In God's Own Country

zenwriter@gmail.com (John) — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 15:37:00 +0000

On a House Boat along the Kerala Backwaters!

zenwriter@gmail.com (John) — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 09:36:00 +0000

Chapter 1 - NEW BOMBAY

zenwriter@gmail.com (John) — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 16:03:00 +0000

To God's Own Country

A Serendipitous Journey to Kerala through South India

Chapter 1

The huge neon signage strung high above the other subaltern glittering vinyl signs screamed “Centre One.” The brand culture had arrived. The equally loved and hated mall ethos had come to India, tip-toeing on tapered heels, and sporting mannequin looks. “Looking good” never had it so good. Dazzling show windows, high watt lights, shining displays, and strobe-light brilliance was slowly pervading the country of a thousand impoverished villages, where electricity was scarce, why, even non-existent. I was on vacation to “God’s Own Country” and was feeling light. The bus to Kerala was due only after three full hours and therefore I decided to check out centre One, the shopping mall that had opened in New Bombay. I would be travelling through a mostly dark and atavistic landscape punctured by a few touches of modernity in an open bus for the next two days.

If there was a cultural definition to these malls it was, “opulent consumerism.” A burger here cost almost twenty times what the Indian equivalent of it cost on the streets. Yet, burger joints were so crowded that one had to stand in a long queue to be served.

The mall culture was an inevitable consequence of modernisation and the fast sprouting “Call Centres” and “Business Process Outsourcing” companies that had sprung up around New Bombay. New Bombay till then was a cluster of villages ignored by the stealthy march of Indian history. My friend Dalvi has told me that the first man to receive a graduate degree from this area in the 1960s was feted like a celebrity. He also told me that the term “educated” to the inhabitants of this area meant having almost “supernatural” powers of doing arithmetic and speaking a few words of English.

Now the story is slightly different. Ever since it was connected to the island metropolis of Bombay by a railway and road bridge things have supposedly improved. There are more industries to offer employment and more cars and trucks on the road. But along with it came another adjunct of industrialization, the itinerant population of casual labourers who doggedly create slums around the industries they serve.

There is a darker side to New Bombay. In the Thane-Belapur industrial belt of New Bombay, disintegrating factory sheds, rusting chemical plants, and forlorn chimneys stand witness to the once-thriving manufacturing industries. No more. Now the unemployed workers from these factories crowd around the Turbhe area looking for work. Their bosses find it easier, and far more profitable, to open an outsourcing unit to contract lowly clerical jobs from western countries.

These companies outsource routine phone call services to young Indians who are trained to speak in the Western accent. They are also given food coupons; pick-up and drop from their homes and a better than average salary in return for working mostly in the night shift. These workers sacrifice sleep to get work ready for American executives when they report for work the next day. The payback is substantial, by their standards, sometimes, even thrice the salary that a company in another sector would pay. However, this didn’t even work out to a quarter of the salaries in the land of Uncle Sam. The concept is called “twenty-four/seven” and means work done twenty-four-hours, all seven days of the week, a backup service, sort of.

The result was that a lot of jobs were generated and the youth were attracted like, forgive the cliché, bees to honey. The pay is more than that for traditional jobs, and there is money to buy that snazzy motorbike, so, what’s wrong with working at night? There were initial murmurs of protest but economic necessity overran these hesitations. I asked this of Prashant who works in such a Call Centre. Prashant, aged twenty-three, is the elder of two children of working parents. “The pay isn’t bad. All my friends are from secure family backgrounds, and we see this as a way of making some pocket money.” I ask him if he wanted to make a career of it. “No, this is just a temporary arrangement.”

In the early seventies seeing the congestion that was going to result from the expansion of the island city of Bombay, the government had taken over cultivable land from farmers in the villages in Thane that is now New Bombay. It then developed housing estates and societies on this land to decongest the burgeoning Bombay metropolis. Well, the metropolis had been rotting for some time due mainly to the sickness of Bombay’s fabled textile mills. According to an article in the news portal Rediff.com one thousand people enter Bombay every day to make it their permanent home. Labour was in abundance.

I am, at this point, travelling to Kerala – God’s Own Country – for my summer vacation. My wife and son have preceded me. My first choice was travelling by train. But getting a train ticket was as difficult as an Indian winning the Olympic gold medal. I am told that people who manage to book a ticket in the summer peak season even go to the temple to break a self-congratulatory coconut. Sorry, joking. Even after booking two months in advance my reservation wasn’t confirmed. Not even a reservation against cancellation, which would have allowed me a seat, not a berth to sleep. I am not particularly fond of the general compartment – a rough way to travel – where there would be people sitting on suitcases in the aisle.

******

Travelling to Kerala, the southernmost state of India, steeped in its religious practices and customs has always been a matter of great trepidation and tension for me. As if in conformity with the name “God’s Own Country” the state is a grand spectacle of various religious festivals and events. What was it that attracted the religiously inclined to this state ruled by left-leaning atheists? At any time in the year there would be thousands of devotees going to Kerala to attend holy shrines and divine programs. One such is the flow of Ayyappan pilgrims visiting Sabarimala Temple, another is the influx of Christians to the aptly named Divine Nagar to attend the Christian healing and resurgence movement taking place there. Yes, Divine Nagar, or, Divine City, is the name given to the railway station nearest to this facility. Train seats would be fully reserved on the day bookings opened, and people do not mind queuing overnight at stations to be assured of a confirmed ticket.

So, since train tickets weren’t available, I decided to go by bus. I generally like bus travel. By travelling in a bus I would be crossing not only boundaries but epochal cultural zones demarcated by archaic traditions, which have survived thousands of years. The journey would be the telescoping of several eras, in which Kerala would be the ultimate frontier, the land that has only been discovered recently by tourists. In today’s world Kerala would be an anachronism in that it still clung steadfastly to its religious and cultural roots. Karate is said to have originated here, snakes are still worshipped here, and farming is done by man and animal. The charges for the journey would be prohibitive, almost double, as the operators were savvy business people who would hike rates during the rush season. Need a ticket? Yes, of course you can be assured of one, if you are prepared to pay.

I would be travelling on the Bombay to Bangalore stretch of the Golden Quadrilateral – the highway connecting the four metropolises of Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta, and Madras. I had only read about this project and wanted to check it out. Bombay would be linked to Madras via Bangalore, and Madras would be linked to Calcutta in the east. Then the road will loop from the east to Delhi in the north. That would mean all four major cities of India would be covered at the four ends of the Golden Quadrilateral.

The scheme was grand, no doubt. By following the trail described above by bus, I would be able to take in the sights and sounds of India. I wanted to do this for a long time. Besides, that was how the great travel writers of yore – Marco Polo, Fa Hien and Hien Tasang – travelled; on caravans, along silk routes, on camels and ponderously moving mule trains. The romance of travelling on the dusty land route of Central and South India was what I wanted to capture on camera and write about. I have a digital camera that fits snugly into the pocket of my photographers’ jacket, and used it liberally during my perambulation through the south Indian states. I wanted to record the smells, the foods, the dialects, and the culture of the states that I passed through.

Al Barunia – a trader from Arabia – had visited Malabar in circa 1000 AD. He wrote about Buddhist influences in Kerala during that period. In fact, Buddhism is the only religion that didn’t take firms roots in God’s Own Country, despite the state’s warmth and hospitality towards all religions. It was a son of Kerala – Adi Shankaracharya – who had revived Hinduism when it was fighting for survival against the spread of Buddhism. At that time Buddhism was at its peak and this Malayali, Shankaracharya, established his unique Advaita philosophy of Hinduism that held the onslaught of Buddhism in check. But more of that later!

King Solomon is supposed to have traded with a land called Ophir. Now, Ophir is believed by scholars to be a corruption of Poovar in South Kerala or Beypore in North Kerala. Another travel writer Ibn Batuta – from Africa – wrote about the port cities of Kollam and Kozhicode, both busy trading ports on the coast of Kerala facing the Arabian Sea. A Dutch traveller named John Neuhoff also wrote a travelogue on Kerala in 1664. My objective was to script my basic impressions of the journey to Kerala as a son of its soil now residing outside it. This is a general travelogue and is by no means a specialized treatise on India or the state of Kerala.

The time was opportune. The world was beginning to discover Kerala and its immense verdant charm. I read somewhere that Kerala is the world’s fastest growing tourist destination, a virgin territory waiting to be explored. Moreover, in my humble opinion, travel books – the dog-eared thick monsters that backpackers fancy – deprived travelling of its biggest attraction, serendipity.

With time on my hands I gave my bags to the care of the travel agent, Mookambika Travels. I was feeling light as my vacation was just beginning. A sense of adventure and expectation prevailed. I could have waited at the travel agent’s office; instead, I decided to visit Centre One. Well, the adventurer in me was seeking out excitement, things I could record, make note of, for something I had in mind, this account, for instance.

******

I entered the cool neon-splashed interiors of Centre One a blast of cold air hit me. The mall was humming. Soon I was sucked into the vortex of a supposedly booming consumer economy. A mother was shouting angrily to her daughter, “Venda, venda, venda, no, no, no,” in Malayalam, the language of Kerala. Probably she translated her words for the benefit of curious bystanders like me. She looked sheepish as she did so. Then she said something equally hilarious to the insistent child, “Ninne jyan kandolam, wait till we get home, I will give you a thrashing that you will never forget.” The middle class tendency to flaunt their knowledge of English was painfully obvious, as she warned her daughter of a thrashing in a distinctly Malayali accent.

Did I hear right? The first part of the sentence is Malayalam, and the second part is English. I know. English rules the heart of every Indian. It seems most Indians speak in a local language and immediately translate themselves into English. So, “Udhar jayega tho, you will get it cheaper,” said in a deadpan Bombay accent is the accepted way of speaking here.

When such a diverse country was thrown together after independence from British rule, which language did they seek out to understand what each other said? The language Nehru used to deliver the “Freedom at Midnight” speech – English. However, what the lady speaks is definitely a curious mixture, a concatenation of languages. That too, with a pronounced Malayali accent. As an inevitable corollary of malls, American pop culture - the language of the streets – is also invading the metropolis.

Probably all she wanted was to window shop as I did, wander about, taking in the ambience. After all, this was new to us, the deprived people of this industrial pseudo city – New Bombay. My eyes goggled with the sudden razzle-dazzle of the mall. Outside was dusty, dirty, and unsparingly hot. Inside music was playing, and many shops were selling computers. Raffles and lucky draws were drawing curious onlookers. Money, competition, the need to look good and dress flashily must have been uppermost in the minds of the mostly young crowd that hung around me. There was a bewildering procession of cute-looking Indian girls – their roundedness, pertness, and coquettishness maddening to say the least.

Center One was huge. Three floors of shops with a glass ceiling and escalators and elevators, made it look like a Singaporean shopping mall. I had been to Singapore in the eighties. This looks much like Singapore in the eighties, with the fast food stalls, girls with neatly made-up faces and straight ironed hair looking blankly attractive. Singapore then and now must have changed a little; the malls must have become a bit more glitzy. But this piece of land I am standing on now was, till just a few years ago, exactly as it must have been for several million years.

After all, what was the purpose of this consumerism mantra of buy, buy, buy? Indians were known to be conservative with money, and the thing uppermost in their minds would be to save enough to retire after leading a full life. India once had one of the highest savings rates in the world. Not anymore. I have read about “money velocity” somewhere and – naïve as I am in these matters – I guess it is the speed at which money comes in and goes out without touching ones wallet. I work in a knowledge processing outsourcing unit, a more dignified version of a business process outsourcing unit, and my salary would go into paying various instalments and bills for the loans I have taken.

Needs are infinite and multiplying and in this mall I was witnessing a mad scramble to keep up with a desired lifestyle, the ones touted by the advertisement of a well-dressed dude in a trendy jacket and tie that I saw when I entered the mall. Sadly, given the hot climate, hardly anyone wore such clothes in India except, perhaps, at a wedding.

There were people everywhere, this being a Sunday. People hung from the balconies facing the atrium, just wandered around gawking, talking, with a sheepish smile on their faces. Eyes regarded, met, and gave that awkward smile. Maybe, they wanted me to think that they belonged here.

A father was saying emphatically to his brood of several gawky children in Gujarati, again, almost simultaneously translating every word into English, “Sirf joyiye, only seeing, nathi levano, no buying.”

Why this aversion towards buying? Where was the great myth of the middle classes’ conspicuous consumption sung in the media? Were all those crowing about a market about to explode with consumerism all marketing fluff? There, I confess, I may be exhibiting the cynical side of me – a distinctly Malayali trait.

Why were they here if they weren’t going to buy? Were they like me, a spectator? Or, were they fooling the marketers of designer couture, watches, expensive-looking luggage, diamond jewellery, the designer stuff that the media was splashing across its pages in this burgeoning middle-class enclave where there was a concentration of call Centres and software parks? Was this just the greed of the multinational corporations?

When call Centres are here, were malls and fast food far off? Not that I know of. I watched the unformed girls at the pizza and burger counters doing business with a practiced impatience. I remember that when Macdonald’s opened its first outlet in Bombay my then boss had sent an employee to buy burgers all the way from South Bombay. The employee returned in the night, after waiting several hours in queue.

I wandered around. There was that sleek-looking tummy trimmer, just right for my bulge around the middle. I entered. A salesman popped up from nowhere. He began demonstrating the machine. I wasn’t sure if I should do a couple of extra push ups or buy this expensive toy that would hog space in my modest house.

“Is this the same you advertise on television?”

“Yes, it is.”

“How many have you sold so far? I mean, here in New Bombay?”

“None. Till now.”

“Why?”

“People come, ask the price and go away.”

My jaws fell. I looked awkwardly at the machine and then back at the eager salesman. Then epiphany strikes; I was going to do the same. Now I knew the reason for the sheepish looks. People were here only to look, just as the mother who said, “No, no, no.” I had company.

Non-shoppers were crowding the railing enclosed balcony of the massive atrium just staring down at the people milling below. Throbbing music was playing and a few stalls were loudly announcing some contests.

“I will drop in later. Now I am busy, travelling, you know. I work around here,” I heard myself saying to the salesman. I know how he must feel. I was a salesman once, and had felt the similar tightening of the guts when a sale didn’t happen.

He nodded as if he had second-guessed my intentions. I assume he knew my game. He had seen enough people saying and doing what I had done. I too felt embarrassed. It was a bit like sinning. Buying that tummy trimmer, I mean. You dither a lot and after you buy one, you totally lose interest in it. Then you begin craving after the latest model, say a tummy trimmer and a cycling machine in one. This is exactly what is happening in developed countries. To keep up with the Joneses you succumb to materials, and what sneaks into your conversation is what to buy and where and how much to pay. After you have bought everything there is to buy, you feel empty, because you can’t buy a new you, or, a new life. This is my considered opinion about consumerism.

Then I understood that coy smile I saw on the faces of the people around me. Co-conspirators - they are thinking the same thing. Should I sin? Should I buy that fancy watch? Can I afford it? They weren’t here to buy but to ask the price and go away. Where was all the money they were talking about? Then I understood the Malayali woman’s stern admonition of, “Venda, venda, venda, no, no, no.” She is saying that more to herself than to her daughter.

Indians are very shrewd in matters of money. They know, especially their women, when a product is genuine and have a sixth-sense about being duped. As a joke goes, the old pyjama is turned into a new pillow cover; the old pillow becomes a new cloth bag, and the old cloth bag transforms into a new duster. Wait, it doesn’t end there, the old duster becomes a new kitchen utility, the wiping rag. Such is the Indian ingenuity employed in recycling. There clearly is not the type of impulse buying I saw in developed Asian economies like Singapore.

The top floor, named Food Court, has a children’s amusement rink with, maybe, a million rubber balls into which children are diving and enjoying themselves. An attendant, a girl, stood forlornly watching the kids with a bored look. Clearly, she wasn’t enjoying her job. The children squeal around the girl, who watches impassively, hating every moment of her job.

Ah! Here comes the escalator. The escalator experience is something, really. Women and children are scared to step on this “moving ladder.” They should be. Their saris, salvars, pajamas could get caught and shredded to pieces. So there is a female attendant near every escalator to help women. How very nice and thoughtful.

A few months ago a salesman was caught ogling through a neat hole drilled in the changing room, at a girl who was trying on a dress at of these shops. The hoopla took months to settle! There were television and newspaper coverage. Suddenly, footfalls fell in the mall. The matter was hushed up and the mall was back in business again.

******

Just a few years ago New Bombay was a hick town when I had moved into it. Now there are big malls, multiplex movie theatres, and a booming call centre crowd wearing low-rise jeans. This attire is that deplorable variation of the American work wear that shows the underwear worn beneath. A friend had seen the same fad in Spain which he had recently visited. It was amazing how trends, pioneered by pop singers and teenage cult icons were transmitted so fast across nations. So low-rise, actually, never rose beyond the crotch area and should have been renamed low-descent jeans, or something more appropriate.

In my college days a display of underwear would have been sacrilegious and the wearer would have been ribbed endlessly. But now, showing underwear is akin to “having attitude” which means getting away with it. Just like saying, “Hey, don’t mess with me, I have an attitude.” But I may be growing old; I am on the wrong side of forty.

I ogled some more at the denizens of the call centre jungle. They all talked in loud voices and put-on accents. After all, with headsets clamped to their ears for hours they lose some of their hearing. I have read somewhere that nearly deaf people talk loudly.

The Food Court has a huge area running around the upper floor of the mall. This area is full of burger and coffee shops, and gaming franchisees, and it seems to be the most popular part of the entire mall. There are couples around and I remember that these fast food joints are actually dating places. Not a seat is vacant and people regard me and the bag around my neck and are thinking. Well, they are actually staring. I stare back.

I have always hated Bombay crowds. They frighten me. The unassuming man standing next to me could be a contract killer for all I know. But I guess that’s a characteristic of cities everywhere. But over there killers come in vehicles, spray bullets and run. Here killers even come in public transport and do their crime and melt into the crowd.

Is Bombay dying from overcrowding, violence and moral corruption? There are people entrenched on both sides of the fence. However, allowance must be made to one thing. Every year a few days of continuous rain completely paralyses the city, rendering life as citizens know it, impossible. The authorities do not know how to deal with the situation. Innovation and modernization are practically unknown.

Cities die and civilization takes its paraphernalia elsewhere. So, it’s virtually impossible to imagine a great city sustaining its greatness over a period of time. Pompeii was destroyed by a volcano; Harappa and Mohenjodaro by the insidious passage of wars and history. If ever Bombay was to be destroyed, most likely, by a flood or a tsunami, New Bombay, or, even Pune would take over, I am sure.

As I came out of Centre One, I saw a restive crowd in front of me. The not unusual standing on toes and asking, “What happened?” This isn’t the normal indolent crowds on the way home from a day in the office. I conjecture, from the expression on their faces that something unusual has happened. This forced communication, the raised decibel levels, the honking of cars, the sea of eyes boldly making contact, this mutiny of noises is what unnerves me about Bombay.

What’s that crowd of people looking at?

“What happened,” I heard myself ask.

Writer VS Naipaul, that sporadic chronicler of India from the eyes of an alien, had written about the “incipient crowd” present on every Indian street. He is right. This was one such, people gawking, interested, involved, a lynching mob waiting to dispense instant justice. I am told that if there is an accident the driver abandons vehicle and flees for life, afraid of this dispensing of instant justice. Law is instantly framed, legislated, and dispensed in the time it takes to say “Your Honour.”

My curiosity was awakened. I have seen such mobs beat up drivers. Truth to say, such mobs exist even in inconspicuous Indian town. Such “mob power” is the only deterrent against crime, in a worsening law and order situation. The law enforcers are mainly deploying their resources to protect those in power. The government statistics on crime is no indication of this decline, as many a time the police refuses to record a crime, for fear of it being a poor reflection on their policing.

A woman shouting at a man in a car, and a crowd of people standing and gawking around them. Then I notice this: It was not a fight between driver and pedestrian but between driver and another driver. A car had grazed another car entering the mall’s parking lot. I could see the dent clearly. The man was at fault as he had cornered more than his share of the narrow passage leading to the parking lot.

As I joined the crowd I saw a woman in a stretched leotard and tee-shirt getting out of her car, her ponytail oscillating like a clock’s pendulum, and walking impudently towards the man in the car. I am still dazed by what happened after that. Frankly, I am amazed even now when I think about it. She caught the man by the collar of his tee-shirt. He sat there in a daze, cowering, and bewildered. His wife sat stoically beside him. As I watched this horror or a horror situation, the pony tailed woman yanked at his tee-shirt, the material rented, and a piece of it hung loosely from his neck. And then she slapped him.

I got closer. I was interested in the proceedings. The ponytail was shouting as I listened hard above the roar of traffic. The crowd was also listening, interested, and inquisitive. Was this woman power at its peak, the unleashing of goddess Durga’s wrath?

I heard her saying something that sounded more than a bit clichéd. “It is because of people as you that this country is like this.” She glared at the man. The crowd gawked some more and shifted restively expecting some free dramatics. I don’t know what exactly she meant but this is what I heard. Maybe, she was holding the distraught man responsible for all that had gone wrong with the country.

The man looked stung, and humiliated beyond words. But his reply confirmed her allegation. He was saying to his wife, “What does she think of herself? I know the deputy commissioner of police,” and turning to the woman said, “Wait I will show you who I am.”

He was admitting guilt.

True, men like him who claimed to know Police Commissioners was the reason the country was inextricably mired in corruption. Graft had become so institutionalised that people like this man took it for granted. A man had bought a legal stamp paper printing machine from the press, printed stamp papers, and sent executives selling these papers, in collusion with unscrupulous law-enforcers. The man is now in jail. But it took jealousy and petty rivalry for personal reasons to expose this graft, not genuine vigilance and policing. Rules and laws were for the deprived. Smart people, such as this clown, for instance, were firmly entrenched in a network of cowardice and graft.

“Hey what you will show, eh? Police commissioner, your police commissioner be damned. Is it your baap ka raaj? Is it your father’s domain?” The woman asked.

“Does it belong to your father, then?” The man retorted.

Such aggression, such naked aggression! I wondered why from Medha Patkar, the political activist, down to Teesta Setalvad, the journalist and activist, women are the public face of protest and the voice of sanity in a society numb to its own malaise. I would witness first hand a disturbing progression of corrupt practices during this journey, which I have tried to catalogue in this account.

The wife of the man with the torn tee shirt became quite upset at this and mumbled something to her man. If I could lip read correctly that transliterated to, “Shut up, it was your mistake.”

The spectacle somehow came to an abrupt end when two policemen appeared from nowhere and began shooing away the reluctant crowd of onlookers. Bombay policemen are know to be “fashionably late” when arriving at the crime scene. I suspect both of them may have been enjoying a round of gossip when they should have actually been on duty directing traffic.

I remember having wondered then about how many such incidents take place on Indian roads. A driving license was easy to obtain and there were traffic illiterate drivers making driving hell on Bombay’s roads. After only around twenty days’ training I was able to obtain my driving license. The issuing officer did not even test my skills properly. Often the only deterrent to rash driving in India was the instant justice meted out by the executive and judiciary of Indian roads – the public.

I guess the man in the tee-shirt got off lightly.

Chapter 2 - ON A FLUORESCENT GREEN BUS

zenwriter@gmail.com (John) — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 15:56:00 +0000

Chapter 2

ON A FLUORESCENT GREEN BUS

The bus to Kerala was due at 7.00 p.m. It was already 7.30 p.m. I felt hot and bothered. I waited with increasing impatience for the much-looked-forward-to luxury contraption to arrive. Yes, I was told it was luxury. I said to myself, “The traffic must be bad,” but, I wondered why they couldn’t factor this in when they made the schedule. I kept gazing nervously at a procession of big buses with monstrous rear-view mirrors. As each monster wove into view and the clamouring crowd grew thinner only to swell when the next batch of buses arrived I started to panic. Mine was nowhere in sight.

The fiasco outside Centre One had created in me an anticipation of some event about to happen, as all journeys are destined to be. All my journeys to the south have been fraught with adventure, or, rather misadventure. There was the time when wife, son and I had braved through South India on a less than shoe-string budget, changing buses at Goa and then at Mangalore. Then we were at the station and found that we had misplaced the ticket. We had survived all.

Meanwhile, where was the bus? It is nearing 9 p.m.

Finally it arrived, more than two hours late, a monster of a bus painted a fluorescent green, with two monstrous rear-view mirrors sticking out in front. I was in for another shock. It wasn’t a luxury bus as the tour operator had promised. The name “luxury coach” was a mere euphemism. This one was also a “video coach” meaning it played a movie video cassette. The only luxury was that I could lean back and sleep if I was a good sleeper. The anticipated misadventure was about to begin.

Then I remembered having spent a night in a bus full of bed bugs on a trip to Goa. Being bitten by bed bugs is not a pleasant experience, no, not to me. Those blood sucking gadflies know where it hurts and, unerringly target those areas for special treatment. They get themselves lodged into clothes, socks with such ease that dislodging them would take days, if not weeks, and your house is not safe after that. Just one pair of these crawlies is enough to populate the entire house.

The bus would take me through Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, in fact, through the heart of South India. An ambitious highway project called the Golden Quadrilateral was going to link the major metros cities of Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta and Chennai in the shape of a quadrilateral. And this road passes through India’s best cities, possibly, the very heart of India. My excitement was great, as I had wanted to travel this route on a bus for a long time, taking in the sights and sounds of the Deccan Plateau and the twin Ghats – mountain ranges on the east and west costs of peninsular India. Ghat literally means “knot” and rightly named because these ranges are in the form of irregular knots. The Eastern and Western Ghats are these two chains of mountain ranges on the east and west coasts of India.

******

The Golden Quadrilateral was about ambition, about what India could do. For this very reason I had always wanted to test it. But it wasn’t free of controversies or corruption. An honest officer Satyadev Dubey was allegedly killed when he blew the whistle on certain murky dealings. More of this later in this account. The Bombay-Pune stretch of the Golden Quadrilateral was an expressway with eight lanes and I was soon enjoying the smooth ride. Unlike in other parts of the country where even the prestigious National Highways were without accident and emergency assistance, I could see a plethora of neatly stencilled instructions and telephone kiosks along the way. There were also these big signs where the road branched towards Khandala, Lonavala, and Khopoli – the weekend getaways of Bombay citizens.

I could see faintly to the left of me the blue hills of the Western Ghats, a sight that would accompany me all the way to Kerala.

The huge fluorescent green bus hummed gently and I sat back in my seat to enjoy the view. It was dark but I could make out the outlines of the familiar areas I was passing through. The modern India, the malls, the business process outsourcing units, and the call centres were behind me. I was in authentic pastoral India forgotten by law makers and money managers alike.

The mountains of the Western Ghats were ahead of me. The bus climbed laboriously over the twisting roads of the expressway towards the Deccan Plateau. The ghats, or knots of hills, ran down the entire western coast of India towards Kerala, on the southern tip of peninsular India.

The Deccan was actually named Dakhan before the British Anglicized it to Deccan. Dakhan means south, or, dakshin in Sanskrit. So what we refer as the Deccan Plateau may actually be the Southern Plateau. For the Mughal and Afgan invaders, anything south of the Vindhya Mountains was south. That gives rise to the theory that anything south of Vindhya Mountains situated in Central India is South India. The Hindi spoken in Hyderabad is still known as Dakhni, or, roughly translated, language of the south.

The inhabitants of the Western Ghats are called Ghatis, a hardy people. They are mostly farmers, and goat and cattle herders. The people of the coastal areas are Agris, Kohlis and Kunbhis. They are mostly farmers and fisher folks. Traditional rivalries existed between these tribes for ages. Education and modernity, in a very loose sense, has only affected them after the development of New Bombay into a modern city.

As the bus passed through Panvel I could see the estuaries, the rivers and the creeks of the district of Raigad. Panvel had seen a lot of development recently as it is a station on the newly constructed Konkan Railway. This railway connects the northern part of India to the south along the Konkan coast, passing through Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka and Kerala. This district was famous for the forts of the Maratha emperor Shivaji. This guerrilla warrior and emperor was, and still is the region’s hero and many a road intersection in New Bombay – where I live – is named after him.

The bus’ tires were whining smoothly below me and the slipstream felt cool on my skin. The long wait was over and my excitement mounted as I thought of discovering the “Golden Quadrilateral” and other regions of South India. The bus would cover Pune over the expressway and then enter the golden quadrilateral. Before that there was a break in journey for food and essentials.

On the way I had passed several clean looking restaurants. For some strange reason the bus stopped at the seediest looking place. God, why they have to choose such a dump, I thought as I saw the fly infested and dirt-caked tables. The reason? Again, there was the tendency to put selfishness, cheapness, and certain skulduggery into even the necessities such as eating. I would see this more as I progressed on my journey. The bus drivers and restaurant-owners would form an illegal pact which would put passengers like me to much discomfort. The bus drivers would stop at the latter’s joints for free food and drinks, and even commissions, and when they enjoy their food and drinks, the passengers, well, who cares anyway?

This restaurant was the worst maintained eating place that I had seen in a long time. First of all, it was so dim I couldn’t see anything. Unkempt looking waiters with bleary eyes took orders. I got up to make the mandatory visit to the toilet.

What I saw made me cover my nose with my handkerchief. The stench of so much urine passed through bad plumbing was just too nauseating. Another observation: the toilet didn’t have bolts and, quite possibly, wouldn’t have been washed for months. Flies buzzed around everywhere.

The toilet attendant, a sleepy looking man was shouting, “baitho, baitho,” “sit, sit,” for no apparent reason. In his attitude I could detect contempt. Poverty breeds contempt? Didn’t he know that we Indians did our toilets sitting down? Did I mention the sights and sounds of India earlier in this account? His loud exhortation was one sound that I didn’t for the life of me understand. Such plaintiveness, a tired voice so immersed in the tragedy of his life, a foretaste of something quizzically strange that would prepare me to accept the huge diversity of cultures that lay ahead of me. No, I shouldn’t be judgemental here and must accept things as they are.

Note to myself: after all, the life of a toilet attendant wouldn’t be elevating stuff, not at least in a book about God’s Own Country. But I had to get rid of my city mentality; at least, there were cleaner toilets in New Bombay. Alas, this is rural India, and I had to respect the cultural and social milieu of the place. I was more than a little disturbed at this point as I took in the dusty yard where the buses were parked, the dirty toilets, the crudely assembled stalls where knick-knacks like plastic mugs, toothpaste, soaps, and towels were sold.

Why didn’t they have clean toilets washed with nice-smelling disinfectants? Why couldn’t they manage themselves like the hotels in Bombay that were, if not blemishless, was acceptably clean. These thought threatened to put off the excitement I had been feeling when I was inside the bus. But on second thought I was deep inside rural India, an outpost of the country that urban people as me tended to forget. Instant cleaning disinfectants that promise to clean to “sparkling, dazzling white,” and keep toilets odour free is unheard of here. The owner of this joint didn’t care as long as he could bribe drivers with free food and drinks to stop their buses at his restaurant, customer satisfaction can go for a toss. Since the toilets were irredeemably dirty, I saw many men relieving themselves in the yard and women a little further away under the cover of a bush.

Then we trooped into the bus and were on our way again. The road was bumpy and my neighbour, as a token of our enforced neighbourliness, tried to make conversation. He was thumbing through many Tamil magazines with the voracity of an addict, and eating quite a lot of fried, crunchy things from polythene bags.

“Where are you going?” he asked in Tamil accented English.

“Cochin,” I couldn’t say my English was accented. I would strongly deny it if anyone said I had a Malayali accent.

“That’s a lang way off. You will have to change puses in Pangalore. This pus goes to Tamil Nadu from there.”

“Long” was pronounced “Lang” and Bangalore was pronounced “Pangalore.” Most Tamil-speakers (I do not mean the educated elite, however) convert their “B” into “P.” This is a linguistic quirk down south. In a similar vein, a Malayali would convert “P” into “B” as in “Simple” into “Simble.” I write this as a simble - sorry, simple - observation of fact, not to deride or mock any linguistic community. Even I slip up sometimes.

“Well, I just asked as I am new to this route. I don’t know the golden quadrilateral so well.”

“What did you say? I am nat hearing properly pecause of the pus.”

He meant, “because of the bus.”

“The Golden Quadrilateral don’t you know? It’s the road we are travelling on right now,” I shouted.

“No haven’t heard of it.”

“Never heard of it?”

“Never.”

“What do you do?”

“I puild roads in Saudi Arabia.”

I said I had also worked in the construction industry in Saudi Arabia, not long ago. Construction was booming in the Persian Gulf, we both agreed. Then the road-builder grunted and went back to reading and eating. I knew his life. During my stint in Saudi Arabia, I confess, I was like him, a man lost in his project and his work and not bothered about anything besides. I was totally isolated from what was happening around the world by a system that not only blacked out news, but also the faces of women from newspapers, books and magazines.

Now this man was something of an enigma. He seemed like a voracious reader of magazines with bad printing and gaudy covers. The papers seemed of cheap variety and apparently featured sensational stories judging by their covers. It was obvious that he didn’t want to be disturbed while concentrating on whatever pulp was his addiction. Come to think of it the publishing industry was doing well in the south, may be, due to the high level of literacy in these states. By the south I mean the states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. I was glad to see that in the midst of the onslaught of television and the online media, the printed word was having a dream run in the southern states. Hail the printed word!

Chapter 3 - THE GOLDEN QUADRILATERAL

zenwriter@gmail.com (John) — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 15:52:00 +0000

Chapter 3

THE GOLDEN QUADRILATERAL

Pune, or Poona, is the erstwhile capital of the Peshwas who ruled most of India during the height of the Maratha empire established by Chhatrapati Shivaji and consolidated by the Peshwas. The Peshwas had extended Shivaji’s kingdom all over India in what could be the only major Hindu empire to rule India after the glorious reign of the Guptas and the Mauryas. In a museum in Bombay, I forget which, I had seen a few letters written by the Peshwas and from those letters they seemed like highly literate and articulate people. They were also the first people from the priestly Brahmin class to come to power after the mythical priest-warrior Parashurama who is credited with having created Kerala, and the entire Konkan region.

I digress. Pune, the city of the priestly Peshwa rulers passed in a cloak of darkness, punctuated here and there by swanky building estates and swish business parks. Unassuming Pune is a close competitor to Bombay and Bangalore in the information technology business. The reason is that realty prices are low and the talent pool is vast and growing.

Then an unexpected bump, and then, a few more followed. What was happening? The so-far smooth journey was interrupted by the wildest tossing. Had the Golden Quadrilateral ended? Vast stretches of it remained incomplete and the only alternate route was to drive on the bumpy country roads. Suddenly all dreams of a smooth passage to God’s Own Country remained just that. I gritted my teeth as a few more bumps jolted the bus.

Then as if to appease some God the cleaner inserted a video cassette into a suspicious-looking box perched into the body of the bus, where usually the picture of a goddesses would otherwise be displayed with some ceremonial garlands around it. This bus service was advertised as “luxury coach” and as a “video coach.” The latter fact had completely evaded me. As if to add insult to injury, a pirated version of a hazy movie began playing, and I could faintly make out Govinda and Karishma Kapoor’s ludicrous antics in Hero Number One. Serves me right for badmouthing the Hindi film industry, I guess.

That night I slept badly, jerked awake by unannounced breaks for tea and by the sound of people boarding or leaving the bus. I saw bits and parts of the movie in complete disorientation. But I hadn’t till then seen the effect it had had on my neighbour. He was enjoying it with open-mouthed glee. He kept chuckling through the movie a simian-like happiness on his face.

“We see such movies in the Persian Gulf, it is fun,” he said.

Then I remembered my brief stint there and, regretfully, I had realized that then I, too, had enjoyed this movie as it was the only way to pass the time in an otherwise entertainment-starved country.

“Yes, even we did,” I admitted with the sincerity of a condemned man admitting guilt before the noose tightened. I had no alternative but to do so, I know what this infantile man has been through in the Persian Gulf country.

I tried to read “The Life of Pi” which I had brought with me. But there wasn’t a bit of silence to contemplate Yann Martel’s exquisite account of how Piscine Molliere made it from a capsized ship to shore in a life boat with a Bengal tiger for company. The bus bumped too much. I couldn’t help wondering if my life itself wasn’t a series of big bumps such as the ones I was going through.

After our brief exchange, my neighbour seemed not to take any notice of me. When I came back after a brief halt for tea, I found that he had curled up in the little available space and had slowly and deviously begun to stretch into my portion of the seat.

By this time our bus reached the outskirts of Kolhapur. It was around midnight and we hadn’t covered half the journey between Bombay and Bangalore. India seemed to stretch on and on without end before me. It seemed like a journey that would never end, not at least in the near future. My back ached from sitting cramped in the “luxury” seating promised me by the clerk at Mookambika Travels. Alas, the promise remained that – a promise. If I could, I would have liked to wring his neck, or pull out his tongue, for promising me false things.

Kolhapur is famous for… umm… Kolhapuri sandals. This sturdy leather sandal, an object of adoration for yours truly, features a delicately crafted upper with a cute red little tassel in the centre. In Bombay I had walked, may be, ten kilometres for a genuine pair of this favourite sandal of choice, to be told that it was no longer produced. As I was talking to the shopkeeper in Vashi who gave me this piece of wisdom, another man came, enquired about the sandal and made a face as if he had swallowed quinine. I couldn’t believe it. Perhaps, a case of bad marketing of a product that sold by itself. Eventually, I found a Kolhapur sandal, a fake one, which cleaved acres of flesh from my two feet.

All the signs of a small town in India were visible, masses of tangled television cables, signboards and hoardings of all sizes, the shops spilling into the roads, the deserted hotels winding up their work for the day.

I had left behind the coastal areas of Maharashtra – literally, the great state – that was inhabited by the Kolis, Kunbhis and Agris. I was now in proper Maharastra populated by the Marathas, a warrior class which had raised Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, the esteemed warrior who had become emperor and saviour of the Marattha people. Marathas and even other communities revered him as a symbol of their pride and as a cultural icon.

I sipped hot tea standing awkwardly with the bus passengers outside a tea shop. The tea soothed and awakened me. I was tired of the constant bumping. My spine seemed as if it was taking a pounding. I could see shadowy figures move into the folds of the darkness to their hovels to sleep the night. This was a poor area of town and the shop stood on a raised ground in a red-tiled hovel. The road I was standing on was dug up in a very unprofessional and haphazard manner. There were the usual forlorn night crowd, and a bunch of people with anxious faces. They were probably waiting for the last bus home.

Their anxiety was not unknown to me. In Kerala which went to sleep by 8 p.m. and everything was pitch dark by that time, it was near impossible to go anywhere after sundown. Standing there I remembered the glitter of the Centre One mall, the people, the jostling, which compared starkly with the motley group waiting anxiously to board a bus to some forgotten village of Maharashtra. The abundance of lights and energy in Centre One and the sheer lethargy in this town struck a deep chord within me. Kolhapur, city of sandals, you will remain fresh as ever in my mind because of your lonely grandeur, and your narrow littered streets.

I distrusted the food in the seedy restaurant where we stopped for a break, as, once again the driver had stopped at the most seedy looking place on our route map. The hygiene level was low as I could make out from the flies buzzing around the tables thickly coated with dirt. Therefore, I went hunting for an apple and some bananas to eat for dinner. An almost rotten apple cost me an exorbitant twenty rupees and six bananas, rupees twelve. It added up to the price of a full meal. I wondered why fruits were so costly and why there weren’t many fruit shops around. In this great agricultural country, it seemed as if there was a scarcity of fruits.

The meal finished, we boarded the bus back again to the journey on the Golden Quadrilateral. India beckoned.

***

The bus tossed me up every time it left the finished portions of the Golden Quadrilateral into the unfinished and rough patches. I discovered that my seat wasn’t comfortable, and was made of some thick synthetic material. My tee shirt was plastered to it and I was twisting and turning in my seat to make myself comfortable. Though it was a “no smoking” coach, some people smoked throughout the night.

In the middle of the night I awoke to find that the slobbering road-builder had encroached on my seat so much that his haunch was in my lap. I was not prepared to have my space invaded thus and gently nudged him to show my displeasure. No way. He didn’t even stir. So I tapped him gently on the shoulder, shook him by the hand, made clucking sounds in his ear, and, defeated, poked him sharply in the rib to get his attention. That seemed to work.

“Yeaah, whaat is the problem?” He asked rather loudly in his heavily accented English.

“Saar, you are encroaching on my space. Could you leave me a little space to sit comfortably?” I had mustered all the Tamil at my command. I loved the lilting nuances of the language and could make myself understood.

“If you don’t like to sit beside me, you change your seat,” he said, his voice a low whimper.

I was disturbed by his refusal to speak to me in Tamil. That meant he wanted to be hostile.

“But I am only asking you to respect my territory, you were encroaching on it,” I said in English.

Alas, poor man, he wasn’t as intelligent as I had imagined. I had read him wrong. This man in spite of his voracity for the printed word wasn’t lettered in small courtesies.

“What territory, what encroachment, simply talking nansense?”

I told him in as simple terms as possible the “nansense” I was mouthing with my fast dwindling vocabulary of Tamil words.

Before I knew it this small exchange had escalated into a war of cultures and languages. A chorus of recently awakened voices was saying, “Why don’t you change your seat,” to me. This was not unlike the fight I had witnessed the evening before at the Center One mall. The only difference was I was in the thick of it this time. I cringe at the sheer embarrassment of it as I write this.

What is it that makes us fight and argue so much? In many online literary forums of which I am a member I had witnessed this tendency to fight unnecessarily over trivials. Nobody showed any patience or capacity for tolerating dissent. This had perturbed me then as it had after this incident.

The bus was stopped, the “cleaner” was summoned and hasty adjustments were made and I was given a vacant seat by the window at the rear of the bus.

A window seat, I was glad.

But that gladness didn’t last long. No sooner had the bus re-started its forestalled journey than a new set of troubles began. I was sitting in the middle part of the bus in the earlier phase of the journey and the constant bumps had bothered me. But this was the back of the bus. The suspension was so bad that every time the bus hit a pothole I would be tossed like a projectile, a few feet in the air, to painfully land on my haunches.

Oh, what an inauspicious beginning to my travails!

******

In the night we had crossed Maharashtra state into the state of Karnataka – the state of the ancient kingdom of Vijayanagar about which Naipaul had written extensively in An Area of Darkness. Tippu Sultan had made raids into Kerala from this very state. He was as feared as Ghengiz Khan and Timur the Lame when he made repeated raids into the till then serene kingdoms of Kerala. In fact, “Tippuvinte Padayottam” was the topic of legends in Kerala. More about this follows in a subsequent chapter.

Till then Kerala had not witnessed any of the violent invasions and upheavals that had convulsed North India. There were minor wars fought between the Chera kings of Kerala and the Chola kings of present day Tamil Nadu, but not any major wars on the scale of the ones launched by the Mughal emperors. The absence of upheavals by oppressors like Mohammed Ghori and other invaders had lulled Malayalis into a state of complacency. I guess this complacency was the reason for the Malayali’s intense individuality and independence.

I was travelling the wide expanse of the Deccan Plateau on the Golden Quadrilateral towards Bangalore. The Deccan or Dakhan or Dakshin was a fertile plateau fed by several rivers once. But now what met my eyes was the vast barrenness that extended over the flat expanse. The bus was late as expected. It had stopped for loading and unloading contraband goods and the driver’s cabin was full of passengers taken on the sly after they had paid money that would go into the driver’s pocket. Again, I could sense an intransigent corruption that was gnawing at the root of the country’s moral and social fabric.

Corruption rules! The demand for a ticket was being met by the supply of money. I had become so inured to corruption that I had begun to see it as inevitable. A friend had said that a ticket checker on a train had taken a bribe to give her a seat and had said that that was the “system” they follow.

According to the aforementioned ticket checker, corruption was not a malaise of the “system” but the “system” itself.

That led to a lot of unhappiness in people who couldn’t afford the money to give as bribes. Coupled with illiteracy this meant that a dividing line was drawn between bribe giving manipulators who would turn the “system” on its head to achieve their ends and the helpless majority who had no say on anything. Maybe this was what was leading to resentment and the anger that I had seen in the road-builder who had returned from Arabia and the woman who had aggressively fought for her rights outside Centre One.

Exactly the same thing had transpired in the building of the Golden Quadrilateral, the very project on which I was speeding on my way to Bangalore. An honest officer – Satyadev Dubey – who was in charge of the stretch of the Golden Quadrilateral project from Aurangabad to Barachatti was killed when he blew the whistle on the murky goings on under his charge. The news made it to the headlines of newspapers for several days, but the killers were never caught. Is it any wonder then that people band themselves into mobs and take law in their hands and dispense instant justice, as I had seen outside Centre One?

I was passing through the beautiful landscape of Karnataka, a greener state than Maharashtra. The rivers Krishna and Cauvery flow through Karnataka. There are virgin forests and ruins of ancient kingdoms at Hampi. The Vijayanagar kingdom the glory of which VS Naipaul mentions in An Area of Darkness is situated here. Karnataka is surrounded by Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Kerala. These states, except Maharashtra, form the Dravidian part of India with their distinctive curlicue letters and their accents characterized by languidly drawled vowels.

Chapter 4 - BANGALORED

zenwriter@gmail.com (John) — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 15:44:00 +0000

Chapter 4

BANGALORED

By late evening we had reached Bangalore and though it wasn’t raining in Maharashtra, a thunder shower had unleashed fury and thousands of leaves on the roads in the outskirts of Bangalore. I sat in a stationary bus, stuck in a traffic jam for about two hours rooted to one spot in the technology and computer programming capital of India.

Being the technology centre of India hadn’t changed the city a bit. There was the usual unplanned chaos, of shops devouring sidewalks, the shameless encroachments, the general lack of civic sense, and the madness for survival against all odds. A vinyl signboard above the clogged traffic read “Enamor.” I stared for a long time at the undergarment advertisement.

Then I remembered a talk show I had seen on television conducted by a prominent news channel in Bangalore. Several participants felt that the information technology contracting business for foreign corporations had let them down. One man with an earnest face, a middle class individual wearing a tie – I will call him Mr. Earnest, for I don’t remember his name – said that it also pushed up the cost of living of ordinary Bangaloreans who had no skills for information technology jobs.

Mr. Earnest’s lament was valid. I saw a lot of institutes advertising computer programming courses, the quick-fix, and instantaneous variety. I had been a victim of such institutes and had wasted time and money waiting for computer instructors to turn up and computer time to be allocated. The technology companies can offer a few million jobs to Indians but what about the villages I had just passed? Would there be money for them too? Could they afford costly computer courses and degrees that would propel them into the back office jobs that most Indians craved?

The west had invented the term “Bangalored” to uniquely describe jobs that were outsourced to India. If Mr. Earnest was to be believed, and he had a point, being “Bangalored” equally affected Indians who weren’t a part of the outsourcing boom as well as the people in the US who were deprived of jobs. I mean, only a section of the people of Bangalore were Bangalored, as only a section of Bombayites were Bombay-ed. Though outsourcing had created pockets of affluence, it didn’t touch the majority of Indians who lived in the rural areas that I had passed on the journey to Bangalore. Most of these villages were starkly poor without either electricity or water.

I had read in an article that in the nineteen nineties the number of millionaires had doubled in the United States. From where had the money come? From poorer people who had no knowledge, skills, or, resources. In the technology era that we live in knowledge could be leveraged for money and foreign corporation knew this very well.

Therefore, there was a mad scramble among Indians to be engineers, managers, and programmers, so that they could acquire knowledge and technical skills. With this knowledge they can manage contact centres for companies in the US and other advanced countries. Thus jobs flew from these advanced countries to these contact centres where comparatively only a fraction needed to be paid as salaries. This availability of knowledge at cheaper rates was making businesses more profitable in the US. Is it any wonder that the number of US millionaires doubled?

Simultaneously, this wave of job migration must have deprived a lot of Americans of jobs. The poor and knowledge-challenged in both countries have no alternative but to grunt and bear it. I guess Mr. Earnest had a point. Being “Bangalored” affected a lot of people especially middle class Americans as well as Bangaloreans who were knowledge-challenged.

******

At Bangalore I changed buses to go to Cochin. The bus that had brought me was bound for somewhere in Tamil Nadu. The road-builder hadn’t woken up yet and I carried my bags down into a wet rain-glistening Bangalore road. My fellow passenger, the reader of a hundred Tamil magazines was sleeping soundly. I guess if you read well, you would sleep well. Ever tried sleeping after watching a movie on television? It’s difficult, random images keep you awake. The road in Bangalore was badly dug up and the mud had run all over and the area resembled a football field in the rain.

Was road digging a national pastime? I think the state of the road is an indicator of the health of the governance of that area. If that is so most areas of India are the boondocks as far as basic infrastructure is concerned. I had heard that there were contractors acting in concert with officials to dig roads and cover them back again. There was a man I knew in Kerala – he died recently – whose job was to build bridges. His nickname was “Bridge Pappy.” He would build his bridges with utmost care. In fact, he was so diligent is he that he would build the bridge to wash away in the very first gust of monsoon.

Then he would wait patiently for the bridge contract to be awarded to him. This went on for a major part of his life. Bridge Pappy made a career out of his inefficiency and retired a rich man. He built around forty bridges in as many years, using the same drawings and the same techniques. He used to openly boast about his bridge-building skills to anyone who would care to listen. So, the nickname Bridge Pappy stuck.

From the dingy office of the transport company I got a ticket issued for my onward journey by a man speaking gibberish. Making conversation in Bangalore is a tough job. All I know about the language of this state is “Inchanda Yencha.” But then, that is Tulu – another language that is spoken around the Western Coast but has no script like Konkani. Making me understood in Bangalore is like climbing the Everest in rubber slippers. I was told that English was widely understood but my best effort at a Bangalorean pidgin resulted in wide-eyed stupefaction. Then I tried my Tamil heavily laced with Malayalam words. That seemed to work. Just as Hindi is the lingua franca in the north – courtesy the Hindi film route, so is Tamil in the south care of Tamil movies. And Tamil movies’ biggest icon MG Ramachandran was born a Malayali.

Bangalore inhabitants are really very sweet, especially if they know one is from Bombay – the movie capital of India. Hamid was a pleasant faced man with a smile permanently plastered on his lips and incredibly kind-looking eyes. He showed me a Police sun glass and offered to give it to me for Rupees nine hundred.

Idly – I was looking for a way to pass time – I looked at the glasses Hamid thrust towards me. My connecting bus hadn’t arrived. The glasses were original and had the right inscriptions in place. “One hundred Rupees, take it or leave it,” I said to discourage him as I already had sun glasses and didn’t need an extra pair.

“Give me something more, sir. I will give it to you for one hundred and twenty,” he pleaded fixing his smiling eyes on me.

I was taken aback. I hadn’t expected this sudden slump in price. I had bargained for the ridiculous price as a deterrent, perhaps, accompanied by a look that could curdle milk. Or, in all probability, a murmured curse. He didn’t do either. I had to buy the glasses. After I had paid him I began to wonder if he might have stolen the glasses. This pair of glasses became my style statement throughout my journey, the sheer comfort it offered was soothing to the eye.

The bus arrived, this time, a white monster. We were again on our way further south through the heartlands of India. Mercifully, this time I had insisted on a seat in the forward section and had got it. I didn’t vibrate as a fish out of water in this stretch of the journey. I stared into the pitched blackness outside and thought of my mother who was ill.

******

Our next stop was Salem in Tamil Nadu. As I had crossed Maharashtra into Karnataka I had noticed the almost sudden change in the culture, language and even the difference in the construction of houses. In Maharashtra I had noticed the squat concrete houses with flat terraces that huddled in clusters. In Karnataka it was the red tiled houses that bore the distinct characteristics of the south. When we crossed over to Tamil Nadu I could see houses thatched with coconut palm leaves.

Salem was an example of the quintessential South Indian town. Its roads were cluttered with advertisements for computer coaching institutes. I saw “Durgamma Coaching Classes,” and another, “BIT Institute of Technology.” Computer training was a thriving industry, also, a hot new money spinning racket. They played on the aspirations of young people for a job in the growing computer and related professions for hefty, often unaffordable fees. New terms as Business Process Outsourcing were creating a buzz among the youth.

Obviously Indians were seeing education as a panacea for all troubles of life and were rearing children as if they were Broiler Chickens adept at spouting mathematical formulas and theorems. The result was a deep-rooted insecurity and insensitivity among the youth which I could see in the young people who worked with me in the business process unit that I was working.

Some people in the West had named this phenomenon as Mannequinism – the living of ones life in blissful ignorance of what was happening around one. True, in my own youth political activism was at its height among the young. Many of my friends – me included – claimed to be left leaning radicals. The fact that we were misguided was another matter. But we were aware that revolution was possible and we were bent on solving the problems of the country through a revolution. Revolution is passé. Something meant for the old-timers as this writer. But today’s youth doesn’t seemingly to care about revolution or the idea of building a better society. Altruism is beyond them. All they wanted is a lot of money – even easy money – to buy the latest electronic gizmos, and enjoy a lifestyle that is the great advertising industry’s creation. Almost everyone wanted fancy cars, mobiles and, designer clothes.

In one advertisement the model wears a certain brand of underwear and the women are shown taking him into a room. In the next shot he is seen in a highly pleasurable mood with lip marks all over him. What message could such an advertisement get across? I digress. This is unpardonable but I do get carried away at times.

Al Gore – I still think he should have been president – had equated this attitude with that of a “business under liquidation.” This was characterized by the craze for what can at best be termed as “trivial pursuits.” Newer varieties of hair colour, ways of looking younger and more beautiful are lining up the shelves of department stores. Businesses would rather have the people eat designer cakes than bread when they are hungry. I saw such blinkered sort of existence during my travel in the south of India. There is nothing more ironic than looking at the hoardings of all those computer classes beside the ones advertising shampoos and ready made clothes to realize how liquidated of ideas we are.

Next stop in the itinerary was Coimbatore, the hosiery town. Coimbatore was much cleaner than either Bangalore or Bombay. The town was sleeping when I reached it and on its streets hung the calm before dawn. Its dusty streets were littered with the unremoved garbage of the day before. The thin light of dawn was stirring over the horizon. I had an early morning coffee and a hectic day ahead of me.

As the bus sped on in the early morning light I could discern huts made of braided coconut leaves and garishly painted local buses. There were also horse-pulled carriages, bullock-carts, and hand carts. There was a lemonade and tea stall, very sparsely furnished that had a gleaming motor bike parked near it. Something warmed me to the sights of my beloved native state – Kerala – God’s Own Country.

A little note about why I consider the above name is appropriate for Kerala. When India’s major religion Hinduism was under threat from Buddhism, a son of Kerala – Adi Shankaracharya – had led what is known as the Hindu revival by engaging religious leaders in debates. Thus emerged the Advaita philosophy, which has many followers in India.

Kerala’s place in the annals of Vedic learning and art is also buttressed by the fact that Koodiattam, the only extent Sanskrit theatre art form in the world, is still performed in this tiny state.

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Chapter 5 - A Short History of God's Own Country

zenwriter@gmail.com (John) — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 15:42:00 +0000

Chapter 5

A SHORT HISTORY OF GOD’S OWN COUNTRY

A short history of Kerala – what is here referred to as God’s Own Country – is very difficult to come across. Vainly I searched to end up in cul-de-sacs and internet information overloads, i.e., much information and no substance. Many versions of Kerala’s history exist, none of which are in any logical or chronological order. So here’s an attempt, humble, and painstaking, I must admit, to put the history of God’s Own Country into some semblance of order.

I must also confess here that research for this chapter was done on the material available on the Internet and that no authors were credited with the matter put up on these Internet web sites. This made it difficult to give credit to their scholarly material. After all, Kerala has a history as elaborate as an elephant’s decorated forehead during the Trichur temple festival.

I must admit at the very outset that most what I am writing may be hearsay, or, for that matter, apocryphal. However, given below is an attempt to trace the history of Kerala, and at the same time, I make a humble request to readers to willingly suspending disbelief in the interest of an understanding of the background of the state. Also, you may safely skip this chapter, if you aren’t a keen student of history, although, a knowledge of Kerala’s history would help in understanding the state and its people much better.

While writing this I must admit that Kerala is of recent origin, believed in mythology to have been created by Parashurama – an incarnation of the maintainer God Vishnu – by throwing his battle axe into the sea.

To begin at the beginning, Parashurama was son of a Brahmin sage, Jamadagni. Parashurama, a Brahmin, and a priest, showed warrior-like leanings, and wanted to rule the world as a priest-warrior. He killed kings like Sahastrarjuna and gave their land to priests. The warrior kings didn’t like this. They detested a Brahmin ruling over them. It is said that Parashurama exterminated, in what must have been an ethnic cleansing of those days, the warrior class, about twenty-one times.

As the story goes Parashurama was struck by remorse at his wanton killings, and offered penance on the top of a mountain. The sea god Varuna responded to his prayers, and offered him all the land equal to the distance to which he could throw his axe. It is believed, according to mythology, that Parasurama threw his axe from Gokarnam in the north to Kanyakumari in the south. As promised the sea under the command of the sea god Varuna gave way to land, and made Kerala rise from the oceans. This is the mythological origin of Kerala.

Interestingly, there is a scientific explanation to the origin to the state. According to geologists and scientists Kerala is the result of centuries of silt deposition by the abundant rivers that flow through the state - rivers such as Bharatapuzha, Periyar, Pampa, Meenachil, and many others. This is a phenomenon seen even today. The land is still forming around the estuaries of these rivers, in what is a curious and inexplicable phenomenon of land reclamation. In fact, in most parts of Kerala a few feet of digging would yield a reddish striated laterite stone formation that supports this theory.

As the new land was being formed beyond the Sahyadri mountains ranges, people are believed to have migrated to these new lands from the Tamil-speaking lands. Legend has it that the earliest settlers were called as Malayali, “mala,” meaning mountain and, “alu” meaning person, or, inhabitant.

Historically, the furthest I can go in my quest for a past to this green paradise is the 297 to 272 to BC when Kerala is said to have experienced the Mauryan onslaught during the reign of emperor Ashoka’s predecessor, Bondasura.

The subsequent historical recording of the history of Kerala occurs in the inscriptions of the great Mauryan Emperor Ashoka who had conquered most parts of India. In these inscriptions, Ashoka refers to the four independent kingdoms that exist to the south of his empire. These are the Cholas, the Pandyas, the Cheras, and the Satiyaputras.

Among these distinct kingdoms, the Cheras ruled over Malabar, Cochin and North Travancore – all part of what is Kerala today. They are believed to have maintained their peace with the great Maurya Emperor Ashoka. Peace prevailed in God’s Own Country.

Sadly, information about the Cheras who ruled Kerala during the period of the Mauryan empire is not very abundant. It is much later, in the Sangam Age that the history of Kerala emerges out of the thick curtains of myths and legends. The Sangam age is supposed to have existed during 300 AD. The word Sangam means academy, and the Sangam age is known for literary works in Tamil, which were written in the first four centuries of the Christian era. There were three Sangams.

From what information is available it seems what is referred as Academies met at Madurai and were attended by kings and poets. Apparently, the literature forming part of the First Sangam is no longer available. However, there is evidence that suggests that Tolkappiyam, the earliest work of Tamil grammar was composed during the Second Sangam.

Likewise, the third Sangam also produced a noteworthy collection of Tamil literature known as Ettutogai, or, eight anthologies. A notable feature of this anthology is that it gives us a detailed description of the political, social and economic conditions of that period. I do not know if Kerala is mentioned in any of these works of literature. I confess my searches proved futile.

What is notable about the Sangam Age is that we learn that at that time Kerala was divided into three kingdoms, with the Ays ruling in South Kerala, the Ezhimalas in North Kerala and the Cheras in Central Kerala. There is no knowledge whether these kingdoms fought amongst themselves or they were the best of neighbours.

The kingdom of the Ays extended from Tiruvalla in the north to Nagercoil in the South. The Ay kings were benevolent rulers and notable among them were Antiran, Titiyam and Atiyan. The Ezhimalas ruled over extensive areas of the north including the districts of Kannur and Wynad.

However, the Cheras who ruled over Central Kerala from four to seven centuries AD were the most powerful of warriors and rulers who reigned over Kerala. The first prominent Chera ruler, Perumchottu Utiyan Cheralatan, was defeated by the great Chola king Karikalan at the battle of Venni, and, so disgraced, he committed suicide.

Imayavaramban Nedum Cheralatan, his successor, ruled for 58 years and extended the Chera kingdom into new territories. We learn that he even had a poet laureate in court by the name of Kannanar. What is referred as the Sangam Age was a significant period in the development of Kerala as an independent entity under the Ay, Chera and Ezhimala dynasties.

However, after the conclusion of the Sangam Age, Kerala passed through a dark interregnum when the Kalabhras ruled over Kerala. Not much is known about this interregnum, or, for that matter, these rulers, except for the fact that the South Indian kingdoms of Pallavas, the Chalukyas, the Rashtrakutas and the Pandyas carved out Kerala into their own territories.

Approximating around this time was born one of Kerala’s greatest sons, who in his short life of thirty-two years dealt a blow to the rapid spread of Buddhism in the land of its origin, India, by reviving Hinduism. During the sixth century AD Adi Shankaracharya, born in Kalady near Cochin, preached his Hindu philosophy of advaita (monism) and engaged many Buddhist missionaries in dialogues. His writings and discourses called “bhashyams” are considered seminal works in Hindu philosophy by religious pundits and commoners.

His philosophy and preaching created such an impact that Hinduism came back from hibernation as the principal religion of India that too at a crucial time when Buddhism had almost spread throughout India. An ascetic and celibate all his life, his tremendous energy and organizing ability saw the establishment of four monasteries, in four corners of India — Sringeri in Karnataka, Dwarka in Gujarat, Puri in Orissa, and Badrinath in Uttar Pradesh. Unimaginably, he did all this in a very short life span of his thirty-two years in this world. Truly, he was a great son of Hindu India. Needless to add, a true Malayali from Kerala – God’s Own Country – was responsible, most significantly, for the revival of Hinduism at a crucial stage in its history.

Coming back to the Kalbhras, where we left off, after the Kalabhras, a second Chera empire took shape with Kodungallur as its capital. This second Chera empire was founded by Kulashekara Alvar who reigned from 800 AD to 820 AD. Ironically, the Alvars, according to some texts, were actually Tamil saints of the Bhakti cult who composed songs in praise of Vishnu, the god who maintains the world. Kulasekhara Alvar, a scholar, is credited with having written five plays – the Perumal Tirumozhi in Tamil, and the following works in Sanskrit: Mukundamala, Taptisamvarna, Subhadradhamala and Vichchinnabhiseka. This lends credence to the theory that the Chera kings were actually Tamils.

After Kulasekhara Alvar came Rajasekhara Varman in 825 AD who is credited with having published the Vazhapalli Inscription, a record of the Chera kingdom. After his reign ended came Sthanu Ravi Varman in 844 AD who had an excellent rapport with the Chola King, Aditya I. This monarch was a great patron of astronomy and a scholar by the name of Sankaranarayana, author of the astronomical work Sankaranarayaniyam, lived during his time.

However, sadly, after Rajasekhara’s death war clouds again arose between the Cheras and Cholas which resulted in the sacking of the former’s capital Kodungallur. The then ruler Rama Varman Kulasekhara, who ascended the throne after Rajasekhara, shifted his capital from Kodungallur to Quilon. Rama Varman’s death resulted in the ultimate polarization of the proud Chera empire and the ascendance of the Venad or Travancore empire.

Venad or Travancore which was till then a part of the Chera empire came into its own after the fall of the Kulasekhara dynasty following the death of Rama Varman Kulasekhara. The newly emerged power of Travancore assumed glory under the great Udaya Marthanda Varma who reigned between 1175 AD and 1195 AD and Ravi Varma Kulasekhara who reigned between 1299 AD and 1314 AD.

Udaya Marthanda Varma, the reformer, brought in changes in the administration of Hindu temples. Even now the devasom boards of Kerala administer the Hindu temples under the guidelines laid down in those days. Details of his reign are inscribed in the Kollur Madham Plates and the Tiruvambadi Inscriptions on copper plates since paper was unknown in those days and copper plates were used for inscriptions of importance. Those days, common writing used to be done on palm leaves using a sharp instrument.

Why those days, my first Malayalam lessons – curlicued letters – were written by my white-haired asan, or, teacher, with a sharp instrument on palm leaves. And that was in the end of the nineteen fifties. That goes to show how in Kerala some things never change. By some unknown quirk of fate, the traditional and the modern snugly dovetail into each other in the land that the Gods chose as their own.

Under Ravi Varma Kulasekhara the Travancore kingdom flourished further. He brought peace to the Pandya kingdom after it was pillaged by Malik Kafur, lieutenant of the Delhi Sultan Alaud-din Khilji. He was a scholar and musician and is also believed to have authored Pradymanabhyudayam — a Sanskrit drama. During his benevolent reign Kollam became a prominent centre for trade and commerce.

After Ravi Varma Kulasekhara, there was a lull in the development of Travancore and the might of this empire almost dwindled. At the same time a mighty empire rose in Calicut towards the north under the Zamorins. The Zamorins’ rule is recorded by traveller who visited Kerala during the period including Ibn Batuta from Africa, Ma Huan from China, and Nicolo Conti and Athanasius Nikitin from the west.

The muslim Zamorins’ main income was from trade with the Chinese and Arabs. They were great seafarers and the name Zamorin literally means Lord of the Seas. Zamorins’ Malayalam equivalent is Samoothiri, and Samoodram means sea. The Zamorins were also patrons of literature and art. They were especially very powerful between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries and annexed most of the territories in the north of the present-day Kerala.

A significant development in Kerala’s history was the arrival of the Portuguese under Vasco da Gama at Calicut in 1498. The European ascension in Kerala had begun. Initially, the Zamorins were suspicious of their intentions and continued trading with the Arabs. The Portuguese, however, had a friend in the Cochin king and established trading posts in Cochin and Kollam. This exacerbated the rivalry between the Zamorins in Calicut and the king of Cochin and resulted in a war in which the Zamorins laid siege of Cochin, but were eventually defeated by the Portuguese.

Post Vasco da Gama another notable Portuguese citizen to set food in Kerala was Albuquerque who bartered peace with the Zamorins of Calicut. The Portuguese power declined thereafter as the followers of Albuquerque were corrupt and inefficient. In fact, the Portuguese can be credited with many an influence on the educational and cultural life of the people Kerala. It was during their reign that the Roman Catholic faith spread in the previously Eastern Orthodox Kerala.

With Europe conquering territories in the new world, the Dutch weren’t very far behind the Portuguese. I have referred to the European ascension earlier and this episode takes it further. In a treaty signed in 1619 the British and Dutch joined hands, in a friendship of convenience, to eliminate the hold of the Portuguese over trade. The Dutch set up trading Centres in Purakkad, Kayamkulam, Kollam and Travancore as early as 1662. The next year, i.e., in 1663, they conquered Cochin.

Consequently the Dutch power ebbed when Marthanda Varma – not to be confused with Udaya Marthanda Varma – came into power in Travancore in 1729 and reigned till 1758. The Zamorins further compounded the Dutch dilemma by conquering Cochin, Cranganore, Parur and Trichur. A reformer like his predecessor and namesake, King Marthanda Varma succeeded in liberating territories occupied by the Dutch.

Marthanda Varma’s successor Rama Varma was also an equally able administrator. He brought in improvements under which all castes and social classes were given administrative powers. He had to bear the onslaught of two invasions from the rulers of Mysore, Haider Ali and his son, Tippu Sultan. Haider Ali conquered Kolathiri, Kottayam, Kadathanad, Kurumbanad and Calicut and Tippu Sultan who assumed the throne in 1782 annexed the entire South Malabar. To his credit Rama Varma’s defenses could fend off the might of Tippu Sultan, a recurring theme in the legends and folk lore for Kerala.

The clouds of doom hung thick over Tippu’s ambitions when the king of Travancore signed the Treaty of Serirangapatam with the British in 1792. In the ensuing Third Mysore War, Tippu’s forces surrendered meekly to the British. Under this treaty Malabar, towards the north of Kerala, became a district of the Madras presidency and Travancore became a British-protected state.

In return for British assistance in the Third Mysore War the king of Travancore was asked by the British East India Company officers to bear the entire expenditure of the war. The reason? The war was fought for the defence of Travancore. A new treaty was then signed in 1795 in which Travancore was further downgraded from a friendly kingdom to a protectorate with a British-appointed minister, or, Dewan who wielded considerable power.

The King of Travancore had to maintain an army far beyond his means to support. Travancore was in the centre of a financial crisis and the King was forced to borrow from moneylenders and merchants. Velu Thampi Dalava tried some economy measures by reducing the field allowance offered to soldiers during peace. This led to a revolt by the army that was put down with the help of the British.

The British took advantage of the relationship with the vassal state by monopolizing the pepper trade. Pepper was, and, is a hot trading commodity of Kerala and the British took full advantage of the plenitude of this spicy food ingredient in the green paradise. Pepper trade saw a sudden surge and no culinary item in the West could be without this indispensable spice. The combination of salt and pepper shaker became omnipresent on every fine dining table. The British, sensing an opportune moment, also succeeded in signing a new treaty with the king of Travancore giving themselves enhanced powers.

Velu Thambi Dalava, another laudable hero of Malayalam folklore, was against the growing clout of the British and made preparation for a revolt against them around the year 1799. He mustered forces for a mutiny and collected arms and soldiers. The revolt that ensued was trenchant enough but petered out soon enough for lack of inspired leadership. British forces began accumulating in Travancore from different regions. This led to the mutineers giving up and the king writing to the British Resident for peace. Velu Thambi Dalava who went into hiding committed suicide.

On the whole the kings and queens of Travancore were benevolent rulers and there were two queens who also ruled for brief periods. Rani Gouri Lakshmi Bai ruled between 1810 and 1815 and Gouri Parvati Bai ruled between 1815 and 1829. All the kings and queens were great patrons of the arts, science and culture. Malayalis show uncommon zeal in preserving their legacy and culture. That may be why many arcane religious and social observances are still followed even in the midst of intellectual modernism. There is in a Malayali a spirit akin to a Bengali in the pursuit of art and literature. And today, if two Malayalis meet even by chance anywhere in the world, they are sure to form a Malayali Samajam to promote their individual culture.

The nineteenth century saw the dawn of the nation-wide independence movement and Malayalis supported this move, having tasted British high-handedness in trade, and military intervention. Mahatma Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement had its staunch supporters in Kerala too. Communist revolution and the founding of the USSR in 1921 had its echoes in distant Kerala with the formation of the Communist party in Kerala in 1939.

Patriotic fervour swept through the princely states and British districts of Kerala until freedom day, August 15, 1947. The thirst for freedom and democracy won over and Kerala elected its first legislative assembly in 1957. To the surprise of all concerned in this naturally blessed state the first election returned a Communist government to power. It is also whispered that it was the first time in the world that the Communists seized power by popular vote and not by revolution. Che Guevera must have been a happy man. From then it was a checkered history for this state that had seen the seeds of a revolt sown by the legendary Velu Thambi Dalava. His dream of independence from the British was finally realized when Travancore, too, merged with the rest of India and Kerala was carved out as a state of Malayalam-speaking people by joining Malabar in the north with Cochin and Travancore in the south.

Eventually the concept of a single Malayalam speaking state that was given birth by the Cheralatan kings, nurtured by the Kulasekhara kings and the great Marthanda Varma, ultimately found fruition in the state of Kerala in independent India. Thus was born a vibrantly beautiful state that today bears the euphemism of God’s Own Country, where God and his believing and disbelieving minions take equal pride in their legacy.

Chapter 6 - A Country of Many Gods

zenwriter@gmail.com (John) — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 15:41:00 +0000

Chapter 6

A COUNTRY OF MANY GODS

Syrian Christians like me believe that Christianity had made its mark in this state when Jesus’ disciple Thomas visited Kerala and converted a number of families to Christianity. This fact has been proved by many scholarly studies. Rev. Thomas, a Jacobite priest and a relation, had told me once that the language of the liturgy used in Jacobite churches in Kerala is Armaic, the language spoken by Christ, and the language in which the first church worshipped.

Today Kerala Christians take pride in being one of the oldest Christians in the world, their parents having become Christians in the first century. This is yet another claim Kerala can make of being God’s own country, a country where Gods of such diversity had co-existed over several centuries without any great upheavals, wars, or revolutions. More of this occurs later in this account.

When writing about a country of many Gods, I would be less than justified if I do not mention the handicrafts of Kerala. There is a wide variety of handicrafts churned out by traditional home-based enterprises. An amazing array of handicrafts awaits the casual visitor to Cochin, the commercial capital of Kerala. Cochin is to Kerala just as Bombay is to India, the hub of commercial activity.

With time on my hands, one day, I roamed around Cochin’s Mahatma Gandhi Road and bought a tambourine, something I had wanted for a long time. I got an instrument, finely crafted from wood for Rupees Two-hundred and sixty-five. At that time, I considered it a good bargain.

Next I visited a church built in the form of a ship, which also called the “Kappal Palli,” meaning “church that looks like a ship.” Actually its name is St. Xavier’s Church. The church also had a bell tower that sported three gigantic bells and I could imagine what it would sound like when they tolled together. Then I visited the Kerala handicraft store on Mahatma Gandhi Road. The variety of handcrafted items on show there amazed me. I had never imagined that there was such a rich legacy of handicrafts in the state.

In the store I saw the “Para” the measure of paddy which brought pleasant memories of harvested paddy lying in neat piles on bamboo mats after the harvesting of rice. I had watched the whole process of threshing with the feet, the winnowing with bamboo baskets, and the rhythmic chants of the master of ceremonies who filled the “Para” with paddy after months of toil. I was mesmerized by the sight of the “Para” now nestling in a corner of the handicraft store. Farming in Kerala is still done the old-fashioned way with bullocks and ploughs. People here apparently have never heard of machines that winnow paddy.

The workers would sing plaintive songs as they thresh and winnow the paddy. The whole process had had an old-world feel to it as I watched it at my native village of Kidangannoor. No paper notes were kept and there was such consummate ease in calculating how much each thresher would take home, which is arrived at after some complicated mental calculations. I had tried my hand at these calculations and, obviously, failed. There is such dexterity of mind and presence of mind that I, as someone used to a calculator and excel sheets, cannot even think of mastering. The operating term here would be “native intelligence” and Kerala men had that in plenty.

In the same abovementioned store was a sign warning visitors, “Beware of steps.” Why should I beware of the poor, harmless steps? Can steps bite? Uh-oh, a literal translation of “Beware of dog,” that can be found painted near the entrance of every house in Kerala that has a mutt, small or big. Then I saw the curiously-shaped steps that many a visitor to the store must have sprained their ankle upon, you know, while gawking at the handicrafts and walking backwards. Another sign on a magistrate’s office warned, “Persons making nuisance in court premises are liable for prosecution.” “Nuisance” is a broad term in Kerala, indeed in India, that can mean anything from talking loudly to urinating to other unmentionables. Again, I digress.

Other products in the handicrafts shop included cute elephant-shaped bookends, elephants supporting shelves, beautifully carved stools, trays, lamps, treasure chests inlaid with brass, wick lamps made of brass, vases, replica of Chinese fishing nets that was a specialty of the Cochin fisher folk, and chess boards with regal-looking carved pieces for king, queen, and bishop. I could marvel the rich cultural heritage of the state that had nurtured such traditional arts over the centuries.

In the afternoon I ate at Ambiswamy’s Vegetarian Fast Food restaurant. This was fast food Indian style. I ate a masala dosa that was very good and crisp. The fare offered included paper dosas, ghee (clarified butter) dosas, onion uttappas, idlis, vadas, chapattis and parotas, all delivered with amazing efficiency and speed. It seemed to me that there should be more such joints around India. Indian cuisines were catching up with the “fastness” of western food, and what an amazing range was on offer. I left the restaurant wondering at the wide variety of cuisines Kerala has to offer.

Orange seller. Now this is something totally out of place, but I must, must write this. I met this orange seller on my perambulation around Cochin. He was a tall strapping man with a cloth bag full of oranges hung around his neck. Orange is one of my favorite fruit. So, assuming my best jocular bargaining style I asked the price.

“Four for Rupees Ten,” was the reply.

“Will you give me five for Rupees Ten?” I asked, again politeness all over.

“Yes, I will give.” I assumed he had succumbed to my fine-honed bargaining skills. But, um, hold on.

“Tell that to the ones at home. They may give for a better price.”

What an insulting reply! I guess politeness is not a virtue in Kerala. I am thankful that Malayalam is such a difficult language to understand. Else, there would have been virtual Mahabharat wars fought over the thousands of subtle insults a Malayali can reel off readily from his tongue.

For a moment I didn’t know whether to laugh or to take umbrage. I knew only a Malayali is capable of saying something so bitter, so cynical, and so insulting. But years of tolerating the “in your face” attitude of my community members had inured me to such comments. He must be one hell of a frustrated man, I am sure. Again I am generalizing when I say that cynicism is somehow very deeply ingrained in the Malayali psyche.

And, yes, before I forget, the mall culture is invading Cochin, Calicut and other cities of Kerala too. I consider myself a mall creature. The more malls I visit, the more I am drawn towards them. I visited a mall that seemed to specialize in women’s and children’s clothing. The only men’s shop in it was named “Yahoo Men’s Club.” I couldn’t consider me as a “yahoo” by any stretch of my usually fecund imagination. Therefore I avoided going in.

I don’t know if India is ready for malls, yet. I remembered the man exhorting his children in Gujarathi in centre One in New Bombay, “Nathi levano, sirf joyiye,” and the mother vehemently telling her child, “Venda, venda, venda, no, no, no,” in the earlier part of my journey. The man was saying don’t buy, only see the displays, the mother was against even seeing, I guess. Such a negative attitude meant only that the majority had some reservations about what is termed “mall culture.”

Mall culture, or whatever that means, could mean modernization, more cars, quicker turnover of technology, and more consumerism for some, but not all. Most people have a feeling they would be duped if they bought from a mall. The credit culture is already here and banks are aggressively pushing loans. I receive a few calls a day with offers of money. If I borrow and fail to repay the same sweet voices could turn abusive. I had read that most Americans live on debt.

Chapter - In Kerala - God's Own Country

zenwriter@gmail.com (John) — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 15:37:00 +0000

Chapter 7

IN KERALA – GOD’S OWN COUNTRY

At last I arrive in Cochin where I will be staying at my brother’s flat on a busy road where the traffic roars throughout the day and the speakers of the arts council built in memory of poet Changampuzha at night. My mother is ailing and in the next few days she has to undergo an operation. The journey was very tiring. There is a quaint old temple which is visible clearly through the window of the flat. I can see the tall masts made of pure copper on which the temple flag is hoisted, the devout make circles around the deity, chanting some mantra under their breath.

The temple is typical of Kerala’s emphasis on spirituality, and, in the other extreme, rationality. After all I am in the heart of God’s Own Country. It is a sprawling structure, hemmed in by high walls from all sides. There are a few red tiled structures that have a triangular pinnacle, usually, for ventilation. In the next few days there are cultural shows, recitals, classical music performances to the accompaniment of loud rhythms played on the chenda, the local percussion instrument.

During Onam – the harvest festival – there would be performance of the Kaikottikali – women dancing in a circle clapping their hands, much like the Garba dance of Gujarat. There would also be murals made on the ground with fresh flower petals, and huge feasts with as many as forty courses of delicacies that would keep coming one after the other. Onam – probably the biggest festival of its kind in Kerala – has its mythical roots in religion.

It goes like this. When the benevolent demon king Mahabali ruled over Kerala, all his subjects were happy. But the Gods got jealous and sent Vishnu to curb the influence of Mahabali. Vishnu took the form of a beggar and asked Mahabali for three foot-measures of land and the generous king granted the wish. Suddenly the God grew to his full stature and measured the earth with one step; with the other step he measured the heavens. Then he demanded that he be given the third foot and Mahabali replied, “You can fulfill the promise by stepping on my head and banishing me to the other world. But please grant me the wish that I should be able to visit my subject once every year.” This coming of the great king Mahabali to visit his subjects is known as the festival of Onam – which also coincides with the harvest season.

From the window of my brother’s flat I can see a nervous crowd waiting for buses. All their eyes intently watch the road from where their bus would emerge, from a corner, or a twist in the road. They comprise of school- and college-going children, men and women going to work, and devotees who are going back after worshipping in the temple. Those who are returning after worshipping have a smear of sandal paste on their foreheads. It is quite obvious to me that religion plays a big role in their lives.

A Malayali by nature has an inherent love for religion, and tradition. This is by no means a sweeping generalization. There is also another side to the ardent religiousness that is inherent in every Malayali. There are those who are sworn atheists, and Communism is a strong political force in Kerala.

AK Antony, former chief minister of Kerala says in a newspaper interview, “Everything is politicised beyond the limit. Anything you touch becomes controversial, that is the characteristic that has continued over the years [in Kerala].” What he means to say is that a political awareness exists at the village, community, and administrative levels. This often leads to discontents of its own; quite possibly, the politicising Antony is talking about.

The rise of communism had dealt a blow to communalism (the polarization of society according to religious castes, of which there are many in Kerala.) However, of late religion and religious ostentations are showing resurgence as can be seen from the elaborate shows put up during religious festivals. In Kerala religious ideologies are locked in a tug-of-war with atheism and non-conformism at either ends. The result is a mixture of pulls and pushes in so many directions that ultimately peace and good cheer prevails. A Malayali has a devastating sense of humour and can, therefore, laugh off religious, caste or political bigotry.

A friend of mine, Rajiv by name, had confessed that though he had no basic party affiliations, he would work for the party that would offer him more money. He had been to protest marches, banner campaigns, pasting of slogans on public properties and had participated in strikes of many parties with strikingly opposite ideologies. He, like a lot of young Malayalis is opportunistic and treats all religious and political fervour with a touch of sarcasm. Rajiv is no exception. I could get the best nugget of unbiased views from this child man.

KR Gauriamma, a leading politician, says in a newspaper interview, “Keralites have learnt to live with foreign money. Earlier Keralites were crazy for government jobs. Now even the good-for-nothings are going abroad and working with discipline.” The craze for money and material possession may be what is driving the Malayali abroad for jobs, but at home also he is not averse to making a little money on the side.

At a prominent hospital in Cochin where my mother was undergoing treatment there seemed to be a sordid lack of proper procedures and amenities. A decrepit lift creaks and stops mid-way between floors, and my mother is admitted in a room on the sixth floor. When I try the stairs, I find that access is barred by a locked door; there is nobody around to even hear my irate pleas. I tear my hair in frustration. The nurses are young and inexperienced and just out of nursing school. In all probability they had paid money to get a job and their only hope is to immigrate to the Persian Gulf to make a profit on their investment. Despite the more than ordinary fees charged by the hospital, the services are deficient and nobody seems to care. Healthcare is a booming business.

The hospital is done up in rather expensive tiles all over. There are tiles on the outside walls, ceiling-high tiles in the corridors, inside rooms, toilets, tiles everywhere. Everything was so flawlessly tiled and made attractive that I hoped that the services would also be a little more efficient. But no such luck. Where did the money for so many tiles come from? It was such a bother buying some medicine from the bustling pharmacy downstairs and getting back to the room where my mother lay. I had to virtually run an obstacle course. I had to wait in a queue to enter my prescriptions, wait in another to pay money and in another to take delivery. Everything was hopelessly disorganized and in the background was the deafening sound of masons cutting tiles, and the shouts of workers fixing them.

With increasing affluence of Persian Gulf incomes people no longer needed to work the farms and most of them gave up active life to watching serials on television. There are channels wholly devoted to Malayalam movies which are quite popular. What all this boils down is that killer maladies like diseases of the heart, high blood sugar levels and blood pressure diseases are keeping the queues at hospitals long, as I could see from the people thronging downstairs.

The hospital mentioned had grown without real purpose or structure except that of making money. As someone said, “Mo money, mo problems,” and the problems of Kerala seemed to me to be caused by the inflow of money and the recklessness that resulted from it. The signs of organized labour can be seen throughout Kerala. Each party has their own cadres of organized labourers wearing distinctive uniforms. In one particular area I passed through, some labourers were digging a trench. I saw that most of them wore distinctly red, saffron, yellow, blue and green shirts. When I asked a friend what this meant.

As mentioned, the labourers were organized into unions by political parties. Communist party union members wear red shirts, Republican party union members wear blue shirts, Bharatiya Janata Party union members wear saffron shirts, and members of another party, the name of which I don’t recollect, wear yellow shirts. It was the rule that these unions should be equally represented in all work being undertaken by the government or its contractors. It was rather nice seeing this wide spectrum of colours working together, a rainbow coalition, of sorts. I made a note of the organizing skills that must have gone into such political rainbow coalitions.

On my way home from hospital, one day, I saw a police jeep fitted with a wire mesh on its windscreen. In Bombay the police fit a wire mesh to the windscreen if there is a threat of violent demonstration. What was unusual about this was that the wire mesh was fixed permanently to the windscreen. The police have to be alert at all times for strikes and protest marches which are very common. It had a hinged design that would enable it to be to be lowered in case things went out of control. During peace it stayed up, as a sort of visor, held by what is called a stay latch, like a policeman’s hat’s visor. This did indicate only one thing – strikes and unrests were a permanent feature of my native state’s politics.

Rajiv had told me that sometimes strikes and stoppages were announced by rival parties for trivial reasons. The main purpose was a show of strength. He had participated in several such stoppages. Vehicles found on the road would be stoned by the party’s workers, even burnt. He, the carefree opportunist that he is, had participated in such demonstrations of parties with opposing ideologies. For him it was nothing but having some fun and being paid for it. Ironically, the fun part involved damaging public property and setting government buses on fire.

Then there are many myths woven around the much misunderstood Malayali ego. Xenophobic, yes, but not much more ego than the normal-sized Indian ego. Some members of our community would preface their talk with, “No I am not an egoist,” but contradict it in their very next statement by stating, “But I like things done my way.” But here again opposites co-exist. Just as it happens in any community, there are Malayalis with big egos and those with no egos. There are Malayalis who have a preconceived and opinionated idea of what they want from life. When things don’t match their ideals they show their cynical side, as is the case with the orange seller I met during my peregrination in Cochin. On the other hand there are Malayalis who go around with a humorous and self-deprecating view of life.

In this category I include Bridge Pappy. He is a contractor in a North-Eastern Indian state and his occupation was bridge building. By bridge, I mean, bridge in singular, since all his life he kept building a single bridge. He has an interesting modus operandi. He specializes in building a bridge across a stream which, when the stream was in spate, would be washed away. He would persistently contract to build the bridge again, and once more he would be awarded the contract. And, then again, and again. He knew all the people concerned and for him getting the contract wasn’t very difficult. No need to state here that a lot of the bridge building fund went into bribes. What was amusing was that that this caricature of a man shamelessly went around boasting about this to everyone, with an absolute lack of ego.

All around Cochin there are posh cars, gold markets, clothes showrooms, and glitzy shopping malls. A lot of sudden affluence is to be seen everywhere. It also has its downside in that alcoholism is on the rise. No Malayali celebration is complete without the salutary imbibing of the spirits. From my relatives I hear of a cousin who is working in the Persian Gulf who is addicted to drinks. The word used to describe his habit was “thanni” which means “water” in Tamil. Some Tamil words were borrowed and used pejoratively by Malayalis. The most commonly used insult in Malayalam means “hair” in Tamil. He, the cousin, had tried several jobs and businesses in Kerala and had then immigrated to the Persian Gulf.

His parents were the first to immigrate to the Gulf many years ago and, they too, lived in the shadow of the traumas they had gone through. The Persian Gulf was where money can be made but was also a frustrating place to work. Rules are rigid and labour conditions are inflexible. I knew, as I had worked there. I feel most Indians were unprepared for the extreme rigors of working in the Gulf and therefore succumb to drinks. I had seen it with my own eyes. Living away from their families, mostly, in a desert, was the opposite of the carefree life of open paddy fields, swaying palms, and plentiful natural resources of Kerala. If only this green paradise had a few more industries and job opportunities!

Chapter 8 - Rural Life in God's Own Country

zenwriter@gmail.com (John) — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 15:36:00 +0000

Chapter 8

RURAL LIFE IN GOD’S OWN COUNTRY

From Cochin where my mother was I travelled further into the interiors of God’s Own Country, to my in-laws’ home in Pathinamthitta. The famous pilgrimage destination of Sabarimala is close to this district. The countryside is ever green from green foliage and evergreen coconut, arecanut, and rubber trees that thickly wood this area, broken by swathes of rice fields nurtured by abundant water.

From a city bustling with wealth and bristling with hoardings, such as Cochin, I was now in the deep interiors of Kerala. My in-laws are retired teachers. In fact, all of them, including my wife, their son- and daughter-in-law are teachers. I am the sole exception. This state definitely is teacher friendly. It is a well-paying profession in this job-starved region. My father-in-law retired as the headmaster of a local school and draws a pension of about Rupees four thousand which he will continue to receive till his death. My mother-in-law, also a teacher, now retired, will also receive a like amount.

The total income of this family along with the income from their rubber estates would be an enviable Rupees 40,000 per month, much more than what I was earning in Bombay working eight hours, six days a week. Certainly, this is a good income for an Indian family. Also a lot of their food items came from their own fields, and there isn’t much impulse or vanity buying. They had all the characteristics of a solid middle-class Kerala family with a high savings rate.

They have a cow, a calf, rubber estates, rice fields, and live a pretty secluded life in the interiors of Kerala. The reason for their bourgeoisie affluence, ironically, is socialism. Successive socialist governments have favoured the working class with huge and unaffordable pay increases. The state’s treasury is empty; still, these popular measures were doled out as sops to win elections. There was a solid lobby of leftists in the bureaucracy and administrative machinery because of these populist measures. That explains the almost lackadaisical attitude one encounters inside the offices of most government run institutions. It is very difficult to get work done. They have strong unions to support them.

The government also privatised education. It seems they wanted to create armies of graduates, nurses, electricians, and mechanics to work in the Persian Gulf and around India. Today, almost every house boasts of a son or a daughter working in the Gulf. The Persian Gulf is seen as a panacea for all problems, financial and social. So, naturally, there is a lot of disappointment when the dream goes sour. There are scores of private institutes offering courses and a computer institute that offers a course to train “office computer clerks.” I saw this in an advertisement displayed outside a computer training institute in Cochin.

Obviously these private institutes aim to train people to work in the Gulf. People are willing to pay anything to get a certificate of some sort so that they can immigrate. There is a “Spoken English Class” that offers to train students in speaking and writing proper English in a month for just Rupees one thousand. Ironical? Indeed it is. As usual, let the buyer beware, there are no guarantees or promises made.

Private education has also given rise to churlish situations. With the growing number of schools offering English-medium education there are no students in the government run Malayalam schools. Therefore teachers in government-run schools go to houses and canvas parents to send their children to government-run schools with promises of offering free uniforms and books.

The growing affluence resulting from Gulf income has given rise to another problem – theft. With the young and able-bodied working in the Gulf, there aren’t any youth left in the interiors of Kerala. Theft is rampant here. Our ancestral house in nearby Kidangannoor was burgled three times, one of the reasons why my brother shifted house to Cochin, a busy city, which offers more security.

Theft is being carried out by gangs who work in the night. There are rumours of extremist outfits being involved with these gangs. If this is true, it is bad for the state. In fact, once when I was in Kidangannoor thieves had entered our house and made off with our holiday expense money and valuables. When we complained to the police the stock reply was, “You identify the suspects, and we will arrest them and extract a confession.” Horror of horrors they are asking us to do the detection work! Then they would use their third degree methods after which even the innocent would confess to the most heinous of crimes. With their methods even an innocent man would confess to the crime. I had written to the then chief minister about the burglary in our house but my letters elicited no reply.

In the interiors of Kerala, amid the affluent government servants and Persian Gulf immigrants live the poor, the resourceless and dispossessed of Kerala. They are labourers, subsistence farmers, and people without political support or affiliation. They suffer their indignities in silence as they don’t have the money to send their children to expensive schools, or buy them private education. They may also be the helpless perpetrators of crime, drawn into it by circumstances. In fact, the hidden frustration of the downtrodden could lead, if unchecked, to major acts of violence and theft in future. I do not wish to be negative, but my observation is drawn from having experienced a theft in my own house at first-hand.

I made a short visit to my ancestral house in Kidangannoor where a cousin now lives with his family. The trip was brief and I had the joy of seeing the rice fields being made ready for planting. They were being ploughed in the traditional method using oxen and plough. I was glad to once again hear the commands given to the oxen by the man who was ploughing. His vocabulary included loud-pitched shouts and many guttural grunts and declamations.

Next day, as I woke up at sunrise, I was glad to hear a symphony of bird sounds, as if in an orchestra. Never had I heard such rich and varied sounds that reminded me of the richness of a symphony orchestra. I couldn’t identify all the sounds but recognized those of the cukoo and a native bird that we call by the name ookan.

Chapter 9 - From Chengannur to Calicut and Back

zenwriter@gmail.com (John) — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 15:31:00 +0000

Chapter 9

FROM CHENGANNUR TO CALICUTAND BACK

I had some business in Calicut and made a long journey from Chengannur by bus first to Trichur and then to Calicut. It involved a full day’s journey from Chengannur, which is the nearest town and railway station. Chengannur is in central Kerala and Calicut is in northern Kerala. The journey would take me through the guts of God’s blessed country.

At Chengannur I tentatively enquired if there was a train that goes directly to Calicut, the city once ruled by the Zamorins. This is where the Portuguese first set up their trading post. I was told there weren’t any trains going directly to Calicut so my best bet was a bus. The state-run bus service, The Kerala State Road Transport Corporation is dependable and therefore I asked the nearest officious looking man.

“Where can I make an enquiry?”

“Isn’t that itself an enquiry?”

Brilliant! That was the sort of repartee for which my fellow Malayalis are famous, though an interrogative was answered by an interrogative. He didn’t sound cheeky and said this with a smile, so I didn’t mind. It’s good to have a sense of humour in Kerala, a state where people use humour with even solemn occasions. Nobody, not even the high and mighty is above a bit of teasing and ridicule.

“What is it you want?”

“How can I get to Calicut? Is there a direct bus?”

Only then did I receive the answer I wanted, “No, there aren’t any direct buses, you will have to change at Trichur.”

Throughout this leg of the journey I could see foreigners, their alabaster white skin shining among the brown and the black skin tones of the local inhabitants. A former tourism secretary of Kerala had discovered that the state had great tourism potential and set about promoting the state’s beautiful backwaters, green vegetation, wild life and rich cultural heritage. The state had actually been a haven for all the major religions of the world, and had a rare natural beauty that was worth watching. Therefore, he inferred, it could be a great tourist destination.

The campaign was successful and, thanks to his efforts, the world is now discovering the beauty of this Shangri-la – Kerala – that has been hitherto been a secret that only the Gods knew about. And they didn’t share it with anyone, least of all, rubber-necked wanderers. I assume it was that advertising campaign that propelled Kerala to the forefront as, “God’s Own Country.” The result of his efforts has been serendipitous and threw open a lot of opportunities for an already affluent state. All it takes to be in business is a traditional style Kerala house and a few Kettuvallams. Just as my friend Varghese Thomas, a prosperous businessman is doing. It is so named because it is made from jackwood planks, held together, believe it or not, by ropes and not by nails. Tourists especially like the Kettuvvallam boat ride on the Vembanad Lake on his Kettuvallams. The ancient Kettuvallams were once used to transport rice, spices, and handicrafts from the interiors of the state to the coastal towns for export. Now they are luxurious apartments fitted with deckchairs and toilets.

Everywhere I went I could see tourists, some even dressed in Kerala’s ethnic dress of kurta and mundu (traditional white unstitched apparel knotted around the waist). I was delighted to see a foreigner fold this pristine white couture with the felicity of a real Malayali. I then felt ashamed that I had never tried wearing the mundu, though I was born in Kerala. The problem was that the inconsiderate thing kept unwinding every time I wound it around my waist. I decided that I would be the laughing stock of my fellow Malayalis if it were to give me the slip unexpectedly. And here was this white-skinned foreigner folding it with such grace and command that I almost turned green shade with envy.

I tried striking up a conversation with the above-mentioned man but he seemed cold and inscrutable. There wasn’t enough trust, I guess, looking as I did with my longish hair, my soiled Levis jacket, and blue denim jeans. But then, irony of ironies, I was in what he should have been wearing and he was in what I should have been wearing!

Why was the man mentioned above in India, where there is no orderliness as in western countries, permissions took too long to materialize, and tickets were such a pain to obtain? May be he was so fed up with the system and structure of the western society that he really craved something totally chaotic as travelling in India and the free flowing and luxurious feel of the Kerala mundu. The reason frankly baffles, my dear reluctant mundu wearer. I just needed a clarification of my thoughts, and, sorry to disappoint you dear sir, theft definitely was not on my mind.

The Westernized Oriental Gentleman (wog) and the Easternized Occidental Gentleman (eoG) are as much disparate as chalk and cheese. I guess both detest each other passionately judging by the look the above personage gave me. I digress.

All through my journey from Chengannoor to Calicut I was assailed by posters of a “Kerala March” organized by the Marxist Communist Party that had the slogan, “Social justice, and integrated development.” Then I found that, in fact, several parties were supporting this march. Another party had announced a “Kerala Walk,” and yet another something similar. These posters had prominent pictures of several leaders and announced in bold and screaming letters their noble objectives beside several movie posters of the leading film stars of Kerala - Mammooty and Mohan Lal.

I had the distinct feeling that these marches, protests, strikes are symptoms of a deeper malaise and the politicians were only indulging in tokenism. I don’t blame them; they live and breathe the present inevitable situation. Never mind. They are not able to bring back governance and address issues of corruption, crime and theft and were merely indulging in a show of strength to maintain their grip over the people. Antony may be right everything is politicised and sensationalized in Kerala.

Many hoardings along the way had film stars and attractive female models, displaying clothes, jewellery, cars, marbles, and expensive products. Some of the brand names advertised included “Nelluvithakunnathil” and other such unpronounceable words. These aren’t difficult if you know their meaning which in this case was, “place where paddy is sowed.” Sure, traditional still holds a stern grip over God’s own countryside.

The driver of the government-owned bus was a short irascible man, who was also a demon for speed. He was bald, had close- cropped hair and was so small that he had to lean to the side to turn the steering wheel to the left or to the right. But, despite his small size, he was a bully on the road. His idea of driving was to overwhelm with the size and speed of his vehicle. He did this by driving in the centre of the road and boldly overtaking on the right and swerving wildly to the left to avoid a head on collision as other vehicles braked and scattered furiously. Three-wheeled rickshaws he treated with utmost contempt careening straight into them and then forcing them on to the mud embankments.

He seemed so absent-minded that he would take his eyes off the road and would seem as if he was enjoying the passing scenery, something he passed every day. Once a private bus overtook him, he became so mad that he made an obscene gesture at the conductor of the bus, who also responded in kind. In Calicut he threatened to abandon the bus when people requested that the bus be stopped at unscheduled stops. For me he represented the tough, though diminutive Malayali, so representative of the scrawny ones who can clamber up coconut trees in minutes.

The Malayali accent is unique, with an extra emphasis on vowels. Many a time when the Malayali accent is criticized, I say that it is the uniqueness of the language that makes a Malayali sound awkward when he/she speaks a different tongue. I am no linguist, but a friend who is one, told me that some languages in India, for expediency sake, have glossed over the difference between “ta,” “tha,” and “thha” except in Malayalam where these words still maintain the distinct identities they should, according to the underlying common rules of Sanskrit grammar.

Also every Malayalam word ends in a vowel, and, if there isn’t one, a vowel is gratuitously implanted. So “bus” is “Bass-eh” and paper is “paper-eh.” However I was quite amused when a bus service had this title splashed boldly across its frontage, “Eee Yem Yess,” meaning EMS, the name of the bus. To be more specific it should have been “Eeeyu Yemmu Yessu,” with the vowels drawled ever so slowly and thickly across the floor of the jaw.

While on the subject of names the Malayali’s propensity for exotic sounding names seemed to result in surprisingly unpredictable names being used for products. I even found a hoarding advertising “Terror Cotton Casuals.” I do not know if it is a spelling error – which I doubt – or a deliberate reflection of the times in which we, rather Keralites, live in.

On the way back from Calicut by train I met a buttermilk seller named Komalan. He wears his mundu folded and tied high above his knees, is unshaven, has nervous mannerisms, and talks in a loud voice. He had a story to tell. He had contested for the Kerala state legislative assembly seat from the area – which the train was passing through – and had lost. His party was the right-winged Bharatiya Janata Party, which he has deserted for not doing enough to get him elected.

He was selling butter milk for Rupees Five when the price marked on the plastic sachet was Rupees Three. A passenger had complained to the police and he was arrested. He didn’t even have a valid vendor’s license. The judge offered him the choice of paying a fine of Rupees One thousand or undergoing imprisonment for one month. He opted for imprisonment as he wanted to see what prisons in Kerala were all about.

“And what were prisons like?” I asked.

“The first thing I would do on becoming a Member of the Legislative Assembly would be to clean up the prisons,” said this Malayali, a Brubaker in the making.

“Are they so dirty?”

“Filthy,” he said.

He said he had changed his party after losing the elections. He is a member of the Trinamool Congress Party now, as he found the right-wing communal ideology of the Bharatiya Janata Party unacceptable. I don’t know how much of what he said was true, but he seemed the typical Kerala politician, opportunistic, adaptable and willing to change ideologies if it didn’t suit him. In short, a turncoat.

Every town I passed had posters with “Panimudakku” written boldly across them. Panimudakku means stoppage of work to demand more wages. There was one on thirteenth and another on the twenty-fourth of the month. It is a blessing or a curse in Kerala, depending on whether you are a politician or a harassed member of the public.

Obviously, these frequent work stoppages are hurting the industrial development of Kerala. Job generation is almost zero, or, hovers in negative territory. It is frightening if one imagines what would happen if the money transmitted by expatriate residents working in the Persian Gulf stopped. Industrial activity was rife with unrest of Panimudakku and tourism was only beginning to develop. The economy was fragile with the huge wage bill arising out of the workers demanding more money and the excessive amounts paid as pension to the already retired government employees. The situation is scary. Successive left-leaning governments had pampered government employees and casual labourers with huge hikes in salaries and perquisites, which were difficult to fulfill.

On the way back from Calicut by train I passed through Divine Nagar. For a state steeped in Godly things and Godly customs this name seemed appropriate. Divine Nagar in Pota is where the Christians go for spiritual healing. A large number of Christians travel every day to attend sessions in the Catholic institution situated here. Spiritual healing and reaffirmation of faith, I am told by a Christian, is to be had here in these morally corrupt times. I have heard a lot of praise for this institution and want to visit it at some point, though this trip was too hectic to even contemplate it.

Everywhere I travel I see a struggle between tradition and modernity. Farming is still done the old-fashioned way with plough and farm animals and harvesting and threshing is still done with the hands and feet. Traditions and superstitions of a religious nature co-exist with scientific and rational thought. Everywhere there is an uneasy balance between different ideologies trying to dominate.

In Cochin I had seen a quasi-religious group’s conference of some sort. The entire city was plastered with huge welcoming arches, posters of leaders, colourful flags, and the noise level was well near deafening. People were revealing in displays of spiritual elation of some sort. Near my brother’s flat in Cochin a temple festival was going on and there were high pitched music being played and performed throughout the night. Sleep was impossible, a torture.

Aside from these manifestations of religious fervour there was another more insidious presence all over Cochin. Besides, what could be expected than godliness in God’s country? There were posters advertising all sorts of products. There are international brands competing here thanks to the sudden affluence. A huge advertisement for a brand of jeans screamed, “Attitude in my genes.” Interestingly, it showed a hunky male model with a come-hither look with one hand suggestively thrust in the fly of the gene, sorry, jeans.

Advertisements also provide comic relief which I found in a huge hoarding at a city intersection in Cochin. It advertised the services of a Dr Sanjeev Master, bsc, md, who is the “Physician of the Anti-narcotic India.” It was a tall claim, as doctors aren’t supposed to advertise according to medical ethics. His medical qualifications became instantly suspect. Scruples take a beating, often in Kerala, and people in distress go to such pseudo doctors. As the former executive secretary of the Advertising Standards Council of India, I had wrestled with issues of “truth in advertising.” This advertisement triggered a recollection of those experiences.

This reminds me of another time and place when I had found this strange mauling of the words of a former prime minister on the walls of Erode Junction in Tamil Nadu. The offending inscription read, “The most impartant [sic] thing about on [sic] administration is the blief [sic] in its fairplay and integrity.” I had copied it verbatim, so its authenticity is not in doubt and this inscription is prominently displayed on the wall of platform number one of this important railway junction. As some time copy editor I found this sloppiness, um, quite pervasive and deplorable.

Calicut is a clean town in comparison with other Indian towns. In the short time I was there I took in the sights quite eagerly. In Calicut, during my peregrinations, I saw a long queue snaking out of a shop in the middle of the night. It was eleven in the night and all shops except this had closed. I had gone out to have a late dinner and was curious as to what people could be queuing patiently to buy at this time of the night. Then I glanced at the signboard above the shop. It said “videsha madhyam, licensed vendor,” meaning “foreign liquor, licensed vendor.” Foreign alcohol meant whiskies, brandies, gin, and the like, and weren’t foreign at all except in name. These alcohols manufactured in India are termed “foreign” to distinguish them from the local palm toddy and a brew called “charayam,” or, arrack, which are freely available.

Admittedly, Kerala is a state with a serious drinking problem of which alcohol companies and the government are well aware. No party is complete without the sip or tipple. Excise duty on alcoholic drinks is prohibitively high. The government’s rationale is that it will discourage consumption. However, it doesn’t seem to have had the desired effect. Consumption of alcohol is at a very high and there were advertisements everywhere promoting alcohol in the guise of mineral water, soda and other harmless products.

Advertising alcoholic drinks is prohibited. But the powerful alcohol companies have found a way around this problem. Their strategy is called “surrogate advertising.” Their strategy to, what shall we call it, ensnare, seems outwardly simple and harmless: launch an alcoholic drink, launch a few batches of mineral water with the same name and advertise the mineral water. The message gets to the people and the advertisement has its desired effect.

“Charayam,” or, arrack, the inebriating local spirit, has been given quaint names in Kerala according to their strength and potency. The strongest one, my parish priest Roy Varghese once told me is called, “boomi kuluki,” which means “quaker of earth.” Another, equally potent drink, is called, “garbham kalaki,” which means “aborter of fetuses,” implying that if women drink it, the fetuses would get aborted. I had made a note of these amusing names then, hoping to use it sometime. This is my chance!

On the train from Calicut back to Chengannur was a very smart and articulate boy travelling with his equally articulate mother. They seemed products of the opulence of remittances from the Persian Gulf and spoke in English. The boy kept up a steady spiel blaming his mother for not buying him anything, and not even asking if he is hungry and needed anything. He wanted to sleep in the middle berth of the three-tiered sleeping arrangement in Indian trains because, “I haven’t tried it, so far.” To this his mother shot back caustically, “Don’t even try it.” I found the exchange between them quite amusing. When they were about to alight at their destination, the mother became quite nervous, and the boy said, “You don’t have patience.” The mother gave him a dirty look. The boy then said, “Even I am losing my patience now.”

I wouldn’t have written about these fellow travellers if it hadn’t struck me that they were the epitome of the new Kerala, smart and articulate to the very core. At the same time a beggar boy with surprisingly regular features came into the compartment and begged, half sitting half crawling on the floor. He only wore a half-trouser. His hair was caked with mud and dirt. To me he was the symbol of the deprived Kerala, driven to poverty for life. I gave him a rupee and took his permission to photograph him. When I showed him his picture, he became quite overjoyed and smiled broadly.

An interesting fact advertised by a mobile phone service-providing company mentioned that Kerala is a state comprising five-hundred towns, one-thousand-two-hundred villages, and thirty million people. A common characteristic of villages in the north of India were the clustering of a few houses into a village, surrounded by fields. However, in Kerala, because of the shortage of land or otherwise, throughout my journey I found houses spread over every inch of land and even the hills were terraced into cultivable land. The Malayali’s house sits in the middle of his property, be it a hill or a gorge. As a people Malayalis are very attached to their land and may be a Malayali’s individualism develops out of the keen sense of protecting his turf from encroachment. Because of this fact, boundary disputes are widespread and most neighbours are locked into some misunderstanding over the right to their private property.

In the northern parts of India in between villages there are long stretches of uninhabited land, maybe, rocks, hills and ravines. However, in Kerala, may be, because of the high population density there aren’t any uninhabited or barren lands anywhere. Most Kerala villages are well connected by private bus services and information and news are disseminated quite fast by newspapers and the electronic media. The prestigious Malayalam newspaper Malayala Manorama had termed Kerala as India’s largest town because of these characteristics and I, former employee, tend to agree. A Malayali’s smartness and awareness comes from what the British termed “native intelligence.”

This intelligence has given rise to a high degree of political awareness and a keen spirit of competition that has maintained a balance, though uneasy, at political, economic and spiritual levels. I say spiritual levels because in Kerala religious leaders are powerful and sometimes elections in churches are fought on political grounds. The occurrence of religious extremism as it has happened elsewhere in India seems remote. A Malayali is a person who convulses at all times with the exultation of temporary victories or the defiance of transient defeats.

I remember a conversation I had with a friend and party activist some time back. I had said that I wished to come back and settle in Kerala and enjoy the serenity amidst the coconut palms. He had scoffed at me and said, “Then be prepared to join The Party.”

“Which Party?” I asked. Not knowing which party he was referring to.

“Why? The Communist Party, which else?”

Then I knew. In Kerala “The Party” meant the Communist Party. As a corollary, “Partykaran” meant a Communist. He was a “Partykaran.” He was a card-carrying Communist Party activist and was canvassing my membership even before I had come back to spend the rest of my life in writerly solitude. I also realized that without a political outlook and support nobody was safe in the state.

Such heightened awareness, and such involvement had given rise to a fluid situation in my beloved home state. From 1956, when the state was established, and till today there have been nineteen ministries that have had an average of around two years in office, though, by rule, the tenure of each ministry was set at five. The politics of Kerala and that of the Malayali is very shifty and fluid. Period.

In the very first election to the legislative assembly in 1957 people chose The Communist Party of India to govern them. This has given rise to a lot of conjecture and jingoism. The reason? The Malayali is still proud that this was the first Communist Party government to be constitutionally elected by the people anywhere in the world. The rest of the Communist countries were either dictatorships in the name of democracy, or, just plain oligarchies manipulated by a few ideologues.

Why should a people elect a government that has widely been perceived as authoritarian? The reason is not far to seek, at least for me, a person who is, so near, but also a little distant to see the fine differences. Though I was born in Kerala most of my forty-odd years have been spent outside it and that has given me a different perspective on my state and my people.

Let me state clearly what I am waffling towards. Kerala is not only a state but a state of mind. When I am in Kerala, I am in the Kerala state of mind. I talk loudly, use exaggerated gestures, am cynical, and use my critical faculties to the extreme. I have to. Nobody is spared the biting wit of a Malayali, not even religious potentates and political satraps. And, well, you ought to believe this as it comes straight from the clichéd horse’s mouth.

This fact – state of mind, et al – became obvious to me during my trip to Calicut. Outside a Calicut railway magistrate’s court was this admonition, “Anyone making nuisance would be prosecuted.” As I aimed my camera to take a picture of the warning, I was told by a policeman to leave the premises. Fearing the effect the “nuisance” value of my camera would have on the government’s efforts to promote the state as an undiscovered Shangri-la, I left the place. Wonder why they have such rules that are more of a nuisance than anything else?

Wait! I have just seen the tip of a submerged iceberg. There is more. There are laws against the use of modern labour-saving machines because of the policy of left-leaning governments to promote physical labour. Rear dumper trucks, tractors, and excavators are not permitted by the well organized labour unions in Kerala under the pretext of depriving them of their rightful earnings. I talk elsewhere of the practice of “Andi kashu” which is a system by which if anyone is found using mechanized forms of loading and unloading the organized labour union members, by touching the vehicle being unloaded, have to be paid, by law, their pre-determined charges.

One sector that has suffered because of such retrograde policies is farming. If one is able bodied there is nothing like farming in Kerala to make a living. On the other hand if you depend on labour then it is a different game altogether. Organized labour unions demand around Rupees One Hundred and Seventy Five a day for casual labour, more than the average in other Indian states. Agreed, at this high rate productivity can be improved by farm mechanization. Here again, Kerala takes a step further backward than medieval Europe or even other states of India. Mechanization is frowned upon, and the labourer has to work with his hands to plant, harvest and winnow paddy, climb coconut trees and dig wells.

In God’s own state, anything mechanical or industrial is frowned at. They are labelled as anti-labour and immediately boycotted. In fact, I wonder if Luddites who once smashed machines in post-industrial revolution Europe are reincarnated as card-carrying members of left-leaning political parties. Both the Left and the so-called Centrists indulge in industry bashing. On the way back from Calicut I saw this poster about a “Smart City” software park which was coming up in Cochin. “Smart City is not progress, but daylight robbery.” I am partial towards software parks that enhance programming skills, but sceptical about business process outsourcing Centres. The reason is that outsourcing Centres add no skills to youth except calling people in the United States and speaking in their accent. The skills of a generation lies in how much they can innovate in the various processes of business, not in letting them do staid clerical jobs with precision. Remember, these words come from the horse’s mouth.

Anyone doing business in God’s favourite country has to be prepared for the risk of a sudden strike and paralysis of work by their employees. Likewise farmers are apprehensive about farming considering the high cost of casual labour. There is not even the hope of using machines as any sort of mechanization is frowned upon. Most parts of this fertile state that has two seasons of rain remain fallow and uncultivated. Vegetables, and farm produce is imported from neighbouring Tamil Nadu. Therefore Kerala is for the most part a money order economy that may remain stuck in a time warp to the delight of lungi-wearing white people who would want to re-discover the quaint farming implements of prehistoric times alongside the most modern gadgets such as mobile phones and the internet.

In Cochin, on my way back from Calicut, where I made a stop to visit my mother, I saw the outward signs of a society that had a surplus of money to spend. There were advertisements splashed across every inch of space. There were huge car- and electronic-gadgetry showrooms, spiffy looking hotels, and neat multi-storied apartment blocks. Obviously, people were splurging the earnings of their absentee relatives who were toiling in the far away Persian Gulf, America and Europe.

In fact, the whole of Cochin is advertisement land. Everywhere you will find advertisements. Myriad hoardings jostle for space on every mall front, be they for lingerie or for designer cloth labels. The craze to sell was everywhere. One such clothes store was named, “Yahoo, Men’s Store.” The young, proprietor-looking owner lounged near the cash counter, looking a bit bashful as I entered. I wondered what would be his reaction if I pointed out to him the true meaning of the word, “Yahoo.”

Not that anyone in Kerala would mind being called a “Yahoo.” I saw buses rather pretentiously painted and decorated as “Benzy.com” and “Vazhathundiyil.com.” I entered a decrepit looking internet café to find mostly girls sitting in pairs inside wooden booths, surfing, I don’t know what. But out there, in Kerala where thousands of years of human evolution is telescoped into a bellow-like tightness, where you can find the Sanskrit theatre art form of Koodiyattam co-existing with pop and rap songs, this is a minor aberration, a matter less attention seeking than, say, a foreigner adept at tying his mundu around his waist better than the son of the soil, that’s me. Example: the man in Cochin who so sneeringly forestalled my attempts at conversation.

Drollness apart, the colourful lungi and its pristine white cousin the mundu are the preferred attire of a majority of the people. Mundu is the trouser of Kerala while lungi is the pyjama. I think this harmless and diaphanous attire conveys the myriad attitudes of its wearer so very well. Thus a mundu or lungi tied well above the knees is an indication that the wearer may be the local hoodlum. So, run! The sudden untying of a tied loincloth is a sign of humble respect for the approaching person and the holding of one end of the mundu in the crook of a finger while walking is the sign of the local rake. Lest I forget, a loincloth fully lowered to the toes is a sign of a “manyan,” a gentleman and a respected person in Kerala.

The wheels of the government moves ever so slowly. With constant changes in the government, ironically, the section that benefited the most are government servants. They are pathetically unproductive and negligent. For simple documents as birth or death certificates the local official ties the mundu a little higher – the equivalent of belligerence – and expects his hands to be greased. As if that wasn’t enough, one can be made to go in circles by the negligent attitude of the drones that inhabit dusty, cobweb-filled government offices.

I have heard that even Bishops expect bribes to be paid to visit folk during weddings, burials and baptisms. They take it as their right. And the faithful don’t consider these gratifications as a bribe. Corruption here is something of an institution. A government servant had told my father-in-law that a bribe was a matter of his birthright, and no one had a right to deny it. It was a naked threat, and those who dared to oppose it were suitably hounded and harassed.

So, steeped in a tradition of corruption, a Malayali migrates, seeing that things are bad in Kerala. When things in Kerala don’t work out he migrates to other parts of India and the world. He is an eternal traveller. It’s in his blood, so to say. The Persian Gulf is a favourite destination, where they work as technicians and clerks.

At Cochin airport, where I went to receive my brother, there were a lot of teary eyed women with children crowding around the exit halls. Their men were going to the Golden Gulf to make a living and I can relate to what they must have been feeling. Just a few years ago, I had left my wife to go to the Persian Gulf, and to my immense relief, she didn’t shed any tears. Amidst the smell of Brut and Channel and the flaunting of Ray Ban glasses I could sense the tremendous grief that surrounded their lives. Their husbands lived in a politically charged country with people from many different nationalities. Some of those embarking now may disembark someday, sadly, as coffins. I knew. I had lived there.

The most amazing thing about God’s Own Country is that whether it is Hinduism, Christianity or Islam, it is celebrated in its purest form, in its fundamentally extremist variations. That may be the secret of why these religions have survived in this unlikeliest of places in the world, where every ideology finds a home, every extremist cult finds firm adherents. There are Bible-thumpers, extreme rationalists, as well as Communist pamphlet distributors. On the way to Calicut I saw a huge university-like campus dedicated to, oh, what else, research in Marxism. Guess they awarded doctorates in Marxism in its vast colonnaded portals. I couldn’t catch the exact name as the bus sped at a lunatic speed, driven by the madman I had described a few pages back.

On the train back from Calicut I also make acquaintance with Shibu Cherian. We talk about many things including the Kerala March that had been called by Pinarai Vijayan, hailed as the hero of working class and as a contender for the chief minister’s throne. Shibu, a small-time functionary of the ruling centrist Congress-led United Democratic Front, had major differences with his own party as well as the party in the opposition – The Left Democratic Front – of which Pinarai was the leader. His learned opinion, delivered in a bombastic and self-righteous tone, was that politicians were playing havoc with the people.

“Recently my party (the Congress Party) came up with the concept of a Smart City in Cochin that would attract investment from information technology companies looking to take advantage of the qualified programmers and skilled workforce.”

“That’s a good idea,” I say, “Bangalore, Pune and Hyderabad have benefited from that tag.”

“Yes, but immediately the Left Parties have called it, ‘Daylight Robbery’ and have said that instead of creating jobs, it would only lead to loss of identity. What loss of identity?”

I remember the posters I had seen in Cochin. “Smart City is not progress, but daylight robbery.”

“Ah, well, I can see their point,” I said. I know. I could agree with that viewpoint having worked in outsourcing units. These back office operations are under constant pressure to keep their projects alive and make undue demand on employees.

Seeing my vacillation he said, “Even in my party there are elements that oppose the Smart City. They say Kerala is not yet prepared to be the back office of the world.”

“True. Some outsourcing units are more guided by greed than principles. Besides, corporate ethics are difficult to implement when you are thousands of kilometres away,” I volunteered.

“What kind of a man are you? Can’t you see this is progress, something that will take us forward?”

Shibu’s sudden aggressiveness and antagonism took me by surprise. He had taken my viewpoint seriously and emotionally. Only a short while ago he seemed as if he was a friendly person, at least, that’s what I thought. Suddenly, he had become very emotional as if I had hurt him deeply. It seemed I had touched a raw nerve.

That brings me to the subject of my clansmen’s, well, um, clannishness. On the contrary, a Malayali treats another with a degree of contempt, as seen with Shibu. This contempt is healthy; I feel, again, my jaundiced view. Malayalis have an intrinsic individualism that makes them prominent anywhere. Perhaps the clannishness is only an indication of how alienated they feel when thrown into the great melting pot of Indian cultures. It’s not that they are clannish in an organized and deliberate way, but out of a need for survival. Inside their so-called clans there is divisiveness and extreme conflicts, as a look inside any Malayali Samajam would show. Again, I have seen the same Malayalis – who were accused of showing clannishness – turning bitter enemies in changed circumstances.

In a Malayali Samajam that I am a member in New Bombay I have witnessed the internecine pulls and pushes of successive regimes for power. I have, somehow, without my knowledge, been so alienated from the proceedings that I no longer attend their “kala paripadikal,” meaning “art programs.” For a Malayali art is like daily helpings of rice.

But about one thing I am in agreement with the average Indian perception of the Malayali. So here it is from the proverbial horses’ mouth. If not clannish, my fellow clansman is terribly emotional and jingoistic about his identity, which for him means anything that has an iota to do with his existence in God’s preferred country. It really is as if God hasn’t chosen Kerala to reside in without a reason. His citizens, be they Hindu, Muslim or Christian, once they are converted, are deeply committed.

My experience with Shibu Cherian, my fellow passenger in the train from Calicut proves it. For the rest of the journey he buried his nose in a copy of the Malayala Manorama Weekly. On the rare occasions when he would gaze up from his magazine, his mouth would curl as if with the bitterness of having eaten bitter gourd. He would then clear his throat loudly and spit, all to show his displeasure of me. It was as if he found me a traitorous renegade who lacked the qualities of being a Malayali. I had disagreed with his ideology.

The feeling that I had somehow hurt Shibu hung over me for the rest of the journey. On the train were several pilgrims clad in black shirts, black loin clothes, black cloth covered packages tied to their heads, and black beads on their necks. Their faces and eyes glinted with atavistic fervour, enlightenment, and ardour. Then I realized that it was the pilgrim season to Sabarimala. Devotees were converging from all over India into God’s Own Country. The land God chose as his own, was host to one of the largest confluence of devout Hindus from all over India.

The black-clad pilgrims were everywhere. The penance before the pilgrimage included abstinence from meat and avoidance of shaving and hair cuts. Also, they weren’t supposed to wear anything but black. Groups of them would chant, “Swamiye Shararanam Ayyappa,” praising Ayyappa, or, Manikantan, the deity they were going to worship in Sabarimala, situated in my native district of Pathinamthitta, Kerala.

According to legend, Ayappa actually lived in the Pandalam palace as the son of the then king Raja Rajasekhara. I do not know if this is the same Chera king Rajasekhara Varman who ruled Kerala in 825 AD during whose time the Vazhapalli Inscription was written. Myths and folklore have been strongly woven into this story about how king Rajasekhara of Pandalam found an abandoned baby on the banks of the river Pampa on a hunting expedition.

Moved by the baby’s radiance and grace the king adopted him and named him Manikantan, one who has a bell around his neck. Ayyappan, too, is depicted as having a bell tied around his neck. The king didn’t have a child at that time and assumed he was a gift of God and promptly gave him the best education and training, obviously, to prepare him to be the future king.

Meanwhile the queen gave birth to a son. But Ayyappaan being older was designated crown prince as he was the elder son and therefore heir apparent. A corrupt minister, seeing Ayyappan’s popularity with the king, is believed to have prevailed over the queen to pretend to a severe stomach upset, the remedy to which was leopard’s milk. The brave crown prince Ayyappan is believed to have volunteered to go into the forest to fetch leopard’s milk to end both the king’s and queen’s agony. He was granted permission and disappeared into the forest, to the relief of the queen, whose son could now stake his claim to the throne.

Alas, not to be! Manikantan, that is, Ayyappan, is said to have entered the palace riding on the back of a leopard, and thereby asserted his divinity. But Manikantan soon realized that he was set up and that his foster mother’s stomach pain was merely a pretentious ploy to test his valour. Realizing this he decided to leave the palace. His foster father, the king, implored him, but he stuck to his decision.

He is believed to have asked the king to build the present Ayyappan temple on the banks of the river Pampa in Sabarimala where he resided in the thickly wooded jungle. Folklore and myth has it that Ayyappan never came out of his self-imposed exile. Pilgrims trudge through six kilometres of thick forests and river crossings to arrive at this temple to pray for his blessings and for atonement of sins. Sometimes penance is also taken to extremes. A man from New Bombay is said to have walked more than a thousand kilometres to this holiest of temples of God’s Own Country. Quite atavistic as it may seem, religion rules the hearts of God’s people.

Sometimes I wonder how this state of 500 towns, 1200 villages and 30 million people would become such a storehouse of religious fervour, faith, and adherence to custom. That too, a Malayali’s devotion to his God or his ritual is shown without any rancour or violence against other religious communities. Sitting in a bus one day I observed a rally of faithful Christians pass through the centre of a town holding candles in their hands with a loud band playing ear-splitting music on traditional percussion instruments, such as the chenda. It is a “perunnal,” or, festival of a local Syrian Christian church. On the outskirts of this loud and din-filled area were several hastily erected business stalls that were frequented, judging by their dress, by Hindus. Religions meet and disperse peacefully in Kerala.

Outwardly it seems God’s country maintains an atmosphere of religious tranquillity unlike other states of India. Onam is a Hindu festival but, even Christians and Muslims participate in this celebration of harvest when the great demon king Mahabali is supposed to visit his subjects. Easter and Christmas are occasions of strict observance of religious customs for Christians but are also celebrated vicariously. The annual meet of the Christians on the banks of the river Pampa, and the various Christians’ festivals are the high points of their lives. For the Muslims there is, no doubt, an equally varied calendar of religious events.

What amazes me is how these religious pilgrimages and festivals co-existed without blood being shed, that too, in a politically sensitive state. To this I would assign some credit to the Communists and the Rationalists. Their cynical, yet, significant presence sees to it that there, mercifully, aren’t any clashes or riots as it happens elsewhere in India.

When on the subject of God, Malayalis are one, except, of course, the Communists. All Gods are equally respected. Which itself is a heavenly blessing. Communalism – not to be confused with Communism – has made a late, though subdued entry into Kerala, compared to its firm entrenchment in Gujarat state. I find that in Kerala, fatefully, all Gods receive equal respect, perhaps because no one wants to incur their displeasure. That may be the reason why political rallies may lead to violence but religious rallies are the most peaceful. But, then, I have never seen a people so religiously oriented, transforming the very word religion into something of a cliché.

In a state that is fully literate – a feat the Malayali takes uncommon pride in – it is not unusual to find the countryside littered with institutes and colleges offering professional courses in engineering, medicine, nursing, and liberal arts. However, strikes and stoppages have paralysed the education system. Hardly a month goes by without a protest march of some sort. Kerala is also the land of marches, shades of, I guess, Chairman Mao’s Long March.

As the former chief minister AK Antony said, every issue finds protestations and protest marches. I do think protest marches are good for a unique democracy such as Kerala, however, it is when it becomes too much that I begin to doubt if it is a good thing. However, I feel it is due to a Malayali’s heightened political awareness that such protests occur. No regime can survive the constant jockeying one can witness in Kerala politics. The people here, blessed with a keen mind, are aware of the nuances of governance. They refer to their leaders by their first name. And the students here are also not much behind and the students themselves are politically aware. However there are many who like my friend Rajiv are in politics for fun, for some “time pass.”

Pride, tradition, custom, modernity coexist; but still the die hard Malayali spirit persists, through adversities, through strikes and stoppages. There is a firm belief, to which I subscribe, that God has put his uncommon faith in blessing their state with the cornucopia of plenty. I could see plenty of this courage during my trip to back from Calicut. This, and several other images captured on my camera are still fresh in my mind as I conclude my Calicut visit.

Chapter 10 - On the Backwaters

zenwriter@gmail.com (John) — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 15:27:00 +0000

Chapter 10

ON THE BACKWATERS

On the way from my village in Kidangannoor to Chengannur from where I would board a bus to Alleppy, a man comes unusually close and peers into the rickshaw that I am travelling. He is unshaven and has a foolish smile on his lips.

“What do you want?” The rickshaw driver asks.

“Just wanted to know who this person is,” he says, and turning to me asks, “Which family do you belong, saar?”

I am rather taken aback. The man is a total stranger, yet he assumes a familiarity that confounds me. Every time I speak to a Malayali some connection emerges. Everyone knows everyone, at least, another member of ones family, none of the anonymity of a big city such as Bombay. It can happen only in Kerala.

“He is not from these parts. He is from far away,” the rickshaw driver says and shoos him away. He reluctantly walks away. Perhaps he expected something from me, a perfume, a tee shirt, or, may be, money.

I was full of doubts about this trip when I started. Should I go for a cruise on the backwaters? Wasn’t the package my friend Mathew Chacko offered a bit high? Mathew is a friend from Bombay. Should I spend the money on a luxury only foreigners can afford? My aim was to check out the backwaters around Alleppy where the Arabian Sea meets with the Vembanad Lake in a maze of criss-crossing canals which are the lifelines of the people around this area. These canals called backwaters for some vague reason are at the same time the trading routes to the port town of Alleppy, which is also called the Venice of the East.

On the way to Alleppy I pass over Pampa and Achenkovil rivers. Pampa is greenish, tranquil, and I remember the various times I had waded through it on my way to the annual religious convention at Kozhencherry. Achenkovil is brackish, seething within and flowing swiftly towards the Arabian Sea.

Sitting beside me inside the state-run transport bus is Manikuttan who, incidentally, has been trained by the Kerala Tourism Development Board (KTDC) as a professional guide. He is dressed in a loudly checked shirt and a white dhoti and carries a bag which contains his lunch. Checked shirts are accepted formal wear in Kerala, even fashionable. I look at him in amazement as he second guesses my every intention. He has guessed that I am a tourist, and that I am headed towards Alleppy for a cruise on the backwaters. Perhaps the nervous look at the guide book, the anxiety, the palpitation, well, gave me away. He tells me that he has worked as a guide for some time and, obviously, could read intentions of people such as me.

We make acquaintance. Right now he works for the Rubber Board and is on his way to work. He tells me not to trust the private tour operators but to go straight to the KTDC which will offer me a better rate. What luck, I think, to be able to sit with a professional and helpful guide on the way to a tour of the backwaters! We also talk about the prices of rubber which is hitting a high of Rs 109 a kilogram.

We pass through Kuttanad – the rice bowl of Kerala – the vast rice fields that stretch towards the horizon, lying on the verge of the backwaters. Recently planted the fields are a velvety green as seen from the bus.

At Alleppy I find that my friend Mathew Chacko has gone to Trivandrum for urgent business. Instead I meet his partner Johnny. I also find that Manikuttan was wrong; the KTDC rate is much higher than what Johnny has to offer me. So I stick to my original plan.

Alleppy – the Venice of the East – because of its maze of canals, is a trading centre for pepper, coconut, rice and other agricultural produce. This merchandise comes down the river Pampa and Achenkovil which I had passed a few hours ago and ends in the canals, or, backwaters, around Alleppy. The backwaters are a body of water that is partly sea and partly river and stretches all the way into the giant Vembanad Lake.

Johnny tells me that the government is not doing enough to promote tourism. His view. He has a reason. Once he had arranged for a tourist couple to stay at the luxurious Bolgatty palace in Cochin, managed by the government. But they refused. The reason? The carpet in the bedroom wasn’t clean and gave off a musty odour.

He is well connected. Very modestly he tells me that his brother-in-law is a famous politician and was a member of the Indian law-making body, the parliament. Dressed simply in a checked half-sleeved shirt and polyester trousers and leather slip-ons he owns tea estates and this is only one of his businesses. That way in Kerala it is very difficult to predict who is a tycoon and who is a pretender. He seemed to me, with his connections, and businesses, a tycoon, a very unassuming one. He and my friend Mathew Chacko were in school together.

Johnny leaves me at the pier called Rajiv Jetty where I get my first view of the boat that will be my home for the next twenty-four hours. I immediately fall in love with the boat. It is sturdy and must be about a hundred years old. From the outside it looks like a traditional “kettuvallom.” “Kettuvallom” means a boat made from wood tied with ropes, in the making of which no nails are used.

The English word Catamaran originated from “Kettu Maram” which is a raft made from tying wooden planks together. I guess, “Kettuvallom” is also of the same family. Ancient boats in Kerala were constructed that way and treated with an extract of cashew kernels that toughened the wood and made it water proof. On top of the boat is a canopy made of bamboo mats, sturdily woven with coir ropes.

I had seen such boats in my childhood, in its deglamourised version plying through the river Pampa, its majestically curved bow in the shape of a palisade inlaid with brass motifs. There is something very Kerala-like about its wooden construction. Very ordinarily it is named, “M.K.” I would have preferred something like “Kayaloram,” but anyway that doesn’t diminish its beauty.

This house-boat is a luxurious sight with rattan chairs in the small deck, a parlour-like ambience, with the captain of the ship, Rajesh, sitting right in front, towards the bow. He is the captain of this ship, and his only crew member, Sojan doubles as the cook, officer, boatswain, and everything else. They hail from these parts and everyone along the route is their friend. So there is light banter and witticisms passed throughout the stretch that we navigate.

Johnny shows me the bedroom which has a double bed, a mosquito net above it that can be pulled down, an attached toilet and bathroom, and a coir carpet. For all ye environment activists, such as me, the toilet effluents don’t discharge into the backwaters, which is the bathtub of those living on either sides of it. The effluents go into a bio-tank which is emptied elsewhere. That cleared, I could happily use the bathroom without guilt.

The boat is mine and only mine for the next twenty-four hours. I feel like a king aboard my medieval luxury boat. I pinch myself to see if it isn’t some sort of dream, or, a mistake, perhaps. But, no, I am wide awake, as I sit and watch Rajesh manoeuvre the boat skilfully in the canal crowded with such Kettuvalloms, some of them bigger, and wider enough to have four bedrooms such as mine. The stanza of an old Malayalam Vanchi Pattu (boat song) passed through my mind.

Kandeda ninte achane jyan,

Vembanadu Kayalil vechu,

Ettu muttum kazhukolum,

Thakartheneda.

I will translate this song towards the end of this chapter. Or, at least try. But right now the backwaters, this body of placid waters over which my boat is moving so smoothly is of more interest to me. This very boat must have done that for perhaps a hundred years, bringing hot peppers, unpolished rice, coconuts, rubber, handcrafts to be shipped to the world.

On either sides of the canal on which my boat (pardon my egotism, I am a bit proprietorial about this boat) is moving are houses opening right into the waters, just as a house would open into a street. There are women washing clothes, household utensils, even taking a bath there. My captain and navigator Ramesh is a local and seems to know most of the folk who live along the banks of the canal. They seem a friendly and tolerant lot and children wave to us. I become hyperactive with excitement and keep clicking photographs on my digital camera and making notes.

A local ferry boat passes us and Rajesh slows down to let it pass. Not that he was going very fast in the first place. But that is the spirit of this place. Everything is politeness personified. An old man with a growth of a few days’ beard misunderstands Ramesh’s signal, and both my giant boat and his puny one-man boat come to a dead stop. A polite argument ensues which is resolved quickly when Ramesh, using great charm persuades the pernickety old man that I am a writer and am writing about the backwaters. Seemingly pacified, he rows away as I click a picture of him. Too late, I only get a portion of his disappearing back.

We pass Kainakary where there is a majestic church on the banks of the canal. Sojan, the cook, takes over the wheel from Ramesh. Sojan has finished cooking my lunch and says I can have it whenever I am ready. He is Christian, and tells me that the church we passed was where a famous saint was baptised. Ramesh is tired of sitting in the sun on the deck and needs a break. They take turns to row, sorry, drive my boat. In ancient days a man with a long pole would propel the boat forward by planting the pole into the canal floor’s soft mud and then would use this as a lever to push the boat forward. He would expertly walk on the narrow gangway on the side of the boat, from the bow all the way back to the stern as he virtually pushed the boat ahead. But these days boats have motors and propellers.

We dock on one side of the canal for lunch, away from the busy main lane where there is a steady troll of boats. The sky grew dark and it started to rain. Ramesh and Sojan brought down the orange coloured tarpaulin and lashed them to avoid the deck getting wet. In the eerie glow of the orange tarpaulin, with the rain beating against them I ate lunch of boiled rice, sambhar, avial, curd, fried karimeen fish, pappadam and salads.

It was quite tastefully cooked and only later did I realize that I had overeaten. I rested a while in the compact but spacious bedroom, over clean sheets. The latticed glass window overlooked a house in which nothing stirred to indicate human presence. But it showed the signs of occupation, there was a chicken coop, and a boat tied to a tree.

Feeling restless I went for a walk along the embankment of the canal, walking gingerly, lest I slip and fall into the canal, which would be fatal, as I didn’t know swimming. I stared at the deserted house some more and took pictures of the house-boat. Then I saw the Kuttanad rice field that formed the backdrop of the house. Perhaps the residents had gone to tend to their rice fields. That explained the eerie silence around the haunted house.

The sky had cleared, though the sun was nowhere to be seen, and in the serenity of the canal, there was peace and tranquillity as I had never known in Bombay. Across me, on the opposite bank, a man sat fishing, making whistling sounds to attract fish. He seemed content, poor man, though he didn’t catch anything as long as I was there.

Around 3 p.m. Ramesh starts the boat again and we cruise on the way to the Vembanad Lake. The tarpaulin is raised and folded neatly into rolls. The Vembanad Lake is a huge water body that extends from Alleppy in the south to Cochin in the north, and the backwaters connect it to the sea in a maze of canals. Though the sea is quite near, the water in the canal is quite placid and calm and the people here have preserved the delicate environmental balance. Never did I see a plastic bag or, a piece of garbage float on its surface. I guess this could serve as a role model for rivers and canals around India, river Ganga for example, which are facing severe pollution from wanton deposition of plastic and industrial waste.

For that matter, the monster of industrial waste is very rare in Kerala, as, mercifully, or otherwise, there aren’t many industries. That could also be the reason for the pristine greenery that surrounded me everywhere I went.

It is here that I feel the urge to navigate my boat. So I take the wheels while Sojan photographs me from the bow. Navigating the boat is quite tricky. I kept turning the wheel over and over and the boat kept weaving like a drunken man. Rajesh tells me that the period from November to December is the peak season when tourists from the cold countries come for backwater cruises. This is the off-season, or slack season, so business is slow. No wonder I was favoured by such a hefty discount.

As we neared Chembakulam the afternoon sun burst gently on the cool waters and there is a soothing wind as we proceed towards Vembanad Lake. Luxury can also get a bit boring after some time. So Rajesh and Sojan kept a spiel of local news and folklore to keep me amused, “The church we have just passed was where a prominent priest was ordained, those boats there belongs to the tycoon who owns ten schools in the Persian Gulf, also, a very generous man; there that is a famous temple, there, that is a famous Masjid, that is where the famous Telugu movie was shot.”

Typical of a state over-awed by the majesty of God – this being God’s country – people build massive churches, temples and masjids around every corner. This is another defining character of Kerala. Every few kilometres there is a “Kurishumoodu,” which is a tall square-shaped tower featuring a cross at the top. At its foot is a small receptacle for depositing money pledged for favours asked and received from God. Surely, Godliness and holiness is sacrosanct in this most tranquil part of Kerala.

Rajesh has studied up to secondary school and Sojan has passed two years of study before admission to a degree college. Sojan has a passport and is looking for a job as a cook in the Persian Gulf, but regrets that the bribes for this passage are unaffordable.

As we cross Arupangu on the way to Vembanad Lake the wind grows stronger. The canal has changed from a placid mirror to a shiny silken sheet. In the haze ahead I can see the reflection of the sun on the water, like several million lights blinking at the same time. To one side I could see the neat rectangular rice fields of Kuttanad just planted with paddy. Curiously, the rice fields are at a lower level than the canal and I wonder what would happen if there is a breach.

Sojan says it is a common occurrence during heavy rains and, when a breach in the canal occurs, usually in the night, he has heard the loud wails of women in the houses skirting the canal. His house is on a higher level. For most part of the canal the public works department has erected concrete walls to avoid breaches from washing away the houses on the banks. According to him life is tough and unpredictable for people living here.

As our boat enters the Vembanad Lake I can see several hulking forms of house-boats similar to ours ponderously gliding on the water towards Cochin in the north. Compared to the placidity of the backwaters, Vembanad Lake is turbulent, choppy waves rocking the boat, in a strong wind. Sojan tells me that a boat had overturned once and the people in it had to be rescued by another. The construction of bedrooms and canopies has made these sturdy boats unsteady.

Rajesh said it is unsafe to navigate in the Vembanad Lake for too long, particularly since some dark clouds were hovering in the sky and the sun was a patch of grey overhead. A thunderstorm would complicate matters. Therefore he swung the boat in a wide arc back towards the canals once again.

We dock at a place called Kuppapuram for the night. Thankachen is the third crew member of the boat, who is now on leave. We dock right in front of his house for the night, as it is safe in case there are heavy rains. Thankachen is a stout man with the swollen eyes of one who has a drink every night. He offers to fetch me freshly tapped toddy, which I decline, as I need my senses around me if I have to make notes.

I watch the fish flitting below the clear water. Sojan has an idea. He goes inside the boat and brings a fishing rod and hands it to me. Well, I have fished before but unfortunately have never caught fish in my life. The fish seem to outwit me, eat my bait and glide away. To this complaint Sojan promises to teach me to fish. I remember having read, “Don’t give them fish, teach them to fish,” and all that, and agree.

He brings some rice which I use as bait. These backwater fishes are smart. They nibble the rice and swim away. Sojan has another idea. He disappears into his kitchen and brings a handful of kneaded flour. He attaches a small portion to the hook as bait. I dip the line into the water. Nothing happens.

“Pull,” Sojan says. I pull.

There’s a writhing snakehead fish dangling on the line. My first catch! Ever!

A bit overwhelmed I prepare the bait and insert the line again. Again, nothing happens.

“Pull,” Sojan cries. I pull but not hard enough and a writhing fish leaves the bait and jumps back into the canal. It starts drizzling. Sojan says he can fry the snakehead for dinner, and, “Freshly caught fish is supposed to be very tasty.” But I decide against it and let the snakehead go. At least, I could sacrifice the tingling of my taste buds, for the lifelong gratitude of a snakehead.

I shoot some beautiful sunset pictures. The light dazzles over the shimmering canal and I am satisfied that I have an eye for framing pictures. Dinner is a subdued affair with me eating in the wan light of the deck. Rajesh has gone to his nearby home to spend the night. Sojan has prepared chapattis, rice, lentil soup, and fried Karimeen fish. Fish and rice are the staple foods of these parts.

Sojan tells me about life on the banks of the canal. It is hard. But people are simple and co-operative. In times of emergencies they work together. And, emergencies are a constant, such as the breaches of the canals mentioned above during heavy rains. The water from the canals then storm into the rice fields, – which are at a lower level – with such force that it even washes away entire houses. Sometimes people don’t sleep for weeks afraid there would be a breach. Life for them is precarious.

A bit inquisitively I ask Sojan what he is paid. I was in for the shock of my life. For a job that requires him to be on the boat in twenty-four hour shifts he is paid rupees two thousand a month, which is around US $ 45, a month! Rajesh gets a little more. But I tell him that he can get twice that amount as a casual labourer, who earns Rupees one hundred and seventy-five a day in Kidangannoor. But he says jobs are difficult to obtain in these parts and most rice farmers can’t afford to keep labourers. It’s a difficult situation. Farm labour is progressively expensive and unproductive because of the demands of the unions and unemployment is a growing menace, leading to several social ills.

However Sojan is optimistic. His passport is ready and he would be going to the Persian Gulf if he gets a proper cook’s job, and if the bribe to be paid to the agent is a bit more reasonable. True to every Malayali’s dream, he wants to escape to the Golden land of Arabia.

After a fruitful day, when I had put all my apprehensions of the morning to rest, I retired to my bedroom. I assume mosquitoes those whiny creatures are omnipresent. As already mentioned there is a mosquito net above the bed and a mosquito repellent liquid, the sort that is plugged to the electric socket. I switch on the latter and go to sleep listening to the lapping of water against the sides of the wooden boat. At times another boat would pass and our boat would rock gently. I had seen some wonderful scenery and met some very simple and hardworking people. I was a bit tired, but I happen to sleep well when I am tired.

I wake up in the morning completely energised and eager to experience the backwaters once again. I could hear the sound of boats passing and the gentle lapping of water against the sides of the boat. As expected, I had slept soundly.

I had a bath, changed clothes and went for a walk along the embankment of the canal. The concrete part of the embankment was so narrow that I had to be careful lest my foot slipped. To one side of me were the backwaters, and to the other side, on a much lower level, the rice fields of Kuttanad. There was a drizzle and the water dimpled nicely.

A private boat named Kalayil drew close to the embankment and the occupants got out. There were four men of whom the man driving the boat seemed the boss and talked in a loud, clearly no-nonsense voice. Kalayil Cheriankutty, his brother Jose, and a few workers had come to inspect the rice fields.

Jose tells me that Cheriankutty owns around seventy-five acres of fields that stretched towards the horizon to our east. That is a large holding by Kerala standards and Cheriankutty must be a rich man, judging by his confident voice. In the recent past his father had owned three-hundred-and-fifty acres of fields. Cheriankutty went as far as the beginning of the clays bunds that divides the fields and came back.

“If I fall I might hurt myself and the rest of the day is wasted,” he says as he walks to where Jose and I stand. He sends on of his men to inspect the fields. He asks Jose in a voice that rings over the waters, “Ingeru Evidathetha?” “Where is this man from?”

I drop some famous names from my family, just to establish that I am from these parts. He nods. As I mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, in Kerala everyone knows everyone. A connection is made. Remember the man who had peered inside the rickshaw I was travelling? Well, he thought he knew me. He actually might.

Cheriankutty asks me what I am doing. I say I write for a living in Bombay.

“Oh, a sahityakaran from the big city? What a boring life sitting inside an office every day, and then going to a flat? I enjoy the wide expanses,” he said indicating the fields. Sahityakaran is a reverential term for a man of literature.

“We also enjoy the wide expanse, that’s why I am here,” I said indicating the rice fields planted with the second crop of the year.

“I was only joking. Even this land can get boring after some time,” he said, loudly clearing his throat and spitting. The vagaries of nature are the cause of his discontent. He runs his farm like a business and has an office and employees. He seems content except that the weather is a little unpredictable. He invests a lot of money on planting paddy and along comes the rain and washes it all away.

“Just one breach of this canal is enough. That’s why I make these periodic visits to my fields. There is no joy in it now. My children aren’t interested in farming. They are all living abroad. One is in Bombay, my daughter, in Goregaon.”

“I know Goregaon,” I reply. I know Goregaon in the western suburbs of Bombay, but not too well. He has the loud and authoritative nature of Kerala patriarchs, and, naturally, I am awed.

By the usual Kerala standards he is a rich man, a prosperous farmer and a notable individual in society. And according to the Indian government’s tax laws his agricultural income is not taxed. He has inherited the lands from his father who in turn was contracted the land by a prominent newspaper group of Kerala with whom my family has had associations. That further reinforces my theory that Kerala is like a small close-knit village where everyone knows everyone.

Rajesh takes the wheel and we are ready to resume our return journey back to Alleppy. Sojan busies himself, preparing breakfast. The day is clear and the water is placid. A few clouds float in the sky, no, nothing menacing.

The boat, glides into the canal that leads into Alleppy town. There are a long row of boats moored along the entrance to the town. I marvel at the beauty of these sturdy boats that are painted a uniform black, with bamboo mats as canopy, which was my palace on water for a day. Rajesh suggests that I should visit during Onam festival when the famed boat races of Kerala are conducted. In these races, long, slim snake boats with typically pointed bows and towering sterns are deployed. I make a mental note of this and tell them that I would try.

Considering their wages, low by standards anywhere, I tip Rajesh and Sojan generously, an amount equal to a day’s pay in Kerala. They perk up, and, smiling broadly, help me into a rickshaw which would take me back to Alleppy bus station. I am taken aback by their friendliness, hospitality and sincerity as I went through an important part of my Kerala experience, which I never have had a chance to savour earlier. We shake hands and they say, “If you come again, we would like to be of service,” or something to that effect. I am touched.

Then the “vanchi pattu,” the old boat song of my childhood, again came back to me. I neither know the exact words nor its meaning – language purists might scoff – but it goes something as follows:

Hey you, I saw your father,

Rowing on Vembanad Lake,

As he rendered eight oars,

And a long pole useless, rowing!

Chapter 11 - The Trip Back to Bombay

zenwriter@gmail.com (John) — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 15:25:00 +0000

Chapter 11

THE TRIP BACK TO BOMBAY

At last it was time to make the trip back to Bombay. Surgery on my mother was performed successfully and I could now go back to Bombay, the city which afforded me a living, the city I loved and hated in turns. I was going back to the malls, back to the 24/7 existence, back to glitzy shopping complexes and sleek cars and unending entertainment on television.

Also back to Center One and the acrimonious fight that took place outside it more than a week back, a fight in which I had witnessed women power in its rawest. What made that woman so wild? I still wonder. Was she upset because of a small dent on her car, or was she ranting against mankind, or, menkind.

I was to travel on the Malabar Express to Mangalore by air-conditioned coach. From Mangalore I would board another train leaving for Bombay. In the summer rush period getting a train ticket was next to impossible. I wanted to avoid going by bus again after my harrowing experience while travelling towards Kerala. A train journey back would complete the circle, pass through Goa and Mangalore and offer more variety. Besides, I love train journeys and there are opportunities to stretch my legs should it feel too cramped.

The train journey by two-tier air-conditioned coach to Mangalore was the most pleasant I had on my peripatetic sojourn so far. It was comfortable and pampering. The coach smelled nice, too good, like an airplane. “Odorless coach” the inscription above door read. There were small comforts like bottle holders, and a plastic pouch to keep spectacles, watches, mobiles when sleeping. An attendant (with Jeeves-like detachment and butler-ish mannerisms) brought me fresh blankets and sheets.

With me on this leg of the journey was a non-resident Indians couple who was on a de-discovery trip to South India. They were the two very talkative people I have ever known in my life. I will call them Mr. and Mrs. Kumar, because in spite of all the words we bandied, I never asked them their names and addresses. There was another couple who were from Bombay, he was a journalist, she, delicately structured, seemed like a house wife. Another passenger was Ajit Nambiar, with whom I shared the same primary school and friends. As I said earlier, Kerala is a small world, everyone besides knowing everyone, would also assume an easy familiarity. There was also a youth, Biju George, a lawyer, built like a prize-fighter, whose wrist muscles were as thick as those of my thigh. We made a close-knit, readily-nodding-agreement group, always willing to put in the extra effort to commiserate, a group, the likes of which one often finds in Indian trains. The entire journey was spent in sling mud at the government for even the slightest problem such as bad weather.

Mr. and Mrs. Kumar lived in the USA, with their two daughters, who lived in adjacent houses and were neighbours. In fact, she confessed proudly in what I considered a put-on nasal American accent, “We have lunch with my youngest daaaaughter, and dinnah with my eldahhhhh daaaghter.”

When they sat down for dinner, Messrs. Kumar had repeated rounds of curry, sambhar, puris, rice, vegetables, curds, pickles, and an unimaginable repast right in the crowded train compartment. Out came bottle after bottle of eatables topped by curd and rice, eaten using the hand, which they licked clean South Indian style. I was amazed how they enjoyed eating so much, and the wide variety of South Indian cuisines I had seen emerging from their bags. Now I know what people carry in that bulging ten-piece luggage when they travel.

When a vendor came selling canned coconut water, the conversation turned to canned coconut water – “bad, youuu knawww, preservatives added,” Mrs. Kumar said prissily. “In the US we have canned sugarcane juice, banana juice, fresh, fresh orange juice, everything,” Mr. Kumar said sounding like an understudy of his wife, who busied herself circulating pictures of her daughters and her grandchildren.

The voluble Mr. Kumar, whose tongue, as a Malayalam saying goes, can’t be contained in his mouth, then went on to extol the virtues of Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhai Patel. I remember wondering how these non-resident Indians living in the US were so steeped in the tradition of India while we, based in India, were so lost when it came to discovering our culture and tradition. In other words, while India is slowly being Americanised with fast-food joints, business process outsourcing outfits, and American clothes and fads, there are stubbornly traditional Indians in pockets of America who still cling to what used to be Indian lifestyles and values.

Mr. Kumar, who had a Ben Gurion look with his tufts of hair, then extolled the virtues of sky buses, escalators, and, hold your breath, helicopter services. They had it in the US and they should have it in India. Mr. Kumar was the enterprising sort and wanted to start a service in India providing emergency medical facilities for a fee.

“It is this mentality of poverty that is defeating, you know,” he said in his originally Indian accent, unadulterated, unlike his wife’s. “I can show you how to put poverty behind you.”

He had these wonderfully simple solutions to all of India’s problems. And he expressed them in all earnestness, in the voice of a ten year old reciting a memorised speech in class. His enthusiasm is infectious and we all nod our heads in agreement. We look rather silly, nodding our heads and being agreeable.

Ajit Nambiar, my school mate, had worked in the Persian Gulf as I had. We had a lot of experiences to share, which included our school teachers, common friends, and acquaintances. He was five years junior to me, and I do not remember him clearly. But we have many common friends. He reminisced about the pranks he had played, which included locking the school helper in the bathroom for hours. He also seemed bitter over a longstanding row with a teacher who later became the principal of the school. Now he is ailing from a back ailment because of which he is in semi-retirement.

Biju George, attired in shorts and a tee-shirt, has a legal practice and is an ethical kind of lawyer who is interested in legal activism. He says to me that legal activism was making progress in all areas of life. It required many a public interest litigations to fight the deep penetration of corruption. He was optimistic about the future of India. He said that though the parliament, and the executive had failed the country, the judicial estate of which he was a part would make reforms possible and make graft punishable. Amen. I hope there are many like him out there. He specializes in public interest litigation in banking. Recently, he tells me, he had unearthed a scam in a co-operative bank where the senior officers were found cheating borrowers by levying exorbitant interest for late payment of loan instalments.

Then the conversation (all speaking at the top of their voices, because of the train sounds), turned to cold remedies, and then… hemorrhoids. “In America, they cut it with a blade you know,” said Mr. Kumar and I shuddered, “Such foolish people.” He made no pretensions and spoke naturally in an Indian accent. To this Mrs. Kumar said exasperatedly in her affected nasal accent, “Youuu are tooo muchhh.”

The differences between the second class sleeper compartment and air-conditioned three tier compartment were stark. I guess the Indian Railways treat second class sleeper travellers who form the majority with disdain, bordering on contempt. In second class compartments there aren’t attendants; there are several streams of beggars, vendors, and persons travelling without proper reservations in the sleeper compartment, which is meant for travellers with confirmed seat reservations.

And here I was enjoying the services of an attendant who brought me blankets and clean sheets! If I was in the second class sleeper compartment I wouldn’t even have had a place to keep my spectacles, or mobiles phones. There were nice little, little Rexene pouches in air-conditioned class for that purpose. Above the door of the coach was written “odourless coach” and true to the legend it was well maintained and smelled nice. As a constant traveller by second class sleeper coach, I must say I felt a bit cheated. Obviously, since the second class sleeper coaches I travelled stank.

I went to sleep on a top berth and, lulled by the murmur of wheels, immediately went to sleep. Except for a few sleepy interregnums to change sides, I slept undisturbed till 7.30 a. m. the next morning, comfortably ensconced in a clean white sheet and a pillow. I felt relaxed and rested when I got down.

I disembarked at Mangalore station and outside it; I was instantly adopted by my protector and escort in Mangalore – Munna. “Munnabhai” as I would call him, would be my rickshaw escort around Mangalore, no, not to be confused with Bangalore, the computer city which I had passed on the way to Kerala. I form sudden associations with rickshaw drivers. I communicate with them on a very subtle level, asking about their families and about their town and, Munnabhai, obviously liked it. I have such a friend in Panjim, Goa, named Prakash, who waits for me outside my hotel and is willing to take me anywhere for a little less than the normal rickshaw fare. Come to think of it I have taken a liking for rickshaw drivers anywhere in India except in Delhi where they are a bit high-handed, the region’s self-importance may be to blame.

Anyway, Munnabhai took a liking for me, and immediately took charge of my affairs and for a measly Rupees hundred more, proceeded to buy me a ticket to Bombay by train for the next day and a suitable hotel room for a day’s stay. May be he was impressed by my Police sunglasses that I had bought in Bangalore for Rupees One Hundred and Twenty, or, may be, he liked me because I called him “Munnabhai,” the hero of the eponymous film starring Sanjay Dutt. I don’t know which. Ah well, Sometimes you never know what people like or dislike. It’s still a big mystery to me as to why Munnabhai adopted me.

Seeing the tall and strapping Munnabhai and my Police sunglasses, the hotel staff scampered around me in a show of warmth and courteousness. Was he some kind of local “bhai,” euphemism for a gang lord? Munnabhai left, promising to come the next afternoon to collect me and leave me at the train terminus. He seemed popular enough for his new friend, i.e., me, to be given the best room, with an uninterrupted view of a vast stretch of swaying coconut palms below. Funny how coconut palms looks so neat and inviting from high above. For millenniums the fronds were woven into a tight flat mat which was used to thatch huts.

Yes, coconut palms formed a green canopy below me. I opened my window to a world below that seemed right out of a picture post card. Below me was a green stretch of trees bearing the favourite food of South Indians in such neat and serrated arrays, waving gently in some musical symphony. As far as the eye could see there was a sea of this dark green vegetation. There wasn’t a single commercial establishment this side of my hotel room and all I could see of human habitation was the red tiled roofs of a few nearby single-storied houses. I felt at peace with everything.

Right then I felt as if Mangalore was heaven, the finest discovery I had made in this journey. The people were polite and sweet to the extent of being syrupy. I saw an argument about right of way just outside the hotel, as I was being driven in by Munnabhai. The argument was so polite that, I first thought that both parties were exchanging pleasantries. Such wonderful camaraderie, even when having an argument! Unbelievable. What gave them away were the nervous gestures they were making with their hands. I can bet my last Rupee that neither “mother” nor “sister” was mentioned, as it would have been in Bombay.

Cochin was in your face whereas Mangalore was politeness personified. From my hotel window, after having unpacked, I could still see the feuding pair standing there and making entreaties with elaborate gestures. Ah! Such was the pleasure of Mangalore town’s discourses on the right of way. The next day I checked the spot to see if they had been standing there the whole night, engaged in an argument they were too polite to conclude. Cochin is the ambitious metropolitan city whereas Mangalore is where I would want to retire. Cochin is the place people would enquire about your wealth; Mangalore is the place people would enquire about your health.

Coconut palms, heady breeze, and politeness bordering on flattery had me so hooked that I wished I could spend more time in Mangalore than I could. Well, I can come back to it some other time. The night was spent in the hotel watching a Discovery documentary on the CIA’s “band of brothers.” In the evening I explored the town a bit more and saw that high-rise apartments were coming up in place of tiled houses and that Malayalis were running hotels in Mangalore while the Mangaloreans were managing hotels in Bombay. That way, Mangalore, being closer to Kerala than the rest of Karnataka has a lot in common with Calicut and Cochin, which are also port cities.

Outside a shop in Mangalore is this advertisement printed on a sheet of paper, stuck untidily on a cardboard, dangling from a thread.

“Paying guest for ladies required.”

Obviously the murderous attack on the English language continues here as elsewhere.

The next morning after I had a bath and a change of clothes, I went down to the reception and wonder of wonders, Munnabhai was there waiting for me. What had I done to inspire him to such devotion I do not know. I hadn’t tipped him much; I had only talked with him as a human being. I do that quite a lot. I know how hard a rickshaw driver’s life is, or, that of any driver for that matter. I can imagine the patient wait for a customer, and when one turns up, the haggling over fares, and the unreasonable demands. If they are a bit rough, it is because they have to tackle all kinds of God’s creations. Gangsters, temperamental women, errant school children, lovers, thieves, so on, are their regular customers. So I can imagine.

I talk to them. They know more about the locality than any shopkeeper. In any city in Indian I can get into a rickshaw and tell the driver to take me to an affordable and decent hotel and be rest assured that he would do so. I am friendly and ask them how much they earn and pay them a tip which delights them. That is sure to make them loyalty personified. I have the loyalty of such rickshaw drivers all over the country. Sterling human beings, Prakash in Panjim, Pednekar in Pune, who on a business trip volunteered to drive me through the scattered industrial areas and offered to guard my brief case so that I didn’t have to lug it to appointments. Now, I have Munnabhai in Mangalore.

I must remember to give him a big tip today.

Munnabhai helped me with my bags. Imagine anyone, least of all, a rickshaw driver doing that in Bombay. He carried all my bags into the rickshaw as I settled the hotel bill. I still don’t understand it. Is it movies that inspire the likes of Munnabhai or do people have kindness and goodness in them the way he has? That is something to mull over on the train back to Bombay.

Chapter 12 - EPILOGUE

zenwriter@gmail.com (John) — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 15:20:00 +0000

Chapter 12

EPILOGUE

So I said goodbye, and all that to Mangalore, and Munnabhai. Direct train tickets to Bombay weren’t available; hence my idea was to go to Mangalore and from there to board a train to my final destination. Munnabhai helped me get a second class sleeper ticket; I didn’t ask him the means he employed, but he told me that I was to pretend to be one “Idris Hassan” through the journey to Bombay. He came as far as the train with my bags and loaded them on the luggage rack of the Matsyagandha Express. I paid him a generous tip of Rupees One Hundred and Fifty which also included the rickshaw fare. This was slightly less than what I had paid to Sojan and Rajesh but he had the rest of the day to himself.

As the train trundles over the lush green foliage of the Konkan coast I look back upon the journey that had begun two weeks and a half earlier from New Bombay. This green belt extended all the way down to the beautiful countryside I had just left behind, God’s Own Country. When I think of Kerala I think of it as a sacred land where God is as important as Godlessness, where history and traditional values are respected and observed, a land of idol worship and anti-idolators, a state steeped in stories and legends.

It is the motherland of great kings such as the Chera king Imayavaramban Nedum Cheralatan, who ruled for fifty-six years, the great reformers Udaya Marthanda Varma and Marthanda Varma and the noble Velu Thampi Dalava who led a rebellion against the British. They were benevolent rulers who commanded respect like the legendary king Mahabali who though he was a demon king, was so loved by his Malayali subjects that the Gods became jealous of his popularity.

It is also the land of Adi Shankaracharya who in his limited thirty-three years on this earth led what is believed to have been the greatest religious revival of India at a time when Hinduism was slowly being overshadowed by Buddhism. In the short span of his life he established the four Mutts, or, monasteries, that still function as the fountainhead of spiritual leadership for Hindu believers in India.

In a land blessed by Gods, thousands of pilgrims converge on Sabarimala every year to do penance and ask for redemption of sins. Sabarimala Ayyappan, or, Manikantan, is revered as a reincarnation of the maintainer God, Vishnu. And thousands of Christians visit Divine Nagar at Pota to seek spiritual rejuvenation, and find spiritual solace inside this sanctuary. There is a world-renowned Christian meeting that takes place every February on the sandy bed of the Pampa River near Kozhencherry, near my village of Kidangannoor. Faithful Syrian Christians from all over India converge on this sandy river bed during the dry month of February.

The journey is also memorable because of the wonderful people I met. Hamid, who sold me Police sunglasses for Rupees One Hundred and Twenty, Komalan, the politician, who sold cold buttermilk in trains, and Munnabhai, who took me around Mangalore as my guardian angel and bought me a difficult-to-obtain train ticket for the journey back to Bombay. Friendly Sojan and Rajesh, my captain and cook respectively on a century-old river boat, simple folks, who, though only paid for a month what a single meal would cost in a developed country, looked after me on my backwaters cruise on a stately, centuries-old Kettuvallom. Sojan taught me how to fish and Rajesh taught me how to navigate the house-boat through the placid canals of Alleppy. Not to forget the somewhat boastful Kumars on the journey from Kerala to Mangalore in the air-conditioned second class coach.

Johnny the tour operator for the backwaters cruise had told Sojan and Rajesh that I was a writer and therefore I should be treated with respect and shown all the sights along the route. They did. In Kerala a writer is not a writer but a “Sahityakaran,” meaning, a man of literature. And, I found out, a man of literature is a respected individual in God’s Own Country.

In a little over two weeks I had cut a wide swathe, travelling from the most modern part of India – Bombay – across to one of the most industrially backward, though prosperous areas of India. The contrast between Bombay and Kerala is stark. On the one side is the ugly face of industrialisation and modernity and on the other is a traditional sanctuary that still clings to centuries-old beliefs, superstitions and godliness so much as to be called God’s anointed country.

In Cochin I discovered a shop selling products of a privately funded trust. It created wonderfully crafted and intricately-designed articles from reeds, bamboos, and metals. The range was vast and the prices were not too high as to be intimidating. I bought a pen stand that had space to keep a mobile phone and a picture frame made from reed. Cost me around Rupees one-hundred-and-fifty. Several traditional crafts are dying for want of buyers and I felt I was doing something to help.

Cochin is full of huge posters of Hindi movie star John Abraham. Reason: he is half Malayali. For a people who worship matinee idols as Gods this isn’t surprising. I also see several gigantic posters of Mohan Lal and Mammooty, both Malayalam film super stars.

A journey that had begun two-and-a-half weeks earlier was almost complete, I mused, as I passed rivers, waterfalls, gorges, and mountains of a rain spattered Konkan coast. It had begun, about a week ago, at Center One in New Bombay.

Goa was peaceful, beautifully green and litter free. I couldn’t find the odd plastic cups and carelessly thrown plastic bags that was omnipresent on the journey towards Goa. Then I see this sign on a road in a sleepy little Goan hamlet in this most beautiful of Indian tourist destinations.

“Dumping garbage is strictly prohibited.”

At least the Goans have, with their love of languages, got their English right! Perhaps there is a lesson in it somewhere. If rules are written in simple and direct enough language, people would be less fussy about its observance. Something for our law-makers to take note. Most of the rule books in India are written in arcane language, with mistakes to boot. Sad to say, they evoke laughter and not observance.

It is a Sunday and throughout Goa I could see the faithful going to Churches that are ever present in this former Portuguese colony. The men all wore trousers and shirts and the women wore skirts. The usual Goan bon homie could be seen at village intersections where groups of men and women in their Sunday best clothes stood talking and smiling in the best free-spirited Goan way, which I knew so well from being with Goan friends in Bombay.

Goa will eternally be Goa, spotlessly clean, with its charming fresh-painted bungalows, its churches, its crosses. That makes me think to myself, some day I am going to make a personal journey to Goa and write about it. When I was there last, Prakash (about whom I have written earlier), a rickshaw driver, had escorted me around Panjim, acting as my personal chauffeur and valet, just as Munnabhai had in Mangalore. The simplicity and honesty of such acts of friendliness and kindness touched me throughout my journey through South India. I wondered what Prakash would have been doing when I passed through Goa. Is he doing well? May be he is busy helping another tourist.

Then I thought of the various atrocities committed on travellers that I had read in newspapers. May be travellers and tourist in India should learn how to respect local cultures and not act high handed or talk down to the local people. I was kind and friendly and I received heavy dollops of kindness and friendliness throughout my travel.

On the train I meet a family from Cochin that is travelling to Bombay to visit relatives. Benny is a worker in Cochin Refinery and his wife Beena is a quality controller of a church reconstruction project in Cochin. Coincidentally I, too, attend the same church when I visit my brother’s family in Cochin.

I am somewhat awed when Beena, a civil engineer, tells me that the project is estimated at over Rupees thirty million. Churches are a matter of pride for the community and such projects are grandly conceived and executed. A lot of hard-earned money from the Persian Gulf goes into these constructions. All around Kerala I see such huge churches that would any day rival the Judaic Temple of Solomon in grandeur. I have met the vicar of the church and a cousin of mine is on the church committee. So again a connection is established proving the maxim that there aren’t six, but only two degrees of separation between a Malayali and a fellow Malayali. Benny’s family and I become friends.

Benny and I talk about the law and order situation in Cochin. He is concerned about the growing crime rate. Beena’s god chain was snatched in broad daylight from inside a bus. She immediately went to the police station and lodged a complaint, but apparently she had no luck. The police did nothing and the thieves were not traced. Benny lives in the heart of the city and he tells me that property rates are so high that his meagre house and property would fetch him Rupees forty million if he is to sell it at the present market value. But, no, he has no intention of parting with the property of his ancestors.

It is eight a.m. when we touch Madgaon, or Margao, as the Portuguese used to call it. My Goan friend Tony Carvalho would tell me that the Portuguese who had ruled over Goa till 1951 were respected, and in some ways, even admired. His childhood was spent in Goa and he had said that one could go visiting without even locking one’s house and there wouldn’t be any burglaries. At a few Goans weddings I have attended in Bombay, guests, in keeping with tradition, would still speak in Portuguese. And from the train I could see a long procession of men dressed in trousers and half-sleeved shirts and women in skirts, with scarves tied over their hair, walking through the greenery of coastal villages. A pretty picture, I must say.

To me it appeared that there is great similarity between Goa and Kerala. Both are states which have been colonised first by the Portuguese, and both have sizable Christian population. In both states rice and fish are the staple diets.

Or, perhaps, on the contrary, the Portuguese must have been strict enforcers of the law and that may be the reason for the observance of the law in this tiniest of states of India. But Goan roads are cleaner than roads in any other parts of India and you will rarely find unauthorised hawkers in any precinct of Panjim, the capital city. Also cheap grocery stores do not display their wares outside the shop, along the footpath, as they do in Bombay.

But I digress. The train moves speedily from Goa into the south of Maharashtra state into areas such as Kudal, Ratnagiri, Sindudurg and Roha. There are several deep gorges along the path which are connected by viaducts. There comes over me a tremendous feeling of something having passed, some world that is left behind. Bombay would mean a mechanical existence with deadlines to meet and no time to sit and stare in the daily churn of events.

But I feel fulfilled and satisfied that I had kept notes on this journey, clicked pictures and that I had the opportunity of meeting some wonderful people and learning about their lives. I would advise anyone undertaking such a journey to go with an open mind, to accept things and situations as they are, and not as they should be. You are travelling through a time warp, or timelessness, a state in which some people still live in some areas of India. There still are tribal people living in secluded areas, in isolation, cut off from civilization, shopping malls, and outsourcing units.

I had undertaken a wide range of crisscross journeys across Kerala and had tried as far as possible to keep my eyes and ears open. As a returning son of the soil – I was born in Kerala, and have spent eight years of my life there before migrating to Bombay – I had the added advantage of knowing the language, culture and traditions of South India and Kerala. If one is not conversant in the languages of South India, I feel a good knowledge of English would suffice as most Malayalis have undergone school education and can understand English.

As I got down at Panvel, quite near Belapur, where I live, I could look back upon the fulfilment of a dream I had nurtured for a long time. The dream was of recording Kerala through my own experiences, as I saw it. My apologies if I may have passed on a few images coloured by my biases towards my native state.

However what was enchanting about God’s Own Country was the feeling that I had visited a different time and age, a place where ancient wisdoms and traditions co-exist with modern thoughts and styles, and where people are learning to cope with modernity in their own individual ways. Corporations and businesses see Kerala as a fast growing market for their products, as there is a lot of money flowing in from its expatriate sons and daughters.

The phenomenon of opulent consumption or materialism could be true not only of Bombay but of Kerala too. I remember the Malayali mother inside Center One exhorting her child with, “No, no, no,” and the Gujarati father saying, “Sirf Joyiye, nathi levano,” which translates to, “Only see, do not buy,” when I had started my journey from New Bombay. There is a desire to be modern and own the latest mobile phones and gadgets, but there is also financial restraint.

The great transition from an agricultural society to a modern, networked society has, perhaps, come too soon, I think, as I see two trendy young people in the latest clothes flirting at an upmarket shopping complex in Marine Drive, Cochin. A group of boys, in more traditional attire of dhotis and shirts, jealously ogle at them as they pass. The contrast between their lives is immediately apparent. The couple in trendy clothes have someone abroad supporting their modern lifestyle while the group of boys only have dreams of being similar to them some day.

Kerala is not Camelot or Utopia but as near as possible to a Shangri-la, which has existed in a time warp till the very recent past, is modernising very fast, and is slowly being re-discovered and recorded for posterity. And I hope this account is one of the many humble chronicles of this serendipitous discovery.

THE END