Thoughts in Words

At that time, that is a full decade ago from now, he was commanding his Battalion as a full-fledged Colonel. In Infantry to command the same Battalion into which one is Commissioned is quite coveted and looked forward to. For each Infantry Officer that is a dream. He was fortunate in this aspect. For many that is the ultimate. They don’t even care for further achievements! By then he was quite deep into married life too, with three children. The youngest was only just about three, then. His wife, who has been with him for about seven years by then, was looking after the Regimental Nursery School. The wife of the Commanding Officer has quite a few duties to perform, mostly de facto. Nursery School was one of those. Ever since their marriage she had been with him mainly in Instructional Institutions, either when he was a student or was an Instructor and on a UN mission. She had thus never noticed him in his full Regimental Regalia, though UN uniform was quite impressive. One...

Perhaps I should title this piece as “A Tryst with Truth” or “My Experiments with Drugs”, but that would sound perilously close to plagiarism and downright pompous in case of former and too humble in the latter. (Why Nehru thought of you know what as “tryst” beats me!) So I will stick with LSD which stands for Lysergic acid Diethylamide, whose chemical formula is, just to indicate the complications, C 20 H 25 N 3 O. Obviously it is not a simple chemical as H 2 O! You see the 60s and 70s were the years of the Flower Children and Hippie Culture and Woodstock and Jimi Hendrix. So there was always a magnetic draw towards this unholy fun for those who were in their early adult hood like me. But middle class morality in which I grew up was (don’t know now) a very strong thing! It was extremely difficult to break out of that shackle as a rebel. One reason might have been that it was not a shackle really and another that I actually did not have any compelling reason to rebel, imaginary or...

Service in the National Cadet Corps was compulsory for all college students from 1963 to 1968. It was during this period that I was in college. My first day at the parade was a memorable one, being a total fiasco. I was getting ready for my first parade. I wore the dress and was trying to tie the boot lace, a leather one, and it broke! With ingenuity I knotted the two pieces and managed to tie the shoes. Then came the belt, a web belt. I could not adjust it to my waist size. So I carried the belt and cap in my hand and stood line when somebody barked something. When the ustad came around on inspection, he ridiculed me by laughing at my condition and showed me how to adjust the belt and the right way to wear the cap. I felt like a clown in that odd uniform and that ridiculous belt which covered most of my belly and in that cap which was ready to fall off any moment. I knew in my heart of hearts that the breaking of the boot lace on the very first attempt was a bad omen. My NCC ...

My father had studied all over the erstwhile Madras Presidency, as his father was in a transferable job in the education department and had retired as the DEO of Malabar District, which was the northern half of the present day Kerala. After his graduation from Loyola College in Madras, my father served in the Defence Account Department in Trivandrum for a short while before joining the Postal Department in Madras from which he retired after donkey’s ears of service. A little more than a decade before his retirement father had a brain wave. Having grown up and having worked in Madras for almost all his while, as a preparation for his retirement, he decided to seek a transfer to Kerala, much against the advice of our mother and other relatives and friends. He began to be nostalgic and talked about his child hood days in the pristine and salubrious Kerala and his desire to settle down there. When he got the transfer I was in SSLC and my siblings, all much younger, were in smaller c...

I have a cousin who answers to the name of Murali. On one of his visits to me for lunch, without checking my liquor stock, I tried to impress him by proclaiming that we would have “Pink Gin”, for I had that small bottle of Angostura Bitters simply called, Bitters. In Defence Canteens Bitters was beginning to be in short supply and so I had whacked a bottle a few years ago and preserved it. It was used very sparingly. Murali came and I went for the bottle of Gin which I was sure I had in stock. Sure enough, there was no Gin! I felt stupid as I had not bothered to keep some beer cold, either. As I looked open-mouthed at Murali not knowing what to do, since drinking whiskey during day is not elegant (though I had Vodka), he coolly came up with a solution. He said: We will have “Old Fashioned”. What? I said. Now Murali is a master at making cocktails, a mixologist as it were, as was told by his charming wife Bindu. Normally wives don’t speak high of or praise their husbands. But not Bindu...

I am not a movie buff, unless you are talking about Westerns, World War movies, 007 movies or such, which I saw on my own during my college days. During school days, it was only if father took me (us) to any movie. One movie I remember he took all of us was Veerapandya Kattabomman. He took me alone for The Absent Minded Professor. I remember even now the scenes from those movies. I was highly impressed by both the movies for different reasons. I had admired the former and had laughed my guts out throughout the latter. While in college, I had generally looked at vernacular movies with disdain. Since I grew up in Madras as a Malayali, it is not as if I never saw a Tamil or a Malayalam movie. I did. But only those considered as a must, being a classic or so and only when dragged along by friends. Those actors were all hams to my mind. But I must confess, much as I disliked the theatrics of some heroes of those days, the dumb acts of some super heroes (a term not coined then I belie...

Background There is no doubt that I was born into a male dominated society. We all are. From time immemorial, man dominated the society. Considering that society basically consisted of men and women, it is not a great deal I think. Still therein lies man’s smartness. He knew that women are actually, intuitively smarter and so he found ways to keep them subdued. The only thing he had was his superior physical raw strength, to hunt and provide. The women who succeeded in this battle of supremacy were the ones who used their smartness very unobtrusively, very innocuously and very intelligently. But this is not an essay on social sciences. An Image Ever since I remember I had noticed that the women in the Kerala house hold were quite smart. Being smart, they had honed the expertise in keeping quiet to near perfection. They would voice their opinion only when asked or when they felt that something was going horribly wrong. And both were not too rare either, it appeared! Since mat...