- G.B&$%u@#$@s&*$@#h – for everything.
- A former boss who made sure everything got personal. I forgive you.
- Specific Hindu/ Muslim/ Xian leaders for their noble attempts convince others through various disgusting means that their religion is the best for India. May a hundred suns set on you.
- People who hunt animals/ birds for fun – try it with your God-given bare hands, bravehearts. (The people who hunt them for money are also jerks, but a degree less darker in my book)
- A priest who made me run around a lot on the starkest of days, get 7 signatures, asked for proof of belonging to the parish and finally refused to conduct the funeral mass for my father. I give him the same line my cousin did when people laughed at him trying to imitate a solemn church ceremony and later tried apologizing to him “Don’t say sorry to me, say sorry to Jesus”.
Close brushes with death/danger:
- Velankanni - Age 5. Fell into lagoon. Before I went in I waved; Dad dove in, pulled me out – hung me upside down to dry. Apart from the weekends, am so far dry! Hic.
- Highway off Madurai. Hero Honda Sleek stickered BMW @ 70kmph, no helmet. Traffic at halt due to railway crossing. Old woman jumps into road. I swerve, she screeches, we roll over. After the world stops spinning, wake up – head on the road 12 inches away from a lorry’s double tyres and neck against the silencer. If the train had been on time, this blog would be going thru an existential crisis right now. Since then my Guardian Angel’s been asking for stress allowance.
- Halfway into French class. Class XI – a bored and hungry hand slips into someone else’s bag searching for something to eat. Comes out with bunch of letters. Love letters. Lovely long love letters. Smuggled them out. Read them a lot. Xeroxed them, just in case we lost them. And then did nothing with them ;-( Death? Danger? When loverboy is 6 foot tall at age 18 and is the son of a CBI officer. That’s danger. Or rather Death.
- Main road @ Madurai. 2nd year college. Friend getting beaten up in front of college in middle of Madurai town by 8 thugs with various assortment of weapons for proposing to a girl-and for other related incidents, shall we say. Approx. 60-70 bystanders with traffic halted to watch the fun. GT trying to hold a 7 foot tall, 4 foot wide specimen from pulling a long dagger from his belt. Other courageous classmates trying out gentle holds on thugs but not working. At this point, thugs decide to temporarily transfer violence to another name mentioned by the much maligned “proposee”- into this melee, floats a gentle question “Who is Ganja?” All familiar eyes turn to me. As shakes off an ant, an elephant – the 7 footed giant shakes me off and lifts me by shirt and says “Are you Ganja?. Silence of 5 seconds in which the world slows down to a snails crawl...Me, in what’s supposed to be angry growl, but more an enraged squeak: “Hello baas, my name is Turtle – please put me down”. Ever since then I have stopped cursing all concerned for the 5 names that I was baptized with.
1 preferable(?!?) mode of suicide:
- Disappear down an abyss.
- Without a mess for anybody else.
- With a lingering sense of mystery.
- Hopefully after everyone I know is no longer around or remembers me.
- God forbid.
9 Guilty pleasures:
- Random Poetry @ Work.
- Beer; Toddy; Sake; Vodka; anything with generous hints of alcohol.
- Madchen Amick in Dream Lover.
- Running fingers through somebody else’s hair. Preferably PYTs ;-)
- Revving the throttle, roaring at 90. Forgive me, o fossils, am a cretin, crude at times.
- Giving just that perfect gift to people and watching their face shine. Why guilty you ask? My credit card sighs.
- Chocolate.
- Petrichor.
- Giving Gyan on life, love, management, Mars…anything.
8 things you never want to forget:
- My 1st nursery rhyme for which I won a recitation prize and still is recounted fondly at family functions much to the embarrassment of the protagonist “Piggy on the railway picking up stones, Down came the Engine Driver and broke his bones; Oooooh, said the piggy, that’s not fair. BAH, said the engine driver, I don’t care” The protagonist as he likes to call himself on such distressing occasions, was well known for his long drawn “Oooh” with pursed lips as well as the Calvinesque screwed-up-face “BAH”.
- The life of my father – from scraping barnacles to sighting the stars...that such a man lived on Earth.
- My 1st interview – the interviewer told me to get out after 5 minutes; I refused; at subsequent intervals of 10 minutes for the next 45 minutes, I was told in different various ways to leave the room. I stuck around pointing out the various facets of my personality that he hadn’t explored. I got the job. Am still at it. And sometimes wonder why.
- Again what my bro & me shared with my father – from waking up at 4am to get “fresh” beef or fish, to riding a brand new Sunny - triples-a hard & hefty 90 kg man,2 boys of varying sizes- to church to bless it on the 1st day of purchase, to waking up at 5am and splitting into teams on Dad’s orders to help mum cut vegetables for breakfast, lunch, dinner and the next day (even if she wasn’t interested too much) and vacuuming/mopping the floor. He loved her, you see.
- Challenging an English teacher that I could teach Tennyson’s Ulysses better than her. And finishing with applause the day after.
- All my pets.
- The way my mother smiles.
- The rush of blood with which I wrote a poem for the 1st time. Didn’t even know it was one.
- 3 days in Switzerland which included…Finding that you can hire a free cycle by just showing your passport…Listening to a live organ concert in the 12th century Grossmunster church and writing a poem as I listened to the music…Watching the ethereal beauty of stained glass inside The Fraumuster Church…Sitting by the Lake Zurich and feeding popcorn to the swans…Gobbling sprungli on the go…Flirting with a Swiss Bank teller (I always found exhange rates rather fascinating, y’know)…A little blonde angel who wanted me to lift her from a pier- by frantically gesturing with her hands and smiling at me and finally grabbing at my legs until I gave in, held her up, hugged her and put her on the ground – in return, a smile that was worth so much more….Watching car drivers smilingly halt and gesture me to go ahead as I fumbled with the gears on my cycle at traffic crossings…Finding that beer was the same price as water….Drinking water from the many fountains in the city…Watching amateur musicians play amazing classical music at various “platz”s in the city…Stalls on the platform with noone to watch over them – if you want to buy something, you select it and look around for the owner of the stall – who would be nowhere near the stall – Trust Works…Finding out that when you put on an accent, foreigners understand you better; and then realizing that I was speaking like that to some colleagues also…They way the Swiss Landesmuseum was maintained – from suits of armour in humidity controlled rooms, to paintings of the Virgin by Renaissance masters to a miniature of a battle scene – The Swiss do so deserve Switzerland. Being startled by a Swiss girl at a souvenir shop in Lucerne: You are Indian,right? Yes. Indians don’t eat meat right? Yeah, lots of proponents (Ok,ok…I didn’t say proponents – I said something which I don’t remember…) of Hinduism, the majority religion in India, don’t. YOU PEOPLE don’t eat meat but wear leather shoes YOU PEOPLE don’t eat cows, but wear leather belts, carry leather bags, wear leather straps. ME: DUH?!?!? (After consideration of this ultimate question, I came up with the best alternative availability theory; however the next day when I went to the souvenir shop to explain it to her, she was missing ;-(
4 things you wish to forget but never will
Beating up my brother black and blue with a cycle tube. Forgive me, MM, for I did not know what I was doing :-/
Losing in the tiebreaker round in two different national level quizzes.
The day a woman said No. Maybe she didn’t know what she was missing. Maybe she did.
The last few months of my Dad’s life.
5 really exotic dishes you have tried:
1. Homemade Sweet & Sour Pork which my father supposedly learnt from a Chinese friend. Remember the Indo-Chinese Conflict? This was how it started.
2. Cherry Brandy – what goes inside your mouth is a dish.Period.
3. The groom figure made with icing on a wedding cake. My cousin got the bride. Grotesque you say? Tasty I say.4. Various homemade pickles attempted by mom. By the time shes finished with them and after they are discovered 2 years later, declared “NICE & TASTY” and force fed at lunch, they become exotique.5. 3 scoops of Movenpick icecream at a restaurant atop Mt.Titlis. 18 Euros; Rs.900 for a minute of pleasure; Rs.300 a scoop. Yes, I am an Indian. But the pleasure was all Swiss.
5? 5?!?! YOU KIDDING?!?! crushes/loves in your life... Divya-sister of Selma (that was the way I prayed so that God doesn’t confuse her with any other Divya and therefore possibly forget the showers of blessings! ;-), Urmila, Vaishnavi, Sindhuja, Uma, Devi, Arti, Saranya, Naushine, Annie, Vanita, Amita,Vinita, Rebecca, Shalini, Yasmeen, Anjali.
Strangest dream you ever had:
Machine gunning a switchboard that refused to break.
Why machine gun? Why switcboard? Why not break?
Ha Ha Ha (evil laughter) Strange you ask, strange you get.
5 most valued personal possessions:My mom.
My books – all of them.Ring(rosary) gifted by mom.
My poetry. Amazing but true, I do.
My biceps. Next question.3 favorite superheroes..... and why:
Phantom – The Skullring was too good. And his nom-de-guerre too – The Ghost Who Walks.
Mandrake- for a long long time, I dreamt of Xanadu and of course the beautiful Narada.
Karna – Yeah, an obvious superhero - after reading Amar Chitra Katha, no one would think otherwise.
Doc Savage – After reading Doc Savage, I tried isometric exercises with the legendary Bullworker. My biceps said Yes. Everybody else said Naaaahhhhh.
A wise man once said “The extent to which some men can go to, whilst pandering to the yearnings of strange therefore exotic women is mostly ridiculous, sometimes funny and rarely sensible.”
Ganja Turtle was once a wise man.
