Mindsport

The thrill of seeing your name in print is comparable to the adrenalin rush from any adventure sports. I was ecstatic on the day when my name had appeared in Mindsport by Mukul Sharma. And as you add layers to your ego, a side effect of ageing, you feel an urge to relive your wins, notwithstanding the scale. Hence I have spent two Sunday afternoons trying to find the proof of that but success has been elusive!

Mindsport was a weekly column in Sunday Times in the ‘90s which had interesting puzzles from diverse domains like literature, mathematics, logic, chess etc. Chess, by the way, was the underlying concept of the column  which had a heading of e4 in bold on top, signifying the first puzzle and Endgame as the last puzzle. MS never claimed that these were his original creations and in fact the Endgame puzzles were generally contributions from readers. It was from these columns that I learnt about science magazines like Nature and Scientific American that the geek world devours. Besides the puzzles, the column used to have interesting trivia. Sample this: there is no english word that rhymes with the word month or there is no verb starting with q whose second letter is not u. Or Benazir Bhutto’s name has all the vowels in it and so does Mozambique!

True to MS’ style, my initials had appeared as one of the puzzle solvers. Given the similarity, it could have been my name or Bhaiya’s, as we both go by the moniker - BKumar from Bhagalpur. I remember having kept a cutting of that column and revisiting the yellowed strip as recently as last year. 

Mindsport puzzles were definitely neither elementary nor weekend staple and the way people would proudly pronounce their alums before explaining their solutions, the chances were bleak that it was my name. However, I was completely overtaken by the thought of finding that treasure trove. Quite unlike romantic flicks though, I couldn’t find it in my collection or books and places where I would generally keep such tit bits!

The search had now turned into a rage and I thought of trying my luck on the internet. In this connected world where people have archived anything that was ever printed or otherwise, I was confident of finding it. And find I did, the URL that has almost all the columns of mindsport, mukulsharma.org.in. Besides, I found hordes of info about Mukul Sharma and how Mindsport was conceived when Pritish Nandy and MS agreed to have a weekly column for the nerds. I also found that MS had stopped the column abruptly after the number of hate mails from smart alecks, on the quality of puzzles, almost pushed him to depression. More interestingly how Mukul Sharma is the Sharma in SenSharma (Konkana SenSharma is his daughter).

Even on the website, however, I didn’t find the column that I was desperately looking for. May be the few missing ones on the website were the culprit. As I was losing hope I thought of searching the other puzzle which I remember (this is called Buffon’s needle problem) -

Suppose we have a floor made of parallel strips of wood, each the same width, and we drop a needle onto the floor. What is the probability that the needle will lie across a line between two strips?

I distinctly remember this puzzle since a school friend  had solved it and his solution along with his initials (TF) were also printed. I searched the website for this too but didn’t find it. At this point I started questioning my memory and my reality distortion trait. 

It so happens, and let me categorically state it that it is very infrequent, that if I try recollecting some story which a friend had narrated, I tend to replace myself as the protagonist. So was this one of those disruptive psychological narrative and my name was never printed in Mindsport! Till I find that yellowed paper cutting, I will continue questioning the authenticity of my memoir - was it TF or me or neither?

Floccinaucinihilipilification

It was a warm summer afternoon of ‘90. Summers in Bhagalpur have always been scorching and people rarely venture out in such heat unless it is for an essential thing like medicines, water (no the story precedes the time when water was sold in bottles!), a calamity or to trade comic books! 90’s were a different era and kids didn’t suffer from any ADHD nor any remotely similar neural ailments. Where was the time for all that when one had to run at least a few miles to borrow comics from the bookshop and once done reading, exchange it with a friend. Or had to shout out at every friend’s door and beg his mother to allow him to play!

The neighbourhood where we lived during those days was called Bank colony. However, there was quite a fair mix of people from other professions. Bankers (of course), Accountants, Lawyers, even a retired judge. It also had families who loved their domesticated cows and who let them loose in afternoons for a casual walk. The colony was pretty well laid out with criss-cross lanes, so the owners were confident that their roaming cows would not go astray. These casual bovine walks, however did cause stinking nuisance on colony roads.

So it was a warm summer afternoon. I had finished reading the latest Nagaraj comic book twice and was planning on making a good deal out of it. There was a power cut that day, quite a regular thing in the ‘90s, which had further inebriated Ma and Didi deep into their afternoon siesta, while Bhaiya was busy with his books in his room. I was pretty sure no one would notice if I sneaked out of the main door. Slowly I got up and made my way through the main door and was about to open the gate when I stalled. The main gate had started creaking at the hinges since the previous week. The sound was caused by the grill of the gate rubbing the bolt that was holding it against the wall. Ma had already asked me a few times to put oil in those hinges to soften that irritating creaking sound, while I had always ignored it. My logic was that the sound was acting as our call bell so why bother! That same logic was now holding me from surreptitiously escaping.

After weighing the alternatives, I decided to bump up the adventure quotient of this errand. I looked around to ensure no one was watching and like an expert athlete jumped over the compund wall, only to land on a freshly dumped, warm cow dung. Cursing my luck and the cow owners, I grudgingly rubbed my chappals against the grass nearby. I had lost a good 10 minutes in the process and was worried if someone at home would notice me missing! That thought jolted my spirit and I rushed towards Mishtu’s house.

Mishtu’s house was roughly a hundred metres from mine. The house was landlocked from three sides by equally imposing walls of adjoining houses and had a narrow alley on its open side. Mishtu’s mom, Sengupta aunty, was a strict disciplinarian and during summer would not allow us to wander until it was late afternoon. And in all possibility, she would report at the HQ, if she found me loitering around.

Ergo the plan was to avoid her at all costs and close the deal without her noticing it. As I reached Mishtu’s house, I peeped through the cracks of the huge grey gate. Aunty was sitting on a chair in the verandah with the most ubiquitous handheld device of that era - palm leaf fan; power cut must have interrupted her siesta. Human behaviour is so contradictory and unpredictable. The same stimulus caused one set to go in a deeper slumber while it caused the other to lose sleep. This was getting tougher by the minute but I had made up my mind, so there was no going back. Before she could see me, I quickly ducked below the level of the compound wall to avoid her alert roving eyes and almost crawled to the narrow alley next to the house.

In that alley, I thought of a plan which of course sounded brilliant to my 9-yr-old self. Without wasting any more minute, I set on executing the plan with a jump and clutched on to the ledge of the house’s compound wall. Yet again like an expert athlete, using my arms, I moved towards the part of the house that was closer to Mishtu’s room. Once I guessed I was closer to his room , I pulled myself up to bring my eyes just above the level of the wall. Thankfully Mishtu was sitting near the window and he saw me. His eyes widened with shock and he gestured that he was coming out. I hurriedly signalled him to come out in his backyard as there was an impending threat in the verandah.

“Wow! Nagraj aur Shankar Shahenshah! How on earth you got hold of it!”, Mishtu was unable to hold his excitement as I pulled out the raison d’etre of the errand, that was tucked in my shorts. On learning about the terms of the trade,however, he returned back to his normal self.

“The seven Crystal Balls for this!”

“Last time I had given you Pratishodh ki Jwala in exchange for The Red Sea Sharks, remember! The first book in Dhruv series is so rare you might not get it in Granthalay even”, I was trying all the tricks on my friend who had introduced me to the world of Hergé’s Tintin.

“Ok fine, will get it”, may be Mishtu got the sense that if he haggled any more Aunty would come to know about it.

He came back with the book and a small oblong diary.

“This is the “Big Fun” diary that I got from Manish bhaiya’s shop after I gave him 300 runs and 10 wickets’ stickers that I collected ”, Mishtu boasted. It was my turn to be disheartened now as I had been trying to collect the stickers for a few months now. After flipping through the diary, I tried the last trick up my sleeve.

“But you had told Aunty that you will not have any more bubble gums!”

“Last week a relative had come with some Big Fun gums!” - so lame an excuse.

“And you got all these stickers from that lot. Anyways, if you let me have this for a few weeks, I will not tell Aunty”, I had played my final card.

In a matter of a few minutes, a very successful trade was executed in my favour. I ran back home, ducking at critical junctures and jumping over a compound wall, in that order. It was the pinnacle of all comic book trades with a Big Fun diary as bonus, that the world would have ever seen and as a consequence it was really difficult to wipe the smirk off my face for three straight days.

I have been a fan of Tintin ever since and now in possession of the entire series, thanks to D. The Big Fun diary that I probably never returned was quite interesting too and had statistics of many international cricket players. It had facts like wonders of the modern world apart from some fun trivia, like longest non-technical word in English.

Though I lost the diary a long time back yet that one word was stuck in my memory - Floccinaucinihilipilification. Time had erased the definition of the word but as destiny would have it I had another encounter with it today, while reading a short-story by Satyajit Ray. I looked up the the word and was actually amused at the definition, it meant ‘nothing’! Amused because that word brought back that summer afternoon of ‘90 and for me  Floccinaucinihilipilification was anything but that!

One third of a Halley’s connection

“Battiyan bujha do...arre batti toh bujha de yaar”. Standing in the school’s morning assembly queue I could see the shock waves that these lines created; ruffled some very serious feathers and definitely had attracted quite severe repercussions, the details of which were never made public. 

But was the singer perturbed? No, not to the least!

He was immune to all this - after all he had scored a 99 in Maths in the board exams (this was 1989-90, way before ICSE had reset its minimum score to 90) and had already graduated out of the school, officially. That day that plucky teenager introduced us to something that we all could feel but didn’t have a term for, then. The term is spelled chutzpah which I learnt much later and after a few more years of existence, I learnt how it is pronounced. Well he also introduced me, at least, to the music director for all moods, Pancham.

And thence two names were forever etched in my subconscious - RD Burman and Navin Sinha! The singer that morning was His pluckiness, Navin Sinha and the original composer and singer of the song was His craziness, Pancham.

Satte-pe-Satta has since then been one of my favorite movies and each time the song Pyar hamein plays, I am transported to that chutzpahdik summer afternoon. That song opened a vista to Pancham’s absolutely incredulous range of music. The movie has a note that is a testimony to Pancham’s musical experiments and his craziness. There’s a character in the movie called Babu (Amitabh Bachhan in a double role) and his introductory scene has that spine chilling music. During my research on Pancham (yes I do research which are never related to my so called knowledge area), I came across a lady’s interview who had “sung” that. She was asked by Pancham to gargle and produce that high pitched sound. His craziness had used several such “instruments” to produce the sound that he had envisioned. Whistling in empty bottles, comb and broom, champagne glasses and percussion instruments from far off African countries are part of Pancham’s legend now.

There is lot of literature around Pancham and his team of musicians. The Lords, Mullans and some who went to explore their other special skills - like Bhupinder moved on from an instrumentalist/guitarist to an acclaimed singer, Uttam Singh composed music under Yash Chopra banner, et al.

However, after that hugely impressionistic day I had made little effort to trace the man who had introduced me to Pancham. And this incommunicado can be assumed to be by default, as is the case with me usually. Mr Navin Sinha, though reappeared, as a twist of fate, on 75th anniversary of Pancham, as a post on my school group on Facebook. Probably still in love with numbers, he had posted a mathematical puzzle. When I read the post, I was meandering down from the hills of Munnar, in a rented car with my better half, surfing FB for a few reasons. The major ones being to divert D’s attention from the looping roads, which she abhorred, and re-instil her interest in mathematical puzzles (the latter is in her genes, by the way).

And so while our car sped down the mountain roads, D was completely immersed in the puzzle, aloof of how quickly we were descending. By the time we touched the foothills she without any emotions presented the solution which I duly posted on the FB group (yes this too is a regular trait of mine, if I am unable to solve puzzles, I copy the solution). With the response, I added a postscript asking if he was the same Navin Sinha who had made me live that feeling of chutzpah. He responded affirmatively without any mention of whether the solution was correct - the pluckiness was in tact, it had to be him!

That appearance of Mr Sinha on Pancham’s platinum jubilee made me really wonder at the situation. A twist of fate is the only probable explanation, that brought multiple elements into play and left me wondering whether Pancham, Mr Sinha and I have a quantum connection probably that realigns itself every 25 years or so!

Circa 1989 and then 2014, my maths (which by the way, boasts of a score just two less than what Mr Sinha had scored) says 2039 is the next year of alignment - Halley’s anyone?

Flemingo

Fleming’s left hand rule (FLHR), with that strange concoction of the three fingers of your - what else - left hand, was how we were introduced to one of the advanced concepts of physics. For some it was just a gesticulation, with middle finger, the prominent one, ridiculing their yet to develop nascent brain. To add to the misery of those brains, there was a right hand rule too!

For me it was fun and a kind of ego massager - where some of the brilliant minds of my class failed to understand, I could effortlessly twist my fingers to show which way would the motion be, as predicted by the thumb! 

Now electromagnetism isn’t a simple phenomenon, especially if you have to imagine a multi-dimensional wave, one being orthogonal to the other. Fleming’s hand rules didn’t even involve the twist-your-brain-into-knots mathematics, which I later found out was for evolved brains. Nevertheless, these evolved brains failed to comprehend the hand rules - probably the only reason I can think of is they detested the idea that a concept with physics and mathematics, entwined, involved gestures from Kathakali!

This story goes back a few decades when I was a young student of X ‘B’. Tansen and I were thick as thieves then, with Naresh completing the triumvirate. Tansen was a natural all-rounder. His Mark Waughish cover drives were as famous as his effortless solutions to really complicated problems (academics or otherwise) or his charming smile. He also turned out to be the lyrical bahati-hawa-sa Phunsukh Wangdu character (immortalised by Amir Khan from ‘3 idiots’), when my friends and I too, lost track of where Tansen was after being last sighted at Infy, Bangalore for a brief period of time. He has suddenly reappeared after quite a long hiatus, thanks to WhatsApp.

The three musketeers (we didn’t have a name then) would meet infrequently at each other’s homes in the evenings and more frequently, if there was an impending exam. It was in one of these group study sessions, while discussing FLHR, I had a feeling of, what psychologists have termed, Superiority Complex. This was because my other two very talented friends had some trouble understanding FLHR, while I was giggling and solving problems with ease. The evening remains one of my cherished memories for it was on very rare occasions that I had an upper hand, with these guys in tow.

Just a few years down the line, however, there was a role reversal. We had graduated from being adolescents to young adults, by clearing what everyone called the-most-important-exam of our life and had got admission in XIth standard of the same school. Some of the dynamics changed - girls joined us (we were an all boys’ school till Xth standard) and all of a sudden, Maths and Physics achieved gargantuan proportions, which as described earlier was only for evolved minds. Add a heady mix of hormonal surge and what you have is a life in dizzy, where everything seemed to be travelling at breakneck speed. There was so much distraction that you had to constantly struggle to stay afloat, while the evolved ones were racing ahead!

Concepts of Physics by HC Verma, is a book revered by many - it is a concise book, explains the concepts (true to its name) in a no-nonsense cryptic text and then quickly moves on to some really good problems on the just explained concepts. These problems don’t have a solution manual and only IE Irodov surpasses the quality of problems in that book. 

I am not sure if Tansen had that feeling of Superiority Complex on that role-reversal day. However, it was a realisation for me that he is one of those evolved ones, who at that time was just enjoying his swim and soon will be among the winners! The problem that we were discussing was from the conservation of energy chapter - where a man is falling from a building with a suitcase in his hand and to avoid the terra-firma, should throw his suitcase at a certain speed horizontally. I wonder how people come up with such problems where you get rid of your worldly possessions, viz., suitcase, to save your life! Only trick here was you had to consider conservation of momentum in horizontal reference frame, with transformation of energy and the corresponding projectile motion which would help the man to fall into the swimming pool. Yes, even I didn’t get that and yes I still haven’t got that, while Tansen effortlessly solved it, matching the solution to the last decimal point!

They say it takes just a needle tip to deflate a baloon, this holds true for ego too. This HC Verma problem was that needle tip for me. My ego wasn’t just deflated but it was shattered to pieces. This was the epiphany that people wait for their whole lives. An inflection point in your life after which you ought to take a different path - be it your career or life decisions. Me? I didn’t change a thing and continued toiling to get admitted to an engineering college. The outcome is an engineer who knows that he is not as efficient problem solver as a Tansen, for instance. But then that is how life is and all we need is some lemons!

Chemistry and Cricket

“We will fire bullets at it, Sir!”


“Brilliant! And what would be your weapon of choice, young man?”


“A pistol or a revolver?”


“No Sir! Remember this - if it is aim-and-shoot, trust 303’s. Though a World War I weapon, it still works like a charm!”


Now, if I tell you it was an Organic/Physical Chemistry class, would you trust me? But that was Prof. Kali Dutt Bannerjee's art of teaching, he would transform a subject as bland as Organic/Physical Chemistry (at least to me) into such an interesting conversation, with trivia, fun-facts, et al.


This was his first class for our batch and he wanted us to understand what Ernest Rutherford had envisioned during his famous gold foil experiment, which ended the short lived era of Plum pudding atomic model of JJ Thomson and gave the world a new nucleus based model. As he walked in to our classroom - we would later be so influenced by his mannerisms that his normal gait would seem like a swagger to us - he spoke out loud and clear, in his crisp, accented English, “There is a gunny bag full of cotton and there are some well scattered iron balls in it. How would you find out - without touching, that excludes x-ray too - that there are iron balls in that bag?”


And this is what led to the conversation mentioned at the start.


“What is your name, young man?”, boomed the baritone, after he had pointed out that my choice of weapon was a poor one.


“Bikash”, I blurted.


“Bikash’s idea of firing bullets at the gunny bag was exactly what was experimented by a certain Mr Ernest Rutherford but at an atomic level. He fired alpha particles at a thin gold foil...”, he went on to elaborate in great detail how Rutherford’s experiment gave a brilliant new insight, literally, into the atomic world. While Prof Bannerjee continued, I, on hearing my name publicly pronounced, was elated and floating on cloud nine, hardly paid attention to any further details, thence. As I look back at it now, I think I was sucked into the winner’s trap that day - a phenomenon where the hero of the battle collects all accolades of the first win but never prepares and hence looses the impending war - notwithstanding a few answers to Prof Bannerjee’s levo/dextro Organic molecule queries or having been gifted a chocolate after the “Bowling Shane” incident.


“Bowling Shane!” - Adam Gilchrist, had then recently joined the Australian ODI team(“The Invincibles” of late 90’s and early 2000’s) and his peculiar style of uttering the words of encouragement, caught by the stump mic, was an absolute hit among cricket crazy fans, like us. Shane Warne, the greatest leg spinner the world has seen, was another hero who was ironically toiling hard in Indian conditions in that series, to make a mark. Post the Australian tour of India of ‘90s, Gilchrist became a permanent fixture, replacing another great, Ian Healy. Gilly though, in that tour and to us, was known mostly for his “Bowling Shane”, behind the stumps.

The finals of the inter-class cricket tournament that year, was scheduled between Std XI (I was the 12th man in the Std XI squad) and Std X. Manik Shankar, was our local Shane Warne - with a style matching Warney and a much better relative record to boast of. Before the start of the match while we were planning our strategy, Prof Bannerjee walked in. Like most of the Bengali bhadralok, he too was a big fan of cricket and was there to enthuse and encourage both the teams. We arranged for a chair and cajoled him to sit on our side. We had set a tough target to chase and as the second innings of the match progressed, Manik was introduced to the attack. I was sitting behind Prof Bannerjee and as soon as Manik found his rhythm I started mimicking Gilly (unlike him though I wasn’t behind the stumps but sitting behind a man who was an alert audience), at the top of my voice, unabashedly and quite frequently after every turning ball - “Bowling Shane!”.
Owing to our superlative performance, the match ended in our favor. I remember Suman running all the way from the stadium to the middle of the ground to congratulate our cricket captain, almost hugging him. The next day when Prof Bannerjee’s class was about to start, he pulled out two Dairy Milk chocolates and handed one to Suman and the other to me, stating that an encouraging audience, sometimes is the difference between a winning and a loosing team.


Legend has it that Prof KD Bannerjee and his team were working on a PhD thesis, funded by the Central government. They also had frequent mail exchange with an American University team, which was working on a similar idea. It was late 60’s and while the research was in full swing, all of a sudden without any consent from Prof Bannerjee’s team, the funding was stopped. The disheartening thing wasn’t that funding stopped all of a sudden but the news that the American team went ahead with their research and were awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry for that. Discouraged yet unperturbed, Prof Bannerjee continued to serve Chemistry and after his retirement decided to train young guns like us, pun intended.

Tales from ‘89

My memories started in ‘89, that is if I discount the taste of rubber from the milk bottles that i used to suck as a toddler or the lullabies that my mother sang to put me to sleep, or...well I remember quite a few things before ‘89 (I, in fact, do remember Indira Gandhi’s assassination announcement on the radio, hell I do) so I would rather say ‘89 had a long lasting impression on my memories.

I believe it is because of a number associated with that year - 272/89. This was my admission number when I got admitted to Mt. Assisi School - the English medium, neighbour’s envy/parents’ pride kinda school, at least in those days. The impact this number has on my life - the three consecutive admission numbers starting from 272/89 have been friends since then and will be life long ones, we believe.

I also remember, how a cousin failed to get an admit after the interview (yes, they used to take an interview even then) and how I bragged around at my nani’s place whenever we used to meet.

‘89 is also infamous for the Bhagalpur riots and I was in the midst of it (though too young to see it all) and for sure saw its repercussions. I have clear visuals from those days - Sanjay chacha carrying a few Singer sewing machines and boastfully exhibiting it in our neighbourhood, having snatched it from ‘them’, while elders in that house were criticising Bhagwat Jha Azad’s endeavour of serving ‘them’ khichadi!

As kids, we enjoyed this forced to live as a community (because of the riots) experience - everyone from the neighbourhood would gather in one house to spend nights there (we moved to a relative’s place, a few blocks away, later till things normalised) so that if any untoward incident happens we face it together. By evening we kids, motivated by some enthusiastic elders, would collect stones, brick pieces, metallic parts from the neighbourhood and anything that would make a dent in ‘their’ heads, in one corner of the terrace of that house. In our imaginary world, we were the first layer of defence that ‘they’ would have to overpower, where the plan was to hurl projectiles comprising of our collected paraphernalia from that terrace! Every night, for more than a week, we used to hear lot of clamour and sloganeering from either side, which sometimes would sound like ebbs and flows of ocean tides, till curfew was imposed. And what followed were vigilant nights where we would shout from top of terraces to communicate to each other - suggesting all is well (Tridev was released around then and Oye Oye being the most popular song was frequently used by us as signals)!


And then the story of my first fist fight - since I didn’t have many - I remember this one vividly and I ensured that the first cut was the deepest one, for my adversary. I never liked this guy in our group - he was a new addition and was cousin of one of our friends, who had come to study for a few months. This guy was like the-man-who-knew-too-much, the dher kabil in local lingo. While we would be doing some sorta treasure hunt (and what fun it used to be) running around in narrow lanes and finding new alleys in our neighbourhood - it was quite an interesting neighbourhood, as most of the houses were pretty close to each other sometimes connected via very close terraces or some stairs helping us in crossing over smaller boundary walls, uncovered drains through the lanes, which would open up in one of the main lanes - this guy would be smirking at us.

But this wasn’t the reason for the fight. It was something fairly trivial. It was Saraswati Puja and as was the norm, the pandal and the goddess’ idol had blocked the main lane. These pandals, after the Sandhwars had moved in our neighbourhood, had become quite colourful both literally and figuratively. While the Sandhwars suggested that we put triangular, multi-coloured banners (jhandi in simpler terms) throughout the lane - which we enthusiastically participated in; they also suggested that we have live musical programs in evenings during jagran - to which we were just mute spectators. These live musical programs had songs/instrumental performances by the entire Sandhwar family and also a perfect setting for a casual meet and exchange of mutual feelings between interested couples, if any. Behind this pandal on the morning of Saraswati Puja, this dher kabil shoved my friend Mishtu on the choice of jhandi probably and though it didn’t hurt him, it hurt where it mattered. I rushed in a rage and pressed him against a wall. Before he could come out of that shock, with all my might I swung a right upper cut across his face. It was such a sudden gush of testosterone, that by the time I was done with the act I was trembling. My adversary picked himself up while trying to stop the blood from his lower lip, spat and rushed towards me only to be blocked by the gang. We dispersed almost immediately with me sobbing (don’t know why) and the smart alec nursing his wound. I don’t remember much after that and vaguely remember my right upper cut but the visual is captured deep in my psyche. So much so that till the end of last millennium, I used to clandestinely practice it by throwing punches in air.


Like any other well oiled freshly conceived machine, memory tends to be working at its maximum efficiency in its younger days and probably ‘89 was the year when my memory was at its zenith. I have lot of visuals from that year like the one where our gang is trying to catch kittens and Bhaiya’s thumb is scratched by one (and we have kept it a secret to this day) or when we see roller skates for the first time at Dileep bhaiya’s house and fall hard in trying our hand or rather feet at it. Ah! We were an adventurous gang.


So even though it wasn’t exactly six strings and a rock band but it did build and shape my character - ergo, in a way, ‘89 were the best days of my younger self!

All the worlds a map and we are mere elevations and depressions

In my thoughts he had never aged. He was always the short stout moustachioed man, with a peculiar knack for discipline. When someone shared a recent photo of his, I was shocked to see shades of grey on his ever dark crop and whiskers - it was like a childhood memory of mine was being erased! His peculiar knack for discipline gave him a habit of introducing a twist on our every free hand drawings of rivers and mountains of india/world map. Whatever Geography we know and remember is all thanks to Sir. World was just a map for him - Kamchatka peninsula being his favourite, lying ignored in one corner of the world map but Sir had an eye for such hidden treasures and bringing out the best from ignored entities.


His three books full of almirahs, may have been a gaffe from his colloquial collection but for us it became common parlance - so much so that I still have to correct myself while using a similar idiom. In his effort to familiarise us with vernacular phrases, he introduced us to man grazing in the field - common knowledge/sense in his terms - who could answer all questions that we so embarrasingly failed to do! His other favourite the boulders, cobbles and pebbles which were present from Savannas to the arid waste land of Rajasthan, though an instance of mirth now in our nostalgic trips, gave us enough substance to fill in our answer books!

Survey map was made interesting by him and if he had his way he would have introduced broad, broader and broadest gauges in the legends, all owing to his knack of discipline. Though I (and all my classmates and the generations who studied Geography and the dreaded Survey map from him) would remember him mostly for his faux pas, he made the subjects interesting for us. A change in one degree of longitude introduces a delay of 4 minutes - which he so casually proved with a smirk on his face, probably indicating that mathematics is just a tool for subjects like Geography, is a trivia I remember to this day, all thanks to Sir.

There was a short duration when Sir was on break and Geography was taught by a substitute and it was then that I realised his worth. Sir for a person who loves nuances, may you find peace in your heavenly abode and for a man of Geography I am pretty sure you would be enjoying your top view of the world - introducing a twist here and a turn there in the rivers and mountains of the universe.

Few Stories and a Mango Tree - 2

​I vaguely remember what I was doing that eventful afternoon more than 30 years ago. However, I do remember what it led to - an ideal toy for us kids and loads of fun which gave us amazing memories and a craving to own that toy someday!

Willy's Jeep is a mean machine in the world of machismo or even otherwise. It has stood the test of time, since its launch in India in the 60's, and is still considered a stud vehicle. If you have one you are the man and that's how the tagline should go!

I do not belong to that era, however, I am pretty sure that Willy's Jeep or just Jeep, as they say in common lingo, must have made its impression on the Indian psyche - especially the macho psyche - post Aradhana, the 1969 Shakti Samanta classic. Rajesh Khanna (without any bulging biceps nor a six pack to match) made girls swoon with just a tilt of head and a disarming smile - which some find irritating in our era. And what is better than Rajesh Khanna - Rajesh Khanna riding on a Jeep, driven by the hero's friend, the stereotyped Sujeet Kumar, with that smile (killer or irritating - take your pick) and gyrating head! That gave the girls of that era the much sought after reprieve from their mundane lives and boys of the 70's, the excuse to own the macho machine!

One such macho machine, with Mama astride and his Sujeet Kumar in tow, drove into our Bengali styled home in Deoghar on a sleepy afternoon. This was late 80's, pre-liberalization India, when people used to reach earlier than their travel plan messages.

Ma and Mausi were pleasantly surprised and we kids were shocked not by Mama or his companion but by that beautiful gray colored Willy's. He parked it under the mango tree at the house's entrance - the innocuous looking one with terminatoresque branches and a girth to match. And there it laid parked (or may be is still parked) to become a bag of bare bones structure minus all the proverbial bells and whistles!

The urgency of the drive or for that matter the purpose of the trip is lost somewhere in the time travel of the last 30 years or was never told to us kids. I don't even remember for how long Mama stayed but his Jeep stayed with us as long as we stayed in that house in Deoghar.

Majestically parked under that mango tree Jeep was our adda. We would be Jackie Shroff one day, or Mithun or whatever hero's movie we had watched the previous weekend on our neighbour's VCR. This story is so old that neither we had TV's at our homes, nor Doordarshan had started it's weekend movie Bonanza! Mr. Bachchan was on his waning spree and Anil Kapoor was just making his mark around that time so it was mostly Gunmaster G9 who was ruling the roost in Bollywood. And we would each take turns to be the CBI officer who was saving the country from unknown enemies (unseen , too in this case, since all of us were heroes in our heads and in our respective parallel stories).

A special mention is needed for the shiny crystal head on the gear lever, which was cynosure of all kids' eyes. It would serve as a secret transmitter aiding the very stylish Gunmaster G9 on his super secret missions, to being an automatic button to pop guns off the dashboard (which was minimalist in that Jeep), to being a plane gear lever being handled by very able G9's side kick. Sometimes the Jeep would be our aircraft and this lever with its crystal head would be magically used to drop bombs, fire bullets or just convert the craft back to Jeep.

The windshield in the front of the Jeep also deserves another special mention. It had a mechanical lever to open it and place it on the hood. We didn't have much success with the lever and I even remember one day one of us had a finger crushing experience with it (and then that kid was carried away by Ma or Mausi away from the after effects of the mercury shooting mood of the male members of the family). The Stepney* tyre that was fixed on the rear half-door (rustic yet beautiful - Jeep designers knew their machology) of Jeep also served as an essential prop in our adventure stories. Someday our hero would be hanging on for his life on it while the Jeep would be a speed boat, racing past all super villains and their Tonygunj (I came to know much later that it was Tonygun and that it was actually a very efficient assault rifle used by Gangsters of New York). On better scripted days, it would serve as a cover against adversary gunfire for our hero who would be shooting from his imaginary gun, with uncountable bullets in it, to save damsels in distress.

Jeep, the original company, has finally made an impressive entrance in the Indian market which makes me wonder - if only the owners of this Jeep had retained the four-wheeler and if only we had known the worth of that beautiful beast then!


*Stepney in UK was the place where a typical styled Tyre was manufactured, which could be used as spares in older cars and hence the name.

Few stories and a Mango Tree - 1

An innocuous looking mango tree, especially the one with branches stronger than terminator's biceps and a girth to match, can be quite a story teller. Sitting at a serene resort in Coorg and looking down at an unusually tall mango tree brought in dollops of some from a bygone era.


It was a swing, as I remember it and a pretty crude one at that. One of the top branches on that mango tree (with terminator sized branches and girth to match) had entwined across it a long rope which then encircled a tyre, if my memory serves me right, on the other end. And on that tyre was Mausi! Swinging first, sitting with legs crossed and then daringly standing up on the tyre and swinging even harder!

I must have been 6-7 years old and don't remember anyone else around. Mausi was entrepreneurial enough to have thought of the idea of a swing and was managerial enough to get her idea executed by her man Friday, Bidesia.

It was a Bengali styled house, with shuttered windows to match in Deoghar. A small verandah led to the house, flanked by pillared protruding on either side and stairs leading to that. From the main entrance to the verandah was our playground (it looked gigantic at that age), and what amazingly memorable games it hosted! From the ubiquitous cricket to football to gulli (kancha as called in our parts then) to pitto (laghori for the uninitiated) and each game with its share of memories!

The mango tree, mentioned above was to the right of the entrance and to the left was a huge cylindrical well. It had stairs, encircling the well and leading to its parapet at a height of around 10 feet from the ground. I remember this well being mostly dry and occasionally Ranjan chacha diving in to fix the tullu pump at its base. As I recall the walls of this well were pristine white.

The stairs served various purpose from being a stadium for the audience watching our sundry games to hiding place during luka chhipi (I-Spy desi version) to hiding injured kids on whom tragedy had befallen at a prime time - sample instance, once when Papa was starting for office I stepped on a glass shard, which lacerated my not so meaty right ankle and Mausi rushed to carry and hide me behind those huge walls, all this while covering my mouth to stifle my agonizing wail! All this was to curtail any shooting up of the proverbial mercury indicative of the the temper, which in those days elder male members of the family, tended to loose, irrespective of the demand placed by the stimulant - less salt in food * mercury shoot * plate flying tending to escape velocity; Your kids failing to scale up to Sharmaji's son * mercury shoot * Newton's second law, force exerted by hand's mass and acceleration proportional to temper.

Well coming back to the swing perched high above from the ground, on that mango tree and I gaping at the daring act of Mausi swinging higher and higher and each time almost coming to level with the terminatoresque branch from which the swing was hanging. And no, I wasn't cheering her for my six-year-old self was in awe-scare-shock all at the same time. Meanwhile I was already planning what I would do when I reach Mausi's age - match her dare or might even surpass it, kissing the horizon as I would sway on a better version of this tyre-swing. Yes - I was after all the next gen of her family and it was expected of me to figuratively and literally achieve greater heights!


A crack-a thud and an aaaaah is how this story ends! Crack was thunderous, thud was loud and aaaah was comparative to the wail which Mausi had tried to stifle few days ago. The terminatoresque branch turned out to be just a poser and cracked no sooner it was asked to prove its worth and Mausi came crashing down on the terra ferma. I don't remember much after that fall as I had gone back to my awe-scare-shock state again!


However, with that fall, my dreams of achieving greater heights, came crashing down too. You are nothing but a continuum of your present, past and painful lessons from the past and this vicarious pain that I have carried has made me a man who hates anything remotely related to yo-yo motion.

A long night

He was lying on his back and through the corners of the eye keeping a close eye on, something which looked like a blob from that distance and angle. It had been a long day and his eyelids weighed a ton. He tried turning to his right on his side to get a better view. This sudden movement seemed to have caused enough dent in the environmental, rather circumstantial, parameters. He saw the consequent movement of the blob and could sense an icy shiver run down his spine! Battling cold sweat, he held his breath and position and squinted at his adversary. Only a trained sniper could have held this position and angle without any muscular movement yet with such alacrity!

All through this exercise a constant thought ran through his mind - what if...? No! He had prepared mentally for all this and trained his brain for this situation over the last few weeks! It was a mental game after all - or at least that’s what his comrades, who had gone through similar crusades, had told him! And how well had they spoken, with a glint in their eye about the raison d’être of human existence and the accompanying joie de vivre!

His adversary didn’t make any further movements and he swiftly moved his left palm over her. And that was a blunder he had not foreseen. What followed was mayhem...loud cries interspersed with hiccups! He had to give up. Slowly he rose up and picked her up in his arms, patting her and uttering musical words, which had a remote semblance of some obscure lullabies from his subconscious memory, to console her!

Lords of Bhagdatpuram - III

5. And it happened one afternoon

While running around one afternoon after our sumptuous lunch, all of us barged into the study room. There was no one there at that hour and we started excavating for something interesting in the cupboards. It was then that we found a dissection box - and boy! What an afternoon that turned out to be!

The surgical scissors, forceps, needles were completely new to us and we were more than eager to find out ourselves how can these be put to use. Though Bhaiya was not the eldest one in the motley group which had discovered the dissection box, he was our intellectual leader (de facto or de jure is left to one's imagination). It was still early afternoon and the elders were catching up with whatever the other party had missed or enjoying their siesta. 

We, a group of around seven-eight kids, tiptoed towards the open field on the right side of the house with our prized possession. This field to the right also used to be our cricket ground earlier and hence was the preferred one. The first hurdle was an easy one, since the aisle door at the verandah end was generally left open (Zamindars of repute and a renowned family name never close their palace doors, for who knows when a needy might come for help!). The major hurdle that lay between us and the open maidan was NanaBabu's room. This room was a protrusion on the eastern side of the house and had an entrance from the house. There was, though, another door that served as its exit facing the open field. The room most certainly was an after thought - probably to keep an eye on urchins creating nuisance in the middle of the day! To top it all there were two windows, both of which opened towards the verandah. The distance between the windows of the protruded room and verandah was at least fifty meters. This empty space was, as I recollect, where a tractor plough and its paraphernalia was perennially parked. 

This was an open trap and any movement was easily traceable from either of the windows from NanaBabu's room. Our idea was simple - run towards the open field with all your might and don't stop even if someone yells your name. Stop only to catch breath or if you are away from your adversary's line of sight. Pretty lame eh! But you can't expect eight-nine-year-old kids to have military grade planning. The stars and all the planets of this motley bunch of kids were busy preparing for the real dampener, ergo all of us made to the other side.

The scalpel was pretty shiny and so were the other blades in the box. Only forceps was matte and that's what caught my eye when the box was opened. Like any other kid, all my cousins were attracted by the shiny blades and grabbed whatever blade was within their reach, while I calmly took the forceps which was the only thing left in the box after a brief flurry for the blades.

With weapons clenched in our fists, we spread across the place in search of our target for dissection. This field, which used to be our cricket ground in recent past, had been sold out and construction of houses had started there as well. There were brick walls of all sizes around us, though not higher than our waists. Ankle-length grass covered the regions between the walls and it was here that we were looking for our prey - not to feast on but to dissect it.

Jumping across one of the walls in characteristic hunter style, by putting his palm and pulling his entire weight over it, Haddi shrieked - "Yahan par hai, jaldi Baba"!

That was the moniker my cousins had for Bhaiya and Baba without wasting any time jumped over the wall, across which Haddi had spotted a...toad! 

Within no time the entire gang had surrounded the toad and eagerly waiting for the Senapti's orders to neutralize it.

"Attack!", no sooner than Senapati shouted, the mini rangers jumped on the toad.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaahhh!", the shriek was pretty loud and we were sure it would reach NanaBabu's ears, who would by now be enjoying his afternoon siesta.

One of the mini rangers, or probably a few, in their eagerness and lack of blade swinging skills had hit (and gashed) our Senapati's webbing between the thumb and index finger. While Chhotu and Pujan tried to calm him down, Bhaiya started throwing choicest of expletives at all of us! 

Haddi and Dhiro had had enough (or so i thought) and they ran towards the Phulwari. If we are caught because of these fools then gone are all our weapons, dissection box and all our future planning of cutting open a few menial beings.

Blood trickled down Bhaiya's palm to the wrists while Chhotu was holding the webbing tightly to stop the flow. None of us were carrying any handkerchief or were filmy enough to tear our clothes and tie a bandage on Bhaiya's palm. While he continued shouting at us, we saw Dhiro and Haddi running back towards us with some shrubs clenched in their fists. So these guys hadn't chickened out at least!

No sooner they reached the place of accident/mishap/adventure (in future, we would be using different lofty terms to recount it), we saw they were carrying a marigold branch with quite a few leaves on it. It was Ayurveda 101 for me when Dhiro spoke like a sage explaining the healing properties of marigold leaves - at least someone had a presence of mind to run to Phulwari and pluck this Ayurvedic wonder. All of us plucked the leaves from that branch and started crushing the leaves and applying the juice on Bhaiya's palm. 

After a few rounds of pluck-crush-apply-rewind, the blood flow stopped. Consequently, Dhiro had that superlative smirk on his face while we gave a not so loud hurrah to celebrate. 

The toad survived to die another day though another one of his consanguinity did sacrifice its life, to the cause of science, when the experiment was repeated at our home in Tilkamanjhi. I was the only help this time which reiterated my belief on the adage that too many cooks indeed spoil the broth. The silver lining that emerged out of that afternoon adventure - Dissection box was flicked on that day by Bhaiya (though he always maintained that he had borrowed it - from whom?) and would remain prized possession of our adventure kit for many of our errands.

Lords of Bhagdatpuram - II

3. Phulwari

Well demarcated by huge conifers, Phulwari was the place where all of us would be found from afternoon onwards, irrespective of the summer heat or winter chill. The lush green lawn where we used to play conventional games (football, running around playing Chooa-Chooii) or the really interesting Budhiya Kabaddi. This is a game that was improvised on the go. The basic tenets though rarely changed - two circles on either end of the garden where one team has to cross over from one end to the other, while the Budhiya from the other team obstructs the opponent and not allowing him to cross. Simple game, multiple memories!

There are many photos of all of us (we were more than 30 cousins) posing in the Phulwari. The two entrances to the Phulwari were from the verandah end and also from the front entrance end (there was no physical gate there, only a partition in between a huge wall on one side and a bamboo barricade on the other). The barricade side of the entrance had a cycle stand - this was a parking stand (simple life, simpler commute modes!) for all movie goers, as Jawahar Talkies was right across the road (I can count lots of buildings named after Pt Nehru but this one beats them all - who names a Cinema Theatre after him, probably the first in the country!). 

The pathway from the main entrance towards the house was a patchy one, with Phulwari on its left. The entrance from the side had a tap - which would be always running. This tap was courtesy the municipal corporation water supply, which was again one of the rarest things to have in one's residence. Another thing that has remained with me after all these years is the distinct stench of the drain which encircled the entire house. The ever-running tap at the entrance and the other one in the Aangan were the main culprits. However, the bigger culprit was the callousness of the residents to ignore the wastage of water, as the water line didn't have any taps to stop the flow. It was just an open ended iron pipe which would start running as soon as the municipality started pumping water.

In later years, the verandah would become our 22-yards cricket pitch and Phulwari would become our mid-wicket region. This was a time when Tendulkar was not yet the legend we know and bowlers were still compared to Malcom Marshall or at best Kapil Dev. The eldest cousin of ours was an avid Marshall fan (his short stature and dark skin would add to the effect) and would bowl with all his might - imagine the pace with which the ball would be flying on a concrete pitch. The ball on most occasion would be a plastic ball since most of the older protective gears (from our other cricketing cousins) would have been either untraceable or stolen. Bats were always the regular heavy ones (we eventually moved to palm leaf stalk - quite symbolic of the decline of the affluence!). Ground was small, audience limited, fielders pretty much unused yet pace was Marshall-esque and every minor heroics forever etched in memory.


4. Verandah

The verandah (or was it meant to be a foyer?) and the two rooms attached to its front end, were once occupied by Bade Mama and his family. That is my earliest memory of the palatial house and as I think of it now, this part of the "property" has now been handed over to Chhote Mama. The two aisles on the either side of the house were the entrance for family members, while a guest would be made to generally wait at the wooden chowki at the verandah. On the outer side of the front end, after the pathway between the phulwari and the house there were a few steps leading to a huge empty space (which would later serve as our 22-yard concrete cricket pitch), which was the open part of verandah and then there were huge multiple cylindrical columns, connected by arched roof, which would make the house exude palatial vibes. This roof made the covered part of verandah. The wooden chowki was moved between the open and covered parts of the verandah as the season demanded or at the whims and fancy of an esteemed guest.  Each time we visited the place either one of the aisles would serve as the house entrance. It still puzzles me to this day as to who used to decide about which aisle should be used on a given day.

Both the aisles also opened on the two front rooms. One of the rooms would serve as Guest room (or Drawing room as it was referred to), again mysteriously decided by don't know who, while the other would serve as the study room.

When we were kids the study room was quite fascinating to us. In one of the cupboards, we would find lot of fountain pens (I don't think ball-point pens even existed in those days), "Cricket Samrat" - the Hindi cricket magazine and all sort of interesting stuff like posters of popular cricketers - Dilip Vengsarkar, Mohinder Amarnath, Kapil Dev, Gavaskar.

There were palm trees on either side of verandah (which would later yield timber for our cricket bats), which divided the house from fields on either side. Invariably there were a few benches too on the verandah, which would serve as tables for water, lassi, milk, tea or other such welcome drink offered to the guest.

Lords of Bhagdatpuram - I

1. A Death that I didn't see

My eyes widened and the shock almost gorged out the eyeballs.

"He is no more!", was Bhaiya's terse statement. Being the elder one in the second generation of the deceased's consanguinity, he was the affectionate one - the so called "apple-of-the-eye" of the previous generation. He was clearly shattered and I could see he was fighting his tears.

Quite dramatically, I lost hold of the bag that I had carried for my unsuccessful errand. Emotions all rolled up but didn't flow down the usual egress. It just conjured up all my memories of him and all my plans that I had stacked up for my future interactions with him.

What followed was retelling of how it happened all of a sudden. Within a span of four days (during which, I was coming to terms with my true introvert personality and the inner struggle), his condition deteriorated. Even doctors failed to confirm the real cause of his death - some said it was a heart failure, some blamed the kidney and multiple organ failure. To me it was a void that had grown into a chasm. 

Parents always are the protective ones - chiding and forcing their will on you, while grandparents are the more chilled-out ones, who give you more well-rounded perspective - having seen two generations (and in fact experimented their will on one), they know what exactly is the impact of over-protectionism. The void in me were the missing paternal grandparents, the chasm was the loss of the third one now!

Memories and nostalgia make you travel back in time. While memories are superficial - happy, sad, et al - rarely impacting your present state, nostalgia digs up all sort of things from your past, paints them with the darkest of colors and sucks up your present. So irrespective of you being in a joyous or sad mood, nostalgia gives you an urge, a want to relive the past.

My next few weeks were filled with nostalgia and as is my wont, I was brooding about all the missed opportunities of sitting with him and elaborately discussing life-plans, the swings and the dips - philosophy in general. 

They say he had a foresight, yet what I see is a lack of planning on his part for the rainy day. To me, he is an enigma - having carefully handled the entire family (quite a huge one) and was always a guiding force for all important decisions, after the death of his elder brother (who was old enough to be his father) - how did he miss educating his daughters. By education, I mean a formal education because otherwise they are worldly wise - objective, independent and always having an alternate perspective (Obviously, I am being carried away because of the personal bias). Then how did he miss a providence for his wife or was he under the ubiquitous, misconstrued denial, that he will be there for her, always.

2. Grandeur of a bygone era

Shri Babu Saheb Kartiknath Pandey was a zamindar of indisputable repute - a kind, big hearted man and probably the town Lordnagar was named after him. This family of zamindars welcomed the birth of the younger son, after almost twenty five years of the birth of the elder one. He must have been a pampered one, having two fathers (the elder one was almost there, ergo two mothers too!) . 

From what I have heard, his baarat was a cavalcade of cars (a luxury in those days), with him perched on top of an elephant - with a howdah (is what I imagine). This was a legendary baarat that was talked about by everyone from Bhagdatpuram to Jagadishpur. And whenever it was retold to us - with an extra addition of some resource, be it cars or animals which were part of that cavalcade - we could see a glint in the eye of the story teller.

The estate owned by this family was known as Karela and from my personal experience even after some twenty years back, the rickshawallahs at Bhagdatpuram railway station would feel privileged to ferry us to "Pandeyji's". The decline, though was gradual initially (for political reasons) and steep in later stages (for both personal, personnel and political reasons).

My earliest memories of the grandeur of the bygone era is that of a beautifully decorated entrance, the majestic "verandah" as it was referred to, with myriads of small colorful bulbs hanging from high above - parapets of the terrace, crowns of confers, thatched roofs et al. This is my memory of one of the marriages in the family (where my memory fails is whose marriage it was - mama or mausi?), where I sipping a cola (quite an affluence those days) and gaping, wide-eyed at the wonderfully decorated house. The huge columns of the verandah were also colorfully painted and decorated supplementing the mythical appeal of the house.

The house, as I remember it, was a palatial one flanked by huge fields on either side and a garden (or Phulwari) at the entrance. Like all majestic palatial houses there was a pathway separating the Phulwari and the verandah.

Date: 1st March, 1956 was the date when this palatial house was inhabited by its residents. The residents would comprise of the two brothers, their wives (one of them pregnant with my mother!), and two sons and a few daughters (this number needs a confirmation) of the elder brother. 

To Sir

"हैं और भी दुनिया में सुख़नवर बहुत अच्छे
कहते हैं ग़ालिब का है अंदाज़-ए-बयां और"


As he would walk in the aisle, between the benches, our hearts would start racing - not me, please not me!
"Kya vahiyat hai ye?"
"Aap sirf nachtey rahiye, sawal toh aapse banenge nahi"
"Goldie...baap ka kya naam hai silvery !!"


Throwing such personal remarks at his shivering culprits, terror in std IX B (and later X B) had two legs, a lean stooped frame, a brilliant superlative brain and perfectly suiting his Einsteinesque face - a handlebar mustache! The chalk powder would be everywhere, on his trousers, his shirt, his forearms as he would delve and make us dive in the world of circles, tangents and that elusive alternate angle!


Old school, stern and never shy of using expletives Mr Javed Hasan, as a teacher, was a giant among dwarfs. Peculiar though he was in his handling of students, his teaching methodologies were ahead of its time. He introduced us to Mir publishers and books beyond our school curriculum - hence never letting us limit ourselves by such superfluous boundaries.


Maths and Physics, the two subjects on which a young mind's logical thinking rests, were the favorites in his arsenal (ghazals, literature, shayari were his other not so commonly known interests) and he would use them judiciously to take you on a virtual tour of the world. Anecdotes from yonder, interesting problems from Russian books (Mir publishers, AF Abbot, Concise Physics et al) were what he would often throw at you to give you a measure of how the world actually behaves and how Physics, with Maths in tow, quantifies that.


The sher at the start holds completely true for Sir Javed. Maths and Physics can be taught in a number of ways but the way he taught it, is a feat that can never be repeated. Many would argue that he was biased towards students who attended his private tuition but ask the same people did he even care if people paid him the tuition fees. I agree that the informal setting at his residence (palatial one at that) brought out his more casual side - quoting a lot from his personal experience, hum a couplet or two, even take a dig at India's sports performance (one such incident was the Olympics semi final match of Leander Paes, which as Sir had prophesied, Paes lost to Andre Agassi to bring back a bronze).


While he was a terror in class, during the tuition sessions he would be a completely different self, sometimes even overshooting his one hour limit. And no one complained, for on such days we would collect some gems from the field of philosophy, science and sometimes literature and music.


I had met him last just before our ICSE exams were to start and had promised myself to return back to the great man if I ever achieve some success in life - someday!


Someday, incidentally and colloquially is just an excuse to fool your heart when you know such a day is never going to come. Last month I came to know that he is no more and I could sense a rush of emotions, memories and humongous personal loss. I also felt a deep gash in my heart to be reminded of my false promise of meeting him again - someday!

Theatrical Physics - Of uncertainty and complimentarity

An evening well spent, in the company of my better half and and more than half a dozen physicists (or at least vocally pronounced) is how a concise sentence would describe our evening. For descriptive insight, read on.

Surfing through the morning newspaper I chanced upon a section in the entertainment supplement, which lists down events, plays and similar reasons to plan a nice evening. Copenhegan, written in bold, quite stood out in that myriad of words (the name always rings a bell in my head - as does Casablanca, which has such exotic ring to it - with so much history and of course the Copenhegan interpretation). I was startled when I found out that it was a play on the famous meeting of Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the autumn of 1941 at Copenhegan (which Bohr remembered as September and Hiesenberg as October, or so it was in the play). D agreed to watch it without battling an eye lid but with a smile - mysterious as it appeared, I knew what it was for - this play would be fodder for my pseudo-intellectual show off at social gatherings, which I admit I don't forfeit, given a chance (rather I grab it at the first opportune moment).

The play was scheduled at 7:30 pm in the evening and having booked the tickets in the morning while sipping my bed tea, I was restless throughout the day. I was so looking forward for the day to wane and as the long shadows went past the building oppposite to our apartment I started hinting D, subtly though, to shut down her laptop and get ready for the play.

We reached Ranga Shankara just in time to grab a bite - since the play was almost 2.5 hrs long, it was a wise thing to do - and also grab a seat which was anything but a compromise (Ranga Shankara is pretty well designed, accoustically speaking, nevertheless I feel that a sense of 'being cornered' creeps in if you are not sitting in the middle rows). Before Mr Karnard's voice over asked us to switch off our mobiles, D pointed out to me how there were a few eager ones in the audience, clicking pictures and promptly posting them on SM.

As the play started with names like Fermi, Pauli, Chadwick, Dirac thrown in casually (it was Bohr and Heisenberg talking about their peers so what else would you expect, or as Heisenberg says in the course of the play, they were the innermost electrons of Bohr) I could sense a rush of emotions in my head. With so much of history, morality, theoretical physics entwined with politics and just the right dose of drama, I almost had a lump in my throat.

A father figure to many theoretical physicists of that era, Bohr is described in the play as their spiritual leader (Pope is how his wife, Margrethe, refers him during one of the lighter moments of the play). With just three actors the play covers almost three decades of the twentieth century, circa 1924 to events ending in the year 1949.

I had done some reading about the play in the morning and knew that it had had multiple shows at Broadway and London National Theater. Here in Bangalore, however, this was the only show and with the lackluster response it doesn't seem like there would be more shows (what a pity!). To top that, I even saw a few walking out in the middle of the play. It shouldn't, however, be any reflection on the wonderful performances by all the three actors who gave their heart and sole to bring to life the believable and humane side of the greats.

The 1941 rendezvous between Heisenberg and his spiritual guru Bohr is wrapped in mystery to this day and there have been numerous conjectures regarding what they discussed. This play picks up one such thread and digs out political, social, nationalistic, scientific, geographical perspectives of the first half of the tumultuous century which has shaped the current world and defined so many nationalistic prejudices. There is absent mindedness of Bohr, mathematical faux pas of Heisenberg, glimpses of German penury after first world war and subsequent resurrection, gestapo's outreach, fascism and Nazi pride, Auschwitz - this play is actually one huge tome of history in itself.

When Heisenberg recounts his story (or his side of history) of crawling in a war torn Berlin (I am presuming that is at the end of first world war) to buy daily essentials, promising all along to himself to not let his children and grandchildren be born in such poverty, I was deeply enthused, even moved! He also recounts how 1920's was such a wonderful decade where he earned his PhD under Bohr and also how he became so close to Bohr's family at Copenhagen. These insights made the play really interesting.

And the life-changing decisions of the greats based on their perspective of the situation - Heisenberg remains in Germany after the war because of the love for his land and what he had seen, Bohr abhors Germany, Hitler and finally escapes to Las Alamos, via Sweden (which again as Heisenberg recalls was facilitated by a contact he had at the German embassy) - which the play so seamlessly incorporates in the course of its running, are rare gems that are hard to find in any war literature. Some other gems that I collected from this play are how Heisenberg was an expert piano player and could pick what note was being played, in the midst of a lunch where many of his peers are discussing, well what else, physics. How he had to cycle for three consecutive nights to escape from Berlin after the war had ended to reach a monastery in a West German village and like a lost, adamant child (without a caring, helping hand of his foster father) was trying to build the bomb. They had dug a hole near that monastery and had run multiple iterations in trying to reach the critical mass and trigger the chain reaction for fission, with only a lump of Cadmium as the controlling element - an idea at which Bohr is shown scoffing at in the play.

History is victor's story and this play so clandestinely touches this part in its second half (a ten minute-break divided the play into halves). After the war and long after the dust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had settled, when Heisenberg reaches America, all the physicists present there refuse to shake hands with him. The victors, who were responsible for killing more than one lakh people would not shake hands with a physicist, who had fought his own war of morality and the promises that he had made as a young lad to revive Germany to its old glory. The victors, who raced ahead in the war, all thanks to the enormous money pumped into the Manhattan Project and with the degree of stress incomparable to what Heisenberg had undergone, not to forget frequent bombings which broke more than physical structures around Heisenberg. Physics was defeated by economics and what evolved out of it was a capitalist uni-polar world (who knows what would have happened if Heisenberg had sold his soul to the devil, buried his morality and had been successful in creating the bomb - a completely new world order may be; more fanatic and chaotic but would that be any different from the disheveled world we have inherited now?).

The play revisits a scene multiple times, where Bohr and Heisenberg go for a stroll on that autumn night of 1941 and each revisit gives a different treatment to the snapping at of Bohr at probably what Heisenberg said. At the start of the play it shows a warm camaraderie between the two, in further iterations it opens up the mind of Heisenberg and his moral dilemma regarding the bomb, shows the layers of queries floating in Bohr's and Heisenberg's minds. The play's climax is a very intelligent "what if" scenario - What if Bohr had not snapped at Heisenberg and instead cross questioned his intentions and provided him the warm adobe that the self-doubting Heisenberg had come to seek from Bohr. Probably then, history would have no mention of a "fat man", or the "little boy", rather an Ubermensch!

Few conversations and an impromptu journey

This journey, pretty close to being a romantic one, was also - under all measurable criteria - quite a talkative one. D was in Bhubaneswar (mind your b's, v's and pha's when in Odisha) and suggested over a call that we can mix business and pleasure that weekend, as she was relatively less occupied during that period. I checked the ticket rates and to my surprise Indigo's web services software had shockingly failed to apply the surge rates, which generally they so efficiently do. I quickly switched to incognito (you should always do this lest you want all data hungry web crawlers to hog on your personal data - mind you google still has access to your data, even when you are incognito) and booked a return ticket, without burning a deep hole in my pocket.
Meru cabs is the most trustworthy one when it comes to airport drops in Bengaluru, especially when our airport is in Chennai (last checked the latest uber app was allowing me to book cabs well in advance, more than the usual hour or two - yes more power to the consumer!) and even though it was just 5 hours before my journey would commence, the reliable service sent me an assuring message that i'll be picked up on time. The excitement of all this left me sleepless that night which was anyway very short!
Venkatesh called me at 2:30 am sharp, even before message details were sent from Meru. He was all too eager to pick me up for my 5:30 am flight. Within half an hour he called me again informing that he was waiting downstairs. I grabbed my "Oracle - iXL program" bag (that was the only bag that would contain all that I needed for my weekend sojourn - travel light, yes but unlike me do invest in your travel accessories and again unlike me, never disclose your identity via your luggage!) and hopped on the Verito to embark on a short and sweet (it was!) journey.

Venkatesh didn't loose any time to start a conversation - how he used to stay near Bomanahalli, was earlier a freight carrier driver, how he moved on to become a cab driver at Dell call centre and became familiar with Bengalure roads/traffic.

"Moved to Chikkaballapur now, saar...very expensive Bengaluru!"

"Drive two days straight, crash at my relatives sometimes...go to Chikkaballapur every 4-5 days"

"Two kids, one boy one girl...education very expensive here"

"Kids very smart these days, saar, speak fast english...know more about smartphones and tech than us"

"Had to pay 18K for boy's UKG and they were asking for 25K for his first standard...Chikkaballapur much cheaper, only 14K for first standard"


14k!! I bet I had completed my entire schooling in an amount less than that!

"You from Bengaluru?"

Not sure if he heard my response.

"Oh! Siddaramaiah is very corrupt, saar...takes money from everyone...he didn't pass a plan for an IT park near Chikkaballapur since the builder was not paying anything upfront and instead was bargaining to pay after the IT park was ready...he knows he wouldn't be around when they complete it...so was asking for upfront money"

Though I wasn't sleepy yet I was certainly in no mood to have a conversation at that hour. But what he said next, forced me to have an engaging conversation with Venkatesh!

"If i don't talk I'll fall asleep, saar!"

What! No!! You please continue - we might as well discuss global warming, US presidential elections, gonorrhea, piles anything under the sun to keep you awake!
"Pubs - Siddaramaiah has changed the timings now...drink till 1 am now and again he is making money with that."

"Naarth Indian girls drink too much saar...have taught south Indian girls also now"

So probably he did hear my response to his query.

"So drunk they can't even stand straight (makes a gesture with his hand - thumb and lil finger in a straight line and other fingers folded, shakes it then to mean girls unable to stand normally after drinks!)"

"Do not dress well also and in that condition anything can happen...not everyone thinks alike, saar"


Was I supposed to feel offended or tell him that it is their choice to dress, drink or do whatever with their life - instead i did what i do best - made a mumbling sound of neither agreeing nor disagreeing with him and remained silent till he picked up another thread!
"Thanks a lot Mr Venkatesh, it was nice talking to you!", was how this leg of my journey ended.

"Kursi kii peti aise lagayein..." - i had boarded the plane and every time I hear "peti" i can't stop smiling (the way the flight attendants speak Hindi with an English accent, amuses me to the core - in fact i go all bonkers in my head but try to keep only a smiling façade, without offending anyone!)

"Good morning ladies and gentleman, this is your captain, Anand Pillai speaking" - no sooner we were in air the captain decided to show off his oratory skills or probably to show off his, I admit, very thick baritone! It was almost like God talking and keeping us braced about the events at 20K feet above MSL.

"It is around 1200 kms to Bhubaneswar and we'll be covering this distance in little more than an hour and half"

Whoa jet speed - please do your math to get as astonished as I was! (not that this was the first time I was amazed by jet speed but accompanied, as it was, with the heavy baritone, it sounded so incredible!)

And Mr Pillai spoke intermittently throughout the flight from his "flight deck" about temperature, weather in Bhubaneswar and if it is cloudy we might feel some disturbances and jitters. However, it was his rich baritone which reassured me, at least, that such minor hiccups will be well taken care of!
He even spoke in Hindi (minus the accent thankfully), equally reassuringly, about how expertly he will take care of everything - or something similar, I wasn't paying much attention at the content and was rather lost in thoughts of how he could as well earn a living by doing voice overs in movies, ads - oh wait but where is the thrill in that! Here at a height of 20K he can bring people close to divinity, shake the belief of atheists - yup no thrill in being a voice over artist, it was a humbug thought!

"You must have guessed from the engine noise that we are descending..." - this was the last monologue from God! But we guessing from engine speeds - what are we Aeronautic geniuses, come on God!

Bhubaneswar is a relatively clean airport, when compared to the airports in this part of the world (alà Ranchi, Patna, you get the drift I hope). Trying to keep up with the mood and plan of this journey, I thought of taking a bouquet of red roses. As I was waiting at a florist just outside the airport Mr Pandav (the way he came to help me I guess Hanuman would've been an apt name), came rushing towards me.

"What type of bouquet you want Bhaina"
"Colorful - no I don't have roses"
"Where you going sir? Mayfair, come come"

"Aye one to Mayfair", he signaled at the pre-paid taxi counter. May be Pandav was the perfect name, handling everything with dexterity - Pandav is what Pandav does!

As I was waiting for the cab what amused me was the vehicle registration numbers around - OD, overdose! And I was about to know what, or rather whose overdose, was I about to get. I got into the pre-paid cab, which stopped to pick me up and guess who was the driver - Pandav! Did he have 5 twins or pentains or whatever you call it! OD!

"Bhaina this is my cab! I have three more cabs"
"You want bouquet...what is your budget?"
"I know a florist, my shop only, will take you there."
3 cabs, florist! Was he the most understated millionaire of Bhubaneswar!

He helped me get the roses I was looking for and also gave me his number in case I need to see more of his clones - just kidding, what he meant was if I needed any cabs for sight seeing.
Thankfully words from arbitrary characters dried up as I reached my destination. After two interesting, calming but breezy days at Bhubaneswar I am back with lovely memories of a chirpy jouney - full of spoken words and some unspoken ones too, by the way. A plane full of snoring paxs was the last sound of the journey which I remember, before I returned to the cacophony of Bangalore traffic.