Oh Behave!

A little put off with the hustle and bustle of big city life, Madam R_ decided to take a break, and head to slightly less turbulent waters. What caused this need for calm is a matter of speculation, but it did exist, none the less, and well, was to be pampered by a visit to Lucknow.

Lucknow isn’t exactly the backwater town it is perceived to be. Some form of social inertia prevents people from realizing that it indeed has a hustle and bustle, which, while not equal to Delhi’s none the less prevents the average citizen from being a sleepy person. Lucknow’s advent into the main stream is made painstakingly obvious every now and again when a miniskirt makes itself seen in public. Rare though the phenomenon might be, it definitely belies the image of Lucknow being an ‘old’ city.

However, it is still known for its etiquette a reputation it will definitely have to leave behind before it can make space for itself in the upper echelons of India’s Metropolises. No one in Delhi or Bombay for that matter has the time to be polite, or help someone across the street. Quite frankly they barely have time to notice that the names of the streets have changed, or indeed in the case of Bombay, that the very city has changed names.

So Madam R_ found two friends who lived in Lucknow, and flipped a coin to choose who she was going to spend the holiday with.

Madam R_ was dutifully shown around the city. Taken to shiny new malls, with the same stores that all malls across the nation had, with the same range of clothes, though truncated towards the more expensive stuff, Lucknowis don’t yet spend that big on labels.

She was of course unimpressed by the bright lights of the city, being used to much brighter lights herself, and in fact looking for escape from their glare, she was mostly disappointed. She made the obligatory visits to monuments of the city and to the obligatory artifacts in obligatory museums and was still unimpressed. She also received the obligatory letches and cat calls in the more seedy parts of the old city; and managed to remain unimpressed. One wonders whether this was because cat calls in the big city are better, or just because it was the smart thing to do. Though Madam R_ definitely gives one the impression of being feminist enough to do something about being a woman.

Being Late

I was late this morning, very late. I was dreaming of her, yes her, you know her, her. Anyway, I was dreaming, and I did not allow the alarm to intervene in a particularly romantic sunset we were enjoying in some remote place, on the equally remote banks, of an even more remote lake. If you have any experience in matters of this sort, you’ll agree that it was worth being late for school.

Well, once the sun had sunk beyond the horizon, and its red orb had slipped below the rippling water, leaving just us, alone…. (you’ll find the rest in a romance… read one and return…) it was over, my subconscious decided to let reality set in. I opened my eyes, I raised my wrist to my eyes, and manage to focus on my watch. IST 7:20.

Panic! I should have left for school five minutes ago…

I jumped out of bed. No time for the usual 10 minutes of trying to convince myself that it really was worth it, you know, I’d learn something new, or do something fun, that’ll be an investment… for my future, and all that. I was on auto pilot… I was going to school, and I did not have time to ask why.

Standing in my underclothes (read night suit), I looked for my shirt.

Its lying on the chair opposite my bed, right below my nose, but I’d rather check the head of my bed, the wardrobe I never use, then jump on my bed, hang my head over the edge, crane my neck, and perform an acrobatic search in the gloom under my bed.

Not finding it in anyone of these ‘obvious’ places, I headed to the dining room; it is not on the fruit stand… I am sure the fruit stand is a common place to leave shirts, or the side board.

Suddenly a bolt of genius! May be I’ve put it in my cupboard.

I rarely put away my clean clothes, so the chances of me returning a dirty shirt to its shelves, roughly equal those of me putting it away at all, roughly, a gazillion to one.

It made perfect sense.

When you are awake, wishing you were in a dream, and worrying about plausible excuses, logic finds new paths: someone called it creativity. (not me.)

My Host and the Dogs

“If there’s one thing I hate,” my host told me, as we sat in an outdoor café, for that was what it was, if not in the Parisian meaning of the term. There were four tables arranged in a rectangle outside the opening of a shallow block of concrete. The block of concrete was lined with shelves, had a stove in one corner and a collection of everything most people visiting Landour wouldn’t need, hoping to sell them. It sold food for the most part, and hence the epithet of being an outdoor café. No the café itself had no such pretensions, though there was a garden umbrella open above one of the tables…

The Applications

“ I remember,” said Julius, to no one in particular, but being the only other person in the room, I was obliged to acknowledge his address, “this very interesting incident. It involved a horse, a hill, and a fall.”

Fairly predictable plot, I thought to myself. “The hill fell on a horse, or some such sequence of events,” He continued. Looking slightly puzzled by how things turned out, or perhaps it was something he ate. “well, that does it for that story, but, hmm, I now recollect another one, that I can perhaps furnish more detail for.”

Well, with nothing better to do, I sat up and paid attention, I muted the tv, to indicate that he had my undivided attention. Of course turning of the tv was out of the question, I mean it’s a tv, it’s almost rude to do that, or at least I haven’t seen any precedent of a polite Tv turning off.

He didn’t seem to happy about the tv still being on, or may be it was something he ate, the paneer probably? Anyhow with a grumpy screwed up brow, and his upper lips turned up in painful disgust, Julius continued. “well it was like this, in college we were, well everyone, except me, was applying for a scholarship. The reason I wasn’t applying escapes me at the moment,” I’m sure it had something to do with the fact that he stood no chance of winning any, “but I was helping one of my friends fill out his form.”

“We’d just got by the difficult part, you know name, address, educational qualifications, economic back ground. These are hard to fake, but none the less, had to be, each scholarship has a particular profile for all prospective candidates, and the goal of your application is to fit that stereotype as best you can. Think of it like a Styrofoam cut out, and you have to make your inset to match that shape perfectly. The hardest to… er… make fit are the basic information about you. So name, education and economic background are the hardest parts of the form. After that, interests, activities, extra currics, sports and the like are easily managed. You can almost get sets of certificated manufactured for the required scholarship. You know, like a scholarship for the US would probably care more about your social work than a scholarship from the UK. Also a UK scholarship is usually more sympathetic to sporting achievements, not so with American Scholarships because they don’t have the same sports.”

Julius insists on giving me advice of this nature every chance he gets. Of course he means well, but he doesn’t realize that I don’t particularly care. I don’t need to, but I humor him, it doesn’t hurt me to.

“So this particular scholarship was particularly prestigious, which basically means, it had the most money. And everyone was in a bit of a tizzy to apply. Two of my friends, one of which I’ve already told you I was helping, were doing some research on it together.”

“Now of them, S_____ needed to know what the scholarship committee was looking for, and E_____ needed to find out about the scholarship itself. Some how they decided that I would know, while this does me credit, it doesn’t do them any, because I am widely regarded as the most uninformed person on campus.”
“However, it soon transpired that they each held the information the other wanted. So when S___ questioned me about the age of the scholarship E____ popped up with the answer, and when E___ asked me what kind of extra currics the scholarship favored, S___ chirped, 'oh mostly social service work, if you have done anything with NGOs that’ll really help for you, and so will having done something on your initiative.'”

“This seemingly pleasant turn of events for both of them soon turned into a nightmare, as it became increasingly obvious to both parties that exactly what they lacked in terms of qualifications the other possessed. If S____ had never done so much as help a blind student to his class E_____ had literally started an NGO for village immigrants into the town, and was running it on her own. She didn’t have the slightest clue about the scholarship though, and was glad to find that she met the minimum academic requirements…”

“This revelation into the stellar nature of each other’s qualifications for the scholarship created an odd sort of nervousness in each other. Well I say odd, because I don’t understand it, but its common enough, I feel given how competitive everything has to be. A good analogy for what they were experiencing is two contestants at a beauty pageant, one with a better posterior, and the other with a better anterior… I hope I don’t need to get more graphic.”

A Critique of PopCulture, Society, International Relations and Education

The garden was entering its final throes of bloom. Barely any green reached the eye through the riot of colour that it had become. Blooms of all colors and sizes littered all the space the eye could capture in the garden. The only place which didn’t look like it was dressed for a particularly grotesque ball was the fence. A staid, ten foot high bush fence protected the garden from the vouyers of the world. Itself completely unadorned, and unremarkable. Unlike the guards of the queen it made no claim to fame, or notoriety. It merely stood, and in standing performed its function, or perhaps it wasn’t even aware of its function.

No one really ventured into the garden. It was too tumultuous and bright. People felt it too easy to destroy what they called the beauty of it, for lack of a better world. After all, it is hard to call blooming flowers disgusting. And yet beauty, strangely, was appropriate, having been applied to so many things even more vile. No one knew how or when the garden was tended, a gardener existed, in some recess, but he was never seen amongst the plants.

The truth was that the garden had become itself. And had learnt to take care of itself, and didn’t need to be tended anymore. It was growing, blooming, and leafing off itself, and no one seemed to notice or mind. Or perhaps they did, but did not know what it was they were looking at to begin with. Was it a well tended garden? Or a weed patch? Was their a method to its insanity? Or… and not knowing the answers to these questions, and not wanting to ask questions in appropriate of them, they just let it be.

That was until little Heidi got lost in it.

How that happened was quite interesting in itself. Apparently she was following a bunny that happened to run across her while she was sitting in the lawn. Entirely ignorant of what bunnies can be like, and especially the kind that wears pocket watches, waist coats, and speaks in guttural tones about its own lack of punctuality, she was though, spared this more thorough introduction the bunnies, and also the subsequent adventure of an endless slide down a hole.

All that did happen was that seeing his bob tail, predictably ‘bob’ across the lawn, she got excited and in childish glee began to chase it about. Now for the bunny this naturally signaled trouble. Because they hate celebrity, and at the rate this girl was going, it seemed the glass house was to be its fate, or at least the mesh house, which was equally permeable to sight.

Quite worried the bunny proceeded to pace in circles thinking of ways to escape, till finally in desperation, it decided to pass through the ‘garden.’ The garden itself was seen as a place of unimaginable dread among bunnies. And for good reason. Bunneis lived of the roots of plants, but in the garden, the plants were inviolate, and all powerful. For a bunny this represented an overturning of the very laws of its existence. It was almost as though the bunnies had met their neo ala matrix.

However they’re few things bunnies hate more than celebrity, and death is only rumoured to be one of them. So he took the plunge into the garden. And she unpredictably followed after.

You know, that’s probably the one thing about children I hate. They take so long to be trained. To understand what it means to be human, and to behave like one. As children we’re still liable to do things that are unpredictable, while the one and probably only thing we’re trained our whole lives to attain is a comfortable predictability. Occasionally this predictability is useful the human being trained like when villagers use the same tracks to go through forests for years and years, even though it no longer is the best track. It keeps other walkers of the forest away from them, but most often this predictability plays against the human being itself, making that one track the ideal place for robbers to ambush him.

So poor, untrained Heidi, did something the bunny hadn’t counted on. And surprised him by following him, even when it became plainly evident that he was heading for the garden. The bunny raced in, among the stalks, which were mostly tall enough to have a few bare inches of stem near the ground. Using this space, the Bunny tried to dash right through the garden.