The Chakki Walla

 
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The Chakki Walla

            “Why in the world did I not know you better in HTA?”

            That was my friend, Ranen Basu, three days ago in an email, posing more or less the same question that Rajiv Desai and I have been asking each other (usually after our third drink) over the past couple of years that we have been meeting in Goa.

            I offered Ranen an offhand answer: The Chakki Walla.

            You remember this fellow, the chakki walla. I do. I would go every week, sent by my mother, lugging a bag of wheat to the local flourmill. He was there, this chakki walla banging his chakki with a metal piece in a convincing rumba rhythm to loosen the flour sticking to the insides of the mill. He was covered all over in fine white flour -- every micrometer of his body from head to toe – lips, eyelashes, the hair in his nostrils and ears all sprayed an even white. The only colour you saw on him was the reddish brown of his paan-stained teeth when he smiled and the black of his pupils in between blinks; the whites of his eyes merging with the rest of him. A marble figure in motion.

            I remember the day I met him on the street. He waved and smiled at me. I didn’t recognize him. He stopped and greeted me with a namaskar. Hesitantly I did the same. He could see that I did not know who he was and I saw the hurt in his face. “Kya baba. Pehchana nahin?Bhikubhaiyya. Chakki wala.” He was a complete stranger to me.

            I was seeing the chakki wala every week for years. I was meeting Bhikubhaiyya for the first time that day!

                        I spent four decades in that chakki called Advertising before I retired in 2002. I worked with the finest of writers, art directors, illustrators, strategic planners, media planners and client servicing directors; often through the night to meet those unreasonable deadlines. We banged our heads to the rumba rhythm of crazy concepts stubbornly sticking to the insides of our crania, sharing the labour pains of ideation, arguing and fighting over differing points of view as if nothing else mattered. We saw in each other the passion to grind out a grand idea. So then, we were covering ourselves over with that fine flour of our profession. We looked at each other through that powdery haze of admiration and awe. We saw all that brilliance, the tweaked madness, the energy, the feverish competition and the dogged ambition of some. And we missed the real person hiding behind all that advertising stardust.

            Right?

            I am not so sure. Maybe I am getting a little carried away by an analogy that’s seductive and certainly partially spurious because, to be honest, it does not apply to everyone with equal neatness. Friend, Mohan Lalwani is the same guy today as he was in HTA of the 90s. He slams you with the same embarrassing, shocking and intimately personal provocations as he did when he was Account Director on Lever brands. No amount of professional flour can hide that Lalwani mischief. Randhir Behl’s camaraderie is as hurtful when he slaps a hard and hearty “Hi!” on your back today as it was 30 years ago. I’d recognize him twenty years from now with my eyes closed and my hearing aid (if I needed one then) turned down. The Randhir you saw then is the Randhir you meet today.

            I don’t know if I might say the same of Rui Menezes, Deepa Kakkar, Sudhir Deokar, Prabhakar Mundkur, Anu Bhatia and a few others. Unchanged melodies? Maybe not. And what about Sheila Syed, Ketaki Gupte, Sunil Lulla, Albert Almeida, Rambha Mankame and, for that matter, yours truly. I have been meeting them over the years, some of them recently and I observe new facets of personality and character. I could say with Ranen, “Why in the world did I not know you better in HTA?” But I don’t. I know that it is not something that I missed seeing in them then. It is just that I see something new today – another talent, a new mellowness, another level of maturity, openness, conviviality or just a new demeanour added on by their life’s experiences, conscious personal development and age. An evolution.

            Time has become the new chakki.

            I discard too the idea that the more extroverted are the ones who seem unchanged, their projected behaviour and social interaction remaining constant at all times. I reconcile myself instead to a more obvious, less attractive explanation of the perceived change or constancy. It is simply a matter of the nature and closeness of our interactions then and now.

            For instance, Rajiv and I saw each other only at Executive Committee Meetings with backslapping hellos for openers followed by two days of earnest dickering over product, processes and profit. Evenings, dipped in overproof beverage fooled us into believing that we were letting our hair down. Perhaps some of us did. Rajiv and I had little interaction where day-to-day work was concerned, whereas Ranen and I also worked on some corporate and training assignments together. With our offices in the same building, we met almost every day; some of the time over work; most of the time over prawn gussi and fried fish at Mahesh.

            There are so many with whom I worked very closely; people I hold in great regard and much affection – In Delhi, Nikhil, Kamal, Ashok, Vandana, Denis Joseph, Alex Kuruvilla, Aman Nath, Pulak Biswas… and in Bombay, Claree, Warner, Sawant, Bawker, Bhagwan, Ananda, Anita, Sattar and Anwar Ali Khan, LVK, David Innis, and in the other offices, Srirup, Dharen Chadda, Chaks, Pops, Indu … and Oh so many! I have not met them for years. Of course, there are chances that we will meet some time in the near future; and when we do, I wonder if we will say to each other, like Ranen Basu: “Why in the world did I not know you better in HTA?”

            Or will it be: “Hey! You haven’t changed one bit!”

An East-Indian Dulpod

 

AN EAST-INDIAN DULPOD

            “Ivan, I need your help.” Mark, my jaam tree friend sounded more than a little excited. “My son is marrying a Goan girl. In Goa.”

            “That’s glad tidings, man!” I said. “Tell me, what can I do for you?”

            “The Umbracha Paani,” he said. “I need your help. Do you know if I can get a pimperi band in Goa?”

            Mark, to me was the quintessential East-Indian, a true-blue son of the soil -- the soil being all that land from the three hills of mango trees stretching from Oshiwara, across acres of rice fields, right up to Caesar Road and beyond, a place called Kevni Village in Andheri. This was in the late 1940s. 

            East-Indians owned every inch of land in Kevni and neighbouring Amboli, all the pretty cottages and the new bamboo-and-mud ‘chawls’, opportunistically constructed to house the new Goan and Mangalorean migrants; they owned too the free-roaming chickens, ducks, pigs and a few guinea fowl, the First Class graves in the porch of St. Blaise’s Church, and to all appearances, the very church itself. Before Bal Thackeray could mouth his famous “Mumbai amchi”, one could pick up faint strains of “Amboli amchi” from these sons and daughters of Amboli and Kevni.

            Mark’s family however was among the more socially inclusive; their doors open to ‘outsiders’ like me, giving me my first taste of mutton kuddi and East-Indian sorpotel, his grandmother even sharing with me stories of the plague and fascinating tales of Kevni’s often-vicious property intrigues.

            He was my first, closest and most durable friend after our family came to live in Kevni; Mark barely six and I, just six months his junior. We would climb up Mark’s jaam tree, perch ourselves on two adjacent branches and chat for hours, discussing in our teenage years, girls, teachers, the books we shared: from Erle Stanley Gardner, Edgar Wallace and Somerset Maugham to a later phase of Aldous Huxley, John Updike and the radical theology of Hans Küng.

            Until marriage did us part. We moved to other cities, other countries. A chasm of nearly forty years; guilt for losing touch and a longing to catch up. We did that catching up a couple of years ago in Goa.

            And now he, an East-Indian was asking me, a ruddy Mangalorean if I could help him with this very East-Indian wedding tradition of the Umbracha Paani in Goa!

            The Umbracha Paani is a ritual, celebrated in mock solemnity a day before the wedding, separately for bride and groom. The word derives from umber, the local wild fig tree, the roots of which give off a cooling and therapeutic sap. This was supposed to be used in the water with which the bride and groom would be given their cosmetic bath. Later, with not many umber trees to be found, the water was fetched from the village wells. The family danced all the way to the well, singing traditional wedding songs, accompanied on a gumat.

            Today, with not many people knowing the words of the songs, brass brands are hired to substitute the words with deafeningly loud trumpeted tunes. We used to call them pimperi bands, because of the raw tones they produced, rather like the pimperi flutes which children made from big, brittle leaves.

            “Can you find me a pimperi band in Goa?” Mark asked, sounding doubtful.

            “I’ll try.” I promised. “Should be possible. Scratch a Goan and you’ll hear music, you know.”

            “But a pimperi band playing East-Indian traditional songs?”

            “I’ll try.”

            I called my friend, Prof. Christo Fernandes of the Goa Institute of Management, an accomplished violinist and choir conductor. Christo put me on to a friend, who put me on to a friend, who put me on to Futusch.

            “Talk to Futusch,” he told me.

            “Futusch?” I asked this friend of a friend of Christo’s.

            “Futusch, re. Futusch. Francis. Futusch. Same thing. You don’t know?” He wondered how anybody could be so dumb.

            I spoke to Futusch, who turned out to be one of those “no problem” Goans.

            “No problem,” he said.

            “Can you play East-Indian wedding songs?”

            “No problem,” he reiterated. I was not quite reassured.

            “Do you know the songs?” I asked.

            “East-Indian songs, no, no, no. I am Goan, re.”

            “Then how will you play them?” I asked, confused. I sang him a couple of bars of Maaza Combda and Yeh garawari to give him an idea.

            “Ah! Just like dulpod, re. Six/eight tempo. No problem.”

            Nicely confused now, I asked him if it would be OK if I wrote out the songs and sent it to him. “No problem,” he assured me. And so, on hand ruled staves, I wrote out the music of a dozen or so East-Indian tunes and e-mailed the sheets to Futusch. For convenience I wrote them all in two/four time with instruction to play them in six/eight.

            There were six bandsmen at the Paani: Futusch on the cornet, a trumpet, two saxophones, a bass drum and kettledrums. That was no pimperi band. They sounded more like a refined chamber group. What I had written was the first melody. What they played was improvised counterpoint around the melody, their Goan musical instincts embellishing the tunes with impromptu triads and flowing obligato, an accidental fusion of musical styles. Yeh garawari melded with Undeer mujhea mama and I could swear that I could hear Cecilia mujhe naum in between the Ee pori konachee, the sound of mando and Chopin minuet in one. This was East-Indian music as I had never heard before. Fascinating.

            The dancers too caught my fancy. Ladies, married and unmarried, young and old moved their hips and feet to Futusch’s polyphonic East-Indian dulpod. Unfamiliar with the traditional half-pirouette of the kunbi-koli dance, they stepped across salsa, hip-hop, the twist and gangnam style. It was an exhilarating and creative performance – all stimulated by that improvised East-Indian dulpod. Brilliant!

            So, now. The next time you know someone who wants to do an Umbracha Paani in Goa, no problem. Just talk to Futusch.

           

Creole of another kind

 

Promoting Goa Differently

The naked torsos vroom past us, left and right, fuelled by the freedom of this holiday destination, forgetting the decorum of the road that they follow in their own countries. Mobile canvases of a prickly artistry, modified bodies pierced with weird patterns, they flaunt the art of the fig leaf -- right out there on the open roads, not on the beaches. Post-sunset, the boom boom of trance (music???) heralds the return of the “Season” as they call it, the cue for transport fares and everything from bottled water to fish to do the high jump.

Nearer home, the gardener complains. Her eleven-year old son has started coming home at 2 a.m. every night. When asked what he has been doing until so late, the brat shuts her up with a “Why do you want to know?” and a 500 rupee note stuffed into her fist. She knows something not quite right is going on, but she doesn’t even want to think of it.

We walk past a string of hole-in-the-wall restaurants and rented premises. Unwashed skin, dreadlocks and olfactory messages of something being smoked propel us to hurry along and not spend too much time there.

News item: “Another prostitution racket busted.”

News item: The State’s Chief Executive promises more and better infrastructure to promote tourism. Good.

Good?

Yes, good. With reservations.

Goa is a veritable tourist mine, like the other mines of the State, so merrily ravished by environmental rapists. Look at what is happening in the terrestrial mining field. Then look in the other direction at what is happening to our tourism. One is a metaphor for the other. At least, where I live in Anjuna, from the nature of tourists we see here and in the whole of the North, it is little short of an alien invasion. The South has somehow managed to attract a better class of tourists and this bodes well for the future. The South is a much later tourist destination and it seems to have evolved into a better one.

What is it that differentiates the South from the North? Apart from the reasons of history – the early hippie patronage of the North with all its attendant culture, which the South managed to escape – it is quite simply, in my opinion, a matter of pricing. The cheap, casual homestays of Anjuna, Chapora and other villages attract a certain kind of tourist to this part of Goa, while the South, with its new hotels and resorts has managed to filter out the tourist who fouls up the image of Goa without contributing much to its economy.

My memory does a little jog. A little more than a decade ago, the tourism ministry of Goa approached our advertising agency in Mumbai to design a campaign to attract tourists. The agency came up with an advertising campaign together with a strategic plan that called for a modification of the product offered. The product as seen and promoted until then was that of a destination soaked in susegado, sun and sand. Predictably it attracted beach bums. This was unfair to Goa, to its image and its economy, we thought. The recommendation was to move away from this positioning to one that presented the unique culture of Goa.

Here was a culture quite different from any in the country, or for that matter, any, anywhere else in the world; a fusion of Iberian and native, a fascinating blend that could appeal to the Western tourist. Beaches could be found anywhere else in the world, but what Goa had to offer was different, unique – a sort of spiced up Europe: native, earthy rhythms set to the triadic harmonies of Western music, reminiscent to the European ear of Vivaldi, Guerrero, Bochherini and Scarlatti; the delectable fusion of native spices with European viands; the art and architecture of public buildings and homes that adapted Portuguese design to the local environment; the exquisite art of the churches and the temples that abound in the State. All these tied up with the easy, friendly attitude of the Goan people added up to an offering that we believed would be exclusive to Goa and attractive to our target audience. This was a Creole of another kind; a different blend of native and the Romance cultures. An experience quite different from any other.

We need the economic goodies of tourism, but not at the expense of our image. We need to re-look at our promotional strategies. With responsibility and imagination. Before the implementation of plans or the setting up of infrastructure and facilities, we ought to spend time in redesigning the product. Its shape, identity, character and personality.Are we projecting Goa as a great host? An entertainer? An impresario?

We have to re-think our target audience. Will it still be the beach bum looking for a patch of beach and the freedom to do what he cannot in his own country? Or is it perhaps a more mature audience with more money to spare, one that has the curiosity and appetite for culture? The answers to these and other questions should be able to take Goa from being a tourist product like any other to being a brand with a difference. It will mean getting all the participants in the industry to be aware of and to conform to the image designed for Goa’s tourism. Surely, it cannot be done in a hurry. It has to evolve. But then, it all depends on the powers that be and the decisions they take.

An edited version of this article appeared in Goa's Navhind Times

The Party Pokesperson

 
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The Party ‘Pokesperson’ as Spectator Sportsman

We have our television channels to thank for a new form of spectator sport, the ‘panel discussion.’ Political parties realized early enough that participation in these no-holds-barred slugfests could end up in bruises to their image – of both, the participating individual and of the party. And yet, for obvious reasons they could not afford to stay out of the medium. They had to find a way out of their dilemma.

They found it in CocaCola!

In those days of the sparkling cola wars, some may remember the excitement of those fizzfights between CocaCola and Pepsi, now all but forgotten. In this fight however, there was only one visible fighter, Pepsi, the challenger who did all the sparring. CocaCola just stood on that Hilltop and sang, “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony”.

Both had a good reason for doing what they were doing. They were conscious of their genetic heritage. Coca-Cola was the universal nice guy, the Pause that refreshes. The Everyone Everywhere Everytime drink. Middle of the road, the golden mean and all that. Pepsi was the excitable, exciting challenger, the young one, Choice of a new generation, the fighter. Their  public behaviour was true to their character. Coca-Cola could never behave like Pepsi and Pepsi could never be a Coke.

There was a short period in India, when Coca-Cola attempted fighting back in reaction to Pepsi’s barbs – and had only bruises to show for its bravado. And then, in an inspired moment, Coca-Cola decided to acquire the popular Indian cola, Thums Up. With a purpose. While Coca-Cola did its nice guy thing on stage, it sent Thums Up into the ring to do all the punching. Great strategy. Thums Up became the flanker brand.

Political parties now have their flankers, their spokespersons, who go and slug it out in that unruly, everyday street fight that our channels have now become. The rough and tumble of TV panel ‘discussions’, led by ill-bred, eyeball-hungry anchors have compelled these spokespersons to bring out the slings and arrows of language and argument. They have become pokespersons indeed!

The Congress, the BJP, the Left and all the other parties have their spokespersons, individuals picked for their mediagenic qualities. They guard the vulnerable image frontiers while the party bigwigs are engaged in doing whatever it is that party bigwigs are supposed to do.

The BJP is something else. One could say they do not need any pokespeople. Their senior leaders can stand and deliver, Pepsi style, the desired sting with panache, without the need for any flankers. As a party they have the people to whom the role of political pugilist comes naturally. Challenge is in the genes of the party. One cannot find a better pokesman than NaMo with his memorable one-liners and the spicy utterances that sizzle off his tongue and reverberate in your earwax long after they have been delivered. No less telling are the political speeches and interviews of Mr. Jaitley or Yashwant Sinha and many of the senior leaders of the party. They are all very sharp, fluent and clever with their punches. What’s more, they come out at the end of it all with their images unscathed.

Take a look at the Congress on the other hand. Genetically and in present composition the party does not have what it takes to go out there onto the street and fight. Barring a few who are capable of some attractive verbal and political jousting, but who will only do it in forums of their choice and not in those media-sponsored brawls, the Congress partyman, by and large seems ill-fitted for the present brand of public exposure. He needs those flankers, their (s)pokepersons who by and large are doing a competent job. They are the Thums Up to their political Coke. Fighting the political Pepsi. We have been witness to a Manish Tewari, a Digvijay Singh and Abhishek Manu Singhvi carry their arguments with aplomb and even deliver punches with grace and effectiveness at least in the more decorous channels.

What the political flanker does well to keep in mind, however is that the pokesmanship, or the fight if there has to be one, has to have a certain character. The fight between CocaCola and Pepsi was fun because it was not a fight to kill, both sides knowing that neither could eliminate the other. It was not even a fight to give the other a bloody nose because they both knew that most often it was the bloodied nose, not the victor that got public sympathy. It was a fight to win friends, the joust to win that fair damsel, the consumer; it was ringside entertainment. It was goodwill fighting, where style was applauded more than brute force, smiles were more precious than blood. It was Jackie Chan not Sylvester Stallone or Swarzenegger; Danny Kaye’s funny fencing, not the blood and gore of the war movie.

All these niceties are thrown out into the gutters of those one or two rowdy channels, where the spokesperson is pushed into a brawl, fighting off not just the opposing panelist but most often the anchor himself. It is a bloody skirmish, which ends in no meaningful conclusion, wounding the topic, the participant and I dare say, the image of the channel itself. Be that as it may, it makes it hard for these flankers to do their thing in style or at least with some decorum. And so we see pokesmen of all parties trying bravely to curl their lips into a smile while they bare their knuckledusters -- something that a one-time smiling pokeswoman succeeded in doing when first she was enlisted for the job, but of late, has been finding the fang-exposing downward lipcurl coming more naturally to her than the other thing. Smiles and bile don’t mix. It is not easy to fight without a scowl. But it is possible.

Just one example: those swashbuckling sessions between Mani Shankar Aiyar and Swapan Das Gupta, the Politically Incorrect series of debates, which has now been discontinued. Here was debate where, as spectator, one was willing to suspend one’s own personal political leanings in order to savour the flavour of chaste phrase and argument. These were worth watching indeed; spectator sport of some intellectual standard, where every thrust and parry evoked deserved applause for linguistic and syllogistic finesse. Give us more of these. It is possible, if only channels and their anchors stop trying to attract the bloodshot eyeballs of a vulgar rabble. Even if it is a fight they want to stage, could they please give up the dishoom-dishoom for a more respectable fencing, jujitsu or even maybe kalaripittu?  


And edited version of the article appeared in Goa's O Heraldo 

THE INDIAN PENILE CODE

 
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THE INDIAN PENILE CODE

A step-by-step guide to rape

You start at you mother’s bosom, my son.

And with that very first meal of you life,

you savour the pride and joy in that breast

for suckling one such as you.

You see in her eyes those tears of gratitude

for that little finger-sized piece of flesh between your legs

that saved you from a bloody ejection

instead of your triumphant entry into the world.

With every diaper change she sings

Jaya hai to that finger-sized promise of patriarchy

That will grow into a singular sinew to subdue the world

Like the mighty mace of Bhima,

The bloody sword of Tippu,

Or at least like the fearful fist

of that local goon, maybe;

A rod to beat both contradiction and concupiscence.

Variance and virginity.

Ah! My son. You have successfully taken your first step.

Then, start walking in the footsteps of your father,

Fists clenched, brain seething, loins aflame

At tinkle of bangle, the swish of sari and skirt;

Of wife, sister, sister-in-law and the one next door;

Hurling the vocabulary of gutter and drain;

Wielding the stick, the open palm and yes, why not

That ultimate weapon: that singular sinew for good measure.

As she cowers weak, helpless and later shamed.

The pleasure and the power is all his, you can see,

Legitimized by the world around him

And that rod of might given him at birth.

Father, uncle, cousin, big brother, the goon next door are

Your role models for what you will become, my son.

Next, walk to the nearest silver screen or picture tube

That will wrap your neo-cortex and genitals around a storyline

so hot and spicy, you’ll want more of it

with all the gore and guts and pleasurable massage

to your ego and nerve-endings, my son.

Action and more action that has you on the edge of your seat

The exciting rollercoaster of fisticuff and pelvic thrust;

The titillation of drenched flesh frolicking under falling cataracts

And then, the blood pumping sequences of delectable rape.

You’re getting there, my son. You’re getting there.

And then the picture tube and their anchors talk

About the lethargy of the law and

The enforcement of the enforcement system

Of heavier punishment and the need for the noose.

And you laugh.

Did punishment ever do away with crime?

With murder and mayhem and corruption and thievery?

You laugh too as the big Solicitor and the administration talk

About licences for bus drivers and tinted glasses for anything that moves,

And changed laws and suspended policemen.

You smile at those righteously angered gender warriors

Flinging slogans and argument against the system.

You applaud the media too

For successfully inflaming a just and peaceful protest

Into one that burned mindlessly for days

Knocking off the teeth of a worthy protest

With the pliers of sensationalism and the greed for eyeballs.

And then, hypocritically calling for restraint.

It helped your cause not theirs, didn’t it?

Don’t worry, son.

While government, society and the system

Tie themselves up in tangles

And crouch under shrapnel of mutual blame

You know that you have to thank us, your parents

Your great and glorious society and culture

For making you the rapist prodigy you are.

Not the police. Not the Law. Not the system.

You and I know that they need to be sharpened.

Now. Without their customary delay

That sticks its tongue out at Justice.

But until then, do the high five, my son.

You’re just seventeen-and-a-half, a minor.

They can’t do much to hurt you.

You’re free, my son! You’re free!