is one thing but what does it mean for a country, for a people, to be free? I cannot claim to know what it was like under British rule but I imagine if it was anything like the feeling of being in school then it is no wonder that the entire nation wept as one on Aug 15th, 1947 when the nation first awoke to its tryst with destiny. Like being put in charge of our own homework or falling in love and marrying someone of our own choice. And now it seems up to the people, us, to do that homework, to make that marriage work. We cannot blame our parents anymore. And there are simply no excuses because the consequences of not doing so are for no one else but us to bear.
And do I have any solutions for how to achieve this? As you may have guessed, No.
When I was younger, I was fiercely nationalistic and idealistic. When my aunt (another aunt, that is, for those keeping count) suggested that I go abroad to study, I scoffed at the idea. I couldn’t dream of settling anywhere else but here. And even when I visited other countries for short visits I never wanted to stay back. In fact, it always seemed like an out-of-body dream-like experience, like I was an objective third-party watching me play a role in some movie and only when I left the theatre would it all become real again. Some part of this, no doubt, was due to my having grown up in a reasonably comfortable, even affluent, household by most standards, and consequently having no need or drive or ambition to rise above my circumstances, so to speak, and some part of it was probably attributable to laziness and inertia. But a part of it was also some strange sort of pride in my country and my people, ignited and fuelled subconsciously by all the stories from mythology and history my grandmom told me throughout my childhood. And some part was also irrational fatalism, no doubt from reading too much Louis L’Amour in my formative years, as if the hand I had been dealt must be played to the best of my ability without asking for other cards.
That I was born here and so here I would die. And here I would spend the intervening years in making my life and the life of my country better in some way (aside – this is in no way a judgement on anyone who may have chosen to go live abroad. I am glad they had the choice to make and they could make it). And while I don’t necessarily subscribe entirely to the idea that India was all glory and greatness in ancient times, no matter how much I joke about it otherwise, I do also think that it is important to learn about my roots and my history, even mythology, and to take pride in and draw inspiration from the good parts without apology, while still keeping in mind that not everything is perfect, or was ever perfect, that I don’t need to work to make it better.
Yeah, I know it’s probably still idealistic, even naive, to believe that, and I am of course nowhere close to making the life of my country even a little bit better, but if the graph of my country is anything like the graph of my family – where my granddad had to really struggle through a childhood of poverty and debt, my dad had it somewhat relatively easier that at least there was no debt, I have had it really good so far, and I am hoping my son has it even better going forward – then I know I can look forward to a future which is bright. A future, moreover, in which I can be an active participant and hope that, much like the squirrel from the Ramayana, if I carry my bits of sand and gravel without complaining or whining, one day there will come into existence a majestic bridge across even the vastness of this seemingly endless ocean.
Written when I was much much younger and, um, more idealistic (read, childish) maybe, and in a time where formatting options were limited to ASCII so you can see the use of _underscores_ for emphasis.
I am producing it verbatim below, typos and all (except formatting changes to fit the blog format) even though some parts of it may now seem somewhat banal and cringe-worthy to my current world-weary and cynical self. Think of it as but a tiny tiny attempt on my part to break free from the self-imposed shackles of ego and self-image. May we all find the strength to be truly free.
Happy Independence Day!
"Granpa, what does it mean to be free?" "Well, it means a lot of things...why?" I asked my 11 year old granddaughter. "Does it mean no homework?" "No sweetheart, freedom means choosing your own homework," I replied with a smile, "It means a lot of hard work, and not because it is compulsory, but because it's your own hard work." "But we became free 50 years ago, didn't we?" the innocent mind queried again, "Why haven't we finished all the hard work by now?" "Hard work begets more hard work" I replied as I remembered that day 50 years ago. What hopes we had had then! When Jawaharlal Nehru raised the Indian Flag and spoke about our tryst with destiny, what dreams we had for a free India! I was one of a batch of 300 prisoners that gained our independance on the morning of the 14th of August and so got to watch the unfurling of the Indian Flag at the Red Fort, symbolizing self-rule over Delhi, the capital of free India. I could not see half the ceremony for the tears that kept forming in my eyes. I remembered all the sacrifices, the tearful face of my wife as the police took me away to jail, the beatings and the solitary confinement. But that day, it was all worth it. I was not the only one who had sacrificed his personal freedom for his country's. There were millions of us, people from all walks of life, lawyers and clerks, industrialists, Maharajas, sweepers, doctors and soldiers. We were all fired by one ideal - To see India free! No one thought about the personal hardships, and they were plenty. We all thought of only one thing. We wanted our children to be born free in their own country. We did not want them to see signs such as 'Dogs and Indians not allowed'. "So do we have to do hard work even now?" she broke through into my thoughts. "Yes dear. We have a long way to go yet. And the path is long and hard, but possible. The work is also hard, very hard. But we can do it, _you_ can do it." "Me?" she enquired, suspiciously. "Why me?" 'These kids today want everything ready-made. No one wants to work for anything anymore,' I thought to myself as she continued, "Isn't there anyone else?" "No. Everyone has to think that it is he or she who must do it all," I said, "Your motto should be, 'If it has to be, it must be me!' Don't wait for other people, don't trust other people to do it for you, don't leave it to other people coz if everyone left it to other people, nothing would ever get done." She was thoughtful for some time after that. She said, "Granpa, I think I understand. I have to do all the hard work so my children can get the benefits, but they have to do more hard work so their children can be happy...and so on...it just continues, never stops. Because work never stops. Because walking forward always requires some effort, while someone who stands still and doesn't move or do any work never goes anywhere." I was quite impressed by the wisdom of this 11 year old girl. I needn't have worried, I thought, about leaving the country in the hands of these youngsters. They are much smarter today than we were at that age. I was proved right almost immediately when she continued with a smile of triumph, "So I think I shall take the choclates from your cupboard myself. Don't want to leave it to you to give them to me!"
Yes, I’m fairly proud of being Maharashtrian. That is to say, at least I don’t have an active inferiority complex about it. My rational mind tells me that being proud of something like an accident of birth is misplaced at best, irrational at worst. My irrational mind though tells me to tell my rational mind to f …, er, go take a hike (of which there are a number available in the Sahyadris) and that if I had to be born somewhere then this is at least as good a place as any other in which to be so born. Sure we may not have the sheer joie-de-vivre of the Punjabis or the superior intellectual’ness of the Bengalis or the centum percentum marks in board exams of the Tamilians (Tambrahms?) but what we may lack in those depaarments (as they are called in Maharashtra) we more than make up for in terms of having the highest production of sugar. All right, all right, second highest after UP. But only marginally. And we have lesser population so per-capita it is still higher than UP. Take that, UP!
Anyway, the point is, seriously, that it is good to be Maharashtrian. I mean, we do have a long and glorious tradition of Maharashtrian contribution in every field of human endeavor throughout history long before there was even a Maharashtra, right from Mahabharat days where even the very prefix Maha is inspired by Maharashtra I imagine. But even in more recent history that I have personally been witness to (from my looks you would never believe I’m close to a thousand years old, or at least it feels like that when I have to stay up late two nights in a row and wake up early the subsequent respective mornings) we have the Bhakti movement, the innumerable Sant/Sadhus who taught their philosophy through their compositions in prose and poetry, the unbroken 700 year long Warkari tradition where a few lakh people of intense faith undertake a month-long spiritual journey on foot without ever causing any disruption to ordinary life, the iconic Warrior Kings that we all know about and have dressed up as one time or the other in some fancy dress competition in school, and the reformers and progressives and freedom fighters of the 19th and 20th century who shaped so many people’s thoughts and ideas. And today we have the Mangeshkars and the Tendulkars to show us the path to genius. For a while in my childhood I did try to practice singing but after the hospital next door started having their dying patients themselves beg the staff to pull their plug immediately I had to reluctantly give it up.
But this post is not about me, it’s about Maharashtra so what could be better than to quote these following famous lines, which may or may not be famous outside Maharashtra (but who cares about outside Maharashtra anyway, right?) –
“राकट देशा, कणखर देशा, दगडांच्या देशा
नाजुक देशा, कोमल देशा, फुलांच्याहि देशा”
Yes, Maharashtra is definitely a land of contradictions. Rocks and Flowers. Like a beautiful rock garden or something (rock gardens have flowers, I’m assuming, otherwise this analogy may be somewhat flawed but whatever). Maharashtra is a land of abundance and generosity but it is also a land of frugality. It just depends on where you stay. If you stay on the plateau with its rich fertile black loamy soil that produces sugarcane by the metric tonne then you tend to be lavish with your generosity and your personality. If you stay in the Konkan where even Lord Parashuram apparently had to breathe life into corpses because no one else would talk to him, then, in general, you would tend to be more frugal and caustic. And if you have ever tried to eke out a meager living from the small slivers of Konkani hillsides that provide some semblance of soil cover then you can be forgiven for pre-requiring confirmation on the number of poLis a guest will want to eat, to the nearest one-fourth. It is not that all of us Maharashtrians are genetically programmed to be parsimonious but our circumstances may force us to be so, and maybe over generations these tendencies have, er, tended to solidify into a culture.
I recently read the whole sweeping generalization of Ugich Kashala? (why unnecessarily?) and while some of it rings true, like every other generalization it is not really entirely true if seen in its appropriate context. I wanted to immediately write a post in rebuttal but thought Ugich Kashala? Jokes apart, yes, we may sometimes be frugal in our leaps of imagination and ambition but as a counter-balance to that we (at least those of us in Pune) are experts on every subject under the sun. It’s just that the world is too dumb to realize this yet which also we will tell you as often as you want to hear it. It’s also not that we Maharashtrians are not enterprising and many of us will cite the example of SLK as being as enterprising as the best of them. But we ourselves may be constrained either by our talent or our means (or both, to be fair) to take that leap of faith. Because to be enterprising one has to take some risks and we do not necessarily subscribe to the idea of risk. Many of us, for example, would rather buy their beers a few days in advance than risk having to stand in long queues the day before a dry day.
If any of the above has given you an impression that Maharashtrians are not enterprising or hardworking, you have only yourself to blame because I certainly did not intend to give that impression. And we all know intent trumps perception. In fact, I will go on record to say that there are no doubt many Maharashtrians who are extremely industrious and hard-working and that this is obviously the reason UNESCO has honored them by making Maharashtra Diwas also the International Labor Day. You may crib all you want about the rickshawalas in certain cities not wanting to go to certain destinations if they don’t feel like it or the shops in certain cities remaining closed during the afternoon hours but I imagine they couldn’t care any less about this. Also, I am sure there are valid reasons for both and as soon as we figure out what those are we will update this post. But not between 1pm and 4pm. That’s when we nap.
When St Ignatius of Loyola founded the Society of Jesus (or the Jesuits) 400+ years ago he may have imagined that one day the Pope would be a Jesuit, but I am sure even he could never have imagined that such a brilliant, diverse, and eclectic bunch of Engineers, Doctors, Musicians, Consultants, Lawyers, Bodybuilders, Salesmen, Investors, Runners, Orators, Footballers, Educationists, and Faujis (and any other profession or calling I may have forgotten) from all across the world would one day gather in a smallish corner of a smallish city in a fairly largish country that the good saint may have never even heard of then, to celebrate the 30 years that hadn’t seemingly passed since they had last been children in half-pants. And some of them still, literally, in half-pants.
If reunions could have had mothers, this one would have been that mother of a reunion. Yes we had one just 5 years back (which I had been meaning to write about but just never got around to doing it because of the tough business of lounging in the backyard having beers), but that had been just a preview apparently. And this was now the real thing, and for the better part of 2 days we were just a bunch of the same happy enthusiastic kids that we had been during the ages of 6 to 16. Happier, if anything, because we didn’t have to worry about homework or exams and were officially allowed to drink. And lots and lots of it, from the number of empty bottles that I am sure had to be carted away the next morning by the bartending team.
Incidentally, how old we were now was made obvious not by the number of bottles we left intact, but by the fact that the bartender had a father who had passed out of school 4 years AFTER all of us! And the DJ who played the best hit songs from the famous fete had probably not even been born when the latest of those numbers must have last played in a club.
I am not clear if there is some sort of statutory requirement to be drunk at reunions, but if there is, we were certainly all of us extremely compliant with it. And if all the stupendous food that we ate had been given to anorexic models instead, I am sure some of us would at least have been the healthier for it. I know for a fact that my own BMI numbers suggest that I could have left well alone all those super duper Wok preparations, the lip-smacking succulent mutton, the amazing Sabudana khichdi, Waala-chi usal and Alu-chi bhaji, and most certainly the scrumptious, hot, cripsy Jalebis with the life-saving Maththa, and still been no closer to starvation. But then I dived in with the best of them because, like that poet said, and something one of our best-loved teachers was inclined to quote often –
What is this life if full of care, all you can do is stand and stare
(at others eating all of that, I mean. I am of course paraphrasing the actual words to suit my narrative as seems to be the norm these days).
But I don’t want to mislead the reader, and to be fair and accurate I must say that it was not all fun and games. Sure, we played football like Barca and Bayern scouts were watching, and basketball like Jordan could have never even dreamed of, and huffed and puffed along the better part of our old cross-country route from four-poles to black-rock and back – we left out the white-rock part of it because 1) it doesn’t exist any more, and 2) we were not sufficiently enthusiastic to verify if #1 was really true, and a few of us ran a 100 meter sprint with a sub-20 timing while the rest cheered and bet on which one would need to be carried off in an ambulance. But in between that we also had to confront our deepest fears. No, not of our wives finding out about the deep crush we had for the school next door, but that of public speaking, as one of our classmates, who was also the MC for the event and who seemed to have the gift of turning spoken words into wine, relentlessly and with ruthless precision singled out each one of us by name and asked us to come to the stage and say a few words. Some of us managed those words like Bruce Lee could manage wooden boards, while others, let’s say, did not necessarily do so.
But nevertheless, what shone through all of those big and small words (or lack of them in my case) was the genuine friendship, the camaraderie, and the shared love and bonding that can only be forged in an all-boys’ school by the iron hand of discipline applied frequently and regularly to tender parts of the human anatomy. What shone through was an absolute absence of any affectation or pretentiousness that can only come from having been friends with each other when not even our own mothers could have predicted the heights of success we were to reach in later life.
Someone said during the speeches yesterday that for many many years after school he didn’t even know that there were people in this world who didn’t love and were not proud of their school, because he had always taken those for granted. And for that kind of love and pride, especially, we are all grateful to St Ignatius in general and to Fr. Schoch in particular for founding this particular oasis in the middle of the Pashan desert, and to all those schoolmates that have passed through its portals, who, when they hear that someone is from Loyola always seem to have an instant and deep connect with that person (even if they happen to be someone from the in-laws’ side).
And finally, we are grateful also for this old bunch of schoolkids who, no matter what or who they are or become, no matter where they are in this world, no matter what petty grievances they may have carried in their school years, and no matter whether they meet regularly or only once every 30 years, I am convinced will always have each others’ backs – now and forever.
Three cheers to the Class of ’87!
“Somewhere between lifeless secularism and mindless fundamentalism let us find enough space for faith and reason to walk together.”
So said the Fr Principal in his address on the occasion of yet another school annual social event. I am probably paraphrasing a little since I don’t remember his words verbatim, but this was approximately the essence of what he said.
I don’t know why, but I simply love these socials. It’s not that they are perfect, far from it, but there is something in the air that is infectious. Maybe this very imperfection fills my heart with gladness – a calming, grateful, gracious gladness – that at least some things won’t change in my lifetime. And of course the gorgeous school campus on a sunlit evening, after a dark thunderstorm in the afternoon, is just a sight to behold. Frickin’ Divine, almost.
The theme this year was “Be the change you want to see” (shameless self-plug – I have written about this earlier) and the stage backdrop had pictures of Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, APJ Abdul Kalam, Obama, the Dalai Lama, and somewhat surprisingly Steve Jobs (like maybe they ran out of ideas and had to quickly scramble to find someone for the sixth spot). The stage itself was well managed with smooth transitions, good lighting, and efficient set changes. The school report and prize distribution were surprisingly crisp and short, and I learned that there is some sport called Petanque and in that sport some students of our school won some prize. On the ride back home when I asked the 14yo what Petanque was, he summed it up succinctly in his standard teen know-it-all what’s-the-big-deal blaséness – “gotya” (marbles). When we were kids, the sports available were football, basketball, swimming, tennis, badminton, and table tennis, but now students were participating and winning prizes at district and zonal levels in not only these but also sports as diverse as petanque, fencing and pistol-shooting (something one would think young boys, being young boys, would welcome as legitimate excuses to play with swords and guns). And looking at the names of the winners across the school it is clear that it doesn’t just talk about diversity, it also walks it to a large extent. Being an all-boys’ school it is, somewhat excusably, hamstrung wrt gender diversity, but other than that it’s a veritable showcase for the word.
The skits and dances (as usual) were not necessarily Broadway quality but the enthusiasm, effort, passion, and heart on the part of the students, teachers, non-teaching staff, helpers and all the other behind-the-scene workers shone through like a welding arc – and they ranged from a play on Swatch Bharat with a very catchy “saaf nahi toh maaf nahi” jingle to a French play underlining the value of kindness, in which one unnamed 14yo child – ahem – played a tiny but pivotal (silent) role of a gendarme (something which he had only initially taken up in order to be allowed to officially bunk classes) with utmost conviction, and even though we’d almost forgotten to pick up the costume until the last moment this child didn’t let that distract from conveying effortlessly the life and character of a true gendarme (stand, apprehend, exit). Yes, one poster right in front of the stage was held upside down during a dance, and the boys holding it panicked a bit when made aware of this by someone from the front row of the audience, but a teacher quickly ran in from the wings and put it right (pretty much what teachers do, I suppose, in general) so all was well that ended well. Apart from a few hiccups like this, the show went fairly smoothly. And I was surprised and heartened at the number of boys who were, willing and happily, dressed up as girls – “nauvari and nath” and all, in some cases. I remember I was once offered the part of Snow White in my KG years and I had chosen instead to play one of the dwarfs because I was afraid I would be teased mercilessly for dressing up as a girl.
The highlight of the evening, though, apart from the beer and KFC dinner later at home, was the Chief Guest’s speech. I’ve noticed that some of the Fr Principals that I’ve listened to in the past few years have not necessarily the glittering gift of oratory that I had come to associate them with after having listened to the various Fr Principals of my schooldays, but this Fr Chief Guest was an exception to that general recent rule. His speech was sparkling and conversational and contemporary and inspiring, ranging from quoting from the Upanishads to summarizing, almost entirely extempore, the theme of the evening in the letters of the word
As usual we had reached late and so didn’t find a decent chair to sit, and as a result were squatting on some wooden steps a little off-center to the stage, but despite all the discomfort of creaky and stiff legs and back, the message resonated loud and clear. Inspiring, really.
I mean, it’s not like we were going to go home and immediately start being the change, but dammit we were sure we were definitely going to think about it. At least that, yes. And even that is a win for some.
As kids growing up in the 80s, for us our parents and grandparents may have been our first teachers but I dare say that our school teachers were our first Gods. “Teacher says …” was almost gospel and “but my teacher told … ” was a regular refrain that must have driven our parents mad.
My mom was initially a bit apprehensive about sending me to a Jesuit school with a statue of the Christ on a cross hanging on the wall in every classroom, no doubt worried that they would make me drink blood or something, but my dad, having seen the school grounds and swimming pool on an earlier visit with my cousin (who went to that school a few years before me) was pretty adamant that the best school in the world was where I would also go, and if that was the price to be paid for enjoying a heavenly campus then so be it. The lush green hills with the waterfalls behind the grey stone building of the school and the huge playgrounds in front may have also influenced his decision. I on my part was not at all thrilled at having to go to this school, so far away, but then after I’d been thrown out of playschool for insisting on having my grand-mom sit in class with me (with me sitting on her lap), I guess I would not have been thrilled about any school. Luckily my mom’s fears proved totally groundless because this school turned out to be probably the most secular institution I would ever come to know way before the word became such a loaded one.
I don’t know if this is the experience of everyone who grew up in the 80s, or I was singularly lucky, but I thought my teachers in school were perfect and they did nothing to prove me wrong. There was an innocence in this belief that was to be dispelled in later years when I came to realize that teachers were also human and subject to the same petty characteristics that we almost take for granted from other professions. But in school they inspired a healthy mix of fear, respect, and awe. And if there was one teacher in particular who inspired all of this in abundance, it was our Hindi and Marathi teacher in high-school, Mr Devasthali Sir – Deva for short (that’s what we called him – not to his face, obviously!)
Deva was built like a wrestler (he was one, apparently, in his younger years), sported thick long hair combed back and a heavy beard, thick black-framed glasses, and he was always dressed in a pair of white pajamas and a sort of beige kurta. I don’t think I have seen him wear anything else in all my ten years of schooling. A few years back I had read about how the truly brilliant people (Steve Jobs or Mark Z, for example) always wear the same thing and I realize now that Deva was already there before any of them. We didn’t know it then but he was also a Sanskrit pundit and a Hindustani classical singer, player, and teacher of some repute. He had a serious face, almost scary in its intensity, and when he spoke you could see only the bottom row of teeth, but when he grinned (which was admittedly rare) you could also see the top row and his face was transformed as if by magic into something that you would normally associate with a mischievous child.
He taught us Hindi and Marathi in turn for 5 years, and it was always the same. He didn’t seem to like the textbook lessons and positively abhorred words like portion and exercises and exams. His teaching modus operandi was simple – he would come into class and start talking, about current affairs, about literature, about politics, religion, philosophy, spirituality, about history and mythology, the warriors and saints and mystics of old, about the wisdom of well-known phrases and sayings, or about whatever happened to catch his fancy at the time. He would sometimes take some word or phrase from some lesson in the book and give us his own take on it. An entirely different take, in all probability, than the one prescribed by the lesson. And we were supposed to take notes, verbatim, about all that he said. And heaven help us if he caught us slacking off or found that we hadn’t been paying attention. He used to make snap checks of random notebooks, and if he saw that the last bits of writing were not in line with his latest words, then there was hell to pay. Mostly for the entire class. We also had to write ten lines of Hindi or Marathi everyday as homework to improve our handwriting, and I remember having burnt more than usual midnight oil in frantically trying to cover up the backlog when he used to suddenly threaten to check our homework the following day. That he would often forget to carry out the threat the next day made it no less effective, because what if?
It was a nerve-wracking period every day, and I am sure there were many kids who resented and feared it. I don’t think there could have been even a single kid in those days who hadn’t felt his wrath, and hand, at one time or the other. I probably feared him but I can’t say I resented his lectures. In fact, I used to enjoy the break from the mundane textbook and looked forward eagerly to what he was going to say each day. And I do see now how the values and lessons he (almost subconsciously) gave us had nothing to do with any rote learning but everything to do with life, and these values and lessons stand us in very good stead in times of adversity to this day. There are times when I see a problem and feel daunted but somewhere there is a confidence that I can face it, fix it.
Because once you’ve been bashed-up in childhood by Devasthali Sir, nothing else in this life can really scare you any more.
The other day as I was walking my 5 km in the evening (ahem – fitness plug!) I saw this tiny stall selling sandwiches and fruit-juice and milkshakes. I must have seen this stall and similar kinds hundreds of times before, but that day for some reason it stayed in my memory – maybe subconsciously, in light of my recent cribbing about the hundred (and seventeen) mundane and boring things I have to do as an entrepreneur that takes away time and focus from doing what I most want to do – build a great product, make tons of money, and eventually retire to a beachfront shack in a Naxalite area (I kid about the last one, a little).
The stall was a typical makeshift one with a grimy sandwich-maker, its chrome plating all but scraped off and its electric lead wire chipped in places (wrapped with semi-sticky insulation tape to avoid electrocution), the two bare tips haphazardly shoved into a dangling socket and held in place with matchsticks, a cracked mixer-grinder kept from falling apart by a strip of black rubber tubing wound around the base, a set of fingerprinted glasses that were repeatedly being washed/rinsed in a single tub of water, and one naked overhead bulb hanging from a rope to light the stall up. And there were a few people crowded around to buy sandwiches or juice or whatever from the young man sitting behind the counter, so it was making some money at least.
Yes, it is likely that he was running the stall out of necessity, not choice, that he would have taken a secure government job if one had been available and he had been eligible for it. And I don’t want to romanticize or glorify his everyday struggle but the thing that struck me was what I now like to think of as the jugaad of ownership. I don’t mean ownership as in mixer or sandwich-maker ownership, but more like work ownership. He didn’t use a broken mixer-grinder because he liked it. He used it because he needed to make a living and there was no one to crib to about its brokenness. No matter how much he wished for a shiny new one he didn’t have the money for it and therefore he just had to bloody well fix the old one the best way he knew how, and get on with his work. Because if he didn’t, he and his family wouldn’t eat that night.
In the past eight years, there have been many times when I’ve wished that I didn’t have to do the mundane and the boring tasks – taxation, invoicing, payments, budgeting and cash-flow planning, following-up with vendors, fielding irate customer complaints, dealing with broken broadband, MSEB woes (until I got an inverter), uncooperative printer, overheating laptop, failing motherboard, leaking windows, and so so many others (as I’m writing this, I’m struggling to load the login page of the GST portal when tomorrow is the last day to file) – and each of those times, while I’ve done what was required, I have often resented having to do so. And while I’m not saying that the chap didn’t necessarily resent having to fix the mixer or that in future I will never resent my own mundane tasks (I have no way to know either), I do see how it can be made a little easier to handle if I think of it as my own work. Something I must own and do because no one else will do it for me. (Leave aside for the sake of argument outsourcing or hiring someone to do it for you. If he – or I – could afford to do that, he wouldn’t be sitting in that small cubbyhole of a stall and I wouldn’t be writing this post.)
When I had quit my job, what had eventually pushed me over the edge to make that unknown leap had been the sight of a roadside flower-seller with her young son sitting beside her, diligently doing his homework in the fading light of evening. And what gives me continued perspective into my everyday problems is the sight of these kinds of small businesses that dot the local landscape by the millions. Ramen sustainable or cockroach startups, call them what you will, they manage to survive against all odds. And with little to no help from the government or anyone else. Because they just have no choice but to do so.
The word jugaad is used in many ways – more often than not it is used in a derogatory sense to mean finding ingenious loopholes/detours/workarounds to designed processes/rules to get some sort of unfair/undue advantage and while this use is often accurate, it can also mean (and this is how I like to think of it) –
Making the best use of available resources in order to maximize output, either out of choice or compulsion.
And whether you are a small sandwich/juice seller or a software entrepreneur, ultimately this boils down to ownership. And it need not be just of your work. It could be of your health and fitness, of your relationships, of your finances, or of any of the million and eleven other things that you wish were in your control, or at least way better than they currently are in your life. Enough and more self-help books and advice tell us to take ownership of our own destiny and I am never really sure what that means in practical terms. But I do know (or so I think) what taking ownership of work means – fixing a cracked mixer to churn out just enough juice to help you live and fight another day, until eventually you can afford that shiny new mixer and also someone to run it.
The jugaad of ownership – take that, and let your destiny take its own.
Yes, you read that right. Not Shri Modi. Shri Vajpayee.
This is a letter I had written 20+ years back as a naive idealistic mid-20-something, when the ABV government first came to power in ’96 for 13 days.
Sidebar – If this blog were buzzfeed, this post would have been titled “7 Ideas to make India a Superpower“, and if it were scoopwhoop this would have been titled – “A young boy wrote to Shri Vajpayee – You won’t believe what happened next!!!“
This was of course post Mandal, Rath Yatra, Babri Masjid, Mumbai riots and the Mar 13 bomb blasts, and I cannot say that I understood everything to do with politics (any more than I can say that now), but I definitely remember that I was maha impressed with what I’d seen of ABV at least, and some of the other BJP leaders at the time seemed more articulate and sincere than some of the other parties’ leaders (Murli Manohar Joshi and Arun Jaitley come to mind, for example – also MMJ looked like one of my uncles so that may have added its own bias). I do realize now that all this could have been just a function of my middle-class MH lens.
But in one of the studio interviews, Dr Prannoy Roy asked ABV what he thought was his greatest strength and greatest weakness, and I was floored by his answer.
ABV said, and I can quote it almost word for word –
“In all my (40?) years in politics I have never hit below the belt …” trademark pause with half closed eyes, then a sudden mischievous smile and twinkle as he continued – “… call it a strength or weakness!”
So anyway, that was all for the background. I don’t remember if I actually sent this letter then but I seem to vaguely remember there was some scheme or website or something asking us to write to the PM at the time, so maybe I did send it. In any case, nothing happened as a result, as far as I know or remember, and we’re still grappling with pretty much the same issues 20 years later.
Apart from minor formatting changes and typo corrections (and removal of some personal fawning) this is largely verbatim, so here goes nothing –
Forget for the time being religious differences. Let the people be of whichever religion they choose. Forget conversion, forget Hindu/Muslim/Christian/Sikh…think INDIAN. Rein in all the fundamentalist and fanatical people in the BJP or any of its associates. Look to instill pride in being Indian. We must start feeling that we are privileged to be Indians, and not cursed.
Put Kashmir and all outstanding disputes with our neighbors on the back-burner for 20 years. Concentrate on building the economy. If everyone is well-fed and comfortable, they will have no reason to spew hate and venom at an imaginary enemy. Anger and violence comes out of an empty stomach.
We MUST, and a big MUST, end corruption. The only way to do it is through the extensive use of Computers and IT. There is no way someone can bribe a computer. Everything must be computerized, land-records, citizen information, voter information, PDS, licensing…etc.
Support small-scale industries. Look towards the domestic market, as well as the export market. The current concessions to 100% EOUs must be complemented by similar concessions (though not maybe of the same scale) to SSIs servicing the domestic market.
Education. This is a must to have good governance. I am sure even after the recent disgusting behavior of the Congress and other oppn. parties (sidebar – don’t remember what this was now, but I’m sure this can be a generic enough complaint about all political parties), and the reams of criticism written in newspapers, 70% of the voters would not have realized what happened simply because they cannot read. An educated voter is an asset to a right thinking, right doing, forward moving party.
Give economic aid, free education, help and reservations to people based NOT on their caste, religion or gender, but based on their economic stature. Help them to raise this, so their children have no need for these kind of aid or reservations.
Last but not the least, stop short-sighted, populist schemes. Take hard decisions based on the long term benefits for most of India and Indians.
As we approach yet another Independence Day, much of the above, while continuing to be naive and idealistic, is still TBD. Mr Modi has the mandate to bring about change. Positive change. Lasting change. I really hope he doesn’t waste it for some petty short term political gains. Because the alternative will probably be even worse. If there is even actually any alternative.
So, on this Independence Day, here’s to hoping we do make all the progress we want and more, so I don’t have to rehash this blog post in 2039. Because, as everyone knows, in 2038 time as 32-bit Unix stores it will officially be over.
Jai Hind. Jai Maharashtra.
Plain Chex 