CJM, Dehra Dun

Thrilled to find my school picture on www.schoolnetindia.com. This picture is just how I remember my school. The block on the left is senior school and the one across the playground (which I realised was huge only after I saw schools in Mumbai) is junior school. The block seen in the first picture (top) was on the right side of the playground. The three science labs and the principal's office are located in this block.
If there was a close-up shot of the junior school block I could've pointed the bench where Ms Gatmell used to sit. The two pictures, however, are less than one half of the school campus. On the other side of the junior school block was the kindergarten section, the dormitory for nuns and a huge church where we were taken on important days.

My Fair Lady

I have seen My Fair Lady perhaps as many times as it rained in Dehra Dun in the winters of 1993 and 1994.
On those biting cold foggy mornings, I would suddenly become a sincere student keen to go to school. On other days, I would be a grudging dullard feeling too lazy to leave my warm cozy bed. But, a night of thunder and lightning was surely followed by two things that I knew would set a perfect mood for a perfect day ahead __ the view of snow capped Mussoorie and poor attendance of teachers in school.
So, on these wet mornings, I would first run to the terrace to check out the snowfall in Mussoorie. After staring at the snow-capped hills, I would get ready in a few minutes skipping my bath yet again, much to my mother’s chagrin, have my toast and scrambled eggs and start for school. The school dress was warm, very warm, red blazer, a woolen grey skirt and white shirt. I used to wear a red cardigan on my shirt under the blazer like all my classmates did and of course wore gloves and a muffler.
Yet, the half a kilometer walk on a narrow stretch of road lined by wild bushes on one side and an overflowing canal on the other side to Ballupur chowk for conveyance would leave my bones and teeth rattling. From Ballupur I would get into a six-seater, funnily called `Vikram’ in Doon valley, that dropped me almost half a mile away from school. I would walk to school from there again.
I trudged to school like this on several such mornings braving the wind and the rain to reach my warm classroom. The attendance would predictably be thin, just a handful of girls __ all rain enthusiasts like me__ who I would find rubbing their wet hair with their small white handkerchiefs.
Soon, the staff room ayah would come and give us the news we were waiting for. ``Just a few teachers have been able to make it to school because of the rains. So, don’t make noise and study on your own.’’ We were in Class XII preparing for our all-important board exams. But, on these rainy days, we always wanted to take a break. So, we, a handful of Class XII girls would go to the principal’s room and seek permission to watch My Fair Lady in the TV room in the nun’s dormitory. After all, Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion was in our English Literature syllabus and what better way of understanding the text than watching the film, well, several times.
The principal would give us permission and we would go running to the nun’s block. The TV room was next to the nun’s kitchen and we would sit there dreamy-eyed watching Eliza Doolittle singing ``Wouldn’t it be Loverly’’ and ``Just you wait Henry Higgins’’ the umpteenth time humming the songs ourselves even as we could hear the cook prepare lunch for the nuns.
I loved the film as much as I loved the book. I loved it more on rainy days. Initially, we would carry our copies of Pygmalion and kept comparing the text with the film. After a point, there was no need to carry the book. We were all too well versed with every scene, every dialogue.
The next morning, our class teacher Mrs Gill, an upright strikingly attractive woman who taught us English and was largely responsible for our fascination for the film, would ask what we did the previous day. And she was always happy to know that we watched My Fair Lady.

(pic: www.thefairestlady.com)

Vizag

Took these pictures at Vizag where I barely spent a day. The picture with Buddha is Bheemli beach, where I had gone for a story.
Don't know the name of the beach (top) but it was a nice view and I could not resist capturing it.

The Passenger Train

It’s difficult not to tell this story when I am talking about my grandfather.
Baba, as I called him, worked in the railways, and for a good part of his work life as a stationmaster. Being a transferable job, he was posted to various places, big and small, but among all the stories of almost all his postings that he narrated to me, the ones to Nishangada and Kartinyaghat (both in Uttar Pradesh) stood out. For, both the places were isolated, far from civilisation, in the midst of wilderness.. and Baba spent close to six years in each of the postings, alone.
My grandmother could not accompany him to the postings for the simple reason that there was just no humanity around these sub-stations leave alone a school which was important as my father, the eldest, and his two siblings were all school-going. So, dadi stayed in Gonda with the children.
And these were not the regular railway stations that had railway platforms where passengers came and waited for their trains to come. There were no tea-stalls. There were no hawkers selling newspapers or samosas. There was nobody else there except the official posted at the sub-station.
There was a one room structure atop a concrete machan. The machan was necessary to protect the station in-charge from being attacked by wild animals given that they were situated in the midst of jungles.
So, Baba lived and worked out of the one-room structures for years together. He spoke about these postings to me rather matter-of-factly… about his routine, how he spent his time alone for innumerable days. But, he never indulged in self-pity. Work, he said, was very important, irrespective of work conditions.
Well, my grandmom would visit him with the children once in a way, when the school was closed for vacations and even he would make a trip to Gonda on festivals. But these moments were few and far in between. The only companion Baba had for years, apart from the wild animals that prevented him from venturing out much, was a passenger train, the only train that passed through Nishangada every afternoon, when he would wave the green flag __ the only moment of activity in an endless day.
There were no trains in the night as both Nishangada and Kartinyaghat were protected areas under the wildlife act. Now, my father tells me that both places are well connected and several trains take the route to various destinations.
Even as Baba narrated the stories to me, I wondered what it would have been like to live all alone for so many years. I imagined him waiting for the passenger train, standing at his window before the train’s scheduled time, with his green flag folded neatly under his arm, his ears strained for the train’s whistle… and then it would pass him in a minute leaving him alone, again. I would look at Baba closely when he told his experiences to me to see if he was trying to hide any emotion from me… he never was. He used to say how he was always happy with his work. Yes, once he mentioned that the ‘white’ stationmasters were never posted to Nishangada or Kartinyaghat.

Letters in Ink

The fondest memories of my childhood are those of writing letters to ``priya Bansi mistriji’’ when the school closed for summer vacations. Baba, as I called my grandfather, would sit with half a dozen yellow post cards on lazy summer afternoons and ask me to write letters for him. It was a vacation ritual that started when Baba was confident that I could hold an ink pen properly. I was in Class V then.
No, Baba was not illiterate. He was fluent in English and Persian but not in Hindi. He could only converse in Hindi but not write in the language. Nevertheless, he preferred dictating letters than writing them on his own, irrespective of the language.
So, I wrote several letters to Bansi mistriji (artisan), whom I didn’t know and never met. The letters were mainly about Baba’s next trip to our ancestral home in Gonda, a few hundred kilometers from Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, and that he wanted Bansi to come and fix the broken windows and seal the cracked walls in the house. He would ask him to get a plumber along. ``The water taps could be leaking,’’ he would reason to me, looking excited at the prospect of his visit to Gonda, which was still a few months away.
He would sit on the edge of the bed and I would sit cross-legged next to him. For me, it was an important assignment and I would meticulously keep the postcard on a cardboard (the one I used for my exams) and write the letter with my new ink-pen. In my best handwriting, I would write to Bansi mistriji to drop at 4 pm sharp on December 2. I wondered why Baba was sending the letter in May when he was planning his trip to Gonda only in December. I realized much later that Baba had no other way to pass his time. Dictating letters to me took care of at least 30 minutes of a rather eventless day. Also, writing letters to Bansi mistriji gave him a valid excuse to talk about his house in Gonda that he loved so much but could not live in as he was too old to stay alone there.
It’s another story that Baba would come back from Gonda rather upset with Bansi for not having turned up on the scheduled date and time. ``How can he forget? I wrote to him much in advance,’’ he would grumble. I didn’t blame Bansi mistriji one bit.
But, those were not the only letters I wrote during my vacations. I wrote to important people as well including the Prime Minister and the President. I remember Baba signing these letters with a flourish.
But, these letters were sad. Baba lamented how the country’s leaders were indifferent to its sluggish progress. ``The best roads and buildings came up during the British Raj. Look at the condition of our roads now,’’ he would dictate to me in an emotionally choked voice. He would then comment on corruption, the long queues for gas connections (this was in the early 80s) and then he would add his favourite question ``did we fight for independence for this day?’’ I wrote this question several times in several letters for several years. At the end of his dictation, he would read the letter, point out how my handwriting needed improvement and then sign it, his hand shaking with age, ``Lalta Prasad, retired station master’’.
(pic from google images)

Young brides and grooms

I had heard of child marriages, even wrote about this social evil, but, a visit to Gangiredulla Gudum in Medak district of Andhra Pradesh was indeed an eye-opener.
A beggar community that lives in this hamlet believed, until recently, in marrying off babies sleeping in their cradles.
It is a common sight to see school-going girl children in the one-room school in this village wearing mangalsutras (see the black bead necklace worn by the two girls in the picture), I was told before I visited the village and indeed, it turned out to be true.
My interaction with the ``married children'' was at times sad and at others even funny. The children knew they were married but did not know what it meant apart from the fact that they were asked to wear the mangalsutra and a red `bindi' all the time.
One boy, all of seven years and married for four years now was shying away from the camera when we tried to click him (extreme left). When asked if he was married, he sheepishly smiled and said, ``She has gone to another village. So, I don't know.'' I laughed with the other villagers at his reply, more so for the fact that this nomadic beggar community is now amused by a social evil it patronised for years.
The community has now stopped the practice of child marriage, completely.
As I spoke to people, I found that innumerable awareness sessions and health camps conducted by activists in this hamlet had helped in ending the practice. However, a young mother, Bothula, gave her own reason: “I don’t remember my wedding day as I was in the cradle on the day of my marriage, but I want my children to remember their marriages,’’ she said.

Pochampalli Sari

I visited Pochampally in July last year and was touched to see the lives of people living in this village revolving around their looms and how liberalisation had hit the community of poor weavers.
I was told this story by a village elder: An annual ritual in the leafy village of Pochampally has come to a tragic abrupt end. Every year on Ramnavami day, Pochampally’s finest weaver Ch Ramalingam would load a miniature loom on his bullock cart and weave a sari on his way to the temple from his hutment. This sari would then be draped around the deity amidst cheering and festivities. Ramalingam passed away in 2003. And, the tradition of draping the goddess in a freshly woven Pochampally sari every year ended with Ramalingam’s life.
In this picture Ramalingam's son is seen with a three-sided sari, a special sari woven by his father on his humble equipment__the loom.

The man with a gun

I did not think that I would live to tell this story. I even wrote about it in the paper I work for, but somehow, I felt I had not done justice to an experience that left me rattled, confused and much later, even disappointed.
I had gone to Mahbubnagar district for a report on child workers in cottonseed farms. It had been a long day, given that I had started at 7 am from Hyderabad and had managed to reach our destination, a small village in Kolapur taluka, only by late noon.
After spending a few hours in three cottonseed farms and interviewing really small children, mostly girls, with sore thumbs (from the endless plucking work), I started for Hyderabad at about 7.30 pm.
I was exhausted and was almost nodding sitting in the car’s back seat. The stretch from the village to the national highway was long, deserted and wore an eerie look in the night. But, I was too tired to notice much.. not until I saw a man with a gun standing by the roadside. I was partially awake then but jolted when I saw him. ``Is he holding a gun,’’ I asked the social worker who had accompanied me to the village. ``Yes, looks like a naxalite to me,’’ Subhash, the social worker, replied.
I had barely recovered from my shock of having actually seen a naxal with a gun, when I saw this man in a white shirt holding a gun and stopping our car. I think I lost my voice then. It was too surreal for me, also `filmi’.
The man asked the driver to step out of the car and made him switch on the lights inside. Soon, the social worker was asked to alight. I remember clutching my bag, completely tongue-tied and resolute not to step out. I looked at the absolutely dark stretch of road ahead and noticed some more men standing across the road__ all holding guns. Comrades, I guessed.
Suddenly, I heard a knock on my window. It was the man in the white shirt asking me to step out. I had no choice.
Scenes from Hindi films, particularly those on police atrocities, loomed large in my mind. If he is a naxal, he will run away with the car, I panicked. How were we supposed to reach the still so far national highway? Just then, another, more disturbing thought, crossed my mind. If these are policemen on the lookout for naxals, they might just ask us to run and kill us in an encounter (thanks to Sudhir Mishra’s very real Hazaarein Khwaishein Aisi which I had watched recently)! I looked at the fields on the road side and imagined myself dead, covered with blood in the greenery.
The man checked the car and our bags and then asked us to leave. We were stopped for about ten minutes, but it was more than a lifetime for me.
We sped back to Hyderabad. It was only after I had locked myself inside my house__ after a good six hours of the ordeal__ that I managed to breathe easy.
For writing my first person account, I spoke to the police officials of Mahbubnagar to find out who had stopped my car. I was told it was a combing operation and that the police had been tipped off of naxal movement on that stretch of road. Why didn’t they bother to identify themselves? Well, they did not want to alert the naxals. But, the naxals would anyway recognize a cop even if he is in plainclothes. Well, the police cant take chances. Moreover, a journalist coming all the way from Hyderabad should not get so easily scared, I was told. Really, officer? I really do not think it was an impossible possibility for me to become statistic in the alleged encounter-friendly police data.

(I wrote this last September soon after I came back from a rather happening visit to Mahbubnagar district of Andhra Pradesh)

I just want...

I don’t want the moon
I just want the star-lit sky

I don’t want the sun
I just want the warm sunlight

I don’t want the earth
But just a calm river and a green riverside

I just want a breeze rustling the leaves of a tree
And green grass cushioning my feet

An endless afternoon
Of sharing stories and giggling with friends
Sitting by a spring absorbing the sun

Call them lazy dreams
Or simply brush the silly thoughts aside
But, this is all I need to give life my best smile.

(Posting stuff i would have perhaps not shared with people ever. i wrote this a few days ago)

my first

Have been planning to blog for over three months now, and am finally doing it. let's see how it goes.