Uptightji

What type of garment do you wear to bed?

Depending on which part of the world you are coming from, I’m sure the answer would vary. Talking specifically of India, if you are a man and coming from the southern part of India, chances are you would wear an old dhoti and singlet to bed. A variation to this nocturnal sartorial ensemble could be a lungi and a half-sleeve ‘banian’. If you are from North India, a set of soft kurta-pyjamas could be your night dress. If you are a lady, probably you change into a loose and comfortable nightie before retiring for the night or maybe a worn-out top and skirt.

To see what is the common thread running through all these different attire, one needs only look at the adjectives used to describe nightwear generally: Soft, Comfortable, Old, Loose... all attesting to a certain high degree of informality, relaxation, and cosiness.

Introducing Uptightji.

A deeply religious person and a strict vegetarian, Uptightji followed an unfailing routine every day. Once he reached home in the evening from office, he took a shower and with the wet towel wrapped round his waist, lit a lamp at the small shrine by his bedside. Then leaving the upper torso bare, he changed into a dhoti and lounged about the apartment reading the newspaper or watching TV till bedtime, the epitome of informality and relaxation.

The transformation took place just before bedtime when Uptightji changed again, this time into a pair of trousers. The trousers were obviously old but stitched at a time when the waist size of Uptightji was at least an inch smaller than what it was now and he had to literally hold his breath and pull in his stomach before the waist of the trousers could be brought together and buttoned properly.

When quizzed about this strange behaviour, Uptightji once explained to me that he was horrified at the thought of someone finding him in an undignified posture while sleeping. For a moment, the thought of Uptightji sleeping in a dhoti and carelessly turning over in his sleep with the dhoti astray and exposing his crown jewels almost made me double up with laughter.

But I controlled myself just in time. Uptightji was several years elder to me and a very nice human being and would have been deeply hurt if he thought I was laughing at him.

In praise of the beard

I have been having a beard for over two decades now. Many are the people I have misled into thinking of me as an intelligent, erudite, caring, sensitive human being by the sole virtue of my beard. Likewise, many are the sticky situations I have got out of with Houdini-like adroitness, by simply stroking my beard and looking thoughtful.

The deception came later. Initially at least, the idea was to save valuable time in the morning. A habitual late riser, sharing as I did a 1 BHK apartment with one wash basin and one toilet with three other office-goers, mornings in our little flat were incredibly chaotic. Tempers, like bowel pressure, ran high and irritation ruled the roost. Words were exchanged, doors thumped, and trains missed. That is when I made the pleasant discovery that I could shave off, pun intended, a precious ten minutes from my ‘rush-about’ time, by not shaving.

The rest, as they say, is history.

The feedback from both family and friends were ecstatic. Covering up at least part of my visage with the fuzz they considered an immense act of kindness from my side. The more charitable amongst them said: since your face is certainly not your fortune, any embellishments that you can add on, such as a moustache or a full beard, can definitely not add to the suffering of the beholder; if at all, it can only alleviate the pain.

Looking back, my co-existence with my beard has been a happy one. True, there have been hiccups along the way, like that time in a hotel in London, while helping myself to a generous portion of bacon at breakfast, the Bangladeshi restaurant manager whispering a hoarse warning in my ear, mistaking me for a Muslim. Or, those days immediately following the 9/11 blasts, when airport security at Frankfurt singled out bearded passengers for special checks which was humiliating, to say the least.

Now for the immediate provocation for this post: one of my young blogger friends from Mumbai whose blogs (she has two) I read with a lot of interest, has come up with a post in which she states unequivocally that moustachioed and bearded men are not her cup of tea. ”When it comes to gentlemen professing l’ amour for me, smooth faces get brownie points...” says she. I am aghast. I feel distraught. I hope what she is articulating is not the general trend among young women these days. If such indeed is the case, my heart goes out to the bearded young men of her generation.

Or may be, they can take heart from the bard saying: "He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man."

Transistor Days

Come to think of it, a tiny device called the Transistor freed us from the tyranny of plugged-in devices such as the vacuum-tube radio and made music portable. The transistor radio became a rage and a status symbol. The early versions came encased in leather and people used to take them everywhere: to parties, to picnics, and while going on a long journey.

The wife has a black and white picture of herself, seated on her mother’s lap while on a picnic, with a transistor radio in the background. If you rummage among old family albums in your attic, chances are that you will find at least one or two such photographs with a transistor lurking somewhere within the frame.

This portability was taken a step further a few years later, by the tape-recorder, the early versions of which were plug-in devices with spool tapes and cumbersome to handle. Then we had the compact and convenient cassette tape and had a compact cassette player to match, which could operate also on batteries. So now, not only was music portable, but we could also choose the kind of music that we wanted to listen to.

This was a mixed blessing, to put it mildly. I remember a car journey from Palghat to Trivandrum, a journey which in those days took close to nine hours, with a family who insisted on playing the same three music tapes they had over and over again. In between, they would also record random snatches of conversations in the car and play it back with much laughter and evident enjoyment, setting my teeth on edge and reducing me to a nervous wreck.

It was but natural and inevitable that the transistor radio and the compact cassette player would combine one day to give you the 2-in-1. When my brother wanted to buy one, we had serious discussions whether to go in for mono or stereo, whether a “Sleep” function was essential or not, whether the “Pause” button was really useful or mere window dressing, and had a host of other questions, most of which I have forgotten now.

The best part was of course that we could jump into our parents’ bed now after dinner with the 2–in-1 having the pride of place, in the middle. Good conversation to the accompaniment of good music with close family and most often, friends or relatives.

It is an enjoyable combination.

Photo Courtesy: Manolo98’s Public Gallery: Picasa Web Albums

Radio Days

Industrial design in the 1950s had a definite predisposition for Bakelite fascias and rounded corners. If you want to see what I mean, just watch one of those black and white movies of that era with James Stewart or Frank Sinatra listening to the radio or playing the gramophone.

We had a radio like that in our house for a very long time. In fact, for the first seventeen years of my life, I think it was the only source of entertainment we had in the house. Finished in dark brown Bakelite with small, protruding knobs for power on/off, volume, band select, and tuning, with a back panel made out of hardboard, it was a sturdy piece of equipment which travelled with us all over Kerala, suffering the ignominy of several cycles of packing, shifting and unpacking.

These radios used vacuum tubes—so once you turned the set on, it took a while before the tubes heated up and the set started functioning. The more advanced models boasted of a “magic eye” which was a thin phosphor strip inside a narrow glass tube, which glowed brightly when the peak signal tuning point was reached.

In our house, the radio was normally switched on mainly for the Hindi and Malayalam film songs. But on certain momentous occasions I remember the entire family crowding around the radio set and listening with bated breath to news of grave importance. The live telecast of Nehru’s funeral procession was one such occasion. Seven years later, during the Indo-Pak war of 1971, we were to suffer the agonies of war and experience the exhilaration of victory through the humble, old radio set.

As a listener, I stuck mostly to the known and familiar confines of MW (Medium Wave) band and listened to the local transmissions. On days when I felt more adventurous, I hit the SW (Short Wave) highway and would continuously work the tuning knob through the entire spectrum, listening to strange snatches of conversation in unknown languages, strange music and an array of electronic noise that spanned a whole gamut from hisses to giggles to high-pitched static screams.

I believed these sounds were created by alien intelligence trying to contact us from outer space.

I still believe so.

Photo Courtesy: Alois's Public Gallery, Picasa Web Albums

Cooking Matters!

I love to cook and admire people who can whip up a simple meal at short notice.

We were three guys sharing a furnished apartment in Vile Parle. Eating out every day was not an option, considering our paltry salaries those days. Fortunately, our kitchen was in great shape with a gas connection, cooking vessels and crockery. The other two guys could cook a bit as well. So it came to pass that I joined the group initially as a modest helper, cutting vegetables and laying the table, and gradually moving up the “value chain” to become a cook of sorts!

I used to come back from my summer holidays in Kerala with ruled pages torn out of old exercise books, in which my aunt would have laboriously written out recipes in her schoolgirl scrawl. The recipes would be tried out by the three of us, often with interesting and sometimes inedible results.

Meena is a better cook than I ever will be. She is one of those slow, methodical cooks who take their time first assembling all the ingredients and then sequentially following each step, right up to its final completion. The results are always predictable and, rarely if ever, disappointing.

The problem however, is that she hates cooking.

According to Meena, it is easy for men to say they love cooking, for they do it maybe once or twice in a month and that too, when they are in the mood. It is different for a woman, because you are forced to cook virtually every day and thus it becomes just another chore and hence, boring and monotonous.

Maybe she has a point. Maybe.

Anu, bless her young soul, loves cooking. She is also very creative and is not afraid to experiment. Sometimes we print out a recipe from the Internet and both of us get into the kitchen to try something daringly different, sprinkling rasam powder on Maggi noodles, for example. Of course, we are creative souls who by nature, tend to leave the kitchen in one big mess by the time we are done, which is frowned upon and acidly commented about, by the mother!

We have learned to take it in our stride.