Strangeness

Hilarious things happen everyday at drama rehearsals, but they’re only funny in a you-had-to-be-there kind of way, or even a you-had-to-be-a-South-Point-student kind of way. But the public pleads for “more ridiculous posts.” (More posts which are ridiculous? Posts which are more ridiculous? Anybody’s guess.) So here’s a story of a few years’ vintage.

There was a guy in our college by the name of Rook, who was very popular among students and teachers alike. We liked him too, though we could see no obvious reason for his popularity: he seemed to possess none of the usual qualities which make people popular in college. For this reason, we called him “the strangely popular boy Rook.”

One day Arjun Sarkar and I saw something strange in college – I forget what.

“Strange,” I said.
“Very strange,” said Arjun Sarkar.
“As strange as the strangely popular boy Rook,” said I.
“As strange as the popularity of the strangely popular boy Rook,” corrected Arjun Sarkar.

I get a kick out of correcting people on pedantic points, and this was a correction I’d have been mighty proud of.

Where can I find my family panda?

For Hindus, the ancient city of Haridwar is a place of pilgrimage and a traditional site for death rites. Brahmin priests at Haridwar maintain genealogy registers of Hindu families, sometimes stretching back twenty generations or more.

A pilgrim who visits Haridwar approaches his designated family-priest, who records his visit and any births, marriages and deaths that may have occurred since the last visit by a family member. But before that, he must find his family-priest. So a very common question at Haridwar, translated into English, goes: “Where can I find my family panda?”

Myshkin thinks this would be a good name for a backpacker’s account of travels in India, and I think he’s right.

Street Chess

Every evening, people sit on the road divider at Gariahat and play chess. This is one of the busiest intersections in the city. Horns blare and brakes squeal as a middle-aged lady, with two children in tow, nimbly dodges oncoming traffic, eyes fixed on the brightly-lit shop window across the road. Around them, thousands of people are noisily going about their business, but the chess-players are in a different zone.

I have been observing the chess-players of Gariahat for a few years, and I had formed many far-fetched but fascinating theories about them. But one day I decided to trade speculation for certitude, and I enquired, and I came to know about the GCC.

Beckham at Old Trafford

Yesterday Manchester United knocked an inept AC Milan team out of the Champions League. But the man of the moment was the ageing David Beckham, returning to Old Trafford for the first time since 2003, but as a Milan player.

I was rather biased against Beckham in the early days because of all the media hype around him. But opinions change with time, and yesterday, I did not much care whether Milan won or lost; all I wanted was a goal from a Beckham free-kick, or better still, a goal from a Beckham cross.

It almost happened too. Beckham came on in the 74th minute, but still created some opportunities which may have been converted if not for the sheer mediocrity of the Milan forwards. And deep into stoppage time, he sent in his best cross of the match, a cross such as can only come from the right foot of David Beckham. A thing of beauty, a perfect cross – and with almost the last kick of the match, Inzaghi put it wide.

Football is so sad sometimes.

Connoisseurship

Cellar door is often claimed to be the most beautiful phrase in English. Geoff Nunberg, in a recent post, set out to explore the reasons for its appeal. Among other reasons, he suggests: “claiming that cellar door is the most beautiful expression of English permits you to make a show of your aesthetic refinement.” It gives the aesthete “an occasion to display a capacity to discern beauty in the names of prosaic things. It’s a classic ploy of connoisseurship.”

Sometimes, when picking my favourite this or that, I settle for an offbeat choice, and then I wonder if it was an honest choice or a ploy of connoisseurship. One such example is my favourite food/beverage served on the Indian Railways.

The Konkan Railway is run by the KRC, a subsidiary of the Indian Railways, and it has quite a few quirks. But the most charming of them all is their custom of serving a cup of hot milk just before lights-out. The milk is the perfect temperature and has the perfect amount of sugar. And when you’re in a dark compartment speeding along the Konkan coast, sitting next to the window and sipping on a cup of hot milk somehow seems like the perfect thing to do.

In itself, a cup of hot milk would not rank higher in my preference than, say, an egg chop. On the Konkan Railway, the attendant circumstances make it special. But still, hot milk may strike you as a strange choice, and you are free to decide whether this is a ploy of connoisseurship; as I said, I am not sure myself. And I must admit that I have never travelled first class on the Rajdhani Express, and have consequently not tried their legendary roast chicken.

However, there can be no doubt about the worst food/beverage served on the Indian Railways. That honour incontestably goes to the Veg. Biryani.

Wildflower

This is not a wildflower, despite the post title.
It is a plastic flower.
Realistic, but plastic.
Magnify and you will see.
The texture of the petals gives it away.

What was your first impression of the image?
Did the text spoil it for you?

School Exhibition Stories

Our school exhibition was held earlier this month and, as tends to happen at anything organized by our school, things got a little surreal.

One morning I went to school to conduct play rehearsals and found the auditorium locked because of some miscommunication about rehearsal timings. I was running around trying to sort this out, when my class nine English teacher caught me and dragged me into a nearby classroom. Some kids were rehearsing a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the exhibition’s English Literature room, and my teacher wanted me to give them acting tips. So one minute I was walking upstairs wondering how to get the auditorium unlocked, the next I was instructing a thirteen-year old Titania in the finer points of serenading a donkey.

The exhibition was still a few days away, so from here, things could only get weirder. Sure enough, a few days later I woke up to find two high school kids in our drawing room. One was heartily tucking into chicken salad from our fridge while the other constructed a Pascal’s triangle out of colourful cups. Why they chose to do this in our house – as opposed to their own houses or indeed in school – is still not entirely clear to me.

At the exhibition itself, a teacher set fire to the Chemistry room while demonstrating the dancing sodium experiment, and a maths prodigy tried to interest casual visitors in his project with the immortal line, “Ki bolchhen didi, apni polynomial equationer ekta root theke shob kota root bar korte chan na?” (What do you say didi, from just one root, don’t you want to find out all the roots of this polynomial equation?)

But my favourite story is that of the little girl pictured on the right. She was demonstrating Bernoulli’s Principle through an experiment, and this was her version of the principle: “When the air flows with a very high speed, pressure doesn’t have the time to fall on that place.”

Hat tip to Srijata for the quotes, and to Deyasini for the second photo.

Film Photography

The advantages of digital photography over film photography are so obvious and so numerous that I won’t even bother to list them out. But film photography has its merits too. Because the marginal cost of an exposure is relatively high, film cameras teach you economy; because they don’t offer the luxuries of instant review and multiple attempts, film cameras teach you perfection.

Manual focusing often gives better results than auto-focus, but most digital cameras have auto-focus and it is hard to resist the temptation of using it; my film camera, a manual-focus SLR, leaves me with no such choice. I also like the excitement of waiting to see how the photos come out. And finally, though I almost always use digital cameras these days, I admit to a nostalgic fondness for film photography and everything that goes with it, because it was with a film SLR that I first learnt to take photos.

I took my film camera on a trip to the Indian Botanical Gardens earlier this month, and I was quite pleased with the results.

Photo by Priyanka.

Minolta X-370s, 70 mm, ISO 200, f/5.6, 1/250 sec.