‘The Barber from Tirupati’ -- Am reading three books at a time!

I grew up with this impinging anecdote that my father would thrust on me, every time I moved to another activity without completing the earlier one. In Tirupati people get tonsured as mark of respect to the Lord. And predictably there are whole bunch of barbers who tonsure a million heads. Apparently, there is stiff competition between the barbers (spirituality and commercialism shamelessly intertwined). To ensure customers stick to a particular barber, the barbers have an amazing trick. They take 5-10 people (customers) in a row and partially begin tonsuring each. This leaves 5-10 customers half-tonsured, hapless and helpless. The concept of ‘vendor-lock-in’ shines brilliantly in the mid-day sun. The locked-in customers wait for their turn, while the barber glides through his temporary slaves and completes the ‘job’ with his own fuzzy logic.

I am the barber these days. There is always a time in my years of reading books (I wonder if it follows a cyclic pattern) when adequacy of my inner confusion leads me to sleep with multiple books together. I am currently reading – The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga ; Sea of Poppies by Amitava Ghosh ; and A Search in Secret India by Paul Brunton

The White Tiger – By Aravind Adiga:
Aravind Adiga - Yes the quondam correspondent of Times Magazine, yes the man who shares his last name with multitudes of roadside eateries in Bangalore and yes the man who won the ‘Man Booker Prize’ for 2008.

I always like a book which has nice paper. I always like a book which has comfortable fonts and liberal spacing between sentences. I always like a book that tells a story of my land. The book is all this and just a little more. Breezy & ruthless is the pace of the story. Could not keep the book down after a point in time – page 124 “The main thing to know about Delhi is that the roads are good, and the people are bad. The police are totally rotten…” to be precise. A fantastic first person narrative of Balram Halwai, who, through his letters to the Chinese Premier vivisects the Indian under-belly. Intelligent concoction of Fables & Facts, Perception & Truth. I like the part where he describes the ‘Rooster Coop’ – “ …. It’s because 99.9 per cent of us are caught in the Rooster Coop just like those poor guys in the poultry market. The Rooster Coop doesn’t always work with miniscule sum of money. Don’t test your chauffer with a rupee coin or two – he may well steal that much. But leave a million dollars in front of a servant and he won’t touch a penny. Try it: leave a bag with a million dollars in a Mumbai taxi…. Why doesn’t that servant take the suitcase full of diamonds? He’s no Gandhi, he’s human, he’s you and me. But he’s in the Rooster Coop. The trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy”

I believe that it is also a superficial view of the many Indias that we know. There are so many alternative, uncontacted and unheard India, and Adiga would do well to dwell on those in his subsequent endeavours.

Sea of Poppies – By Amitava Ghosh:
The last (and the only) Amitava Ghosh creation that I read was ‘The Calcutta Chromosomes’. Sea of Poppies is part of trilogy by the author. He weaves an intricate story around myriad characters. The story meanders around the Ganges and the characters, with the passage of pages, pile-on to the Ibis - the ship that would make the journey to Mauritius Island- with a predictable alacrity to the plot. By the time you reach page 375 the Ibis resembles the Noah’s Ark. One can see one each of one variety in the characters that embark Ibis. A remarried woman, a bankrupt zamindar, an American sailor, a French girl who has an Indian muh-bola-bhai, coolies, convicts – all become jahaj bhais ( ship-brothers)
What stands out in the novel is the excellent detailing of mid-Nineteenth century India, the research to recreate & describe the poppy trade and the strange use of the language (many of the words are Hindi, Bhojpuri, Bangla).

A Search in Secret India - By Paul Brunton:
Paul Brunton (‘PB’) is probably one of the earliest westerners who cared to delve into the mystic beauty of our land. ‘PB’ tells the story of his search of secret India. He tries to unravel the spiritual mystery of the land without compromising his western rationale. He meets different kinds of people ( Sages, Sadhus, Yogis, Rishees, Babas) in his travails - some honest , some outright thugs. He documents, fairly emotionlessly of his encounters till he meets Ramana Maharishi in Arunachalam. He submits .. “I perceive with sudden clarity that intellect creates its own problems and then makes itself miserable trying to solve them”. Never before, have I read a book, where I had to always keep a pen and paper ready lest I miss noting an invaluable comment. Am in page 149, about halfway through and without a shadow of doubt I can vouch, that there would be multiple times in the future that I would be half-way through this book.

Mumbai bleeds - Bridge the imbalance

The attack on Mumbai . Over 150 killed , hundreds injured. 20 odd terrorists held the city at ransom. The politicians have sanely (and strangely) shown restrain and have not retorted to mudslinging.. for how long is what the question is. The resilience of Mumbai has been challenged yet another time and oddly enough, we don’t hear news such as ‘Mumbai will bounce back’. People are scared. The army, the Police and the NSG become heroes and so would the terrorists in their respective ‘nations’. Sons became martyrs, husbands became heroes, children became hostages, the suave became pedestrian, the whites became blacks, the bearers became bystanders, ratans became helpless, and I became someone who kept watching TV for longer than what my wits would permit.

I got the same SMS from several people - “Forgiving terrorists should be left to God, but fixing their appointment with God is entirely our responsibility” ; asking me to Pass it on ! I realized that they have succeeded – they (terrorists) have managed to pass it (hatred) on!

Gandhian as I may seem, but I have realized that anger, hatred, revenge, tit-for-tat are so futile an expression, that vanity of its consequence does not need anything more than common sense as its catharsis.

It is impossible to eliminate the terrorists. Napoleon for one would not mind me using the word (impossible) . There is no better way to curb terrorism than to create an environment of conscience awakening. Imbalances always create chaos, sooner or later. It is the distance between the rich and the poor, the learned and the ignorant, the resourceful and the struggler that creates such imbalances. As countries search for innovative techniques to immunize themselves they forget to awaken their conscience. They forget to build the bridges as they are busy building walls. Break the imbalance and see the difference.

Quest for Knowledge

Quest for knowledge is the only relevant quest for man. For, in that (quest) lies the true meaning of life. The quest for knowledge is self-sustained and continuous

I tried to put this theory to test in the last year or so. Before you read-on through the passage, I must confess that the ‘realisation that I treaded the path of knowledge and that it would lead me to something was not a forethought’

I asked myself … ‘ when was the last time that I learned something new’ and realized that it was donkeys years earlier .. maybe sometime in college. I know that we keep hearing the phrases such as ‘life teaches you in every step’ ; ‘we learn something or the other everyday’ etc etc. There is a difference between this form of learning (which is to learn something new based on your existing knowledge) and the form that I am referring to .. i.e. to learn something new.. I mean from scratch….. just like when we were kids.

So, coming back to my story.. When I came to Bangalore I needed personal transportation , buying a car and driving it to office was the next natural progression ( for someone who drove the Activa at a little over 30 kmph in Delhi roads and who still does not know how to drive a geared two-wheeler .. you may call that as a ‘leap’ rather than a progression). Obediently, I enrolled myself in a car-driving school. It was a 10 day course .. 1 hour each day. The teacher , in his early 20’s, the best thing that could have happened to me – I thought – same age group you see !! Within 10 minutes of training on Day-1 I realized that the going would be tough. Somehow my Activa days were flashing in front of me as a monster that would not allow me to move forward ( > 30 kmph). The first gear was the toughest. At first the teacher was nice.. ‘you need to release the clutch gently, while you accelerate ( gently again)’ . The subtlety of the exercise was too much for me .. no less than doing a in-vitro-fertilization (IVF) with naked eyes. The teacher’s patience broke in the 9th minute.. thereafter he started dealing with me like a kindergarten kid. Each driving nuance was drilled into my head.. with absolute disdain to my ‘age’ or ‘stature’. At the end of 10 days I realized that my confidence level was exactly as it was in Day-1.

The second story started in office .. my colleague mentioned that he was going to learn Spanish .. I simply piled-on. It is easy I thought to learn a new language considering that I have a “finesse” to grasp new languages. The teacher on the first day mentioned that the ‘key to learn Spanish is to stop translating it from English’ – incidentally that is exactly what I do to learn new languages .. My most potent weapon was barred from being used. . Every time my Spanish teacher looks at me, I see in her eyes the words that say .. “ How can you be such a moron.. what you are learning now is something that children in Latin America learn before they join school”. Two months on and am still struggling. Not sure how many more years it would take to get there ..

These two experiences have left profound impression in me. When I am learning I keep my baggage of arrogance outside the class… All what I am outside the class in kept outside the class! If not anything, these two experiences have taught me to be more enduring and humble. To be child-like .. I say ! So the message to me was loud and clear .. keep learning .. for the quest of knowledge will keep me grounded and humble.

Many of us would begin to opine … and would ask .. If you keep learning all your life, when would you reap the benefits of what you learn.. or to put it differently .. ‘the measure of how well you have learned is the success it yields… ’ hence success is an essential element of learning or quest-for-knowledge. Where I differ with the above theory is .. Being successful or famous is the not the most important thing, 99 % of the people are not famous and it is stupid to have an aim / goal to be famous and successful.

The quest for knowledge is the most important thing .. Success is the by-product and it becomes so inconsequential when the journey (of learning) is so enchanting.