Introductory Ignominies

I’m sorry, but did I miss the memo on how people ought to introduce themselves now? Since when did “North Indian” and “South Indian” attain an ethnic label all their own? Are official Indian government forms now demanding you declare yourself thus?

“Me? I’m just a North Indian guy”, someone once introduced himself to me. What? That tells me absolutely nothing about you, apart from the fact that you are possibly of less than average intelligence for introducing yourself like that. Or you credit me with little or no geographic sense. Either way, you are far from becoming my favourite person. I feel almost apologetic that my geographic knowledge is as sound as it is. Dangle a tempting enough reward and I can name every state and union territory. Yes, I am geeky like that. It’s still a hell of a lot better than being plain ignorant or just mindlessly accepting absolutely pointless labels.

An even bigger sin is introducing yourself while adding “I am from North” or “I am from South”. Forget the fact that you probably lost your definite articles about the same time you lost your marbles, but you leave me hanging onto the edge of my seat. North of where? South of where? The equator? North Hampshire? South America? One of the Koreas? Pray, tell, where is it that such a dazzling nincompoop as yourself sprang from?

And if “North Indian” and “South Indian” are indeed accepted labels now, why aren’t people going around saying they are “East Indian” and “West Indian”? What is this - the Doordarshan weather update of the 80’s which conveniently left out the entire North East and the cloud-covered Andamans? I mean, if this is the way it’s going to be done now, we might as well go the whole hog.

Truth be told, I am sick and tired of hearing the aforementioned labels and this growing regionalism around me. For the love of God, just name your home state. If someone hasn’t heard of Bihar or Andhra or Uttaranchal or Kerala or some Pradesh or Nadu, they probably aren’t worth conversing with anyway. Unless you enjoy particularly scintillating conversation with half-wits. In which case, you might as well introduce yourself as an imbecile. Imbeciles, in my experience, are not limited to any specific geographic regions. Most unfortunate. Ideally, they ought to be confined to strait jackets.

Bah!

Cooing over Kurumgad

I am not a city person. I will maintain that to my last breath. Sure I can honk with the best of them, bicker with the worst of them and appear perfectly at ease in a city bursting at the seams with people, vehicles, noise, smoke, garbage, a million one-ways, insane mayors, loud people, rude people, inconsiderate people, "I-me-myself" people, people and more people. But I need to get away from it all. For a little peace and quiet. Nothing like a little trip to the hills or to the beach to restore good cheer and general sanity. I am beginning to conclude that people grow progressively nicer as you move closer to the coast or further up the hills. Serious. It’s the boors in-between who seem to have no other purpose in life other than to drive every living being in their vicinity absolutely mad. The coastal lot is happy, laidback, pleasant and cheerful while the hillbillies are pleasant but quieter, gentle, helpful and courteous. It has to do with the cleaner air closer to the coast or on the hills. How else would you explain it?

So while I spent the previous weekend sauntering around the cool green hills I call home, with two pooches and billions of chirruping cicadas, birds and the odd frog or two for company, last weekend saw me making my way to an island with four certified mad hatters I call friends . 

Sun (plenty of it), sand, surf and some hilarious company ensured I had a break that I thoroughly enjoyed. This post will be a somewhat serious write-up about the place and how to get there (mostly because I found very little useful information about the place and route before we started out). 

Kurumgad Island is about a half-hour boatride away from the coast of Karwar. The island’s distinct shape is what inspired its name, which means “tortoise shape”. The boatride to the island is interesting. Kurumgad comes into view only once the white sandy beach line of the more popular Devbagh recedes into the distance.

The resort there, “The Great Outdoors”, is very basic yet functional and definitely not for the luxury traveler. The entire island, about 2.5kms in perimeter, belongs to the resort. 

The resort offers clean but very simple bamboo cottages and “tented accommodation”. The tents are pitched on concrete platforms with tin roofs. The island has no electricity so lights and fans are run on a generator that is switched off during the day until the evening. They depend solely on water from a natural spring on the island, which runs low during the summer. A notice in our bathroom requested us to please limit ourselves to one bath a day. A request we decided was worth ignoring, considering the amount of perspiration the blistering heat evoked. Nonetheless, the water never ran out. 

The island could be straight out of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five adventure series. A rocky coastline all around, except for the white sandy cove which is suitable for swimming and other water sports. The water in this naturally formed cove was very gentle, so even the most nervous of non-swimmers was quite happily neck-deep in the salty water. (Smitten promptly donned a bright yellow lifejacket and spent several happy hours bobbing around in the water, amusing the rest of us with her unintentional and apparently uncontrollable skittle-like movements.)

The resort offers a few “watersports” – banana boatrides, snorkeling and a ride in a rubber dinghy towed by a speedboat. It also organizes boatrides to spot dolphins, which are fairly abundant in the area, lolling around lazily in the bright blue water, quite unconcerned by gawking humans.

The rest of the island is rugged, thick with trees, shrubs and bushes. Birds, snakes and tortoises are quite easy to spot in the crazy canopy of aerial roots that dot the island. 

There was also a mention of otters frequenting “Mystery Creek”, which was apparently formed millions of years ago during an earthquake. The otters eluded us.

There are remains of a fort, a garishly painted temple, a canon and an abandoned lighthouse. There isn’t much to do once you are done exploring the area and taking a dip in the sea. We spent the rest of our time taking pictures, contemplating the beautiful sunsets and sunrises and napping or reading in the several hammocks that overlook the sea.

The food was simple but tasty Mangalorean fare. While fish and chicken were part of the regular buffet and barbeque, prawns and crabs are cooked up on request (keep in mind that anything you ask for has to be brought over from the mainland, so it could take a while). Only beer (Kingfisher) is served. Carry your own booze if you fancy anything else. The vegetarians didn’t complain about the veggie fare either and I’ll just take their word for it.

 The resort staff was pleasant, helpful and courteous. One of them, the Kurumgad Hoff, would sit patiently on the beach for as long as we wanted to stay there, keeping an eye out for any sort of danger – rising tide, us swimming too close to the rocks and so on – before escorting us back to the resort, which is a ten-minute walk away from this area.

 As we sat quietly watching the sun sink into the Arabian Sea on our last evening there, I mulled whether or not to write about this unexpectedly pleasant getaway. While a part of me wanted to keep it selfishly to myself – the less tourists that get there, the more chance of it remaining as unspoiled and peaceful as it is now – I finally decided that I would do the place an injustice by keeping mum. If a place, just a ten-hour drive from the chaotic city of Bangalore, can restore such a feeling of peace and general bonhomie, it deserves to be talked about.  

 

 (Driving instructions from Bangalore to Karwar (about 520kms): Head out of Bangalore via Yeshwantpur onto NH4 (the Pune highway). This goes past Tumkur, Sira, Davanagere, Chitradurga, Haveri and then Hubli. At the Hubli stretch of the highway (do not take the turnoff into the town), take a left after the toll gate toward Karwar (NH17). Karwar is about 120kms from here. Follow NH 17 and at the T-junction, take a left. This is the Yellapur ghat section. At the next T-junction, take a right toward Karwar. From thereon, it is pretty much one straight road until you reach the Karwar Port and naval base. The Great Outdoors’ office is about 200m from the port main gate, and the jetty for the boat to the island is about 3kms after that. The island has a private parking lot at the jetty where you can safely leave your vehicle. This route, although slightly longer than other routes, is a good road. Carry ample food and water as there are hardly any decent pitstops on the highway after Chitradurga. NH17 is even more deserted, with just the one functional petrol bunk.)

The Doorable Blah Vocabulary

I have more or less established by now (assuming you’ve been reading my blog for a while) that my family is just a little bit cuckoo. And by family, I mean my immediate family – not including the likes of an aunt by marriage, who dreamt one night that her husband had swallowed their wind chime. She awoke in the middle of the night and attempted to push her hand down his throat to rescue her beloved wind chime, while he, rudely awoken from a deep slumber, gurgled for help. There’s a fine line between stark raving mad and quirky and we, the Blahs, have yet to cross it.

If a Blah were convinced of a prized possession being down a man’s gullet, he/she would tell him he had sheer “gumption” sending “bumf” down his throat. Now, while the dictionary shows “gumption” to mean “the quality of being sensible and brave enough to do the right thing in a difficult situation”, the Blah dictionary holds that it is the “quality of being cheeky, brazen and having the sheer gall to do the wrong thing in any situation.”

My mother’s vocabulary would be down to 50% if the word gumption were taken away from her. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Gumption, and the Word was Gumption. A phone call from my mother is filled with anecdotes about the sheer gumption of the drunken woman labourer who ran amuck in the nude, the gumption of my boisterous dog who gave her a black eye and the gumption of the person who left a single slipper on the road and disappeared.

“Bumf” in a normal (archaic) dictionary refers to unwanted or uninteresting printed matter such as governmental forms, legal documents, The Times of India, junk mail, promotional pamphlets, Bangalore Mirror's Sexpert column etc. The Blahs have adapted the word to explain away any otherwise inexplicable junk. Bumf is a very handy term. It saves you the time and energy of having to supply long explanations about say, the contents of a drawer. “What’s in the drawer? Oh, just some bumf.” Nobody ever attempts to question any more. You never question bumf. You just accept it. “Some bumf” is good enough. It effectively qualifies everything from a speckle of food on someone’s chin to the putrid carcass the dog dragged in to the strange greeny-grey mold on an abandoned vegetable in the refrigerator.

Bumf is not to be confused with another Blah word “bum fluff”. Bum fluff refers to a scraggly pre-pubescent-type mustache. This word belongs to my maternal uncle, who maintains that such weak attempts at a mustache resemble the “hair on a bum”. I have never worked up the courage to ask anything further.

And if you happen to touch some bumf (or bum fluff for that matter), make sure you wash your hands with the “bum soap”. That’s right. The bum soap – the bar of soap placed on/near the wash basin meant for washing of hands. I’m not sure just how it came to be referred to as “bum soap”. I suspect my father coined the term and we children, thoroughly amused, adopted it. My mum faced the embarrassing consequences of such learning when my brother Scion once hollered from one end of the supermarket, “Hey, Ma! Do we need bum soap?” He remained oblivious to the stunned expressions of fellow shoppers while my mother tried unsuccessfully to bury herself in a sack of wheat flour while muttering something about God smiting firstborns. When he, convinced his mother was hard of hearing, shouted again about the lack of enough bum soap in the house, my mother responded with “Grr Wolf! I heard you the first time.”

“Grr Wolf!” for the Blahs is an expression of extreme exasperation. Attaching a growling animal to the otherwise meek and mild “Grr” sort of drives home the point apparently. No vulgar expletives for us Blahs. Grr Wolf usually works for just about any sort of aggravating situation. The need for stronger or cruder cuss words or commonplace vulgar expressions does not arise. However, for a particularly sticky situation, we do resort to the much harder hitting expletive “Shit ‘n molasses”.

Now, I am not sure how exactly this expression came about. But I suppose having shit in your molasses or shit and molasses are both bad things. “Shit ‘n molasses” is a Blah Code Red.

A “shit ‘n molasses” moment would be the opposite of a Blah “door you” moment. “Door you” is an expression of affection. Now, we aren’t exactly the most emotionally expressive family. Everyone keeps a stiff upper lip during any sort of upheaval, which would leave normal families blubbering a bit like the ones in Indian television soaps. However, as a kid, this was the one expression of affection we resorted to. When I was four, I would exchange “Good nights” and “Door Yous” with my folks last thing at night and then spend the next few minutes staring at the door, wondering what that plank of wood had to do with anything. It took me a few years to realise it was just a Blah way of saying “I adore you”.

The expression works for us. In fact, they all do – all these somewhat unique expressions. I door them all and no one can tell me any differently.

How to be an Ass at the Airport

1. Park for 30 minutes or more at the “10 seconds alighting – tow away” zone and hold up traffic and pedestrians alike while your 56 pieces of baggage are strewn across the road and walkway.

2. Bump everybody out of the way with your luggage-laden trolley and run over anybody who dares get in your way. A fractured foot or two is no big deal. I mean, if people are flying, why do they need feet?

3. Break your way into the queue at the check-in counter. Of course, you are more important than everybody else and don’t they know who you are?

4. If you really must stand in queue after the vicious protests of those around you, time to open your sandwich which smells like carrion.

5. Press up against the person in front of you – she is bound to appreciate mayo in her hair and the scent of onions on your breath.

6. Argue with the airline personnel about how their weighing scales are wrong. 40kg? What rubbish! Mummy’s IMPORTED kitchen scale only showed 21kg. Check again. Again. Again. Again. IMPORTED scales are never wrong. Again. Again.

7. Continue arguing with the check-in counter staff. God forbid that you leave the spot any time before the wailing infant behind you is ready to graduate from college. Of course, that grand piano is cabin size and qualifies as carry-on baggage. And the pedestal fan? That’s needed for health reasons – you’re asthmatic.

8. Proceed to the security check after telling everybody in no uncertain terms where they can stick it, who your daddy is, how they have no legal daddies, what size and quality of fecal matter they are etc.

9. Repeat Point 3 at the queue at the security check point.

10. Argue loudly with the security personnel over why you must not remove your waist pouch and send it through the screening machine. Everyone must know that you are just back from South Africa and you’re carrying DOLLARS! And GOLD! You’re not one of the bums standing in line who must send their tiddlywinks and Monopoly notes through the scanner.

11. Go in for the security pat-down. Refuse to acknowledge that the bulge in your jeans is really a mobile phone which must be sent through the scanner. Shriek that you, alpha male, feel violated and how the press will be told the gory details of that violation.

12. At the coffee shop, jostle everybody out of the way to get your “braid omlet” and spill your “express-o” on the female thing still wiping mayo out of her hair.

13. In the waiting lounge, place your baggage on the only vacant seat. Your Pustak Mahal plastic bag must be comfortable and takes precedence over the gasping old lady with the oxygen tank.

14. Point and holler at every plane you see taking off and landing. “Plane! Plane!” That’s a rarity in an airport, right - what with all the flying giraffes and Santa sleighs we see on any normal day.

15. Disregard the details of your boarding call. Only seats 1-14 in group one? That’s all right. It is important that you, seat 26, get on that plane first. Don’t they know who you are? Nonsense.

Stay tuned for: How to be a Pest on a Plane.

The Trouble With Being Social

“I was very tolerant of the idea of being behind the times, having had long opportunities of studying the perfectly ghastly people who were abreast of the times; or the still more pestilent people who were in advance of the times.” – G.K. Chesterton

Social networking has never really been my thing and probably, never will be. And yet, I seem to insist on keeping my Facebook profile, even though I rarely log in there. It has something to do with my fear of being left behind as the whole world moves on to new and exciting developments, leaving the days of email far behind.

Confucius say “Man who speaks with forked tongue should not kiss balloons.”

So, when Orkut made its debut years ago, I was in the thick of things. Primped my profile, “scrapped” friends frequently and set up a group that proclaimed “Ooty Schools Rock!” Then, as is the case with most social networking sites, things turned unpleasant. After being bombarded with “scraps” from every weirdo on the planet, I retaliated. I created a profile with a fake tongue twister of a name and the picture of an ugly pink heart-holding teddy bear and went after my tormentors, matching them bad grammar for bad grammar and everything. This profile was something of a shared asset – BC, Krazy Frog, Merry and I made good use of it, posing as a broken English-speaking bunny boiler whenever needed. The scary part, however, was that our psycho virtual creation garnered quite the fan following of her own.

I sighed with relief as Orkut finally introduced some semblance of privacy settings. However, the novelty of social networking had begun to wear off.

Confucius say “The inventor of shag carpet make big pile.”

As I slowly withdrew from the Orkuttian world of scraps, fans and testimonials, I wondered if I was doing the right thing. I had my answer when a random dodo I mistook for a waiter at a club in Pune found me on Orkut and crapped…err… I mean left me a host of “scraps”. I was more embarrassed that such poor English had found its way onto my profile than anything else. He even lacked the poetic charm that the moon-eyed “Kay Pee”, who wrote an ode to my “pillow cover lips”, exuded. Cursing the lousy privacy that Orkut offered, I deleted my profile and settled into a happy existence without the bane of social networking.

Then came Facebook. I steadfastly refused to sign up and rebuffed everybody’s attempts to “friend me”. I spat at the terms “friending” and “unfriending”. However, after months of mounting pressure, I succumbed. I soon realized why Facebook was the rage it was. The all-proclaiming Wall and, of course, lousy privacy settings – the trademark of any successful social networking site apparently.

Facebook was and continues to be the answer to every social voyeur. It effectively satisfies two basic human needs: The need to tom-tom every aspect of one’s life to all and sundry and the need to snoop on other people. Facebook is manna for every hungry gossipmonger. Besides, you can get anyone to “like” anything on Facebook. I once put that up as a status message – “You can get anyone to like anything on Facebook”. Twenty-four people “liked” it. Facebook fuels this very comforting feeling of immense popularity. The more number of "likes", the more fabulous the happy ending to a luxurious ego massage.

Confucius say “Man who stick foot in mouth get athlete's tongue.”

I did try to be “sociable” on FB once. Someone prone to posting “philosophical” status updates once put up something about the sun, moon, universe and all things planetary. Predictably, a host of people “liked” it and it sparked a number of “deep and philosophical” comments.

Now “deep and philosophical” and all things intellectual is not me. Not by a long shot. I am… well, I am just blah. However, on this particular occasion, I decided to be social and added my two blabs’ worth to keep up with the Joneses. Now who deeper and more philosophical than Confucius? “Man who eat too many prune sit on potty many moon”, I commented.

A day later, I found I had been banned from this particular err… friend’s wall. I was hurt. Such disrespect to Confucius. However, not all was lost. One person “liked” my comment. Ha.

Confucius say “Wise man never play leapfrog with unicorn.”

Anyone snooping around my FB profile now will leave sorely disappointed. For besides a mug shot that has been run through the “Fat Booth” application and some scorching disclaimer about my innate nastiness in the “About” section, there is really nothing to write home about - unless the snoop is particularly interested in my newfound affinity for social gaming. Yes, yes. I now tend to virtual gardens and beg people to send me spackles, tool belts and paint cans or else I will die. I haven’t the patience for anything else. I don’t even recall the last time I opened my FB messages. I find it easier to check all and clear.

I’ll stick with more personalized one-on-one interactions – email or chat or even the occasional good old-fashioned postcard. I’m with Chesterton on this one.