The Ego Surfer

Thayir Sadham, Thachi Mammam, Thasuru Anna, Bagala Bath, Curd Rice...Call it What you will...But the thing is divine. I am a vegetarian and a flexible one at that. You know what I mean? I am not one of those veggie bigots who will keep reminding you of their narrow choices of foods and restaurants when you eat out; and make you feel guilty by ordering home delivery (and reminding you about it the next day) after returning from a "fine diner" where there weren't enough choices to suit their narrow dietary habits. I am also not one of the annoying fretters that would liberally lecture hapless non-vegetarians on the virtues of vegetarianism; how it is an elevated state of existence; and how they are God's "chosen people", a step closer to Moksha, in the vicious cycle of births and rebirths, due to an accidentally picked up food habit. On the other hand, I can be pretty good company for dinner, casually conversing or even cracking a joke as you eat a large-heade...

God...give us bijli, sadak, and paani... While we were busy meticulously carving out inch-by-inch of what we call "National Highways" (and the accompanying architectural wonders called speed breakers), as if they were heritage structures for posterity; and showering panegyric on Laloo and his cronies for the ingenuity of introducing chai in train stations and public address system on Shatabdhi trains, China was quietly building, for the last two years, what is now being touted as the world’s fastest conventional train service. The inaugural service, expected to be flagged off on August 1, 2008 will link Beijing and the port city of Tianjin and ferry passengers, in "aircraft-like cabins with spacious interiors" (which aircraft has spacious interiors?), at speeds touching 350 kilometers per hour. Trains will run on the Tianjin line – which was built at a cost of USD 2.93 billion – every 3 minutes, with each train expected to carry close to 600 passengers. China, in sp...

The surroundings were alien. The pretentious exterior of the school building seemed more intellectual than the unimaginative white-washed buildings of St. Mark’s where Ravi had been his previous academic year. Scores of aspirants pored in through the two gates of the school and seemed suave and from the well-bred nobility of northern Bangalore. Ravi felt an overpowering sense of nervousness as he tagged on to his elder sister, waiting for their appointment with the Principal. The Principal’s office was right next to the entrance and Mr. Radhakrishnan was conversing with a deferential parent inside his cabin. A score of desperate parents unabashedly starred through the window trying to catch a glimpse of the celebrity principal. “I heard he is very strict even with the parents!” a parent told her spouse in Tamil. Ravi’s sister, Kala, glanced at him and parted with a nervous smile. Ravi reciprocated. The security guard, in a ragamuffin uniform and a Hawaii slipper, rushed towards the cro...

I have a bunch of articles posted at http://bragsegosurfer.rediffblogs.com/

My literary flair seems to be titillated only when I am acutely poignant or heavily in monetary debt! Now, having been ensconced in relative ordinariness and narrowing the gap between the negative and the positive in my unkempt balance book, I seem to have totally lost it to express myself on anything. I am your unfriendly neighborhood IT guy; physically disproportionate, emotionally challenged and economically endowed with more than I deserve or can handle. I seldom talk to anybody other than my laptop. I keep myself passive with a 9-9 job; dealing with clients across the globe, churning out colorful reports in impossible formats and spending time “fire-fighting” (as software folks say with brooding eyebrows) issues in my projects and the ever-increasing attrition in my teams (am I the reason for it?!). I have a miniscule domestic life and spend weekends in hibernation when I try – and fail – to pull my overweight ass to the neighborhood gym. Just the other day – actually it was a yea...

Most Tamil moviemakers, it seems to me, are school dropouts, single, rural and perverted. Almost every movie unfolds – and tears apart – in a village. “Kounder ayya!!” the hapless village folk bend over to touch the sand the hero had just treaded to the sound of conches and women making suggestive sounds using their tongues. “Veera Koundaru varaaru, then singam varaaru!” a song resounds in the background as the hero takes a 3-½ minute walk down the lush, green Pollachi fields with villagers waving their “angavastrams” – and “dhotis” – for visual effect and old women feeding him leftovers. The movies, using the village “perrivars” as their mouthpiece, would copiously lecture the audience about the hypocrisy of the rich and the city folk (no differentiation there), dispense the loutish city slickers with tame lessons on jurisprudence and sycophancy, highlight the degeneration of culture amongst the educated (abetted by rapturous applause from illiterate front-benchers), and of c...

It was a warm, pleasant summer day when I landed in the US to pursue my version of the much-touted ‘American Dream’. The year was 1994. Indians, humongously more illustrious had been arriving at US shores for more than four decades, then. To be sure, I was under no illusion then that my ride was going to be smooth. I absolutely knew that my dip into the American melting pot would have its own challenges and surprises. “India!” I told with palpable pride to the politely curt immigration official first, and then to my colleagues at work later and expected laudatory nods on hearing the country of my origin. That didn’t happen. What left me more flummoxed was how, about one-fifths of humanity, figured nowhere in their value systems - news, politics, society or economics. I initially took it upon myself to educate people about my country but realized later – with a pang of agony – that people didn’t want to know. In the “New World”, they were not interested to know how a five thousand year ...

My friend Kumaresh quite suddenly treaded into the movie industry. He just got into the groove and got caught in the web, before he could say “Bandha” (which was the name of the first movie he produced)! Kumaresh was a flamboyant character who always set the ambience afire with his inscrutable personality and his inimitable humor. That was how he caught the eye of a rapacious film industry personality, in faraway Houston, who tried hard to tie him into the film industry and use his software money to fund insipid and sentimental yarns from Kodambakkam. And succeeded. One thing led to another and Kumaresh, already one enamored by glamour and glitz, which was evasive in the software industry, fitted into the image-conscious industry like the pieces of a puzzle. A year (and a few million dollars) later, when I met him in his film office, he was clad in a kitschy printed shirt, masticating a meetha pan. He sported a longer moustache that gravitated toward his proud chin, had a “chandana pot...

I can remember weird things in the murkiest corners of my mind. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of things that I have forgotten from my childhood. I still remember the whiff of fresh air at dusk near the “Ala maram” of St. Anthony’s Higher Secondary School, Thanjavur; my “Palingu” sessions with Kandasamy and Charles at “Selvam Colony”, Arulananda Nagar; my walk back with Sushila, the maid, from Shankara School, RA Puram, my first bicycle and my first cricket match at Chepauk. I even remember the day Manish, my fourth standard classmate, drank lukewarm rose milk at my newly constructed home in Thiruvanmiyur. And about Swami, my dear friend of primary school years, my escapades with him are as fresh in my memory as my mom’s Rasam that I devoured over last night. But why do I so inexorably sham ignorance of all those crystal-clear memories when a cousin or an old high-school friend rekindles them. Am I afraid of my past? Or ashamed of it? What is the reason for this fake Alzheimer’s?...