Ajith Nair

Today is the 26th Jan. And it’s a Friday. Thank god for that, cos no Indian would ever have their long awaited, most cherished long weekend otherwise. Thank God that our revered leaders chose this date to turn republic else what if they’d chosen 25th? How many would have had to sacrifice a Casual Leave in the name of the nation in order to get a long weekend! Flag hoisting in residential complexes, done by the ones who are not away sun tanning on beaches ‘this’ long weekend, is usually a hilarious affair. There is a statutory notice, full of typo that goes up in the society notice board every January. It speaks about the glory of India, in two lines and then the schedule of ‘cultural’ programs in the next four. Flag hoisting will be at a convenient, 10am when all and sundry including the mongrel dog have had a late lazing morning wake up, farted in peace, yawned at will, consumed two cups of tea and browsed through two newspapers. The flag pole, is rusted, browned and orphaned until t...

A movie whose time has come had to be made. Guru is the story of entrepreneurial success and the man who defined it for all of us. It legitimizes using any and every mean to get what one wants. This might not have been acceptable about fifteen years ago, when India was still third world and middle class values were still bordering on un-materialistic. Today when we’re fighting global battles in business and wanting to make money is a legitimate thing to say in class, this movie tries to play to a now popular sentiment by saying that here’s a man who did it first. And how. Alas it falls flat. For one the narrative is linear, it struggles to find enough ‘big’ episodes in the life of man who always thought big. Sometimes threatening to be a documentary, it makes desperate attempts at injecting commercial value. The songs are a glaring example. Except the main theme, all others stick out like bad share scrip. One senses that the crew knew what it wanted to say but didn’t quite manage to ar...

I was privy to a decking up ceremony. Before you get ideas, it happened to be a truck. A goods carrier. I have never seen a new truck, a brand new one, not even in pictures. For me trucks have always been pesky, irritating occupiers of road space without whom travel would have been so much smoother. They are dirty, spew a lot of smoke, and are all noise and no speed and perpetually breakdown and cause traffic snarls. Finding a new truck was special. I’ve never stared long enough at the front face of a truck. You don’t want to see the face of most things you don’t like right. Truck posteriors with Horn Ok Please messages have inundated my vision, more by default cos one is usually tailing a truck that refuses to give right of way. Coming back to how the ‘new’ truck looked. At the forehead, was a salutation to a certain Goddess, written in bright saffron. Right below, the forehead, much like a human face, was a wide eyed windscreen which gives the driver a large view of the smaller piece...

Recently newspapers have been full of people who’ve died while on flights. Condolences. Having experienced most domestic airlines and what’s offered along with, I’m not surprised. Some examples of the agents of death as one travels 1. Food on Indian Airlines 2. Airhostesses on Indian Airlines- if their looks don’t kill you their glares will 3. Delays on Air Deccan- I just about celebrated two birthdays waiting for one to take off 4.The ‘suraksha niyam’ routine on all airlines- especially that phrase “agar kisi karanvash vimaan ko paani mein utarna pade” (now that’s what you call watering down the worst) 5. The endless wait at conveyor belts to collect one’s luggage even as everyone else seems to be getting theirs faster. 6. Security check and what goes with it- stashing everything into an already overloaded hand baggage and the latest one at Lucknow was about getting the laptop screened separately, not under the guise of a leather cover. The next thing you know they might ask you to pe...

I was in small town North India, Lucknow to be precise, today. This blog has nothing to do with Lucknow exclusively but since the stimulus happened there, I thought the city deserved a mention. I noticed how we seem to have various ways of using our Gods and Goddesses in our day to day lives. The stimulus in question was a wall tile with God’s picture on it. This tile, for the ignorant, was placed so that passers by refrain from painting the town ‘red’ with their paan and other products. So I passed a beaming Goddess Lakshmi, a meditating Lord Shiva and an ever enthusiastic Lord Ganesha all playing divine guards to cheap walls. It seemed to work, for I saw the walls around them spotlessly clean. The tiles were small ones, occupying just one tile space in huge walls. But they seemed to hold enough power to thwart any miscreant. The casualty of course was the atheist wall, which was multicolored and looked like a poor man’s Hussain. God appeared in a different avatar in a cheap rundown h...