Ideally.......

The word `ideally' is possibly one of the most absurdly abused and terribly ill-treated in the English lexicon. If it can express its anguish standing on its hind-legs, it would probably collapse in a pool of gut-wrenching emotion and tears, before it completes the heart-rending story.  Story of being used very loosely, almost being bandied about, to describe various situations which don't even have nodding acquaintance with the ideal world.  If one thinks about it, this comes about because things, people and even thoughts which populate the ideal world differ drastically from person to person. Meaning there are so many ideals and sometimes the spectrum is so woefully stretched.  This is bad enough to confuse us but then the word is also used when people do not really mean `ideally' but something close to `preferably', thereby taking the downgrade a few levels further.  Where is the ideal stuff and where is petty, personal preference??

The other day, we were at a carnatic music concert and heard continuous chatter from the row behind.  One gentleman was behaving so demonstratively in his interventions with his wife during the concert, as if he considered himself a connoisseur a few rungs above the rest of the audience. I suspect this attitude he reserves for dealings with the spouse exclusively, because he can not find many kindred souls, who are either so sympathetic or so tolerant to put up with his kind of bombast.  After the singer concluded a song, this gasbag told the wife 'he should have ideally sung Devadi Deva instead of that one'.  At another point he opined that the singer should have ideally done raga Arabhi instead of Thodi.  It was clear he was stating a matter of his own personal, narrow preference, based on what he knew better, but forcibly made it part of the big ideal world. My dear wife, when we came out, said with a wicked grin `Ideally, I would not have married him even under severe duress; and if I was guilty of that grievous crime for reasons beyond my control, ideally I would have dumped him forthwith'! Agreed, completely.   

This word `ideally' will be repeated umpteen times on the day Indian cricket team  is announced for a match.  Probably about 1.3 billion times.  We are all inborn pundits of the game, have very strong opinions on its every little aspect and are compulsively driven by a burning desire to spout opinions, to boot.  So we hear so many 'ideal' combinations for the team tumbling out into public domain. `Ideally Jadeja should have played instead of Ashwin' or `Ideally Pant should have been the wicket keeper instead of Saha'. Given that there are eleven players in the team, about seven usually select themselves and for each of the other four slots there are at least multiple alternatives for each, one can imagine the permutations available.  That many mind-boggling ideal selections would be talked about for the next few days.  Then there would be expert comments like `Bumrah should have ideally started from the other end' (that would have been uttered just before he took three wickets on the trot in four overs to embarrass that expert) or Rahul should have ideally played in the middle order (again, he would have scored a century opening the innings).

  

Contextually, nowadays you hear a lot about what the ideal government should have done ideally to stanch the Covid spread.  This is a classic case of defective hindsight propping up dubious arguments. Nobody, absolutely none, had a clue as to how the contagion would spread and behave in India. Nor do we hear of any sizable country going that way in the quest to beat the virus. But now we hear seemingly intuitive guys, with `assumed'  foresight (not one could have correctly divined where that one mosquito circling in the room would touch down even after it squats on his own nose!) venturing forth righteously thus. 'That is why I said long back ideally we should not have had any lock-down; we should have ideally let the contagion spread so that herd immunity would have resulted'.  Now, there is no real data to shore-up this point of view, but proponents would still want to claim that ideally we should have done what Sweden did, no lock-down at all.  That Sweden is obviously a far-cry from the ideally suited comparison here for a thousand reasons is nowhere in the zone of reckoning for these seers.

Another of the government initiatives going through the churn nowadays is the ideal financial package. Ideally, govt should have put cash in the hands of every Indian who needed that.  But the government has contradicted that by going with what they think is ideally the best way, to give part as cash/kind and the rest as a loan for the family or small business to have money at their disposal for a fresh start, without unduly straining the government finances. One thing we all know for a fact is the ideally people prefer cash to loans at any level, since only one of them involves what is called repayment.  We have not heard the final ideal solution in this matter yet, the jury is still out. We will have to ideally wait awhile.

Everyone and as Boycott would say, his mother-in-law are now saying ideally the migrants should have been allowed to travel back to their home states at the beginning of the lock-down. The troubling visuals of hordes of migrants walking on highways and train tracks, burdened by kids and luggage, should make all of us  agree that this was not how it should be actually, forget about ideally. Rational individuals would believe that with the pestilence hovering over as a threatening cloud, ideally the migrants should have been kept in their shelters, properly cared for in terms of food and medical facilities in the cities because cities could handle the pressures better. This process was supposed to give precious time to the completely unprepared state governments to set up shelter, food arrangements, medical support etc to deal with the inevitable virus surge when the migrants return home.  Apart from reducing exposure for everyone to higher risks if a lot of people were moving around earlier.  Many parts of the ideal scenario did not work well in the cities for various reasons and due to the failures on multiple fronts.  And the ugly results are out for everybody to see now.  All of us need to ideally hang our heads in shame, but I know better; that won't happen.

A very common sentiment one hears in the stock market is `Oh, shucks, I should have ideally picked stock X over stock Y.'  I cannot tell where `ideally' comes into play in this gamble because one is expected to pick on the basis of facts and take the consequences, remembering this is not always a game of science.  There are a lot of imponderables in this, which can skew the results away from expectations.  If the idealist in you is tending to punt or speculate without basis, then this is ideally another case of cribbing in hindsight.

Very recently I came across statements about ideally an aid project to operate in a disaster situation,  running the entire operation on the pillars of neutrality, impartiality and independence. There is a lot said about how these principles, once adhered to, would ensure that the deserving people get the aid and funds were spent most usefully. But it is also very clear this has not fully worked in many aid projects. Actually we know it does not, even in a simple food distribution exercise involving some 200 people. So why would the principles work in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Balkans or Rwanda, Syria -- all complicated places riven by local conflicts, exacerbated by political meddling by other countries??  Ideally what we need to do is inject a good dose of pragmatism in the principles in dealing with such dire situations.

So, we should ask what is meant when we loosely say `ideally' in very mundane contexts?  It would be apparent that it means different things to different people in the same context, because comprehension levels as well as expectations are different.  Actually there is no specific hint of anything ideal in such routine perceptions and statements and we find out -- surprise, surprise -- that`ideally' just translates directly to `actually what I like'.

After this my dear wife and I have decided that philosophically we will not ideally use the word `ideally' anywhere, if we can help it!!

Takeaways After 30 Days

God promise, I did not plan to venture into a sequel to the previous Covid blog post. But the problem is, there has been an absolute dearth of material flitting through the mind, which has been bludgeoned numb by the onslaught of virus related discussion all around. But do not fret, folks; I am not going to add to the information overload all of you are suffering from -- me too -- regarding Covid, with lane-wise, street-specific statistics. Just wanted to share some tit-bits my antenna has picked up over the past month about what is probably happening out there, when most people are happily or unhappily constrained to stay leashed to their homes. I am certain that all these nuggets, which are way out of common people's reach, are at least new, if not useful, to you. No, no need to thank me.  You are welcome. The least I can do. Just read on.

Trust me, in some cities and towns, certain types of movie songs have been banned out of sheer fright and as a matter of absurd precaution.  Ones which go like Aa jaa sanam, Aajaa re aa zara, Aayiye meherbaan in Hindi and Anbe Vaa, Nee enge en anbe, Vaaraayo en thozhi in Thamizh, (this is a very long list, but I hope you get the drift) which could even remotely be misinterpreted as an invitation to you-know-who, have been banished. Anyone who is heard to even badly hum such a song (even if it is a totally different one but comes out like one of these, thanks to the singer's/hummer's skill or the complete lack of it) runs the risk of being labelled a traitor to the community.  This serious antipathy has spread wings so fast that it is more infectious than the virus itself and can be equally injurious to health, I am told.

Old fogeys in various communities have been frightened out of their wits so much by a specific piece of intelligence filtering in. That the virus seems to have a very sharp search engine, multiple times more powerful than Google, which seeks and effortlessly culls out data relating to benign senior citizens minding their own sedate business. In the absence of clinching evidence as to wherefrom such data is being pulled out by the virus, panicked elders are going out of their way to achieve a complete wipe-out of all information regarding their birth dates and the like from systems supporting passports, aadhaar card, PAN, whatever.  Even birth certificates and SSLC books are being demolished. After the virus is gone, it might take another life time to reinstate all such data, if at all possible, in various Government offices. But the immediate goal seems to be to significantly diminish the threat of mortality.  They reason that if the virus gets them, this latter work would be redundant any way.  They firmly believe that if the virus does not know one is a senior citizen, there is less danger.

Swiggy, Zomato and assorted delivery companies were jolted by their discovery of a startling trend two weeks into lockdown - that the demand for Chinese cuisine evaporated into thin air, without a trace.  No, not because Indians have been offended by the inept way China handled the virus outbreak.  We have tolerated much worse from them for decades. But some vague research paper from a remote corner of Mongolia has apparently concluded (no proof has been provided, as usual) that the virus is very fond of  Chinese food, especially of the Wuhan denomination, as well as bodies used to it. That is the reason for that country and province being preferred as the originator of the contagion.  This obviously is too simple a rationale for Trump and the like, who are looking for more sinister designs behind the origin of the virus.  The same research paper also stated that the next preferred cuisine for the virus was Continental, meaning Spanish, Italian, French, etc. This has been borne out by the trajectory of the virus, taking it to Europe first and then to US which is partial to all those types of foods and many more.  Obviously the spicy, tangy Indian food is not a hot favourite in this milieu, which explains its less aggressive tangle with our country so far; even though the `curry' served in Britain seems to have a better appeal.

Another secret paper published inside White House has firmed up the theory that the hotter climes of South Asia have been able to dodge the virus significantly better, more or less.  Some experts have also expressed this opinion.  Keen to avoid a repeat when the virus comes visiting again later for the next round and to demonstrate his prowess as a `thinking' leader, Trump has stumbled on serendipity. He seems to have ordered Pentagon to try and violently tilt the axis of earth such that USA ends up relocating geographically to South Asia, catapulting all of us to USA.  The huge expense for this rather intricate project is being justified, it seems, with the following incontrovertible logic.  That with this fundamental shift, USA can stop worrying about H1B visas and all related administrative headaches since the whole of South Asia will be in the erstwhile US anyway, with or without visas.  And it is a bonus that the wall and Mexicans can be forgotten for ever.  `I am smarter than all of you', the President seems to have boasted after he pitched his idea to his appreciative staff.  It doesn't look like the fact that he will be China's neighbour has dawned on him yet.  I was not prepared to take this whole thing seriously, but my dear wife, who is a keen 'fan' of Trump's, swears this must be real, given that the harebrained contents of the plan seem to be very much in character.

Heavy drinkers -- drunkards seems a slur, even in these trying times -- are, at the best of times when booze is available aplenty, nervous people.  When supplies in the open market have dried up and even the open market itself is absconding, this tribe has become desperate in the extreme.  They are out to forage whatever stock is available wherever and to that end, are using all their extensive networks for research and execution. A teetotaler friend recently told some of his cronies that he had some spare booze left from some celebration.  Almost overnight, he started getting calls and messages from perfect strangers at all ungodly hours. God knows how they got the contact details, but this category of people acquire high grade resourcefulness when they are in an acutely deprived state, I understand.  They were asking the friend to confirm that he was a genuine contraband dealer and he could supply to specific locations in the city, in bulk at twice/thrice the market rate.  The friend is now more stricken with this infliction than he would have been if the virus visited him.

Women folk at home are sick of the men doing binge watching of whatever Netflix and Prime can throw at them, regardless of the language.  Women would have been happier if men made themselves a tiny bit useful with chores at home, but no such luck.  Not only that, the latter want to replicate the multiplex experience and do this by rearranging sofas/recliners to get the feel of the Gold Class, switch on the aircons and start ordering the women to start supplying eats and drinks at their seats.  Reports are out that the wives are viciously getting back, resorting to playing the national anthem frequently, disrupting the show and making the men stand up when they least expect that. 

During regular working days, habitual liars got away explaining their late home-coming from a round of pubs with a vague `Oh, had a couple of long conference calls'. This group seems to be in serious trouble. Wives are asking how come such conference calls have ceased suddenly during WFH times, when logically they should have been more frequent. So, nowadays men are hiding away in balconies and terraces, pretending to be on phone calls while watching movies on laptops, with earphones tuned in.  We are waiting for 'discovery' time and a report on the consequential pandemonium -- only a matter of time.

I am sure a lot more is going on and it is impossible to cover everything, you will agree.  We just hope the virus recedes soon and we are all back to some semblance of normalcy.  Amen.

The Scourge Is Here

Disclaimer:  The intent of this blog post is not to scoff at Covid or belittle the collective efforts of the country to fight it.  In such seriously depressing times, if a few people can smile through all the weariness, the objective would be achieved.
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Ours is a country where a cacophonous and high-decibel argumentativeness, often acrimonious,  characterizes everything from parliamentary debates through TV news to street-side bargains and household discussions.  Amartya Sen has done a stupendous job of portraying this part of the Indian psyche in his book.  Even democracy is equated unabashedly with the ability to bludgeon opponents with larynx power in public spaces. And we Indians are experts at looking for ways to cut corners, dodge regulations, identify or innovatively create (Jugaad?) rat-holes to hide away from authority, while scooting from responsibility and accountability.  I know that is too much of a generalisation, forgive me. Most of all these are predictably blatant, self-serving efforts, with a few exceptions here and there.  So, nothing one comes across in the media about people's responses and reactions to Covid itself and to the government's efforts to fight the virus, however bizarre and asinine, should surprise anyone.  We Indians are like that only and will never shy away from switching on our headlights and drive against the traffic on highways because such absurd behaviour is ingrained in us and is our birthright.  Even if it results in a chaotic mess and public disaster time and again.

So, an average Indian should not lose his equanimity even when members of the state assemblies and government ministers mindlessly choose to attend soirees and bashes, hosted by dim-witted celebrities who have recently returned from a wild `phoren' sojourn in Italy and France.  Completely ignoring the country's Prime Minister and government screaming from roof-tops that people should practise social distancing, cease community activities and stay indoors as much as possible.  Or when self appointed, godliness-infused spiritual agents, surely based on direct diktats from God Himself, organize massive congregations in public spaces to sing and pray for reprieve from Covid.  Or when thousands of purblind herds of followers ignore all common sense and attend such gatherings.  Or when the Chief Minister of a state government vigorously bans in the morning through a government mandate, all gatherings of ten or more people and directly proceeds to preside over a pompous wedding with a thousand people attending, in the evening.  For us, this is par for the course and all we feel is deja vu!!

Comic relief in this distress comes from multiple directions.  One old classmate of mine from a village near Thirunelveli in Thamizh Nadu called a few times to ascertain what Bangalore was doing in terms of taking precautions.  Being highly pro-active with marked political leanings, he wanted to implement similar measures in those communities.  But given the agrarian nature of the population, working from home was not a concept suitable to their setting.  Nor was the idea of self quarantine/isolation of people returning from foreign trips appealing .  Finally he agreed to stay with simple measures like looking out for people falling sick, social distancing, avoiding community galas etc.  He ended the final conversation with a weak joke that his concern was that they were probably the closest in the country to the Chinese submarines and warships -- possibly infected? - in the Indian ocean.

I was fondly hoping that some authentic looking American scientist (we don't trust the local ones, do we?) would advocate the theory that smartphones and their damning accomplices like WhatsApp, Instagram etc can be certain carriers of the virus, if people are engaged with them long enough.  For a brief interregnum, the government came up with a reasonable but partial alternative deterrent in the form of the one-minute advisory, beginning with a cough, whenever one made a call on the phone.  Having to compulsorily listen to that, many people deferred their calls and if the first call went unanswered, refused to redial.  And the smarter counterparts did not call back either, having got allergic to the same advisory.  My dear wife neither got calls nor made many and said she was put off by the idea of hearing the advisory in the same unappetising voice, as if she would have been happier if Arijit Singh and Shreya Ghosal had recorded the same as a song!  I am sure this month's phone bill will be considerably less for many households.

And today, I heard one Dr Thomas Cowan, who convincingly links the last few major virus outbreaks to increasing electrical signals on the earth and above.  His theory (may be someone else's, which he is propagating) is that the Spanish flu in 1917 was the result of the introduction of the first wave of radio signals, which invade our bodies and result in cells decaying and getting discharged as a contagion.  Thus, at the end of the world war, there was a massive surge in the number of radars etc which brought about the next outbreak and so on.  The final nail on the coffin is, if this is indeed true, that the current Chinese virus (let me make Trump happy) is the result of the humongous increase in electrical signals from, guess what, G5.  I was floored when he finishes by asking if we can surmise where the biggest G5 drive is concentrated.  Yes, Wuhan, in China.  Creepy, isn't it?

A week back, all of a sudden, there was a great proliferation of masked faces in our community and one could not even say hello with certainty because recognition was rendered difficult. They all looked similarly simian with the protruding mask.  Unless you got within two inches of the individual and did a nose-rub Maori style, there was no way of fixing the identity -- and that would have been violative of social distancing norms.  If they hailed first, voice identification was also sub optimal because the mask significantly corrupted the voice.  So, for a few days now, I am enthusiastically waving in the general direction of everyone, a la the Pope, and keep going.  But we should be grateful that the masks are not all in a single colour.  They come in various bright colours, otherwise would have been very boring.  God bless the mask makers.

Amidst all the hullabaloo, there was a very serious discussion in some group about the need, not even desirability, of keeping golf courses open -- the logic was that golfers can go to courses just to practise social distancing and the exercise is a bonus.  There was collective angst and frustration because courses were closed and people could not take out their anger on the poor golf balls, which never once reacted in a negative way but ended up some 45 degrees away from the intended spot, thereby showing their displeasure.

Some other hilarious take-aways from this situation, according to aggrieved anti-virus campaigners -- are that everything imported from China for the next few years, including metro rail coaches should be boiled in hot water for appropriate period of time before being commissioned; the other alternative is not to import anything from China, thereby imposing a cost on the country for exporting the virus (Trump will eventually say this and gladden a lot of hearts, I think);  many of the usually entertaining politicians like Rahul Gandhi, Mamta Banerjee have been very restrained and almost silent in the face of the virus and that is probably the only positive emerging from the situation; all domestic pets seem to be terribly upset that everyone is staying home all the time and are probably planning to take people out for walks once in a while, leashed or otherwise; the expression of anger/disappointment at IPL being postponed, as if that is almost the end of the world, even if not caused by the virus.

I am only hoping that the tribe of TV anchors and all those bawling, truculent people who occupy those boxes on the screen are treated as extremely dangerous in this current context and kept in isolation for 5 years, to protect the masses and also the virus (so that some sample survives for research purposes)!!


     


 

   

Went On A Cruise!

For at least one decade, my dear wife and I have been unwaveringly unanimous - very rare indeed - in declining all invitations to join groups of friends on a cruise.  Visuals in commercials of the huge cruise ship and the oh-so-blue ocean in the commercials were good, but not tempting enough, so we stayed away.  Only because we thought that a cruise could wait till we are closer to the wheel-chair phase of our lives! When, finally, we disembarked from our first cruise a month back, our judgement got a thundering affirmation.  If you are the reasonably active kind, cruises can wait.  We consciously chose a short 5 day cruise from Miami to the Caribbean islands of Turks & Caicos and Dominican Republic, to limit the cumulative boredom that we could absorb.  There are quite a few enjoyable things about the cruise, but a longer one would have probably stifled us too much.  Juxtapose that with the fact that there are very strange people who stay afloat on cruises for months, across continents.  God bless them! And we even heard the story of a widow who prefers to criss-cross continents on different cruises for months, without getting to anything remotely looking like a home on shore.  A very different breed indeed.

I am not exaggerating when I say that the most physically draining activity on a cruise is to get out of the bed in the morning and reach the deck where the activities, especially the one exercising the food-pipe, are concentrated.  A day's routine for many individuals/groups seemed to be "breakfast-sunbathing-drinks-lunch-pool-tea-bar-dinner-back to bed"; but there were those whose days stretched to 16 hours of the above routine, thereby indicating it was far from monotonous for them.  We guess our types were the wrong ones on the ship because these chaps knew what they wanted to do on board and stuck aggressively to their plan, having fun all the way.  One common denominator for all these groups was that they all had purchased a Drinks Package for the cruise, which gave them access to sufficient quantity of liquor, any time of the day, during the cruise.  Just so that the usually recalcitrant kids did not complain, they bribed them with the Soft Drinks Package; consequently, there was this particular brand of absolutely noisy peace on board, as the drinks flowed liberally.

The only other phenomenon that assumed greater proportions than drinking was of course, eating.  Let me put things in perspective by saying that out of the 24 hours in a day, there was not a single hour something was not being put out by the cruise's chefs for people to gorge on.  The completely captive audience, perennially looking to fill up some unidentified crevice in an already over-burdened stomach with something more, was an eager and willing partner in this tango. I would say that about three quarters of the cruisers were members of the brigade striving to stuff their face all the time.  About 15% were those whose spirits were willing to participate in this gluttonous orgy but their bodies rejected the overture due to lack of capacity. The residual lot managed to retain their innate discipline, ate what they had to and looked distastefully at the massive spread of food as well as those who were having a hearty go at that.  My dear wife succinctly described the scene as a non-stop buffet for 5 days, where food was aplenty, plates were on hand and payment had already been made - whether you eat or not. So.

For all that, we found the vegetarian selections to be limited and repetitive.  One night, at the formal dinner, for want of anything else I asked for a strawberry bisque, which was listed as a starter.  What arrived was a dessert, masquerading as a solid soup/starter.  Not bad it was, but it sort of turned the sequence of my dinner dishes on its head and I was almost ready to leave the table after the beginning.  There seemed to a sizable group of chefs of Indian origin and for that, there was an awful spread of Indian/Asian food.  These chefs somehow gave me the impression that they did not want to indulge in pow-wows; they probably thought I would ask for idli, dosa or curd rice.  They thought right!!

We kinda estimated that about half the cruisers were happily obese.  Either they were life-time cruise hoppers on an eating binge or were just avidly practising their art on the ship instead of in their homes.  When we were next to a group of such gifted people, we felt like midgets in the midst of giants and shrank ourselves a bit to make way for them.  To think that a few ounces of extra flesh on my body is a frequent subject matter for discussion at home, brought a wry smile to our faces.  The question we tried to find answer to was do obese and fat people actively seek out cruises, because the whole cruise system seems to lend to their way of life of huge amount of eating and very little exercise??     

If we were entertaining any stray thoughts of sailing alongside some whale or shark or for a stellar show by a school of dolphins, we banished that within a few hours of boarding. Nothing showed up for long hours, except a few sea birds which probably had lost their way. We will never find out. We wondered where they park themselves when they get tired, unless they could land on the waves like sea-planes do. The obvious answer is they never tire of flying, probably.  We got excited whenever we saw a few coast-lines and by looking at the ship's position, guessed the land parcels to belong to Cuba or some other Caribbean island. Few stray vessels showed up and other cruise ships crossed us in inky darkness, reminding me of that famous quip by PG Wodehouse about `ships crossing in the sea at midnight'.  Having said that, it was tremendously peaceful to just watch the ocean slip by for hours and the changing colour of the sea depending upon the depth, stuff lying underneath, the sun etc was just fascinating.  With a book, one can sit in the state-room's balcony and shut out all the hubbub on the main deck, if necessary and we chose to do that often.

Strangely, we did not hobnob with anybody for considerable lengths of time.  No friends were made.  Was it due to our desire to keep away from crowded locations and raucous groups or did others shun us because we were looking like the weird ones??  Compare that with a train journey in India, when overnight we effortlessly make friends of strangers and food get exchanged four times in a few hours!!  So, why is a cruise different?  I am sure there were a few others like us on the cruise, but they must have been hiding from us too!  The answer is that there were no berths to share and everyone was in a room, however cramped it was.

Some enjoyable parts of the cruise involved a trio of young violists from Belarus, who were fantastic and kept us engaged for a couple of hours each evening, without repeating too many songs.  Also, an Australian singer, who had a great voice and sang songs from the past that we could identify with.  What more, he asked for requests and all ours were belted out with fervour.  And what more, he acknowledged us among that decent crowd.  Good stuff.  And our valet for the 5 days was a smiling Balinese man, who grinned broadly the first time he saw us, pronounced my name faultlessly and did a `namaste' in true Indian/Balinese fashion.  Felt very good and he became a good ally for short conversations about his beautiful country and people.

Fifth day on the cruise, at breakfast, I looked forlornly at what I had on my plate - the same omelette and hash browns I have had for the previous four days.  I recalled ST Coleridge's lines `Water, water everywhere, not a drop to drink'.  So much food all around and somehow I was feeling constrained in choice!!  A sense of relief and pleasure swept over me when I realised that was our final meal on the cruise and in a couple of hours, we would be disembarking.

Will we go on another cruise ever??  My dear wife thinks yes.  But with a group of friends and on a cruise where a lot of vegetarian food is available.  I may be able to live with that. 

Until then, `land ahoy' it is for us.



  

Vocational Behaviour Patterns

As keen observers of our cacophonous environment and turbulent life as it swirls around us, as most of us would want to pride ourselves, we should be familiar with the unmistakable traits of people plying their individual trade or vocation.  It is not as if I woke up from slumber today and decided to do behaviour-analysis of specific tribes of people we exist with.  This is the cumulative experience-driven gleaning, aggregated from decades of observations, distilled with care and canned for casual reading; never to be mixed up with a diatribe on people of different vocations.  The intent here is not to hurt anyone, but just to hold a tiny mirror to some sets of people.  So, please drop that cynical and critical prism you generally look through and frown; just chuckle, laugh or ignore, as you please.

Have you noticed that delivery people of any stripe, religion, caste, creed, colour and denomination, regardless of whatever exalted or humble company they work for, always arrive at your door-step at an inopportune time??  When you would rather have them somewhere else, say, a few kilometres away??  The general high-handed assumption with which these deliverers start their work is that you have ordered the stuff, so you are duty-bound to wait at your address, ignoring everything else in life and just focusing on the impending delivery.  The companies will graciously mention a period, say 9 am to 7 pm, long enough to  deny you the freedom to do anything else except wait for the tryst.  And you know when the delivery finally shows up - at 6.50 pm, to enable the company to gloat on on-time delivery, `always'. If you need the stuff badly, you have no choice but to stick around; if you move away to the bathroom or neighbour's house, it is very likely that the deliverer goes on to the next victim and your delivery is re-tagged for 9 am to 7 pm the next day, make for one more day of entertainment and excitement for you.

The other salient features of deliverers are (1) Pressing the calling bell at home thrice within 4 seconds with alacrity, to show their impatience with waiting - the gall of it -- disdainfully disregarding your own waiting for hours (2) Never showing up in the mornings when people generally are up and about and ruthlessly disturbing you during the afternoon siesta. And they are always in a hurry, perhaps answering their sworn calling to go to the next chap and wake him up too (3) Waiting till you climb up two floors after doing a chore on the ground floor of your home and then ringing the bell with obvious glee at your breathless discomfiture, having to descend again (4) Calling you when you are 10 kms away and asking you to reach post-haste so that you can sign for the debit or credit card, for which you have been waiting for one week; and yes, he can wait for 90 seconds, nothing more. (5) Perfectly knowing well that you are retired, captive audience at their disposal, asking you for approval to enter your residential complex with 20 other deliveries to do; then incredibly disposing of all the other deliveries before finally coming to you.

What about auto-drivers? The moment you approach one, the curtain opener is invariably his spitting whatever is in the mouth - colourful or otherwise - out on the road, just a foot or so away from you.  I received edification from a seasoned and tough auto-driver dealer that we should not assume this act is just a casual, innocuous one.  This sets the contours for the forthcoming negotiation/possible ride and cautions you that the next spit may not be a foot away, unless you are reasonable in dealing with his own inherent unreasonableness.  Most auto drivers seriously believe they are God's gifts to people, doing a big favour to commuters by taking them anywhere and their behaviour generally reflects this attitude.  The fake bonhomie with which they welcome arrivals at a railway or bus station stems from  the warped belief that each one is new to the city and is a solid candidate for mindless fleecing.  The moment they become disenchanted in this pursuit, they turn rude and recently one chap even manhandled a person who refused to deal with him.  This is not to say, there are no good specimens among auto drivers.  There are some, kind, polite, helpful auto drivers, but you seldom meet them!!  They seem to carefully hide themselves from us.

A true-blue newspaper deliverer will always give you Deccan Herald instead of your favourite and usual Times of India twice a month; and twice a month one of the four papers you buy will go missing completely without any pretense of being replaced. The agent's excuse always is that he has new campus recruits to the highly demanding job and the intern/trainee deserves time to learn.  Until then you better eat up the paper that is served.  Also, if it is raining, you can count on the guy dropping the paper in obviously wet areas, such that you get some 60% of the news, if lucky.  The rest is a soggy, unreadable mess.  Once, when I complained to the deliverer, he nonchalantly dismissed me saying `Sir, this is all old news.  Go online and get the latest'.  And he rode off, looking at his smartphone as he rode, leaving me speechless.

During our childhood, a security guard's profile was such that he was at least above average height, had a good enough physique to deter random guys from creating small scale mischief; he was typically a retired guy from the army.  Nowadays anything goes and we see security guards who are five feet tall, scrawny, weighing about 50 kgs and one wonders if they can even stand up to budding and aspiring bullies, leave alone midnight marauders.  A security guard is not one, if he does not nod off during the working hours and if you watch one periodically for a few hours, you can catch him blissfully asleep, ignoring the hordes of mosquitoes which swarm around him.  Just to delude everyone including himself that he is on duty, he manages to tap the bamboo stick a couple of times on the ground at a reasonable frequency.  I guess it reassures himself  but keeps people in the immediate vicinity more awake and alert, especially the older ones, who are sleep-deprived anyway.  At the end of the day, so long as no untoward incident takes place, everyone is happy and a bunch of such young kids are probably just about the deterrent required.

Then there are the house-keepers, who inexplicably keep moving things from their original positions (where you want them to be) during their elaborate dusting performance every single day, at least by a few inches, prompting you to readjust after they are done.  This minor, probably involuntary,  revolt either gives them the satisfaction that they control the placements or convinces them that they are doing their jobs.  A maid or gardener, who does not 'kill' the same relative frequently, just to get a day off, does not qualify to be a gardener or maid. A gardener who arrives to trim the plants protruding into the balconies on the higher floors, will never arrive with the required ladder; even if it is a monthly chore he has been performing inadequately for years.  He will reach with the scissors, sickle and other contraptions, then doubtfully look up at the balcony he has known had existed for time immemorial, look around to find a jugaad-like solution and then go to retrieve the ladder which should have come along in the first place.

Many of us have grown up with teachers amongst us.  Some of us might have encountered multiple teachers at home, in each generation.  Like yours faithfully, whose grandfather, father, many uncles and aunts had all been Principals, Professors, Headmasters and teachers.  And then came the teacher of all teachers, my dear wife.  So much so, that the arduous responsibility of being a student or learner at home squarely and heavily falls on the few souls, who decide to be non-teachers.  A teacher seldom casts aside the teaching mantle, even when he or she is not in school.  The rest of the family learns to cope with constant questioning because the teacher believes teaching through catechism is the better way.  Even before one finishes the explanation to the previous question, the next `why' or `how so' pops out quickly, making the most prolific of speakers struggle for breath and words after some time.  If the answer or clarification does not provide satisfaction, while thankfully you are not asked to kneel on the floor or stand up on the bench or get out of home, there is no mistaking the fact that the teacher is unhappy about your shortcoming and a corrective session will follow down the line, involving a serious monologue.

Sometimes the home-teacher's instruction could be contradictory, leaving you confounded as to which way you should go.  My father was a real guru for all of us and a lot of our learning came from just observing him.  But sometimes he used to get testy about some action of mine and I had been frequently admonished not to talk back at elders, even if some questions are specifically asked of me.  Point taken, I used to assume the stoical position of a statue, cast in concrete, all respectful and stubborn silence, during the next grilling session.  Then I was accused of being akin to a thief caught in the act and having nothing to say in self-defence and was encouraged to at least mumble something in response.  I learnt not to fall for this taunt because once I responded, things go back to status-quo-ante, with me being admonished again for talking back!!  He never solved this distressing and vicious tangle, by laying out a clear process for such situations.  Didn't matter because, after half an hour, he was playing cricket with all of us and all else was forgotten.

My current in-house teacher is very kind and patient and I never get reprimanded for my acts of omission and commission.  But I do get the feeling that some teaching is always going on in the background, consciously or otherwise.  I try to learn as much as I can but I think I am yet to make the grade in terms of learning with my dear teacher-wife!










   

Multiple Shades Of Insomnia

My fervent appeal to readers is not to entertain any thoughts of a parallel between `Fifty Shades of Grey' and this title.  One has nothing to do with the other.  With that preamble, let me proceed.

Once one becomes a senior citizen (in many cases, even much earlier than that), it seems age gets you happy discounts everywhere, but God ensures that even your sleep gets sadly pared down.  The degree to which one forcibly gives up on sleep varies, but some loss at this juncture in life is a reality.  Of course, God perversely makes some exceptions and some people never pause to realise they are expected to struggle for sleep or others do.  They just continue as if nothing has changed even well after 60 and sleep their way to our envy.  My dear wife has such a boon (God bless her) and another chap who can sleep wherever and whenever he wants even in a state of perpendicularity (I suspect he catches a satisfactory nap even while standing in a metro train) is my brother.  Obviously, since the bounty has been cornered by such folks, others in the family are made to suffer that extra bit in compensation, in order to preserve the clan average and this is where I enter the scene.

Many love-stricken youngsters may enjoy staying awake, pensively singing, a la Dev Anand in Guide, about the slow-moving night.  But for most others suffering from some shade of insomnia, the reason is not any such emotional wrench.  Try as much as they can, their fate consigns them to toss and turn endlessly in their beds and when they are exhausted from this agonising exercise, fall asleep for a short while before waking up and resuming the tossing and turning.  My own personal experience is a bit different and rather unique. I go to bed like others and sleep well for two hours.  But then, a silent alarm goes inside the body, specifically my nose, which organizes a block at that time in the left nostril, in my horizontal position.  I surface with one nostril temporarily but completely closed for emergency repairs and another one pretending to do the work for both.  After mollycoddling the shut nostril with a combination of spray, drops of sesame oil, a dash of Vicks etc, I am forced to remain in sitting posture for a couple of hours to avoid a tragic relapse.  My advice to other brethren who suffer from my shade of insomnia, is to take advantage of this heaven-sent opportunity to sharpen their skills in Solitaire or Word Cross or Scrabble.  Actually, any game on the cell phone helps but those are my favourites.  Sometimes, I even read Omar Khayyam or Bhagavad Gita or some biography (Hitler, recently) to keep the grey matter functional.  After that, when the phone or the book drops from your hand a couple of times and wakes up a few other sound sleepers in the household,-- yes, changing the gorilla glass frequently is the penalty you pay -- you know it is time to restore yourself to the supine position for a re-try.

There are more reasonable but mundane shades of insomnia, in which people force themselves to stay awake till early morning and nod off subsequently.  They begin by eating dinner after 10 pm, then watch a movie or two (some for the 20th time or some such) or something equally inane, before hitting the sack for a few winks.  During a recent discussion about our respective shades of insomnia, I suggested to one such victim that he probably would be better off if he ate his dinner early, as if it was my place to provide expert advice. He condescendingly sneered at me and retorted that he shifted his dinner from 7 to 10 only after he became an insomniac, since eating late helps in killing more time, when one has lots of it on hand.  Strange, I thought but he insisted I should be clear about cause and effect in this context.  He seemed more upset by my analysis than about his insomnia.

What if one is neither fond of nocturnal audio-visual entertainment nor in the habit of reading/games??  How do such people while away their periods of sleepless inactivity?  You would say, `counting sheep' or `doing deep breathing' and all such well-established, but useless nevertheless, antidotes to insomnia.  I am unable to get guidance from my closest advisor-cum-Muse because she is a perfect stranger to this phenomenon.  What follows is not authentic but entirely my guesswork based on some vague conversations, so you don't have to take this seriously.  Some women told me that they rehearse in their minds the entire kitchen routine for the next day, including chopping vegetables, cooking full meals, feeding the family etc.  Those who are not into such domestic chores but are afflicted by insomnia, said they made a list of all the phone calls they would make the next day and practised some conversations as well, with all the grunts, fake laughs and paraphernalia.  Another constituency of insomniacs who delighted in shopping just let their imaginations loose and shopped from all over the globe, mostly for things that they would seldom use or need. 

The sleepless are the ones who are enthused about the time difference between India and USA as this helps them indulge in real conversations with friends across zones.  If one has some ten friends in the USA, then any shade of insomnia actually becomes a gift and a very purposeful tool in handling communications, mostly about trivial stuff, with friends overseas via phone and Whatsapp.  It is probably true that parties at both ends get exhausted and benefit from some sleep after the prolonged pow-wows.  I too have spent part of some nights, mindlessly watching a particular stock oscillating wildly in the US market, even though I had nothing to do with the stock - just for time-pass; I could not remember the name of the stock when I woke up.  There may be a lot of such workouts people can indulge in, so that their sleepless hours are filled up. 

One fallout of insomnia bothers me.  When you are awake after the middle of the night, around 2-3 pm,  a lot of sounds are heard, which you do not normally pay attention to.  And shadows here and there.  Such sounds, shadows etc not only distract you from your book or game but spook your mind a bit, which make you, well more sleepless! TV watching insomniacs are not flustered by these sounds etc because what they watch itself is full of horrible sounds and shadows.  I wish someone develops an App which will prevent such extraneous things from playing ducks and drakes with our minds, especially when you are already suffering from insomnia.

How does one deal with the overwhelming grogginess the next day, if sleep has evaded one completely or mostly?  The prompt advice is for the guy to sleep when sleep envelops him - be it in the morning or afternoon, whenever.  So that some energy is restored.  As usual, contrarians urge such people to keep wide awake through the day so that they are sufficiently and senselessly bushed to get over their sleeplessness, come the night.  Empirical evidence is not available to me to conclude which is the better of these two advices. 

Those cases of techies or others who slog in India for a corporation headquartered in the USA and who necessarily have to interact with their US offices during the night, are outside the ambit of this blog post.  For the simple reason, theirs is not a case of insomnia.  Probably they would rather be asleep blissfully but are forced to stay awake and participate in such 'high-powered', 'educational' and 'meaningful' discussions previously scheduled for the sleeping hours here.  And they are exempt from the category under discussion, because they get handsomely paid for this masochistic experience.  I recall one particular senior in USA who insisted on Asian offices having twice-a-week conference calls with him during our sleeping hours.  After a month of this brainless rigmarole, all the Asian branches unanimously suggested that one such conference call should be scheduled during Asian working hours every week!  Pronto, the calls ceased.

If insomnia hits you after retirement, probably the damage is mitigated because the demand on your time is much less and you can do as you please.  I wonder how people who manage active jobs or even busy with home work, cope with sleeplessness. On the other hand, there are people who take naps during their working hours regularly.  We can let it slide, so long as they do not make fun of insomniacs!!



 

Where The Heck Did The Day Go?

Hours swirl by, days whizz past, nights whoosh into history and soon you are a month older, without anything significantly interesting popping up for you to savour this recent past.  You wonder `where did all that time vanish'??  Sounds familiar??  My question has no scientific shades of the relativity theory, but is something much more fundamental.  Do you recall what you did yesterday in your life??  We have been told time and again that chores, even the mundane and mindless ones kinda expand themselves to fill the time we have on hand.  Still, I bet that if you sit down to tabulate the stuff you did on any particular day, you struggle to barely fill up even half a page of a A4 size paper.  My suggestion is that you don't venture back too far because all of us are seriously susceptible to forget the eminently forgettable things we do and this will complicate the already problematic and distressing exercise, frustrating you even more.

Recently, on a relatively hectic day by my high standards (which means I could laze around only for half the usual quota) I had received crystal clear instructions from 'you know who' to blunder through some tasks/errands and submit the banal `Action Taken Report' by late afternoon.  Evening is usually reserved for Judgement time, a rehearsal for that day when we are finally in front of our creator.  The solemnity of such occasions makes me fidget, standing on one leg for a while and then the other; wringing my hands frenetically and mumbling inaudible excuses (let me tell you, it pays to be unclear in this context). Hoping that you get an air-conditioned room and two square meals in the easier segment of hell - a la the criminal politician lodged in Tihar jail, who failed to share the booty with powers that be and is therefore heavily out of favour.

Her Majesty's commands are usually unambiguous, and blemishless, to the extent that she actually demonstrates once to show me how to fulfill the mandate!! The perceptive and perplexed ones among you may ask why she does not take the final half-step to just compete the job herself and let me applaud heartily from the sidelines.  Go ahead, ask.  To me, it is not a mystery at all.  This is a diabolical plot through which she can chuckle and reassure herself periodically that neither time nor experience has improved me in any way and there is still that yawning gap between her expectation and my execution.  It was deja vu again on that fateful day and she rounded off with a plaintive `how could you have forgotten to do that'??  Some error of omission on my part, let me hasten to confess unabashedly, which has unsurprisingly resulted in nothing short of a cataclysm.  It always does.  Suitably admonished, I did a clinical session of catechism to identify root causes for my lapse (also did a fish bone analysis) and began with a list of things which engaged me on that calamitous day.  And the outcome made me ask the question appearing above as the title of this blog.

*Bought air-ticket for my dear wife.  An astute review of the result revealed that there was an almost fatal flaw.  Had typed Mr instead of Mrs as the title. Apart from incurring her mild rebuke (it never is severe, just to make you feel worse!) for the mistake itself, the resultant situation would have seen her being disallowed boarding.  Would have been disastrous and immediate reparation was warranted. The actual booking took 8 minutes and the fixing of the problem consumed 135 minutes, with multiple calls to almost 80% of the people in the call centre, who were adept at passing me and the problem on to the next guy.  I was bleating like a lamb, when a sympathetic soul corrected the ticket for me. I was all the more nervous because it was not the first time something like this happened with her booking.  I had once booked her mother, herself and brother on a flight exactly 3 months after the date on which they wanted to return from a trip; a genuine error but it came out as if I was eager to keep her entire tribe out in the boondocks for longer.

*WiFi at home has been playing truant for a few days. Every 30 mins, it developed an itchy desire to drop off and went off wandering for a few seconds and then resurrected itself, causing agonizing disruption in browsing.  I can empathize with the people in Kashmir, who are suffering a lot without internet.  The technician from the provider company had become a frequent visitor anyway -- probably he liked our home, its ambience and the cuppa coffee he got? He came happily again for the umpteenth time to dissect the system.  For a good two hours, I winced and struggled to watch him wrestle with the problem without a hint of a solution on the horizon.  In my desperation, I finally told him to reset the WiFi settings and voila, everything was fine.  This seems to be the solution for all problems with gadgets of all hues nowadays.  RESET.  I wish this trick would work with the people too, but we have to discover the specific buttons to push!

*Periodically we have been noticing an unapproved intrusion in our home-- a sedate procession of hordes of ants from one of the bathrooms to a balcony outside through crevices in the woodwork.  For the lives of us, we could not tell why these creatures could not bypass the interiors of our home and take the march through external routes. The tantalizing question has always been `how can we divert this unwanted traffic' without harming the marchers themselves?  Took over two hours to find a benign solution, with  inputs and interventions (some of that unsolicited) from a dozen people, including my mother on phone from Madras, my mother in law, gardener, our resident housekeeper, maid, driver and a few other special invitees.  By the time we finished, there was a queue of  disappointed do-gooders at our door, all craving admission to visit the problem and provide a creative solution.  But, I somehow feel that we will see the disruptive ants again soon and therefore can call on the disappointed good samaritans again.

*Of late, I have repeatedly been stymied to find that favourite CDs don't work properly.  After a couple songs, they stubbornly refuse to deliver any sound, not even a screech.  I ignored this phenomenon for a while but then realised that it was getting to be the new normal - almost like an infection spreading fast, which was just not acceptable.  So,  I sat down patiently to copy the CDs to the desktop and use a tool to burn them on new CDs (actually 20 year old unused CDs, stocked for such eventualities).  Should have taken all of 15 minutes but like a lot of other skills, this one was forgotten too and I had to re-learn the whole stuff; to begin with,  I could not even locate the Windows Media Player and rediscovering that took an enormous amount of time. Had to retrieve it from some corner where it had taken refuge. Every step was a struggle, but finally got done and the the process took over three hours, end to end.  Why not use USB stick, somebody is asking derisively.  No fun and more importantly, not compatible with my player!

*I have taken to ordering some repetitive stuff online and am already regretting that.  Neither easier nor faster because of the plethora of clutter displayed unnecessarily. In the neighbourhood store, you look at a couple of options and pick up one and quit post-haste.  Now, once the order is placed, there starts a series of updates to your phone, about the origin, route and other horoscopic finer points of the items and tracing their two-day journey to your home, all the way mile after mile - which information is egregiously superfluous for most of us.  Deleting those messages is an arduous task and takes a chunk of my time till after the delivery.  Then we find that the order is not delivered in one lot - our fault, because the items do not form a homogeneous bunch. They come in multiple lots and the delivery guys make it a point to ring the bell when you least want them to.  If I order 14 items together for scheduled delivery on the same day, I have to go up and down the stairs 5 times to receive the bounty in dribbles.  If want to return an item received, then make it 6 times, because the return item is handled separately.

I know I have not accounted for the entire, waking twelve hours available to one but after describing the above with seriously tiresome effort, I am not even sure if I will be able to.  Listing all the activities along with time spent is going to be absolutely impossible and I suspect it is not prudent either to create such records for posterity.  It is easier and practical to take the rap from the dear wife on the seasoned knuckles and prepare for a repeat in the future stoically.