wutheringheights

I am not an admirer of  Muhammad Ali but I am an ardent fan of Hulk Hogan. The reason is simple. In the late 1980s, almost every Malayali who worked in the Gulf returned with a couple of video cassettes of American wrestling. The availability of such cassettes abroad, especially places like Dubai and Sharjah, made Hogan popular among us. I don’t know much about American wrestling but I like Hogan. I still remember an yellow-colour cassette my uncle got me from Dubai. The cover showed different poses of a heavy man with long white mustache and hair. What was special in Hogan compared to other wrestlers, you might ask. I like Hogan because he was an embodiment of defence. You would see him badly beaten up by rivals, blood oozing from his mouth but once he had decided to get up, no one could stop him. So much was the power to stage a come-back. I have seen cricketers returning to form after a bad patch. I have seen business magnets making remarkable come-backs. But I have never se...

I had left my house for lodges a couple of times during my college days. Maybe this was because of my great fascination for old, stinky lodges with common toilets. I was also attracted by the mysterious presence of creatures like bedbugs, mosquitoes and cockroaches in the interiors of these ‘budget’ rooms. There was a sense of rhythm in our live-in relationship. The cockroaches were the most liberal, as they were occasional visitors. Once in a while, someone would perform a mid-night-walk over my body. I could even feel in my deep sleep the ‘hairy legs and antennae’ moving from one end of my body to the other. The action would last only for a couple of seconds. The mosquitoes attacked me only when they wanted food for thought. The bedbugs were the most dangerous. They were good mind-readers and they did this even in my deep sleep. Despite the disturbances, we shared an absolute tent of unity. A friend of mine had an interesting experience when he was staying at a rented house in ...

A former colleague today invited me for her birthday party. The invitation over phone was different. "Hey, Saju. I turned 40 today, just want to celebrate it. Please come to the Guindy Race Course club tonight." Normally, I avoid birthday parties. I hate being formal. If at all I want, my communist hangover comes as a barrier. But today's invitation was different. This is the first time someone inviting me for a birthday party after disclosing the age. How many women do this? I still remember how furious my mother was when my dad got her age wrong (two years more to her exact age) while booking a railway ticket some twenty years ago. Let me tell you another incident from my childhood pages. The character was Sarada, a vegetable vendor. If you asked Sarada how old she was, she would immediately tell, "I am 38 now, and next Dhanu (March) I will turn 39." Nobody would believe Sarada's words. Because her elder son was 30 when she said this. Usually, Sarada wou...

Six months ago, when I visited the controversial Thoothampara Estate near Nelliyampathy, I saw a deer's skull kept for drying outside the storehouse. I immediately took a couple of pictures of it from different angles. The workers told me they would send the skull to the forest department in a month's time. Recently, a wildlife enthusiast from the area told me that the skull was missing from the storehouse. I had my own doubts about the skull when I saw it. The kind of care it was getting made me believe that a "rich enthustiast" would turn up at any moment. Good that i took the pictures, otherwise you might ask: How does it look like?

A couple of days ago while returning from work I stopped at a shop near my house in Velachery. An old woman and a little girl were standing before the shop. The woman was counting some old ten rupee notes while the little one was busy. She wanted chocolate, not the usual ones but Kinder Joy. The poor woman was struggling to pronounce the word so she asked the shopkeeper, Mutta chocklate irkka, saar ?,. The shopkeeper laughed. The little one's ego was hurt. Patti, Kinder Joy, thereelya, she tried to explain it. The shopkeeper's reply was a bit surprising. "If I stock Kinder Joy, I will definitely lose my regular customers. I used to stock it but you know whenever children come to the shop, they ask for it. The parents (rich or poor) will lose Rs 30 at a stretch. It's a kind of addiction that children get from this egg-shaped toy. The next day they will again ask for it. So my customers suggested I must stop ordering this toy which I obliged." True, that's wh...

Rajan died yesterday. At 47, he was not healthy but never showed any visible symptom of illness or uneasiness when he came to see me during my holiday in Kerala last month. We spoke for a long time, in fact he was asking for a copy of the coverstory that I did for my paper eight months ago. There was a reason for it. The story was a satirical attack on politicians. I met a couple of genuine boozers from different parts of Kerala and asked them what they would expect from the politicians. Most of them replied quite boldly and of course they were right. Rajan spoke against his favourite party, Congress. He went on and on...from his childhood to being a Youth Congress member. He said despite his hardwork, he couldn't make anything out of politics. "I am still a poor man. I don't have money to take care of my mentally retarded son. After all I have to find a good guy for my daughter. I don't know when I will have money for all these things," he said. He was sad. Me to...

Watching Ritwik Ghatak continuously for two days brings back memories of film festivals at my home town, Thiruvananthapuram. Akira Kurosawa was our favourite those days. I never had the opportunity to watch Ghatak so close. Yesterday, i saw Subarna Rekha and Nagarik. Today, Komal Gandhar...more to come....

Yesterday, a neighbour couple adopted a 4-month-old baby girl from a reputed orphanage in Chennai. She was sleeping when we, me and my 5-year-old daughter Mihika, went to see her. Though I was happy seeing the child, I was a bit disturbed with questions related to the baby's birth....who's her mother, dad? How did she become an orphan? etc etc.. Whatever it be, i didn't want to spoil my mood, for this was the first time in my life i came so close to 'adoption'. I had studied the subject in my Law days, but never got so close to the process. A friend of mine once told me he wanted to adopt a boy since he has a daughter. He had a reason. It was in 2004. The tsunami had just hit the Indian shores, killing thousands of people. He wanted to adopt a child among those who had lost their parents in the disaster. The idea sounded nice to me and i encouraged him. A couple of months later, the friend told me that his wife was pregnant and he wanted to abort the idea of adoptin...

trekking 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9uZx1CO3VA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gGeCoZ_dJ4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87s8V9chXNw

My memories of Kerala begin with a (train) journey to Goa from Ernakulam. I was hardly three, and you know how much geography mattered to one in that age. What I still remember is a huge ring of yellow light with its rays scattered over the silvery rails coming towards me in the darkness. We (my dad, who was with the Indian Navy, and mom) got into the train. The days in Goa were memorable. I sensed a spectacular setting around me: The sea, abandoned aircrafts, stray dogs, cattle, prawns and ice creams with the colour of the setting sun. But the days didn’t last, we had to return to Kerala after a year. Though Goa evoked in me a sense of feeling about the place I live in, Kerala taught me the basic principles of life. Memories are always interconnected. So do my Goa and Kerala. I was born and raised in Attingal, a sleepy town 33 km from Thiruvananthapuram. As a child, I liked the place. But once I grew up, I began searching for bigger canvases. I joined University College, one of the mo...

Sorry, I couldn't update my blog for seven months. I was regularly writing, especially for the last two months. But somehow blogging didn't take place. All these months, I barely used my keyboard for writing, instead I used my fountain pens. I always loved writing with pens filled with different colours of inks. Violet, Turkish blue, black etc. I will be posting from tomorrow onwards.... cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeers

It was an April evening in the early 1990s. We — a group of ‘‘aspiring’’ young poets — were discussing Kafka and Sartre at the India Coffee House near University College, Thiruvananthapuram. An old man with long grey hair growing around a bald patch, wearing a white mundu and shirt, walked into the hall. He sat on a chair in the middle, and placed a lighter and a packet of India Kings on the table. We became quiet and nervous. If he overheard anything ‘‘funny’’, it could very well become the subject of the next Sahityavarabhalam, his controversial literary column in the Kalakaumudi, a popular Malayalam weekly. Krishnan Nair, the veteran Malayalam columnist who passed away last week at 84, could be the embodiment of love and affection. But he was disliked by most in literary circles. At the time of our seeing him in the coffee house, he was having a war of words with a Malayalam poet, a professor at University College. The poet claimed that Krishnan Nair had insulted him. Newspapers and...

From the verandah of the Bungalow on the Beach in Tranquebar, I alternately focus my eyes on the partly-destroyed Masillamani Nathar temple and the remains of the fort wall, where waves from the Bay of Bengal hit. As I turn my head, I see the 17th-century Dansborg Fort; further away, there is the ruins of the Governor’s Bungalow and the post office building built by the Danes. Wherever I look, I see ruins. Built by the British in 1845, this erstwhile collector’s bungalow has recently been restored by the Neemrana Group, the Delhi-based heritage hotel experts. Because of its proximity to the sea, it has been renamed Bungalow on the Beach. To restore an ancient building and turn it into a living monument, one has to take a passionate journey into the soul of the place, which Neemrana has successfully done here. You see the same pillars and wooden ceilings that existed hundreds of years ago. Barring a couple of electronic items (sorry, no TV), everything in your room is antique. When you ...

Satapada... Satapada… Satapada…’’ Tourist officer Bijaya Kumar Jena passes wireless messages to the boatmen onboard cruising on Chilika Lake. Sitting in his office at Yatri Nivas in Satapada, he instructs a particular boatman to reach the jetty immediately. “Sir, another half an hour, please bear with us,” Bijaya tells me, turning off the wireless set. I wait at his desk, glancing through some brochures and maps of Chilika, the largest brackish water lagoon on the East coast of India. A gentleman walks in and hands over another brochure, this one with a dolphin’s picture on the front page. “What would you like to have for lunch, sir?” a man in uniform asks me. It’s hardly 11, and I’m not hungry. I look at Bijaya. “You have to place your order in advance. The cruise will take three hours. Once you come back, you will be hungry,” Bijaya explains. What should I order? “Try our crab and prawn. Everything we get here is fresh,” says the man in uniform. We walk to the jetty; on the way, I se...

The yoginis of Hirapur In Bhubaneswar, if you see your fellow passenger in the bus touching his forehead with his right hand, that means you are crossing a temple. People do it quite often, especially while travelling. Big or small, there is a temple in every corner of this city. One of them is the 64-yogini temple of Hirapur, about 19 km from the city. Built in the 9th century AD, the structure of the temple is hypaethral, having a circular stonewall which is about nine feet high. Sixty yoginis — in different forms, shapes and postures — are kept inside the circular wall. Carved from black chlorite, many yoginis here have animal faces. However, the saddest part is that most of them are in ruins, the legs missing or the faces gone. Among the four yoginis kept separately in the central pillar, the 61st one is missing. Nobody knows what happened to her. Even Surendranath, the ASI’s monument attendant of the temple, doesn’t know. But if you ask him about the names of the yoginis, he will ...

Kamala Surayya is wary of journalists. ‘‘Recently, a reporter came to see me. He wanted to know how many men I had slept with. I asked him to get out. Reporters always hurt me. I have stopped meeting them,’’ she says, sitting in an executive chair at her flat in Ernakulam. Her head is covered with a sky-blue scarf, secured by two hairpins. Years ago, when I first met her, Kamala Surayya was Madhavikutty; for her English readers, she was Kamala Das. She wore a sari and a bunch of keys hung from her waist. There was sindoor on her forehead. Today, at 72, there are new additions to her life—a name, a walker, a magnifying lens and a swelling on one of her eyes. ‘‘I had a stroke last year and was not able to talk. The right chin had been badly affected. I was bedridden. I’ve done physiotherapy for months. I still haven’t fully recovered from it,’’ she says. ‘‘And writing?’’ I ask. ‘‘Yes, these days I mostly write poems. In India, we have only two magazines publishing English poems, Kavyabha...