The Arranged Economics

Frederic Engels definitely is not a name that surface up when we think about marriage. For enlightened ones Osho comes up easily when they think about sex (pun not intended). I was knocked down to contemplation when I read one of the rhetoric of Osho that Marriage is not a spiritual or social institution but an economic institution. Articulation was never an issue with Osho but originality was. A brilliant recycler that he was, when I read Engels’ view on Marriage I smiled. Indeed Osho took a hitchhike with Engels.

Why all of a sudden I am musing over a communist and spiritual rogue? It’s because she told me that her marriage is delayed because of the real estate prices have been crashed in Kerala. Her parents were hoping for a fatter price for the property so that they would get her married to a fatter money bag and rest of her life she would eat rich food, travel in swanky cars and gain the diseases of rich. And ha, she would also deliver some fat babies who will go to international schools and would speak accented English and scoff at their mother tongue. And the parents? They would brag about the alliance in the church, during the holy mass, to the bystander. In the whole process the only ignored factor will be ‘she and her life.’

And he, finally going to see a girl tomorrow after his parents rejected innumerable proposals, mostly based on the balance sheet of the girls’ family. Now do you understand why I remembered Engels after a long interval? In fact I have forgotten him ever since I started working in posh air-conditioned comforts of neo economy companies.

When economics (fat pay, family wealth, abroad jobs, government job where getting big bribe is a possibility etc…etc..) is the primary concern and the girl’s or boy’s feeling is the most neglected aspect in our arranged marriage then Engels has a point, right? The dowry calculation formula in Kerala and Andhra Pradesh etc. is based on some complex analysis of the economy of the family of the groom. It’s a miniature economy where the GDP, inflation, deflation, trade deficits etc. gets analyzed and then agreed on an amount. Chances of an economic recession in the family is also predicted by the brilliant economist parents. I heard that IT Professionals are available at throw away prices in the current marriage market because of the collapse of the world economy.

Alliances of nations also show the same behavior traces. Look how hard the mighty USA is trying to date with China. China’s new found affluence and stronger economic fundamentals are the prime reason for the affinity and not because USA has learned to love off late. Profiting from a relation is the fundamental capitalist whim anyway.

Move over Engels, now all I wanted to do is pray sincerely for the real estate prices to go up in Kerala so that many girls may get arranged to a good economy.

A Jumbo Theology

Brahmadathan. He has a very Brahminical name but despite his purist name he may soon be barred from entering temples in Kerala. His kingdom does not know the malice of religions and yet now it is imposed on him. He is one of the many domesticated elephants in Kerala. `The spectacular visual treats of the temple festivals here is incomplete without caparisoned elephants. To understand what elephants mean to Malayalis go to Orkut Communities and search for Guruvayoor Padmanabhan or Pambadi Rajan. They simply command more fan following than many celebrities. The call sheet of a pageant quality tusker is heavily booked during the season. They bring serious money for the owner. Couple of years back Guruvayoor Padmanabhan was auctioned for more than 2.5 lakhs a day. I know, you are feeling pity about your salary.

The reason for Brahmadathan’s possible ban is anachronistic though. His owner is a Christian so technically he is a Christian elephant. It is rumored that a Hindu fanatic political group had sent a warning to temple authorities to stay away from non Hindu elephants. A vast majority of these elephants are owned by Christian businessmen. The primary religion of businessmen is money so they have no pang in naming these elephants with the choicest of traditional Hindu names. That’s the motive behind giving a chaste Brahmin name for Brahmadathan; not because he is a vegetarian or because his owner is an ardent secularist. Elephants that are given non Hindu names will lose out heaps of cash that they fetch for their owners from these festivals during the season. Hence don’t find it funny if you hear about Akbar. He is a Muslim elephant but camouflages that name during the festival season and gets a traditional Hindu name.

The Hindu fundamentalists’ point of view is very clear. Non Hindus shall not enter the temple, be it people or elephants. May be they are also suspecting that the sudden spurt in elephant menace and killings in the temples is a part of the unholy ploy of the other religions. How can a Hindu organization tolerate the murder of Hindus by Christian or Muslim elephants? Yes, these elephants are anti Hindu or may even be religious terrorists.

God; there is no hope for you. Religions are not going to release you from their holy prisons soon. Pollutant and perverted are their theology. It already irrevocably poisoned the human existence and now they would blot the innocence of the animals too.

Love for a Day

The day of valentine. It did not exist when our generation fell in love. Or it existed but we never knew that there was a day that the merchants invented to sneak into your love and told that if you do not buy her diamonds, red rose, and took her to a star pub you are a moron lover. Now love is expensive and often credit card or personal loan assisted. Thank Almighty; love was economical and very personal in our time. Once in a while a banana fry and tea from college canteen (and the girls paid most of the time) did the trick.

Commercializing relationships is a big business and the mushy ones are soft target. But love always had its antagonists and Hindi cinema always knew that. They kept asking pyar kiya to darna kya etc. etc. But I suppose the new generation boys grew up without watching many Hindi movies. Otherwise why did they run when the Sena attacked? The battle struck boyfriends abandoned their girlfriends and ran for life. (Birbal’s theory “Khud ki jaan subse pyari” got proved once more). TV cameras followed and Channels’ TRP ratings went up. Pubs’ loss is TV Channels’ gain. Love makes good business sense either way.

Sena exhorted victory over the meek boyfriends who fled the scene. The Indian culture wins. It’s the culture that glorified love (lust, love, carnal instinct, or whatever crap you may call for that Estrogen flow in the brain) and told the world that one can love in many gymnastics positions. Poor westerner knew only missionary love or some weak improvisation of that and now he has to bear the blame for ‘degeneration’ of our culture. It’s high time Senas bomb Khajuraho and many other temples and burn Kama sutra. Also they may take a good reading of all Puranas and Ithihasas of India and understand our ‘original’ cultural stand on all these.

Now the lovesick are adapting Gandhigri to fight against Senas. They are planning to send Pink Lingerie to Sena offices. Additional expense for lovers! I am sure Senas will sell those pieces in whole sale and beef up their fund. Interestingly both the Bombay Sena and Bangalore/Mangalore Sena are named after two Lords who are married. Senas are magnanimous enough to say that ‘married love’ is permitted. Obviously there is no Sena in the name of Krishna; the Lord of love. Why not the battle fled boyfriends start a Srikrishna Sena?

Staled Toddy

Elevators are slow and if some fellow traveler has body odor it becomes unbearably slow. A familiar face smiled. “You are not writing anything now a days?” I grinned at her still holding my breath. She was referring to my blog which was lying unattended for many weeks. Some people were happy about it and some where sad about it, pretentiously though.

What to write? “No more undressing and masseurs please.” Shanti’s plea was difficult to ignore. Should I write about those concrete statues in Technopark? But most of them don’t have dress either. I never understood sculptors’ obsession with nakedness. From temples to technopark statues, none of them have dresses. May be tailoring is a more difficult art than sculpting.

Or should I write about social injustices? But the problem is that unlike many other bloggers my blood does not boil when I see or hear about social injustices. If you have been a Hindu for 38 years you really start believing in “Sambhavami Yuge Yuge. ’ Detachment, man. The last time my blood boiled was when the banks slashed the housing loan interest rates only for the new lending and did not reduce the rate for old customers. My housing loan’s floating rate was bloating day by day. I was in a rage about this injustice and spoke vehemently about it to Kuldeep Singh, over a cup of coffee at Coffee Beans. He told me to write to the Chief Justice of India and send it as a registered post. I did not do it but fearing a follow up I lied that I did. “Registered, no?” “Yes, registered.”

When I had a small accident while driving down to my village for Christmas vacation I was glad and thought I will write about it. (Though I incessantly blamed Shanti for not being vigilant enough to warn me about the bus came from the left side. “Useless navigator,” I told her. Pat came the reply, “Pathetic driver”.) My ecstasy was heightened after reaching home when my nephew took the car out and jumped it into a canal. It looks like a concept car now. But still it’s not a long enough story to write.

What about nature? I am sitting and watching the beautiful paddy field just in front of my house. Actually, I don’t deserve to sit and watch it. Why? Because there was an intense campaign to protect this paddy field from brick manufacturers some months ago and I did not participate in that. And here I am sipping a beer glass full of tea and gazing at its expanse. Lucifer. And you wanna write about it? Traitor.

The last idea was to write about the search words that visitors have used to reach, intentionally or otherwise, my blog. One searched for “How to find a Mallu boy to marry” and landed in my blog. I never new desperation has such heights. Another one actively searched for Nayanthara’s body parts and that divine incarnation had also landed in my blog. Some other souls wanted to know about the ‘Ghosts in Technopark’ and for some days I thought my blog is being haunted. Toddy shops in Kuttanadu, naked masseurs, Nayanthara’s _____, ghosts in Technopark, penis enlargement, brandy and babes, the list was long. When I showed all these noble search words to Shanti, she yelped, and also made some strange noises in her effort to control laughter. “Look at the wicked nature of your blog. Close down your toddy shop man.” Hmmm…I am thinking seriously about it.

Keyboard Commandos

Mahendra Pardesi called me on the eve of our MA examination and told “Dost, I will not be able to complete the course this year’. “What happened? I know your preparations were intact” I could not figure out the reason. “Prime Minister Narasimha Rao’s niece is writing the same examination and I have to guard her”. Mahendra was a commando posted in Pune and was pursuing his studies as well. I vividly remember Mahendra, wielding an automatic gun with a dead stern face, standing beside the girl like an impenetrable shield. He did not even smile at me or any other classmates. His eyes were scanning each and every movement in the classroom. I could not see any consternation in his eyes for not being able to write the exam. I saluted him when we met that evening at the café. Even after 16 years, my memory of that visual is not smudged. Not even a bit.

Fast forward. This Sunday morning, here I am, sitting and reading the comments from readers about the commando operation in Mumbai in a news website. “The helicopter should have dropped the commandos through the chimney of the hotel”. “We should have brought Mossad from Israel and they would have finished it in 3 hours; useless Indian commandos”. Some of the comments were funny. Comical rather. They were providing expert advice to the commandos. Suddenly there was a comment and it was like a gunshot. “You all are keyboard commandos and keyboard commandos can do anything”. The comment pierced through the idiocy of armchair commentary that some of the readers were engaging in. A tight slap on the face. I liked it.

Decades of popcorn munching, sitting in front of the TV watching cricket, and ruminating over Sachin’s square cuts and swing of Lee’s balls have given us that ludicrous habit. We think that we are all living legends and the commandos who were caught in the labyrinth were fools. Human folly has no limits.

Yesterday, when the Commandos were emerging from the building after the final assault, a reporter asked whether they caught anyone alive. The commando said, “That’s not our policy; leaving the enemy alive is not our policy”. And he told this without any heroic fuss. The simplicity and unpretentiousness gave me goose bumps. The relaxed answers to the news reporters did not have a trace of haughtiness of achievement. “Mushkil tha ye mission?” asked one reporter. “Nahi, nahi, zyada kuch mushkil nahin tha,” was the simple answer.

When the entire commotion was over, they sat in a bus, chatted and laughed as if they were going back home after the office hours. They were not sleepy, not tired, but alert and agile even after the marathon meeting with death.

Because these men were the real commandos, not the keyboard ones.

Saludo brave men.

The Mark of a Woman

It’s pouring outside. A soggy smell lingered in the air as dampness crept into the badly lit room. The creamy colored walls further dimmed the yellow light. Shanti is lying north side of me reading a South American’s work. I am lying south side of Shanti reading a North American’s work. The rain, moist, yellow light and smell that encircled us sneaked into the pages. Shanti suddenly got up as if responding to an intuition. She kept a bookmark neatly in ‘Strange Pilgrims’. A second later I heard Shiva crying in the other room. Mothers’ intuition is matchless.

Men are earthy. Hence their intuitions are also earthy. I remembered that I wanted to pass urine an hour before but got engrossed in the book. While getting out of the bed I wanted to keep the bookmark in ‘The Sound and Fury’. Could not find one. I pulled out the bookmark that Shanti kept in her book.

While listening to the sound of one water meeting the other water I thought, why did I pull her book mark? It was a murky act. Wasn’t? “This was not the first time you are doing it Santosh.” I consoled myself. But my mind was in a mood of becoming a gracious husband. It started agitating. “What the hell you take her for granted, always.” “Peace.” I said. “I will keep it back.” And I kept that back.

After a while she came back. Turned the leaves of her book and asked me “why did you keep the mark in a wrong page?”

The Bearable Heaviness of Being

Sita was not in her usual self. The gloom in her eyes and her sluggish movements suggested that. On the way up through the narrow stairs that smelled disinfectants, we tried talking about her father. My heart was sunk deeply in to an unpleasant mood. I was going to meet a man who was diagnosed with cancer in one of the kidneys. Sita’s father. How would his eyes look like? Will I see the terror of death in that or a shallow gaze fixed at distance? Will I be able to strike any sort of conversation with him? Sita was talking but my mind was already in the room with her father.

“This way sir.” Her polite tone makes me uncomfortable sometimes but hardly I ever objected. The exposure to the room was sudden as there was no visitor space in between. There he was lying in the bed that was slightly raised towards the head. He was reading a comic. He smiled. There was no fear in his eyes neither any distress. I talked to him for an hour.

Sita’s father was receding in my memory, but as if like a sequel the other day Tinu called me and told that her young aunt was diagnosed with cancer on nerves, from nose to brain. I get a chill in my spinal column every time I hear the term cancer. I even wonder how Cancerians carry that ominous zodiac sign with them for a lifetime. “How’s she?” I had nothing else to ask. “She seems to be facing it bravely”. Came the reply. Tinu continued “She told us that she does not differentiate happiness and sorrow at this moment”. What would you call this revelation? Calling it ‘profound’ would belittle her wisdom of the moment. No saint she is, but an ordinary woman. The wise ones say that the ecstasy of life begins when there is no fear of death in mind. Here is a woman who started living for the reason that she dropped the fear of death.

I thought of miracles. There is miracle in every pore of life though we fail to notice that. Miracle is not a mysterious cure, but the unwavering strength that life gives to the human existence when they go through the unthinkable. Think of that perturbed moment of sliding into a MRI machine. Think of those harrowing moments of waiting for the diagnostic report and think about that moment when someone whispers in your ears that something fatal is lurking inside. And you want to die. But nature has to comfort her divine children. She hugs them to bosom and softly tells “child, this too shall pass”. I am dumbfounded looking at the alarming speed with which the nature acclimatizes people with the most unbearable and alter it into bearable or may even to pleasurable. I could never stop wondering oh Mother.