a mARTIAN dIARY

…Words that wouldn’t make any sense to any but some imaginary people living in the realms of the world of infinite possibilities that is my mind. Of course to them it would herald the coming of their one and only saviour Cracker Boy, dressed in red suite with a blue cape to match. And if those trees and plants that I so bravely fought in those countless fits of imaginative role-playing had a memory they would also probably remember how that red and blue saviour helped show them the error of their ways for which they repented at the edge of his stick sword, and have henceforth grown in trees’ with fully satisfying lives that most trees ought to have.

For it was childhood that brought with it freedom that I could not even imagine for a while in my life, a sense of anything being possible and also a inherent want for something larger than life manifesting itself in various stories entwined with whatever I picked from my world around - my comics and my father’s bed time stories the prime culprits. Yes, I wanted to be a super hero, an innocent want to be special, to be larger than life, a common human want? But as time has passed I have been fed to believe that I am not special. But we are special aren’t we?

What is special but a word with a vague enough definition for people to satisfy the minimum criterion and enjoy the vicarious pleasures of the max. For me this flight of fancy has taken different forms from my want, no, need to be a superhero and then to my belief that I am a alien. And alien I truly am in some level of its definition but more so by my inabilities than by my abilities. But then the trees that tasted the edge of my sword were aliens themselves who were forced to become human and lead the least judged path.

Ah Yes..the least judged path , as our society has shown us is the path of least resistance and hence the right path. But isn’t this contradictory for a society extols the hard work & creativity and resistance to the path of least resistance, at least in its overt overtones?

As for me, I have and will remain an alien, abet one which has learnt to put the human mask as and when necessary

Currently the Indian academia seems to be split into two camps – the pro-reservation junta or the anti-reservation junta. And as a person who is now confirmed of stepping back into the academic world in a few months, I move around people and places where this discussion happens in a very heated manner. As such I have been quizzed many time by both camps – are you with us or against us?

Few months ago my response would be “If I get my seat, I don’t care much about how the others get in” but then I realised that it was not me talking but the tension of being on 3 waiting lists and the prospect of a future so cloudy taking its toll on me. Now that its clear that, barring unforeseen circumstances, I will very much be spending the next two years of my life at Delhi University South Campus studying MBA(MS) from Faculty of Management Studies (FMS) Delhi, I have had time to reflect upon this issue more closely. Having been in both the camps at different times in my life, instead of justifying my current stand I would like to trace my relation with reservation.

My first tryst with reservation came when I was trying to get into first standard. Since my father was a transferable bank employee, it seemed a logical step for my family to try and get me into a “central” school or KV which followed a “central” syllabus so that changes in school would affect only the social-politic environment rather than the curriculum making the inevitable adjustment less difficult. You could say that I was at the “wrong end” of the reservation since I was neither a defence personnel’s ward nor a central govt employee’s ward, which constituted the first two levels of priority on the basis of which the admissions were granted in a KV. I was a level III person or in human understandable terms - “Ward of transferable employee under the state government”, which was pretty low considering that even that time KV’s usually used to get filled by the time the applications from the first two categories were done with. As luck would have it a new division started that year, the now notorious (in my mind and our batch-folklore for all the beating me and my friends got from the “D” people) “D” division. But anyway I was in the “C” division list and was able to get into KVCPT.

Thinking about its right now, even though it was reservation per say, it was a very logical system since it was in the order of people who were mostly likely to get transferred and in hindsight (and more importantly having got my seat ) , it does not make any sense for me to have any kind of grudge towards it.

My next recollect-able memory of reservation is from my 8th or 9th standard civics class where I learned that some constituencies are reserved for SC/ST. it is something that I believe that I don’t have enough knowledge to make a stand on right even now though I really hated the idea at that time, but it’s a memory none-the-less.

Then came the engineering entrance “nonsense”. ( I call it nonsense now because I find people attaching so much value to it that after having done engineering from one my the best colleges in my state, I still feel the hue and cry is a bit too much, ESPECIALLY for people to REPEAT year ( plz guys unless your would die for engineering and for you believe its your true calling, your time is better spent doing something else…something you like. This does not include repeating for the IIT’s cuz I don’t have enough input to take a stand on that yet)

This is the stage where it dawned upon me that if there are 100 seats in a college, I am eligible only for less that 50 seats and some people, who studied along with me, came to the same tuition class, got the same books, bunked the same classes (more or less); had a special inheritance to the seats. Looking at the sheer numbers (less than 300-400 good seats and more than 50k people writing) I was convinced that it was injustice and hence was a fierce anti reservation guy, ready to air my view anywhere with supreme conviction. But once I got into the college I drew solace from the fact that these people would not get any reservation at the placement time. But only time will tell me that these “Reserved” people walked away with some of the better paying jobs, for which I can hold no grudge as I felt they deserved it.

But during my four years, I interacted with many people including people who came thru reservation and one of my closest friends, Miss R, was the daughter of a daily wage labourer. She was the person from whom I and my best friend in class S used to copy all our notes from. She was in most of my practical lab groups owing to our close roll numbers and without her I don’t think I would have passed my engineering labs. (Special mention to Miss C &N who were the people who I am eternally indebted to, for proving me with the rest of the notes :P) I think she , Miss R, would be the first person to agree to the fact that she was not good in our class subject as some of us. But that did not deter her from working hard, and now after my engineering even though there are people who got in with a “merit” seat who haven’t cleared all their papers, she cleared all of them and is working in a good job earning for her family. I am not trying to say “ See she did it, other merit students didn’t do it…so reservation is justified” but what I am trying to question is a question whose answer that most people take for granted.

What is Merit?

Is it my marks in the different exams I have taken? Is it the percentile I get in a hugely random exam like CAT, which depends, much more than my liking, to the taker’s luck on that that day? Frankly to me that’s not merit, nor can I define merit. But of course one thing I accept is that we don’t have seats for everybody and hence some people need to be selected or in other words others need to be eliminated. So its more a process of elimination than selection and a good academic profile would mean that there are better chances of a person putting the opportunity to study at an IIM or an IIT or an FMS to better use, but we have to understand that the selection or elimination process is flawed, it is not ideal, but close enough to idea and close enough to practical for us to make do.

Now that’s one way to measure merit. But that’s not the only merit. In the case of Miss R, given the resources she had, her output efficiency was probably at least equal if not much better to many of us ours. Which means that she also, in this definition of merit “Deserves” the seat. Why I use the word “deserves” the seat is because I see lots of anti-reservation people say that “deserving” candidates are loosing seats. But to them the word deserving is a 1 dimensional word without any meaning beyond the percentile obtained in cat or marks obtained in IIT-JEE. I again point out, they are a good measure of merit, but they are not without flaws.

So if entrance exams are a practical approximation to selection and elimination so are reservations a practical approximation to social justice. Both are not without flaws, but close enough to the ideal to be implemented.

Having said that I do not say that reservation is the only solution or the main solution for social justice, on the contrary it is just a stop gap solution. The thing to be emphasised most in my opinion is primary education that is the mail solution to social justice in education. More should be done at the grass roots level, which will unfortunately take too much time for it to have relevance in a vote-bank dominated politics. But I guess that’s for NGO’s and similar organisations to take up. My previous company MindTree used to do some work in this area and is something other organisations can also cue up on. And reservation can be phased out, once primary level education standards are reached.

But also having quoted this example, it is only prudent that I let out another fact about my college. Some of the people who got in through reservation, where some of the richest guys in my college which does make a mockery of the system, but since I know that more than 1 deserving candidate got thru reservation, I think the system has worked. And the creamy layer, if implemented properly will go a long way in helping the system match the ideal curve.

As a product of the Indian KV schooling system, some of my earliest memories date back to my English classes where spelling tests used to be the stuff my nightmares were made of. Having been constantly fed on 2nd hand DC comics that my father used to get me, “Color” is one of the first words that helped me realize that all English is not “good” English. I still remember the red marks (although I have to confess that a recent viewing of Tare Zameen Par refreshed those memories) in my English notebook with ‘color’ being one of the words prominently getting colored.

It’s been over 60 years since the Union Jack was taken off and replaced by our Tricolour at Red Fort. But even with a history spanning more than thousands of years, the 200 odd years that the British ruled us left a huge impact on us, nothing more profound than the popularization of (British) English as a means of communication. 60 years is of course too close to call, but at the dawn of the information age, the English legacy can be said to have had a positive impact on our economy. The availability of so many employable English-speaking youth is the single most important factor that has helped us emerge from our slumber in this age where English is the sickle which is helping us reap as the knowledge industry sun shines brightly

But gone are the colonial days when the sun never set in the British Empire and now the US of A has taken over as the dominant economy of the world and with the end of the cold war, its position as the first among equals has only gotten more and more concrete. The fact that most countries hold their foreign reserves in American dollars is perhaps the best testament to the fact that they drive the world economy.

Now in this uni-polar world it’s only natural that a doubt arises in our mind as to whether we should tow the line of our former masters or cede our “English freedom” to the Americans. This is more relevant for us as we are a rapidly growing “developing economy” with services exports as one of the major propellants of our growth. America is an important market for the skills of millions of Indians and if you go by the cliché “any money is good money” it won’t be hard to predict how the winner of the British vs. American English tussle is. Not only is a large chunk of our exports going to the America, of that a good chunk of the business goes into transcription and voice/text based support where the subtle differences in the different avatars of English will stand out.

But in a recent study in India, for the book English in India: Loyalty and Attitudes by Hohenthal, Annika., we were still able to see the ghosts of our colonial past. In the study the majority of the respondents (70%) felt that RP (Received Pronunciation: BBC English; Standard English in Britain) would serve as the best model for Indian English, 10% thought General American English would be better, and 17% preferred the Indian variety of English. This is of course due to some important fallacies in our earlier analysis, the most important being the question of teaching resources. For a country that has a history of teaching a different flavor of English , which is now entranced in all its English teaching resources, both human and material, it can be a humongous task to chance and there is no switch button solution to move to American English and the as simple business rules go, the cost must be justified by the advantage.

Also its is not just a matter of teaching resources but also some of the words are so ingrained into our culture that a change would require a change in our social mindset. Think of confused driver having to put “gas” into their cars instead of petrol or of the devout vegetarian wife going aghast at the prospect of having to put ‘egg’plant ( brinjal) into the “otherwise” fully vegetarian dish or The disgust of the Indian who is happy when he can pay bills with bills, only to later find out the truth. And in a different view, this can be seen as an open invasion of our culture which we ourselves are promoting
Another important factor that must be given its due is the origin of the so called Indian English which comprises several dialects or varieties of English spoken primarily in India, and by first-generation members of the Indian Diaspora. This dialect evolved during and after the British colonial rule of India for nearly two hundred years. English is the co-official language of India, with about 100 million speakers. And looking at the activity in the Indian English Literature arena, which is only rising year by year, we can see that we taking our rightful place in the history of evolution of English by contributing to it, as much as, if not more than what we take from it.

At the end of the day if we are to move to American English , which, as we saw, warrants a lot of social and financial costs, it has to be justified by the advantages gained Also we must be convinced that such a path is the only path for us. But this is not the case as the success story of the our services industry in itself points to the fact that the differences between the various dialects of English are not very high and that they can be compensated by an intelligent mind or in the worst case scenario by a job specific “finishing” training.

To conclude I feel that for us to move to American would not only be a step backwards in social terms but also it would be a great insult to the English language itself, as we would be discounting its resilience and universality which made it popular in the first place. And as for the huge influence that British English already enjoys in our English, only time can tell whether this impact is good or bad. As Angus Wilson once said, contemporaries are too close to the event to be good judges. And contributing and developing our own Indian English would be the best step forward.

Some people by a single act of volition leave a mark on millions of people without ever intending it and the irony of life is such that at the time of the act and years thereafter they never realise the weight of their decisions nor come to face with the millions of faceless people whose face-lines they changed. It is like an invisible cloud that took its first steps of formation the moment they took the decision and then ever growing exponentially every moment thereafter as the decision took effect affecting one, then ten , then thousands of people in succession, always following the person around in its growth, awkward and blissfully unaware, ever threatening to vanish into thin air with in a single act of fury but never driven beyond that invisible line between life and death.

India with its controlling past has many such examples, where decisions that touched the life of millions of people was taken in a moment which was more devoted to finding out ways to reach ‘that’ itch on the back which was at that no-mans land the hands could not reach, in some dingy office with yellow walls, pastels falling out not because the funds were not there to repaint but because the funds were taking a stroll with the Mrs as that lucknowi chicken churidar that was bought a year back, and under a cranking fan, which started cranking the day it was installed and which most people that knew about its existence could never imagine without that sound

But as fate would have it not all decisions were done with the same callousness that these dingy offices bring to mind. Yes there were idealists. People who were beyond corruption or the arrogance that was brought in by the protective rationalisation that destroyed all planning centric economies like ours. When Sam Pitroda was entrusted with the task of modernising Indian telecommunication sector, he was a idealist, a man with a dream. He dreamt of an India where no mothers cried for want of hearing their son’s voice and where no lover slept without hearing sweet nothings from their distant better half. He dreamt of an India, who could rival global standards of telecommunication and more importantly global costs. And he single-handedly set forth into motion that invisible movement that would eventually have made India one of the most connected and cheapest places in the world for phones. The fact that reality caught up with this dreamer before he could see his dreams fulfilled is another thing altogether.

He also set into motion a revolution that eventually became a welcome addition to the hugely imaginative Indian folklore growing tired of all the freedom heroes as time eroded their charm. He coined the term, the idea - PCO. Public Call Office or PCO’s was a concept which revolutionised how Indians saw telephones. Soon, to an Indian a PCO was more than just a telephone office. It became a beaming community centre, an unintended fallback to the village centres of the yesteryears. Even in the early years of post-liberal India, private telephone waiting lists was 2-3 years long and more of an luxury item. Anyone who had anything to do with a phone, unless he belonged to the miniscule affluent class with “connections”, had been touched and deeply touched at that, by the PCO. The social meter reached high markings near a PCO for many a love affairs, dispute settlements and business activities centred in and around the PCO.

But still getting a PCO licence was something that required knowing the right people and greasing a few palms. But in line with the socialistic obsession with social justice, there were some exceptions built into the dogmatic and sluggish machinery. One such loophole was the disability clause which set aside permits for people with disability. Though the person who thought up the rule might as well have been inspired by a disabled person he chanced to stare out through his government ambassador car or just a theoretical application of something he learned at a foreign university at the governments expense, none-the-less it touched many less fortunate lives by helping them break out of the metal crutch that society had forced them to wear

Once such person was Chandarshekar Nair or “Chandru” to his close ones, from gods own country. He was to me, till few days ago, same as a bench or water cooler at the railway station I have been using for most of life. But now he is something much more.

The moment of his birth had brought with it an unwelcome guest into the family. From being a revered male child in a middle class Nair family, the instant his deformed that legs came out resoundingly announced the birth of a disability certificate that said he would be paralysed from waist down. As a wailing infant lying in over crowded government natal ward he was blissfully unaware of this, but growing up brought him face to face with the harsh realities of being an invalid in a developing country where it was a rat race everywhere. But what he lacked in motor skills was more than adequately balanced in his cerebral skills. He topped every class he went to. Chandru didn’t like pity, but unfortunately that what he got from most areas. Growing up dreaming the Great Indian Dream of meritocracy and in a state obsessed with academic performance, he looked at studies as the only ladder out of the sea of pity which was drowning him. But even when he passed B.Com with a gold medal, he was seen as the Invalid who happed to get a Gold Medal rather than a B.Com Gold Medallist.

He finally understood something that the jagged faces of reality etched upon his density long back, the fact that the Great Indian meritocratic dream is not for the less-able led like him. From door to door his search for a job yielded only more and more pity. Dejected he contemplated extreme measures until a good Samaritan neighbour moved into his locality and heard pity-filled stories about him. No one will ever know if pity was the emotion that lead him to do what he did next, but history makes that irrelevant and he offered him a chance to get a PCO license through his contacts in govt. Chandru accepted it with open arms and then things changed around him for a turn. “I still remember the evening Madhavan Ettan, came to my house to offer me that option. I had gone and brought rat poison and was praying to god for the strength to go through with it, but he came in like a god’s messenger and rescued me. I and my family owe whatever we have today to him. He not only got me the licence but also got me the seed money to get going with it. But as they say that god calls back good people back to him fast, he died a few years later in an accident on a trip to Guruvayur”

Now sitting in his PCO booth at the un-crowded corner of the chebakam railway station, he and the weighing machine standing tall beside him share something more than the connection with the railway station. Both anachronous in this age of mobile and electronics weighing machines but both an integral part of the memory of many a commuters who use and have used the station over the years. Take any of them away and any picture of the station, drawn either with imaginary strokes of memory’s brushes in ones mind’s canvas or real horse-tail brushes on a paper canvas, would be like the last masterpiece of a maestro on which he was working just before his death. Complete to everyone but still with a sense of incompleteness that no one can put their hands on.

“I have seen it all” he continues in that distinct kochi dialect of the malayalam. “Yep, this station has been my second home for the past 23 years and I have seen it all”. Now nearing 50, I can see small wrinkles starting their conquest of what would once have been a very handsome face, as his voice reverberates thru the lazy afternoon air inside the station. “It’s the lean time” he explains, “thats why I asked you to come at this time when you called up. After the Chennai mail goes at 1 o clock there is no other train at least till 2:30 pm. That’s because today is a Wednesday and there are no long distance trains starting during this time today.” I can see that he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the trains and their timings, and my mind wanders why he doesn’t double up on his PCO business by setting up an enquiry as his voice and demeanour seem more human that the computer-like voice that greets you when you call the official railway system or even at the enquiry counter that is just a few steps away from where I am sitting now. But then my wandering mind comes back and fixes on his voice. “Well, actually business is quite low these days, what almost anyone from a daily labours to fish vendors having a mobile, no one is bothered about using the PCO.” While he talks about mobile proliferation there is a unique tone in his voice, which shows a sense of disappointment but also, to me, a strange sense of pride. I enquire him about this and he replies back “Well even though this PCO is something that puts the food on the table for my family, but it is also something that gave me a sense of worth in this world and I consider my self a proud stakeholder of this industry. Not the PCO industry, but the industry that helps provide the service to the people of this nation be near to their loved ones when they are far and also get their business done from afar. These old arms and body may be a relic from a different era, but I like to think of them as having played a small but important role in its progress.” I think, here is one person who is probably loosing a major part of his income due to the mobile proliferation and still he looks at it in such a manner. As my eyes catch the Vodafone and Airtel posters in his booth, he proudly declares that he also does mobile “currency” charging at his booth which leaves me admiring at his ingenuity and also his sheer power to look at the “Big Picture”.

Slowly our discussions move towards his family, upon which he takes out his purse to show me a B&W family photo. “Mine was an inter-caste marriage, with the daughter of a coolie. At that time we used to have mass inter-caste marriages done by the communist government. EMS himself inaugurated my mass wedding. Her father knew me thru the station and she used to visit often. Since I was not “valuable” to my community there was not much opposition. I wonder whether it was a love marriage but shy away from asking this. Love marriage or not, his love for his family clearly sparkles in his eyes makes my doubt irrelavant Of his 2 sons and 1 daughter, all are settled he says with a sense of accomplishment. “My elder son Krishnan used to help me initially with the PCO but now works in a mobile repairing shop while my younger son, Madhavan works at a travel agency nearby and my daughter is married to a TC in the railways.” After each and every sentence his makes it a point to thank god, the railways and everyone else that helped him to be where he is.

I look out thru the window near his booth, trying to imagine how the view would have changed thru his 23-24 years there. I let know what I am thinking and he looks out, going into a day dream simultaneously. He speaks about how the huge hotel that now occupies most of the view was a small tea shop and how well he knows the owner. The sun is away from the window but the hot Kerala summer sun makes you sure that you don’t forget its presense thru his messengers that heat up the place. The small revolving table fan is doing nothing for the AC’ised me but seems to be enough for him. As he speaks about his buddy ship with the hotel owner, I look at his desk predominantly occupied by a billing machine with a monthly magazine and the days newspaper lying beside it and in the side lies another anachronous relic, a radio, at which he catches me staring.

This brings about another dimension to our discussion in which he tells me about how the railways have changed over the years. Like most people related to the railway fraternity he also seems to admire Lalu Prasad Yadav for the results he is bringing. “The quality of the food has improved; the inside of the station, even though I don’t go in much, has become a lot cleaner. There is a lot of transparency in the tender process thru when some of the work in the station is outsourced. Earlier I used to see lots of people coming to my booth and saying…the train was 12 hours late…train was 24 hours late….now I have even heard the train came half an hour early. All in all he has brought about a face change in the railways.”
His cerebral powers come to fore when he beautifully goes on relating the different things in the cities history to the different changes he observed in and around him; the gulf war, the NRI exodus, the cricket match days, the liberalisation, the party meetings at Cochin, the religious conclaves etc for all this affect his business and also stimulate his fertile mind. And his knowledge of history astonishes me, for he goes thru dates of important events in the city with a super speed. I wonder, if he had more opportunities where he would have ended up.

His disability is something I am, now that I think of it, shamefully scared to tread upon. But he brings me to ease by talking about it as something very natural and something he is not ashamed of. He is probably put to ease for his condition and what he has achieved is something that evokes admiration in me rather than pity. “Our whole society is very disability unfriendly. For example, this is my 2nd home – but I cant use the ordinary entrance for I cant get into using the wheel chair without another person’s help so I have to go around and use the entrance for luggage and then come back to the front. Going to the bathroom is the time I hate the most in a day about for it is an ordeal everyday.”

My experience in the UK and the disability friends services there reminds me of an area where we, as a nation, lag against other countries, something which frightens me for the sheer amount of effort we will have to put in to get it right. On expressing this, he calmly replies that neither he nor any of the less-abled people he knows expects anything drastic overnight. The most they expect is for people to at least start recognising that this is an issue and then to take simple baby steps at a time. By this time his face takes the looks of a serious social activist to whom these issues are visibly close to heart. He talks about the small organisation that he and other less abled people and their well wishers run for bringing such issues to fore and the activities they have undertaken

As 2:30 approaches, I can see the blanket of indolence that had so grasped the station slowly uncover, with people arriving for the train and coolies taking their place in the station to be the first to get to the potential customers. I realise it for me to end this vicarious trip thru Chandru’s eyes and get up and bid good bye to this man, who epitomises most of what is right about the mankind. So this is the story of a faceless Indian who was taken on a roller-coaster ride by destiny but perseverance and hope, along with a little luck, drove him to where he is against impossible odds and I look forward to keeping my promise of putting his story into words so that, after me, you and others can be inspired by him.

It was Nietzsche who put into words that what was already known by most living creatures innately - Life is a constant struggle between heaviness and lightness - One of freedom against that of duty, of faring on as opposed to faring well.  In the history of life, long as it may be, lot has been written favouring both but never has one won over the other. Yes, there have been momentary victories but that’s where they stop, and then fall back to their patterns as the summer in all its fury still gives way to winter when the time comes.

It is such an observation that makes me believe that it is not fight at all, but rather a more like a staged one much like the ones we see in wrestling. Each wrestler knows that it’s not the fight that’s important, but the ratings and the money that the fight can bring in, as they make pre planned moves and get hit at the same place they would hit, if the script had been written differently. Likewise heaviness and lightness smirk at each other as people fight about them, wrestling with all their emotions, raw and polished, to concede to either. Finally it’s a victory for one and a defeat for the other yet, always a victory for the subject.

Of course for a person there should be multiple victories in life but the defeated enemy must differ at different times, for both heaviness and lightness have their own purpose. For a life , once its over, is never felt if it been light throughout its existence, for it’s the dull, boring hours in life that make you feel contented that life is long enough and a life is will never seen fondly in pictures if its been heavy throughout, for the long 2 month summer holidays during school and the hours and hours spent whispering sweet nothings into your significant others ears are the lightest memories, memories which are so sweet that you never feel that they got enough time,  in your life but are also the pictures that flash you by as you are about to breath your last.

As for me, let’s say that I am I am going to be a bit more heavy by the end of the month and I just can’t stop beaming