aditya kumar's weblog

Last year we moved to Sydney. It was a move that me and my wife had been planning for more than 3 years. The idea was to move to Australia and get a job. 

I wouldn’t go into the details, as much has happened over the last year and a half: job, setting up a home and our daughter started going to pre-school. Suffice to say that we feel settled.

The one thing I often wonder about is how I don’t find myself missing Bangalore. I lived in Bangalore for close to 12 years and it is the longest I have ever been in one place. I do miss “things” of Bangalore, the coffee, the darshinis, the food, the vibe of MG Road but that’s about it. 

You generally don’t miss a “city”. You can’t. It’s as if, if I were to be there, in Bangalore, at this moment, will I derive the satisfaction that I used to derive, say, in 2008? So what I am missing now isn’t the city, it is the time I spent back in 2008 and it won’t come back. Nostalgia aside, cities, like people, like you and me, change (often for the worst). You can either love them, live them or you leave them. 

Being in love with your surroundings, at any given time, is when your “level” of evolution is at a point that matches of everything around you. So my time in Bangalore and the things they were during that time were at a cusp and that, sort of, defines my time there. Such is the case with different phases of our lives, our times and our surroundings. I like to think of the external surroundings and factors that affect our lives as “arcs” and our own life as one big arc – that of a circle with a much bigger diameter. The smaller arcs touch the bigger arc at various points, forming many cusps. Where those cusps are formed are the most important, if not critical, times of our lives. Those three years in Bangalore, between 2007 and 2010 were such years for me.

How big a cusp will form, with our lives here in Sydney, only time will tell.

Last Saturday I went to the other side of town, to Malleswaram. On the way back I could not find a bus so I had to take an auto. I live in south Bangalore and the distance is quite a lot. It was a long way home and as it happens under such circumstances, almost inevitably, the auto driver and I got talking.

The election fever has overtaken us all and so I asked him if he would vote. Yes, he said. We got talking about political affiliations. To my surprise, he said he would vote for the AAP. As I recall, I think he got Kejriwal’s name wrong (I think he said “Aggarwal” – but that is beyond the point because he was aware of what had happened in Delhi). We, the urban elite, have always thought of AAP as a mostly urban-upper-middle-class phenomenon so that conversation was a myth-buster.

Anyway, towards the end of the ride, the driver mentioned that he was cautious about opening up with his passengers these days. Considering that we had just had a long conversation, I found it a bit odd so I asked him why. The other day, he recalled, an incident happened when he dropped a lady at Malleswaram. I asked him further. “Well”, he said, “she got talking just like you. About life, social issues, politics etc. And when she got down, she asked me if she could take my picture. I was hesitant but she took one and left”.

The lady was a journalist. The auto driver claimed that she asked him questions, got him talking and recorded the conversation without telling him about it. A few days later (or the next day, I do not know) an article was published with his name (and he claimed it carried his picture too) in Bangalore’s Deccan Herald. “My friends saw it and they were laughing at me. I kept telling them – I never said all that”.

I told him, in a way that he could understand, that for a journalist to do that was wrong. He didn’t need much convincing – he already knew that. More than the quotes, which he said weren’t true anyway, he was hurt by the fact that his name was published in a newspaper without his consent. “But I don’t want to do anything about it”. I told him that I can take this up with Deccan Herald. He agreed but later he added, “Sir, I just don’t want my name anywhere”.

I went home and searched for his name at Deccan Herald’s website. I found him quoted in a story, just as he had mentioned. I did not find his picture there (thus, I can’t say if Deccan Herald carried it in the print version).

The next day, I posted a series of tweets – some of them mentioned his name and the link to the article. I was wrong to do that – in my bid to highlight the lapse of ethos, I committed the same mistake I accuse Deccan Herald of – quoting the auto driver despite his reluctance. Moments later, I deleted those tweets. I have taken care not to mention his name and the article link on this post.

What I did was though was this: I tried to contact the author of the article on twitter. I haven’t heard from her. Maybe I will. I also tagged Deccan Herald’s twitter account on my tweets about it (those tweets that I decided to keep) and somewhat conveniently, I haven’t heard back from them.

Apart from the obvious lack of ethos evident here, my only question is this — would this journalist dare do the same thing if she met, say, a CEO of a company? Or anyone who held more influence than our auto driver? Someone who won’t be as helpless and won’t hesitate to go public about it? Would she record the conversation without telling, snap a picture when done and then run the story despite knowing that it is not OK to do it?

Because out there, an auto driver doesn’t want to ever talk to journalists.

Friday morning, August 23, I was taken aback hearing about the rape of a journalist in Mumbai. Social media was abuzz with people in shock that such a crime could still happen after all that we had witnessed a few months ago in Delhi.

The first thing that we need to change is the mindset that city X is safer than city Y. Maybe it was true 20 years ago. Not anymore. There are various reasons to it.

The first reason I can think of is the unprecedented migration that has been happening in India over the last two decades. I do not have any data to support it right now but it seems plausible that with the growth that has taken place in our cities over the past 15-20 years, we have witnessed people, of all classes and professions, moving around across the cities for jobs. Bangalore has software engineers from Delhi and Bombay while the security guards that I have met have mostly migrated from the east. Delhi has migrants from Tamil Nadu just as it has people from Bihar. The typical one-city guy, that stereotype is no more. Everyone is everywhere.

Secondly, the behavior of our society which I believe reflects our morals (or the lack of it) is more or less the same. Reason being that our morals, across geographies, have that common ground. Haryana and Tamil Nadu, states that have had little in common in terms of culture and language have witnessed numerous cases of honour killings. Moral policing in a town of, say, Uttar Pradesh, is more or less of the same brand that exists in the southern port city of Mangalore.

The only exception to the above two reasons could be India’s North East. Look closely and you will find the reasons — their culture is more open, a boy and a girl holding hands is not a social taboo. And largely, the movement of people for jobs from the rest of India to the North East, it is safe to assume, must be negligible (It has been mostly, east to north/west/south but not vice versa).

Before I go any further, I must tell a small story here that a friend shared with me a few months ago. He had gone to Goa on a holiday. One of those days, in the mornings when the beach was deserted and the shacks were just opening up, a shop-helper sort of a guy was opening a shop. Mornings in Goa beaches are usually sane, with less crowds and all. A few foreigner tourists, all women, were walking by. This guy, suddenly exults, gives a smile and positions himself to be ready for a series of “high-fives”. The ladies obliged, perhaps smiled too and moved on. After the ladies had left, this guy, happily proclaimed something to the effect – “Back in the village I never get to touch a lady and here? wow!” (“saala wahan gaon mein koi choota bhi nahi hai!”).

I hate generalizing but it seems that to me, people who do the ghastly crime of raping a woman, have tendencies like this guy had, only magnified a few times.

To be honest, I am a little surprised that all the “change” that I am hearing about on social and traditional media has something to do with the law, or the Government, or the policing. No one is looking at what could be driving a 20 year old guy to commit this ghastly crime. It is almost naive to think that a law or a stronger police force is the ultimate answer to this menace.

A few months ago, I was at the Bangalore town-hall to witness the protest and the candle light vigil that happened just after the Delhi rape. People demanded justice and justice for them meant that the state give capital punishment to those six men. With the Mumbai rape, people may still ask for a similar punishment as the outcry right now suggests. There have been equal (if not more) calls for a more stringent law that would deter someone to commit this heinous crime. While I think that a strong law is the need of the hour, I also believe that giving someone death for this crime would not really bring about the change we want, in the long run. If that had to work, our society must have learnt its lessons after the Delhi rape case. It has to be a combination of a stringent law AND a social change.

The social change that I talk about here is about not making a deal out of a boy and a girl holding hands. To not look at young, unmarried couples in contempt. To make it reasonable for a young unmarried couple to stay together. The urban society that we are so used to may have learnt to agree with it but there is a lot to India than just the few big cities. It is only when our villages and small towns come out of long held social but irrational beliefs would we be able to see a real change in our society.

Maybe then that guy in Goa will stop raising his hand for high-fives everytime he saw a group of white women on the beach.

“A Fine Balance” by Rohinton Mistry is one of the finest (probably only surpassed by Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children) Indian literary novels ever. There have been very few books that have touched my heart as it did. I was new to Bangalore, in 2005 and was looking forward, with a book in hand, to getting lost in the myriad of lanes that the city had to offer.

A writer friend I constantly look up to, once suggested that “Tales from Firozsha Baag”, Mistry’s debut, was a great book and his personal favorite. I had the opportunity to read the book over the last couple of months. As it turns out, as debut books do, this one not only gives enough hints of the great writer that Mistry would turn out to be but it is a masterpiece in it’s own right. Here’s a small para I loved for the sheer prose of it, describing the Bombay local train scene in all it’s essence:

The suburban local was at the outskirts of Bombay; they would arrive at their destination in forty-five minutes. The ’17 Standees Allowed’ by the scratched and peeling sign had already been exceeded by the crush of Sunday morning commuters, but not to the extent of a weekday train: as yet, there were no roof-riders or window-clingers. In the sky the sun was higher than the when the train left Bombay Central. The heat began to strengthen rapidly now, seeming to feed on itself, growing more oppressive with every breath. From metal straps hung the standees, listless, upraised arms revealing identical damp patches under sleeves of shirts and blouses. Overhead, the fans turned ineffectively, whirring and rattling, their blades labouring with feeble rotations, trying to chop the air thick with heat and odour, scattering it around unelessly in the compartment.

The book is a collection of eleven short stories set in the 1980s about people living in a parsi colony in Bombay. The stories are intertwined while each story has a main subject/family and at least a few characters from other stories make appearances in each story.

As any good book would, this takes a little time to pick up even though the stories by themselves are distinct. But then again, with Mistry, it is not so much about the story but the beautiful prose that he weaves with his simple tools that comprise mostly of words. At times, the stories have an element of shock, but are mostly amusing and sometimes even funny but the common thread that binds them all is the pettiness that was the common ingredient that every middle class family in Bombay must have had in the 1980s — something I could relate to, for I grew up near Bombay at the same time and have seen the city at close quarters.

Consider for example, the story called Squatter in which Nariman Hansotia, a man popular with kids of Firozsha Baag for telling stories tells the story of an imaginary cricketer named Savukshaw, the greatest cricketer who played during the times of greats like Umrigar, Contractor and Farokh Engineer. Savukshaw, who gave up cricket for cycling, before he became a pole-vaulter and then a hunter could never find happiness in his life. Eventually Mistry, with Nariman at his aide, tells us about Sarosh, living in Toronto for ten years and yet not being able to balance himself on the western commode. So Sarosh, throws himself a challenge and what follows is a funny account of an Indian immigrant’s life in the first world.

Or one could keep thinking about Lend Me Your Light, where the lives of three friends, one of them, the narrator, the other being his brother and the third, a friend, keep crossing each other’s at intervals. Nothing much would have come of it if only the three would not have spent their childhood together. The story depicts how, in the 1980s, the Indian Youth reacted to the hopelessness surrounding the times. But then again, it is not so much about the story but in this case, it is the difficult questions that Mistry asks his readers by way of the characters he beautifully crafts, at will. It is this rush of emotions that these subjects feel and you, the reader, would find yourself inevitably attracted to these viewpoints, almost agreeing to one of them, and maybe taking out time, thinking and answering these uncomfortable questions, looking out ways to possibly ensure that your well-thought of answers that you mumble quietly within the vicinity of your head are somewhere heard. It is what any well told story should do to you, and this one most certainly qualifies for one, as it continues to dwell, this story of three boys growing up to men, living in different lands — Toronto, New York and a small village in Maharashtra but returning home to Bombay with a different set of emotions each time.

Or maybe I could also talk about the last story, if I can call it that, because Swimming Lessons has distinctive details about the author’s own life (More on that later). Here Mistry goes back and forth between the central character of the story who grew up in Firozsha Baag but finds himself in a Toronto apartment while his parents wait for his letters in India. The Toronto version of events turn out to be about his daily experiences where he recounts his childhood with minute details while the events that happen with his parents (presumably set a little in the future) talk about letters that his parents keep receiving only to find, inevitably to his father’s disappointment, a standard paragraph on weather from their son in Toronto who refuses to divulge details about his daily life without asking any in return until one day they find that their son, in a clerical job with an insurance company in Toronto, is also a writer and has written a book of short stories on his childhood experiences of Firozsha Baag! (Mistry was a banker until he started writing in his late 20s/early 30s)

The story is a joy to read with segments of hopelessness coupled with antidotes on what could become a writer, coming from the father’s perspective who is much delighted now that his son has found his calling in writing. And now, with the way of his father’s dialogue, Mistry conveys to us some theories that are heartening to hear for any aspiring writer. Consider some excerpts:

all writers worked in the same way, they used their memories and experiences and made stories out of them, changing some things, adding some, imagining some, all writers were very good at remembering details of their lives.

And:

Father explained it takes a writer about ten years time after an experience before he is able to use it in his writing, it takes that long to be absorbed internally and understood, thought out and thought about, over and over gain, he haunts it and it haunts him if it is valuable enough, till the writer is comfortable with it to be able to use it as he wants; but this is only one theory I read somewhere, it may or may not be true.

Ah no, I am not much of a writer but I can see why I keep remembering the past so often. Maybe I miss it so much and that I try to relive the experience by writing about it and talking about it in fine detail, as much as I can, as much as I can afford and as long as I have an audience. Maybe I should start using my memories of growing up on an island near Bombay to good effect. Anyway.

So the stories go on but with Squatter, Lend Me Your Light and Swimming Lessons, Mistry saves the best for the last. I wish I could mention more stories but that would be telling too much. Like the taste of filter coffee, the stories linger on long after you are done reading it.

Today evening, in Bangalore, there was a silent protest and a candle light vigil at the Town Hall. It was heart warming to see a lot of men turning up. There were banners mentioning the Delhi gang rape and the 23-year old woman, whose death has shaken up our souls and there was at least one banner asking for the death of those responsible but there were also banners that asked for changes at the social level. Not capital punishment, not a new law but a change in ourselves — in how our society, and its men treat women.

I guess this was quite unlike the protests in Delhi, where they have been mostly attributing justice with the killing of those six men. I personally believe that though capital punishment may calm public’s anger over this heinous crime — it is social change that will eventually prove to be the catalyst for everlasting betterment of our lives.

Unless we ask for that social change, things may be the same. And for that change to happen, we may not even need to take the streets and blame the Government (as we have become used to doing it for sometime now). So the answers to most of the the evils that ail us may not be on the streets but in our own backyards. We just need to look.

Here are some of the pictures that best describe the emotional scenes there at the Town Hall.

(PS: My blog’s template does not allow big pictures to be displayed properly. You may please click on the pictures to see them in their entirety)

A few days after Anna Hazare’s now infamous April 5 Hunger strike, I saw a car, in the posh Koramangala neighborhood, with the sticker “I support Anna Hazare”. Instinctively, I wanted to run after the car, have a glimpse of the person behind the wheel and ask: Sir, how exactly do you intend to support Mr. Hazare? I didn’t do it; the thought came a few seconds too late while the car gained momentum.

In August, during the time when Hazare was in jail, various rallies were organized in the city. There was the gathering at Freedom Park. Some people decided to wear black on certain days. Some of them burnt effigies and had mashals in their hand while they carried a portrait of Hazare (with the Mahatma in the background). One evening, I witnessed one such rally in Koramangala, with people chanting slogans in the name of Hazare.

The same evening, not very far away from where I had seen this rally and strikingly close to where once I had seen this car with “I support Anna Hazare” sticker, I saw three traffic policemen manning a junction. One man, his two-wheeler parked by the side, on the broken pavement, with a bunch of notes in his fist. The officer had a firm grip on what lay inside his fist while the man was trying to free his arm, in vain. I do not know if I was alone in this but I certainly felt some irony witnessing this scene with the Hazare rally in the backdrop. That a group of Hazare supporters crossed the same busy Koramangala intersection at almost the same time must have done little to sanctify the surroundings and the scene.

A few weeks later on the same location, I saw the same policemen. This time they were preying on the two-wheeler riders that came on the wrong side of the road. 15 minutes later, I had spoken to two of their “victims”, both of them who chuckled while they told me they had just “paid up”. There was even a broker, as they told me, who helped bridge the linguistic barrier while negotiating deals.

Keeping Hazare and India’s fight against corruption in background, let me talk about a few other instances.

In one of the sub-registrar’s office, my wife had to pay a fee of Rs.200 for a stamp on a document. Until asked for, she never got any acknowledgement for the amount paid. When asked, she got frowns and was given directions to various windows across the office until someone obliged with the receipt (but not without giving a nasty glare). In another sub-registrar’s office in Bangalore, they reject your property registration if a bribe of Rs.14000 (for a standard area plot) is not paid (cash, of course) with your application fee.

Another day, on the way back from work in an auto-rickshaw, stuck in the evening traffic jam at Koramangala inner ring road, I saw an argument between a pedestrian, who had been walking on the pavement and a rider who had his two-wheeler on it. Now, Koramangala inner ring road is not the typical Bangalore road. For a 3 km stretch, there’s no shelter on either side of the road, only green bushes in an army land that encompasses both sides of the road. The road also has a slightly elevated pavement, all the way. That rainy evening and with that traffic jam that’s such a common occurrence, the rider, in a bid to outclass the lesser mortals using the road, had ventured into pedestrian territory and now wanted the pedestrian to make way for him. Only that the pedestrian was hell bent on not giving him room to pass. “This is for pedestrians. If you have to go, you hit me and go”, shouted the pedestrian, looking back, blocking the way. The rider, in return — with rage in his eyes, threatened to beat the pedestrian up.

Times like these, I end up thinking of the Koramangala car with it’s “I support Anna Hazare” sticker and my intention to ask that question. Admittedly, I have asked the same question to many of those who chose to wear black and were a part of human chains or went to Freedom Park. In most cases, the answer was simply that they planned to support Hazare by forwarding emails, giving missed calls, sharing videos. This way, many said, awareness will be increased. Many also believed that by doing this, they would be “morally” supporting Hazare.

Talking about Hazare: My problem with Hazare and his team is simply that they have projected the politicians and the people who hold state power as a completely different breed from us. It is like a giant beast that needs to be put on a leash. The lokpal bill, for now, is our projection of that leash. While creating this image, we – the citizens, have completely absolved ourselves of even, at least, trying to live our own lives in honesty and driven by moralistic values. The truth is, a society gets the Government it deserves.

In that regard, destiny has served us well.

If something in us instinctively makes us break the most simplest of laws that we can adhere to (and that includes our daily tryst with traffic signals), what right do we have to expect those who yield power in the State to be clean and models of honesty?

All these people: The policemen manning the Koramangala intersection, those who confessed that they paid bribes to the policemen, the two wheeler rider who had the audacity to drive his bike on a 3 km long pedestrian pavement and then threatning to beat up the pedestrian, those officers and clerks in various sub-registrar offices in Bangalore and the rest of us who use our own discretion while deciding to break red-signals — I am certain, all of them would say “yes” in unison if Hazare asked them their support in his movement. All of them are, afterall, fed up of a corrupt Government that runs this country.

But my question to them is – How can we claim to give moral support to a movement against corruption and be immoral at the same time?

Today, in Bangalore, Tejas is set to join the Indian Air Force in it’s own first squadron. This may appear a “typical” defence news story to many of us, but it is a very significant milestone for a project that was first conceived in 1983. An aircraft, from it’s first prototype till the time it gets inducted into the armed forces, has to pass through rigorous tests to confirm that it can withstand extreme conditions should there be a need for such operations during war. For example, here is a news story when LCA had to pass the flying tests after taking off from Leh. They froze the aircraft overnight in sub-zero temperature to test how it flies the subsequent morning.

Also, the whole project had come to a virtual standstill at least on two occasions — The failure of India’s ambitious aircraft engine program, “Kaveri” and a little before that, the sanctions imposed by the US Government after the Pokhran blasts. Much has been said about this project and many have termed it as a failure primarily because of cost overruns — but the truth is that despite the cost overruns, LCA is still a cheaper and at-par alternative with the best of it’s class in the world.

Moreover, the faith an airborne Tejas will instill in scientists and technicians for aiming higher, despite everything, is a priceless thing to achieve.

Anyway. Back in 2005, when I was a frequent visitor to the India Coffee House at MG Road, in Bangalore, I came across an elderly gentleman who used to work with the HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Limited). He was closely associated with the LCA program (later, known as ‘Tejas’). Over my next few visits, I had many conversations with Mr Vasudevan at the coffee house. Those were random meetings as we were both regular visitors to the place.

This post below was published on my old blog, in 2005 (pardon the quality of prose). I believe this is a significant day for many people who have been closely associated with the LCA project. I am not in touch with Mr. Vasudevan anymore but I am sure he is one happy, content man today.

In the Coffee House, with Mr. Vasudevan

The coffee house, as I expected was half full. With old furniture, its wooden benches and tabletops which had developed cracks of all lengths and depths, just like the wrinkles which were as common in almost every attendant, spelled the longevity of time this coffee house had witnessed.

As I said, the coffee house was half full, but no where was a complete empty table in sight. Next to its glass window, I chose to sit, on a table whose lone occupant was an elderly gentleman completely immersed in his reading. By the time I satisfied my hunger I thought of striking a conversation with the gentleman, who at that time, could be my only company.

As it was revealed, Mr Vasudevan, was a retired Aviation Quality Inspector. I knew his white hair suggested wisdom, but possession of wisdom of the aviation kind was not only a surprise but a pleasing one too. I could smell the prospects of an exciting conversation right there.

The mention of India’s latest indigenous combat aircraft, LCA (Light Combat Aircraft) struck the right chord. Excitement is inevitable, once LCA is mentioned to any Indian Aviation Enthusiast.

“I retired in 1992. When the LCA entered advanced stage of development in 1995, they needed people with experience. As it so happened, I was re-called and was a part of the LCA team. I was one of the four quality Inspectors. I was a part of the team when LCA took its first flight in 2001. I worked till 2003. Eight more years”, he said with a hint of excitement in his voice.

And what did he have to say about the first flight?

“Everyone was nervous. Our creation was touching the sky for the first time. During those moments, I went to a corner of viewing area, alone. I was too nervous. There are so many things that can go wrong in the first flight. My responsibility was to ensure the safety of the pilot. I was the quality inspector for Seat Safety/Ejection. But the take off went fine and people rejoiced. Obviously, I could not afford that joy.”

And why so? If the take-off was fine, why was he more nervous when the bird was in the air? I knew what he was coming to but I wanted him to say it himself. And so he did.

“Landing!!” he exclaimed with a new burst of excitement. “How can you miss that my friend! Touchdown is the most important aspect of the whole flight! That is when most things can mess up. Things can go haywire.”

“I remember”, he continued, “It was an 18 minute flight. The longest 18 minutes of my life. The machine we built was up there, and so was my heart.”

And how was touchdown?

“I cried. People came and shook hands and I had to hide my emotions. There were sweets distributed, accolades given. And after that, I tested 137 flights of LCA. In my career, I gave the quality thumbs-up for 138 of LCA flights. Nothing can match that.”

And on the current trends of aviation which are embedded in the LCA?

“1.6 Mach, I think should be the top speed of LCA. You have to understand, in our Air-Force, LCA has to play the role of a major force in Air-to-Air combat. Air-to-Air combat doesn’t go beyond 1.6 Mach. We have to suite those requirements. Plus the microprocessor handling of LCA is such that it lets the pilot concentrate on what he should- Combat”.

And on the wing-design? I remarked, that I had noticed LCA’s wings are the Delta-designed ones, similar to Mirage-2000.

“Ah, yes. They are critical to achieve a high lift for supersonic flights. Talking about wings, do you know how many flaps per second does a housefly make? 200. Imagine. And a dragon-fly? 600. These are god created miracles that most of us oversee in everyday life. The cobra manoeuvre that we talk so highly about in Sukhoi aircrafts, is performed by the housefly all the time. These facts inspire me.”

Here was someone, in his late 60’s or early seventies, who had dedicated his life to Aviation. And where did his inspiration came from? Houseflies and mosquitoes.

“I have the knowledge to tell you the most technical aspects of flight without quoting scientific principles. I was only a quality inspector, but I played a part in this achievement.”

“I like cricket, I like car-racing and I like books. But at my time I could not afford it simply because I did not have the time. Sometimes I regret this fact. But soon I am overwhelmed to realise that I have been one of the privileged few who have been able to realise the kind of dreams like I had.”

So true, Mr. Vasudevan. Ask those who couldn’t.