Rx.. Care of the heart

Those of you who want to prevent a heart-attack or some of you who have already suffered a heart attack but want to prevent the next one, take heart. Your doctor can now prescribe the latest class of statins which, by lowering cholesterol levels, can cut down the risk of heart attack by 30%. The dosage will vary from person to person and will be determined by a simple formula. The doctor will examine your salary slip closely and fix the dosage in such a way that you spend 50% of your salary on the statins. That's the simple formula.

But statins are known to interfere with the functioning of the liver and can also cause muscular atrophy in 0.0005% of the patients. So your doctor, ever alert to business opportunities, will prescribe additional drugs to tone-up the liver, apart from inorganic supplements to make up for the weakening of the muscles. Some of these supplements can increase the toxicity of the blood and can affect the kidneys. So you would be forwarded to a nephrologist who will quickly assess how promising a candidate you are for a kidney transplant . He will also make a mental note to refer a patient with mild urinary infection to your cardiologist for a routine ECG, as a return favour. The entire medical fraternity subscribes to this quid pro quo arrangement.

Back to the heart. Statins also need to be supported by ACE inhibitors which help dilate the blood vessels and reduce blood pressure. Controlled experiments on rats have shown that those rats that were administered ACE inhibitors, lived a week longer than those that went without the drug. Considering that a rat lives for hardly 16 weeks on an average, a week’s extension is significant. What works on a rat must surely work on you ? You are just a scaled-up, biped version.

It is also good to take some anti-coagulants and blood-thinners like aspirin to keep the flow through the vesels as smooth as possible. Alas, aspirin is also known to cause intestinal bleeding and coupled with the fibrous diet prescribed by the thoughtful cardiologist, will induce acidity and flatulence. To tackle these symptoms, your doctor will ask you to take some antacids every day. Antacids can interfere with the absorption of some key nutrients into the system and your doctor will tell you when exactly to have them, before or after a meal. Usually, he will advise you to have them instead of the meal.

The statins, the aspirin and the ACE inhibitors together make a formidable combination and some research indicates that you have a good chance of reducing a 60%- blocked-artery to a 20% blocked one. Too bad that new evidence shows that in a 20%- blocked artery, the chances of the plaque breaking loose, clogging the vessel and causing a heart attack are much higher than in a 60%-blocked artery. Well, you can’t have everything.

About the diet. Don’t gorge yourself on fried food which contain polyunsaturated fat, bad for your heart. Eat plenty of green salads. A word of caution here. It has been observed that salads are quite often washed with contaminated water and can cause severe infection of the stomach. Not to worry. Your clueless gastroenterologist will prescribe some broad-spectrum antibiotics ostensibly to kill the bacteria. These antibiotics will be still protected by patent, and therefore your salary for that month will be used up for the noble cause of amortising a substantial chunk of the R&D expenses of the drug company. The good doctor will also recommend an ultrasound scan of the abdomen partly to rule out cysts and tumours, partly to look for other danger signals , but mainly to earn his 30% commission from the owner of the scan machine.

And get plenty of exercise. Your doctor will advise you that walking is the best way to keep fit.. The considerate doctor will not want you to blow up good money on fancy gym equipment. In fact he will want you to reserve your income, fixed deposit and other savings purely for medical expenses and not to sqaunder it on non-essential needs like food, clothes, petrol, etc.

A final piece of advice. Don’t fret and fume about the doctor’s fees and the expenses on the medicine and the visits to the diagnostic centres. Anxiety over such trivial things can induce high levels of stress and high blood-pressure and can lead to heart attacks.

Dark thoughts of a closet MCP

You should have seen the fuss that my wife made and the tantrums that she threw up when I woke her from a afternoon siesta yesterday and asked for a cup of coffee!

Why she should go ballistic over such a simple request, I could never fathom. It would have taken her hardly a couple of minutes to warm the milk in the gas stove, mix the instant coffee and sugar and serve it to me, along with some chocolate biscuits, as I was on my recliner chair reading a book. Nothing complicated about it. Minimum physical labour involved.

It is not as if she had to slog it out like my multi-tasking grandmother who had to wake up at 3 am everyday, have a cold dip in the Cauvery (cleverly dodging the lurking crocodiles), finish her pooja, run after the cows, pin them down, milk them herself, then grind the coffee seeds, roast them, prepare the decoction, and get the steaming coffee ready for my grandfather at 5 am sharp, before he commenced his morning ablutions. All this, while she continued to prolifically deliver several babies a year.

What make my eyes red, my ears steam and my blood boil are the double standards of women these days.. Last night, when I was engrossed in my favourite episode of “Friends”, wife actually asked me to go down to the shop nearby and get some bread for the kids. To pack lunch for them the next day, she explained. This complete insensitivity for a fellow human-being engaged in an intellectual exercise got my goat. Did she think that this was such a simple errand? The shop is a good 200 metres away – which meant I had to not only walk down to my basement, but had to open the car door with my bare hands, insert the ignition key in the right place, start the car, put it on first gear while applying the clutch, press the accelerator slowly while simultaneously releasing the clutch, play my favourite CD, navigate my way through the maddening traffic, find a parking slot……in other words 15 minutes of agonising, back-breaking, manual labour. Can’t the kids manage without bread for a day? Why can’t they eat cake ?.

Let me narrate one more incident to gain your sympathy. Once, I brought four of my colleagues home for dinner. I grant you that I should have called my wife and given her advance notice, which I omitted to do. Ok, I forgot. So, what? I am only human. To err is human, but to her it was a crime. The screaming and ranting that I had to put up with for a week! All for the merest trifle of mixing a few ingredients and cooking a meal for four, aided by the galaxy of fancy gadgets that is found in the kitchen. Hell, there’s even a device to peel the onions, without bringing a drop of tear to the eye. In contrast, my great-grandma - bless her soul- had to harvest the paddy from the fields, de-husk it, de-stone the rice, collect wooden twigs from the forest, crush the snakes and the scorpions with her bare feet, draw water from the well using counter-weights, pluck the vegetables from the fields, light the stove, cook the rice, remove the starch, feed the first helping to the crows and serve the meal piping-hot to my great-grandpa And she did this every day without a whimper of protest . All my great-grandpa had to do was let out a loud burp and other similar bodily noises after the hearty meal. I tell you, dear readers, that those were halcyon days when men were he-men and women had perfect role clarity.

Now, when I am busy blogging, wife asks me to change a fused bulb in the bathroom instead of wasting my time with my chat-mates. . What lop-sided priorities and what contempt for blogging! First, in these enlightened days, when liberated women commandeer space shuttles, fly solo aircrafts and head large MNCs, one would have thought wife would have by now acquired the elementary intelligence to change a light bulb. No such luck. I must do it, because she is not tall enough to reach the bulb holder. Must I do all the hard work in the house, merely because I am 6”1” tall? Second, does she think blogging is child’s play? Is she aware at all of the depth of knowledge, intensity of research and thoroughness of detail that characterise my blogs

Sigh ! What degeneration of values. We live in decadent times ! Let me go and change that blasted bulb now.

The last male domain....

I confess that I am dismayed by the proliferation of new institutions such as the unisex beauty parlours and family saloons. One, they threaten to drive to extinction that most Malgudian of characters- the local barber. Two, they strike at the very foundation of the last male bastion left. Till recently, the barber shop remained the only place – apart from the Gents Toilet- where ministers, politicians, sportsmen, farmers and businessmen alike were allowed entry,solely on the strength of their being men and to bask in the exclusivity of the surroundings, unspoilt by female presence.

Now I am no misogynist and am all for gender parity, equal space and all that. But there are times when men like to be left alone with the boys and women with the girls. The barber shop provided such a sanctuary to men, while women had their own parlours and spas ,where they were left contentedly alone . This arrangement worked very well for both sexes for centuries and there was absolutely no reason to disturb the status quo ante.

So, I view these new-fangled parlours with utter contempt and remain steadfast in my loyalty to Nataraj, the barber-round-the-corner. Once a month, with unfailing regularity, an inner voice tells me that I must proceed in the direction of the barber shop and I follow its diktat unquestioningly, in a hypnotic trance. There are many mysteries that science has not provided answers for. My monthly sleep-walk to the barber’s is one such puzzle.

Nataraj’s methods are simple but effective. Different strokes for different folks, is his motto. Not only in his cutting technique which has to suit the individual, but also in gauging the customer’s mood and temperament and adopting the appropriate conversational style. I have seen him play various roles – keen listener to a gregarious soul, eager story-teller to the more reclusive, shrewd commentator to the uninformed, astute advisor to ranting teenagers, sharp critic of wayward adolescents ,– moving from one role to the next , as in a rapid slide show, with effortless ease.

Isn’t he worried that these deluxe parlours and saloons started by the MNCS and other corporates would eat into his business ? Nataraj dismisses this suggestion with complete disdain.. “ These places employ smart-looking, over-paid youngsters with fancy titles like hair-stylists, hair-engineers and hair-doctors and think they can steam-roll us into extinction. It is not as simple as that. Customers look for much more than just a hair-cut, when they come here.”.

He continued, “You can send your driver to pick up groceries, to pay your water tax and to get your watch repaired. But do you realize that hair-cut is one of the few activities that you can’t delegate to your driver and you need to physically present yourself at the barber’s shop ? This creates a special and sacred bond between the barber and the barbee. Big industrialists who cannot be accessed at all in their lush offices become my captive listeners when they are seated in this chair. Many of them pour out intimate family secrets to me. Teenagers who can’t confide to their parents find in me a father-figure to let out minute details of their love life. Why, even the DIG of Police is my customer and has shared some vignettes of the interesting crimes that he has been investigating. Such is the clout we wield. Such is the status we enjoy”.

“ Take you, as an example, sir” he went on, “ I have seen you on your morning walk on Boat Club Road, in a pensive mood, probably worried what the day has in store for you, and giving the clear signal that you do not want to be disturbed from your reverie. Yet, here. in my shop, you are completely relaxed and are in a mood to open out and engage in pleasant conversation with me. This is what makes us special and irreplaceable. We are certainly not an endangered species yet. “

I hope these don’t turn out to be famous last words, I thought to myself as I watched Nataraj usher in his next customer making the latter feel that he was ascending a throne for his coronation.

May his tribe survive and flourish.

The Ambassador car

A generation back, there was a simple method to separate the men from the boys. The real men were those who could claim total mastery over the Ambassador car.

The kids of today who gallivant all over town in their toys such as Ford Ikons, Santros and the Zens will never be able to understand what it took to drive one of those Ambys.

You could never be taught to drive the Amby. Either you were born with the skill or you weren’t. The chemistry between the car and the driver had to be perfect, not unlike that between a horse and the rider.

One started the day with silent prayers. If the battery and the electrical systems were in good condition, the car could be cranked in half a dozen attempts and still the engine had to be “raised” for a few minutes to get it to behave. The steering wheel was stubbornly pivoted in one position and would refuse to move. It was far easier to get down from the car and rotate the tyres with your bare hands, than attempt to steer it . The clutch and the accelerator pedals would put up such resistance that the driver had to practically jump on them to avail their services. Releasing the clutch pedal and simultaneously pressing the accelerator called for multi-tasking skills and not many would pass the test. Some ended up with fractured feet and injured pride.. Hand brakes existed in theory, but there is no recorded instance of these actually being put to use anytime. One was advised not to rely on these handbrakes, but to always carry a large stone, to insert as a wedge under the rear tyres, in case the car came to a halt in the ghat section of the road.

Driving was just one part. One had to be a mechanic too and have a fair idea of how the system worked. Checking the radiator water level and the crankcase oil level was a daily ritual carried out diligently. Rainy days called for a fair bit of daredevilry. Windshield wipers were either missing or not functional and so the driver had to use one hand to clean the windshield and the other to steer the car. The Ambassador car would stall if the water on the road was more than 6 inches high. “Water got into the delco” was the immediate pronouncement of the knowledgeable driver. What this meant was that the driver had to pull out the petrol pipe from the carburettor, suck out some petrol, spit it into the distributor cap, light it on fire and drive away the moisture in the cap, in complete disregard for one’s own safety or that of the other passengers’. It was the done thing and theirs was not to question why.

These days, life’s too easy for the kids and driving has become too unexciting. I know of quite a few people who have never opened the bonnets of their cars or learnt to pull a car out of a slope without using a handbrake, let alone setting the distributor cap on fire. What a pity.







.

Out of chaos.....

In an article published three years back, TIME magazine had analysed the reasons behind India’s success with IT and software. “How did India gain superiority in this field alone” it wondered “ while China remained a non-entity, struggling to get its bearings right?”

After looking at possible answers like “ India has the advantage of having a large English-speaking population “, “ the accident of time zones of India and the USA being such that a seamless 24-hour working could be ensured, “ and so on, TIME concluded that while the Chinese were extremely good with tasks that called for discipline, strict adherence to rules and instructions and conformity to standards- as required in manufacturing, mining, construction, etc, Indians had that uncanny ability to thrive in chaotic conditions – which equipped them to take on the type of challenges that IT and programming posed.

I agree. Indians love disorderliness and revel in chaos. Take a genius like Tendulkar. He picked up all the rudiments of the game in Shivaji Park, where on a typical day twelve different matches go on simultaneously with about 250 fielders running all over, and the same spot on the ground can be gully position for one team, mid-on for another, deep square leg for yet another. If your skills have been honed in these conditions, scoring a century at Lord’s with all its tranquility is child’s play.

I don’t know why the same logic doesn’t work with Narain Karthikeyan. Perhaps, he has frittered away his time at the racetrack during his learning days. He should have practised on the Indian roads instead, where millions of people effortlessly navigate their vehicles through narrow roads, alongside pedestrians, thousands of cycles, rickshaws, bullock-carts, fish-carts, trucks, cars, hundreds of two-wheelers, all honking and hooting and moving in different directions and velocities. Traffic lights and other signals exist just to provide some comic relief. The whole atmosphere is lively and jolly, if you see my point. Brownian movement, if you get my drift. Once you manage to survive on these roads, you can take on the Grand prix events blind-folded, with or without a Formula 1 car.

Raman Roy, the founder of Spectramind, is quoted in an interview as saying that when Wipro first won a contract from Amex in 1991 for some back-office work, they couldn’t locate a dish anywhere in Delhi. They had to run from pillar to post to get the necessary licence. So, they went in for cables. One day, the system collapsed mysteriously. It took them a few days to realize that somebody had dug into the cables to steal the copper. Against such odds, they managed to deliver and get Amex to move the entire operations here. On the other hand, the Chinese programmer would have got the Govt to provide the connectivity, power connection, running water, etc but would not have had the wherewithal to write a line of code, under such perfect conditions.

If the Universe tends towards chaos following the laws of thermodynamics and entropy, Indians are bound to rule this world. Let's hope for such conducive conditions.

Movers and Shakers of India

There is a pronounced cultural bias, when it comes to appreciation of the parts of the human anatomy. The Japanese people go ga-ga over long necks; Audrey Hepburn, if you recall, was a hot favourite there. The Chinese had a fetish for tiny feet and girls had to wear tight shoes for years to prevent them from growing further. Tiny feet had such sex appeal.

And Indians? Ha, we get turned on by swaying bottoms.

This truth dawned on me, as I was channel surfing on my TV, the other day. Whichever channel I hit, I saw nothing but swinging bottoms.

On Channel A (name changed to protect its identity), Shah Rukh Khan had climbed on to the top of a moving train, in complete violation of Sec 19.1 of the Indian Railway Rules, and swinging his hips wildly to the chant of ‘chaiya, chaiya’, and instigating other passengers to follow suit.

On Channel B, to the beat of a Telugu song, a dozen men were shaking their bottoms vigorously, dressed in pink trousers and green jackets. Cut to the next frame where a dozen women were gyrating their torsos, dressed in green skirts and pink blouses.

On Channel V (original name retained), some exuberant teenagers were sending their bottoms into a spiral whirl, as if there was no tomorrow.

You get my point.

To learn more about this “bum fixation “, and to get to the ‘bottom’ of the mystery, I met up with Dr. Shake Abdullah, an acknowledged expert on this subject and who had obtained his PhD on the strength of his seminal thesis “ the simple harmonic motion of swinging bottoms”.

Dr. Abdullah’s office was simple and the decor harmonious. On his table were photo alBUMs (bought, no doubt, from Higginbottoms) with pictures of starlets – no, not their faces, but their shapely bottoms. Adorning the walls were cutouts of animal bottoms and one could clearly make out what would have once formed the rear of a bison, an antelope and a warthog. He had hunted them down in Africa, but such was his commitment to his subject that, where the run-of-the-mill hunter would have taken out the animal heads as souvenirs, he had brought back the bottoms and hung them up in his office.

“As a nation’, he said, “ we are so divided, be it on religion, language, diet, etc. The only common thread that you can discern from north to south, west to east, is the Indian fascination for shaking bottoms. It cuts across all barriers and binds the nation together. Naturally, this obsession is reflected in the movies that we produce “

“Do you know “ he continued “ that no longer does Bollywood or Kollywood call aspiring actors for an audition? A good voice is not important, as other artists dub most of the dialogues anyway. Good looks also don’t matter, as any make-up artist with a little bit of help from a plastic surgeon can convert an Ugly Jane into an Aishwarya Rai, in a matter of minutes. But, what is a pre-requisite and what will get you the job is the ability to swing your bum. An eminent panel evaluates both the amplitude and the frequency of the 'shake' of the candidates. The Indian audience can be demanding and high standards have to be maintained”

“ Lest you conclude that there is no practical use for all this shaking, let me point out that every dancer is fitted with a dynamo at the hip so that the energetic movement can be converted into electricity. All Bollywood studios are self-sufficient in energy use thanks to the captive-power from the inter-connection of all the hip dynamos.”

As I left Dr Abdullah’s office, he offered to take me over to witness the shooting of a film scene. About thirty young actors and actresses were in tight-fitting clothes and ready for the shot.

“Silence” cried the director.

“Camera”

“Action”

“Bottoms up”.

And the swinging began.

The white shirt

Saraanch’s blog on how the same piece of a specific rajma gets lodged everytime in his second, upper-molar, reminded me of an identical experience I had with white shirts.No,they were not getting stuck in my molar. Read on.

I love plain white shirts. They go well with dark trousers and also provide the right contrast for a bright, multi-coloured tie, the one with the Mickey Mouse on it.. I also find that the white shirt alone among shirts, when worn inside a jacket or coat, has that magical ability to confer quiet dignity on even the most obnoxious-looking of individuals.

But, sinister forces have been at work and sabotaging my plans of wearing these white shirts. What happens invariably is this. Two weeks after I commission any of my new white shirts and, more particularly, after the third wash, it comes back with a prominent, brown stain on the bottom right corner of the pocket. This has happened to four of my shirts and so I am unable to dismiss these events as mere coincidence. As Ian Fleming says in his James Bond books, “once is happenstance; twice is coincidence ; thrice or more, it is enemy action “

I did some analysis with my usual scientific rigour and observed that

-Only my white shirts are attacked ( nothing happens to navy blue or bottle green shirts, which can hide such stains easily)
-The stain always appears after the shirt returns from its third wash ( as if to increase my hopes after the first two washes and dash it after the third)
-It always manifests itself at the bottom right corner of the shirt pocket
-It is always dark brown in colour ( not that I find dark brown particularly abhorrent, Any dark colour can inflict the same damage)
- It cannot be removed by any methods known to machine or housewife

Result : White shirt condemned for ever, Go back to navy blue shirt.

Reminds you of those eerie tales of weird crop patterns observed in many parts of the world. Or stories of UFOs being spotted at some specific time, only on the second Tuesday of every month.

I know that there are many hypotheses to explain these strange happenings. For example, wife is convinced that the brown stain must be due to my disgusting habit of chewing betelnuts; one or two of the more adventurous nuts would always jump over from the packet into the pocket, leaving a destructive trail when coming into contact with soap and water. Possible, dear wife, but not plausible. As is my habit, I keep count of all the betelnuts in the packet and consume them all. Hell, each of these nuts cost quite a bit. You can’t afford to have them jumping out of packets. A friend, who heard out this tale of the stained shirts, suggested that it must be the handiwork of the dhobi woman ( we call her Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady), intent on deriving vicarious pleasure at someone’s suffering and to bring comic relief to her own dreary existence. Again, this theory doesn’t hold water. Why should she pick on white shirts alone, when she has a bewildering array of colours to choose from ? No. No. The mystery does not lend itself to such simple explanations.

So, here I am, agonizing over my plight and asking these deep philosophical questions to myself “Why me ? Why my shirts ? Why only my white shirts ?

If you have any answers, you know where to find me. Even better, if you can send me a spotless white shirt……………….

And yet another stolen bicycle....

If Harry Potter series can be stretched over seven episodes and Star Wars over six ( if I haven’t got the figure wrong), won’t you permit me to publish my bicycle trilogy ? Here’s the third part.

This incident happened in the early seventies. We lived in one of those narrow lanes in Mylapore,Madras. Our neighbour was a policeman who had seven children of assorted shapes, sizes and age.

Kids of today are so used to seeing the full-panted cops of today on their gleaming mobikes and sporting their smart caps. The policemen of the seventies were positively comical to look at. They were dressed in sharply creased, bell-bottomed shorts, had pointed funny-looking topis on their heads and carried wooden lathis in their hands. They rode bicycles..

Back to our neighbour. I don’t know how good he was as a policeman, but he was a terror at home. His seven kids used to shake and shiver in his presence and hardly utter a word. Discipline was enforced strictly in the house and the slightest sign of rebellion crushed mercilessly. There was a set routine, which had to be followed unquestioningly. Deviations would simply not be tolerated, not that they were ever attempted.

We never got to see the policeman leave his house as he probably got out very early in the morning. But my sister and I would be waiting on the balcony at 6 pm everyday, to watch the “ritual” next door, as the policeman returned home.

The grand ceremony that took place everyday, with clockwork precision, similar to the Change of Guards at the Buckingham Palace, went like this.. The policeman would ride his bicycle home. A few metres ahead, he would ring the cycle bell, to sound a general alert to his family. On this Pavlovian cue, all the seven kids, would come running out of the house. The eldest would collect the bicycle from the father and park it in the small verandah. The second would pick up his topi and hang it on the nail near the entrance. The third would take the lathi and keep it on the bench, next to the parked bicycle. The fourth would help him remove his shirt and gently hang it on the coat-stand. The fifth would collect the shorts carefully (as the sharp crease could cut the fingers), the sixth would hold out a lungi to him and help him wrap it around too and the seventh would stand at attention with a glass of water and give it to him, as soon as he had put on his lungi.

So, a quick recap of the story so far. Mylapore. Narrow lane. Sis and I. Neighbour, a cop. Cop’s seven kids. Cop strict. Home 6 pm sharp. On bicycle. Seven kids in same sequence collect bike, topi, lathi, shirt, pointed shorts and hand over lungi, water. Same routine every day. All right, all right.You got the plot.

So, this ritual went on, every single day, for many, many years. Boys became adults and girls metamorphosed, as only girls can, into lovely women. Yet this routine never changed at the policeman’s house…

One day, disaster struck the family.

The policeman’s bicycle was stolen. He had to come home walking !

The family had never seen this sight before. As it always happens to people who are used to rigid schedules, they found themselves completely disoriented and lost at these changed circumstances.

The eldest, robbed off his first-born rights of taking over the bicycle, insisted on collecting the topi instead. This was strongly resisted by the second-born, who in a desperate maneuver tried to reach for the father’s lathi. In the pandemonium that ensued, the third and the fourth-born found themselves fighting over the shorts and shirt with the fifth and sixth-born. The policeman realized that he had handed over his shorts but the lungi was nowhere in sight. Nor his customary glass of water. He was simply caught underwears and water-less.

At this stage, I regret that, in the interest of veracity, I must break the news that this was the beginning of the split-up of the cop’s family. Having tasted the joy of indiscipline for the first time in their lives, the seven kids wouldn’t have enough of the newfound freedom. The family broke up and the seven kids went off in different directions and settled down, each clinging to his or her core-competence. The first to start a cycle-hire shop, the second to sell hats, the third to make walking-sticks of the ornate variety, the fourth and fifth to set up a tailoring unit specializing in shorts and shirts, the sixth to join the firm that did the wholesale marketing of Sangu-mark lungis and the seventh to peddle Bisleri water bottles at the Central Station. The policeman has retired from active service, has joined a Security agency and is a watchman in one of the ancient buildings that abound in Mylapore.

So, boys and girls, the summary . Cop has bicycle. Family remains united. Cop loses bicycle. Family disintegrates.

The stolen bicycle made all the difference.

Another stolen bicycle

I heard this story on a BBC radio program.

In the tiny village of Glaslough, Ireland, populated by a few hundred people, there lived a man called Patrick. One day, Patrick lost his favourite bicycle and was completely heartbroken. The village policeman tried his best to trace the missing bicycle, but to no avail.

Like most Irishmen, Patrick was quite a religious person and never missed the Sunday sermon at the local Church. On one such visit, he narrated his tale of woe and misery to Father Murphy who was the chief pastor.

Father Murphy was quite sympathetic and told Patrick not to lose hope. He would nab the culprit . His game plan was this. The following Sunday, he would deliver to his entire congregation a moving sermon on the Ten Commandments, which would be loaded with enough punch to inspire and motivate even the most stone-hearted . He would enumerate the commandments in the same order that God handed over to Moses on Mount Sinai. By the time he came down to the seventh commandment, namely, “Thou shalt not steal “, the bicycle thief would be so guilt-ridden and have his vitals so gnawed by remorse, that he would stick out in the crowd. Patrick had to just watch out for the guy who had the furtive look when Father Murphy read out the seventh commandment.

Sure enough, there was a big gathering on Sunday and Father Murphy, true to his word, gave it the works. Some say that he delivered the best sermon ever heard in Glaslough, for a long, long time. He placed particular emphasis on the seventh commandment, pausing there an extra second, for added effect.

At the end of the sermon, Father Murphy came down the pulpit and asked Patrick eagerly, “ Did you spot the thief ?”

Patrick smiled sheepishly and replied, “ No Father, I didn’t have to wait till the seventh commandment. When you had reached the sixth commandment, namely, - 'Thou shalt not commit adultery' - I remembered where I had parked my bicycle”.

Our heroes !

As a nation, we face an acute shortage of genuine heroes - at least the ones cast in the western mould. You know the type, strongest, tallest, swiftest, wealthiest, etc. As demand exceeds supply,we are willing to clutch at any straw, so to speak, and eulogise the most mediocre of achievements. Or, at the slightest provocation, go back to our ‘glorious’ history, selective in our choice of period and events, to delude ourselves that past performance is a guarantee for future success.

And who or what are our role models ? In sports, we still talk of our 1983 World cup victory in cricket, of P.T.Usha missing the bronze medal by a whisker in 1984 at Los Angeles ( in a truncated field, in an event boycotted by the Russian and Communist Bloc countries) or of “The Flying Sikh”- an epithet that only we would confer on an athlete who finished fourth in his race.Sania Mirza making it into the top 50 or reaching the third round of the Australian Open get such hype and mileage in the media as to embarrass even the less-objective and more-charitable reader or viewer.

Six decades after he departed from the scene, we still, at the drop of a hat,need to invoke Gandhi’s name. We romanticize and mythologise Netaji’s heroism and valour, based on folklore and unsubstantiated stories. With not too many sportsmen around to distribute our acclaim, we go into gleeful raptures at the very mention of the name Sachin Tendulkar.We sing paens of praise, idolise him and elevate him to the level of a demi-God . When we need some diversion, we turn to our celluloid heroes for help. The distinction between real-life and reel-life gets blurred and we wallow in an illusionary world, desperately clinging on to our few and far-flung heroes.

But,is there such a vacuum ? Don’t we have anything to showcase ? To be fair, we do. Flip through the Guinness book of Records and you will come across names of Indians who hold the records for sporting the longest beard, biggest moustache, longest nails and for the thickest face make-up ( Kathakali dancers) . We even have one for the maximum distance covered by 'rolling' on the floor. Yes, these are the indigenously-grown heroes, with those unique skills that are homespun and quintessentially Indian.These are the events where Indians reign supreme, having truly and indubitably conquered the rest of the world.

Alas, dark clouds are looming even over this field. In our misplaced complacency, we believed that we dominated this turf. I just read a newsitem last week that an American has entered the Guiness Book of records with the longest eyebrow hair (9.5 cm). I threw up my hands in righteous indignation, when I read this. This was a record that was rightfully ours, but was not to be. The last, nay only Indian bastion has indeed fallen.

The stolen bicycle

My daughter’s bicycle was stolen, one day, from our house. Dreading the red-tape, I chose not to file a complaint with the police and accepted the state of bikeless existence, philosophically.

But, Life –as we all know- has a knack of throwing up unexpected surprises. Two months after the incident, there was a knock on the door. It was the police ! With the thief in tow ! The serial de-biker had been caught red-handed recently and he was pointing out the several houses whose owners he had stripped off their bicycles.

“Would I be good enough to come down to the Teynampet police station to identify the bicycle ?” asked the policeman, belching out the words in the manner unique to cops.

”Sure” I said, thrilled at the prospect of delighting my daughter as soon as she was back from her Maths, Science and Sanskrit tuitions and imagining her clapping her hands in girlish glee.

I reached the station in less than 15 minutes, identified the gleaming bike and got on to it to drive it home.

“Not so fast , “ said the cop, spitting out his betel-nut and blowing his nose at the same time. . “You need to file an FIR first for our records, and add an explanation why you had failed to register a complaint for two months”
I started to fill up the form , Anything, I thought, to please my darling daughter. Having done it, I asked if I could have the keys please ?

“No way “ said the constipated cop, his flatulence acting up. “ You need to come to the Saidapet Court tomorrow. There are procedures we need to follow..

So, the next day I found my way to the seedy Saidapet court, informing my office that I would be late by an hour or so.

An hour passed. Two. But no sign of my bicycle. Business worth crores of rupees was slipping away at my office, while I was aimlessly whiling away my time on the verandahs of law courts, for a bicycle whose book-value was less than Rs 1000, I thought. I confronted the constipated cop finally and enquired what was happening. He let out a gas-loaded burp and then explained that I needed to file a petition before the Hon’ Court pleading for the release of my cycle and added that I would be well-advised to appoint a lawyer to write this out on stamp paper. The lawyer would charge Rs 250/- for these efforts and the stamp paper would cost Rs 100/-

“Here’s the money” I said in disgust, “now can you get on with it?”

After a few hours, the petition was ready and duly stamped.

“Now what ?” I asked

“ Be patient. You have to appear before the judge, only when your turn comes”

After disposing off half a dozen cases involving pickpockets, bootleggers, pimps and other scums of this earth, the judge summoned me to the witness box and asked me to solemnly swear that the bicycle was genuinely mine and that whatever I had stated in my petition was true to the best of my knowledge and belief. This I confirmed with all sincerity and honesty and asked, “Can I leave now and take the bicycle too?”

The judge admonished me sternly for the impertinence and, for a minute, I got this sinking feeling that he was going to have me beheaded.

What I was required to do, he told me, if I wanted to take the bike home, was to execute a personal bond for Rs 1000/-, promising to return the bicycle back to the Court if a trial later found the accused not guilty. How the low-criminal who had already admitted to the offence would ever be found not-guilty was more than I could imagine, but I agreed to do as per the instructions of the Hon’ Court and now, for God’s sake, would they let me take my bicycle home ?

I, of course, had presumed that the bicycle was parked next to the judge’s chambers, they would give it to me in a grand ceremony and it would be a simple matter of pushing it into the car’s boot and driving home, where my daughter was, no doubt, waiting with her nose to the window pane.

No such luck. The bicycle was not in Saidapet. I had to go back to Teynampet police station to pick it up. The constipated cop kept scratching his head in the time-honoured tradition of cops, hinting that some currency notes had to exchange hands, if he had to part with the keys and send me home. I had run out of change and the constipated cop wouldn’t accept credit cards. So, I had to give him a crisp 100-Rupee note to coax the keys out of him.

Finally, at 8 PM that evening, my daughter got her bicycle back. Lucky girl.

The homicidal bibliophile

My wife ( hereinafter referred to as “She” to protect my identity) is a voracious reader of horror books and an avid watcher of horror movies. “She” hand-picks only those books that contain, not later than on the second page, a vivid description of a disemboweled corpse lying in a pool of blood. Horror movies must pack enough gory scenes, scary shrieks and other spine-chilling special effects.

A fortnight ago, I came across a newsitem which said that a 32-year old woman in Patna had poisoned her husband, inspired by a scene in an Hindi movie. This made me panic. If watching one movie could inspire this illiterate Bihari woman and turn her into a murderess, imagine the effect of all those hundreds of horror books that “She” had been devouring for so many years. It was evident that I was a potential and a definite target. I had to be on my guard all the time. Ceaseless vigilance was called for.

Last Monday, she pulled out two drumsticks, from the fridge. I froze. “She” had once told me a story, written by Roald Dahl, about a housewife who had knocked out her husband, using a frozen piece of lamb leg and then called the cops. Asking them to wait in the drawing room, she deep-fried the leg of the lamb and served it to the cops, thus destroying the only evidence they could have had. Was “She” going to knock me out likewise with the drumsticks and destroy the evidence in Murungaikkai Sambar ? I calmed down only after seeing the drumstick being cut into smaller pieces, which greatly reduced their potential as a murder weapon.

A week back, I had locked myself in the bathroom when I heard the pressure cooker blowing off steam in the kitchen. “Wait a minute” I thought, “ was it really the pressure cooker or was it a hissing snake ?” Did not the character in Conan Doyle’s “ Case of the Speckled Band” introduce a live snake from a tiny opening in the locked room, to poison the victim and leave no clues whatsoever ? Was “She” trying to do the same to me ? Where would “She” get hold of a snake ? I got out of the bathroom after “She” shouted that “She” would break open the door, if I didn’t come out fast enough to drop the daughter in school.

Two nights back “She” snuggled up to me and seductively cooed, “ We need to have a holiday, just you and me, far away , in a quiet place. Let’s take one of those long train journeys. Leave the kids with the grandmother”. “Ha”, my senses alerted me, “She” is trying to lull me into a sense of false security and lead me to a lonely spot. Does “She” think that I had not heard of Ray Bradbury’s story about a man on a train between Moscow and Vladivostok, getting down at a station in the middle of nowhere, so that he could meet some stranger and kill him and leave no trace at all . Nobody would suspect him as they couldn’t attribute any motive . Was “She” trying to take me to some such lonely spot to bump me off?

This morning, as I was leaving for office, “She” patted me fondly and lovingly adjusted my tie-knot. As if I would be deceived. This was straight out of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic movie, “Frenzy” where the serial murderer strangulated all his victims with his neck tie……

I hear the phone ring now. I am not going to pick it up. Was it not the movie ‘Dial M for murder “, in which the villain had hired a killer to enter his house, hide behind the phone and choke the villain’s wife when she came to answer the call ?

I told you. Ceaseless vigilance is called for.

The Panchatantra Tale

Ganesh was a creative genius, a brilliant innovator, a compulsive tinkerer or a gizmo-geek, depending on how one viewed his obsession with gadgets . He was constantly closeted in his workshop trying to make a meaningful whole of the various parts and components that littered the place. He passionately believed that everything in life must have more than one use and endeavoured to inject varying degrees of multi-functionality into all his inventions.

Alas, good inventors seldom are good entrepreneurs and Ganesh struggled to make a commercial success of his creations. Once, he toiled for days together and came out with an indigenous version of the Swiss Army knife that consisted of a corkscrew, bottle-opener, knife, scissors, screw driver, inch tape and a monkey spanner. The merciless market rejected this contraption outright . Inscrutable indeed can be the behaviour of the Customer and one can do nothing but solemnly bow to His diktat

Undeterred by this setback, Ganesh went back to his laboratory and swung into action again. This time he designed a wrist watch, which was awesome in its complexity. It had a built-in mobile phone, digital camera, torch light, thermometer, sphygmanometer, FM radio, alarm clock and a miniature micro-wave oven to make one corn pop at a time. Unfortunately, it too bombed at the box-office as the finicky, irrational customers insisted that the wrist watch must also be able to tell the time.- which need Ganesh had not provided for

Now, Ganesh’s wife was getting impatient and would not put up with this any more. She lashed out at Ganesh for sitting on his butt all day, tinkering with his toys and not doing anything worthwhile to fetch some income for the family. She gave him a week’s notice to deploy his time and resources profitably, warning him of dire consequences if he failed to do so. She told him in no uncertain terms that she would use his Army knife to skin him alive or his microwave oven to cook one finger or a toe of his at a time, if he persisted with his madness.

Ganesh was stung by the accusation that he was sitting on his butt all day . He was determined to prove her wrong and made a mental note to begin work on an integrated model consisting of a pedometer (to be attached to his legs to measure the number of steps he walked every day) and a piezo-electric sensor glued to his trouser-seat ( which would be connected to a timer to record the number of hours he spent sitting on his butt ) and a calibrated differentiator to display the net energy he burnt every day. He was lost thus in his reverie when Serendipity smiled on him.

A farmer visiting the city had chanced to pick up Ganesh’s multi-purpose knife from a roadside dustbin and immediately appreciated its potential as an ear-poker, a nose-digger, a back-scratcher, a lice-picker , a tongue-scraper, nail-cleaner and a tooth de-stainer, all packaged in one. Soon, the word spread as it always does in our villages . There was a huge demand for the product and Rural India’s need was insatiable. The knife was re-christened as Kisan Ka Katthi and positioned by the FMCGs as the farmer’s inseparable companion. Gadget Ganesh had finally arrived. He also thus managed to keep his skin and his fingers and his toes intact.

Ganesh is now engaged in designing , for his wife, a new multi-purpose dress which can be worn as a sari , or as a salwar kameez by the simple expedient of folding it inward and twisting it to form a Mobius strip or as a kimono merely by tugging a couple of strategically-concealed strings. His wife is a very happy woman.

The lesson to you, boys and girls who want to pursue a career in marketing, is to anticipate the unarticulated needs of your customers. Learn to do this and success is yours.