Monday Musings

Saturday being a holiday for me and too hot to go out, I picked up a whole bunch of newspapers on the way back from home. I had planned to read all of them thoroughly but my attention span being what it is I could only skim the headlines. One thing I noticed was that the Saturday supplements of all the papers- The New Indian Express with its ‘Expresso’, ‘TV and Cinema’ of Deccan Chronicle and ‘Weekend’ of The Hindu have all gone tabloid. The latest to change was The Hindu.

There was news of two book readings in the city in the papers. One was by Anju Poddar on Saturday at the ITC Kakatiya and the reading on Sunday evening at Taj Deccan was by Shobhaa De. I haven’t read any of De’s books but enjoy some of her columns in the TOI. I did not attend either of the book readings and stayed put at home. The ‘Outlook’ magazine’s latest issue carried a rather interesting review of Shobhaa De’s latest book by Bhaichand Patel.

The constituency I live in is going to the bye polls at the end of the month and the election fever has already started. It began with a massive traffic jam on Saturday due to a procession taken out by one of the candidates. Yesterday evening one of my neighbours kept popping into all the houses in our lane to inform excitedly that a candidate he supports was visiting our lane. I have never faced a candidate on a house-to-house visit so was a bit nervous what to say. But in the end, the candidate didn’t turn up and my neighbor was not to be seen for the rest of the evening.

In the run up to election day the clamour is only going to increase so much that one will be upto the neck in posters, leaflets and banners. One happy side effect of the bye-election that it would be a holiday on election day, that is 29th of May. There are no holidays until the end of July so it comes as a welcome break.

The Bank That Has Only One Branch

I have an account with a bank that seems to have only one branch and one head office somewhere in the country. When I tell others the name of my bank they tell me they’ve never heard of it. It’s only branch happens to be near my home and is a small, quiet branch manned by only a handful of staff. One would think that in this age of competition for customers, banks would be going out of their way to offer better service to the customers. The people at my bank seem to think otherwise.

I was there today morning to open an RD account. I filled up the form and gave it to the lady at the counter. She asked me if I would like to come every month and deposit the amount in my account or if I would like to have it transferred from my other account. I told her I would like to have it transferred and told her I had given that option in the form I had just given her. For some reason she asked another staff, some kind of a manager who looked up in alarm and told her, “No, let him come every month and pay. Don’t encourage transfers.’ The guy said it as if it involved digging a pipeline to transfer the money between my accounts.

It made me wonder what difficulty they had in transferring the money from one account to another on paper. I didn’t want to argue with them because it was meaningless, and they would offer a thousand explanations why they couldn’t do it. It happened in the past. They are bothered about their own convenience. It is one think I dislike about most public sector banks. They have their own convenience in mind and not the customers’.

Maybe they wanted the branch to be seen as a busy one bustling with customers. From past experience I knew the bank belonged to a different era but still I patronized it because it is a small bank. My bank has a lot to catch up with, and meanwhile I will go looking for a better bank.

Hyderabad's Only Drive-In Irani Restaurant

Yesterday I dropped in at an unusual Irani Restaurant. This restaurant located near Ravindra Bharati is Hyderabad’s only drive-in Irani Restaurant. Hotel Panchsheel just beside Ravindra Bharati on the Birla Mandir side is the drive-in Irani I am talking about. You can drive your bike straight into Hotel Panchsheel, park it and walk two steps to your table. This isn’t the only good thing about it- watching your bike while you sip your tea-for the chota samosas in this Irani are some of the best I’ve tasted in Hyderabad.

I was there yesterday evening on my way to a second hand bookstore in the vicinity. It isn’t very busy in the evenings but seems to attract a lot of people in the afternoons. It is one of those Iranis that serve food too- biryani and stuff like that. The only thing missing in this Irani is the mirror which is a regular fixture in most old time Irani restaurants in Hyderabad.

Panchsheel was quite spacious before the GHMC started cracking down on hotels and establishments that didn’t have adequate parking space. Though they have made a provision (a sliding iron contraption)for parking your bike on the pavement, they also seemed to have shifted some table from a portion of the hotel and made it a parking place. Only hitch is you can park only bikes not cars. However, there aren't many people left around who come to Irani Restaurants in their cars.

Mornings at the Pool and the Tyranny of Parents

Recently I’ve discovered that the swimming pool is one place where one can learn about the tyranny of some parents. I’ve been accompanying my son to the swimming pool since his summer holidays began a couple of weeks back. While he swims in the pool I sit on the pool side and watch people which is one thing I like doing. I’ve observed that in their eagerness to get their kids to learn swimming (or learn a new skill,) parents reveal newer aspects of their personality. I watched quite a lot of parents these two weeks but what happened in the past two days made me sad.

Kids love to play in the water and should be allowed to frolick in the pool. However parents think that the kids should begin to learn to swim from day one. The parents subject their kids to unimaginable agonies. I’ve watched kids being hurled into the pool in order to force them to learn to swim. In the process I’ve seen kids too traumatized to return to the pool. Instead of the enjoyable thing that swimming was supposed to be, the parents are making it into something they are terrorized with.

At the pool the parents stand on the edge of the pool and bark at the kids to do this and that- ‘move your hands!’, ‘move your legs!’, ‘go into the deep parts’. Suitable gestures like flailing the hands and legs accompany these instructions. The more the kid shows reluctance or fear the sterner the parents’ expressions become. Some parents wag their fingers at the kids menacingly. Some stopped short of hitting the crying and cowering kids.

But the day before yesterday I saw a young mother slap her 9-10 year old daughter who was afraid to venture into the pool. It was something that made me very sad. Beating your kid in front of others is something a parent should never do. It is the worst sort of humiliation one can mete out to your kid. It filled me with horror, shame and embarrassment, watching the poor kid plead with her mother not to force her to enter the pool.

There’s a burly, sadistic coach in the pool who is gruff and rude with the kids. His style of teaching kids to swim is to hurl them into the water without any sort of protection and force them to swim. It is very traumatic to the kids and I’ve watched the kids stand in line, crying and pleading with their parents not to subject them to this kind of enforced learning. Instead of enjoying the process of learning to swim I am sure the kids will detest water all their lives. Some kids run away to the other end of the pool scared of the water.

Yesterday morning as soon as we entered the pool premises the coach was hurling the terrified kids into the pool as the parents watched. One of the kids ran away and once again I witnessed another mother hit her son. My son watched silently while I tried to tell the mother not to force the kid. Instead she glared at me. I went my way feeling sorry for the poor kid. I don’t understand when some parents will understand that you cannot force kids to learn anything in this manner.

However, I am very happy that my son learnt to swim on his own without anyone’s help. Last year when we started going to the pool, for a week he swam with the help of the tube. The coach was there last year too but taught only the kids whose parents asked him to teach. I didn’t ask him and I am glad about it because a week after swimming with the tube, my kid told me he would try to swim without it. He started hesitantly and within a few days began to swim without the tube. He is proud of having to learnt to swim without anyone’s help. Maybe that is why he enjoys the daily visit to the pool in the summer holidays.

The Sunday Haul: Of Birthday Presents and Prizes

An interesting sidelight to buying second hand books is finding books that have been either won as a prize or is a present from someone. The inscriptions on the front pages reveals a minor story of the background of the book. The books with inscriptions generate a lot of questions inside the mind that remain unanswered. Why did the recipient of the present/prize decide to dispose the books? Who were they? Are they alive now? They remain a mystery forever.

Two of the five books I picked up on Sunday turned out to be books that had inscriptions. It was another hot day in Hyderabad this Sunday as I set out for Abids. I had decided to return after just an hour’s browsing because it was too hot to be in the open for too long despite wearing a cap.

The first book I picked up was another copy of Peter Mayle’s ‘A Year in Provence’. It is my third or fourth copy. But this edition was a different one. It was by Pan books where as the other copies were of a different publishing house. This one had illustrations and had a different type. But it was in mint condition and I got it for fifteen rupees only. The other book I got at the same place was ‘A Choice of Words’, a book about using the right word in one’s writing. It was something I could learn from so I got it for fifteen rupees again.

A few hours earlier I had read the ‘Literary Review’ and the front page articles were on translations. Though I didn’t plan to buy any translations after reading the articles I didn’t hesitate to pick up ‘The Hunted’ by Mudra Rakshasa. It was an English translation of a Hindi novel translated by Robert A Hueckstedt from the original written by Subhash Chandra. It was a Penguin book and in good condition. I got the book for only twenty rupees.

The next book was a birthday present made in April 1984 as inscribed on the front page by the friend. The book was VS Naipaul’s ‘Mr Stone and the Knights Companion’. I got this slim novel with yellowing pages for only ten rupees.

The next book was another good book- RK Narayan’s ‘Old and New Stories’, a collection of eighteen new stories I haven’t read. It was on old edition of Indian Thought publications and the price on the back of the book said Rs 14-50 but I got it for ten rupees only. This book was presented to a seventh class student of Sujata High School in 19823-8 as a first prize in essay writing. I am not writing the name of the person for obvious reasons. But I wonder what made her give away this book now?

The Sunday’s finds had me thinking about all the books I found that had inscriptions on them. I have to take all of them out and maybe do a post. One such book I found a couple of years ago was a signed first edition of Jay Leno’s ‘Leading with My Chin’ that I got for only ten bucks. Sometime soon I will do a post on all such books with inscriptions and scribblings.

This Month's Literary Review in "The Hindu'

The Hindu Does It Again With a Front page Ad

On Saturday it was with mild irritation that I opened ‘The Hindu’. The front page was plastered with a full page advertisement that began just below the masthead and occupied the entire page. This is the second or third time the paper is springing this surprise on its readers. Somehow I do not like when the papers do things like this violating the front page. I don’t know about others but I feel damned irritated. Sometime back the paper’s Reader’s Editor had justified a full page ad on the front page citing commercial compulsions. It was quite ironic that in the inside pages of Saturday’s Hindu was P. Sainath’s lament that newspapers were giving in to the corporates' right to sell over the right to inform the reader.

It is when papers you trust do these sort of things that one feels like taking all their own sermons about others (greediness of BCCI for instance) with a pinch of salt. I don’t know if the management is aware of how much loss of credibility the paper suffers whenever it does things like it. The loyal readers having no other choice other than to continue to read the paper will esteem the paper a bit less and bunch it with other papers who have gone all the way to be fully commercial.

This is another indicator that the paper is going the same way as one paper that began the price war, reduced the size of the paper, sold out its front page including its masthead. Now only one thing is left, the sort of pictures it publishes. When those kind of pictures appear in my paper I will shift to another.

‘Literary Review in ‘The Hindu'

Yesterday, for a change, the paper was delivered on time. In fact it was delivered before the normal time taking me by surprise. I took out first the ‘Literary Review’ for which I was waiting eagerly since a week. The front page was taken up by two articles on translation. Later in the day at Abids I found one nice book that was a translation of a Hindi novel. I will write about it in the next post.

Pradeep Sebastian’s column was lifeless and I found it too commonplace a topic. Inside were two articles relating to Naipaul. One was about Patrick French, his biographer. The other article was on Naipaul by Rumina Sethi. Coincidentally, in the evening’s “Just Books” program on NDTV there was a special interview of Patrick French.

There was one interesting book reviewed in Literary Review` and that was Meenakshi Mukherjee’s ‘Elusive Terrain: Culture and Literary Memory’, a collection of her essays about various aspects of writing in India. I am going to buy it though it is priced at a wallet-emptying Rs 575.

Caught by the Cops

Being Fined by Traffic Cops

Yesterday evening I was stopped by a traffic cop near the RTC X Roads while returning home from office. Apparently, I had my bike’s number plate all wrong. I was fined fifty rupees by the traffic sub-inspector for violating Section R 80 (a) 177 (Without/irregular number) of the Motor Vehicle Act. In the twelve years that I have been driving my bike, I have never been stopped for this violation. This was the first time. I did not argue with the cop but paid the fine and drove away.

At the back of the challan receipt was a list of all the traffic violations one can be fined for. There were thirty one violations, and the fines and compounding fines ranged from Rs 50 (the minimum) to Rs 2000 ( for driving without registration papers). The most interesting violation I found was about driving in drunken condition for which one will be charge sheeted and produced in court of law. Sometime back the traffic cops had undertaken a drive to detect drunken driving but nowadays they don’t seem to be doing it.

Nowadays there is a lot of noise being made about following traffic rules and the need to educate the motorists about the rules which is a good thing. Back in the eighties when one needed a driving licence in Hyderabad one only had to tell someone and within days the licence would be yours. We didn’t have to take any sort of driving test or get tested about the prevailing rules or anything like that . It lead to a situation where many of us are ignorant of not only the Motor Vehicle rules we don’t even the know where the RTA offices are located! (That was only a joke and not to be taken seriously.)

The Direct Autowallah

While driving home from Secunderabad yesterday evening I saw this on the back of an autorickshaw:

‘No Compromise. Only Punch’.

The autowallah has made it very clear what he would do in case you happened to enter into an argument with him or get involved in an accident with his autorickshaw. I did not remember to take down the number of the autorickshaw.

Media Matters: Small Changes in 'The Hindu'

Yesterday ‘The Hindu’ daily managed to give an entirely different award – the ‘Yudhistir’ award -to Shankar Melkote in its columns. I wonder how they got the name of the award so totally wrong. It should have been 'Yudhvir' award. It could have been an oversight by the sub-editors but imagine the disappointment of its trusted readers when they notice such bloopers.

Starting today, The Hindu is coming out with a new supplement on Saturdays that is being called ‘Metroplus Weekend’ in place of the regular 'Metroplus' supplement which had more pages on Saturdays. The new supplement is in a different format, more like a tabloid and is all about Lifestyle, Food, Music, People, Fitness, Leisure, Events and Gadgets. Whatever it is, it is a welcome change from the usual broadsheet supplements.

Also, the Friday supplement for the kids, “Young World’ is now being issued on Tuesdays. Perhaps they would have learnt from their readers that Tuesdays are the dullest days with nothing much to read. It doesn’t make any difference to the kids who love to read them anyway.

Today’s supplement of ‘Property Plus’ carried a letter I wrote to the paper in response to an article in which certain dangerously toxic pesticides were recommended without any sort of caution. As I deal with that subject in my job I thought it was necessary to tell them so. My letter was much edited and published in the ‘Home Blog’ column.

Of course, tomorrow is the first Sunday of the month which brings with it the 'Literary Review' supplement in 'The Hindu'. I am eagerly waiting for Sunday to dawn to read the much awaited supplement.

Finding a Simple Fountain Pen

The same day that I had been to the sale at AA Husain at Abids I also bought myself a new fountain pen. It had been quite a long time since I had gone without buying a new one. I was walking back to the office when I decided to check out a stationer’s that I have been seeing for a long time but had never checked out. It was ‘Hina’ on the Abids main road. For all my needs of fountain pens and other stationery requirements I go to Deccan Pen Stores but that day I went into ‘Hina’.

I checked for fountain pens in the display and saw a couple of them. They were all of one brand- ‘Doctor.’ The fountain pens were lightweight but deceptively thick. They were simple, elegant and inexpensive. The one I bought cost me only forty rupees. I bought one in what can be called as a turquoise color which was the color of the cap for the barrel was totally transparent. I wanted a simple fountain pen like it for my daily jottings in the office where I am one of the few who use fountain pens.

There were two others of the same model but in a dull grey color and I didn’t fancy them. Using it would make me look like an ancient file pusher which I am not. I could hardly wait to get back to office. I got ink filled in it ( I keep a bottle of Quink at office) and tested the new pen. The nib was surprisingly smooth considering the price I paid for it. It wrote beautifully and I was glad I had picked it up. Sometimes such impulsive purchases turn out to be better than things on which you have spent a lot of money and effort.

A Mid-week's Find

A couple of days ago I happened to notice that AA Husain had a sale at their store at Abids. My office is within walking distance from Abids so I ambled across yesterday in the afternoon to AA Husain’s. There used to be a shop selling furnishings etc called ‘Haji Kurban Sons (or Brothers?) beside AA Husain’s but now it seems to have shut down since AA Husain has their sale in that empty shop. Apparently, the sale had begun quite a long time ago and is up to the end of this month- May 31. The books are offered at a 20% discount.

There are a lot of titles in the sale, most of them the latest books including Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Enchantress of Florence’. I saw almost all the books of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Maria Vargos Llosa, VS Naipaul and also of all the well known Indian writers. I saw ‘Granta 100’ and plenty of screen writing books, most of them by Syd Field. I also saw Che Guevera’s ‘Motorcycle Diaries.’ There were hundreds of titles on management, self-help etc on sale. I couldn’t decide which book to buy because of one practice of AA Husain’s that I dislike.

For some reason I cannot understand all books in the AA Husain stores are covered with a cellophane wrapping so you just look at the front and back covers only. I wonder how many people buy books without flipping through a few pages and sampling the writing. I just cannot buy books like that unless it happens to be a really interesting title which is what I found on the cover of one book I finally bought at the sale.

The title of the book was ‘Nosepicking for Pleasure’ by Roland Flicket. It was an unusual book that intrigued me so I had to buy it. Another reason was that the book was about a habit that a majority of my fellow Hyderabadis seem to be naturally adept at. We Hyderabadis are so focused on this activity and so good at it we can pay equal attention to our driving while at it. It is a subject worthy of further detailed research and hence the reason why I bought this book shelling down no less than two hundred rupees for it!

Of course, there will be a review here sometime in the future.