The Secret Archive

There used to be a time in Dehradun, when anything short of a bungalow surrounded by acres of mango and litchi orchards would be considered as lowly and undignified (showing guests around one's house used to be or rather still is a favourite pastime of our city's people). That trend did of course change with the dawn of independence, the eviction of the British noblesse and the massive population explosion but not to a large extent. Even now most homes are designed on generous proportions with a room for anything and everything. One might consider this fortunate considering the matchboxes that most people in the metros live in but then having a large house can also have its drawbacks.

Countless have been the times when as a child I would get late for school because the entire family even with its combined efforts took hours to locate a missing maths notebook or a geography map. Of course as a family we have never placed any faith in the maxim, 'A place for everything, and everything in its place'. Our family motto runs more like, ' Just chuck it somewhere, and worry about it later'. Combine that with the other family tradition of never throwing away any stuff, no matter how useless it might be and you have a disaster. Over the years our house has slowly started resembling a massive garage with 'kooda kabad' stuffed in every nook and cranny.

One of our favourite spots for hiding away unwanted stuff has been the dressing table and its drawers. This old piece of furniture (gifted I guess during my parent's marriage) has displayed such an enormous capacity to store rubbish that it has never been completely cleaned out according to my memory. Though there are just three tiny drawers, they within themselves contain a fascinating collection of perfumes, jewelery, combs, cosmetics and other bric and brac.

It was therefore quite a delightful experience when I finally decided to clean up the place at my mother’s insistence. The first step to be taken while cleaning out such a place is to open all the drawers and throw everything out into one big pile. Then you can examine each article at your leisure and decide whether it should go back or be chucked away as garbage. Adopting this approach, I warily opened the drawers (because of the cockroaches you see) and collected everything in a pile. What I gathered in this jumble heap is listed below:

1. Six bottles of perfumes collected over the years and never put to any use: ‘ The year was my class 6^th I guess, when didi brought her first bottle of fake perfume from Indira market (Doon’s China bazaar of smuggled/pirated/stolen stuff). The brands were always fascinating and so were the bottles in which they came, especially to me. Escada, Swiss Army, Hugo Boss and several others. While Didi might have bought them out of some nascent fascination for branded stuff (a full blown disease by now), they served a far greater purpose in entertaining me on boring Saturdays (spent all alone at home). The Harry Potter fever had just recently bitten me and the perfumes served as my ingredients for cooking up all kinds of crazy potions. Their equally crazy shapes added to the charm. “A few drops of Escada mixed with a liberal dose of Brandy (Yeah, I have been handling alchohol since I was a kid!!). Add a spoonful of cooking oil and a little candle wax. Now just set it aflame!!”

2. A painted bottle of tiny black flower seeds: ‘An empty bottle of Chelpark ink was all that was required to kickstart one of our oldest and craziest collections. The year must have been my class 1^st or 2^nd I guess, when Didi and I first decided to collect the shiny black seeds of the ruby red flowers that my mother would grow every winter. February as it is can be quite a dull time with most parents shutting up their kids for the upcoming final exams in March. Hence every year we made a tradition out of painstakingly collecting the tiny black seeds of the flowers. First we would shake each flower over a large plate. Then we would sift them with the common kitchen sieve. This process would be repeated for some 5-10 days before we would have a bottle full of shiny black seeds, ready for planting next year. I do not remember when the tradition stopped but the bottle replete with our last collection was stored away in the drawers of the old table.

3. Nine different brands of lipsticks and nail polishes from around the world (India, Japan, Germany and the US): My mom has always had a repulsion for cosmetics. Though I have never seen her buy any herself, thoughtful (or rather thoughtless) relatives have piled all kinds of colours and brands on her as part of the ages old Indian ceremony, ‘Dekho hum aapke liye Videsh se kya lae!!’. No wonders then that my rubbish pile contained a hell lot of lipsticks and nail polishes. Though they never served their true purpose, they did serve as an interesting piece of entertainment to us. ‘The year was my class 3^rd, when on another boring Saturday Didi and I decided to attack my Mom’s collection of lipsticks. There was quite a large collection gathering dust on the dressing table. All hues and shades were present from shocking pink to deep maroon, brown and even something that resembled orange. Excited we cooked up our own little game of painting each others’ faces with them. Didi started first by drawing red moustaches on my faces. I promptly followed with a pink tika and dark red fake teeth on the chin. By the time we were finished, both of us resembled two Rakshasas straight out of Om Namah Shivay. The colours were later scrubbed off with a great deal of difficulty. By the way mom never noticed any difference.

4. Branded pen sets gifted by crazy lunatics on my birthdays: Honestly why gift a pen when it doesn’t work!! Of all the pen sets that I have ever been gifted half have never worked. The others are too expensive to be used for general writing. Of course by the time an important occasion arises, their ink always dries up.

5. Watches: All the broken dysfunctional watches that my family has worn emerged as a big part of my heap. Each one belonging to a distinct era and holding its own small part of family history. ‘The year was my class 7^th when Didi returned from Indira market jumping with joy that she might just have bought a real stolen swiss watch at throwaway prices. The watch did say ‘Made in Swizterland’ and had all the branded markings, unlike the others that had been on display in the shop. Her exuberance disappeared quite rapidly however when her surmise was proven false and the watch stopped working after just some three months in service. The watch was soon relegated to the drawers of the dressing table as another bitter memory of Didi’s eccentric shopping experiences in Chor Bazaars.’

A pair of magnets that I loved playing with as kids, a old spool of silk thread, our first scientific calculator (another fake),…..

The list just goes on and on, with each item holding its own distinct set of memories. I have never maintained a diary but honestly do I need one with each nook and cranny of our house stuffed with these memories from childhood. A large and messy house may have its disadvantages but nothing can beat its quality of collecting secret archives in all its different corners.

Balding (an investigative story)

{The post below was written an year back so please forgive any outdated references :) }

It requires just four years in IITR and in some unlucky cases five to completely transform your life (and I’m not talking in terms of salary, recession’s effects are yet to get over). All of us enter the serene and beautiful campus as budding engineers and leave as the future leaders, engineers and managers of this country and abroad as well (which is true only in ideal cases, unluckily ideal students are by now an extinct species). Even though you end up gaining loads of knowledge (doubtful in most cases), there are plenty of things that you also end up losing. And I’m not just talking about the shiny new bicycles that we bought in the beginning of first year, for the biggest tragedy it seems is the loss of the cylindrical filaments growing from the epidermis of or skulls or in simpler words our hair.
Alopecia or the loss of hair is a disease common to most of the junta at IITR. Every day you can see the proof in the form of the clogged drains of the bathrooms on the campus. I agree that there are other reasons of course, but there has to be a link between the fast receding hairlines and swirling muck that we get to see each day. The reasons attributed to this strange phenomenon are several. Plenty of people while discussing this tragedy during the usual 3 am ‘bakar’ session very conveniently place the blame on the shoulders of the draconian early morning professor who forces you to come to class after 8 straight hours of CS and just 2 hours of sleep. On the other hand, others feel that it must be the enormous number of ‘tuts’ that we get and the effort we put into photocopying them that is to blame. The most popular culprit however is our seemingly radioactive water supply, point in favour being that most people hardly lose any hair when at home. There are plenty of other suspects of course but no one knows for sure.
IITians are famous all across the country for being the hub of innovation. Agreed that most of the budding electrical engineers on campus can’t even fix a fuse when it trips and most of our computer engineers face problems while formatting their own laptops but when it comes to cooking up innovative solutions to somehow mask their bald pates, we might just be the international champions. Most people initially start with restyling their hair and opting for what I call as the ‘straw sprinkled on an egg’ look. Later as the problem becomes even more severe and the aforementioned style becomes unfeasible, hair oil and shampoo ads sporting smiling ‘sushmitas ‘ and yoga ‘babas’ suddenly look promising. Depending on their inclinations, most people opt for either baba’s magical babuti or the chance to become another smiling sushmita (the tv ads remember). When even this fails, most people resort to desperate measures, chopping off the few locks that still cling to their bald pates. A recent movie starring ‘Aamir’ has thankfully come to their rescue and all of a sudden bald is the new in thing. The Bhawan barbers are happily shearing the heads of those among the balding who had not dared to take the plunge.
In the end as I attempt to conclude, I just remembered that our friendly ‘behenas’ in Sarojini are also subject to similar problems. How then do they manage to deal with this dilemma? No one’s sporting a ‘Ghajini’ look in Sarojini at least. No one I’m sure has the daring to ask, but we can at least guess. Wigs, anyone!!

The Other Side Of The Story

15th August 2010—Bangalore-: Finally a holiday!! Most Denizens of our IT capital spend the day exchanging a few patriotic messages, spending time with their friends and perhaps watching a patriotic movie or two.
1st November 2010—Bangalore again: It’s Karnataka Rajyotsava!! The streets are decked in yellow and red (the flag of Karnataka). Sweets are being distributed and the tricolour too can be seen fluttering proudly atop government buildings amidst the sea of red & yellow.
1st May 2010—Mumbai: Maharashtra Day. It’s time to reassert that Marathi pride. Loud trumpets can be heard everywhere as the Marathi Manoos pay homage to Shivaji Maharaja and their leader Balasaheb.
And it doesn’t stop at that: “Jai Maharashtra” & “Jai Telengana” are these days heard much more frequently than “Jai Bharat Mata”.
The first and foremost conclusion that a naïve reader might draw from the above instances would be that India is all set to split into a hundred small countries. Are these people (plenty of times including our friends as well) truly patriotic? Why then do they celebrate their own distinct identity and statehood with such vigour? The reason my friend is quite simple. In order to decode any of the above stories, one only has to look at the economics of it all.
15th August 1947 was definitely the day that India was granted independence but genuine freedom was still a far way off for a large part of the country as most of the people still struggled to make ends meet. Development did kick off but in a discriminatory manner. While Mumbai was completely run by Gujratis, in Bangalore the writ of the Tamilians ran supreme. Both the Marathis and the Kannadigas were left jobless and powerless in their own homes. Similar was the case in several other parts of the country as tribals were driven out of their resource rich forests and entire forests were cut down in the Himalayas to serve as furniture for the ruling elite in Lucknow or Calcutta. Before soon the simmering discontent boiled into outright anger and protests and demonstrations broke out in all parts of the country. The Britishers had maintained a semblance of order and equitable development at the point of a gun but the moment the gun was lifted, all hell broke loose and our founding fathers were at a loss to find the same people who had fought together for independence now fighting each other for jobs.
Hunger strikes, suicides and chakka jams soon became the order of the day and each passing day made the situation all the more difficult to handle for Chacha Nehru. Separate statehood emerged as the only viable option to end the crisis and within 10 years of independence, India’s map was being redrawn on linguistic lines. Even then unluckily economic differences were forgotten and more often than not a rich majority was coupled with a poor minority and in democracy obviously the majority rules. The strikes continued and continue to this day as one community finds itself exploited by another.
The situation however wasn’t any better in the new states as Tamilians were chased out of Bangalore and the Shiv Sena was formed with the primary motive of bashing up any outsider who dared to take up a job in Mumbai. The overall financial state of the Marathis and Kannadigas did however improve and they expressed their joy via their own respective Rajyotsavas.
Even now one can find Gorkhas demanding freedom from Kolkatta and Telanganites planning to chase out Andhrites from Hyderabad. The problem after all is economical and little respite can be found from it unless the central government ensures equitable development for all the people and regions of India instead of basing its decision on pure vote bank politics.
To sum it up, I’d like to quote a TOI journalist from my home state of Uttarakhand, “ Independence was granted on 15th August 1947, but it was 53 years later on 9th November 2000 that we actually tasted it.”
Jai Hind!!
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