We Shall Go by the Boltless Doors...

Yes he's imperialist, and racist, and jingoistic, and... Yes, yes, yes! Butbutbut...

This is from Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling. Reviews: (1), (2), (3).

Ruddy is describing his childhood in Bombay.

---

The garden within the School's compound where Ruddy and the sister who followed him played was afterwards remembered by both children as a lush Eden before the Fall, with flowers 'taller than chimneys' and a well 'where the green parrots lived, and where the white bullocks were always going blindfold round and round drawing up water in red waterpots to keep the roses alive, and the little grey striped squirrels nearly tame enough to eat biscuits out of his hand, used to play about in them.' Along with the cool interiors and harsh sunlight, this sense of closeness to the natural world stayed with Ruddy all his life, returning vividly to mind when he visited South Africa for the first time in 1899:

We shall go by the boltless doors,
    To the life unaltered our childhood knew -
To the naked feet on the cool, dark floors,
    And the high-ceilinged rooms that the Trade blows
        through:

To the trumpet-flowers and the moon beyond,
    And the tree-toads' chorus drowning all -
And the lip of the split banana-frond
    That talked us to sleep when we were small.

---

So something... Gerald Durrell, Ruskin Bond, Kipling... If you get my drift.

IDE Fever

I've spent the last day or two mucking around our codebase after what seems like ages. The peace, the peace...

IDE Fever (with apologies to John Masefield)

I must go down to the IDEs again, to the lonely Eclipse and vi, And all I ask is a version control and a scrum to steer it by; And the code's kick and the keys' song and the algorithm making, And a small class in the correct package, and a new feature baking,

I must go down to the IDEs again, for the call of the code compiled Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied; And all I ask is a quiet day with the headphone music playing, And the filter coffee and the air conditioning, and no clients/colleagues/boss braying.

I must go down to the IDEs again, to the vagrant techie life, To the slob’s way and the hackers’s way (there goes my chance of a wife); And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-coder, And quiet sleep and RESTful dreams when the release cycle’s over.

With apologies to John Masefield

It's Alive

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.
                                                      - from Manual of Muad'Dib by the Princess Irulan

I woke up to leaden skies and an unaccountable hankering for bacon. Actually that's not true. No hankering for bacon is unaccountable on account of it being brilliant. So off I went and treated myself to eggs, bacon, sausages, waffles, juice and coffee. Even got some work done in a desultory sort of way.

In the evening, a run. The aasthaana kitten sat on the driveway wall and stared incredulously at me. It rained in T. Nagar. A globular, almost malevolent sort of rain which mysteriously stayed west of Mount Road. So the run was no problem, a pell-mell huffpuff through Kotturpuram and IIT. Somewhere, a coppersmith barbet called in the prescribed manner for it. Near the hostel, 3 mongeese crossed the road with great intent, mother mongoose and a couple of mongoslings.

On the way back, T. Nagar bus stand was like Watson's London; the great cesspool into which all the idlers and loungers of the city seemed to have been irresistibly drained. A child of some sort saw the half full Gatorade bottle in my hand and started beseeching me for it saying "Juice anna, juice." It clutched at my legs, almost fell at my feet. I tried to push past, and it persisted. So I shoved it away to the side. I am not sure why I did this. Or maybe I am. The damn thing costs too much.

Meanwhile the rain had started up again, now each malevolent drop was like an uncomfortable question, all cold and remorseless. When it let up, I pushed on down Burkit Road. A pretty girl struggled with her (doubtless semi-globular) umbrella near Venkatnarayana Road. Perhaps she saw me staring.

Perhaps she didn't.

I bought chicken and came home and ate it all up along with a couple of episodes of Breaking Bad. Really, the only question of great pith and moment is: Should one's blog be like Sartre's? Or should it be like David Dhawan's?

Mailing Lists I Am A Member Of

A somewhat odd bunch of them:

saras97: Hostel mailing list. And my oldest one. Easy enough to explain.
putscheme: This one flickered for one glorious New England summer (of 2001). Bunch of us used to hang out day in and day out, was used to plan trips to Cape Cod, Gloucester, parties and so on. Now defunct.
siripuram: Childhood Andhra University quarters gang. The people on this know me since I was yeh tall.
ebazm: Urdu poetry and such. Subhanallah!
iitmaa1997: Boring alumni thing.
minstrelsd: The super list of the now sadly dead Wondering Minstrels
timpany: The school where I studied till 7th class. When it's alive, it's one the most entertaining ones. Bunch of quizzing lists: Slightly boring. Good for planning trips.
irfca: Indian Railways Fan Clubs Association. To be expected, non?
marinemammalsofindia: Marine mammals of India. It's vitally important to know what's afoot in Talai Mannar, apparently.
wachusett2003: Another short lived glorious New England winter list that we used to plan weekday snowboarding trips from the office!
BSAP: Birdwatchers Society of Andhra Pradesh


There's also a bunch of others I can't find on the Yahoogroups page but I keep receiving emails from: Chennai Runners, Andaman and Nicobar Environmental Team, IIT-M's wildlife club Prakriti, and so on.

Most odd.

There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

by W. B. Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

I Ate Paneer Bhurji Yesterday. Sort Of.

I boiled a packet of milk a few days too late. It failed. So I strained the thing and ended up with a handful of paneer. So I thought to myself, "When life hands you a lemon, make paneer bhurji."

While making it, I ended up melting a little bit of the cutting board into the frying pan. Like so:

Which reminds me of this:

The bhurji was OK.

I Ate Biryani Yesterday

It was OK.

A Beginning Is The Time For Taking The Most Delicate Care That The Balances Are Correct

I shall write again. Something. Every day. Now I am going to eat biryani.

Schadenfreude

I can't believe that of all the things in the world, a completely pointless cricket match is making me post after so long. But this stupid, utterly inconsequential IPL final has made blissfully happy. It is the only match I've seen in this IPL and I am supremely kicked at the way things turned it.

 The thing is, basically, I hate the Chennai Super Kings. Really hate them, their whole "dynasty" swagger, their whistles, the sense of entitlement that the team seems to exude, and the sense of entitlement that the city definitely exudes. Above all, I am learning to hate the whistle podu-ing. podu it where the sun don't shine.

It's very embarrassing that this thing bothers me so much. But there it is. Why is this so? This is very complicated. Perhaps it's because when the IPL began, I used to live in that sporting capital of India, Hyderabad and got used to the home team dominating the tournament. Oh wait... So perhaps the real reason is that quite against my own conscious self, I started rooting for the Chargers. There you have it. I am like one of Konrad Lorenz's goslings. I hatched. I looked around. There was a completely useless team in front of me. BAM! Done.

 Then I moved to Madras 3 years back. And I love this place as much as I did Hyderabad, and I'm having a cetacean of a time here and all that. Except for this abomination of a team and its swagger and its sense of entitlement and...but I've covered that ground already. Worse than having lived in 2 cities (this one also is part of personal history) with hapless teams is to live in a city whose team (not your team) is doing well. This I have learned. (Ooh. Corollary. Would've HATED to live in New York.)

Anyway, as I wrap up this post, the Bollywood monkey brigade from KKR is doing cartwheels on the TV, so some of the euphoria is ebbing. But a good way to start the week. Unlike the week after the World Cup final. But that heartbreak is a story for a different time.

Repost - The Saga of the Side Middle Berth

Back in the day, we used to have a blog on Livemint, now deceased. Recently, vox populi (and a dolphin) have been asking for certain posts, now long forgotten and dead. We are reproducing.

The Saga of the Side Middle Berth
Which was provoked by disturbing goings-on on the Charminar Express last night [Note: This is circa July 2009.]

Long, long ago in a land far, far away, there lived a dairy farmer. He and his friends were mesmerized by the magic of trains. Often, on hot summer days, they would gather near the doors of the air-conditioned compartments, hoping to catch a refreshing gust of cool air as the doors swung open and shut. When the coach attendant caught them, he would shoo them away. The farmer never forgot how cool and good the AC felt, and nor did he forget the treatment that was meted out to his friends.

Many decades later, Lalu Prasad Yadav became India's railways minister. Much Gangajal (and other unmentionables) had flowed under the impressive bridge at Patna, but the minister had not forgotten his encounters with the AC sleeper coaches all those years back. While he set about busily turning Indian Railways around from its slide into bankruptcy, Laluji made plans to make his dream of AC travel for the common man come true.

Or so goes one theory behind the fully air-conditioned Garib Rath superfasts that were introduced in 2005. Another theory holds that they were conceived to steal back the section of upper class rail passengers who had succumbed to the voluptuous overtures of the low cost airline boom. Like all legends, the truth is probably a heady cocktail of all of the above.

Be that as it may, the fact remains that the seed of an idea for creating the Garib Raths for providing fully air-conditioned, cheap travel options to Indians who had hitherto been unable to afford this luxury, germinated in some cosy corner of the labyrinthine megalith that is Rail Bhavan.

The powers that be were acutely conscious that they would be accused of populism and pandering to the 'masses' if they came up with a cheap, loss making train that would have to be subsidized by receipts from other railway operations. Right from the beginning, the idea was to make sure that the trains would be profitable (like the Rajdhanis). So how do you take a Rajdhani Express, reduce the ticket price substantially, and yet keep the operation profitable? Simple! You have to carry more people.

Trantrantrantraaaaa...(and other fanfare). Enter the Dragon [At this juncture, connoisseurs of that Telugu classic 'Money' are invited to chuckle]. This scorcher went by the name of Side Middle Berth (SMB. Or, in the interest of industrial quantities of cuteness, Simbu). Simbu suddenly meant that you could carry 9 more people in the same coach. Simbu was cool, Simbu was innovative, Simbu was the new kid on the block. It is rumored that the designers all dislocated their arms from paroxyms of a patting-oneself-on-the-back epidemic that briefly swept through their brotherhood and sisterhood.

At some point, someone must've gone, "Machaan! (Or Aila! Teri To! Edo! Orai! Dude! as the case may be) What is good for Garib Rath must surely be better for Sleeper Class!! Why don't we bung Simbus into SL coaches, and suddenly we can carry 81 people instead of 72!" Kaching kaching kaching! The cash register sound was like a siren song. Lo, and presto. Suddenly a whole new class of coaches started showing up, all souped up and Simbued.

The problems began from Day 0. The IRCTC website, which had been commissioned by Chanakya and inaugurated approximately in the period of Pulakesin II (and is now officially a UNESCO World Heritage Site), still assumed that you could only seat 72 people, and allotted seat numbers accordingly. Many an uncle (including this one), showed up in the compartment to find out that the comfy lower berth number 33 that they'd booked in the interest of their arthritic knee had mysteriously wafted upwards and was kissing the ceiling now. It became mandatory to take a look at the reservation chart to find what your new seat number (with promised lower berth) was. This was OK if you were in Howrah or Chennai Central and had all the time in the world, but if you were in Ankamali For Kaladi (I kid you not, this is a real station), you only had 13 milliseconds to do this.

Others (i.e. I) resorted to deriving complicated formulae to remember the new berth number. Issued in the general public interest under a Copyleft license

1. Take old berth number (example 33).
2. Divide by 9 (=33/9 = 3.remainder)
3. Remainders are for WUSSES. Chuck the remainder.
4. Add quotient to original berth number (33 + 3 = 36)
5. Give Praise Unto The Mundoli

Quarrels erupted ("This is my berth!" "No, this is my berth!" "No, this is my birth!" "Hain ji?")

And this was only the start. Once you got the poor Simbu occupant on the train, you had to seat him somewhere. In the bygone era of equality and uniformity, it was 3 people to each long seat, facing each other fixedly for several hours. Now Simbu was inserted into one of the long seats. Disruptions in the space-time continuum!

Inequality looms. The 3-seat fellows all suddenly acquired smug grins (Ha, ha! Look at those 4 unfortunates trying to fit on that slab, lucky us!). The 4-seat wallahs were apoplectic at the insertion of Simbu. They stare him down, and start moving their hands across their throats in a highly knife-like and suggestive manner. Poor Simbu became an uncomfortable outcast, trying to minimize his width (to fit in the seat), his height (to fit in the berth) and in general behaving like a touch-me-not.

So far, so good. Everyone has found their place, and made their peace. The train is careening into the night. Bedtime arrives. Now, the fellow who would normally be in the Side Upper Berth (SUB, obviously a.k.a Subbu), clambers onto the berth with the alacrity of a space monkey. The horror, the horror. Subbu finds that in order to accommodate Simbu, they've moved his berth closer to the ceiling. He can't sit up, and needs to constantly watch out lest he is decapitated by a very suspect, tetanus inducing fan that is hanging in front of his face. So now Subbu also hates Simbu, and makes dark plans for what devilry (involving fluids) he might do unto the sleeping form of the hapless Simbu, from his veritable Golan Heights of strategic advantage.

Simbu doesn't make a fuss, and quietly occupies his shelf in the rack. The lights are switched out, various expectoratory and other noises are heard. Soon, that comfortable and familiar silence of the Sleeper Class coach descends, punctuated by only the clickety-clack of metal wheels on metal points. Before the bastard in 41 starts snoring at 50 million decibels, as he inevitably will, you know it. (Sometimes I am that bastard, so please don't cuss too much).

It is 2 a.m. The rocking of the train has lulled the panic-stricken Simbu into a lap-of-mother type sleep. The rocking of the train has also resulted in Simbu starting an oscillatory rolling in his berth. Now in their infinite wisdom, those coach designers (of dislocated arms fame) did not move the light switches that we find between the 2 side seats (i.e. between Subbu's seat and Silambarasan's (i.e. Side Lower Berth) seat). Crucially, this switch is now athwartships of Simbu's gently oscillating backside.

In the old days, they had those massive metallic or Bakelite switches where you needed a team of horses (to pull the switch) and a Reynolds pen (to poke and jiggle the light/fan) before they would get going. As part of the Simbu innovations, they've replaced those switches with more 21st century avatars, which actually respond to feather touch. Alas, they didn't account for Simbu's gently rock-n'-rolling backside. At 2:30 in the morning, under the influence of the oscillatory impact, the fluorescent light starts to go on-off-on-off.

Now I'm not one to complain about a light flashing a couple of times. But absolutely, positively the last thing in the world I want is a Simbu-induced, fluorescent strobe light equipped, moving-at-100-kmph discotheque in front of my face at 2:30 in the morning, somewhere between Bapatla and Chirala. That is, without other expected accessories such as alcohol, recreational drugs, music, and pulsating, gyrating, nubile bodies all around.

But this is a delicate situation. One way to "handle" it is to...umm...reach out with one's hands and reposition the...err...oscillating rear end, but even in these heady post Section 377 days of freedom, some of us balk at this sort of thing. The other is to reach down from the upper berth and poke Simbu in the eye with one's big toe and wake him up (but not before toe is retracted) and thereby stopping the on-off. The third is to fill one's heart to the brim with the hatred of the Side Middle Berth, grit one's teeth and grin and bear it. Guess what we did.

To cut a long story long, the Side Middle Berth is a PHENOMENALLY bad idea. We have listed at least 4 reasons. Bad for Simbu, bad for Subbu, and for everyone who loves and cherishes Indian Railways. The good news is that there is talk that this sentiment has reached the highest echelons of Rail Mantralaya, and that steps are now being taken to possibly get rid of this obscenity. The bad news is that Simbu, who got this berth because of Tatkal in the first place, is now running around like a headless chicken on Platform 1 at Secunderabad, because he doesn't have a seat any more. If you see him, give him a hug.

PS It is noted that we've been highly gender un-neutral in this post and it's all "him" and "his" and all that, but may it be known by these presents that Simbu, Subbu and Silambarasan might equally have been Simbdoori, Subbulakshmi and Silombavardhini, without loss of generality.

---

The reader will be pleased to note that the SMB in SL coach phenomenon is now officially a thing of the past. We like to believe that this happy turn of events came about because of this post.

A 50-50 Sort Of Feeling

This passage somehow manages to mentally split me neatly into 50-50, the one half filled with Vizag, and the other with New England.

One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into their own holiday gayeties, to bid them a hasty good-by. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-that’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: “Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?” and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

That’s my Middle West — not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.

Maybe it's the mix of snow, trains, and going home.

From here.

I've been to Union Station in Chicago. And to the other great stations of the East - South Station, Penn Station, Grand Central, Madras Central. On snowy and rainy evenings. It is as he says.

A Recipe

The last 5 weeks of enforced eating at home has resulted in the (re)discovery of possibly the tastiest dish in the world. Recipe follows.

Prepare, order or get invited to a proper South Indian meal. It doesn't matter which state it is from, I have verified that the AP, TN and Kerala versions all suffice, and unless our Kannadiga brethren and cistern are children of a different culinary god, their version should work too.

The meal should contain (roughly): some form of podi + ghee, an oily curry of some sort (brinjal etc.), a dry-ish coconut based thing, an isotope of pulusu/kozhambu/what have you, sambar, rasam, curd, pickles, pappadam/appadam and so on. The usual stuff. Just make sure there's enough variety. A degree of license is permitted, depending on your genetics and proclivities. The Mallu may not countenance the oily brinjal curry that warms the cockles of Reddygaru's heart, but she can easily prepare this dish with a kaaLan, olan, puLi inji type of mishmash.

Having consumed all this in the order and manner prescribed by the relevant shastras, at the last moment, one is to refuse the paayasam in the plate/leaf (only for a brief while).

If you tilt your head downwards and examine the receptacle for a moment, you will find a an oily, viscous sludge. It behaves somewhat like mercury, flows sluggishly, has enough surface tension to form globules, which merge easily enough to form larger globules under the sweeping action of a palm across the plate/leaf. Bits of rice and coconut will interrupt this otherwise homogeneous medium, but do not detract from the overall effect we are questing for.

If you have done everything right, the whole sludge thing will look as though it is meant to be fused with glass and poured into stainless steel containers, later to be disposed off at Yucca Mountain type places.

But appearances are deceptive. This goo, my friends, is the Holy Grail. Slurp some of it up before it trickles down your palm and see how your mind explodes with taste and texture and memories and many other things besides. It is home, it is the world, it is tactile, it is ineffable, it is nostalgia, it is promise, it is It.

Poems From 10 Years Back - II

Quiet Night Thoughts
        -Li Po

Before my bed
there is bright moonlight
So that it seems
like frost on the ground:

Lifting my head
I watch the bright moon,
Lowering my head
I dream that I'm home.

Untitled
        -Hafiz
I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:

How are you?

I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:

What is God?

If you think that the Truth can be known
From words,
If you think that the Sun and the Ocean

Can pass through that tiny opening
Called a mouth,
O someone should start laughing!

Someone should start wildly Laughing --
Now!

III
        -Neruda, from the Book of Questions
Tell me, is the rose naked
or is that her only dress?

Why do trees conceal
the splendor of their roots?

Who hears the regrets
of the thieving automobile?

Is there anything in the world sadder
than a train standing in the rain?

That last question, I just realized, is satisfactorily answered here.

The Second Battle of El Alamein - 2011 Redux

In November 1942, General der Panzertruppe Wilhelm Josef Ritter von Thoma was ordered by his commander Generlfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel (who was relaying a Fuhrerbefehl) to fight to the last man and tank. The Deutsches Afrikakorps ground itself to pieces around him and virtually bereft of tanks, he mounted one the tanks attached to his HQ guard unit and drove to the apex of the battle.

With his tank hit several times and on fire, von Thoma dismounted and stood quietly amongst a sea of burning tanks. Rommel later opined that von Thoma was probably seeking his death in battle while other staff officers quietly speculated that he went to the front to deliberately surrender. That evening, von Thoma dined with General Montgomery at his headquarters to discuss the battle.

Nearly 70 years later, Rahul Dravid is attempting a Thoma.

Separated At Birth?

Inspired by a Facebook update from the Mami

"If Anna Hazare were blue, he'd look like a Smurf."

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

This one goes out to everyone I've ever run with.

It wasn't until early one chill New Hampshire morning when my nipples started gently bleeding into my nice new white "wick" enable running T-shirt on my third leg of the 200 mile Reach The Beach relay race that it began to dawn on me that things may have gotten out of hand. It seemed like a very hurried and surreal path from sitting on a couch and doing finger exercises with the remote control that spring, to sharing a smelly van with 6 other sweaty, unwashed runners over 2 days, with this crazy idea of running 200 miles so that we could eat everything we wanted at a free barbeque on the beach, and be massaged by rookie masseurs and masseuses (also free).

I'd secretly fancied myself to be a runner for a while. Mainly caused by repeated viewings of Chariots of Fire. That title sequence never failed to evoke ambitions of running endlessly on a beach (with a band playing Vangelis in the vicinity). Of course, I'd done fat (literally) lot about this all my life. Moving to Cambridge and having a real job (read: enough money to eat many many things) meant that there was no time and place (so I thought) to get any exercise. In passing, and since I didn't know too many people in Boston, I started desultorily going to the Asha-MIT/Boston chapter meetings.

Soon, this became a regular feature, and there came a time in 2003 when this guy named Parthiv Shah suddenly sprang out of the woodwork. He was a grad student at MIT, and showed up at one of the meetings and proposed that the chapter could raise several thousands of dollars, if only they found half a dozen dimwits who would sign up to run 26.2 miles and con their family and friends into parting with their pay cheques. He claimed that he could coordinate the whole thing, and even run with the sacrificial flock. All this, when he was limping with a bandage around his ankle that he claimed he twisted while playing football somewhere.

Now Parthiv is a born and bred American, but his ancestors are Gujarati. The last sportsperson from that part of the world to have achieved any sort of distinction was one fellow called Narendra Hirwani, mainly by appearing in a Doordarshan video on national integration [1:52 - 2:00] and singing a ditty. That too in Sindhi, not even Gujju. So I took this whole thing with a kilogram of salt.

Strangely enough, everyone in the chapter (who was not running) seemed to love the idea. As Melli put it, "They come, they run, they raise money. We don't have to do anything!". Too good to be true. Parthiv rustled up a coach from somewhere, and one morning Coach Jonathan Wyner and and oddball bunch of very unfit desis showed up on the Charles wearing just about ever inappropriate piece of gear possible. To paraphrase Churchill, "Never in the field of human fundraising has so much been expected, by so many, from such a small group of tending-to-spherical people."

Anyway, off we went. The first challenge was to come up to a point where we could manage 30 minutes at "conversation pace". We nailed that, even if the conversation was of the "Hmph." "Ugh." "Grrr." "Urk." monosyllabic Australopithecus variety. Then one week we found a spreadsheet in our inboxes. Coach had neatly planned all the weeks from April to October. Strange numbers floated in the last, long run column. 16 miles. 18 miles. Surely we were going to rent cars and drive?

As New England's sticky summer rolled along, somehow we kept at it. Parthiv would chalk out new routes to prevent us from dying from boredom. Mostly we ran along the Charles, or on the Minuteman trail. Nice, predictable paths with known milestones and pitfalls. Jonathan (who qualifies for and runs the Boston Marathon year after year) ran with us often, but you got the sense that he felt like a Federer forced to play 5 sets with a sloth. In the time that we ran 5 miles, he'd have gone up and down the ragged line 5 times without breaking a sweat.

He introduced us to a couple of his running buddies (these were the Yodas to his Obi-Wan). I vividly remember one of them, supposed to be extraordinarily good. Jonathan asked him what advice he had for our fledgling flock, and we expected something one the lines of brand of shoe, choice of diet, importance of cross training. Instead all he said was, "Take it easy." Very Yoda like. Also the very best piece of running advice I have ever received.

Once in a while, coach (whose day job was to be the Grammy winning Chief Engineer at his own recording and re-mastering studio) would get these funny ideas where he'd send us off into random neighbouring towns such as Arlington and Medford, along state highways that had never seen brown people in shoes at 7:00 in the morning.

We got lost a few times, to which he'd have this gentle I-am-the-master-at-Shaolin-Temple-patience-grasshopper response, "Getting lost is one of the best ways of increasing your weekly mileage." Confucious say. Coach's house was on the trail, and we'd be guaranteed Gatorade and goodies on our way back from the long run.

We had all kinds of characters in the group. There was Mithu. Super enthu. She ran practice long runs the day before the actual long runs, just so she'd be prepared. Deepak never ran on weekdays, he more or less lived in airplanes, airport lounges and hotels. But on Sunday morning he'd be there, with a fuel belt around him, knees pounded to jelly, and a "So, how much are we doing again today?" look. Biju was my wingman, we both ran at the same pace, and exchanged various important thoughts on the state of the universe. He was old enough to be my father (not), but somehow I never managed to be much faster than him. Mo Sikka - showed up only at Poisson intervals and ran his guts out. There was Kripa. This guy was too much, he designed computer chips or something like that for a living. He didn't even run with us. In the manner of Ekalavya, he used to train all alone in some far flung suburb on the Canadian border. On one occasion when he actually made it to Boston, he offered this stellar piece of advice to conquer running boredom: "Take a large number. Compute its square root." Vivek was the good guy, most disciplined, diligently followed all advice that was handed out. Ran like a metronome, same pace, every day, week in and week out. He finished the marathon at the same pace, and was the fastest in our gang. Father of 2, Sloan MBA. Maybe that had something to do with it.

Through June and July we persevered, and Parthiv and Jonathan perserved even more. They conducted speed trials, intervals, and fartleks (hee hee), and shoe clinics, and stretching clinics, and fundraising strategy sessions and what not. At some point when there was a glimmer of hope that the thing could actually be done, and we started emailing our friends for the money. The ones that didn't immediately die of a heart attack (last words being, "You? You? You're doing what??" Thud.) were very generous, promising us multiple $ for every mile. Life started to be consumed by running. What you ate, when you went to bed, ablutions, movie nights, work, alcohol, everything had to fit into THE SCHEDULE. My roommates bought ear plugs because they couldn't stand us jabbering about running any more.

September, when we should've all been in peak shape was that special month called Injury Month. Body parts that had been stretched beyond redemption said WTF and began to fail. In one case, one of the guys (who will be known as Loquacious Knee, "Indian" fashion) literally came to us and said, "Dude, I was running along fine and at mile 18, my knee said 'Fuck you.'"!

My particular problem was that around mile 16 my foot and then gradually my leg would start to go numb till I couldn't pretty much feel my leg by the end. This started happening sooner and sooner. Too cheap (and too afraid) to have it looked at by a proper sports medicine person, I called up a friend's sister who was a physio. She said I probably had something called compartment syndrome and that I should probably not run at all. By this time I had successfully conned nearly $2,000 from various folk and forgotten who had given how much, and there was no way I could even return the money.

A small company called Google had come up with a new-ish search engine that we all liked, and the first few links on "compartment syndrome" contained the words "serious", "trauma" and "amputation" in close succession. I didn't touch a computer for a few days after that. My solution was to stop running Cold Turkey and hope that the exoskeleton would hold up on race day.

That finally rolled along in late October. On the flight to DC, all of us were of good spirit, even though we must've been inwardly terrified that we weren't good enough. I was, anyway. Roommates and family accompanied us. We checked into our hotel in Washington, drank a lot of fluids, ate a lot of pasta, and in general tried to pretend that were old hands. The evening before the race, I went for a short jog around the hotel. Not much of a point at that stage, beyond reassuring myself that my legs still knew how to put one foot in front of the other.

The morning of the Marine Corps Marathon, we took the subway to the starting point, and I got separated from the rest of them. We were penned into a hold on a section of freeway, and I saw a sight that cheered me up greatly and have never seen since. Hordes of Americans sidling off to the edge of the road to pee, because the port-a-potty lines were too long.

The starter gun went boom, and I started at a snail's pace. The legs held up fine. At mile 10 I still felt fresh, at mile 15 the monuments around the Capitol showed up and I thought Lincoln winked at me as I went past him. We'd written our names on our shirts, and thanks to the kindness of random strangers, we were cheered all the way to the end.

The route loops its way around the Capitol and then past more majestic edifices (the Smithsonian?), but whoever designed it seemed to have suddenly found out at the last minute that if we took the straight and narrow route back to the finish, we'd never be able to make up the mileage. So they sent us off into this horrible limbo called the Tidal Basin, where it seemed like we were running in endless circles for a while, before spitting us out onto the last hurdle before the finish line, the 14th Street Bridge.

I was nearly wiped out now, the leg thing had kicked in, and I had to stop ever so often to give it a rest. But when I started walking I'd cramp up and had to start jogging again, until the leg... Catch-22 continued for a bit, and when I got on the bridge, it was hot, sweaty, shade-less and just misery. Luckily, some cheer was at hand.

All along the route, the soldiers from the US Marine Corps had cheered us along, handed out drinks and snacks, and generally made us feel special. This bridge though, had no one on it. No water point, no volunteers. There was just one towering hulk of a Marine. He had a boombox at his feet on the sticky-ish asphalt, which was belting out Queen's We Will Rock You. And he was bellowing, "THIS BRIDGE IS YOURS! YOU OWN THIS BRIDGE!! TAKE THIS BRIDGE!!!". I think he must've been on Omaha Beach in a previous life.

To regain some self respect, I ran the last couple of miles full tilt. I don't remember the finish very clearly, no exultation, at least not immediately. I was just thankful to get a banana and a drink. Also medal. We'd decided to meet under some balloon, and as everyone trickled we went crazy with joy. We'd done it. No one had died. Parthiv told us that coach had taken down our bib numbers and had been tracking us from Cambridge, with his heart in his mouth. That evening at the hotel, we sat in the revolving restaurant at the top of the world and savoured every moment. Even the bleeding nipples seemed worthwhile then.

We'd made grandiose plans on the plane back, about how we would all run together next weekend, how we'd run another marathon together next year, how we were a band of brothers (and sister). Within a week, it had all come to naught. Fall came, and winter. Everyone's lives sucked them back, and the months of weekend family deprivation and alcohol deprivation had taken its toll. I don't remember if we ever ran together as a group again. I sacked out through winter, using the weather and the leg as an excuse, and grew fat. When spring came around, a mountain of work, applying for a Ph. D., and thoughts of moving back to India all jostled for attention and running took a back seat.

That summer, I moved back to India, and have not stepped outside the territorial borders ever since. I took up running again, but don't really have the stomach for a full marathon now. I huff and puff a couple of half marathons every year, and call it a winter well spent. I made excellent, excellent new running buddies. In Hyderabad, and Bangalore, in Bombay and Madras. It's always great to run with them, even if it's not exactly the Minuteman Trail that we're on.

I ran a half marathon at home, on the beach, which was fantastic and something I'd always dreamed I'd do some day.



I moved to Madras and bless her soul, so did Kenny. She's old enough to be my mom (not) and runs the pants off me every time, but at least she has nice legs and keeps talking and will make coffee afterwards and give me a ride in her car even though she really wants to run or bike, and is very very generous with beer, and is OK with my general reluctance to wake up before 5:30 and many other things besides.

And there's Kid, who is my new new wing man. He keeps it simple, takes it easy, insists on filter coffee after 3 loops of Boat Club. Life is good.

But the mind wanders back to that summer of 2003. When we were young. I am told that many batches of Asha-MIT/Boston runners have since raised a mountain of money, and gone on to even more incredible feats of endurace such as triathlons and ultras. There's a small glow of satisfaction, because even though we were probably the slowest, smallest, and least-likely-to-finish group to finish a marathon, we did it first, and showed it could be done. That is enough.

I use Jonathan's spreadsheet to this day, it remains my running plan template. Most of the plan never gets executed, but there's rarely a better moment in the mornings than when I fill in x k.m. in the "Achieved" column when there is y k.m. in the "Planned" column, and x > y. Yes, switched to metric after moving to India, the distances look a lot better.

Having opened with "Chariots of Fire", I must close with it. To paraphrase the funeral oration for Harold Abraham [0:00-0:12], "Now there are just a few of us - who can close our eyes and remember those few friends with hope in our hearts and wings on our heels."

Poems From 10 Years Back - I

In the process of backing up various online email accounts to disk, several old emails/forwards with poetry content have been discovered, and are now presented without comment.


Prandial Plaint
        - Vikram Seth

My love, I love your breasts. I love your nose.
I love your accent and I love your toes.
I am your slave. One word and I obey.
But please don't slurp your coffee in that way.

(from 'All You Who Sleep Tonight')


Seth has featured in these pages before, and the excellent but sadly inactive Wondering Minstrels have a whole bunch of his stuff.

Revolutionary Breakthrough In 2D Planar Geometry

Wonder if any of you caught the announcement of the most breathtaking, path-breaking advance in 2D geometry since the day the Elements were a gleam in Euclid's eye? This headline in today's Hindu spills the beans:

Five-nation triangular axis mooted

Auslin, having done to geometry roughly what Jael (Heber's wife) did to Sisera, is surely a shoo-in for the next Fields Medal.

Hon'ble Supreme Court of India

This may just be me, but the way I pronounce "Hon'ble Supreme Court of India" (as it is often written) in my head, the image that comes to mind is this:



Very weird, no?

In other news the Hon'ble Supreme Court of India may have at least temporarily undone one stinking pile of poo. Bravo.

Dell-uding People?

I have bought 2 Dell laptops. One was in 2004, for a princely $2k types, in the US. Inspiron 8600. Lovely screen for writing code. Another was for the sibling, a couple of years later, also from the US.

Both turned out to be pretty delicate physically. Keys pop off, battery dies, power adapter stops working, something or the other gets fried. Dell is reputed for super-efficient customer service in India, I think the chief reason is that they need it. Of course, warranties are carefully written to precisely not cover the exact WTF that just happened to you.

In any case, we are in need of some machines at work and one of the things we were looking at is the Dell Vostro V130, supposed to be a lightweight travel friendly beast etc. Of course, glossy photographs and soothing marketing is listed on the website.

Who cares? The first-ish questions that come to anyone buying a computer are "How much RAM?" and "How much disk space?" Now the site says that this model is "From Rs. 37,290", but nary a mention of how much of the aforementioned juice one gets.

The kicker is that there's a "Tech Specs" tab, and perhaps it is reasonable to expect RAM and disk size to be available there. Nothing. Zilch.

So unless I've been doing something drastically wrong, epic fail by Dell. May this post be easily found on the internets before someone tries to buy one...