Three Accidents

Kolkata 2004
I’m sure those mall trolleys will soon have horns. Like cars on our crowded streets, these trolleys just don't budge. Nobody keeps to the left or bothers if he/she is blocking somebody's path. Forget trolleys, even pedestrians could do with horns these days. Imagine trying to rush to work through a narrow lane. You will encounter people walking hand-in-hand at a leisurely pace, while you hunt for an opening from where to overtake. Maybe it would help if you could honk. Until the authorities come up with that, I thought the next best thing to do would be speeding. So, whenever I saw a crowded path ahead, I simply ran. Big feet landing with a thud, announcing my hurry, seemed to help. Or, I hummed loudly while brushing through people. That made overtaking people easier. So long as people coming from the front kept to their left it was smooth sailing. Then, one day, as I was speeding through, believing my truck-like demeanour would show me the way, I hit someone hard. There was no crash, but bone hit bone and rebounded. I looked up to see who the victim was. An old frail man in a dhoti kurta, he could easily have been my family patriarch. I could not meet his eyes. I looked downcast, ashamed. With great effort I finally tried to meet his eye. All he said was, “Bete, tumhe choth to nahi ayee? (Son, hope you didn’t get hurt!)”

Cuttack 2008
My father is riding a scooter. It has ferried our family for 25 years now, but like many other mementos it stays with us. When I first joined work, I rode to my workplace on it. I am in Mumbai and my father, now retired, still rides it sometimes, in Cuttack. One day, he is returning after visiting a friend. At a crossing, he waits for some speeding youth to overtake him. But the two bike-borne youths still come and hit his scooter from behind. Luckily nothing happens. Until then. “Old man, you should not drink. And if you do, you should drink at home. For, you are an old man and can die. But we are the youth. We should not die.”

Mumbai 2009
Should I buy bread to have with eggs, or milk to have with cornflakes, I debate on my way back from the gym. Just as I am approaching my place, a car stops short of hitting me in front of a neighbouring society’s gate. I want to tell him that he might as well “run me over”. He lowers the window and, “@#$%@#$%@#$%.” I try once again, but he cuts me with more “@#$%”. I give up, “you are a battameez insaan (uncivilised man).”
“Come, I will teach you tameez (civilized behaviour), you @#$%^%.” He steps on the accelerator, the car runs over my foot. Thank god for small mercies, light cars and sports shoes. But this time I yell, “you @#$%^&.”
He comes out of his car, asks the watchman to get a danda (stick). They both go looking for one. I should use this time to flee. I don’t. When he comes back, I tell him we should go to the police station and settle this. But he grabs me by my shirt and tries to shove me into his car. “Yes, let us do that. Get into the car, chal, sit there,” he tells me. I am like, “Don’t touch me.” And then, “…..”
I next see my two-year-old son standing beside me, telling me something (Remember Meena Kumari in the last scene in Mere Apne?). I wonder how my son came to be there when he was away in Kolkata at that time.
Next moment I am lying on the road, blood oozing from my mouth, my cellphone clutched in one hand. My tormentor and his car have left. I ask the watchman the car’s number. He tells me, sotto voce, ‘Go away from here’.

At the cinema

Ever since my wife and toddler son joined me in Mumbai, we had stopped watching movies on the big screen. Denied the luxury called undisturbed sleep at home, thanks to our bundle of joy’s uninterrupted wailing, we dared not venture into a multiplex and look back at it as our hall of shame. We would just rent or buy a VCD and wait for our son to go to sleep. But by the time we could coax him into dreams we would be yawning ourselves. So we dropped the idea of watching a movie altogether.
We would look back at the last time we had been to a hall together in Kolkata, or when I had been to one in Mumbai alone. Otherwise, it made little difference to us whether it was ‘A Wednesday’, Thursday (Ghajini) or Friday. It looked like we had already seen our last show, at least for the time being.
A visit to the movies section of Landmark or Crossword meant looking nostalgically at a combo collection of Ray movies, or with regret at the new offering of movies from West Asia courtesy NDTV Lumiere.
And we comforted ourselves by reading the reviews or hearing friends speak about the movies they had seen. SMS jokes giving out the secret of a must-watch suspense thriller had little impact on us. Until, one Saturday (my off day).
Though we had stopped going to the movies, we did what we thought was the next best thing. We would go and sit inside a multiplex complex close to our home. It was the ideal setting to look back at how much fun it was to sit outside the government-owned Nandan cinema complex in Kolkata. People do not go there to just watch movies. There’s always a theatre festival going on in the open inside the complex. Or there’s a fountain beside which lovers just sit and watch and are watched. There are stalls doing brisk business selling coffee, tea and other edibles. Some went there only to see then chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee arriving to translate Gabriel García Márquez into Bengali.
The multiplex near our place did not offer any of these Nandan-esque possibilities, but images of Nandan moved before our eyes, nevertheless, as we sat in front of a fountain and stared into the nothingness.
So lost were we in our thoughts, we never realised when our son had crawled all the way to the entrance of the hall. We saw a couple and their son looking askance, seeking out the careless parents. I waved at them and rushed to relieve them the responsibility of babysitting as they proceeded to watch a movie.
On coming close, the man smiled at me and asked if I was planning to watch a movie. I said ‘No,’ not letting him know what it meant to us. He then went on to say that he had bought some extra tickets as he wanted to watch the movie and they would not screen it until at least a certain number of tickets were sold. Seeing my reluctance he added that he would give me the tickets for free. I decided I would buy the tickets from him.
I told him I would need to ask my wife. By the time I talked to my wife, still near the fountain, and went back, he had found some other takers and was left with just one ticket, which he graciously gave to me, drowning all my pleas to buy the ticket. With the ticket in hand, I proceeded to buy one more for my wife, while she hurried home to collect milk bottles and extra diapers. We were not expecting to be in there till even the interval, though. We just wanted to go in long enough to watch the curtain rise, the lights go off, and the light from the projector hit the screen, just to get a feel of some of the things we were missing. And make a respectable exit, before our son started wailing.
But surprise of surprises, our son stood and watched the whole movie, from between two seats. He cried only when we tried to make him sit, as he was too short to watch the screen while seated.
Movies have cast their magic in our lives once more, and we now have someone who is, as they say, catching them young.

Lost in transit

It came on a platter and I let it go by... Here's how it went (away). Shortly after I joined Hindustan Times in Kolkata, there was talk that the Ranchi edition was short-staffed and the head office in Delhi wanted to know if anybody from the Kolkata office wanted to be transferred there. But by the time staff came to know about it, there was a 'twist in the tale'. The rumour was that some employees would be transferred to Ranchi against their wishes. So, for some days, everytime my boss called me, I thought, 'this was it'.
The boss never called, but one day when I landed in office, 10 minutes late, a senior colleague I used to report to, told me, "There was a call for you. You have to go to Jamshedpur."
Coming to Kolkata from Bhubaneswar had taken me away from my mother to my father. Going to Jamshedpur now would take me away from both. So with such fears in mind, I worked reluctantly that day, dreading the moment when my boss would call me into his cabin and officially communicate to me that my services would, henceforth, be required at the Jamshedpur office.
I wondered what may have provoked my transfer. Was it the delay in releasing my page the night before? Or perhaps the silly headline I had been reprimanded for, mildly then, a week ago. Or maybe because I walked in 10 minutes late that day.
And yet, the call from my boss never came. Had he forgotten? Or was he trying to make up his mind on where to send me, Ranchi or Jamshedpur?
He even passed by my desk once. He looked at me and I looked at him but there was no communication. So, it occured to me that he would tell me at the end of the day, when I went to show him my page before releasing it.
So, suddenly, I was extra careful. Running my eyes a second time over every sentence I had subbed, every headline I had given, every caption, every slug, every intro. Finally, the moment of reckoning arrived.
He took one long look at the page and yet, either he did not see anything wrong or simply was in a hurry. He asked me if my senior had okayed the page. When I confirmed he had, boss asked me to release the page.
I had just turned around when he called me again. "Wait a minute," he said.
Here it comes.
He asked me if I would like to go to Jamshedpur. Suddenly, on realising that I actually had a choice, I blurted out "No", perhaps even before he had completed the question.
He continued, "It's a day-long trip, a junket from ONGC. You don't have to book the tickets. You travel by train, stay at a nice hotel, enjoy and come back. If you feel like it, just reach Howrah station tomorrow morning and the rest will be taken care of." He even called my chief sub-editor and asked him to excuse me for a day if I changed my mind about this junket.
There I stood like a fool. I had said 'No' with so much stress. There was no way I was going to change my answer in a lifetime.

A short tryst with e-learning (Jan-Sep 2008)

The highest Adobe: Going green at the workplace
Everybody is going green at the workplace, some of them with envy. The others have Captivates. The green icon Adobe product has captured popular imagination and content alike here.
For those working on this project, the closest we can get to the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) is through this software, which allows us to hear the experts speak and move mice (mouse for clarity) to enter data into different systems in different regions of the US of A. These are systems on which Americans order new products, or want their existing service moved to a new address.
But what we see are simulations. Real live customer data, if any, is not for our eyes and needs to be masked. It’s another matter that sometimes this instruction is given after the SME has already explained how and where salespersons take down data from Mr !!!!!! !!!!!!! (existing or would-be customers, masked here to avoid litigation) to serve him better.
So there’s a separate team in place to identify which captivates need to be masked before writers can work on them. One live data in the storyboard that is delivered and we are all dead!
While going through captivates, hunting for live data, the team also makes sure the SME did not say something and entered something else. There’s also the issue of resolution, deviations from the standard having the potential to forever hold back storyboards inching closer to delivery dates. Minor errors are, however, left in a note for the writer to take up with the SME. Captivates going back to the SME for rework, too, carry a note. On occasions, we have been told to be polite to the SME.
After all the SMEs do provide some light moments. Like, when one of them said at the end of a long session, “O, my boyfriend’s here”. There was another who kept making blunders and later added, “I’m drunk”. No wonder, everyone seems to be high on this project.
Once the green captivates get the green light, they are published. They evolve from captivate to .html or flash files that are made available to the writers, who have access to a server, which is at the heart of this project (Every time the server goes down, there are sighs and gasps of evidence).
To keep this heart pumping, the captivate team, spread across Mumbai and Kolkata offices, ensures a steady supply of freshly QA’d stuff. And QA’ing is fun. The teams make use of headphones all day. There is no saying, however, if they are all listening to captivates. Once when a member of the team was approached for something, he first took off his headphones and then his earphones, plugged to his cellphone, tuned to some FM channel.
It’s not surprising then that captivates that had been made production-ready had to be sent for SME or graphic rework at a later stage. There were false alarms too.
Like when a writer got back saying there was live data in a QA’d captivate. The one who had QA’d it was suddenly the accused, all guns pointing at him for an explanation. He went through the captivate once again, looking for the four-letter ‘live’ word in what seemed to be familiar territory. As the timeline of the published file inched closer to the end, his anxiety levels began shooting up. And, there it was, the SME did say it was ‘live’. But, wait a minute. Did she say live data? No, it was only the system that was live. And not the data, phew!
We could have gone on and on and on, but there are targets to be met. The captivate team gets to QA around 500 slides every day. There are times when the team sits idle, waiting for the captivates to be downloaded from SharePoint. Once one has got the 500 slides to QA, time is on a roll. On other days, people go home without meeting targets. They return the day after with a silent prayer on their lips, “Give us this day our daily CPs…”

Asmara

Ever heard of Shutter Gazina?

You may not have heard of Shutter Gazina. But you might have seen him, in reel or even real. No, it's not that he has a screen name, but this is how street urchins in Asmara, Eritrea, knew him, 20 years ago.
Eritrea is now a separate country, having seceded from Ethiopia. But I believe street children, including beggars, in its capital Asmara's streets still crowd around and try to befriend Indians by delivering Gabbar’s dialogues or simply mentioning names of Amitabh, Chassis Kaapur (Shashi Kapoor), Darmendra (Dharmendra). No prizes for guessing what they called Shatrughan Sinha, though I do wonder how they pronounce Hrithik’s name, or which Indian stars they are crazy about now.
In those days, most Eritreans (then Ethiopians) could sing songs from Hindi films, and a neighbour even asked my parents if they had sung songs and run around trees before tying the knot. Another neighbour could speak perfect Hindi, picked up from the movies.
Eritreans loved Indians because of ours songs and films. They also believed that we NRIs were there because India was a poor country where none could afford a proper meal. My father tried to help me dispel this opinion of theirs with pictures and reports from India that the Indian embassy provided us.
But they were either not wholly convinced that India actually manufactured automobiles and aircraft and had sent satellites and a man to space, or were not willing to lose the debate early. But then, if I was treated as a poor boy from India in Eritrea, I was a “Junglee African” for cousins and classmates on returning to India.
Some Eritreans found Indians funny. At my father’s workplace some Eritreans had come up with a joke on Indians that went like this: An Eritrean tells an Indian, “You Indians shake your head a lot while talking.” The Indian reacted with outright denial. “No, no, no, no,” he said,each ‘no’ emphasised with a shake of the head.
A visit by then Ethiopian leader Mengistu Hailemariam to India was one of the best days of my stay in Asmara. Coverage of his India visit on TV made my friends change their opinion, but they then started assuming that India was a land of skyscrapers and three-wheelers.
There were no English-medium schools in Asmara, so I first joined an Ethiopian-medium school. My stay there (less than a month) was too short for any memory to register at age 5. Even before I had figured out how to learn the regional language Tigrigna and national language Amharic, I got admitted to an Italian-medium school. Ethiopia had been an Italian colony once, so it had a sizeable Italian population and Italian was the third language after Amharic and Tigrigna.
Worried at the lingual turmoils I was being subjected to at such a tender age, my father accompanied me to my classroom on my first day at the Italian school. But the elderly Italian lady, who was to be my teacher, put him at ease when she welcomed me with a peck on my cheek.
To help me with my Italian, she invited me to her place on weekends where she gave me free lessons. I was soon a favourite with her retired husband, who would wait for my lessons to get over so that he could show me his garden.
All my classmates were either Italians or Ethiopians of mixed Italian-Ethiopian parentage. There was also a girl who had a British father and an Italian mother. For a short while in Class II, I had an Indian classmate, who had been my best friend before becoming a classmate. On learning that we were friends, our teacher made us sit next to each other. But when my father visited school the next time, she complained that the two of us talked a lot in class. My father suggested that we be made to sit separately, but she said she did not have the heart to do that.
In all the memories I have of Asmara I am wearing a sweater or a jacket or a coat. That’s because Asmara, at 2,325m above sea level, is cold round the year. Its dry climate ensured that there was no snow. In fact there was no rain either. The famine in that part of the world is well documented.
Once, in 1985, there was a hailstorm and it took three days for all the ice to melt. Bad for me, though, I was laid up in bed with a fractured leg and could only hear the noise of cars running over roads layered with hail.
We had a bathtub that we used to hoard water, which arrived in a tanker before it was fetched all the way up to our second-floor house in pails. Thanks to the cold and paucity of water there, it took me a while to get used to taking a bath every other day after returning to India.
Another thing that I remember about my stay in Asmara was the curfew there after midnight. There was a secession war going on between Eritrea and Ethiopia. If we went to a party, we ensured we were back at home by 11.30 pm. Only armoured vehicles and tankers ruled the streets by night and gunshots announced it was not safe to venture out. In fact, the siege at the Taj in Mumbai in 2008 reminded me of a similar 24-hour operation near our home there.
But despite an ongoing war, I never felt more secure in my life elsewhere. Credit goes to the disciplined people of Asmara. Sample this. Asmara University, where my father worked, had strict rules. Office vehicles could leave the premises by producing an official permit, which had to be returned when the vehicle returned. One day my father had left the premises in an office car when he realised he had forgotten something. So he had to return. After collecting his stuff when the car was leaving again, the guard at the gate asked for the pass. My father told him that he had returned only to collect something. But the guard just smiled and said, “The pass”.
At that very moment, my father spotted the person in charge of issuing passes, a friend of his.So he requested him to tell the guard to let him go. But even the friend smiled and said, “He won’t let you go even if I tell him. Let’s go to my office and issue you a fresh pass”.