Pythagoras and the Football Tournament

The basic tenet of the Pythagorean philosophy was this:

In this life, there are three kinds of men, just as there are three sorts of people who come to the Olympic games. The lowest class is made up of those who come to buy and sell, the next above them are those who compete. Best of all, however, are those who come simply to look on.

The Football Tournament started last Saturday. On Matchday One, I bought Gatorade. (Yes, I like the blue Gatorade. Yes, I know it looks like kerosene.)

I came on as left winger. Had a rather indifferent game, I might add.

From the sidelines, I watched our girls’ team play. We gave them half-time instructions and outlined strategy. As always, they gave us a patient hearing. As always, they went back on the pitch and played exactly as they wanted.

On Matchday One, therefore, I was by turns a consumer, competitor and spectator. Where does that place me in the Pythagorean scheme of the Universe? Pithy aphorisms are all very well in their way, but they tend to oversimplify things. Maybe our man should have stuck to more universal truths like the square on the hypotenuse.

The Mystery of the Locked Loos

There’s nothing quite like a nice, juicy mystery to get the boys’ hostel excited. The last time I remember so many theories flying around was when a kleptomaniac stole cash, cell phones, watches and hard drives worth tens of thousands of rupees. The culprit was eventually discovered and brought to justice. This time, it’s something even more serious.

Since last Sunday, two out of the six loo cubicles in the second floor toilet have been locked. From the inside.

The first theory was, of course, that someone had hanged himself in there. But this explanation had its skeptics. What are the odds that two people would commit suicide on the same day in adjacent cubicles? Very slim. Again, why would anyone choose a loo cubicle as a suicide venue? Loo cubicles have their virtues, but they leave much to be desired in the way of cheerfulness and hygiene.

Anyway, the Suicide School of Thought has now been conclusively proved wrong. There is a narrow gap between the partition wall and the ceiling (hereinafter, “the gap”). Tall people have peered through this gap, and pronounced that there are no bodies. We have groaned in disappointment and moved on to other theories.

The Supernatural School has its own set of explanations. Some believe that the ghost of the Pink Lady, who for a time terrorised residents of the fifth floor, is now plying her trade on the second. Others babble wildly about people flushing themselves down the toilet, spontaneous combustion, dematerialisation and little green men. But no true investigator ever admits a supernatural explanation.

That leaves the field open for the Pragmatic School, who point at the gap (see picture below) as the key to the mystery.

The Gap Theory is indeed plausible. But consider for a moment what our mystery man would have to do to accomplish his feat. He would have to enter a cubicle, lock the door, scale a seven foot wall possibly using the commode and the window ledge for support, wriggle through the gap, drop seven feet down into the next cubicle, lock the door again, scale the wall again, wriggle through the gap again, and eventually drop to safety.

So this gives rise to a new set of questions. Who would do such a thing? And why? Was it one of the cleaners, trying to reduce the floor space he had to cover each day? Was it a late-riser who had to wait in the bathroom queue every morning and now wants everyone else to wait in line? Was it a resident of some other floor, jealous of the incredibly cool second floor, and trying to despoil our standard of living?

The morning queues grow longer, speculation grows more intense, and toilet goers grow ever more frustrated. But the locked doors are telling no tales. Silent and enigmatic, they stay as locked as ever.

Of lawlessness

The course structure of our college has undergone a reshuffling this year and a number of new optionals have been introduced. So our discussions these days often run on the lines of What Subjects Do You Have This Semester. My fellow students, when referring to a subject, often omit the word ‘law’. If you, a clueless layman, overhear one of these conversations and find yourself baffled, please remember that:

When a third year says, “I have Property,” he doesn’t mean that he belongs to the landed gentry.

When someone says, “I have Insurance,” the correct response is not to ask, “For what?”

When a fifth year says, “I had Human Rights yesterday,” he does not mean that a totalitarian regime has snatched away his human rights overnight.

When Manavi says, “I have Competition,” she doesn’t mean that some upstart is challenging her vertiginously high class rank.

But the best is yet to come. The third years have Labour Law next semester. What I’m really waiting for is for some girl to message her boyfriend from inside the classroom: Can’t meet you for lunch. I’m in Labour.

Imho

I recently read number9dream by David Mitchell, which introduced me to the word ‘imho’. But you, dear reader, since you peruse blogs’n’all, probably know already that ‘imho’ is leetspeak for ‘In My Humble Opinion’.

The acronym was probably novel around the time the book was written (2001), but today, a google search for imho throws up 30,100,000 hits. It has been around long enough to even spawn a variant: Imnsho (In My Not So Humble Opinion). But in the world according to Sroyon, a phrase only becomes cool when it has fallen hopelessly out of fashion. Dig that?

So in this post, I shall express three humble opinions. Each will give me a chance to use the magic word.

Imho, the scriptwriters of Friends may have come up with many good things, but Stevie the TV is one of their best inventions. When I have my own flat, I shall name the furniture. Abel the table, Claire the chair, Fred the bed, Hubbard the cupboard, Merton the curtain, Midge the fridge.

Imho, the Juno soundtrack is one of the best ever. Kimya Dawson is awesome, and anyone who hasn’t heard me singing, whistling or listening to Piazza, New York Catcher has probably not met me in the last two weeks. What a song! *goes into raptures*

Imho, girls look prettier in ice-cream parlours.

In other news, a leading psychiatrist has claimed that internet addiction should be recognised as a clinical disorder. What’s more, I appear to have all the symptoms. Fortunately, there’s plenty of help available online.

Of mondegreens and other variants

A mondegreen, as I suppose you already know, is a misinterpretation of a line or lyric in a song, caused by similarity in pronunciation. I am rather unsusceptible to mondegreens because of my habit of obsessively checking song lyrics online. Also, to come up with mondegreens like the famous ‘Michelle mondegreen’, I suppose you need much more imagination than I possess:

Incorrect version: Sunday monkey won’t play piano song
Correct version: Sont les mots qui vont très bien ensemble

I ask you! Paul’s French isn’t that bad.

My favourite mondegreen is from another Beatles song – Hey Bulldog. There’s a line which goes “Some kind of happiness is measured out in miles.” For years I used to think that the last word is ‘smiles’. Taken together with lines like “Some kind of innocence is measured out in years,” ‘smiles’ seems to fit so much better.

Speaking of which, Saha has a lovely post about a personal mondegreen.

Also on the topic of mondegreens, consider the following snatch of conversation, and believe me when I tell you I didn’t make it up:

Prateek Shroff: I have a match with the VC tomorrow.
Lahiri: What! Nandan Nawn is taking extra classes?

This, however, is not technically a mondegreen. There is a word in the English language for it. It’s called deafness.

Of Banana Republics and Natural Justice

British mercenary Simon Mann, one of Africa's last ‘dogs of war’, went on trial in Equatorial Guinea on Tuesday for his role in a failed 2004 coup plot. He faces charges of crimes against the head of state, crimes against the government and crimes against the peace and independence of the state.

The right to an interpreter and translation is guaranteed by Article 440 of Equatorial Guinea’s Penal Procedure Code, as well as Article 14 (3) (f) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. However, the Reuters report on Simon Mann’s trial indicates that proceedings were conducted in Spanish without translation. Mann does not speak Spanish.

I mean I always knew that Equatorial Guinea is no picnic spot, but a trial in a language the defendant doesn’t understand? There is a natural justice principle which states that “justice must not only be done; it must also be seen to be done.” The courts of Equatorial Guinea have evidently never of it.

NPL

All throughout our internships we were pining to get back to college. Then college started, and not even a week had passed before we were all complaining of boredom. It was on a particularly idle afternoon, when we were discussing ways to liven things up, that the idea of the NPL was born. I reproduce below the Sports Committee notice that started it all.

The NUJS Premier League An intra-college zonal T12 cricket tournament This notice is to provide you with our official answers to the frequently asked questions on NPL. It’s the shorter version of the game, so we’ve kept the answers short. Q1: So what is the NPL all about? A: Controversy. A gripping auction of players. Scandal. A spicy weekly newsletter detailing events, real and fictitious. A lot of fun. Q2: What? No cricket? A: Oh, yeah. There will also be some cricket. But we shall endeavour to preserve IPL tradition and ensure that the cricket is all but forgotten in the glare of the attendant hype and controversy. Q3: What’s the format like? A: Twelve overs. Five teams on a zonal basis. Each team shall have five players from its respective zone, and eight players picked through auction. Detailed rules will be issued by the SportsCom tonight. Watch this space. Q4: Is any money involved? A: No real currency is involved in the auction process. Teams will have to pay a nominal entry fee which shall be utilised towards field booking and prize money. Q5: Cheerleaders? A: Honest answer: Alas, no. *wistful sigh* Official answer: Most certainly not. We in the SportsCom are strongly opposed to the vulgar objectification of women. Q6: Won’t the NPL promote divisiveness? A: The SportsCom emphatically condemns any form of regional divisiveness. We urge players to participate in a spirit of sportsmanship and maturity, purely for the love of the game. For further information, contact Bunty, Davis, Kisku, Sarbajeet or Sroyon.

Now the only necessary expenditure for a team is the entry fee of Rs. 2,500. As of today, three days before the tournament begins, the West Zone team has raised Rs. 20,000. The money comes almost entirely from students wanting to be identified as owners of the team. Other teams are not far behind.

The maximum prize money that a team stands to win is Rs. 4,000. Furthermore, the teams each have more than ten ‘owners’, and the proceeds (if any) will be split among all the stakeholders. So the investment far exceeds the expected returns and makes no economic sense whatsoever. People evidently have more cash than they know what to do with.

As one of the originators of the NPL idea, I suppose I should be happy at these developments. In fact, I should probably be looking like this:

Excess cash is never bad for any enterprise. But this wanton squandering seems to have something obscene about it. Wasting money seems almost like an impiety, like throwing away bread. Also, the big money has turned the NPL into something I can no longer identify with. It has taken on a life of its own. You can almost see the dollar signs in its eyes. It is unrecognisable from a trifling diversion dreamed up by five friends on a lazy summer afternoon.

All That You Can't Leave Behind

It was Arthur Schopenhauer who famously said that every parting gives a foretaste of death. My philosophical vision being rather more limited (and less morbid), when the batch senior to us passed out, I got a foretaste not of death, but of the fact that my own days in college are numbered.

This post celebrates the things I love most about hostel life. By its very nature, it will probably be uninteresting to anyone but me. Especially for someone who hasn’t experienced NUJS hostel life and doesn’t know what the hell I’m talking about, it’ll probably be boring to the point of being unreadable. But as Saha says here, it’s been a good trip, and I think it’s important that one acknowledges that.

Daybreak: I take my time over my morning cup of tea. The first batch of tea that they make in the mess is always the best. I say cheery good mornings to fellow early-risers who for some reason all seem to be Tamilians. I like the peace and solitude, but better still I like to listen to Nokia alarms and Windows XP start-up music: the sound of the boys’ hostel waking up.

Morning: Sitting with people like Lahiri, Kisku and the Quaker makes classes not just bearable but fun. They come up with the funniest comments and do the weirdest things. Lahiri practises touch-typing without a keyboard (on my bag to be precise), and drives the Quaker to distraction with his lizard-call imitation. The Quaker punches his own thigh extremely hard from time to time. When classes get too boring, we chant “Su-phol, Su-phol” in an undertone. Suphol is the man who rings the bell.

Afternoon: Reading magazines in the library. I must have read every word of every issue of National Geographic and Time that came out since I joined college. Often, friends congregate; the magazines are forgotten, and we chat and laugh until Tutu Ma’am turns us out. Less frequently, juniors come and ask me for advice, and I do my best to misguide them.

Post-dinner: I say post-dinner, but in point of fact, our adda sessions have been known to continue till daybreak. Favoured accompaniments: Pure Magic and the Beatles. Once we recorded minutes. Topics discussed included the Battle of Taxis in the World War II, relative merits and demerits of the Choco Pyramid and Chocolate Éclairs from Escoffiere, and an extempore speech by Arjun on fan regulators. As Lahiri once wrote, projects submissions, vivas and end-sems are at most week-long events, to be sandwiched between the all-important continuance of adda.

Night: The orange light from the sodium-vapour lamps filters in through my window and casts shadows on the opposite wall. The trees create fuzzy moving shadows; the shadow of the window bars, by contrast, is darker, motionless and solid. It’s a beautiful show.

Then there are those things that can’t be fitted into a typical daily itinerary. Football practice in the morning; the fact that I can just pop over to someone’s room when I’m looking for toothpaste, a cell phone charger, a confidant; watching late night football games with the most dedicated and biased group of spectators ever to follow the sport; and (although this is going to sound majorly nerdy) even the 4 a.m. joint study sessions with Sarbajeet before exams (just after I’ve woken up and before he goes to sleep).

When I was in Bombay recently doing my interminable ten-week internship, I missed hostel much more than I thought I ever would. So when I got back, I resolved to enjoy, for the remaining one year, those bits of hostel life that I had hitherto loved without noticing.

I began this post with a quote; I’ll end it with another which is about reading, but applies equally well to hostel life. This is from To Kill a Mockingbird. “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”

Harper Lee is a wiser and kinder philosopher than Schopenhauer.

Two Lists

FOUR THINGS I LIKE ABOUT BOMBAY

1. MARINE DRIVE: *long dreamy sigh*

Me sitting on Marine Drive

2. LOCAL TIME: The solar time in Bombay is just over an hour behind Calcutta. That meant I could get up later by the clock, and still catch the dawn – the best part of the day.

3. THE COLONIAL ARCHITECTURE: Gothic, art deco, neo-classical – you see it in all in South Bombay. And it’s not just the public buildings: some of the older private houses in Cuffe Parade are equally pretty, with wooden facades, sloping roofs and flowers in the window (such a lovelyday / I’m gladyoufeel the same). I spent hours taking long walking tours and gawking at the buildings, leaving an army of bemused pedestrians and irate motorists in my wake.

A building in the Fort Area where I did a due diligence

4. LOCAL TRAINS: No matter how rich you are, you can’t make traffic move faster. So in Bombay, there is only one human institution that makes a Bandra pub-hopper the equal of a Dharavi scavenger, that makes a Koli fisherwoman the equal of a Dalal Street investor. That institution is the local train.


FOUR THINGS I DON’T LIKE ABOUT BOMBAY

1. MODES OF ADDRESS: The two common methods that the natives use to attract people’s attention in Bombay are (a) shouting “Boss” and (b) making a squeaky whistling sound produced by puckering the lips and drawing the breath inward. For some reason, I find both of these intensely annoying. The latter sounds positively obscene.

2. NAMES OF STREETS AND CHOWKS: Bombay municipal authorities suffer from a perpetual frenzy of renaming. Almost all the roads and chowks are named after obscure people, and are therefore difficult to pronounce and impossible to remember. Fortunately, the new names remain on paper, while the old names, like ETEC diarrhoea and the sacred Vedas, are orally transmitted. There are therefore two Bombays – the road-map Bombay, and the Bombay that lives in people’s memories.

See what I'm talking about?

3. NO ROLLS: This is one of the things I missed most about Calcutta as a city. Bombay has its own version called the Frankie, which is a pale imitation of the real thing. A kind of roll is also sold in Muslim eateries which is a delicacy in its own right. But the absence of the roll from Bombay street-food leaves a gaping vacuum.

4. MULTIPLE BUS STOPS: This is the civic administration’s little prank upon the citizens. See Anuj’s blog for more details.

A BEST bus wondering where it ought to halt

Media Analysis

Many months ago, I designed a poster inviting volunteers for our inter-law school sports fest, Invicta. It featured a parody of the Lord Kitchener recruitment poster (The SportsCom WANTS YOU), and a few lines of copy, most of which escapes my memory at the moment.

Aneek had complimented me on the artwork and the concept of the poster (yes, we’re jobless enough to subject Sports Committee posters to media analysis). But he expressed reservations about one sentence, which ran thus: While you’re standing here reading this notice, people are running around looking for sponsors, booking fields, and doing all kinds of cool stuff.

“It’s a golden rule that an advertisement should not take a jibe at the product it is trying to sell,” I remember Aneek telling me.

I agree with his principle as a general rule, but I still think that if the target audience is sufficiently mature, an ad can work quite well, even though it pokes gentle fun at the product it is trying to sell. Heck, it might even work better than an ad which eulogises a product in clichéd ways.

An ad I saw the other day reminded me of Aneek’s advice. McDonald’s has introduced wi-fi at some of its outlets. The advertisement for the facility features two people typing on laptops. Speech blurbs contain the text of their IM conversation:

John: Hey!!
Mira: ssup??
John: nm. n u??
Mira: :) nm

My first impression on reading this was that McDonald’s copywriters must have about as much imagination as a doorstop. Far be it for me to suggest that my own GTalk transcripts run on Aristotelian lines, but surely John and Mira had more to say to each other?

But halfway through my glass of Iced Tea, another thought struck me. Was the ad, in defiance of Aneek’s golden rule, consciously parodying the pointlessness and vacuity of modern-day modes of conversation? I’ll probably never know.

In other news, Abdul Karim Telgi has vehemently criticised Mudrank, the movie based on his stamp paper scam. In particular, he has criticised the item number by Rakhi Sawant. “The item number in the film is so obscene that I had to close my eyes,” says the politician.

Here is a man who has defrauded the exchequer of thousands of crores of rupees, and his sensibilities are shocked by a flash of midriff and bare thighs. Indiyaah!

A Little Morning Music

One morning about two weeks ago, I woke to the sound of someone whistling Spring from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The first thing that struck me was how wonderfully melodious the whistling was. The second thing that struck me was the incongruity of whistling Spring when it was thirty-three degrees in the shade. The third thing that struck me (for by then I had left my bed and stepped out into the corridor where the whistling was coming from) was a question: How in the world had a sweeper picked up a tune from a western classical concerto?

I’ve heard him on several mornings since then. He empties waste-bins and dabs at spots on the floor, while the music ripples and trills and arpeggioes with the wild, free grace of birdsong. Almost always, he whistles popular Bollywood tunes. The Spring Concerto appears to be the only classical piece in his repertoire. But there still remained the puzzling question of where he had picked it up.

Like Father Brown in The Point of a Pin, I solved this problem in my sleep. I was lying in bed vaguely wondering if it was time to get up yet, when through my layers of drowsiness, I heard that tune from the Spring Concerto floating in, not from the corridor, but through the window. And it was an electronic monophony, a pale shadow of the vivaciously whistled melody I’d become accustomed to hearing.

I rushed to the window. A car which stays parked below our hostel was reversing, and this was its warning music. The sweeper was not, after all, a closet connoisseur of Western classical.

“High” culture permeates our world in the strangest of ways.

How We Are All Losing It

Lahiri, like Dill, is a fellow whose head teems with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies. On the way to office last week, we saw a taxi – a Fiat Uno, unlike the Fiat Premier Padminis which overrun Bombay roads. On the back screen of the car was a sticker saying “Same Fare Taxi”. It was meant to assure the world that nobody would have to shell out extra fare for the privilege of travelling in a more advanced make of car. This much was obvious to all of us, but not to Lahiri. “Maybe it means that the taxi will charge the same fare, regardless of your destination,” Lahiri suggested. The next few minutes were spent in an interesting and pointless discussion on the possible ramifications and commercial viability of such a scheme. I think nine continuous weeks of law firm work are taking their toll: we are all starting to lose it.

If further proof is required, witness the slogan Mrunmayee and I came up with at lunchtime the other day: “Either you’re with us, (slight pause, sheepish look) or you’re not with us.” We both laughed our silly heads off, and repeated it to everyone in sight, but no one else found it funny. In fact, even I don’t find it that funny now. Oh dear.

Beautiful People

On Wednesday, Justine Henin, aged only 25 and ranked number one in the world, announced her retirement from competitive tennis at a press conference in her native Belgium. Her decision came as a shock to the tennis world, and left me wondering why it is that the sportspersons I love most have to leave the stage in such heartbreaking ways. This post is a tribute to my three favourite sportspersons.

Henin, at her best, would play her tennis in a different world from that of her opponents – a world without sweat or haste, where all is elegance and grace. Old-school tennis fans who swear by Borg and Chris Evert are often heard to lament the passing of the ‘golden age’ of tennis. Carbon-fibre rackets and advanced training techniques, we are told, have robbed the game of much of its beauty. Sometimes, you see a slugfest of a tennis match, and you feel inclined to believe them. And then, you watch Justine, and you know that all is well with tennis.

Jonty Rhodes, unlike my other two favourite sportspersons, has never been regarded as one of the real greats of his game. He did not amass centuries with the bat, or demolish batting orders with the ball. But often in a match, he would take a catch, stop a boundary or effect a run-out in such a manner that, in my eyes, all else that can be done on a cricket field would pale in comparison.

For me, Rhodes flying through the air to take a catch at backward point has always been one of the greatest sights in the world of sport. With an eleven-year-old’s enthusiasm, I strove to emulate him in gully cricket. As a surface, asphalt is much more unforgiving than grass, but with every bruised elbow and every torn trouser knee, I imagined that I was somehow closer to my idol.

In the 2003 World Cup against Kenya, Maurice Odumbe hit the ball in the air toward Rhodes. Rhodes dropped the catch and in the process broke his hand. The injury effectively ruled him out of the rest of the tournament. Rhodes never played for South Africa again. The greatest fielder in the world had left the game on a dropped catch.

Jonty Rhodes took 139 catches in Tests and ODIs combined. Many of them were outrageous, unforgettable. But the Rhodes legacy is at the same time simpler and much greater than anything that mere statistics can convey. Jonty Rhodes, quite simply, made fielding cool.

Zinedine Zidane is the third great artist to whom this post pays humble tribute. Simon Barnes described his style most appositely: “Always severe and serious, but with that strange sense of detachment. It was as if he were well aware of the absurdity of football and, for that matter, of life. All the same, he could still see no point in giving these absurdities anything less than his best.”

Zidane was the closest thing to a complete footballer that I have seen. He left us many great memories to savour. He orchestrated beautiful moves, and his double drag-back had the dreamy beauty of ballet. Against Brazil in the 2006 World Cup semi-final, he stamped his class on the game in a manner I have never seen before or since from any footballer at any level. In the final, he chipped Buffon from the penalty spot, and I remember gasping and whooping at the audacity of the man.

Considering all that, it is tragic that he will, above all, be remembered for a head butt. Zidane’s career as a player ended on a red card, when it could so easily have ended with the greatest prize of all. They did not even let him attend the awards ceremony.

Henin’s farewell left me sad and surprised, Jonty’s made me miserable for days, but Zidane’s brought tears to my eyes. L’Equipe asked: “It was your last image as a soccer player. What do we tell our children and all those for whom you were a living example?”

Tell them, I say, that Zidane made mistakes. But tell them also that he played the game with such grace that it took your breath away. Tell them that Zidane was human. The children will understand.

I will always remember Zidane for all the good things: his wonderfully Gallic sense of style, that volley in Glasgow, those headers in Madrid, as well as the modesty and humility that he brought to the game. Because Zidane was a hero to me, and a hero deserves no less.

The Cafeteria Ketchup Conspiracy

The movie Kate and Leopold introduced me to this delightful little rhyme:

You shake and shake the ketchup bottle;
None will come, and then a lot’ll.

Such a thing is impossible at the cafeteria of the Law Firm. Every time, and I mean every single time you want ketchup, the bottle is almost, but never entirely, empty. You upend it and wait patiently as the last dregs of ketchup wend their weary way down. You shake, slap and curse the bottle. If you are patient and vigorous enough, you are eventually rewarded with a blob of bottom-dwelling ketchup, in consistency not unlike alluvium.

How can the bottle have the exact same amount of ketchup every time we visit the cafeteria? I have given much thought to the question, and there seems to be only one solution. The stingy rascals who run the pantry wish to prevent people from overusing ketchup. To ensure this, they have, at all times, two bottles of ketchup: one full and one empty. Before mealtimes, they pour a minute amount from the full bottle into the empty one, and set the latter on the table. The other bottle is returned to a secret place, whose location is known only to the evil Pantry Master.

I admit that it takes a devious mind to uncover such a conspiracy, but to dream it up calls for a mind which is positively diabolical. Anyhow, the Cafeteria Ketchup Conspiracy has been uncovered and laid bare. You read it here first.

Miracles

At the law firm where I’m interning, one of the computers in the upstairs library has a Perpetual Calendar. If you enter a date from any year, it’ll give you the day of the month. Some members of the library staff are fascinated by the program, and yesterday, one of them wanted to show it off to me. I for my part wanted to explain to him the elegant mathematical principles on which it works, but I caught myself just in time.

I refrained because I remembered an incident from my school days. A friend of mine was complaining that her birthday never fell on a Sunday. I told her that this was impossible, but she persisted with her claim, so I tried to prove to her that God or the Gregorian Calendar were not biased against her.

The proposition which I was trying to prove follows directly from elementary principles of modular arithmetic. The proof should be evident to any reader with a basic background in number theory.

But within three minutes of launching into my explanation, I could tell that I had lost her interest. In fact, she was giving me that disconcerting “What a freak you are” look that I sometimes get from people. An exercise book that I was using at the time had a sort of perpetual calendar, so I picked it up and tried to use it as a teaching aid. It was then that she commented that I was spoiling the magic of the perpetual calendar by explaining its working.

Yesterday’s incident made me think about her comment, and I am convinced now that she was wrong. A perpetual calendar is wonderful, but more wonderful still are the principles of modular arithmetic on which it is based. And most wonderful of all is the undying curiosity of the human mind that drives us to take apart cars, radios and atoms to find out what just what it is that makes them tick. As Brutha said about finding an aquifer in the desert, “just because you can explain it doesn't mean it’s not still a miracle.”

One Month Down the Line

Today, The World According to Sroyon turns one month old.

April 1 is a strange day on which to be born. April 1 marks the commencement of the fiscal year. More pertinently, April 1 is All Fools’ Day: a day for frivolity and horseplay. April 1 is also a day whose history is riddled with mistakes. In 1873, the RMS Atlantic strayed 20 kilometres off course, ran onto rocks, and sank off the coast of Nova Scotia, killing 562 people. In 1944, US bombers strayed from German airspace into neutral Switzerland, and mistakenly bombed the sleepy town of Schaffhausen. This is a most disturbing trend. I will refrain from drawing inferences.

Nine posts in a month is not bad. There appears also to be a pleasant randomness in subject matter – among other things, I have written about beggars, free dinners, angler fish, shade cards and buses. What is more, there is actually a small group of people who claim to read the blog. Out of the goodness of their heart, some even go to the extent of leaving comments, and when this happens, I startle my co-interns with my ecstatic shouts when I check my mail in the morning and see the notifications (O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! He chortled in his joy.) My co-interns are all non-bloggers, and do not Understand.

I too was once counted among their ranks, but as of today, I have been a blogger for one whole month. And I still can’t think of neat conclusions.

4-0908T

There’s a shade of paint called Bruised Lilac. I don’t know which paint company came up with it, but it seems like a clear indication that they had a poet in their Department for Nomenclature of Shades, or whatever it is that paint companies have.

Considering how easy it is to come up with poetic names for colours, it seems to me that paint companies do a deplorable job most of the time. Berger Paints for example has this beautiful shade of green.


For me, it evokes pine trees on a hillside on a foggy morning – a damp, cool shade, sort of fuzzy around the edges. They could have called it Misty Pine, or Smoky Cypress. Instead, they call it 4-0908T. I’m lost for words.

It must be remembered, of course, that Berger is the company that came up with the obnoxious pink and blue Taj Mahal for their ad campaign, so I suppose they don’t know any better. But 4-0908T still rankles.

In the world according to Sroyon, paint companies would not give names to shades that sound like an Asimov robot or a computer virus. In their Department for Nomenclature of Shades, they would employ (at a good salary) young poets trying to make their mark. And with luck and a little imagination, reading a shade card could be as much of a pleasure as looking at one.

Forgetfulness and BEST Buses

I got up on a BEST bus the other day which had a TV screen showing live video footage of the inside of the bus. If you were sitting in the right place, you could see yourself on the screen. The picture quality was bad, but the screen was the cynosure of all eyes. Grown-ups were covertly adjusting their hair. Children were doing the only sensible thing: smile, wave and make faces.

Then, abruptly, the screen went blank. People left off looking at the wonderful world inside the bus, and focussed their attention on the even more wonderful world outside. But the dark screen was a good reflector, and the interior of the bus was sufficiently bright. You could still see the inside of the bus. And the picture quality was slightly better.

In other news, this is the third time I left my shower-gel and shampoo in the shower cubicle in the hostel. All three times, the cleaners have found them and deposited them in the administrative office. Each time, I have got them back. The God of Absentmindedness is too kindhearted to be a good teacher.

The Traffic Symphony

The hostel room where I’m staying in Bombay directly overlooks Sir J. J. Road. This is one of the busiest and most important roads in Bombay - a kind of backbone of the city. All day and all night, huge numbers of vehicles pass underneath our windows. The noise is continuous, unrelenting.

Noise, did I say? Music would be a more apposite word. If I stick my head out of the window, close my eyes and wave my arms in the night air, I can almost imagine I am conducting an orchestra. Taxis, trucks, buses and motorbikes ply up and down, allegro con brio. Lorry engines rumble in bass; brakes squeal in falsetto. A pathbreaking avant-garde composition: The Traffic Symphony for a million taxis and trucks.

We are lulled to sleep by the music of the city; the same music greets our ears when we wake up. I have grown so used to it that when we went for a weekend trip to the seaside village of Nagaon, the silence at night was deafening. Even more unsettling were the occasional howls and cries from dogs, owls and other assorted Creatures of the Night. We stayed awake till 4.30 in the morning, chatting and telling ghost stories. After that, I did fall asleep, but by that time I was so sleepy I could have comfortably dozed off at a rock concert.

So much for the peace and quiet of the countryside. Gimme the bustling city any day. The sound of a million people noisily going about their business is the sound I want to fall asleep to.

What a Girl Wants

When a male angler fish matures, his digestive system degenerates, making him incapable of feeding independently. This drives him to find a female angler fish. When he does find a female, he bites into her skin, and releases an enzyme that fuses the pair down to the blood-vessel level. The male then atrophies into nothing more than a pair of gonads. This extreme sexual dimorphism ensures that when the female is ready to spawn, she has a readily-available mate. Not to mention the ultimate guarantee against infidelity.

Hey There Delilah

Hey there Delilah / What’s it like in New York City? / I’m a thousand miles away / But girl, tonight you look so pretty / Yes you do / Times Square can’t shine as bright as you / I swear it’s true

I discovered yesterday that the song is not being sung by a guy in England to his girl in New York, as I’d initially thought. (Yes, I know you’re thinking “What kind of idiot would think that?” But I’m very clueless about distances in general). I made this important discovery when I looked up the distance between Calcutta and Mumbai, and found that it is all of 1227 miles. Hang on, I thought, so London-New York must be much greater, right? In fact, the distance between London and New York is no less than 3456 miles. So the guy’s probably somewhere in the United States as well. Which makes it all better somehow.

A thousand miles seems pretty far / But they’ve got planes and trains and cars...

All this reminded me of a story that Fenchurch relates to Arthur Dent in “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish”.

When I was a kid I had this picture hanging over the foot of my bed. It was one of those pictures that children are supposed to like, but don’t. Full of endearing little animals doing endearing things, you know? There was a raft with rabbits, and assorted rats and owls. There may even have been a reindeer. And a boy was sitting on the raft.
The picture worried me, I must say. There was an otter swimming in front of the raft, and I used to lie awake at night worrying about this otter having to pull the raft, with all these wretched animals on it who shouldn’t even be on a raft, and the otter had such a thin tail to pull it with I thought it must hurt pulling it all the time. Worried me. Not badly, but just vaguely, all the time.
Then one day - and remember I’d been looking at this picture every night for years - I suddenly noticed that the raft had a sail. Never seen it before. The otter was fine, he was just swimming along.
It was just such a sudden revelation, years of almost unnoticed worry just dropping away, like taking off heavy weights, like black and white becoming colour, like a dry stick suddenly being watered. The sudden shift of perspective that says ‘Put away your worries, the world is a good and perfect place. It is in fact very easy.’

Now I’d read the book at the cynical age of fifteen, and I’d thought, “What a stupid story! What a load of fuss about a silly imaginary otter!” And this post is a load of fuss about a silly song about an imaginary girl. But at least I know what Fenchurch meant.

Two Beggars

Last Sunday near Victoria Terminus, I saw the most remarkable beggar I have ever seen in my life. He wore lipstick, an orange cap, and a black, orange and green windcheater. His teeth were in a state of abominable decay. His nails were painted in different colours. On his back was a spectacularly colourful patchwork sack; a mobile phone dangled from his neck.

Some little distance down Threadneedle Street, upon the left-hand side, there is, as you may have remarked, a small angle in the wall. There sat Neville St. Clair, alias Hugh Boone. A shock of orange hair, a pale face disfigured by a horrible scar, which, by its contraction, had turned up the outer edge of his upper lip, a bulldog chin, and a pair of very penetrating dark eyes: these were enough to mark him out from amid the common crowd of mendicants. But Neville St. Clair appeared in Conan Doyle’s fiction, set in bleak, grey London. In colourful South Bombay, obviously, stronger measures had been called for.

There’s No Such Thing as a Free Dinner

Around 8.30 in the evening, on days when there’s not too much work, we interns face an interesting choice. If we stay back for an hour, we can order out at any restaurant of our choice. The dinner will be billed to the law firm. We will also be entitled to claim cab fare. If we leave, no candy.

Every afternoon, visions of free pizzas and biryani float before our eyes. Every afternoon, Lahiri and I promise ourselves that tonight we shall be resolute. Every evening, as soon as the opportunity presents itself, we unceremoniously slip out.

We buy dinner, and go to Marine Drive, where we meet up with friends who are interning at other law firms in Bombay. We eat our packed dinner at the seafront, and enjoy the surf in our faces. We discuss moots, shopping, Wordsworth, swivel chairs, and many other unimportant things. We inhale the smell of the sea (which we compare favourably to that of Lahiri’s feet). We laugh a lot. When we’ve polished off the last of the chicken, we use Abira’s hand sanitiser. Just before midnight, we go home.

What can explain this economically inefficient behaviour, especially on the part of me and Lahiri - two dyed-in-the-wool devotees of free food? By doing what we choose to do, I know that we forgo our free dinner. I know that we spend anything from Rs. 40 to 60 on a dinner that is not a patch on what we would have got at the firm. And I know that tonight, unless some hard-hearted associate forces us to stay back late, we will slip out. Again.

Hasty Clarification

Okay, I should read gtalk transcripts carefully before I post them on a public forum. My first post carries an acknowledgment from Saha that my farts are the smelliest around. That is sure to raise a few eyebrows.

For the uninitiated, he was referring to the Fascinating Assortments of Random Trivia (F.A.R.T.s for short) that I periodically mail to some of my friends.

At least, that’s what I hope he was referring to.

Three Reasons for not Having a Blog

There are three very good reasons I can think of for not starting a blog:

1. It seems presumptuous to imagine that people will be the least bit interested in what I insignificant thing did and what stupid thing I thought.

2. There is a distinct possibility that I will lose interest in the blog and abandon it a few months down the line.

3. I think that if I ever write anything that’s meaningful or good, it is the private entries in my diaries and notebooks, written for my eyes only. The moment I write for public consumption, I try to sound funny, or intelligent, or erudite. I try to be something I’m not. In a word, I mess up.

Against that, there was just one reason why I did start a blog.

Excerpt from gtalk conversation with my esteemed friend Rahul Saha (31 March 2008):

Saha: ok..ppl are asking me if u have a blog...if not it is requested by many u start one and blog the FARTS especially
me: very nice! who are these admirers? :D
Saha: visa bala and me that i know of...but ther are others i am sure...ur farts are universally acknowledged as the smelliest arnd
me: hehe. thing is, i'm rather protective of what i write. i know it's silly, but i don't start a blog because i feel it might be ignored by people
Saha: fat chance...just put it up and judge for urself
me: and i probably wouldn't really get much of a positive return if the blog was read by diff people, while it'd be depressing to be simply ignored
Saha: stop this utilitarian bullshit
me: okay, lemme think it over
Saha: i leave it to u...any free dinners yet?

And we moved on to other topics. I have always been a sucker for flattery.

Edit: FARTs stands for Fascinating Assortments of Random Trivia, which I used to send to a mailing list of friends.