Silver anniversary reunion

(Published on July 23, 2016 in Business Standard) 

Some years ago, an enterprising classmate from my boarding school, Rishi Valley, created a WhatsApp group for our class. It was a high-spirited space. After the first 200,000 messages, I put it on mute. 87,000 silent notifications later, I texted the group admin to say that I was exiting the group, though I still loved everyone. He sent me teary emoticons. I felt guilty.

The trouble is, I was only at this boarding school for two years, while many of my classmates grew up there together, share ionic bonds, and apparently all have Mensa-style memory. They kept reminiscing fondly about what x had said to y at 3.22pm on that Tuesday in Septemper 1986, behind z building, and then so-and-so teacher caught them—remember? I frequently can’t remember my own name, so I thought I’d slip off and do other stuff.

But this year marks 25 years since we graduated. One of our classmates took on the role of reunion architect, and set about persuading, cajoling, threatening, and browbeating everyone in an organised and timely fashion. He phoned me in March.

Hmm, I said, wow, lemme think about it, I’ll definitely try to m—

“I’ve emailed you your air ticket,” he said. “I don’t trust you.”

That’s how I found myself boarding a bus in Bangalore with a score of people who look exactly the same as they did a quarter century ago—perhaps a touch more tired, maybe because of staying up nights drinking babies’ blood.

But even the best preserved of us was a little slower. Between beer habits, lunch requirements, and weaker bladders, the three-hour journey from Bangalore somehow took seven hours. But finally we were there. Or were we? It looked as though it should look familiar, but if it hadn’t been for the signboards, I wouldn’t have recognised a thing.

And yet I remembered the feel. Rishi Valley is a looker, tucked between trees and ruddy Andhra earth and boulders and blossoms. What’s not to love about outdoor classes, on stone benches under shady trees? The valley is silent, which is to say, loud with birdsong, insects and the breeze in the trees. The air smells of sap and flowers. I went to school here? Lucky me.

I spent my weekend open-mouthed at all the beauty, trying to remember whether I remembered this walk to the dining hall, or that path to the junior school, or the fact that we had a juice break mid-morning. “Remember this?” people kept saying. “No,” I kept replying. The nice thing about a goldfish-like memory is that the world always seems new and fresh. I daydreamed about teaching here for a term, as so many alumni do. We rambled, chatted, wolfed the excellent cafeteria food and coffee, and capped the weekend with a mass bonding session—think the lovechild of Oprah and an AA meeting—in the middle of an operatic thunderstorm.

Reunions can happen anywhere—it’s the people that matter. But being on campus was very special. A quarter century later, it is much clearer how unusual a school it is, for better or worse. I’m suddenly glad, all over again, to have attended it, even though my lifestyle would make Jiddu Krishnamurti spin in his grave. I am not a sentimental person, but returning to Rishi Valley, with two-thirds of my class, revived a note of sweetness in a world energetically going to shit around us.

The whole thing was so good that I asked to be let back into the WhatsApp group. I’m not an idiot, though—it’s on mute for one year.

Gorillas in the mist

(Published on July 9, 2016 in Business Standard)

An hour into the climb in Volcanoes National Park, I begged for five minutes’ rest. “Sure,” said the guide, “we’ll stop just ahead at the bench.”

Twenty minutes later, I collapsed on the bench where Dian Fossey used to take a breather on her way up the mountain. Dian Fossey is the madly famous scientist who spent her life studying mountain gorillas, which are found only in the Virunga massif. She is best known for introducing the term ‘dung lobe’ to my vocabulary, as in “The animals simply shift their buttocks slightly to catch the dung lobe in one hand before it contacts the earth. They then bite into the lobe while chewing and smacking their lips with apparent relish.” She’s buried further up the trail, where I imagine she dropped dead after this observation. (I’m joking. She was murdered, totally not funny.)

Lungs straining, faces aflame, we looked out at the lush cool hills of Rwanda piled range upon range; and the little flat potato fields far, far below, which they put there at the start of your walk as a prank, to lull you into a false sense of security. Our porters, who helped us up the trickier bits, watched us with pity. We had no idea that we this had been the easy part of the trek.

A few minutes later we put on gloves and rain jackets and went off-trail, straight through a solid wall of nettles. Mountain gorillas are oddly unmoved by the fact that despite your advanced age you have crawled up to them on one arm and one leg, having given up the pairs to pay for the permit that allows you to spend one hour with them as part of one group of eight visitors each day. You’d think they might meet you halfway, but they just sit in the extremely poky bush, doing unspeakable things with dung lobes.

The trackers beat through the nettles with a machete, and we thrashed, skidded, and swore our way up, ever up, on highly unstable wet vines and vegetation. An eternity later, the tracker began to growl “Mmuh-mmmm,” which is gorilla for ‘I come in peace, everything is cool’. There, a few feet away, sat Giraneza, the silverback—the mature male that dominates the family group.

Silverbacks are romantic heroes—200kgs of solid muscle, and soft brown eyes. They can reputedly crush a coconut with one hand, but are very peaceable as long as you don’t challenge them or mess with their wives and babies. Giraneza’s tearjerker life story, however, features abandonment, social rejection, failed romances, and murdering other silverbacks. His happy home is hard won. He came towards us, speaking gorilla for ‘Know that I can crush you with one hand like a coconut’, and we all dropped to the ground with eyes averted, which is gorilla for ‘I am not worthy of your dung lobe, please don’t kill me’. Having made his point, he ignored us.

We slipped around the poky wet mountainside, tracking and watching the family as they groomed, fed, and slept. One lady-gorilla was cuddling a tiny infant. Baby gorillas look like demented gremlins—hair standing straight up and huge eyes reflecting the sky—and command instant adoration. I would have brought him home, except that his mother was built like a tank.

Too soon our hour was up, and it was time to destroy our knees walking down the mountain. It’s always very special to be allowed into the private space of a wild creature. But when you and that creature share almost all your DNA, looking into its eyes is like encountering a much better version of yourself.

Except for the dung lobe habit.

Packing up

(Published today in Business Standard)

My packing process has always been to stress out about it for two weeks beforehand while catching up on TV shows. At the eleventh hour I fling in clothes by the kilo rather than by usefulness, take the shoes I’m wearing, and tear around town buying supplies, finishing work, and saying goodbye to friends and family in the two hours before my cab leaves for the train station or the airport. It’s amazing how well one can get by at the beach with six sweaters and no underwear.

I’m getting better at organisation, but other issues have cropped up.

In 1999, I left home for three weeks carrying a small duffel bag and a knapsack. The bag contained t-shirts, a pair of jeans, a sweater, underwear, and a camera. The backpack contained my passport, tickets, wallet, and a book. I didn’t have a phone. I had never even heard of ‘travel insurance’. I just took off and had a great time. That’s how you travel at 27.

This week, as I surveyed my suitcase, I saw clothes for every climate known to man—even, possibly, for every man; and a vast sea of pills, interrupted only by the odd joint brace.

I have not been kind to my body recently. (For reasons of patient confidentiality I can’t get into the details, but I have this friend who drank too much, smoked too many cigarettes, had too many late nights, and stopped exercising completely for half a year.) I’m here—just barely—to tell you that in that dark alley of delinquency I ran into middle age, who turns out to be a violent, vindictive jerkface.

First, it broke my chest with an infection. Then it broke my tummy, both ways, so that first I was on stop-it-ups, and then on let-it-gos. Then it broke my eyes with a hat trick of styes that required three rounds of eyedrops, hot compresses and antibiotics, and one episode of corneal cell death. (“Relax,” said my ophthalmologist, “all I do all day is bring cells back.”) Somewhere in between came a vicious flu and a sprained ankle with crutches, crepe bandages, ice packs, and hot salted water.

As soon as I could walk, I began to heave myself around the park again, because my trip involves some trekking. So far, my fitness regimen has resulted in a sore back and an inflamed tendon. Then I bit down on a small stone in my food, and an ominous sensation shot all the way down through my jaw. A couple of days ago a seam in my track pants split during my morning walk, and the chafing created an angry, exquisitely painful welt on my inner thigh.

So packing isn’t what it used to be—it’s more like packing up. My bag includes anti-malaria pills, antacids and anti-emetics for the anti-malaria pills, mosquito repellent spray and patches, antihistamines, five kinds of antibiotic pills and creams, tummy meds, probiotics for the tummy meds, anti-spasmodic pills, muscular-skeletal painkillers, thyroid medication, muscle relaxant tablets and gel, fever meds, headache meds, antiseptic lotion, antibiotic eye drops, lubricating eye drops, crepe bandage, ankle sock, blister pads, band aids, gauze and surgical tape. Oh, and sunscreen. Ridiculous, right? On the other hand, I’m already using the gauze and surgical tape for the welt on my thigh. It was right there, amid my better-organised, already-bought packing items.

So this is how I’m going to the jungles of Rwanda—fat, wheezy, limping, swollen-eyed, raw-toothed, and sore all over, much like the UK after Brexit.

I can’t wait! The only thing that the thug in the alley hasn’t broken is my spirit. (Yet.)

Fly, the beloved country

(Published on June 11, 2016 in Business Standard)


When I was sixteen, Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception convinced me that mind-altering substances were the way forward. I would know the colour of sound. I would see music! I would touch the most exalted parts of my brain, and the grottiest, and never be bored.

I took my first drag of marijuana in college, bright-eyed with expectation. Nothing happened, so I took three more quick ones. Suddenly I was boiling from the inside, skidded out of the door into a Pennsylvania winter storm, fainted into a snowdrift, and had to be dragged inside. After four head-spinning hours, when the panic attack subsided, I concluded that drugs were horrible, and left them the hell alone.

Twenty-five years later, a kindly felon chaperoned me through the right way to smoke the stuff, and I finally discovered why people go on about it. There I was, lifting through the inconsequential material roof of my skull, trying to float out clear to the stars, moored to the planet only because I was holding on to my chair. So that’s why people do drugs: unreality is much nicer.

It’s so appealing, in fact, that despite our strong Indian traditions of drug use typified by ascetics, Holi revellers, and Shiva, we also continually strive to achieve unreality without substances. It has become cultural second nature, probably because our realities are so nasty.

Thus the strange case of The-State-That-Must-Not-Be-Named in the movie Udta Punjab, which is currently giving everyone hives for completely opposite reasons. It’s a movie about the raging, tragic drug problem in Punjab. That seems like an important, necessary movie, right? But under the marijuana-like influence of the Central Board of Film Certification’s chief nitwit, Pahlaj Nihalani, Udta Punjab is being turned into a movie about someone, somewhere, doing something, beside a signboard that maybe threatens the sovereignty of India. The CBFC has removed bad words like ‘election’ and ‘MP’, and turned Udta Punjab into a movie floating up through our skulls, unmoored to any kind of reality. Nihalani’s imbecilic political and cultural instincts set off his alarms 89 times in that film, for reasons of swearing, for wanton use of the name ‘Punjab’ for the place ‘Punjab’, and for generally being offensively spot on. On Planet Nihalani, reality is defamation. The most unusual howls of protest from Bollywood have shown that even people known for party drugs draw the line somewhere.

The Shyam Benegal-led committee, set up this year to review the certification process, recommended a new category of certification, for which Udta Punjab may qualify: A/C, or ‘adult with caution’. A/C-certified films will be screened not at theatres near residential areas, but in, for example, red light areas. Puzzling, wot? Do cautious adults not live in residential areas? Are adults who take their kids out to the movies incapable of picking suitable movies? Are cautious adults only allowed to go to red light areas to demonstrate their caution? It’s all very confusing—or, in real, non-marijuana terms, barking mad. Benegal reportedly said that the Punjab government might be upset by the suggestion, in Udta Punjab, that parts of the government collude with the drug mafia, when, in fact, “the government is doing a great deal to curb this menace.” This suggests that Benegal and Nihalani both confuse the function of film certification with the function of keeping the state happy.

The point is, people, you can’t just go around confusing art with reality! You have to confuse it with political spin. That’s what it takes to pass anything in this joint—in which case, I’ll pass on that joint.

Kids: Just say no.