aditya kumar's weblog

Sunday morning, walking from Bangalore’s Garuda Mall to LifeStyle Mall, we pass by The Bangalore Football stadium. A game going on inside, tickets priced at Rs.20, no takers for it. I am tempted to think — In this nation of cricket worshippers, for all we know they could make the entry here free and yet there would be no takers for a local game of football. Everything the usual here but for one announcement that has been printed on A4 sized papers and pasted all over the gates —

“Parking not allowed here. If you still park here the Tiger will take away your vehicle.”

All the previous thoughts notwithstanding, I stop and stare. Read it again and stare more. The Tiger taking away the vehicle. Hey, I want to try that. Or maybe not.

And as I later found out, the source of the stadium’s authoritative stand, as I had suspected, has been mentioned here. Mind you, these Tigers are far from extinct.

A few days after I told my house owner that I would like to vacate the house I am in now, word seems to have spread fast across the estate brokers of my colony. So much that after a few days of it, I notice that my house has a “TOLET” board on. How it came there and since when it has been there, I have no idea.

On the electrical pole, across my house, another “TOLET” message. It says, “Indievisual houses for rent – 1,2,3 BHK” and then on another line, “4,5,6 BHK”. Oh yeah, I want one too, an “Indievisual House”. Oh no wait, what if I want a “7,8,9 BHK”? Where’s that pattern gone, now?

Can’t help but notice a similar lack of patterns at my office cafe. On the price list:

“gravy with 3 roti – Rs.30
gravy with 4 roti – Rs 40
gravy with 5 roti – Rs 50”

People don’t eat gravy with 6 roti, oh no.

On the train to home, Goa, I wake up in the morning to find out that my shoes are stolen.

You ever build stories on what you see while you travel? I mean, I see wide barren land on a dark night and there is one hut with a little light out there and I ask myself, how would it be if I were alone here, on this land, right here, right now. One of the other (and much less horrifying) possibilities that have crossed my mind is of my shoes being stolen. Well, now what.

Well, those were running shoes. Somebody had to run with them.

So I have no choice but to limit my visits to the toilet. I have no luggage but for this backpack which has a Thinkpad and an ipod. I have a Robert Ludlum which warrants some attention.

Sonaulium (actually it’s called Sonaulim) is Goa’s first station as the train enters Goa through Karnataka. The station, or what seems left of it, is in shambles. A deep valley on it’s back and on the outside of the station are lots of, what would have been big rocks and cement blocks, broken down in pieces. Most of the rooms are locked. But as the train passes by, one man manages to come out of nowhere. He’s holding a green flag, as if, signaling to each and everyone one of us — keep going. Rather, leave. And amidst of what looks like silent chaos, I see an empty but perfect flagpole. Maybe I should be back here on independence day. I bet it would be more inviting then.

A few minutes later, as we approach Madgaon, another station passes by. “Curchorem” it is, in English but the Devanagari script tells me it’s something to the effect of “Sanvordem Curchorem”.

Why this discrimination?

A few meters ahead I see a building with “Toilet” written in bold letters over it. On the left side of it is a smaller heading that says “Gents” with an arrow pointing left. On the right side of it, well, its painted white on what I think, in the recent past, would have been “Ladies” (with an arrow pointing right) and the entrance on the right is blocked by an old plank of wood. There is no ladies toilet at Curchorem (or Sanvordem Curchorem — based on your linguistic skills).

Why this discrimination?

Then, as the train nears the end of the station, a freshly pasted (and soaked in the rain) computer printed poster informs us that there is a “Swine Flu Awareness Cell” somewhere around there. This could be the only railway station in the world with no ladies toilet but a Swine Flu Awareness Cell.

And then there is Madgaon station, my destination, with no shoe shops.

And if, what you can read from the above image makes you want to read the fine print too, maybe you should check out here and then here.

Back in 1996, one day in the school, a friend told me he had a couple of stickers for the Dangerous tour. What was that, I asked. It was Michael Jackson touring India and I would be stupid not to know it, I was told. The tour was called “The Dangerous Tour”. Oh, Michael Jackson. I thought his best song was “Black and White” or something but it was the grooviest thing I had ever heard and had fallen in love with the video, especially because it showed an Indian girl doing Bharatanatyam with Jackson in the middle of the road.

For a boy who didn’t know the difference between “Black and white” and “Black or white”, it must have taken some convincing to do, that this friend eventually gave one sticker to me. It was a prized possession. After much thought, I pasted it on the back of an address book which I was sure I would use forever (The “Black and/or White” confusion was because Philips electronics had used the song jingle and conveniently called it, well, “Black and White”, for promoting their colorless television set on radio).

Then in 1998, an uncle who had studied in the IIT while graduating to Jackson’s music came to visit us. When he agreed to buy me a music cassette while checking out some music at the local store, my hands went to Michael Jackson’s Dangerous. He told me not to go for it. If he were to buy me one, it would be Thriller. I resisted it (because I had never heard of Thriller and I did not want this chance to go waste by letting him buy me something I did not know about). Eventually he had me convinced that it’d be a sin to choose Dangerous over Thriller. That was my first MJ tape.

Then, three years later, one day I went to my best friend’s house. He had an impressive music collection and we had evolved to mp3s. In his CD rack, I found the audio CD of Dangerous. Not willing to lose it this time, I told him that I was taking it home. It had songs I had long wanted to hear. It also had “In the Closet”, which was and remains, till this day, the sexiest song I have ever listened to. The video with Naomi just adds another dimension to it.

Shortly thereafter, in Indore during my first few days of graduation, I met Devashish Bhatt. Quite simply, he was the greatest fan of MJ I have ever met. While discussing music one evening, I told him that “Stranger in Moscow” was a song I wish I could listen to more often. My Sony Walkman was playing UB40’s “Can’t help falling in love”. Dev sang the first four lines of “Stranger in Moscow” for me and then offered a deal – we could swap what our “Walkmen” were holding. So this way, I ended up with the Blood on the Dance Floor tape that had “Stranger in Moscow” and Dev had his UB40 with a host of other cheesy love songs in the “Now that’s what I call Love!” tape.

I was not very generous to Dev in our future dealings. I ended up taking the History Part 1 & 2 tapes and never giving them back.

Then in 2001, in Pune, I met Pushkar Krishna, my room mate’s brother. Impressed by my knowledge on books and music, he took me one day to the infamous Fergusson College road. After a bulk of books and tapes that we carried home, he put a smile on my face by a simple gesture that I remember vividly till this day. He gifted to me Invincible – MJ’s last album.

From my perspective, the best part was that MJ’s music always found a way to get to me. Call it luck, but it just happened. I never tried hard. I never had to.

I graduated to Michael Jackson much later than I should have. But it happened. I traced his music back and forth. In this journey of music, I have met very few people of my generation who actually knew what Michael Jackson was all about — for mine is a generation that has seen Michael Jackson as a fading star. What a pity would it be for those people who now are left wondering, having seen Michael Jackson for the first time on the front page of the newspapers yesterday, in his death. Would he be greater to them in death than when he was alive? Would they ever know what he was all made of? Would they realize the gravity of this loss?

Does someone see the irony in this?

One guy calls me Pakistani after knowing my family migrated from Punjab’s Pakistan during partition. He says that yesterday I must have been a happy man, afterall Pakistan won the cricket match. I ask him if he had similar thoughts about the bengali friends he had, who came from East Bengal in East Pakistan — he has not heard of it. I ask him East Pakistan, 1971 war, he doesn’t know about it. I asked him 1947 partitioning of India, he tells me he never loved history. And then, as if forgiving me of my sins, he calls me an immigrant.

I have faced this situation at least two dozen times and yet I can’t learn to live with it. It just gets worse.

These are the young Indians who aspire to change the world.

In the overall constructive years of my adolescence, my cricketing conscience was taking shape. So in 1996, when Michael Atherton played the shot and at ESPN they said that it’s the best cover drive you can ever get to see, true to copy book style, I took it to heart.

It was also the year when I formed one of my earliest opinions of the Indian Cricket team of the pre-John Wright/Ganguly era. I noticed that India always lost its first test match when they toured. And then they trailed. If they were lucky, they’d come back with a 1-1 result but that was a rarity. Generally it was 0-2, 1-2, or worse, 0-3.

Indeed, it was ironical that when this particular opinion was formed, the same very series, two boys debuted in the second game of a series that India was trailing and one of them went on to bring a whole new dawn to Indian Cricket; the one on which I have named an “era” in itself. The second cricketer, of course, will be seen as the one who always lived under the shadows but rose to be called the greatest test cricketer India has ever seen.

So the 1996 India tour of England, has been on my mind this evening. Why, you ask? None of the reasons above, I can tell you that.

Well, the India tour of England, 1996 was India’s first test tour after the 1996 World Cup debacle. It was also the tour when Ganguly and Dravid debuted in the second test match, in Lords and Dravid fell short of a well deserved century by all but 5 runs. But why I remember this tour the most is because of one Chris Lewis. A well-toned, dark body, running at full throttle and single-handedly destroying the Indian batting in the first test match at Birmingham, England.

It was horror. A 15 year old test cricket loving boy’s, and I tell you – you won’t find many, expectations lay shattered.

And it is indeed an irony again, that the same Chris Lewis is in prison. Well, maybe not the same Chris Lewis.

It formed some opinions, that series. It still does.