All along I was searching for an editor to post in Sanskrit, so that I could start a Sanskrit Blog. Today I found a way. What an exhilarating moment this is to me only one who could get into my shoes can really feel. What all have I not done, to see this moment. I posted a query in blogger.com asking for suggestions. I opened an account in Wordpress thinking there is a direct phonetic Sanskrit editor available online there. I was unsuccessful. Today I just tried to use Barahapad to input phonetic Sanskrit and copy pasted it onto the Blogspot Screen and Hurrah! I got my Sanskrit post right. This means that I could straight away start a Sanskrit Blog, right here!Earlier I had tried to use the Hindi editor available on Blogspot to write something in Sanskrit and I wasn't at all happy about the output!
I must celebrate this day.
Monday, March 1, 2010
देवीस्तुतिः
सिन्धूरारुणविग्रहां त्रिनयनां माणिक्यमौलिस्फुर-
त्तारानायकशेखरां स्मितमुखीमापीनवक्षोरुहाम् ।
पाणिभ्यामलिपूर्णरत्नचषकं रक्तोत्पलं बिभ्रतीं,
सौम्यां रत्नघटस्थरक्तचरणां ध्यायेत्परामम्बिकाम् ॥
अरुणाकरुणातङ्गिताक्षीं ध्रृतपाशाङ्कुश पुष्पबाणचापाम्।
अणिमादिभिरावृतां, मयूखैरहमित्येव विभावये भवानीम् ॥
ध्यायेत्पद्मासनस्थां विकसितवदनां पद्मपत्रायताक्षीं,
हेमाभां पीतवस्त्रां करकलित-लसद्धेमपद्मां-वराङ्गीम्।
सर्वालङ्कारयुक्तां सततमभयदां भक्तनम्रां भवानीम्
श्रीविद्यां शान्तमूर्तिं सकलसुरनुतां सर्वसम्पत्प्रदात्रीम्॥
सकुङ्कुमविलेपनामलकचुम्बिकस्तूरिकां
समन्दहसितेक्षणां सशरचापपाशाङ्कुशाम् ।
अशेषजनमोहिनीमरुणमाल्यभूषाम्बरां,
जपाकुसुमभासुरां जपविधौ स्मरेदम्बिकाम् ॥
त्तारानायकशेखरां स्मितमुखीमापीनवक्षोरुहाम् ।
पाणिभ्यामलिपूर्णरत्नचषकं रक्तोत्पलं बिभ्रतीं,
सौम्यां रत्नघटस्थरक्तचरणां ध्यायेत्परामम्बिकाम् ॥
अरुणाकरुणातङ्गिताक्षीं ध्रृतपाशाङ्कुश पुष्पबाणचापाम्।
अणिमादिभिरावृतां, मयूखैरहमित्येव विभावये भवानीम् ॥
ध्यायेत्पद्मासनस्थां विकसितवदनां पद्मपत्रायताक्षीं,
हेमाभां पीतवस्त्रां करकलित-लसद्धेमपद्मां-वराङ्गीम्।
सर्वालङ्कारयुक्तां सततमभयदां भक्तनम्रां भवानीम्
श्रीविद्यां शान्तमूर्तिं सकलसुरनुतां सर्वसम्पत्प्रदात्रीम्॥
सकुङ्कुमविलेपनामलकचुम्बिकस्तूरिकां
समन्दहसितेक्षणां सशरचापपाशाङ्कुशाम् ।
अशेषजनमोहिनीमरुणमाल्यभूषाम्बरां,
जपाकुसुमभासुरां जपविधौ स्मरेदम्बिकाम् ॥
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
LIFE WITH MOM # 2
In the last post I stopped at lamenting on the status of today’s aged. In my Mom I see a person from the old world who, as I have already written, is one of those who cared for their in-laws, in that, they respected them, accepted living with their idiosyncrasies. In turn when it was time for them to live their own old age all they’ve got is a world where they are not welcome as live-in aged family members! Daughter’s-in-law find very ingenious methods to avoid living with their MILs of which, one is: throwing away money if necessary so that the old find ways and means of living by themselves, the other of course is to get them into some old age home. In the process they (DILs and the nincompoop sons) forget the fact that what the old fellows need is not perhaps money, or even the security of company, but the coziness of a home which they can call their own.
Let’s take a hard look at how good my mom’s own acceptance of her in-laws was. In the very beginning of my father’s family- that is my grandfather, grandmother and uncles when they moved to Hyderabad from their ancestral home in Kerala - lived as a huge joint family. Even the married couples like my father and mother initially, and my eldest uncle and his wife (my aunt) and my aunt (father’s sister) and her husband (my uncle) who had got married in a mutual exchange agreement, apparently to save marriage expenses as well as “groom finding” expenses and efforts that are the wont of Indian society, lived under one roof as a joint family. We had no business interests or great property that we could call our own, which would have made joint family living a natural choice. Perhaps for this reason, slowly and within a period of three to four years at best, the family split into nuclear families, the parting couples citing various reasons for living away from the main family. Later couples in the old family home found newer and newer excuses to split. My grandfather and grandmother were forced to increasingly gravitate towards living with the yet-unmarried sons.
My grandfather and grand mother had four sons-my father being the eldest- and three daughters. Two of the daughters had been married long before my grandfather’s family had left Varkala, the ancestral village. My mom moved out first to take care of our education in an English medium school. So, that was her ruse, for my grandfather had earlier put me in a Telugu medium government school as was his belief and affordability. She opted to stay away in a rather small dwelling receiving regular payouts from my father, employed away from city in a way-side railway station, where a decent education for me would not have been possible. After this gingerly experiment of living separately, there was one more coming together of all the original family members, in another large family home-a rented accommodation about four kilometers from the first joint family dwelling- also a rented accommodation referred to as John Buneen (Bunyan?) House- a chawl like place in Old Nallakunta. The next to move out to Kozhikode [Calicut in those days], after about a year of marriage, was my eldest uncle. At that time we were in another house belonging to one Sh.N.S.Natarajan. I still remember the day my uncle was seen off from Hyderabad R.S. On that day, my mother had got hurt by slipping on mossy floor near the well in the yard. With just the first aid given in grandma’s remedies’ style- bandage tied around the head with just some turmeric powder stuffed into the wound - my mom had joined the rest of the members of the family, to see my uncle and aunt chug off with their eight-month old son Sekhar, whose legs hadn’t developed the strength to let him get up and stand. He used to drag himself all over the house, yet he was a cheerful child. I remember my school friend appreciating the child’s cheerfulness.
To cut a long story short, my grandfather oversaw the splitting of the family couple by couple until they found themselves staying with my last unmarried uncle at BHEL Township in RC Puram. By this time Grandpa and Grandma had been staying in turn with the different nuclear families off and on. They would move in with my uncle’s family at Chikkadapalli, or stay with us at New Nallakunta. Sometimes Grandma and Grandpa would stay separately with different families. I do not remember what went in my grandma and grandpa’s minds as they moved from place to place. May be they enjoyed the frequent change as a welcome condition, that also helped beat boredom of being with one family and one set of problems for long, or whether they secretly, cursed their fate. Now, that was something they might not have wished for, nor even dreamed of. Well, then they had to make that compromise. By the early seventies there was no joint family. All of us- the four brothers and three-sisters family of my grandfather were nuclear families now, with some of those families electing to even move to other cities so that even by some quirk of fate a return to joint family living should become a possibility. But all of the sons respected their parents and the DILs were not averse to having the parents-in-law even it was for small periods of time like three months or six months at a stretch.
Time has rolled by and my Mom and Dad had become old, and we had grown up found jobs and married. The DILs came. I was already working in Bangalore away from our Hyderabad home. So our life started straight away as a nuclear family. My brother had also married and set up home in Pune. My parents tried living with us for short periods of time. Cultural differences between the father’s generation and his sons’ and DILs created quite a few misunderstandings and frequently my parents retreated to their abode, perhaps a trifle dissatisfied even though they were not complaining. Their disagreements with our living styles were the chief reason for their often opting to stay by themselves in the paternal home in Hyderabad.
“We will continue to stay as man and wife, alone. When we age sufficiently and are unable to take care of ourselves please take us to your places and give us our much needed and well-deserved rest form the cares of life.”, my father told finally after finding the old style living of parent and sons’ families together has to be but a distant dream. He cannot recreate the old world joint-family system once again. He had always fervently hoped for it perhaps even in his day, but has seen it cracking. In the present age instead of cracks appearing there were homes formed away right at the beginning.
Let’s take a hard look at how good my mom’s own acceptance of her in-laws was. In the very beginning of my father’s family- that is my grandfather, grandmother and uncles when they moved to Hyderabad from their ancestral home in Kerala - lived as a huge joint family. Even the married couples like my father and mother initially, and my eldest uncle and his wife (my aunt) and my aunt (father’s sister) and her husband (my uncle) who had got married in a mutual exchange agreement, apparently to save marriage expenses as well as “groom finding” expenses and efforts that are the wont of Indian society, lived under one roof as a joint family. We had no business interests or great property that we could call our own, which would have made joint family living a natural choice. Perhaps for this reason, slowly and within a period of three to four years at best, the family split into nuclear families, the parting couples citing various reasons for living away from the main family. Later couples in the old family home found newer and newer excuses to split. My grandfather and grandmother were forced to increasingly gravitate towards living with the yet-unmarried sons.
My grandfather and grand mother had four sons-my father being the eldest- and three daughters. Two of the daughters had been married long before my grandfather’s family had left Varkala, the ancestral village. My mom moved out first to take care of our education in an English medium school. So, that was her ruse, for my grandfather had earlier put me in a Telugu medium government school as was his belief and affordability. She opted to stay away in a rather small dwelling receiving regular payouts from my father, employed away from city in a way-side railway station, where a decent education for me would not have been possible. After this gingerly experiment of living separately, there was one more coming together of all the original family members, in another large family home-a rented accommodation about four kilometers from the first joint family dwelling- also a rented accommodation referred to as John Buneen (Bunyan?) House- a chawl like place in Old Nallakunta. The next to move out to Kozhikode [Calicut in those days], after about a year of marriage, was my eldest uncle. At that time we were in another house belonging to one Sh.N.S.Natarajan. I still remember the day my uncle was seen off from Hyderabad R.S. On that day, my mother had got hurt by slipping on mossy floor near the well in the yard. With just the first aid given in grandma’s remedies’ style- bandage tied around the head with just some turmeric powder stuffed into the wound - my mom had joined the rest of the members of the family, to see my uncle and aunt chug off with their eight-month old son Sekhar, whose legs hadn’t developed the strength to let him get up and stand. He used to drag himself all over the house, yet he was a cheerful child. I remember my school friend appreciating the child’s cheerfulness.
To cut a long story short, my grandfather oversaw the splitting of the family couple by couple until they found themselves staying with my last unmarried uncle at BHEL Township in RC Puram. By this time Grandpa and Grandma had been staying in turn with the different nuclear families off and on. They would move in with my uncle’s family at Chikkadapalli, or stay with us at New Nallakunta. Sometimes Grandma and Grandpa would stay separately with different families. I do not remember what went in my grandma and grandpa’s minds as they moved from place to place. May be they enjoyed the frequent change as a welcome condition, that also helped beat boredom of being with one family and one set of problems for long, or whether they secretly, cursed their fate. Now, that was something they might not have wished for, nor even dreamed of. Well, then they had to make that compromise. By the early seventies there was no joint family. All of us- the four brothers and three-sisters family of my grandfather were nuclear families now, with some of those families electing to even move to other cities so that even by some quirk of fate a return to joint family living should become a possibility. But all of the sons respected their parents and the DILs were not averse to having the parents-in-law even it was for small periods of time like three months or six months at a stretch.
Time has rolled by and my Mom and Dad had become old, and we had grown up found jobs and married. The DILs came. I was already working in Bangalore away from our Hyderabad home. So our life started straight away as a nuclear family. My brother had also married and set up home in Pune. My parents tried living with us for short periods of time. Cultural differences between the father’s generation and his sons’ and DILs created quite a few misunderstandings and frequently my parents retreated to their abode, perhaps a trifle dissatisfied even though they were not complaining. Their disagreements with our living styles were the chief reason for their often opting to stay by themselves in the paternal home in Hyderabad.
“We will continue to stay as man and wife, alone. When we age sufficiently and are unable to take care of ourselves please take us to your places and give us our much needed and well-deserved rest form the cares of life.”, my father told finally after finding the old style living of parent and sons’ families together has to be but a distant dream. He cannot recreate the old world joint-family system once again. He had always fervently hoped for it perhaps even in his day, but has seen it cracking. In the present age instead of cracks appearing there were homes formed away right at the beginning.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
काचन परीक्षा
अहं तेभ्यो अकरं नमः
शारदा शारदाम्भोजवदना वदनाम्बुजे ।
सर्वदासर्वदास्माकं सन्निधिं सन्निधिं क्रियात् ॥
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Life with Mom #1
After the passing away of Dad I must say Mom lost much of her verve and vitality. Diagnosed a diabetic in her fifth decade of existence she wasn't in the pink of health anyway.Most of the time she breaks down, lamenting her being left behind. Her insecurities have increased and she is showing behaviors that are not her wont. Mom and her Sis (our aunt) were living together in my aunt’s own home, while our own Gautamnagar home was let out on rent as noted in My Nostalgic Trip to Bolarum. Our aunt had gotten into debt by borrowing to help people- her neighbors through their, hard times. They had given her a hard time in return, by defaulting on the return of the loan. She had retired as a teacher form government service. She had just a decent pension to live on. Yet she borrowed money to lend a helping hand to her neighbors. The money was much beyond her means to service the interest payments, much less return the principal. After trying every trick in the world to persuade the neighbors to return the sum she took the extreme step of selling her house to wipe off all the standing loans, and still be left with a tidy sum to live by for the rest of her life which she has gambled would not be very long. She is 76 now. Ever since my aunt disposed the house off my mom has become very insecure. Nowadays she insists on having her belongings in physical proximity to her. Ah! Recently they moved house as they had to hand over the keys of the house they sold, to the new owners. The house they have moved into is smaller, so the first problem was to accommodate their possessions in that space. Now, neither mom nor my aunt would want to throw away any of the items they hoarded. Not that those things really were that useful. But both of them are touchy about relinquishing any of those mostly worthless stuff. My sis told me just the mere suggestion of throwing away of any of those things that mattered least is enough for either of them to go off into a tantrum where they would start saying, “We have also become dispensable. Throw us away then.” My sis has since been silent about such ideas. I saw this myself when I went to Hyderabad to help them with the job of moving house. It took three days to set the new house in order after the major items were moved. Some of the items used were moved by physically carrying them long after the movers had left with their truck. The very process was so quick that we had to take recourse to moving things by ourselves. When we picked up these sundry items, I couldn’t help suggesting their removal by either simply throwing them in the dustbin or disposing them off at whatever price they go for. My mom and Aunt simply heard me and tended to agree. My sis confided, had the suggestion been from her there would have been scenes!So, I learnt that my Mom at 74 needed all those things that had little relevance to their lives to feel reassured that everything is going fine. Mom was then worried about the rent payments to the landlord. That was a genuine concern. The rent was pretty high. They could ill- afford a drain on their finances. The landlord for his part needed assurance of monthly rent payments from someone he could have reason to trust. I gave him my mobile number, my sis’ house was visited by him. He made a mental note of the fact that it was an own house my sis lived in. He told me that as regards rent receipts he would only contact my sister. I assured my mom and my aunt that my brother and I would take care of the rent payments. My sister would be the administrator. IOW assurances were not only required by the landlord for he wasn't trusting the mere retirement pensions of two persons would guarantee his monthly income, they were required by my Mom and my aunt [to a lesser extent] for they weren't sure how we seriously we would service this obligation!
This condition of their minds is pathetic but a reflection of the old world order crumbling. The culture in India was that sons were supposed to take personal care of parents and other elders. It is yielding place to more old aged finding shelters in Old Age Homes.To the classically trained minds of ours this was nothing short of ignominy ! To them it was a bad turn from Providence. They-especially my Mom had done their best, in caring for their own in-laws. In return, they weren't welcome to live with the fast-paced current generation!
This condition of their minds is pathetic but a reflection of the old world order crumbling. The culture in India was that sons were supposed to take personal care of parents and other elders. It is yielding place to more old aged finding shelters in Old Age Homes.To the classically trained minds of ours this was nothing short of ignominy ! To them it was a bad turn from Providence. They-especially my Mom had done their best, in caring for their own in-laws. In return, they weren't welcome to live with the fast-paced current generation!
Friday, February 15, 2008
My Nostalgic Trip to Bolarum
I make trips to Hyderabad now and then, some official, and mostly personal. Whatever be the reason, I do get to visit my sister, my mother, and above all the place where most of my formative years and a considerable portion of my youth have been spent. So, it is not merely coincidence that waves of nostalgia burgeon within me whenever I set my foot on this part of India. Thanks to advancement in technology and the associated boost in economy, the geographical boundaries within the city might have shriveled, and the temporal artifacts seem to choke the air one breathes, yet my mind and heart always seems to soar above these imposed limitations! Many of my friends whom I had grown with, the pranks we played together – they may have been relocated to distant lands either by providence or by their own volition – but the memories remain, as fresh as ever.
This particular trip gave me some free time on my hands. On an epiphanic day, my sister and I decided to let our emotions take the better of us, and off we set out without any particular plan in mind. Amidst reminiscences, we sauntered to our own Sweet Home – the house that Dad had proudly built and lived last. With Dad’s passing on and now with each of us siblings located wide asunder, the house has been let out on rent. My mother refused to stay at ‘our Home’ alone what with past memories constantly haunting her, and therefore chose to live with her sister (our aunt), just two kilometers away. Well, our visit to our home from the past was not entirely purposeless. One Mr. Janakiraman, our late father’s friend wanted us to search for a book he claimed to have lent our dad. This book was titled in Malayalam, a language my sis was neither very comfortable with, nor had the patience to decipher. I did not wish to miss a chance to show off my polyglot skills!
After rummaging through the books we got every other book than the one being sought! The efforts were not a waste since we could lay hands on a treasure trove of books, most of them devotional – a cornucopia of songs penned by great devotees of the Lord and transcribed patiently by my dad in his wonderful handwriting. An added bonus turned out to be the one I had almost given up – our father’s first volume of his memoirs!
We carried this treasure to our aunt’s place and one look at the heap, our mom went ballistic. She complained about additional junk being brought into a house where space was scarce. After pacifying her that they would be taken by me to Bangalore, albeit in smaller chunks, our mollified mom sat down along with us to go through some of those books. A few glimpses of the recorded past set her into bouts of depression and brought unrestrained tears. She was vacillating between recollections of all the people that she missed – sometimes her late younger sister, and sometimes our dad, finally blowing her nose loudly in sheer desperation at the condition that she was now in: to fend for herself all alone (at least according to her!). My sister and I had to intervene in our own ways to reassure her and bring back the equilibrium!
We had a quick lunch and then drove to Bolarum – once a little sleeping hamlet where we spent considerable part of our childhood between 1972 and 1983, but now another concrete jungle. Each time I visited Hyderabad, I wanted to make this trip, but it never seemed to happen. At least for me, it really had been a very long time since I was the first bird to flow out of this nest as the oldest sibling, so to speak, because of my employment in Bangalore!
We safely avoided the gridlock problems by opting to use the narrower but safer network of roads of the cantonment, an area that spans the land between Malkajgiri (the place where my mom and sis live) and Tirumalagiri (or if you want the British desecration of Indian words for the same place – Trimulgherry), and further beyond Bolarum. We could reach Lalbazaar, a junction located midway to our intended destination, fairly quickly. Up further, we paused at the distinctive gradient that defines Alwal. Here, we could see the addition of ‘Raitu Bazaar’ – a place where farmers from nearby villages assemble to market their produce directly. It gave me immense pleasure that the government had condescended to eliminate the usual stumbling block – the usurping middleman! We drove along Doveton Road and found the post office still as it was when we had visited it as children – the familiar smells of stationery, glue, shellac and ink for the stamps drifting amidst noisy interactions between the clerks, still wafting through our minds. The Government Primary School still stood opposite the house where my cousin once lived and where her children grew. That house is anyway sold. Her neighbor’s place had been razed to the ground perhaps by another buyer planning a more modern dwelling. We turned around the corner to see if our old, familiar grocer’s shop (where we used to buy our groceries by the month) was around, but found no trace of it. Another detour along the non-descript lanes made us reach the Bolarum Bazaar railway station. We beheld drastic changes to the environs! There was no trace of the fields of maize that bordered the railway tracks; the verdant milieu was replaced by residential and commercial erections. With a sigh, we moved on, crossed the turning to Risala Bazaar, and continued to go along the curve to Turkapally. We finally reached the Bolarum railway station – a familiar structure that we grew up with.
In a brief moment of silence, I could distinctly remember the first time we had set foot there in 1972 during the summer holidays after my secondary school. We parked the scooter in the station yard and walked up to our old house. The house was part of a strip of quarters assigned to railway officials working at Bolarum. These once housed officials encompassing two levels down the totem pole of professional hierarchy. Station masters and booking clerks lived in absolute harmony sharing each other’s joys and sorrows. Now, we found that these were totally abandoned. We walked into the verandah and then into the empty rooms! How tiny they looked making us wonder, how a family of five could live under the same roof with just two 8x 10 rooms to spare! Yet, we knew that we were a lot happier then! Wondering about the vicissitudes of life, we blew the dust on the floor to seat ourselves and just let our minds wander. We remembered our bold experiments on rocketry on the leeside of the railway station. We recalled our efforts to make the rocket shoot into the air – all it had done was to make a disgruntled effort (much ado about nothing!) and then lie dead! It certainly was amusing to think of our exploration into laws of physics and the ways we wanted to discover them despite extremely limited resources at hand.
Turning our heads, we could still see traces of the blackboard that our father personally set up with cement and paint. Despite multiple whitewashes, our dad’s instrument of education still showed through. All of us, including mom had used the blackboard to teach students and get some pittance in return for the efforts we put in. Yet, these small amounts of cash did help us scale the crests and troughs of inflation down the years. And above all, there was pride in our self-made earnings. All of us siblings used to contribute half our earnings to mom who managed the family’s finances under strict control measures. While most of today’s children are pampered with monetary benefits as pocket-money, we had to sweat it out even if it were meager! But, as I said, there was extreme pride and honor in the rewards of the efforts put in…
The venue for tutoring our students was this same verandah around which our father had erected the wooden trellis to give a semblance of an extra room. Dad had the least of tools to work with, but he somehow managed to get things done either by borrowing tools or thinking of some other practical means to achieve an end. The quarters were designed by the British where one could see the enforced diminution in the design for the blue-collared workers. Our father attempted to redefine these perimeters in his own way! Across from our quarters in the open government lands, once lived karnats, a nomadic tribe and free to do what they wanted. The tribe avowed allegiance to the Hindu faith and upheld their caste-based values so much so that, I remember their refusal to partake even a glass of water from our neighbor who was a Muslim.
To our left was the tamarind tree – which still stood the test and ravages of time. It would have been at least a century old – strong and deep-rooted and one of the immutable signs of our childhood days and across generations! My sister fondly remembered her teaching students al fresco on the heap of ballast that was heaped in neat trapezoids in front of our house. We then walked the length of the platform, which seemed to have been extended to thrice its size! The atmosphere was surprisingly silent except for a few crows cawing and a few roosting on the branches of a banyan tree. I remembered the times when I, engrossed in assimilating the concepts of Fourier series to differential equations, would be jolted out of my concentration with the ear-piercing hoots from the teeny-weeny YM class steam engines which made more noise than movement. The rumble of the cars (what the British call as rakes), the grunts and groans of the wheels while they braked to a grinding halt and the general hubbub of passengers alighting or boarding…for once, I wish I could hear the same cacophony once again!
As we walked along the now-lengthened platform, my sister silently shed tears remembering our dad. Our dad worked as the Assistant Station Master at Bolarum. Those days, it was a block station, with signals and switches operated under the directions of the station master. “Line-clear” tokens were exchanged between Medchal and the Cavalry Barracks (mispronounced by the simple village folk as “kairalvee barkaas”) block instruments. Ajanta Express was one of the premier trains that ran between Secunderabad and Manmad. It was a great feeling to see it zoom past by several stations without stopping and leaving a trail of dust behind because of its speed. But the same train stopped at our station – Bolarum, even if it was for a measly minute! We felt proud that even the famed express train had to bow down to our railway station and pay due respects by stopping at Bolarum!
The landscape around the station once dotted with green maize fields was now replaced by high-rise flats with the fanciest names. My student and I used to jog along the then dusty village road and walk back home along the tracks. As I looked around, we could see no familiar face from the past.
I fondly looked into the station which now had a layout of the tracks on the desk. Now every block section was interlocked and under the centralized control from Secunderabad – the headquarters of South Central Railway. The station master now conveniently shortened just to a set of initials – S.S., also had his duties shortened, perhaps. I had seen my father spend sleepless nights doing the nightshift way back in ’72! I remembered those nights when I gave him company with tea to keep us awake while I prepared for the Engineering Entrance Examination. All my father’s colleagues would either have retired or crossed to the other side.
As the sun began to go down, we left the station to make it to Koteshwar Mandir in the Defense Area. We were lost as the topography had changed substantially. We had to make a few enquiries before we could reach the temple. The exterior of the temple had metamorphosed but the idol of Lord Shiva in the sanctum sanctorum was still the same (at least time and people had left Him alone!). The steps leading to the temple now were canopied with fabricated structures to protect the devotees from sun and rain. As we stood in the temple lounge where our dad had sat and sang the song he had specially composed in English for this deity (it goes like: “Come all, come, let us sing his praise!/He that blesses this fort temple dais…”), our eyes grew moist.
On our return journey from the temple, we took a different route; we rode right through the arterial road in Risala Bazaar, staying close to the Sadhana Mandir High School. We turned right to take the road that led past the Zilla Parishad High School. This was the same school, I told my sis, where Mr. Sambamurthy, well known for his high school math book, had worked as a principal. Though his first love was math, he taught the English language. For some uncanny reason principals in Hyderabad always taught English whatever their individual specialization was.
Well, so much for the education system!
We finally took the road via the Hanuman Temple to reach the main road. As we drove along back home, we could hear the strains of ‘Swamiye Saranam Ayyappa’ being vociferated by the throng of devotees. We reciprocated it with a simple humble prayer in our minds. We reached home around 9 PM just in time to sit for a hearty meal. After a nostalgic journey down the memory lanes, we were famished. As the lights were turned off for the night, we decided that we should make a trip to Bidar and Parli Baijnath – two places where our father had worked and we had spent our summer holidays!
This particular trip gave me some free time on my hands. On an epiphanic day, my sister and I decided to let our emotions take the better of us, and off we set out without any particular plan in mind. Amidst reminiscences, we sauntered to our own Sweet Home – the house that Dad had proudly built and lived last. With Dad’s passing on and now with each of us siblings located wide asunder, the house has been let out on rent. My mother refused to stay at ‘our Home’ alone what with past memories constantly haunting her, and therefore chose to live with her sister (our aunt), just two kilometers away. Well, our visit to our home from the past was not entirely purposeless. One Mr. Janakiraman, our late father’s friend wanted us to search for a book he claimed to have lent our dad. This book was titled in Malayalam, a language my sis was neither very comfortable with, nor had the patience to decipher. I did not wish to miss a chance to show off my polyglot skills!
After rummaging through the books we got every other book than the one being sought! The efforts were not a waste since we could lay hands on a treasure trove of books, most of them devotional – a cornucopia of songs penned by great devotees of the Lord and transcribed patiently by my dad in his wonderful handwriting. An added bonus turned out to be the one I had almost given up – our father’s first volume of his memoirs!
We carried this treasure to our aunt’s place and one look at the heap, our mom went ballistic. She complained about additional junk being brought into a house where space was scarce. After pacifying her that they would be taken by me to Bangalore, albeit in smaller chunks, our mollified mom sat down along with us to go through some of those books. A few glimpses of the recorded past set her into bouts of depression and brought unrestrained tears. She was vacillating between recollections of all the people that she missed – sometimes her late younger sister, and sometimes our dad, finally blowing her nose loudly in sheer desperation at the condition that she was now in: to fend for herself all alone (at least according to her!). My sister and I had to intervene in our own ways to reassure her and bring back the equilibrium!
We had a quick lunch and then drove to Bolarum – once a little sleeping hamlet where we spent considerable part of our childhood between 1972 and 1983, but now another concrete jungle. Each time I visited Hyderabad, I wanted to make this trip, but it never seemed to happen. At least for me, it really had been a very long time since I was the first bird to flow out of this nest as the oldest sibling, so to speak, because of my employment in Bangalore!
We safely avoided the gridlock problems by opting to use the narrower but safer network of roads of the cantonment, an area that spans the land between Malkajgiri (the place where my mom and sis live) and Tirumalagiri (or if you want the British desecration of Indian words for the same place – Trimulgherry), and further beyond Bolarum. We could reach Lalbazaar, a junction located midway to our intended destination, fairly quickly. Up further, we paused at the distinctive gradient that defines Alwal. Here, we could see the addition of ‘Raitu Bazaar’ – a place where farmers from nearby villages assemble to market their produce directly. It gave me immense pleasure that the government had condescended to eliminate the usual stumbling block – the usurping middleman! We drove along Doveton Road and found the post office still as it was when we had visited it as children – the familiar smells of stationery, glue, shellac and ink for the stamps drifting amidst noisy interactions between the clerks, still wafting through our minds. The Government Primary School still stood opposite the house where my cousin once lived and where her children grew. That house is anyway sold. Her neighbor’s place had been razed to the ground perhaps by another buyer planning a more modern dwelling. We turned around the corner to see if our old, familiar grocer’s shop (where we used to buy our groceries by the month) was around, but found no trace of it. Another detour along the non-descript lanes made us reach the Bolarum Bazaar railway station. We beheld drastic changes to the environs! There was no trace of the fields of maize that bordered the railway tracks; the verdant milieu was replaced by residential and commercial erections. With a sigh, we moved on, crossed the turning to Risala Bazaar, and continued to go along the curve to Turkapally. We finally reached the Bolarum railway station – a familiar structure that we grew up with.
In a brief moment of silence, I could distinctly remember the first time we had set foot there in 1972 during the summer holidays after my secondary school. We parked the scooter in the station yard and walked up to our old house. The house was part of a strip of quarters assigned to railway officials working at Bolarum. These once housed officials encompassing two levels down the totem pole of professional hierarchy. Station masters and booking clerks lived in absolute harmony sharing each other’s joys and sorrows. Now, we found that these were totally abandoned. We walked into the verandah and then into the empty rooms! How tiny they looked making us wonder, how a family of five could live under the same roof with just two 8x 10 rooms to spare! Yet, we knew that we were a lot happier then! Wondering about the vicissitudes of life, we blew the dust on the floor to seat ourselves and just let our minds wander. We remembered our bold experiments on rocketry on the leeside of the railway station. We recalled our efforts to make the rocket shoot into the air – all it had done was to make a disgruntled effort (much ado about nothing!) and then lie dead! It certainly was amusing to think of our exploration into laws of physics and the ways we wanted to discover them despite extremely limited resources at hand.
Turning our heads, we could still see traces of the blackboard that our father personally set up with cement and paint. Despite multiple whitewashes, our dad’s instrument of education still showed through. All of us, including mom had used the blackboard to teach students and get some pittance in return for the efforts we put in. Yet, these small amounts of cash did help us scale the crests and troughs of inflation down the years. And above all, there was pride in our self-made earnings. All of us siblings used to contribute half our earnings to mom who managed the family’s finances under strict control measures. While most of today’s children are pampered with monetary benefits as pocket-money, we had to sweat it out even if it were meager! But, as I said, there was extreme pride and honor in the rewards of the efforts put in…
The venue for tutoring our students was this same verandah around which our father had erected the wooden trellis to give a semblance of an extra room. Dad had the least of tools to work with, but he somehow managed to get things done either by borrowing tools or thinking of some other practical means to achieve an end. The quarters were designed by the British where one could see the enforced diminution in the design for the blue-collared workers. Our father attempted to redefine these perimeters in his own way! Across from our quarters in the open government lands, once lived karnats, a nomadic tribe and free to do what they wanted. The tribe avowed allegiance to the Hindu faith and upheld their caste-based values so much so that, I remember their refusal to partake even a glass of water from our neighbor who was a Muslim.
To our left was the tamarind tree – which still stood the test and ravages of time. It would have been at least a century old – strong and deep-rooted and one of the immutable signs of our childhood days and across generations! My sister fondly remembered her teaching students al fresco on the heap of ballast that was heaped in neat trapezoids in front of our house. We then walked the length of the platform, which seemed to have been extended to thrice its size! The atmosphere was surprisingly silent except for a few crows cawing and a few roosting on the branches of a banyan tree. I remembered the times when I, engrossed in assimilating the concepts of Fourier series to differential equations, would be jolted out of my concentration with the ear-piercing hoots from the teeny-weeny YM class steam engines which made more noise than movement. The rumble of the cars (what the British call as rakes), the grunts and groans of the wheels while they braked to a grinding halt and the general hubbub of passengers alighting or boarding…for once, I wish I could hear the same cacophony once again!
As we walked along the now-lengthened platform, my sister silently shed tears remembering our dad. Our dad worked as the Assistant Station Master at Bolarum. Those days, it was a block station, with signals and switches operated under the directions of the station master. “Line-clear” tokens were exchanged between Medchal and the Cavalry Barracks (mispronounced by the simple village folk as “kairalvee barkaas”) block instruments. Ajanta Express was one of the premier trains that ran between Secunderabad and Manmad. It was a great feeling to see it zoom past by several stations without stopping and leaving a trail of dust behind because of its speed. But the same train stopped at our station – Bolarum, even if it was for a measly minute! We felt proud that even the famed express train had to bow down to our railway station and pay due respects by stopping at Bolarum!
The landscape around the station once dotted with green maize fields was now replaced by high-rise flats with the fanciest names. My student and I used to jog along the then dusty village road and walk back home along the tracks. As I looked around, we could see no familiar face from the past.
I fondly looked into the station which now had a layout of the tracks on the desk. Now every block section was interlocked and under the centralized control from Secunderabad – the headquarters of South Central Railway. The station master now conveniently shortened just to a set of initials – S.S., also had his duties shortened, perhaps. I had seen my father spend sleepless nights doing the nightshift way back in ’72! I remembered those nights when I gave him company with tea to keep us awake while I prepared for the Engineering Entrance Examination. All my father’s colleagues would either have retired or crossed to the other side.
As the sun began to go down, we left the station to make it to Koteshwar Mandir in the Defense Area. We were lost as the topography had changed substantially. We had to make a few enquiries before we could reach the temple. The exterior of the temple had metamorphosed but the idol of Lord Shiva in the sanctum sanctorum was still the same (at least time and people had left Him alone!). The steps leading to the temple now were canopied with fabricated structures to protect the devotees from sun and rain. As we stood in the temple lounge where our dad had sat and sang the song he had specially composed in English for this deity (it goes like: “Come all, come, let us sing his praise!/He that blesses this fort temple dais…”), our eyes grew moist.
On our return journey from the temple, we took a different route; we rode right through the arterial road in Risala Bazaar, staying close to the Sadhana Mandir High School. We turned right to take the road that led past the Zilla Parishad High School. This was the same school, I told my sis, where Mr. Sambamurthy, well known for his high school math book, had worked as a principal. Though his first love was math, he taught the English language. For some uncanny reason principals in Hyderabad always taught English whatever their individual specialization was.
Well, so much for the education system!
We finally took the road via the Hanuman Temple to reach the main road. As we drove along back home, we could hear the strains of ‘Swamiye Saranam Ayyappa’ being vociferated by the throng of devotees. We reciprocated it with a simple humble prayer in our minds. We reached home around 9 PM just in time to sit for a hearty meal. After a nostalgic journey down the memory lanes, we were famished. As the lights were turned off for the night, we decided that we should make a trip to Bidar and Parli Baijnath – two places where our father had worked and we had spent our summer holidays!
Sunday, February 18, 2007
On Happiness...# 1
Today I read an interview by Tal Ben-Shahar in TOI[Sunday, 18th Feb 2007] where he has summarized the essentials of happy living!?! It is of course based on personal experience and working at his own pat discomfiture. The header of the Interview says that he has paid some tributes to Hinduism & Buddhism.This vindicates the ancient wisdom of the sages and seers, even in our very modern and rational times. Material wealth does not ensure 'happiness' which has more to do with the mind than with what we have. The happy state of mind that follows the fulfillment of our cherished wishes will stay at peak for a few hours to a few days. The euphoria wears off and you are back to searching for something afresh to feed happiness fuel.
Of the several things that he[Tal B-S] suggests I found one thing particularly relevant to me. This is summarized as Lesson 2: [In a box titled Happiness Lessons ]. To quote:
" Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning.Whether at work or at home, the goal is to engage in activities that are both personally significant and enjoyable [bold mine]. When this is not feasible, make sure you have happiness boosters [ bold mine], moments throughout the week that provide you with pleasure and meaning. "
This is what I have been using to keep myself going without deteriorating the feeling of richness in the life that has been mine till date. As a professional engineer I had my dreams when I entered service: of making a significant contribution to technology within the boundaries of company policy. There was hardly any activity [that could be classified as a challenge] that led to developing technology, within our enterprise. In our enterprise all developments were driven by customer demand or insistence. None of the lofty self-initiated, inner-drive fuelled heralding of technology was possible. A company driven only by goals of maintaining the bottom lines, with the proportional amounts of turnover that were the dictates of the market and political situations that obtained in the country, rather than by any kind of insight or foresight or deliberate planning, had little to offer in terms of professional satisfaction that could have gone to make those 'highs' in one's professional life, an important component of happiness.
In the initial years, I had somatized this 'dissatisfaction' into bouts of hyper acidity and then the same manifested as migraines. The medical books tell us that migraines have, apart from food allergies, unfulfilled aggressiveness(UA) as one of the possible reasons. I tend to identify with UA as the chief reason, in my case. The first decade and a half I was battling the 'emptiness' of my professional life by trying to shift department, I mean work area, but then with company policy revolving around turnovers and bottom lines.
The one or two opportunities that lasted as brief as 47 to 50 days in my nearly two-and-a-half decades of professional life, pales in comparison to the years added to my life. If today I am better adjusted to the situation that obtains in my life which I call as a less than mediocre existence, it is only because I learnt the futility of pursuing the 'richness' that I desired in the environment I was in. So, I turned to the other passion of my younger days which was on a low key because of my being busy with enriching my professional life with relevant kind of experience.
Yes, I dusted my Sanskrit books somewhere along the line may be around 1984-89, and later more off and on, then again after 1999-2000. I read with absorption and lot of struggle to understand Kashika by Vamana and Jayaditya[K by V& J]. The challenge of piecing together this near-cryptical 'elucidation' of Panini's seminal work on Sanskrit Grammar viz., The Ashtadhyayi has given me sleepless nights and frustrated me often. This has satisfied my technical knowledge seeking appetite which I badly missed in my Engineering Life. I have always wondered on the technical perfection of Panini's systematization of Sanskrit Grammar. V & J have stayed faithful to the Panian order of the Vyakarana Sutras, bringing into relief the excellently organized Mind of Panini.It has ever been a treat to my mind since. For this, has triggered my creativity with the promise and prospect having my ideas bearing fruit, without the need of external help unlike in the case of following Engineering Excellence.
Thus it has been V&J's book which has kept my spirits high giving me a sense of accomplishment filling the emptiness of the lack in Engineering Excellence. I hope to see some very meaningful output coming in a few years from now and depending only on me. Swami Vivekananda has defined true education as the unfolding of the knowledge within. True ! one cannot really accept anything that is at variance form one's experience.
Of the several things that he[Tal B-S] suggests I found one thing particularly relevant to me. This is summarized as Lesson 2: [In a box titled Happiness Lessons ]. To quote:
" Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning.Whether at work or at home, the goal is to engage in activities that are both personally significant and enjoyable [bold mine]. When this is not feasible, make sure you have happiness boosters [ bold mine], moments throughout the week that provide you with pleasure and meaning. "
This is what I have been using to keep myself going without deteriorating the feeling of richness in the life that has been mine till date. As a professional engineer I had my dreams when I entered service: of making a significant contribution to technology within the boundaries of company policy. There was hardly any activity [that could be classified as a challenge] that led to developing technology, within our enterprise. In our enterprise all developments were driven by customer demand or insistence. None of the lofty self-initiated, inner-drive fuelled heralding of technology was possible. A company driven only by goals of maintaining the bottom lines, with the proportional amounts of turnover that were the dictates of the market and political situations that obtained in the country, rather than by any kind of insight or foresight or deliberate planning, had little to offer in terms of professional satisfaction that could have gone to make those 'highs' in one's professional life, an important component of happiness.
In the initial years, I had somatized this 'dissatisfaction' into bouts of hyper acidity and then the same manifested as migraines. The medical books tell us that migraines have, apart from food allergies, unfulfilled aggressiveness(UA) as one of the possible reasons. I tend to identify with UA as the chief reason, in my case. The first decade and a half I was battling the 'emptiness' of my professional life by trying to shift department, I mean work area, but then with company policy revolving around turnovers and bottom lines.
The one or two opportunities that lasted as brief as 47 to 50 days in my nearly two-and-a-half decades of professional life, pales in comparison to the years added to my life. If today I am better adjusted to the situation that obtains in my life which I call as a less than mediocre existence, it is only because I learnt the futility of pursuing the 'richness' that I desired in the environment I was in. So, I turned to the other passion of my younger days which was on a low key because of my being busy with enriching my professional life with relevant kind of experience.
Yes, I dusted my Sanskrit books somewhere along the line may be around 1984-89, and later more off and on, then again after 1999-2000. I read with absorption and lot of struggle to understand Kashika by Vamana and Jayaditya[K by V& J]. The challenge of piecing together this near-cryptical 'elucidation' of Panini's seminal work on Sanskrit Grammar viz., The Ashtadhyayi has given me sleepless nights and frustrated me often. This has satisfied my technical knowledge seeking appetite which I badly missed in my Engineering Life. I have always wondered on the technical perfection of Panini's systematization of Sanskrit Grammar. V & J have stayed faithful to the Panian order of the Vyakarana Sutras, bringing into relief the excellently organized Mind of Panini.It has ever been a treat to my mind since. For this, has triggered my creativity with the promise and prospect having my ideas bearing fruit, without the need of external help unlike in the case of following Engineering Excellence.
Thus it has been V&J's book which has kept my spirits high giving me a sense of accomplishment filling the emptiness of the lack in Engineering Excellence. I hope to see some very meaningful output coming in a few years from now and depending only on me. Swami Vivekananda has defined true education as the unfolding of the knowledge within. True ! one cannot really accept anything that is at variance form one's experience.
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