Building a library

Growing up away from home and in residential schools and colleges, one of the things I missed the most was having my own room and bookshelf. Even in law school, while I had a healthy collection of books, there was never enough space to keep them together.

Therefore, I was very keen on having a proper bookshelf once I got my own place.  But the process of getting the ideal bookshelf is not quite a simple as one may think. The kind of bookshelf I want wouldn't fit in the elevator or through the front door. I haven’t come across a design for a bookshelf that can be dismantled that I like yet. My house, a rented two bedroom, came fitted with a large living room cabinet. Seeing as we did not intend to get a television and clearly, the pride of place in any house we lived in should rightfully belong to our books, we converted this cabinet into a bookshelf. This poses a bit of a problem as there is a large space for a television which goes completely wasted. Currently, we have a Christmas tree made of post-its adorning it. Then, there is long rack made of glass, the kind people reserve for their trophies. All the trophies, the very few that we do have, sit in our respective parents’ homes. But the glass shelf means we can only keep judiciously selected books that do not threaten to bring it down. 

Nevertheless, there it is, my first proper bookshelf, a make do one, shared and much fussed over. Sharing a bookshelf can be tricky. What books should sit together is a game of extensive deliberations and even after we come to a decision, constant second guessing. Add to that, the fact that it is a constantly growing collection under the shared belief that at least one tenth of the money one makes must be spent on books. Therefore, every couple of months, we do something we call the Great Reorganisation. We decide what books should continue to be displayed on the cabinet and what should be relegated to the cupboards in our rooms. 

The Vikram Seths and Amitav Ghoshs, our favorite Indian writers whose books we own numerous copies of, have claimed a right to the prime real estate locations, occupying prominent shelves, at least for now. Pooja’s complete collection of the Linguistic Survey of India, the only one ever done, stay together as an imposing presence, red hard bound books in seventeen volumes. Then there also some element of mixing and matching. Some subjects flow thematically into the other while others are bound more by contrast than familiarity. As language enthusiasts, we have literary history, etymology books and Pooja’s collection of books of typography displayed together. It took us some time to figure out the sequence in which we wants the books to sit, and we eventually settled on order of evolutionary progression with typography books (letters) at the top, followed by etymology (words) and finally, literary history (literature). This sense of logic is not consistently adhered to as Gender Studies books share a shelf with Men’s Fashion, the Asimovs sit next to British Humor, and Science and Cookbooks reside together. 

What amazes me more and more is how differently you think of your books, depending on the way they are arranged in your bookshelves. In the earlier arrangements, Ram Guha’s books used to sit together as part of the India collection, but now lies distributed across Sports, History and Politics. An MC Escher sits comfortably in Design, Science or simply, large hard bound books. Fritjof Capra’s Tao of Physics  and The Introduction of Numbers have moved from Philosophy to Math and Science in the last reorganisation. This moving around of books based on a semblance of logic often dictated by whims and fancies ( “Do we have enough books to have a Science shelf? A Science shelf would be cool.”) often changes how you think of your books, in what order you read them and what books you buy next in the desire to fill up or build a shelf. 

For some time now, Pooja has been trying to pitch the idea of arranging the bookshelf by the color of books as an interesting experiment. While the idea sounded abominable to me in the beginning, it has gradually begun to grow on me. A more common and less bizarre way to arrange the books would be chronologically. Anne Fadiman argues if you do have books from across centuries, it will “allow [you] to watch the broad sweep of literature unfold before [your] very eyes.” Another arrangement I read about somewhere spoke of the idea of arranging the bookshelf based on what writers you felt would get along with each other, the kind of delightfully wasteful intellectual exercise that it sounds both tempting and daunting. 

Moving on

I had decided to write this piece when Tendulkar retired, however, what with him being out of form in the last one year, this has seemed less and less likely, I think I will get down to it. (I say less and less likely as Tendulkar, much like Gavaskar before him is too conscious of his legacy to not retire on a high) To loosely borrow from Nick Hornby, I fell in love with the game of cricket as a boy much as I was to fall in love with women later. It was a miserable and desperate sort of love, obsessive in its need to love and driven not so much by even a desire to be loved back but by its revelry in a narrative built around torment and heartache, which elevates an otherwise mundane existence to a thrilling albeit self absorbed suspense and high drama.

Growing up as a 90s cricket fan in India was an education in character building and perseverance. The story begins with (and will end with) Sachin. Indian batsmen have traditionally scored heavily in their own backyards. But, it is the overseas knock, often scored in the face of adversity, shoring up one end while the others around you wilt, that separate the men from the boys. Sachin, though was always special, the boy wonder, the slayer of the wily veteran Abdul Qadir at 16, scoring an overseas hundred at 17 and most famously, standing tall in all of his five foot five frame at the chin music haven at 18. The legend of Tendulkar had been established that day in Perth and his subsequent conquests - neutralising Shane Warne at Chennai, the twin centuries at Sharjah, the six over third man off Shoaib Akhtar in the 2003 World Cup, counter-attacking Dale Steyn in Capetown, the endorsement from the Don himself, and the sheer monstrosity of numbers were just further chapters that crystallized and built on the myth that had been born during his teens. He was consistently at the core of the narrative, Arjuna amongst the Pandavas, the proverbial hero.

The support cast included the much lampooned Anil Kumble. An engineer Bangalore, Kumble was the rare legspinner, never easy on the eye. Not for him was the soaring flight that would draw the batsman out only to be beaten, he couldn't spin the ball square, he bowled mostly straight yet the batsmen continued to miss it such was the precision, subtlety and perseverance of his art. Kumble also understood the value of constant evolution, adding to his repertoire every few years. Dravid and Ganguly joined them a little later. Co-debutantes who could not have been more dissimilar in their approach of the game or the way they played, yet they formed a fine marriage for years. You add Laxman and Sehwag to the mix, men with mercurial talents and oodles of self belief, one a wristy artist, prettier to watch any other cricketer when on song and the other, primitive and uncomplicated in his approach of "see ball, hit ball", and you had the core actors in stories. There were others filling in for supporting roles, Srinath and Prasad, overworked fast bowlers of limited talent, Harbhajan and Yuvraj, young men who never grew up, the highly skilful yet underachieving Zaheer Khan, to name but a few. 

This was not a team with a lot of options. There were no menacing fast bowlers, no bench strength to allow for any degree of rotation to share the workload, no imposing openers till Sehwag turned up. But they won often in India, and managed to compete abroad. They weren't champions, never dominating sides out of the contest, but scrappy men who didn't stand down from the fight like their predecessors. This was also a largely middle class and cultured team. The leadership comprised men from cities, mostly from middle class backgrounds, cerebral men who took pride in their talents but largely underplaying their larger than life status. Importantly, they had lost the gentility which accompanied most Indian teams before, often in awe of the opposition, and expecting to lose. But they did not believe in posturing for the opposition. 

It is both fortunate and unfortunate when the nucleus and the narrative of the team is built entirely around men who are the same age, for they pick up and leave pretty much at the same time. The follower of the game is left slightly unprepared especially when it is accompanied by sudden cultural shifts. The definition of what is cool in sport should change gradually or it makes relatively young people like us feel very old. I can applaud all the talents of Viral Kohli and he is indeed, the future, but the slew of invectives he leaves behind in his trail every time he exits, belongs, for people in my generation, in the playground when you are ten, not on the poster boy of Indian cricket. Similarly, MSD is as cool as they come, in anybody's books, but he is not a real test cricketer. It gets to a point when you don't really know what to root for.

When Sachin retires, my interest in cricket will, I think, become largely academic. I will continue to follow the game but I will lose the sense of obsessive drama that the game has always carried for me. I did not expect to feel quite so old at twenty five.

Radheya's feet

Having recently re-watched all of B R Chopra's Mahabharat, I was fairly disappointed with this Doordarshan classic. The performances were wildly over the top, the chief culprits being Mukesh Khanna as the venerable Bhishma unabashedly channeling a very overdone Dilip Kumar, Puneet Issar with his tendency to break into wicked grins and thunderous laughter at every opportunity and Girija Shankar's Dhritarashtra cutting an even sorrier figure than you'd expect. But what bugged me more was that so much of the epic that has a lot of impact was left out of show.

I can understand some of the sideplots like Kachchha-Devayani being edited out, which though terribly interesting do not bear a direct relation to the central plot. But there were several details which added a lot of impact to the main storyline which find no place in the televised series. Yudhisthira's chariot touching the ground after he utters the half-lie, for instance was a defining moment in the build-up of the character of Dharmaraja.

There is another small bit during the game of dice which I have always loved. Draupadi is being humiliated in open court and even Yudhisthira, that most equanimous of men is seething with rage. At that moment his eyes fall on Karna's feet and he struck by the uncanny resemblance they bear to his own mother, Kunti's feet. This immediately calms him down, to his own surprise. It's a beautiful little detail in an otherwise sordid scene.  

Where I wax existential about the nature of Test cricket

I haven't written anything cricket in a while. India managed to beat Australia in 3 days and one session. Are we that good or is Australia that bad? And if things continue in the same vein in this series and we win four-zip, what does it prove? Is Australia as rubbish in playing in the sub-continent as India is playing on bouncy pitches with lateral movements? Or is it that the creaking terminators in the Indian team, all but one (he who I have taken a policy decision not to discuss) have been replaced by youth, energy and exuberance? 

Has Ravichandran Ashwin evolved since the drubbing down under or as he claimed back then that he didn't really have a dismal tour, he is doing pretty much the same thing, aside from having inherited something in the vicinity of Laxman's ghost when he plays a back-foot off drive ever since Laxman traded the whites for the blazer and the sublime strokeplay for awkward analysis? Does Australia have truly no replacements for Ponting, Hayden, Langer, McGrath, Lee, not to mention Warne or this generation merely needs to go through what teams (even the Australian ones) routinely did while touring India in the 90s? Can Murali Vijay bat on a seaming Mohali pitch, let alone at WACA or Wanderers?

In a cricket as in life, there are a few near certainties. Cheteshwar Pujara is clearly the cat's whiskers in the current crop young men wearing whites. He is not quite the new Rahul Dravid yet, for one he looks a bit like a snake and is nowhere as pretty nor is his strokeplay as ornate. His hook shot requires some work before he jets off to bouncier foreign shores. But two double hundreds and an average of close to 70 clearly indicate that he is going to be around in that No. 3 spot for some time to come. Ravindra Jadeja is still not much more than a hairdo on any pitch where a flat trajectory won't turn and jump like it does on Indian dustbowls. Plus triple hundreds in the Ranji notwithstanding, we are not convinced he can really bat at the Test level. 

My city

A friend who is moving mentioned that she was glad in a way for her city had started becoming too familiar. I have never really known the feeling of calling a city my own. I lived in a small hamlet of a town called Purnea till I was 9. My parents still live there, it is the single place I have had a connection to my entire life and by the conventional definition, it should qualify as my town. But my years there were spent in a protective household providing little contact with the world outside home and school. There wasn’t much to do apart from playing cricket and getting bullied by girls in a convent school, the place must have its charms but it wasn't really Narayan’s Malgudi to me. I did meet my best friend here, so that’s something, I guess.
At the age of 9, I moved to Patna. This was a place largely synonymous with family for me, it comprised cousins, uncles, grandmothers, all of which both pampered and suffocated me. Families are at their best when they are an assembly of diverse characters – flawed, quirky, opinionated, performing largely the function of adding color to your life, sometimes in excess. Here again, I was an outsider looking inwards.
When I moved to Delhi, I hated it, pretty much for the same reasons anyone hates Delhi. But I continue to feel a strong connection to it. Though I wouldn’t want to live there, I never miss an opportunity to visit Delhi. Delhi was where I grew up, this was the place I started becoming the person I was to become. Yet, so strongly we disagreed, it would be laughable to call Delhi my own, in any way.
Bangalore is the city I moved to for college and where I currently, work. Bangalore has been kind to me, Bangalore agrees with me, the weather (despite the absence of a real winter), the rust in the Bangalore sky late at night, the conduciveness to a late night walk, and even though I am not really one of them I like Bangaloreans, it is not a mere coincidence that this city has produced Dravid and Kumble. I fell in love for the first time in Bangalore. There are things about the city I like to file in my head categorized as 'my Bangalore'. Yet, I don’t know if a North Indian can ever really call Bangalore his own.

Missed Opportunities

"Jim? Whatever happened with you and Lisa?"

"She doesn't wanna go out with me. Gave it a try."

"A try?"

"Yeah."

"'Gather ye rosebuds', you know what that means?"

"It's the first half of the first line of a poem by Robert Herrick."

"What's the second half?"

"While ye may"


Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry:
For having lost but once your prime
You may forever tarry

Recently, I began letting my phone run my life. It was part of my whole makeover plan to live my life in an organised manner. But, like most things in my life, I have taken it to an obsessive extreme. My phone wakes me in the mornings (app- Alarm Clock Xtreme), it helps me choose and tie my knots as I get ready (How to tie a tie pro), it keeps a record of how much I walk and run (Endomondo), I read on the commute on my phone (Kindle for Android/Aldiko), once I reach work, I look at my open matters and organise them by time on a To-do List (Astrid Tasks), I make copious notes of anything new and relevant I learn on my phone (Evernote), I steal time every two hours to go through Twitter or Google Currents for interesting reads and save them on Pocket, I use apps to find places/menus to order in (Zomato/Local Beat/Handy) on days I do not want to cook, on others I use ChefTap to pull out recipes, my shopping lists are made on the phone, when I'm travelling Google Maps is a must, I have even started blogging from my phone. 

Despite this, every now and then, I am mistrustful of my phone. Everything you use tends to get a personality of its own, phones have a way of being temperamental and have their own quirks. My oldest phone - a hand me down Motorola  had this umbilical cord-esque attachment to me such that it would find its way back to me regardless of how often I lost it, plus, there was always something vaguely communist about it; I have had phones that have been prejudiced against my love interests and would refuse to let me court them by way of texting; the strangest, a Chinese phone probably aimed at kidnappers had this option to change the pitch of your voice when you spoke on it and it would do it at times on its own accord. 

My current phone has its own way of playing tricks on me. Typical behavior would run something on the lines of it showing a missed call from someone who at that point may be a source of great agony and heartache. When I wake up in the morning, there is a missed call from her, yet by the time I mentally prepare a breezy response, the log doesn't show anything. There are times I feel that I have some trouble with reality and fantasy, my dreams tend to extend into my waking hours, often times I am not entirely sure whether conversations happened in reality or in my imagination. So maybe this is not all the phone's fault.