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”.

A father is born..

Child is the father of man, but you don't realise it till you are a father yourself. A father is born when he queues up at the nursery to take a peek at his own child. He sees total strangers visiting relatives at the hospital take some time out to take their children to view babies at the nursery. The kids remark about how the baby looked at them, coughed, cried, smiled. But you have to await your turn after the little ones have finished admiring your latest creation. And when your turn comes, all you get to see is that your baby is sleeping soundly. And yet, you want to stand there forever. Till you are told that it's now past visiting hour.

Honeymoon tales, Jan 2007

Shooting from the lip
Gangtok’s a paradise for honeymooners, not to forget tourists. People just won’t bother you and their frankness could unsettle any man from the plains.
A colleague and his newly married wife on honeymoon there wanted a passer-by on the street to capture them in one frame with their camera. “Not possible,” said the Gangtok lad, even as his girlfriend stifled a giggle. Our couple were clueless as to what could be the reason. Maybe photography was forbidden there. But, in a Gangtok garden? In what is easily one of the most peaceful cities in the country? Encouraged by the smile on the Gangtok man’s face, our man asked him if photography was banned there. “No,” said the man, with an apologetic look, while his companion finally giggled. “The problem is I don’t know how to handle a camera,” he added.

Hand-not-in-glove
It’s so cold at Nathula, you can’t take your hand out of your glove. And for any reason if you do, the wind is sure to blow it away. It has its advantages, though. You can come back home and tell your friends, “This glove of mine had entered Chinese territory.” There’s more you can say. “A Chinese soldier fetched it for me. He stopped by across the fence for some small talk while taking a look at my Canon camera. ‘Good camera’ he told me”. That’s enough to make you take a second look at your camera, a more careful one, until you come across a marking you had not noticed earlier — Made in China.

Seven Years in Kolkata

I never realised I would miss Kolkata. Because I always thought of different things. The dust and pace of Mumbai clouded all thoughts, smells and visions that Kolkata brings to the mind. But an email from Kolkata changed all that. A photograph of buses plying on a Kolkata street with a caption reading 'Are e conductor, bus ta jore chalate bol na...' and another of the Victoria Memorial with a caption 'E baba, Victoria te ja dekhlam na! Ishshsh....' brought alive all those familiar sounds and visions. I suddenly felt I could hear the sounds of buses racing on the Chowringhee. And smell the Pani Puri near AC Market. All other familiar sounds too..
Shayad sab kuch waisa hi hai Kolkata me..
Bas hum wahan nahi hain.
Kolkata tumi kemon acho, Ami Mumbai tey bhalo achi..