Thoughts in Words

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...