Portrait of a criminal as a young thug

He is five feet and eleven inches tall, hundred and three kgs heavy, with sweaty arms and a glistening moustache, shoulder length black hair oiled and tied into a small ponytail. He has a wild demeanour and suspicious eyes.

Beyond that, in his twenty-seven years he has piled up a tall and ugly police record: a multitude of arrests, from petty theft and battery to rape, narcotics offences - and all this without a single felony conviction, being officially guilty of nothing more than what any spirited citizen might commit in some drunken or violent moment of animal weakness.

Word of caution:

If you happen to get in an argument with our young criminal in the making - your chances of emerging unmaimed depends on the number of heavy-weight allies you can muster in the time it takes to smash a beer bottle. In this league, sportsmanship is for old liberals and naive fools.

When Joan Didion said, ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live’, I think she meant - the stories we delude ourselves with.

I used to think that if I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning, I’d hammer through the noon and end it with a Thud! Whack! Clanggg! before I hit the sack. But once I had a hammer, I realised I wasn’t hammering as much I said I would.

A road-tripper’s recipe to beach-hopping: Sri Lanka south coast

Nay-sayers said it couldn’t be done. Well-wishers said it probably shouldn’t be done. The fact that the mercury would rise to its zenith high in the peak summer didn’t stop us from travelling to the southern coast of Sri Lanka last month. After a rickety eight hour bus-ride that saw us descending into the plains from the hill country, we reached the bustling sea-board town of Weligama. If you are travelling along the same route, keeping a day in hand for the Yala National Park would seem like the most obvious choice. However, short of money and time – my fiancé and I headed straight for the holy trinity of sun, sea and sand. It would be safe to say that any road trip involves the road (duh!), a pair of trusty-ish wheels and at least one companion (who you will most likely fall out with at least once a day. But regardless the offense these silly skirmishes that start with ‘let’s stop for a cola’ have a knack to smooth itself out soon enough). Like life, which’s about the journey and n...

Other Names #3: Brojesh

The best way to describe Brojesh is to think of him as an old, inhospitable house at a part of town that had seen its peak more than half a century ago. It has no claim to architectural beauty yet remarkable in its thickness of walls and the fewness of windows, most of which has been grated over time. It was built to last. Without talents. Without arrogance. Read about Project Other Names here .

Other Names #12: Kaamkar Das

The rain pelted incessantly for six years and five months and twenty-two days over the city of Someplace. There were periods of drizzle when people stepped out but soon, they began to realise that the respite was only a forecast for more rain. At first life came to a standstill and then boredom set in. People stopped going out altogether so establishments had no reason to stay open. The public gardens were flooded and turned into veritable marshlands with crocodiles and snakes which put an end to walking. A thick layer of moss covered the asphalt under the waterlogged streets that made cars and motorbikes skid off their paths and often into death. People received their weekly supplies of grains from a government helicopter that came twice a week to drop sealed packets onto the terraces. Time stretched into infinite seconds over Someplace and its people came to be characterised by their glassy eyes, wet yellowish skin and a perennial dry crust around their mouths. Kaamkar Das was one of...

Other Names #4 and #5: Ahana and Asha

Other Names #4 Ahana belonged to an aristocratic family. But as a rule, Bengalis think more of influential friends, than birth. Ahana was lucky to be esteemed and even loved by people of consequence in society, whose example was followed by others of lesser means. It seem hardly necessary to remark that her family worries and anxiety had little or no foundation, or that her imagination increased them to an absurd degree. But if you had a wart on your nose or forehead, you imagine the whole world is looking at it, sniggering behind your back. Because you can’t see past the puss-filled elephant sitting on your face. Doubtless, Ahana was considered ‘eccentric’ in society, but she was nonetheless esteemed; the pity was that she was ceasing to believe in that esteem. Other Names #5 “I’m going through a phase. And I’m awfully glad it’ll all be over in a couple of days”, Asha whispered to herself. For a fleeting moment the weight slid off her shoulders and she felt a breath of fresh ...

Other Names #10: Mrs. Ghosh

She sat on a wooden bench facing an empty communal pool, contemplating its green chlorinated waters, with her hand resting on the silver handle of her cane and thinking about death. The first time Mrs. Ghosh had visited Dolphin Square, she was no more than five herself. Her father, a district magistrate in the Calcutta high court and a skilled swimmer himself had unceremoniously doused her in the pool. It was the first of many days that would become her entire adolescent years. The pool was emptied and cleaned once every year in the winter. There had been numerous deaths at the bottom of the diving board but all of Calcutta’s best swimmers frolicked to the murky green pools to compete with children from nearby slums who inevitably turned out to be stronger and swifter in the district championships. Every second Sunday of the month, young people who couldn’t afford the membership fee of the government run swim club, competed against each other to earn their place by merit. It afforded t...

Three salad dressings with a side of honesty

Salads. The healthy-and-mighty of all meals. The snooty accompaniment to a glass of rosé. The veritable rainbow on your plate. In Fran Lebowitz’s words, a salad is not a meal – it is a style. Well, as long as ‘style’ includes a fair amount of mud under one’s fingernails – I couldn’t agree more with Fran. Sure, it’s fashionable to eat a salad – but there’s a certain panache to going down on all fours in wet mud, rummaging through fresh lettuce pods every morning and wondering what you’re going to dress them in. While it’s far from the fashion statement that salad has come to symbolise, growing your own food definitely is a style of its own. There are many categories of salad snobs – the ingredient minimalist, the chop-it-right evangelists and the brigade of dressing-goes-first, but the only consensus between the salad factions is that you don’t actually need packaged dressing. A homemade vinaigrette made from basic ingredients lives just as happily on your refrigerator door, not to ...

Footnotes from college and my holiday in Istanbul that has nothing to do with the former

The following is best enjoyed with food or beverage that's a tad bit sour, bitter or whatever seasoning that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Besides teaching me calculus and semi-conductors that have been of no future consequence, the four years at an engineering college furnished me with an elementary knowledge of scientific thinking. I was glad to learn that the minds of people (themselves a product of natural causes) was a function of the brain subject to the laws of cause and effect, like any other part of their body. And that these laws were the same as those that governed the movements of star and atom. I exulted at the thought that the universe was no more than a vast machine in which every event was determined by a preceding event so that nothing could be other than what it was. These conceptions not only appealed to my dramatic instinct; they filled me with a sense of liberation. It gave me such satisfaction to learn that the Earth was a speck of mud whir...

Other Names #11: Aul Singh

It was nine o’clock, while Aul Singh was having breakfast on the terrace of The Kumaon hotel under a bright sun, a large fold of the glacier in the Himalayas of the western Kuman region broke free and rolled down the mountainside, raising a white cloud of ice and rubble that blew across the valley where the hotel was located, with such force that it turned the great entrance window to dust. It was like dynamite exploding. Panic spread across all five floors of The Kumaon hotel. No one was seriously hurt except a few guests in the lobby who were cut by the hailstorm of glass. But when the crane picked through the rubble at a road nearby, they uncovered a curious object. It was a seven metre long tear-shaped block of ice. When Aul Singh first saw the black and white grainy picture in the newspaper, he sensed a dark form inside. He had no doubt that it was protecting something inside. Since the beginning of adolescence when Aul Singh had begun to be aware of his premonitions, they ...

MADTROTTER

Search This Blog