How I got arrested and had to spend many minutes in Prison

I went to the fast conducted by Satta Panchayath Iyakkam (SPI), a remarkable NGO (no foreign funding, so relax). It was to submit 10 demands to the TN state, most important to remove the State Chief Information Commissioner, Mr.Sreepathi IAS from the commission. The TN state information commission is, in general, doing a really bad job.
Anyways, at the end of it the activists decided to proceed with a lock to symbolically "lock" the office of the Information Commission. Police were there in massive numbers.
I stood in a corner, gaping at the spectacle, while my head was swimming from the 8 hours fast. I have no idea how people do this for many days. I wanted, craved, sambar idli for some strange reason.
Suddenly the police came marching in our direction, asking all of us to get into the van. I stayed still, hoping they could not see me. But there was nothing to hide behind, and an Inspector who looked like a Software Project Manager came in my direction with a few constables.
He said, "Why are you standing here?"
I said, "I came here for the fast."
"Do you want to get arrested or leave?" he said, like Bruce Willis.
I said "Leave" without ANY hesitation.
"Then go," he said, as if a massacre was about to happen.
But as I ran to one side of the road, it was blocked! I run to the other side and that is blocked too! So I run from one to another like a caged rat, thinking, "That Inspector WAS a software PM, because he gave me a command and closed all ways of executing it."
By this time everyone was in the vans and they were all basically watching me go from one end to another. So, with as much dignity as I could muster, I went into the van.
We were taken to the Chepauk guest house through a circuitous route so that nobody could follow us. This place is like a open air jail. I think they call it "guest house" as a joke, because the MRTS train passes right above you every 20 minutes. No man could survive there.
We all sat in plastic chairs. There was a nice breeze.The walls were high and i thought my only chance of escape was to time the MRTS trains over the next 10 days and get on the last car somehow, like Papillon.
But then they asked us to sign something and leave. The signing sheet said "Arrest detail" so then I understood I was actually arrested.
My only advice to you is to get arrested with 60,70 people - that too pumped up activists, because then nobody cares about your sorry, timid self.

The Warriors at Home

I live in an apartment in Chennai these days. The residents usually keep to themselves. We don't hear a lot of noises from outside. It is a good community, with some common facilities.
One of these facilities is a Gym. I can see people sneaking in and out some times. At times I walk around the complex listening to the birds. But otherwise I strain to hear a snatch of conversation from any other house.
You see, when I was growing up, we did not have Gyms in our flats. Instead families lost calories by having loud fights in their homes. Everyone could listen in and they usually did. I remember during one of my family fights, the entire neighborhood was standing outside, sometimes cheering. They all had broad smiles in their faces.
I keep saying this - while television saved our nation from itself, it messed up some old-fashioned entertainment and exercise.
People were healthier in olden days because they would have a lot of exercise at home; most of this came from fighting within joint families. This is why the joint family was a great idea. You put together two guys in a room, with a transistor radio in between. They will soon be fighting over the channel to turn to. Now imagine three different families with that same radio.

Our family issues were usually long running epic wars. At any point we may be engaged in a small battle and one or the other may lose. But we were focussed on long term victory and total domination. We even had epic battles, in which the location of the fight kept changing from room to room. One such battle with my brother started in the kitchen; and then my mother joined in and the action went from kitchen to hall to even the toilet.
My brother and me were having lunch. It is a small kitchen, so my brother reached out to get something. It stuck me that he deliberately dropped a bit of his food on my plate.
I yelled at him and we went back and forth. Finally I dumped my plate's content - not on his plate, but on him.
Brother did not expect this and before he could react my mother joined in and asked me what the hell I was doing. She took the plate from my brother's head, and dumped more food into it. And she wanted me to eat it. (Both of us ignored my brother who was sitting with Sambar dripping from his hair)
I ran to the toilet and tried to close the door. Mother follows me in and asks me to eat it right there. I push mother and mother falls on cement tank; cement tank breaks. Mother is fine.
I feel sorry for her. I feel more sorry for myself, because I know that Father will come in the evening; and he may not understand my perspective about the cement tank. In fact I am sure I won't have time to explain my perspective, before the beating started.
I sit at the dining room and was saying abject apologies to my mom, when my brother walks in. He has by now removed the food stuff from his person. He takes a metal pot and bangs it on my head.
There ended the battle of the cement tank.

I had seen some other families - they did not fight. But they also ended up being fat. In our family you have to be nimble. My brother was very nimble, but he also had the knack of saying the exact wrong thing to my Father.
One day we were all eating together. Joking to each other; Enjoying the meal. I remember now that I had a eerie sense of foreboding - the whole setting was unnatural.
Then my Father asked the Family a question - what was his first job?
I stayed quiet. My brother could not. He jumped in and started counting down from Senior Clerk, Upper Division Clerk etc. Father kept smiling and saying no.
Then my brother had a brain wave. He said, "Were you a peon?"
Soon he was running from cupboard to cupboard seeking sanctuary. His idea seemed to be that he could get in a closet and close the door; and Father will then abandon the "battle". Alas, none of our closets had doors. He only got himself wedged in a narrow closet, unable to move, while Father pummeled him.

One of our neighbor families had a different problem. Doordarshan telecast the movie "Mudhal Mariyadhai" in the usual Sunday afternoon slot. In that movie, Shivaji Ganesan plays a middle-aged man who is ill-treated by his wife. He falls in love with a young fisher-woman and they become very close.
This movie fulfilled the fantasy of every family man in Tamil Nadu at that time. Since the actress Radha played the young woman, these guys imagined that they all had their own Radhas waiting for them. They also imagined that they were all being ill-treated by their wives. It helped them feel like Shivaji Ganesan. More importantly, it made them find Radha in every younger woman they saw.
This particular neighbor was in a good mood until the movie started playing in the TV. Then as the movie progressed, the family noticed that he was being morose. he started complaining about his wife. By the end of the movie, he was in a frenzy about being ill-treated. He could not stand his malign family - nagging wife and ungrateful children. He started yelling and screaming. We all were listening and making fun of them.
It took him a few days to come out of "Mudhal Maryadhai" syndrome.

Now, during all this, there was one family, that was annoyingly peaceful. they never fought. We could never hear their voices outside. They were very proud of it and we were all waiting for them to have a big fight.
It finally happened this way. You have to follow this closely.
There was a teen aged girl who lived with her parents in our colony. This girl, thinking back now, was not all that great; but she was there (as Sir Edmund Hilary would have said). Her neighbor had a teen-aged son. This young man took a fancy to the girl next door. She had no idea.
There was a servant maid in the girl's home. That maid was also serving in another house.
Our Romeo thought that his way to the heart of the girl went through the maid. Why? No idea. But he wanted desperately to give the girl a love letter. He could easily have passed that letter on. But our genius, instead, approached the servant maid. He wanted her to pass on the love-letter.
This he did with the help of two other friends. One of these was the son of the peaceful family guy.
As you can imagine, it was not the best plan. First, the maid thought the letter was for herself. Then she was faced with three young guys assuring her that Romeo would take care of his lady love forever (he was in Plus One at that time). She went and told everyone.
One fine evening we were all playing downstairs, when there were shouts from somewhere. I automatically thought it was my family, in battle stations. Well, it was not. Surprise of surprises, the peaceful family were all yelling at each other and fighting. Their son had brought shame on them.

We watched the fight for some time. It followed us in our homes. We talked about it for a few days, complaining about how these families were too loud. Everybody felt very mature and good for some time.
Then my brother asked for a bicycle and all hell broke loose.

My experience with religion

For the first 20-25 years of my life I was a pretty religious person. This blog post tracks my experiences in religion.


I suddenly found a great attachment to religion in 2nd standard. The bullock cart for taking us all to school would wait outside, while I will be chanting Kandhar Sashti Kavasam for half an hour. My teacher did not know what to make of this; she had to wait outside too.
My hope at that time was that I would become a holy man. This lasted until I saw Sri Vidhya in 4th standard (not the actress). I had joined a new school and there was a divine girl named SriVidhya. For the next two years that I studied with her, I do not remember chanting Kandhar Sashti Kavasam.

At that time, performances known as "Kathakalatchebam" were famous in Tamil Nadu. Krubanandha Vaariaar, one of the most famous performers, used to draw huge crowds. He would talk for 10 days about the Ramayanam or Mahabharatham. I call them performances because they were not solely devotional. Vaariaar used to joke a lot; sing; and would have danced if his size had permitted. Sukhi.Sivam, who now talks in television about the evils of coke cans, used to be young and funny then.
WE used to go to a lot of these performances. One of the more devotional and serious ones were by a person named Krishna Premi. He had disciples and a retinue following him ; and so he was more like a "swamiji".
I was very inspired by him (by that time SriVidhya was gone - my parents put me in a gents school). So one day while we were walking to listen to him, I decided that I would ask him my question. My question's inspiration was taken from Vivekananda's question to Ramakrishna(and Nachiketas's question to Yama). "Some say there is God; some say there isn't. What do you think?" (for context - I was in 6th standard at that time)
A bunch of people were standing before Krishna Premi and they were falling one by one at his feet. I was impatient - I was afraid I would forget the exact question. In my mind the time for self-realization had come. I would ask him the question, he would answer it brilliantly. And then he would deserve to take me as a disciple. I may even end up in Chicago.
I approached him and nervously said, " Some say there is God; some... "
He nodded his head and said, "Ok" and moved on to the next person.

At some point in this whole deal, I decided that I knew a lot about religion. I felt that I had crossed the stage of the masses who have to deal with Bhakthi,offer prayers and had to make pilgrimages etc. These foolish people actually did not realize what Vedanta says! I decided that I would follow the Vedanta and Bhagavat Gita and all that.
In this, I was helped by my family. My parents were getting into Vedanta themselves. Discussing Vedanta with different people is an exercise in increasing intensity of self-righteousness. When two middle-aged Vedantins of the 20th century met, their conversation went like:
V1: That is why I have given up all ties to my children. I tell my son, you go to college or become a peon, I don't care. I have no attachments.
V2: Why just to children? I have given up ties to my wife. After my duties are done, I will just leave for (usually Himalayas or Kashi)
V1: Come on, wife and children are not the only ties. I told all my relations....
and so on. They try to beat each other by how much they have given up "attachment". I have not seen one guy (it is always guys) from this circle actually go to Himalayas. They all stuck around until retirement; complained about pension; and are now generally Green Card holders and spend their time watching Asianet for some reason.

My family was also into Sanskrit at this time. I discovered this one day when I came back from playing outside and found a strange conversation at home:
My dad: But ..., you have too much Kshaathram in your voice.
My brother: No, I don't have any Kshaatram
Mom: You are always talking with so much Nishtooram

What the hell? What is Kshaatram? Who is Nishtooram? And they were all talking as if they all knew these words. I did not ask them, of course. I just managed to sneak in weird words myself (such as NiratcharaGutchi) into our conversation. At some points, I would say 50% of the words we used made no sense to each other.
It was just a phase.

In the newspaper Hindu, Khushwant Singh wrote an article that dismissed the idea of reincarnation. I got upset at this and spent one full day brooding about how to answer Khushwant Singh. That is how I developed the "Law of Conservation of Souls".
You see, the Bhagavat Gita says the soul can neither be created nor destroyed. That is similar (in my mind) to saying energy can neither be created nor destroyed. My letter to the editor of The Hindu had the following passage:
"According to the Law of Conservation of Souls, a soul is neither created nor destroyed. But we do know that there are a lot more people and souls in the world now rather than earlier. Where did all the new souls come from? They must be coming from other alien civilizations in distant stars, which are getting destroyed all the time"
They must have had a good laugh in the editor's room about the alien stars.

As a Vedantin, when I went to temples it was pure torture. On the one hand, I wanted to pray fervently about getting marks in Plus 2 exams; or getting at least one neighborhood girl to be my girlfriend.
On the other hand, as a Vedantin I was supposed to realize that all desire is futile; god is myself; and so the neighborhood girls do not exist.
Everything is Maya!
So I would go into the temple and one part of me would be praying and the other part would be like, "Excuse me, why are you praying to yourself? Hello?"

Finally I broke down and decided to go full metal into Devi Bhakti. I started doing 4 hour poojas every Friday waking up at 4 AM. College was missed many times, but what is college before the wishes of my goddess? I went pretty deep into the whole thing; I learnt a lot of theory in Devi worship. When I got into the bus at Nungambakkam and went to Mylapore, I would close my eyes and start praying for every temple along the way. There were a LOT of temples.

So my religious exploration had taken me from meaningless chanting; to Vedanta and philosophy (without gaining any good knowledge of either); to something pretty close to Bhakti. I was in engineering school by that time, and had to get a job. My times of exploration had come to an end.

I do pray from time to time, a short prayer thrown to the universe, just in case someone is listening. It is always a specific prayer about some immediate thing (such as praying for my client to be in a good mood). I am completely comfortable with that.

An interview with my wife (on art)

September of this year was our tenth marriage anniversary. I interviewed my wife (she is an artist) for that occasion.
This is the second interview in this blog; it is mostly about art.
RA: Hello SS. Can we start the interview?
SS: Enna vachu edhuvum comedy keemadi panlaye?
RA: No, let us be professional here. You will discover how skilled I am at writing and interviewing. You have only seen the positive side of your husband. Now you will see how serious I am with a subject. I am relentless and ask very tough questions. Lying is useless; you may as well give up now.
SS: Is the interview about art or you?
RA: Yes. About art. I know. I am just warning you.
(In the meantime, my son wanders into the room; wants to be part of the interview process. We convince him to go play with toys - "choppu". He has a little set of small wooden cooking utensils.)

RA: You know, art has always interested me. If you think about it, I am an artist myself - I draw with words.
(pause)
I guess you could say I paint colorful characters.
(pause again)
I outline the landscape of life with my words.
Do you notice how good I am with this?
SS: (silence)
RA: Anyway, my point is art is such a essential part of our lives. But many people are not aware of it. They only have contempt for people studying art.
(pause)
I guess you could say the same thing about writers. I have gone through a lot of insults in my life for being a writer. The first time I wrote something about the neighborhood cat, my father laughed at the manuscript and threw it away.
SS: You know, if you just want to talk about yourself, I can go play with the kid.
RA: Ok. I guess my question is how did you become a drawer? What interested you in drawering?
SS: I am not a drawer. I am an artist.
RA: Whatever.
SS: I am not a full-fledged artist. I came to know I had a talent for it in school. But I only thought of it as a separate field you could specialize in after watching the "Art of Painting" show by Bob Ross in the WYBE channel, Philadelphia.
I also had access to the Free Library of Philadelphia close to our home, which had an extensive collection of books on art (even for a novice).
RA: Now, that would be after your marriage to me?
SS: Yes
RA: So you could say I had a part to play?
SS: No, Bob Ross did.
RA: Ok, so then you went to the Community College of Philadelphia. What options does a person studying art have in the USA?
SS: They start from High School, where they create a portfolio. The idea is to get a BFA degree which makes you employable in Graphic Design, Product Design, Printing, Textiles, Interior Design, Architecture, Photography, Web Design, Animation, and even into movie and advertising fields.
Usually you apply to a private art school. The best is Rhode Island School of Design. New York University is famous. The Pratt Institute. UPenn in Philadelphia has a good art department.
RA: What are the options in India?
SS: Government Arts College, Chennai is good. I think Art director Thottatharani, actor Siva Kumar and many others studied there. The "elite" schools in India (like the IITs) are the National Schools of Design. The Ahmedabad NSD is very famous.
Again, you get a BFA (4 year) degree and then you can do masters (MFA).
One big difference is that the Indian schools have an age bar. Generally after 27, you cannot get admitted to any of these.
RA: Back to Philly. What courses did you take in CCP?
SS: I started with basic drawing and design. I never planned to complete a diploma there. (The CCP provides an Associate in Art degree; it is equivalent to an art diploma).
I had several streams to specialize in - Printing, Art & Design, Photography or Architecture. You take a lot of common courses and then take a few specialized courses (for 65 credits). I specialized in Art & Design.
They teach you drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramic work, basic design, three dimensional design..
RA: Now, when you say design, you don't just mean graphic design.
SS: No. There is a separate stream called design. They teach you Fundamentals of Design, Color Theory, use of space. For example, when I say three dimensional design, it has nothing to do with computers or animation. We had to mold or cast and prepare models. That was 3D design.
Such a design course, with no reference to computers, gives you a very strong foundation for all design work, such as Interiors.
The computer is just a tool. Design has existed for a long time.
RA: You also had to take Art History courses...
SS: Yes. You remember the heavy text books.
RA: We had a fight over where to keep them.
SS: Art History is vital to students because it inspires you with art over time and different cultures.
RA: In other words, it lets you copy not just from current artists but also dead artists.
SS: What we create now will be history for future generations. Varalaaru migavum mukkiyam, Amaichare.
RA: What was the teaching like? You had been to college in India. Was it different?
SS: We had to do creative work all through the semester. It was very stimulating that way. Like anywhere, there were good teachers and bad teachers. But I always felt good at school.
RA: Ok, for people finishing art school, where do you like to work the most?
SS: Ad agencies. They are the ultimate prize in terms of work. Also Design firms that do graphic design. One of my friends is specializing in product photography.
RA: Now, let us get to the crux of this interview. Modern art. Why is it so weird? One of my classmates in college said it was a complete scam because you could hang a picture upside down and nobody would notice. Kamal Hassan makes fun of it in the movie "Kaadhala Kaadhala".
SS: Sometimes it creates magic. It has to do mostly with your subjective interpretation.
The important thing is there is no "message" in modern artwork. There can be focal points, but the artwork itself cannot be reduced to a single message. It is like poetry - you just understand something that makes a connection. I think it plays with the viewer's emotions. A landscape or a portrait is about the scene represented by the artist. In modern art, the viewer plays a major role.
Sometimes people confuse messages with symbols. When we say "symbolic" (in India) we generally mean in terms of "something that is a hidden hint for something else". In the West, they actually mean symbols, cultural, historical symbols.
RA: So, if you see a human being drawn in a weird way, it does not "symbolize" anything? Such as his mood, or his nature?
SS: It can, but such art is not really "modern". Such symbolism has existed throughout history.
If a human being is drawn in a different way, then whatever it means to the viewer is all that matters.
You should not ask an artist what she "intends to convey" in a painting. In art class, if we are asked to talk about the masters' paintings, we describe what we see - such as if it is an oil or watercolor and other obvious features. But we never were asked to talk about the "meaning" of the painting. That is wrong when it applies to any art, particularly to modern art.
RA: So, it is like hearing a Ilayaraaja song and asking for its "meaning"?
SS: Yes.
RA: My classmate Vijay and I had an argument about modern art in college. He said that the art that we see normally growing up, such as in magazines, the European paintings, Ravi Verma's paintings...they seem more "natural" than modern art.

SS: European paintings brought in realism around 16th century because they did a lot of research at the time of the Renaissance. The proportions that they drew in were based on real human proportions. Before that, drawings in Europe were religious themed mostly. They also showed very ideal figures. The figures' sizes were based on hierarchy in society (you can still see this in Mughal paintings).
They had something called a register where the focus or the top of the painting was Christ or the King. The knights followed and so on. Serfs were shown as small figures at the bottom.
Now, that CHANGED to realism in 16th century. Even that included symbolism and hierarchies.
That is, the paintings that we consider "normal" would not have been considered normal 500 years back. Not in India, not in Europe.
Art has always had different streams and evolutions. You cannot judge between the arts of different times or different cultures.
RA: I would say that applies to music and writing and so on.
SS: Yes.
RA: Thank you, SS, for your time. Now, one final question...
SS: Yes?
RA: Do you think I am the best person in the world ever?
SS: I will answer that on our 20th anniversary.

If I can program..

I am posting after a long time. Researching a long screed on the National People Registry. In the meantime, here is a filler.
It is true that in this day and age, people who know computer programming have an advantage - it is somewhat like auto mechanics but with more glamor and money. I was recently at my wife's sister's place. They are running a business and they had a problem with a sales product they had bought. One fine day the product stopped working. The product maker just denied support. And all their information was tied up in the database.
They asked me to take a look at it. This is an unknown product; I had no access to source code. But I could make the product work again. My relatives were very thankful and my wife very proud.
Computers still have a glamor in India. Its "mechanics" are still not sullied with the geek image that programmers in the United States have to bear. If you know a certain set of programming languages, you can understand how systems work and (mostly) what breaks them.
Given this, it is sheer luck that I chanced upon this particular field. I was a computer hater in college.

Computer Hater
I majored in electronics engineering as well as Physics. Our class had a few guys who were taking computer courses. "We" thought they were pathetic traitors to the cause of Physics.
"We" were a bunch of guys who thought it was fun discussing the existence of the centrifugal force when we were hanging in the bus footboard. We all thought we were the natural inheritors of Einstein's legacy. Even though I myself had difficulty doing Physics experiments in the lab without breaking things, I completely identified with the great physicists. I thought I was a "theoretical" physicist, like Einstein. (It took some courage writing that last sentence)
In my world, if you sucked at experiments, then you were a theoretical physicist.
Unfortunately I was bad with theory too.
We started noticing that a few of our classmates were going to NIIT classes. They all had books such as "C Programming". Since none of us knew anything about computers we decided it was not worth knowing.
Then college ended and most of my bunch of budding physicists went on to MCA.
I was shocked by this. I decided I would carry on the lone torch of Physics even if everyone in the world started learning "C".
I was in engineering college by this time; and our syllabus involved computers. In the 5th semester I finally had to sit before a computer and write something called a program.

What is all that blank space after C:?
One of my classmates Vijay was an expert in computers (he apparently has patents to his name now). I enticed him with a Rava Dosa and begged him to teach me DOS.
He sat before the computer and typed a few commands. He created a directory. He deleted one. He copied a few files. Then he explained to me that files were organized in paths, like house addresses.
"When you say your house is in 20, Some Street, Adyar, Chennai, India - you are pointing to your location. It is the same way with files. You have to tell the computer where the file is."
I was intently staring at the monitor. It had a C: and then a cursor blinking.
I said, "So what is all this blank space after C:?"
He said, "What blank space?"
I said,"You said there are files. But I only see a blinking dash."
He was confused. He said again, "It is like an house address"
I did not relent. "What is in the computer after C:?"

It took me a long time to realise a couple of things:
1) The computer monitor is not directly connected to the keyboard. There is something in between called the processor, memory and all that. That is, the computer is not a typewriter.
2)There is nothing after C:.

It took a lot more Rava Dosas too get that precious bit of knowledge.

My point is that when you don't know something, you automatically dismiss it. Then you have to take it as a course in 5th semester and your entire career depends on it. That is my point.

My encounter with Windows
Before I first saw a Windows machine (3.1), I did not think multi tasking was really needed. I was surprised that people were spending so much time on the ability to do multiple things at the same time with one computer. To me, it seemed like you would need two keyboards before you could multi task. Then you would need two people to type in the keyboards. Who needs one other person sitting near you and typing?
So that was my understanding of multi tasking.
(By the way, I had a similar reaction to constructors in C++. I did not understand why they would ever be needed, so I skipped the entire chapter on them)
Then I was sitting in a shopfloor one day and saw a computer with a screensaver. I saw the mouse and thought it was very cool. I tried to explore that computer to learn all about Windows.
Qucikly I found out that I could play Solitaire and so spent the entire evening playing Solitaire. That was my first attempt at learning Windows. That computer only had two icons. One was Solitaire and the other was Minesweeper. I thought Windows was completely lame.

The debate between Systems and Application programming
Once we understood that all the computer learners were being shipped off to the USA, we found a new interest in computers. I was convinced that I was born for computer programming, but I still thought of myself as a theoretical programmer.
At that time there were people who worked on Y2K; there were people who worked on network programming. In between there were weird people who were learning VB6, Java or HTML/ Javascript.
Now each of these were split into camps which knew nothing about the other. You can find some aspect of the below question, I am sure, still raging in campuses:
Would you be a systems programmer or an applications programmer?
In college, most people wanted to be a "systems" programmer. We had no idea what this meant. But in our minds, we would rather be someone who wrote code that everyone else would use (such as a tiny portion of an Operating System) than a mere programmer who ASSEMBLED such pieces.
That is, we wanted to write core functions that everyone else will call.
Now, as most people familiar with software programming will understand, this is impossible. Every programmer assembles their software - but that does not mean that the coding is easy. If anything, application programming is very complex because it has changing requirements. Application programmers simply address a different set of problems, and those are not trivial.
(The reason I emphasize this is because a few months back in a facebook discussion, someone told me that an AT&T scientist thought Indians were better with applications; but could not write really complex software - such as algorithms. This is hilarious, because applications model human interactions and transactions. These are hardly trivial )
So we have tribal warfare between the Javascript guys and the Middle Tier programmers; network programmers vs application programmers;C++ vs Java; C# vs VB; and so on. Each camp knows nothing about the other. The sorriest lot of them are the database developers who stand in a small corner and keep complaining.

I always took sides in these debates until I found out that all of these can take you to the United States. In fact the much detested web UI programmers have the best shot.

So I started from staring at C: and wondering what that was; and have ended up even winning my relatives' approval as a computer expert. All the while I hated everything new that came up the horizon until I learnt it.
My current hatred is for mobile app/web programming. I am sure it is just a fad and will go away shortly. I cannot imagine that people will actually access websites through mobile phone. That is what I have been telling everyone...

Lying while leaving IT companies

A few days back, a fresher (2009 batch) came to meet me at home. A month earlier, he had started working for a huge MNC in Chennai. He had been looking for work more than an year and finally this clicked.
Except that they had him attending training in QA instead of his core interest - database programming. He had a certificate in Java. [Nothing wrong with QA. Just that this guy was not interested in it]
In the meantime, a company which had actually offered him in campus (but then had made him wait through the recession) came back. They were recruiting again and they could have him working in Java.
The fresher faced a dilemma - he had attended work at the MNC for a month, in pretty much pointless training. He wanted to quit. He had not signed any bond. He wanted to know if he could resign; and whether there would be any problems.
I advised him to tell the HR in the MNC the truth. Tell them you were bored with testing and you had decided to leave. Let them know the situation and then leave.
He went and told them the truth.
I will tell you what happened at the end of this post. But before that let me rant about IT companies a bit.

The Lying Culture
I had posted earlier about a white guy who asked me if lying was in the Indian culture. I have seen HR and line managers in IT complaining that people are not honest. "Why don't they just tell the truth about leaving?", they say.
You know why they don't tell the truth? Because you can't handle the truth.



IT Employees lie when they say grandma is dying and they are moving back to the village and tilling the field; when they say (I am not making this up) resigning and starting an MBA school; when they say they are moving to another city and starting a company for selling churidaars.
They lie and say anything to get away from YOU.
Because they know you are power hungry. You have THE POWER - to ruin an employee's life by lying in background checks. They know how vindictive you are - that if the management asked you to go after someone you would do that. You would call up people you know at the destination company and ask them to "be warned" about this "nasty developer you have just recruited". They know you will delay the (legally mandated) relieving order. They KNOW you will exercise your power.

I know all of this happens; we all know all of this happens. Yet HR and Managers have the gall to complain about lying when we leave a company. Of course, we lie. We lie so that we can leave in peace. In any culture, people do not come after you if you are bereaved about a death. So we have to say that our long-dead grandma is dead again.
If we just said, "I am leaving your company and joining the company over there", would you all shut up and bless us with the sacred relieving order?
No, you would talk to us for 15 days about staying, going onsite, giving a promotion, threatening to talk to our parents (believe me, has happened), and so on and on.
In India sane IT employees do not let you know which company they are joining next. When a bunch of people behave that way, it is fair to ask the question why? To say "It is cultural" means you are a moron. The answer is, of course, that we are worried about the nature of people with power, some power, any power.
Because people with power always choose to exercise it.

My Experience Not Lying
I resigned from a big Indian services company when I was in the USA. I had been with them for 2.5 years. I decided to stay in the USA, while they wanted me to go back offshore and work on a project.
I had completed ALL the transitions for my onsite work. The offshore team was already set up for 6 months. If I left, it was not a big loss. I was not leaving at a critical time - it was a maintenance project. I had done all I could (along with the excellent onsite lead) to operate the project smoothly.
I resigned by email and let them know I was giving two weeks notice. I told them I was joining another company.
The Account Manager onsite called me and harangued for 2 hours. He said it was unethical for me to leave at all (nice try; it was not). He insulted me to his heart's content. I said I was available for the two weeks notice period. But he said it was not necessary.
Did I deserve the call or the insults? No, but I am sure he enjoyed it.
I met one of my classmates last week and he tells me that the idea around my former company was that I had "ditched" the company. I was surprised because he had joined a few years after I left, and I am not that famous a person. But I got confirmation from a couple of other people.
So, to recap - I had resigned; given notice; and left. That is ditching. And it is so bad as to make an example out of it.
What I should REALLY have said to the Account Manager is this: "My grandma in the USA has died. In her last will she wanted me to leave your company. How can I ignore that?"
By the way, the Account Manager "ditched" a few months later.

What happened to the Fresher?

The fresher (you should read from the beginning) went and told them he was leaving them and HR freaked out. They found out that they had not got the bond signed. So they asked him to stay back for two months - although it served no purpose;he was in training, and no revenue would be gained.
He went the next day and said his father was sick and they HAD to move to Bangalore because his father's whole family was there. They shut up.
If HR will shut up only on hearing lies (that everyone know are lies), that is what HR will hear. You don't have to dig through culture to find that out.

My Grandma and the movie Gentleman

When television first spread across Tirunelveli, there were people who frowned at the development. Television viewing was a community endeavor - you could expect half the street to be at your home for the Sunday movie.
My father got a television in 1986 - it is still at his home.
At that time people would visit other people's homes and find that they were not welcome. They were not as interesting as "Vayalum Vaazhvum". If you went to someone's house between 7:30 and 8:30PM on a Friday (Oliyum Oliyum or Chitrahaar time), you would probably have a lifelong enemy.
Now, from the safe distance of 25 years, I can see that we were going through a transition to more nuclear communities. Nothing wrong with that, but it created some tension.

The Idealistic Balu

During that time, my father was associated with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP). It was a tumultous period, about to get more tumulty between 1989 and 1992, a period that ended in the criminal demolition of the Babri Masjid.
High ranking Tamil Nadu VHP cadre would visit our home pretty often.

There was a young VHP member named Balu stationed in Tirunelveli at that time. He was a extremely polite, nice person. His family wanted him to marry and settle down. But Balu was a nationalist. He (along with many others in the "Sangh Parivaar") had no plans to marry. He was waiting for Akhand Bharat (a future plan of the RSS in which India, Pakistan and Bangladesh will reunify and form a mighty nation of software programmers).
Balu visited our home often. He had a lot of respect for my father and mother. They tried to tell him to marry, but he was not convinced.
Then my father bought a television.
Initially we had Doordarshan, Hindi, telecast from Kodaikkaanal. Our family still maintained a rule - if a visitor came in, we were to switch off the television. The switching off was easy in 1986 - while watching the news with Rajiv Gandhi's face plastered all the time.
The next year Tamil programs started coming in from Chennai. Balu still was visiting our home, but my father had a noticeable disinterest in Akhand Bharat, or in reclaiming the Dalit-Muslims of Meenakshipuram. He was talking about avoiding "social commitments".

The Ringing of Temple Bells

Soon we left Tirunelveli. My father was slowly disengaging from VHP and RSS contacts. But the fires of communalism were burning bright across India. Apparently not everyone had bought televisions. Advani started going around in Raths, pretending to rescue Lord Ram from a 500 year old affront.

On Dec 6 1992, a couple of my classmates came to meet me at home. They wanted me to accompany them to the nearby temple; apparently there was to be a peaceful protest by ringing temple bells for the Ayodhya temple at 12 Noon.
What really happened in Ayodhya at 12 Noon was far from peaceful. That is now history. But why didn't I accompany my classmates to the temple-bell-ringing?
Because there was a new movie on the cable channel at 12 Noon.

My Grandma and the movie Gentleman

Cable television had just arrived for the Chennai middle class. Music director A.R.Rahman had also arrived on the scene. Mani Ratnam was at his peak. The Chennai film institute cameramen had just begun to kick butt.
That was the early 90s.
From that time on, my family was completely hooked on cable. There were several new channels within a couple of years. Further, we all were proud that "our" cable channels telecast even the newest movies immediately. We had no idea about piracy or copyrights. We just thought the new cable technology guys were hooked with the movie makers and all of them were telecasting arabic sub-titled Tamil movies in our television purely out of benevolence.
Time to introduce my grandmother.

My grandma was the bestest grandma in the whole wide world.
She was smart, the sanest one in the family. She was around 90 and managed most of her tasks herself - even though she was blind by then.
I had a habit of narrating world events (she was completely briefed on the First Gulf War). I kept her abreast of the progress of the Agni missile. Our only point of difference in politics was that she believed the Nehru family were royal. I tried to educate her about democracy (she had voted many times in her life). But she was very emphatic on that.
Apart from these, I also told her stories of the movies I watched. She usually did not like the stories much. She would listen to the whole thing and then say "Bad story" and walk away.
When the movie Gentleman was released, we all went bravely to Vetri theater, Chromepet; fought in the crowd; got tickets; and watched the debut of director Shankar. As you all probably know, that movie cannot be "seen with family". It had too much eroticism, and was not subtle. But the movie is very, very fast. It is just spectacular.
I came home and narrated the story (editing out the nasty parts) to my grandma. Surprisingly, she liked the story. She had a lot of sympathy for "Kicha" as the lead character was called. She also understood that the very rhythmic song "Ottakatha Kattikko" was from this movie.
Within a few days the cable company announced they will be telecasting Gentleman that Sunday afternoon.
Sunday afternoon, I asked my father and mother and brother to sit together and watch the movie. This rarely happens; we all usually end up fighting. But that day we were all ready and it seemed that we could watch the movie without beating each other up.

The doorbell chimed at 12 Noon.
It was Balu.
Balu who? Yes, the same Balu who was the tireless worker for VHP, whom we last met running around Tirunelveli.
After five years, Balu had finally gotten married. But he was still passionate, I think. He had brought along his new wife to meet his ideal family.
Unfortunately the television was on. And Arjun was beating up people in it.
We all sat down. The conversation was mostly one-sided. Nobody switched off the TV.
Balu kept talking and we all kept watching television.
I think he was slightly disillusioned. His wife fidgeted in her seat. Surely, Balu must have thought, there must be some remnant of that old dignified family.
Then "Ottakatha Kattikko" started. There was commotion in one of the inner rooms. The door slammed open and my grandma came feeling her way to the living room.
She said, "Is it Gentleman?"
I said, "Yes, Grandma"
"Oh, that poor Kicha. He tries so hard, but the police is after him", said Grandma.
And then she started keeping time for "Ottakatha Kattikko".

Balu left and we never heard from him again.

It makes you wonder - If everyone in the country had cable television in 1992, that old Masjid may still be standing.

My son and my music

I have already said here, that I am going to make sure my son becomes a singer. I decided to take his training myself and the below is the result.
He seems to show a keen interest in getting away from me when I sing, but I think that is because of the bad acoustics.



He also laughs at weird words. Here is the video:

Some advice on Arranged Marriages

I was married eight years back. It was an arranged marriage; people think (especially abroad) that arranged marriages are very easy and that you do not have to make any effort. Let me narrate my experience and you can judge for yourself:

The very first problem I faced was managing my hair. I had it all nicely turned and everything so that I had the 50s samathu payyan (good boy) look. I spent atleast two hours before the mirror trying to adjust every individual strand of hair. I had no idea how my potential future wife would judge my looks. I knew vaguely that they did not like the Albert Einstein hairstyle.
Well, after this struggle, I got into the car and sat, stupidly, in the window seat. So my hair ended up looking, indeed, like Einstein. I hoped that the woman liked physics.

It is best, in my mind, to keep the affair as low-key as possible. I was sure that the girl would not like me. I would be lucky if she did not throw up on seeing me and hated every word that I spoke. So, I did not want one of the huge movie style episode in which a bunch of my relatives and a bunch of her relatives, plus all her neighbors show up to watch me getting rejected.
I actually wanted to meet her in a restaurant in a remote corner of the city so that only the waiters would know, but no one would leak the matter to the press. But when I asked for this specifically, I was accused by my parents of being an un-Indian brat. Her parents did not like the idea either - they thought I would kidnap their daughter. They wanted the full glory.

Thus, my ONE attempt at trying to influence the course of my own marriage and life failed. I stopped trying after that.

So, we ended up at her home. Luckily there were not too many people around. I got out of the car and ran in before the tabloids could take photographs.
I sat in a nice elevated chair and kept my head down. Her brother sat in a corner and kept looking at me with an impassive face. Let me tell you what he reminded me of: In American movies they show a secret CIA interrogation room where one inscrutable American sits silently in the corner while they try to get information from the terrorist. At the end he usually walked over and banged the terrorist's head on the table until he revealed the location of the bomb.
Her brother never took his eyes off me the whole time and never said anything. He rarely says anything to me even after 8 years of the marriage.

Her mother and sister buzzed about and we all tried to make conversation. I tried a few jokes. But I was waiting for my future wife to show up.
I had spent a lot of time (the previous day) in front of the mirror trying to see the angle in which I looked good. I was sure that there must be atleast one angle out of the 360 degrees where my face would show up handsome. So I tried each one of those angles until I found that there was one particular way, if I raised my head and bent my face to the left - I looked absolutely dashing. Turn a little bit to the right or left and the "effect" was gone. I could see myself only from a corner of my eye in the mirror, but I was sure I had hit upon the ideal way to present myself to my future wife.

Now, sitting in front of her whole family, I tried to find that angle again. I was almost there when the door opened and my future wife walked in. She did not look at me at all. She sat in a chair and studiously avoided looking at me.
So we both sat like statues while the rest of them had fun.
The one advice I would give you, the future arranged marriager, is to AVOID eating mixtures (this is a south-indian dish), while you are on a "girl-seeing" episode. It is a nasty trick played by the bride's family. They are trying to judge your mechanical competence. There is absolutely NO way to eat the mixture without a)looking uncool or b) spilling most of it on oneself. If they offer you the mixture, politely say no. If they insist, tell them you know their dirty trick.
Do not drink coffee either. They will offer a very full cup of coffee and figure out how scared you are when your hand shakes. Ask for half a cup; if they offer anymore, throw it on your brother-in-law. That will teach them.

There are several misconceptions about arranged marriages. Movies show the guy and the girl falling in love immediately; then pining for each other while the evil villain takes the girl to a mountain cave. The truth is that you don't really feel anything when you look at her. Your goal at that point is to get out of a really awkward situation. There is no place for love. It is a tough world out there.

After some time, they suggested that we talk to each other. This is the most liberal advancement in the institution of arranged marriages in the last two thousand years - they allow us people to talk.
So, me and her went to the terrace. It was evening time and the terrace was cool. It was very romantic except for the airport close by. There were flights zipping over us every five minutes.

I had prepared a long speech to her. It went something like this:
"I do not have much experience in this. I like your family. Let me say something about myself. But before that, I want you to be assured that you may say no to me without any reservations. You do not have to marry me out of compulsion. But that does not mean that your family compels you. I am just saying, if your family is of the type that comples daughters, then if they compel you to marry me, you can freely say no. This does not mean that I suspect your family of tyranny. No, no, on the other hand I like your family a lot. But it is all circumstances. Instead if you say yes to me because of compulsion, then our life may not be that happy. No, I am not saying that I will torture you. But I am just saying that if I do...."

I forgot most of the speech when I sat there. It sounded like a PhD dissertation.
Anyway, I started with "I don't have much experience in this"
My wife said, "It is not as if we are all sitting here with lots of experience."

That was it. We ended up chatting for an hour and by the end of it, I wanted to stay at their home.

PS: Apparently there is a rule as to the decent time when you can get back to the girl's family and let them know you like her. Say you see the girl on Monday evening at around 6 PM. Then the decent interval is to let their family know Tuesday afternoon at 3 PM. If you do it any sooner, they think you are too needy. If you do later, the girl may be married off to someone else. The optimum time interval is the above.
I did not know this. We got into the car and I started badgering my family about the marriage date.

Tenth Standard Exams

I will write more about our examination system later. I am trying to inteview one of my nephews.
Meanwhile, someone wrote in my comments (among lots of abuses), that the Indian education system is ideal because it separates good students from bad students.
That is, of course, not the goal of an education system. The goal should be to educate, not eliminate people from the job pool.
But then I remembered a few details about the 10th standard exam when I took it, back in 1987. I don't think much has changed till now.

You start preparing for the 10th standard exam when you are in the 9th holidays. From then on, if you go out to play, neighboring aunts frown at you and complain to your mother. So you stay at home the entire year.
Here was the list of things we had to endure going into the exams:
1. Geography - you had to remember the imports and exports of a dozen countries. Most of them had the same imports and exports except for one particular item. For example Cambodia would export rubber, rice, teakwood and coffee while Laos would export rubber, rice, teakwood and tea. So you had to remember that little change. Somehow the question paper writers loved to ask about the imports and exports.
So you ended up preparing acronyms and match them like this:
Laos - rrtt
Cambodia - rrtc
and so on. The day of the exam you tried to mug all these down.
Doesn't this sound pathetic? I have more below.

2. Apparently the guys who were correcting the answer papers were paid by how many papers they corrected every day. So, their incentive was to zip through your paper. So, you wanted to convince them by using - wait for it - color pencils. You had a bunch of color pencils and you had to underline key items in your answer. Supposedly the paper evaluator would then just look at the key words and award you marks.
Let us say the question was:

Write about the weather conditions in North America

You could write a learned tract about how the weather is shaped by the Rocky Mountains and the North Atlantic warm current. You could explain that weather moves from West to East in the plains and all that. Or, you could do this:

Weather of the Rocky of the Mountains of the Atlantic Ocean of the North of the America..of the.

And then underline the key words with red pencil and you will get full marks.
I am not sure if this was a myth or not, but we ALL had color pencils. All of them were sharpened and kept in boxes where the tip would not break off. Our own teachers said this was true and they should know.

3. If you skipped a question, you wanted to REALLY bring that to the attention of the evaluator. So, if you answered question numbers 1, 2, and then skipped 3 and went to 4, then unless you did something drastic, the evaluator would assume your answer to question 4 was really an answer to 3 and so on. So you would FAIL!!!
So when you skipped a question, you wrote the question number down and then struck through the paper twice. And then you pray.

4. The worst thing was the Science exam in 1987. It had 40 "one word" answers as the first section of the question paper. Since we were all focussing on saving time, our teachers suggested a classic method.
You see, as soon as you get the blank answer sheets, you have to draw margins. You should do this BEFORE they give you the question papers, because then the bell will ring and your countdown starts. You don't want to be drawing margins when the clock is ticking.
So you draw the margins. During the exam, you should write the question numbers down and then draw lines after every answer.
Well, our teachers taught us ANOTHER way to save time. You see, you know that there are going to be 40 "quick" questions in the Science exam. So, why not write the question numbers down and then draw the lines BEFORE they give the question papers?
So we were all trained to do that. Most of us got the answer papers and drew lines next to each other with the question numbers.
Unfortunately, that year the science paper setters wanted to create a "tough" question paper. Their idea of doing this was to ask questions that required long answers in the first 40.
So, we got completely messed up when we were given the question papers. Some of us bravely tried to "fit" the long answers within the existing lines. Some others started erasing the lines. But these left black marks on the white answer sheet and your answer sheet did not look "neat".

5. Again the science paper was supposed to be tough - so the idiot paper setters asked questions from remote corners in the text book. For example, there is a small "Do it yourself" section at the end of each lesson. They asked questions from that section, because no one notices it.

This is what passes for examinations in our education system. It is simply a way to play mind games with the students and torture them to paranoia. I do not remember a SINGLE thing I was taught in 10th - other than the sheer terror of the exams.
Remember we all have "exam nightmares"? The ones in which you dream about ending up in an exam without preparing? These are only next in horror to the "naked sprint" dreams in which you are walking outside nude.
(The worst dreams are ones in which you go to an exam unprepared AND nude).
I wonder if only Indians get these dreams...after our exam freak shows.

Notes to my new-born son

Welcome to the world. I thought I may as well let you know a few things about myself and this planet, in that order. It may help you understand me better, but it also makes for a good blog.
First of all, your father was not a genius growing up. This is important - because you may see my current IQ level and may conclude that your father has always been the smartest man on earth. This is not so - I had great difficulty crossing 50 marks in mathematics all through secondary school.
Nor was your father so ultra-cool growing up. It is hard to be ultra-cool when you are forced to wear "drawers" till 10th std. It leaves a scar all through your life.
How do I explain, then, the current super-coolness and super-smartness that I radiate on my person?
The answer is simple - coolness and smartness automatically are thrust on you when you cross 35. This is because no one expects you to be cool when you are 35.
So, the first lesson of life is this - do not worry about iPODs;or the latest mobile phone models. You will be cool when you are 35 and the coolness then grows with every year (along with your irritation factor).

You mayask what motivates your father's political views. I was a community organizer at 4th std. It is TRUE that I organized my fellow classmates, particularly the boys, against the tyranny of the class leader, Sri Vidhya. At one point, as a mark of protest, I wrote "Sri Vidhya Down Down" all over the blackboard. This shows that I was willing to seek peaceful means of disapproval.
Unfortunately, the teacher did not see it that way - she used violent means such as thrashing the hell out of me; and other forms of initimidation. I had to give up my protest at that point, but it was a strategic retreat.
There is no doubt that it was this early exposure to state power that has made me radical and still helps me protest injustice in peaceful ways. I consider myself a modern day Che Guevara, ever ready to protest the tyranny of class leaders and project managers. I fiercely fight entrenched interests by writing anonymous blogs.

Your father was interested in literature from the time he was in 5th std. One of his earliest poems (written in a fit of literary excitement) was this:
Nature
------
Today, one who is in sorrow
Comes to me tomorrow

I had the word "tomorrow" and then spent two hours searching for a rhyming word. Then I chose the title and the subject.
Poetry IS that simple. Start with a word and then find rhyming words. It is like a game.
I also was influenced heavily by the writer Sujatha. At one point I wrote a really complex detective story in which, just from some water near a dead body, the detective figures out that there is a giant conspiracy to overturn India's elected government. What really helped the detective was that I, the writer, knew exactly what happened.
Writing stories and poems is a family tradition - I want you to continue it. Do not worry about publishing them. Nobody would publish them anyway. We have something called the internet. We can always publish there.

The other art your father is very good at is singing. Our neighbors may not agree, but I sacrificed my whole childhood in singing practice. I am not going to rest until I get acknowledged as a good singer. If I can't, it is your turn - I am willing to sacrifice your childhood for the same purpose.
Unfortunately, the whole idea of "rhythm" is not helping me. I don't know why drums or mridangam have to start playing at the same time I am singing. I have tried to signal them to stop but it is of no use.
At least, I want you to be in the college orchestra or music troupe. I never succeeded in this. They always gave me really weird songs to sing. Such as the songs sung in movies by blind beggars or by drunk vagabonds. Maybe you can improve this situation.

What is your father's profession? What does he DO? How does he earn money?
Long before your father was born, someone discovered the software project manager. Then they invented the computer because the project manager wanted to manage something.
Technology stagnated at this point until someone found that Indians could write software programs for computers. Once they found that, a half a billion Indians jumped up and started learning the C language.
Your father was one of them.
Now, I know that you see your father pottering around the house ALL the time and never see him leave the house and go to "work" like other fathers. You may be wondering where the money comes from. You may be worried about your future purchases such as train toys and Deepavali firecrackers. Has your father been laid off?
No - your father does something that only people who work in computers can do - he works "from home". This means he is available ALL the time to change diapers. Isn't that fun?
No, you can't go to school "from home".

Being Ultra Rich

The question that has been bothering me for the past few years is this: how can I become ultra-Rich?
To address this, you first have to understand if you are rich or not. The India Together Editor Ashwin Mahesh did some back-of-the-envelope calculations a few years back and wrote that you are rich in India if you have more than Rs.10000 as income per month.
This will be shocking to most people, because we call most people in that range as middle class; actually we call them lower middle class. We definitely did not consider ourselves rich when we were earning Rs.10000 per month.
But in India, the average wage is much lower than Rs.10000 per month. So most of us reading and writing in the internet are already Rich.
But there is an important reason why we do not consider ourselves rich - that is because, we still have to struggle for recognition with millions of other people. So we are Rich, but we do not get some of the SOCIAL benefits of being rich. We are not Unique.

The New Rich

You see, there are two kinds of rich people - we call in Tamil "Pudhu Panakkaaran" - the New Rich and "Paramparai Panakkaran" - the Traditional Rich.
Most of us are the New Rich - I started out with a pay of Rs.2500 in my first job and then reached Nirvana only because I went to the USA. The New Rich people have some money, and want to be respected as Rich. But we still have a long way to go.
How do you know the New Rich? We are the ones hanging out in Pizza Corner, Coffee Day, Barrista, LandMark, Odyssey and all these shops. There is a very very important way these shops are distinguished - in these shops, all the staff talk in English. They have "English" music going - never ordinary Tamil, Hindi movie songs.
You see, the New Rich are trying hard to show that they are Rich; they do this in a variety of ways. One of these ways is to make you feel you are "foreign".
I was browsing books in Odyssey the other day when a staff member walked over and said, "Do you need any help?". I said "No". The guy replied, as a single word, "Looking-for-nothing-in-particular" and walked away. It took me about five minutes to figure out what he said.
So, these shops, the New Rich shops provide an important function in society - they are there essentially for validating that you are, indeed, a Rich guy. They try to make you feel exclusive in a country with a hundred million other people exactly like you.
The staff there know this - they are so uncomfortable with their role, though.
This was brought home to me last week in Barrista. The guy at the cash register frowned at every one of his customers. A family came in and ordered coffee. The guy harassed them with all the stupid questions about coffee - latte, cream on top and all that. The couple gamely answered all the questions, but still could not get RESPECT from the register guy. So, they started complaining that the prices were higher than in the USA and tried to talk about the USA - for the sole purpose of informing the guy they were NRIs. That did not help either. The guy never stopped barking at them.
I was nervously waiting for my turn. I started out asking for coffee in Tamil, asked him a couple of questions about seating upstairs. The problem I have is that I find it difficult to talk in English with other Tamils - it is just not natural.I asked all my questions in Tamil, and the guy probably got offended. He resolutely kept answering in English. Finally I gave up.
When I thought about it later, I realized that all of us customers at Barrista are competing for some respect or distinction because we are the New Rich. Unfortunately, the staff there are aware of that. They know that they hold the power to make or break our Rich egos. So, they exercise that power.
I always find tense, morose staff at Coffee Day, Odyssey and Pizza Corner. The reason is not far to seek - the staff is forced to behave in a cultural context outside of their regular experience. It is somewhat like BPO.

The Ultra-Rich

But how can you truly distinguish yourself in Chennai?
You have to be one of the Ultra Rich traditional panakaarans.
Have you ever walked into the Taj in Chennai? Or Park Sheraton? You talk to them in Tamil, they would reply in Tamil. Right there is a clue of why they are so cool.
We have to realize that there is an unassuming tradition of richness, native to India.
When I was growing up in Tirunelveli, there was a family friend of ours. He would turn up at our home without wearing a chappal, covered in Neem oil and sit by the shoe rack and converse with my dad. Well, he was on the Board of Directors for the Ramco group and owned half the village of Kayathaar.
Again, there was the owner of a private bus transport. This guy would wear a cotton dhoti and white shirt. He would have a "thundu" (towel) bunched up in his hand wherever he went. The guy was a multi millionaire - he owned 10 buses in the Tirunelveli area and was a philanthropist. He donated the gold statue of Thyagaraja currently in Thiruvaiyaaru.
I saw the leader of the TN Congress Party and national King Maker, G.K.Mooppanaar once in Tirunelveli. He was simple as well, although he landed up in a fleet of Benz cars.
There is a tradition of extreme humility (matched many times by conservative ideas) in Indian Ultra-Rich world. Political leaders, Cinema luminaries, Industrialists - many of them operate in a constellation far above ours.
Well, you think they go to Coffee Day? I bet even their grand children don't. They have no need for validation. They are so damn cool, they can walk into the Taj and order curd rice. They are so damn cool, their women do not go to Nalli. Nalli chettiyaar personally delivers hand-designed sarees to their womenfolk.
Right now, I can count a few of these rich families:
1. M.Karunanidhi, Stalin, Maran family
2. Rajinikanth family
3. Saravana Stores family
4. S.Ve Sekhar family
5. Y.G. Parthasarathy family
6. Kamal Hassan-Charu Hassan-Chandra Hassan family
7. Saravana Bhavan family
8. Nalli family
9. AVM family
10. DK Pattammal (Nithyasree) family
11. Sivaji Ganesan family

There are probably hundreds of them, but not thousands. Most of these men and women are recognized only by the others in this exclusive club.

My Ultra-Rich Fantasy

I have a fantasy about belonging to this club.
In my fantasy, housemaids and gardeners and drivers abound in our home - none of them ever quit. Even if they do, I do not have to personally worry about finding their replacement.
In my fantasy, the hall in the house is enormous; has two staircases going round - like the houses in old Sivaji, MGR movies.
In my fantasy, the driver drives me and my wife upto Vummidi Bangaru Jewellers (VBJ) and parks in the back. Someone goes in and informs the manager. They come running out. My wife gets samples delivered to the car. Meanwhile I am munching fried cashewnuts and contemplating the expansion of my immense business house.
In my fantasy, I don't talk much.
In my fantasy, I buy Barrista and Odyssey.

Ok, the cooker whistle is going like a siren, I got to go.

Tamil Short Story

I wrote this story (among others) 4 years back. I thought I may as well publish here. It is copyrighted to me and should not be reprinted without my permission.

ஒரே ஒரு ஜோக்
--------------------
இரா. இராமையா

வீட்டில் இருந்து பார்ட்டிக்குக் கிளம்பியதில் இருந்து ஒரே சண்டை.

முதலில் ரகு மௌனமாகத் தான் வந்தான். பிரேமா பேசிக் கொண்டே வந்தாள். திடீரென்று ரகு கத்திச் சிரித்தான்

"என்ன?" என்று கேட்டாள் பிரேமா.

"ஒண்ணுமில்ல"

பெண்களிடம் இது சொல்ல கூடாத பதில் என்பதால் சற்று நேரத்தில் அவனே பணிந்தான்.

"இல்ல.. ஒரு ஜோக் ஒண்ணு யோசிச்சேன்."

"என்ன ஜோக்?"

"பார்ட்டில சொல்றேன்"

அவள் நிதானித்து, "பார்ட்டில ஜோக் சொல்லப் போறீங்களா? வேணாமே.."

"ஏன்? போன முறை மாபிள்ளை ரொம்ப ஜோவியல் டைபுன்னு எல்லாரும் சொன்னாங்களே? நீ தான சொன்ன?"

"ஏதோ சாதரணமா சொன்னாங்க"

"ஏ.. சும்மா மட்டம் தட்டாத ..போன முறை எங்க தாத்தா பத்தி சொன்னேனே. எல்லாம் விழுந்து விழுந்து சிரிச்சாங்க."

"உங்க பரம்பரைய பாத்து யாரு தான் சிரிக்கல?"

ரகு அவளை முறைத்தான்.

"நீ கூட அன்னிக்குப் பெரிய பல்லை காட்டி சிரிச்ச .. குழந்தைங்கல்லாம் பயந்து அலறிச்சு."

பிரேமா வாயை மூடிக் கொண்டாள். சில நிமிடங்கள் கழித்து, "ஒரு முறை ஜோக் சொன்னா சிரிப்பாங்க. ஒவ்வொரு முறையும் சொன்ன கோமாளின்னு சொல்லுவாங்க." என்றாள்.

"யாரும் அப்பிடி சொல்ல மாட்டாங்க."

"சரி..என்ன ஜோக்? சொல்லுங்க.."

ரகு சிரித்தான். அவனுக்கே அவன் ஜோக்கை நினைத்துச் சிரிப்பு வந்தது.

"ஒரு முறை ஷார்ஜா கிரிக்கெட் மேட்ச் எந்த ஊருல நடக்குதுன்னு பேசிக்கிட்டோமே?"

"ஐயே. அது வேணாம்."

"ஏன்? நீ சிரிச்சியே?"

"கேவலமா இருக்கும்"

ரகு கவலையுடன், " வேற எதுனா யோசிக்கிறேன்" என்றான்.

மணி பார்த்தான். இன்னும் ஐந்து நிமிடத்தில் ஹோட்டல் வந்து விடும். அவனுக்குக் கவலை அதிகமாகியது.

"எங்கயாச்சும் காரை நிறுத்திட்டு ஜோக் யோசிப்போமா? " என்று கேட்டான்.
"அப்பிடியாவது ஜோக் சொல்லி ஆகணுமா?"
" என் மேல எதிர்பார்ப்பு நிறைய இருக்கு பிரேமா. பார்ட்டியே என்னால தான் களை கட்டணும்."
திடீரென்று, "கிடைச்சிடிச்சு ..சூப்பர் ஜோக்", என்றான்.
"என்ன?"
"உன் கிட்ட சொல்ல மாட்டேன்."
"அங்க வந்து மானத்த வாங்காதீங்க."
"முதல்ல நீ என் மானத்த வாங்காத. ஜோக் சொன்னா சிரி. போன முறை சில ஜோக்குக்கு நீ சிரிக்கவே இல்லை. எல்லாரும் விழுந்து விழுந்து சிரிச்சாங்க. நீ மட்டும்..திமிருடி உனக்கு"
"சிரிப்பு வந்தா சிரிக்குறேன். தத்து பித்துன்னு எதாவது சொன்னா?"
"உனக்கு எப்பவுமே நான்னா நக்கல்"
"சரி".
"என்ன சரி? இந்த முறை மட்டும் சிரிக்காம இரு..உன்னை வச்சுக்கிறேன்."

ஹோட்டல் வந்து விட்டது. இருவரும் கடுகடுவென்று இறங்கி உள்ளே போனதும் புன்னகைத்துக் கொண்டே போனார்கள். பிரேமாவின் உறவுக்காரப் பெண் மாயா, பிளஸ் டூவில் நிறைய மார்க் வாங்கியதால் இந்த விருந்து. அந்தப் பெண்ணிடம் நேராகச் சென்றார்கள்.
"கங்க்ராட்ஸ்", என்றாள் பிரேமா.
"தாங்க்ஸ்"
"என்ன மாயா..பேப்பர் சேசிங் போல இருக்கு? இவ்வளவு மார்க் வாங்கி இருக்க?" என்றான் ரகு.
அந்தப் பெண் பயத்துடன், "அதெல்லாம் இல்ல", என்றாள். லேசாகக் கண் கலங்கியது அவளுக்கு.
பிரேமா அவனைத் தரதரவென்று இழுத்து கொண்டு போனாள். "சும்மா இருக்கீங்களா?" என்றாள் தரதரவிற்கிடையே.
"நான் என்ன சொல்லிட்டேன்?" என்றான் அவன்.

எல்லோரும் சாப்பிடத் தொடங்கினார்கள். ரகுவிற்குப் பரபரப்பாக இருந்தது. தகுந்த தருணத்திற்காக காத்திருந்தான். எல்லோரும் கத்திப் பேசி கொண்டிருந்தார்கள்.
"இப்பல்லாம் ஸ்டூடென்சுக்கு நிறைய வாய்ப்புகள் இருக்கு", என்றார் ஒருவர்.
பிரேமாவின் அப்பா, "மாயா ..என்ன படிக்கப் போற? மெடிகலா?" என்று கேட்டார்.
"சிங்கப்பூர்ல ஒரு ஸ்காலர்ஷிப் வந்திருக்கு", என்றாள் மாயா.
ரகு, " சிங்கபூர்ன உடன ஒரு ஜோக் ஒண்ணு நினைவுக்கு வருது", என்றான்.
யாரும் அவனை கவனிக்கவில்லை.
"சிங்கபூர்ல எப்படித் தனியா போயி படிப்ப?"
"அதான் யோசனையா இருக்கு"
ரகு பல்லைக் கடித்து கொண்டான்.

சாப்பிட்டு முடிக்கும் வேளையில் ரகு ஆவலுடன் காத்திருந்த சந்தர்ப்பம் வந்தது. எல்லோரும் பேசி முடித்திருந்தார்கள்.
"கேர்ல்ஸ் தான் இப்பல்லாம் நிறைய மார்க்கு", என்றார் ஒருவர்.
"உலகத்தையே சுத்தி வந்திடறாங்க கல்யாணத்துக்கு முன்னாடி", என்றார் பிரேமாவின் அப்பா.
"உலகம்ன உடனே ஒரு ஜோக் நினைவுக்கு வருது", என்றான் ரகு.
அவனே பயப்படும் விதமாக எல்லோரும் அவனைத் திரும்பிப் பார்த்தார்கள்.
"என்ன ஜோக்", என்றார் பிரேமாவின் அப்பா.
ரகு சற்றே கலவரத்துடன் தொடங்கினான்.
"அமெரிக்கால ஒரு பொம்பளைக்கு நாலு குழந்தை பிறந்துதாம். நாளுக்கும் நார்மலா பேரு வச்சா. அஞ்சாவது குழந்தை பிறந்திச்சு. அதுக்கு மட்டும் ஹூவாங் ஹூவங்க்ன்னு பேரு வச்சா...ஏன் தெரியுமா?" என்று கேட்டான்.
ஒரு பாட்டி, "என்ன அசட்டு ஜோக்கா இருக்கு..", என்றாள்.
"சிரிப்பே வரல", என்றார் ஒருவர்.
"ஜோக் இன்னும் முடியல", என்றான் ரகு.
"மாப்பிள்ளை..சீக்கிரமா முடியுங்க. குலோப் ஜாமுன் சாப்பிடணும்", என்றார் பிரேமாவின் அப்பா.
ரகு, "ஏன்னா உலகத்துல பொறக்குற ஒவ்வொரு அஞ்சாவது குழந்தையும் சைனிஸ் குழந்தையாம்", என்று முடித்தான்.
எல்லோரும் அவனையே பார்த்துக் கொண்டிருந்தார்கள். பிரேமாவின் அப்பா, "உம்..மேல சொல்லுங்க", என்று ஊக்குவித்தார்.
ரகு கோபத்துடன், "ஜோக் அவ்வளவு தான். முடிஞ்சு போச்சு ", என்றான்.
பிரேமா "ஹா ஹா ஹா ..." , என்று கத்திச் சிரித்தாள். வேறு யாருமே சிரிக்கவில்லை.

வீட்டுக்குத் திரும்பிப் போய்க் கொண்டிருந்தார்கள். ரகு மௌனமாக இருந்தான். பிரேமா ஏதோ பேசிக் கொண்டே வந்தாள்.
ரகு திடீரென்று, "என்ன திமிருடி உனக்கு..", என்றான்.
பிரேமா திடுக்கிட்டு, "என்ன?" என்றாள்.
"அந்த ஜோக்குக்கு ஏண்டி அப்பிடிச் சிரிச்ச?"
"நீங்க தான சிரிக்கச் சொன்னீங்க?"
"எல்லாம் சும்மா இருக்காங்க. நீ மட்டும் ஏண்டி சிரிச்ச?"
"இது என்ன இது..சிரிச்சாலும் தப்பு ..சிரிக்கலன்னாலும் .."
"உம்..சும்மா கிட"
கார் போய்க் கொண்டிருந்தது.
"திமிருடி உனக்கு"

Stress Relief for the modern worker

I worked in a public sector company in Chennai for a couple of years after college. I was assigned to the R&D division but ended up working in the shop floor. I did some assembly and C programming at that time and spent a lot of time at home.
One of the useful things I figured out while at that company was this - mechanical work, as in repeating something over and over, is a GREAT stress reliever.
It all started like this - I was asked to slightly modify and add additional functionality to a STD (phone billing) machine. The programming was in assembly language and the first day work started, I got a foot thick printout at my desk - the whole source code was in that stack. The chip with this embedded code was sitting innocently in front of me.
I had to read the stack, understand what was going on, and modify the code in appropriate places.
To slightly complicate things, the chip can be "burnt" only at a different building. So I had to make modifications to the code, take the chip over to the other building, burn it, come back and test it. Repeat.
Needless to say, I was greatly stressed by this line of work. All my classmates were leaving for the USA (this was around 1997). They were talking about this brand new problem called "Y2K" and they were going to save the world from the Y2K monster. They had to be in the USA to do that. It all fit in, and I was terribly upset that I was sitting with pipes over my head in a shop floor. I wanted to fight Y2K.
(Little did I know that my classmates were having printed stacks of COBOL to pore over and change dates in)
Production companies have a very strict hierarchy - the workers are all treated with suspicion. Security used to pat them down to see if they were taking something home. The officers were treated with reverence - and at 23, with an engineering degree, I was an officer. The security would even salute me, sometimes (if I wore shoes). When I walk upto a worker, they would stand up. As an engineer I would stand up for senior engineers, and so on.
It all sounds ideal, except that the workers get to kick the crap out of you, literally, during a strike. The company was pretty unionized. Unlike other public sector companies, they actually got work done. I thought they were well run.

Anyway,one day I am sitting next to the senior engineer when the shop floor got a big consignment of telephone jacks. This company was the only manufacturer of the tiny telephone jacks that are installed in your home by the pre-BSNL DoT. So, we got a big shipment of them to deliver. They were almost ready except that you have to tighten some pin at a single place.
They distributed the work and all the workers started picking up the connectors and tightening the pins. I watched them with fascination - they had a big pile of telephone jacks in front of them. They would pick up each one, bend a pin and then move it to another pile. It was like watching Charlie Chaplin in "City Lights".
I had a tough assembly algorithm to crack that day. I postponed that. I got the unfinished jacks, a big pile in front of me and proceeded to tighten the pin.
I spent the whole day on it and it was my happiest day in that company. I could completely forget about life outside, its problems, even Y2K.
It was better than being idle. Or sleep. I felt I was actually accomplishing something - my STD machine work was meant for Ethiopia (We were selling those machines to Ethiopia). But this telephone-jack-tightening was meant for the people around me - patriotic Indians. I felt I was making a difference by tightening the pin.
I tried doing it the next day but the senior engineer chased me away.

Since then, whenever I get into stressful situations, I try to do mechanical work that still accomplishes something. Let me list such activities here. Try them at home and work:

1. Potato peeling - my wife heats up the potatoes. Once they are cooked, I have to peel the potato skin. You require a bowl with the hot potatoes and a plate to drop the peeled potatoes. Patiently waiting for the potatoes to cool is fun.

2. Phone Contacts - transferring contacts from one cellphone to another, when you get a new phone. I am sure there are easier ways of doing this, but do not try them. Do it manually, one by one. Type each contact's name in the new phone. It is more fun if the cellphone has a really small keyboard. You will make mistakes and then you can correct the mistakes and feel good.

3. Photo Album - transfer print photos into an album. Sort the photos, then insert each one into the album cover. If you want more fun, create small labels and stick them on the album about where the photos were taken and more.

4. Data Transfer - at work, you will have excel sheets with some data that needs to be transferred to some other form. Do NOT write a program to do it. Transfer manually. Have both excel files open and move data from one to another by copying and pasting. With around a hundred rows of data, this can be very fulfilling. Do not attempt for more than hundred rows.

The key idea here is that you should not have to think too much about the work other than placement. "Where do I place this?" is a good stress relieving question. "Should I place this?" is not. "How should I place this?" is a very stressful place to be. This is why cooking is not a stress reliever (for me). It requires a little bit more thinking and thus causes my head to explode and ruin the food.

The Porn Library of Chromepet

(This is not meant to be an adult post - it simply analyzes a model of working together as a community. Nothing offensive in here)
I went to engineering college in a suburb of Chennai called Chromepet. My first lesson in civics was in that college, from unlikely sources.
The college had several hostels, with different batches of students. There were also dayscholars (although most of us were far from scholars), who resided in Chennai and did not need the hostel services. Still, most of us spent lots of time in the hostel.
Within a few months of starting college, the hostel rooms had a good supply of porn books. Some of these books were supplied by our seniors (in the sense they were left over). Some were actually bought by our batch mates. With the frugal money supply we had, we still managed to allocate some "charity" money for buying porn. A few of us were more avid hobbyists - they got the weekly and monthly Tamil and English magazines with religious regularity.

Side Note on Porn Books
You would expect that English magazines rule; but actually the regional industry is more innovative in porn. The writers in the English magazines want to get into movies or something - so they write very high quality English with obscure vocabulary. They also take a long time getting to the point - most of the time the "incident" has happened without any warning. The Tamil porn books excel - the writers are not going anywhere, so they have more motivation to make the magazine succeed. So usually the way it works is this - you read the tamil books and then take a look at the photos in the English magazines. Repeat.


The Community Forms

Soon it became apparent that there was a problem with our collection of porn. The books were not available in one central location. Since they were distributed, someone in a hurry (don't go there) had to go room after room. Since many of these books had similar looks you may pick up an already covered book by mistake. Our premium and newer books were not well-managed - nobody knew where they were.


At this point I want to point out that the porn book collection follows a model very similar to the Web 2.0 model (as described by Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo! VP-product strategy in his blog here). 1% of the community contribute the money and the books (contributors); 10% are more active users and volunteer administrators (synthesizers). The remaining use the books (consumers).
It seems that this model will never work for anything other than porn books in the non-web world. The contributors gained nothing by spending money, getting the books and then handing them over to the consumers. But the porn books were kind of "hot property". You could NOT take them home. Plus once you had gone through them a couple of times, they are done (so are you). There is no point in scrawling your name in them or anything stupid like that. Thus, the contributors were motivated to share the books with their batch mates.

Back in Chromepet, thus, there was a strong case for some community activism that would better the situation for everyone. The first thing a couple of synthesizors did was to find a permanent location for the library. There were pros and cons in hosting it in a room - our first choice of location was disrupted because the "scholar" had his dad visit him the next week. We finally chose a classmate's room which was easily accessible and whose family did not care about him. The idea was that the library should be accessible all the time - so we put the collection next to a window which was always open.
We also had a volunteer librarian who would sort the books and put new books on top and did some housekeeping.

Issues with Community Sharing

Now, this is, of course, a trust based model. There are different reasons for it to fail:

1. It is possible for a guy to not buy a single porn book; and still manage to get the best and latest on time.
This is a classic problem and relates in a way to the "Prisoner's Dilemma". If enough people became convinced that they could get a free ride without buying a single book ever, and the contributors sensed this; then there exists a strong disincentive for the contributors to keep buying. The whole community would stop working - which would be a personal catastrophe.
Please keep in mind that, in the web world, a contributor to YouTube atleast gets to see people visiting his video, commenting and thus has a sense of fulfillment. This never does exist in the non-web-porn-book-library-community-in-Chromepet. If exposed, actually the contributor faces ridicule and ostracism (I should be writing English porn).
But, this never happened in our case. The community came together and even the poorest of us contributed atleast a couple of times to the growing library. Dare I say it, there was a sense of shared purpose.

2. If people took the books, there was no punishment for not returning a book. Actually no one kept track of loaned books and returned books. We were trying to become scholars. If this system was misused, people could just stop returning books to the library. Eventually the library would shrink and may cease to exist as a community endeavor.
Again, this never happened in our case. Our batchmates always returned the books - very rarely were pages torn and eaten. There was a commitment to keep the porn stash in its allotted place.

Thus, our model of community work survived in spite of many challenges. In a pre-web world, it is a miracle that it worked. Now, of course, with the internet, there are several porn boards and groups were people share videos, and stories. But there are several incentives for a user to gain "credits" in such a community. And of course, in a virtual environment, the user need not be afraid of his video getting "lost".


The Community Thrives

When I left the college, the library had thrived through the years. We left it to our juniors to manage. There may still be books marked with our names being circulated among younger scholars (unless they have all shifted to YouTube).
We left fulfilled that we had built an institution. I am reminded of Subrata Bagchi (MindTree) in his famous speech, Go, Kiss The World:

That was my first lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success

Running into celebrities

I have been living in Chennai for almost 12 years (with gaps). When I was in Madurai I frequently heard that Chennai people get to see MGR or Jayalalitha or Karunanidhi just walking around in local markets. So you could be shopping for a clothes and boom! you could run into Rajinikanth. (It was a simpler time then).
I also heard that the people of Chennai were so used to celebrities that even if they ran into Rajinikanth looking for leather pants, they do not react like "country fruits" - that is, they will not rush towards him and bother him. They will act as if they shop with Rajini all the time.
So, that was the myth about Chennai - it was hot, sweaty and rude - but then you could run into superstars anytime.
This appealed to me a lot. When we were moving to Chennai, I expected that I would be running into Mani Ratnam or SPB pretty soon. I even imagined how "cool" I would behave when I saw them. I used to debate whether I should smile at them or give them a frosty look.
It was all a matter of time.

I moved to Chennai in 1989 - and from then to just an year back, I did not see a SINGLE celebrity. I hung around all the cool places in Mylapore and Adyar and Nungambakkam. Yet, I saw no one - and I never got to practice my slow "acknowledgment" smile.

My woes continued in the United States - I visited New York City pretty often. No celebrities there either.

After I came back to India, around an year back, my luck changed. I went to the Subway restaurant to get some food. And I saw Krishnamachari Srikanth sitting and munching a sandwich with his family.
Remember this was my first time - so I abandoned all caution and stared at Srikanth so hard that his family seemed to be alarmed. They all started pointing at me and whispering and I left the restaurant very embarassed.
But I was excited - surely my luck was turning. I could figure out why I was missing all the celebrities: celebrities are like the tigers in Discovery Channel shows. You catch them at the watering hole - they still needed to eat! The reason I had not seen ANY of them all these years was because I was stone broke in college and initially at work. I ate in local tea shops. The celebrities will not be caught dead in those shops.
Now that I could afford Subway, a new world opened up before me. I visited that subway a couple of more times to see if anyone else would turn up.

Then I realized there was someone else blocking my access to celebrities - my wife. Let me explain:
By the East Coast Road in Chennai, there are sevaral resorts. One of the more famous ones is Fisherman's Cove. Me, my wife and my brother-in-law went to the Cove one day for lunch.
We were sitting in the restaurant - and I was keeping an alert eye on the other guests to see if anyone turned up. I was concentrating so much inside that I did not immediately notice that my brother-in-law and my wife went silent.
When I noticed, they were staring intently out the open french window.
I asked them what happened.
My wife initially shook her head, then relented and said, "Vikram walked by".
From the nonchalant way in which she said that, it seemed like one of her friends or something. Then I turned and saw a well built man walking further off, walking away from us and everyone in the balcony of the restaurant were waving to him. Some even had their cameras out.
I said quietly, "So you mean actor Vikram just walked by?"
"Yes."
"You, of course, mean the guy who won the national award for
acting, who kicked so much ass in Dhool, Dhil, Saamy and all those movies?"
"Exactly"
I was apalled. They apparently saw him walking in our direction, and wanted to appear SO cool that they did not even tell me that this world-famous (ok, among Tamils) actor just strolled past us.
All that I got to see was his behind.

This level of ultra-coolness hurt me again, once in the beach. We were sitting and chatting in the Besant Nagar beach. My wife said singer Chinmayi walked past. Again I was too late; Chinmayi is the singer of Kannathil Muthamittaal and Ennuyir Thozhiye.

All these celebrities sneak around my back and I am utterly clueless about how to spot them.

Then a couple of days back I hit jackpot.
I was going to work, at peak traffic time. We were waiting for the signal at one of the busiest intersections in Chennai. Suddenly police stopped all traffic. A bunch of guys walked to the center of the intersection and started exploding firecrackers. I was late for work and along with my colleagues I was cursing the person causing the delay.
A bunch of white SUVs went flashing by. And then there was a slow moving van with a open sunroof. Actor Sarath Kumar was waving to everyone in the intersection.
He did not seem to understand that we were not gathered there to watch him pass by. We all had to get to work - and in the heat and the smoke, here was Sarath kumar, mighty pleased with himself, waving at us.
Nobody waved back.
So, here was the first movie celebrity I ever saw - after so many years in Chennai - and I was already praying for him to be gone so we could move on.
Such is life.

Oh, by the way, I saw one of the guys who acted in "Chennai - 600028" in Cofffee Day yesterday. I am going to hang out more there. I am sure Kamal Hasan will come along any day.