When the world became less Crazy...

From Vasool Raja MBBS:

Raja : Naa Vasool Raja. Inge naa irukkum bodhu yavan ya unna vasool panninu pomudiyum? Yavan aale mudiyunren!

Zakir : Yaman aale mudiyum.

Raja : Paathiya! Indha joke ku onniyun koracchal ille.

Apologies for starting with a death joke but that's what Late. Mr. "Crazy" Mohan left us with - a joke for every situation.

            As a child, I was not allowed to watch many movies. Once in a while, I was taken to Mylapore or Alwarpet for music concerts, where I slept, or stage plays, where I tried to figure out what was going on. All I understood was that multiple plays had a Maadhu character, unlike in the movies, where names changed. I also remember one aunty who would exit the stage in a red saree and re-enter the stage in less than 2 minutes, wearing a blue saree. I even asked my mom how they changed costumes so fast. And halfway through the play, there would be a felicitation of the troupe and one uncle with hardly any hair in the front half of his head would receive the biggest present or garland or shawl. I would wonder why, as he was not even the "hero" of the drama. Little did I understand playwrights then. There were some jokes I would laugh at and some only my parents would understand. The take-home was that the play was funny and all ages enjoyed it.

            Only later when I could change TV channels as I liked (and pick among DD1, DD2 and Podhigai), I started watching similar plays on Podhigai. I learnt what a "set" was, where the walls were made of cardboard and not bricks. So my initial ideas about stage plays were by Crazy Creations. Then eventually I started seeing that same uncle in movies. Once when I recognised him, I was asked to give him respect and not call him crazy (LOL :-D). I am sure several kids of my generation would have had a similar experience with one of the wittiest and funniest writers Tamil industry has seen. I clearly remember 3 plays - "Maadhu Cheenu", "Jurassic Baby" and "Chocolate Krishna". The last one was performed during our college culturals more than 7 years ago and that was when I saw him last.

            Kamal Hassan, a very talented and highly appreciated actor, could connect to people through comedy movies truly because of Crazy Mohan's scripts. Michael Madana Kama Rajan, Avvai Shanmughi, Sathi Leelavathi, Panchathanthiram, Vasool Raja MBBS, Thenali, Kaadhala Kaadhala, name it and it would have been the Mohan-Kamal duo's work. There are still some jokes that I newly discover while watching any of these movies again.

            Personally, I have adored Crazy Mohan and appreciated his scripts for the kind of comedies they contain. I do enjoy other types of humour like insult, slapstick, etc., but people who know me would not be surprised when I say I look up to his "mokkai" comedies and witty puns! I come up with a similar class of jokes (don't beat me up for the comparison) and hence have always felt a connection while watching his comedies. So in loose terms, he has been a role model for me. The Tamil theatre and film industry will miss his creativity and "crazy"ness. May he RIP.

From his last movie:

"Bike le starting trouble na choke podanum; life le starting trouble na joke podanum... Take things easy; life is crazy"

From Kalyana Samayal Saadham

The ice-breaker!

My USA Chronicles: Part two and 2.5

            After I reached my vacation rental (yes, that's what they called it), the day did not end. The place was pretty cold but the app where I checked-in said there was a thermostat in there. Not knowing what it looked like, I groped around all the walls in the suite and finally located a plastic dabba with a knob. Damn the Fahrenheit conversions, it took me a few seconds to realise the temperature was supposed to be comfortable even without converting to Celsius. As I walked around, I found that the bedroom was warmer than the hall. I mentally solved some equations for heat and mass transfer, Newton's cooling curve, fluid mechanics and thermodynamics and found the source of the problem. Just kidding... I straightaway checked the windows and saw that the previous user had not shut the door properly. After I fixed that, the room slowly began to warm.

View from the window (irrelevant here, but the pic is so cool to not post!)

            Having got the impression that the previous tenant was dumb, I entered the bathroom to shower. There were no buckets or mugs; instead, there was a showerhead over a bathtub. I thought to myself, "Oh! These efficient buggers!" and stepped in. There was a curtain to cover only the bathtub segment. As expected, the dumb ex-tenant had left the curtain hanging inside the bathtub, allowing it to get wet. Where do these people come from, right? I gently lifted the curtain out of the tub, showered and then stepped out. TADAAAAAA... The shower water had hit the insides of the curtain, dripped down to the bathroom floor outside the tub, flown to the dressing room and trickled into the hallway. The floor being wooden, I don't know if water had even seeped to the roof below me. I mopped all the litres of water, silently apologised to the unknown ex-tenant for calling them dumb and put the curtain back into the bathtub where it rightfully belonged.

            There was an evening "welcome mixer" session at the conference. It was meant to be an icebreaker for people to chill-out and blend-in. I was already running late but was very thirsty since I had emptied my water bottle earlier. I had learnt from the movies that the kitchen water in the US was potable. And in the last several hours, I had encountered different kinds of taps in sinks and basins at the airports. However, most of them had the same convention - rotate left to get hot water and rotate right to get cold water. I was subliminally trained to follow this with my kitchen tap. No water came. I tilted the tap right, left, centre, hit on its head, and repeated the sequence. No water. Being an engineer, like most Indians (I also have a degree, though), I opened the cupboard underneath to check the pipes. I randomly rotated some valve and found that was for the "kitchen waste disposer". One after another I turned some valves and then water started dripping from the valve, but not from the tap. Having established that the water supply was not an issue and there was something wrong with the tap, I gave up repairing it further. I mean, as a detective I had figured the source of the problem. It was now a child's play for someone else to fix it. So I called the office but they had all left for the day. Being the good person I am, I called my roommate, who was on his way from the airport, to buy a bottle of water for himself for the night. The poor guy asked for his van to be stopped in the middle of the highway, in the freezing cold, and bought a bottle of liquid water and came home shivering. I told him about the complex tap issue and how I managed to identify that the problem was idiopathic. He just walked to the sink and pulled the tap. Water gushed out like Niagara Falls. Wait, WHAT??? No one told me t... Never mind. That's okay. Not a big deal. Shit happens! I just acted surprised and left.

That two-faced tap. Grrr.

            I walked 2-3 minutes to the conference centre which was just across the highway. This time, for the first time, I had packed myself in all the warm clothes I had. I could hardly feel I had a backpack on my back because it was a foot away from my actual back. I went in, expecting people to greet me with rose water, garland and toffees. No one gave a damn. I spotted some familiar Indian faces from earlier that day and hung around with them. By now everyone was holding differently shaped glasses with liquids of different colours. I suddenly remembered the "Free Drink" coupon we were given during the registration. I proudly marched up to the bartender and asked in a grown-up voice and fake American accent, "Excuse me? Do you have any non-alcoholic beverages?". The guy first searched for me and then looked at me and pointed at the table. There were several brands and Pepsi was one among them. I should have first thought why there was exactly one can of every drink on the table. But I did not. I grabbed the Pepsi can and thanked the bartender. He was so surprised and shocked and politely said, "I am sorry sir, those are just for display. I'll give you a different one.". Completely unrelated, but in the next fraction of a second, I remembered a shopkeeper tell a toddler, "No kiddo, that toy is a showpiece. Ask mamma to buy you another one". But like I said, that was a completely unrelated thought. So now I too had a glass of cryptic brown liquid. I just left people guessing what I was drinking.

            After slowly sipping from the transparent silica container filled with non-transparent, non-opaque, brown, sweetened carbonated water, I wanted to eat something. I heard that people ate healthy there. So I waded through a very crowded hall, found a table with uneaten food and brought some cucumber and broccoli. Cucumber did not go well with Pepsi. So I switched to the next obvious healthy item and sunk my teeth into the broccoli. Yum...YUCK! IT WAS RAW! Not even boiled. I felt like I had fallen flat on my tummy on a dirty grassy garden with my mouth open. Who cared if it was uncouth - I quietly put the bitten broccoli back on the plate and left it unattended on an unattended table and went back to drinking my sweetened water; by now the carbon dioxide was gone. In the meantime, my friends had finished eating and having two rounds of alcoholic beverages and were ready to leave. So I again found my way to another abandoned table to put my empty glass and walked backwards. I heard someone shout way behind me and I turned back to realise I had bumped into somebody with my backpack that was a foot behind my back. I did not even check if I spilt his expensive drink. I just said, "I am so sorry!" and non-invasively stormed through the rest of the crowd and went outside the building. I could not take any more embarrassment in there since I had to face these people for the next 4 days. After going out in the cold I started re-packing myself amateurishly with all the winter gear from my insensitive backpack.

            Four of us were walking back to our places of stay. It was literally freezing cold. So to keep us occupied while we walked, I was narrating how all I embarrassed myself in there and how badly I wanted to get out of that place. I was perhaps a bit loud while describing the events, that a stranger walking a few feet behind us might have been silently laughing. Or she minded her own business and completely ignored us altogether. Until... one of the girls climbing down the stairs in front of me stepped on solid glassy ice and slipped. She fell on her back and slid down one more step. Ouch! I was like, "What? Seriously? Wait, let me help y..." and THUD! I was lying on my back, enjoying the stargaze. As usual, my back didn't feel the ice it cracked on the floor because of the foot-wide padding. The irony was that the two people who were standing steady in front of us were the ones who had actually consumed alcohol. They helped us back on our feet. There I was, completely satiated for the day, going back home after a literal "ice-breaking" session!

The innocent dry staircase

The wicked staircase. Imagine its wickedness at night!

Stay tuned. More to come...!

My first "flight" abroad!

My USA Chronicles: Part one

            So, after accomplishing all the rare feats of getting a US visa, getting finances set, and getting my research work chosen for a conference presentation, in the reverse order, I was all set to get aboard the third flight of my life. Except, this was the first one crossing the Indian borders. I'll not bore you with the routine airport stuff where I did not quite know the sequence of procedures to follow, and how the staff asked if that was my first trip abroad, and how my screen was the only one on the entire flight that did not work, and how I applied butter under the bun because I could not cut it open with a plastic knife, and so on. After a really long 21 hours of night and time travel, I put an end to all humiliations, or at least I thought so, and landed in Chicago airport.

Chicago O'Hare from the air

            It wasn't as bad as I thought. People were very helpful there. I couldn't get the user portal at the customs kiosk to work. I asked a lady there and she said, "read the instructions". I thanked her, completed the task successfully and went ahead. There was a spooky empty corridor in front of me. With the fear of getting arrested for trespassing a secret military establishment behind a wrong door, I asked the security there. She said, "just follow the boards". Great, right?! I again thanked her for her advice and walked ahead. Well, people do take the instructions seriously, both, for putting them up and following them.

Hallucinatory airport lights to weed out the weak-hearted before they set foot on the country's soil.

            I then hopped on a plane to Colorado and guess what? I got the window seat! I was clicking so many pictures of the beautiful view outside, from high above! Well, I might have missed the fact that the flight had not even moved a bit. I did hear my neighbour's neighbour tell my neighbour, "I can't believe this!". I forced myself to believe he was commenting on the cost of the food available for purchase on the flight, and not on my childish behaviour. The air hostess asked if I wanted something to drink. Since my neighbour's neighbour had exclaimed about the prices (or not), I declined the offer, only to later realise that non-alcoholic beverages were for free!

That beautiful view from my window seat. (Don't notice the broken shutter; it's unimportant.)

            Fast-forward to my trip in a van to Keystone, I remembered several people and websites advise that hydration was the key to managing jet-lag and altitude sickness. I started drinking from my new water bottle, gulp after gulp until I could take no more. And then I had more again. Come on, who would want to die of dehydration on their first trip abroad? But, my actions had consequences. My driver was a very friendly person called Matt. And since Americans address each other by names, I told Matt where I needed to be dropped. Matt, being super nice, chalked out a plan to drop everyone off at their desired locations. Fortunately, my place was the last. That meant I could roam around the city and have a look at the beautiful snow and mountains and the highway.

The snow, the mountains, the highway, and Matt's hand

            We got off the van to get registered for the conference and get the hotel room keys. I was just wearing a jacket unzipped, and pretty proud of myself that I could survive sub-zero temperatures like a boss. However, what my fat-layered skin couldn't feel, my kidneys could! We were still on-route dropping everyone else off. Unfortunately, my place was the last. That meant I had to roam around the city and stare at the snow and the mountains and the empty highway, just to distract myself from a full bladder. At the penultimate stop, which was the furthest from my place, I asked Matt, "Hey Matt, do you know of any restroom I could use?". A friendly Matt replied, "I dunno man, just get into one of these hotels and pretend you belong there.". I said, "Erm, I guess that is okay. I'll wait for my place". Matt understood the emergency and drove back so fast. Matt did not care for the pits and bumpy snow speed breakers. Well, I kinda wish he had because I was under more pressure now. The poor guy treated me like a patient in an ambulance. Matt turned back with a pitiful face and said, "We are almost there man, just a couple of minutes away". I had to reply something while I pretended to remain calm. I said, "That's okay, Matt. I'm good. First time experiencing such cold, you see". He sympathetically said, "I understand, man". I wanted to reply, but my energy was focussed elsewhere. Once we reached my place, Matt ran out of the van, grabbed my luggage and put it at the doorstep, while I cautiously had just gotten out of my door. Thanks, Matt! No time for taking any more humiliation or addressing him by his first name again. I just stormed through the door and miraculously found my room without any help. Thanks to the airport security; I now remembered to follow boards for instructions.

Me, not showing off where I lived. Obviously, clicked after the emergency had passed.

Stay tuned! More to come...