GANJA TURTLE - THE TRUTH BEHIND THE LEGEND

Let me put an end to all this speculation about my blog name. Obviously am not going to explain this without a fair bit of story telling, so sit a while, have a drink, put on some Floyd and read this...

At school in Madurai, when we weren’t forming gangs to beat up classmates, when we weren’t following pretty girls home, when we weren’t hiding from people who wanted to beat us up, when we weren’t hanging from the footboards of town buses, when we weren’t stealing love letters from classmates' bags, when we weren’t (no, that’s not true, make that "when I wasn’t") trying to somehow crack integration/differentiation fundas and barely pass in HSC math, when we weren’t sharing beer bottles & mutton balls in dark underground bars, when we weren’t bullying weak lady teachers, when we weren’t writing English exams with letter writing sections addressed to Chelsea Clinton, when we weren’t sharing bowls of thickened goats blood after basketball practice & gym, we also QUIZZED.

In high school, along with Pervert by Social Compulsion (PSC) and another guy called Roshan, I was part of the local school quiz team & our ultimate goal was the MADURA COATS INVITATION TROPHY - not without reason - this was hosted by a local school called Vikaasa - the school with the prettiest babes in town. Besides that, this was the only trophy where they had an awesome cash prize of Rs.500 each! So me & Roshan (PSC wasn’t yet part of our quizzing gang) prepared like mad - memorizing capitals, currencies, sobriquets, books and authors, species, animals, historical dates, presidents...we coaxed our parents and teachers to let us prepare during weekends & PT period; Google was non-existent then, so we had to rely on print and print only - I started off from the end of the McMillan encyclopedia and Roshan started working from the front...thus did I learn the meaning of zymurgy and realize that Zenia is a flower (which I proudly recognized years later in the hilly slopes off Peermed). The big day came...and there we were against the strength of the Kendriya Vidyalayas and Bhavans of the world, along with a whole lot of very smart looking students as audience.

Although slightly shaky against these bastions of propriety, we cracked the prelims &  semis and moved on to the finals...against smart tie-laden personalities with funny English accents, we seemed totally outdated...but somehow after connecting Singapore to a stinking flower and pointing out the old name of Tokyo was Edo and explaining why women tennis players skirts were called Jesus Wept, we won! And how! My mom and Dad took that Rs.500 note from my hands and have kept it somewhere safe, till today - first earnings senti.

When we came back, we were local heroes...the Principal- a very distinguished man called Nandakumar (who was used to calling me into his room usually for perusing aloud whether I should be suspended or dismissed from school) this time actually praised us in the school assembly. It almost erased the blot I had earlier earned when he shouted at the same assembly in front of LKG-UKG, 1st to 12th STD students "GJ & RAJKUMAR, GROWN LIKE MULES AND YOU CANT EVEN KEEP QUIET DURING THE FLAG SONG - and boomed at me separately "WITH YOUR FATHER IN THE NAVY, THIS WAS THE LAST THING I EXPECTED!"

Sometime during the MC invitation quiz, we realized that both of us were pretty bad at Indian Music-both filmi & classical (I had brushed up-or so I thought-on Western Music by buying a whole lot of Bon Jovi, Billy Joel, Michael Jackson tapes)...and during our various interactions with PSC, he seemed to know a bit of Indian Classical/Hindi Music. So he became part of the quizzing gang. And from thereon, there was no looking back - right from the Vikaasa Youth Festival to LOSA (Old students association) culfests, we were local studboys.

One of my favourite showdown moments was - LOSA 94 or 95, I think - As usual it was, Us vs Vikaasa-final round...Vikaasa team consisting of Mr.American accent + PY fair babe with Sanskrit sounding name + geek looking Northie - all with mini clouds of perfumes floating around their heads...us - slightly sweaty students of varying heights in tight bluechecked uniforms...a lil background check on the quizmaster had revealed the fact that he loved a particular type of round as the final round - asks you to choose a topic and then he asks for "ANY TEN" somethings related to that...so we thought that if we said American politics the only choice this guy would have would be to ask us for names of 10 American presidents - so Yours Truly had memorized the names of American Presidents - from George Washington to about Chester Arthur...so the moment came and he asked us exactly what we wanted him to ask and  phat phat phat - I shot out the names of the 1st ten and asked him if he wanted ten more...I know, a bit of arrogance...but hey, those were the days when I was made of light - if you cut me I would shine! (Na, not mine, Billy Collins' line).

Next was Vikaasa & we all know what Amaerican-accented perfume cloud floating Indian boy will choose as his topic - Wastarn Meesic! Having apparently waded through the kilos of MJ/ Aerosmith/ Beatles musikassettes at home to reach this quiz, what else would he ask? And what was he waiting for? TEN GRAMMY WINNERS?-he could reel that out in 5 secs...TEN OST ARTISTES? 7 secs...TEN AFRO-AMERICAN ARTISTES? TEN BOY BANDS? You could see that puppy like eagerness in his face..."Give me my juicy question! Give me!" his face said...and that’s when the clouds parted and a light from heaven seemed to shine down on the quizmaster and suddenly he looked even more wise, revere-able and Moses-like...like the Matrix, where everything happens in slow-mo time-slices, the quizmaster turned around in a measured masterly movement and faced the Vikaasa team – giving them the grimmest look he could muster, he said "GIVE ME THE NAMES OF 10 WESTERN CLASSICAL COMPOSERS"

The uniform next expression on the Vikaasa teams faces, in all its yummy memory can be expressed exactly in the Tamil phrase- The "Inji Thinna Korangu" look. Translation being: The look of a monkey that wanted something sugary to eat, found something and biting it, realizes that it is ginger...time stood still as they looked at each other, at us and then at the audience...

And slowly they started off “Beethoven, Mozart, Vivaldi.... er.... Tchaikovsy.... Andrew Lloyd Webber...Phillips?…and faltered off! And that’s when the audience got to its feet and roared their throats off (we were on home ground)! We had won again!

After schooldays, we parted – me, due to er…familial compulsions, went on to do my B.Com at a local college, PSC went to do his integrated MCA at Madurai Univ, Roshan went on to Anna Univ for his Engg...after joining college, I was looking around for a quizzing partner when I chanced upon a fat, seemingly slightly intelligent "Arunthur Dent" (he was in the top 5 in his class)...those days he used to swing to "Backstreets Back, AWRIGHT" and his home was the local lunch get-together place for us all, conveniently located next to Bhaikadai, local sherbet + vada +cigarette shop, which again was conveniently located next to Lady Doak College – our sistah institution...he wasn’t yet the heavy metal loving slim boy karate kid nerd that he now makes himself out to be;-)

With a fair application of thought, we concluded that since technically American College came under the Madurai University jurisdiction, we could join up with PSC and technically call ourselves the Univ team...This was one of the best times of my culfest life - FESTEMBER @ REC Trichy, Cascall, Harmony, PECOFES, JIPMER, IIT-M,Fisheries Institute, Kovilpatti - we went everywhere where there was even a remote possibility of a quiz being organized- in T-shirts, dirty jeans and Hawaii slippers (Arunther Dent was the decent exception). Along with this, me and PSC also got into crosswords/ JAM/ Dumb Charades/Creative Writing...our culfest to culfest existence was what made life in Madurai barely tolerable during those years...each fest had its share of local heroes and invariably we would turn out to be the wild card entry from “Madurai-Jeez, wheres that??!!?” that walked away with the prizes! (ok…maybe only some of them ;-)

Sometimes in the middle of all this we started attending open quizzes...like the Landmark quiz (we never even got into the finals), the Odyssey quiz and the LIMCA quiz-in this, we got short-listed and got to travel to Chennai for the finals-staying at a 3 star hotel for the 1st time in our lives was awesome-Arunthur Dent was jumping up and down when he saw the two TVs in the room and was so excited that he applied moisturizer to his head thinking it was shampoo. It took us approx. 2 hours to convince him that NO, HE WOULD NOT LOSE ALL HIS HAIR AND WOULD HE PLEASE CHANGE FROM A SHORT WRAPAROUND TOWEL AROUND HIS BODY INSTEAD OF POPPING OUT OF THE BATHROOM AND ASKING WEIRD QNS AFTER DOING WEIRD THINGS! (Maybe slightly exaggerated! ;-)

We managed to beat teams from Bangalore and Chennai to reach the finals and were up against the quiz-lords of the metros - IIT/IIM/MCC/BISHOP COTTON/ LOYOLA...one team (IIT?) broke away right from the beginning and raced ahead...us and Loyola, I think, were tightly tied for the 2nd place- and there was no 3rd prize...after 3 rounds of tiebreakers, we were still tied and tension ran taut in the room -it was then that a question involving Io & Ganymede happened – and try as we might, we couldn’t narrow down - all of us had totally different answers, so we decided to wild guess and alas, we went wrong! To this day, Arunther claims that he had said Jupiter, but we tend not to believe him – he’s like that only.  And thus ended yet another long tension fraught adventure. But this time in failure.

And finally......yeah…finally, coming to the point, the fallout of these open quizzes was that you needed to have a different sounding team name...like say "I, Iyer, Iyengar" or "Morons of the Nth order"...After several rounds of brainstorming, we could think of only one group of weird creatures similar to us  - the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles"...while we could claim to be "TEENAGE" (without doubt) "MUTANT"(something that both our parents and the Bhaikadai gang would swear over to), "TURTLES" (it was doubted several times over whether we belonged to the human species - with a name like PSC, you can understand right?),  "NINJA" was a thing that stuck like a fish bone in the throat...try as we might, we just could not find any connection between us and NINJAs (despite…ahem...my Karate brown belt!) and unfortunately all of us were quizzers in the purist traditions - unless we found a decent connect with NINJA, we wouldn’t touch the name with a quiz-pole.

Which is when I got to thinking about typical personal characteristics of each of us - not finding anything noteworthy, my lightning fast mind moved on to college/city references... During the 60s/70s, The American College was reputed to be a hotbed of rebellion-wild western music echoing Morrison and Hendrix, anti-war movements, strong causes, passionate arguments that divided the entire college on philosophical lines - these were the stories that were passed on to us about our now watered down alma-mater...and the fuel behind these fires was allegedly blessed Ganja - legend has it that the hostel students of Dudley Hall lovingly cultivated ganja plants in their gardens and actually cured and smoked them-a lovely self sustaining model of economic viability!

This really struck a chord or rather several wild riffs in us - that otherwise unkempt, wild eyed, acid rock loving, dirty hostel students could so dedicatedly bring themselves to do something as neat& basic as ganja cultivation - ensuring that wee green saplings got adequate sunshine, water, making sure no weeds grew nearby...it really seemed so delightfully incongruous! Esp. given that people like me/ PSC etc (sons of respectable university professors) now had turned wild and wanton somewhere in our quest for truth, justice, beauty and beer...

And Voila – the TEENAGE MUTANT GANJA TURTLES were born!

2 wild quizyears later, after Arunther Dent left for his MCA, TMGT became Perverts By Social Compulsions (a name coined by PSC obviously)...but since “TMGT" was a personal brainchild, I still love that name...I can’t call myself teenage anymore (especially when the kids are calling me “Uncle”) and neither am I still a mutant species - these days am as propah as a starched shirt, dimple-tied, power-pointed, mobile wielding corporate specimen can get- a shadow of my college self - as irritatingly human as one can get.

But yes, deep inside, the GANJA TURTLE lurks!

AMEN!