Jewel Thief

Once upon a time, a merchant approached Emperor Akbar with a problem. A box containing some jewels was stolen from his house in the morning while he was away. “I don’t know who has done it,” he says, “but I am sure it is one of my neighbours.” Akbar refers the case to Birbal.

Birbal summons the merchant’s seven neighbours to the palace that evening at 8pm.

“One of you has stolen the jewels,” he says, “and I will catch the culprit by morning.”

“Here,” he begins, handing around sticks to each suspect, “these are magic sticks. They’re all the same size. They’re magical because they’re sensitive to the physical touch of a thief. If you’re the culprit, your stick will grow by two inches overnight (an idea an Italian author may or may not rip off in spirit three hundred years from now while writing a story called Pinocchio).”

“To make sure you can’t get away,” he continues, “you’ll be locked up in separate rooms in the palace until tomorrow morning. I’ll unlock the rooms in the morning, collect the sticks and catch the thief.”

The first suspect is the merchant’s next door neighbour. He knows both the merchant and Birbal very well, having helped them out with some business dealings in the past. The merchant trusts him too, so before the suspects are to be locked up for the night, he approaches Birbal and the merchant and asks them to let him go. The merchant agrees. Birbal sees no objection. The neighbour walks out into the cool evening breeze a free man.

The second man is locked in a room with a small window. He props open the window to let some fresh air in. He alerts the attention of a passerby who passes him some food through the window. He’s really upset about the rising crime in the neighbourhood and can’t wait to see the thief caught. The more he thinks about it, the more he realizes that Birbal is a genius. These are magic sticks, after all – what can possibly go wrong?  

The third man is in a room with no window and no light. He hasn’t eaten all day and has no idea why Birbal has locked up everyone like this. He didn’t even know the merchant had jewels in the house. Tired and hungry, he stays awake all night.

The fourth man is in a dark room with no window. Being locked up for the night is causing him extreme despair because he had to conduct private business with some traders this evening. The traders owed him a large sum of money, which he needed to feed his family. That opportunity is gone now, and he doesn’t know when he’ll be able to meet the traders again.

The fifth man stole a jewel from the merchant’s house last month and promptly sold it on. He doesn’t know if the sticks are actually magical, though, and that’s making him nervous. Desperate to find a way out of the predicament, he probes around the room and finds a loose panel in one of the walls. He has a confederate waiting outside, to whom he explains the situation. The confederate searches around outside and quickly finds another stick that’s the same size as the magic stick. The man then cuts off two inches from the magic stick. If the stick is magical, it’ll grow back overnight and be the same size. If it doesn’t, he’ll just show Birbal the second stick instead.

The sixth man is extremely sick. His room is completely dark and cold. He feels utterly helpless and is struggling to see out the night.

The seventh man knows he’s ruined. He stole jewels from the merchant’s house this morning. He checks his room carefully for any means of escape but doesn’t find any. There’s no way he can get rid of the jewels from his house before sunrise. More than that, he’s worried about the damn stick. Like a lamb to slaughter, he chops off two inches from his stick thinking it’ll grow back.

It doesn’t grow back, of course.

Birbal rounds up the suspects the next morning and proceeds to collect the sticks.

The first man left the previous evening. There is no stick to collect.

The second man hands over his stick with a smile on his face. When Birbal asks how he spent the night, he brushes off any concerns. “It was only a minor inconvenience,” he says.

The third man is confused, upset, tired and hungry but he dare not say anything to the mighty Birbal. Dejected that he has not even been compensated for the night in restraint, he quietly leaves.  

The fourth man is furious with Birbal. “Do you have any idea how much I have lost overnight?” he asks angrily. There is nothing he can do, though. He, too, leaves.

The fifth man has called Birbal’s bluff about the magic stick. He notices that the stick hasn’t grown, so he coolly hands over the second stick that was slipped to him by his confederate at night. Birbal doesn’t notice the difference in sticks and lets him go.

The sixth man’s condition has worsened considerably overnight. He needs urgent medical attention and is taken away. An unaltered stick is found in his room.

The seventh man is caught with a stick that is two inches shorter. Birbal declares him the criminal. He tells the merchant to go to the man’s house and recover the jewels.

The merchant is ecstatic. He goes to the seventh man’s house and finds the same box that he had left unattended the previous morning. He takes the box home and shows it triumphantly to his wife.

She unlocks the box, surveys the contents and goes, “WTF? These are only 6% of the jewels – where are the rest?” 

Slightly under the surface, and remembering Benoit

The biggest learning for me from a slightly jagged and often frustrating June so far has been that clarity of thought isn't linear. This might not seem like a particularly spectacular conclusion but there's been a definite - if shrinking - and possibly extremely middle-class part of my mind that has always believed that chains of continuous and fruitful thinking aren't so much a matter of finding inspiration or reason but more just a function of removing the distractions and focusing hard enough on the links in the chain to the point where the solution is compelled to present itself to you.

I've found efforts in the latter direction entirely unsuccessful for the past three weeks or so. In true hard-thinking fashion, I attempted to blame it on everything around me until I was left with no other conclusion than the inevitable one - one that forced my mind to acknowledge, you know, no matter how much you try, you really aren't very good at answering these questions.

Perhaps equally surprisingly, this hasn't caused me to question whether I've lost the ability to 'switch it on again', whether I'm getting too old to dramatically clear everything off my metaphorical desk with one swish of the crook of my arm and take time off to just think or even whether, as I did through a disturbingly vacuous eighteen month spell in 2012-13, I've lost the desire to want to think - all it has really done is make me appreciate the vagaries of the accessibility of the thinking process, vagaries that, I now realise, aren't so much unfathomable as they are inconsistent in themselves.

So the process behind clarity of thought is vague, it would seem. Yeeeeeah. I'm just going to park that there. And not think about it again.  

Also: Eight years today since Benoit, and a wound that simply refuses to heal. However, with every passing year, I'm starting to accept that, while I will never be able to forgive what happened at the hands of Chris, the person, nor forget Chris, the wrestler, there doesn't have to be a personal explanation for why I feel the latter as strongly as I do the former. I'm just going to park that there, too. And think about it again and again and again.  

Dig Deeper

I'm no less amazed today than I was a few years ago when I first started to appreciate the magnitude of our everyday outward abstraction of things which are so essentially and fundamentally human endeavours. On my office list, I have reduced into a few short words entire chains of command, processes, works-in-progress, physical activities, online activities and conversations, all of which easily have several dozen, if not hundreds, of people they impact directly. That these few words represent these microcosms is something I've always known, but now that I have the time to light a fire under one or more of these words by my simple action to do or not do something, I realise that what I'm contemplating is likely to have far-reaching and almost certainly unimaginable consequences. 

Staring

Observation: If a man is staring at another man, the second man won't stare at a woman that he would've otherwise stared at if the first man hadn't been there.

Objection 1: Because the second man would rather stare at the first man?

Answer: No, because he's conscious that what he's doing is shady and doesn't want other men to know that because of some unwritten universal bro code (not that the first man and second man in this - or any other such - scenario are 'bros' but please work with me here).

Objection 2: But if the assumption that all men are shady is right, then they could both go wink-wink and then stare at the woman together!

Answer: That's right. But - and it's an important but - I'm talking about situations where the first man has chosen to stare at the second man and not at the woman and has thus already made his moral choice. The second man knows - as all men know - that staring is wrong. They do it anyway because they think they can get away with it.

Objection 3: How do you know that the second man would've been staring at the woman anyway?

Answer: Because that's what men do. (Sad but true.)

I Like To Move It, Move It

 

Big Daddy Cool.

 

That will be all.

The Lou Gehrig Speech, Interrupted

I wanted to give the Lou Gehrig speech today but those plans have suddenly evaporated. I wish today was special and that it would give me some other signpost to recall it by but unfortunately, we are equally removed from Global Handwashing Day (October 15) as we are from International Stuttering Awareness Day (October 22).

 

There's a lot to look forward to over the next few days, of course, and there's always the chance that today won't make it to my days-to-remember-from-2012. I'd still desperately like, though, for today to have significance of some other kind. The only thing I can think of, however, is that today is the day that Harshvardhan Nawathe's Rs. 1 crore winning episode on Kaun Banega Crorepati was telecast on Star Plus all those years ago. It was so long ago, however, that I can't even find a YouTube video of it which, come to think of it, perfectly caricatures the worthlessness of today.

 

Who'd ever have thought that someone who seemingly meant so little to your life actually meant so much? You would think it should put into sharper focus my own seemingly human motivations but, astonishingly, it hasn't. I'm now convinced that I must dig in and carry on and this realisation has made my own alternative plans suddenly evaporate.

 

One good turn deserves another, I guess. Let us continue.  

...

I haven't been writing much recently. I want to write. I want to write something properly. Something with soul and depth and meaning. I want to write something that doesn't involve wrestling or sport or law or music or books. I want to write something that's not "gay, even by [my] formidable standards".

 

I am feeding a few words into this page and, every few minutes, I am feeding a few words into three other windows that are minimised as I write this.

 

Foremost among my thoughts right now - how fidgety my legs are feeling, how the air-conditioning at home is going to feel tonight, what Seinfeld episode will air on Comedy Central at 9 p.m. (in a willing suspension of disbelief, I have chosen not to open that door in my mind that remembers every Season 6 episode in seriatim or, easier, I have decided not to look it up online), whether keeping the rice on for thirteen minutes today will finally, finally rid me of the grainy-hardboiled-or-soggy-mess dichotomy, what they really teach at the M.Phil in Law and Governance at JNU, if there's a problem with the way I speak English on certain days (I've had to repeat myself on three separate occasions and there are days when I speak a lot more when I don't have to do that at all. Do I speak too quickly? Do I not wait long enough for the other person to reply? Do I roll my eyes too much? I know that's a rhetorical question - I do) and lastly - and this has been annoying me all day - how the people at the Airtel store come in in regular clothes but, within five minutes, are all decked out in red Airtel t-shirts. I want to see that changing room they all go into - are the shirts hung on hooks asymmetrically or are they lined up in a clothes hanger a la Dexter in Dexter's Rival? Do they even have hooks? They have to have hooks, it must be like a changing room in a clothes store - how can they not have hooks in a room so small? Where else would they put all those shirts? Or do they all just wear their Airtel shirts underneath their regular clothes and go inside only to remove the top layer? If yes, why can't they do it in the main store area? Sharam aati hai unhe? Airtel ke liye kaam karte hain, isse zyaada sharamnaak aur kya baat ho sakti hai? 

 

I remember I used the expression "tough cookie" during my English book review presentation in Class IX. I am still astonished that no one knew what it meant and I remember I was asked by the teacher to explain it and I said it meant "the same thing as 'a tough nut to crack'". Why didn't I think of a cookie/nut etymology comparison then? I hate cookies with nuts. I love chocolate cookies. Lots of chocolate on those cookies. Chocolate chips, melty chocolate, chocolate sprinkles, all kinds of sweet chocolate. I also like cinnamon cookies. That's the real debate, cinnamon vs chocolate - not freaking nuts vs cookies. Nuts are irrelevant. They're usually tasteless and make you fat. The salted varieties have more salt, less nuts. Might as well eat salt only. Much cheaper, too. The only place nuts are borderline acceptable are in Fruit and Nut chocolate. Actually, I don't even like nuts in Fruit and Nut. They should just make them with fruit. Fruit bhi kya, dried raisins are the only "fruits" they use in that chocolate. Useless. Calling it "Fruit and Nut" is such misrepresentation. Overpriced chocolate with the odd raisin and almond, more like. Saala, uska bhi alag se chocolate banate hain. And they sell it as "Silk" or somesuch. Raisin and almond hai toh say "raisin and almond" on the label, na? Nahi. Hum toh nahi likhenge. Mental only. I would really like to live in a world where they sell dried raisin chocolate and have the guts to call it that. I would buy it. But I won't buy it today. Because Crackle is way cooler and better and it has those crackles which are extraordinarily good, even shorn of their chocolatey context. And I'm totally going to force my way inside that little changing room at the Airtel store next time. 

 

And leave a Fruit and Nut chocolate wrapper in there.

 

Haha.    

'Some day, the true story may be told.'

"One likes to think that there is some fantastic limbo for the children of imagination, some strange, impossible place where the beaux of Fielding may still make love to the belles of Richardson, where Scott's heroes still may strut, Dickens' delightful Cockneys still raise a laugh, and Thackeray's worldlings continue to carry on their reprehensible careers. Perhaps in some humble corner of such a Valhalla, Sherlock and his Watson may for time find a place, while some more astute sleuth with some even less astute comrade may fill the stage which they have vacated."

 

***

 

Genuinely, genuinely moved by my second go-around with Nick Drake's music. His story is a tragic one but "Pink Moon" and "Things Behind The Sun" are timeless classics.

Four Word Proposal

I've always believed that, as obvious as it may seem, the way people write mirrors how they feel. I'm delighted to say I've rediscovered about five years' worth of writing through an old friend this morning. In tribute and celebration to our many disagreements about poetry and love, here's to you:

Four Word Proposal

August 14, 2012

(Prologue: I was, in true heavy metal style, going to "call this one 'Wasted'" and "dedic it to my ex-girlfriend, may she burn in hell" but I realised (1) that my ex-girlfriends are adorable people and have been unreasonably nice to me even though they've had no reason to be and (2) this isn't about my ex-girlfriend(s) anyway - it is entirely fictional.

Second prologue: I wrote this in sharp, inspired two-line bursts. The rhymes came out of nowhere - it has literally taken me twenty minutes to put it all down. Must be something in this mid-August air.) 

***

Economy of words has always eluded me

Eschewing 'no wasted motion', I'd rather be free

It should come, therefore, as no surprise

That it is my editor's blue pencil that I most despise.

Back and forth into his little lair I'd go

Having my words brutalised in the rain and snow

In whatever little I'd salvage of my all-consuming day

I'd find time for lunch and I'd find time to pray.

Each day, my little prayer would be exactly the same

That somehow He could deliver she who has no name

For I'd exhausted all possible avenues and every resource

In fruitless courtship, leaving only remorse.

Charm her, please her, they would say

Chip away at it every single day

It doesn't matter if progress is slow

You've got time, go with the flow.

And so I pursued but she would not budge

But I stuck to her like sweet chocolate fudge

Tirelessly, relentlessly, till I was obsessed

Stopping only when I was under blue-pencil arrest.

Slowly but surely she began to crack

Starting to like me though I was a hack

As more time passed, it just became vanilla

I know that makes no sense, this line is just filler.

It turns out they were right about persistence and its reward    

But it had taken too long, it was time I couldn't afford

So I decided for certain that this would be my time

Just so I could put an end to this rhyme.

I spoke without fear, without the apprehension of failing

At least when she said no, there'd be no wailing

But as I began my choreographed soliloquy

I started to tremble and so did she.

So I asked her what she was so fearful of hearing

And shushed at the window where my friends were leering

I got her to talk like she'd never talked before

And with every word she said, I realised more and more.

That come what may, I would always be around

Be that friend if she ever fell down

And slowly but surely, as you can probably tell

I sank quickly and without a trace into the friend zone well.

Suddenly women started coming out of the woodwork

'My boyfriend's a sexist, a druggie, such a jerk'

So I became a yes-man to the prettiest women - it was a cruel tale

Turning into an agony aunt a hot-blooded twenty-four-year-old male.

Long nights of 'Uh-huh' and 'I understand'

Dissolving mental images that had once been grand

But somehow I'd think back to that night when it came undone

And what a miserable story I had spun.

***

The news, when it came, hit me like a two-ton weight

She was leaving for good and I knew it would be too late. 

So finally in the fifth minute of injury time

Armed with a row of shots and loads of lime

I finally put the record straight with Miss Best Friend

And told her in no uncertain terms that this must end.

I waited anxiously for the tears I so richly deserved

But was astonished to see her so taciturn and reserved

What must I do to get a reaction, I thought

Many years of trying are all coming to naught.

So I did what all opportunistic buggers do

I waited for a time to come that we all knew

A couple of hours, maybe more

Till she finally staggered through that door.

I wasn't playing hard to get, I lied

I'd actually been playing conquer and divide

We sat down to talk like the old days, when it all made sense

And I realised there were no more moves, no more defence.

In this soliloquy, though, I felt something strange occur

I felt a real connection when everything else was a blur

And it dawned on me that this is what she had felt all along

And if I let her walk out that door, I'd be doing something very wrong.

So I engaged her, indulged her, told her she was right

And we talked forever and late into the night

But when the moment came to say our goodbyes

I saw friendship and trust but nothing else in her eyes.

And even though years have passed since I dusted that book off my shelf  

On lonely nights when I cannot sleep I still ask myself 

Was she blind, could she not see

That my four word proposal had become three?

?-8-8-A-A

There is no Timmy anymore. From now on, he shall be called...

Another Day, Another Grid Failure

I have to thank the largest power blackout in history for jogging memories of early 1999 (the last time I can remember such power cuts at this time of year) and, more specifically, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppdWrsHJeEE. Some stuff never gets old. Fantastic.

***

Feeling a lot better, everyone - your concern is much appreciated.

Also see http://www.sportsscientists.com/2012/07/london-day-2-quick-thoughts - best thing I've read...today.

Fear - I

I tend to be scared of places rather than things.

Unpalatable things tend to evoke aversion but unpalatable places tend to evoke fear. 

* * *

There is an unfinished painting that I first saw in a dream many years ago that comes back to me now and then. 

It is a perfect rectangle, equal parts beige and maroon. There is a stick at either end, and there is a crudely, almost carelessly drawn body of a tribesman on the left side. The body occupies most of the space on the left side and there is some kind of ornament around the neck of the tribesman. His head is oblong, it is inclined at an angle with the upper boundary of the rectangle, and juts out of it most asymmetrically. 

The right side of the picture is incomplete. It also features a tribesman but the body of this tribesman is a little more irregular, almost fragmented. Most oddly, I cannot seem to form a clear picture of the second tribesman's head. I am convinced he must have one but, if I close my eyes, I cannot see it. 

Other minutiae, however, arrive at the door of my memory with ease.

His arm is twisted, almost broken. His legs look far weaker than those of his counterpart on the left side. They look almost cartoonish. He appears to be stretching his arm out and holding on to the stick to his left. Yet, because his body is so fragmented, I struggle to tell which hand he is holding on to the stick with. It just seems to be there. 

For the life of me, I cannot picture his head.

* * *

I am scared of the place upstairs. 

It evokes fear in a way I do not associate with any other place in the world. 

I have been downstairs, of course. I have been downstairs several times. For most of my life, I have thought of downstairs as my second home. I know the upstairs looks exactly like the downstairs. The house was designed that way. They were  mirror images of each other. 

Up until about twenty years ago, they used to be. But then the kitchen downstairs was broken down and expanded. The far bedroom downstairs was rebuilt from scratch. The bedroom across from the far bedroom was also refurbished. It is now occupied by other people. Both washrooms downstairs have been rebuilt on multiple occasions. They bear scant resemblance to the ones upstairs. The near bedroom downstairs has also seen much upheaval over the years.

In all this time, the rooms upstairs have also had hundreds of little changes and modifications; some approved and some not. The rooms upstairs have been occupied by several tenants. Some have stayed for years, some have stayed no longer than a few weeks. Each passing tenant has stapled their imprint on the rooms upstairs. Their electrical gadgets have tripped up the power lines once in a while. Their posters have peeled off a fair bit of plaster from the walls. Their peculiar habits have caused a fair bit of moaning and, on occasion, cursing. But there is one thing that has not changed a bit since the first time I remember going there.

Upstairs.

Upstairs is still exactly the way it was all those years ago. 

* * *

I went upstairs in late 1998.

We had just moved houses. There was much celebration in the family for several other reasons besides. My first recollection of upstairs is from the morning time: there was dust, there was the smell of termite-infested wood, there was a cool November breeze, and I recall that there were charcoal-black hoop-shaped grills on the windows.

There was a wedding.

There was a lot of chatter and a lot of dancing downstairs. I was upstairs with a few other people who were frantically trying to ensure that upstairs was set up for the wedding guests who were to arrive soon. I was instructed to run, upstairs and downstairs, ferrying as much as my eleven-and-a-half-year-old hands could carry at one go.

Apart from the happiness of the occasion, I remember nothing of consequence occurring on that night in late 1998.

We retired to bed around twelve.

I was the last one to leave and, as such, I was told to latch the door. The latch was a little stubborn but after struggling for a few seconds, I managed to secure it, aided in part by the dark yellow light thrown by an old bulb that was a few feet to my left.

I took a quick look around, first right, then left, and finally hurried back to sleep.

Downstairs. 

(to be continued)

Seven Questions about Section 15

Today, I'm going to rant about why nobody has deemed it necessary to supply some context - explanations, illustrations, examples, something - to the words "other matter of a non-distinctive character which does not substantially affect the identity of the trademark" in Section 15(3)(c) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999. 

I. Given that Section 15(2) requires every variation/representation of a series trademark to independently satisfy objective trademark criteria and given that Section 15(3) says "may be registered as a series", does the law even contemplate a situation where a series application is necessary and not merely more desirable/appropriate than a set of individual applications covering every different variation/representation?

II. Isn't a literal reading of Section 15(3)(a) rendered redundant purely by the facility (and I use that word carefully) of a multi-class application for the same trademark?

III. Is the reference to "other matter" in Section 15(3)(c) to be ejusdem generis'd with (a) and (b) (which cover the statement of goods/services and statement of number, price, quality or names of places respectively)? 

IV. If so, given that (a) and (b) are independent criteria, how exactly is ejusdem generis to be applied in this case? 

V. Assuming broad brush-strokes on the ejusdem generis, how does fixing different numbers on the same base trademark or prefixing/suffixing names of places on the same base trademark colour the "does not substantially affect the identity of the trademark" bit in Section 15(3)(c), in light of Carlsberg v. Radico Khaitan and Section 9(1)(b) respectively?

VI. Speaking of colour, does the inclusion of "colour" as an independent, later criteria under Section 15(3)(d) mean that it is not within the contours of "other matter of a non-distinctive character" in Section 15(3)(c)? 

If so, (1) on logic alone, why? (2) how is it to be reconciled with Section 10?

VII. Assuming even half-decent answers to all of the above questions, where does that leave the basic "resembling each other in the material particulars thereof" standard for a series trademark? 

Isn't it astonishing how a seemingly straightforward, rarely used 112-word sub-section can serve as the point of departure for endless discussion? It hasn't escaped my attention that the way I've framed these seven questions would fit snugly into an exam paper/hypothetical (complete with the entirely unnecessary Roman numerals). You have been warned. :-p

Sunrise

I watched the sun rise this morning. Not after a sleepless night either - the proper way. And as that reluctant giant ball of orange inched its way up the cold, hazy Noida skyline, two thoughts came to mind - one, there is absolutely nothing to compete with this feeling of solitude and two, it's a feeling that wouldn't go amiss if it occurred a little more frequently (as unlikely as that is) over the days and months to come.

Britpop, Bad Food, Statutory Interpretation - Story of My Life

I'm riding a wave called A Northern Soul. Now this is music, no pun intended.

The bruschetta at Nirula's is bad. Really very bad.

Section 30(4) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999 states:

"Sub-section (3) shall not apply where there exists legitimate reasons for the proprietor to oppose further dealings in the goods in particular, where the condition of the goods, has been changed or impaired after they have been put on the market."

For the life of me, I do not understand why there is a comma between 'goods' and 'has'. Someone 'explain me why'. Please.

The Musgrave Ritual

At around 3.30 a.m. this morning, on a whim, I dusted off an old, torn paperback, smattered with a cold tea stain on the first page that has been in my possession for at least eleven years. I flipped through the pages of this slender volume (from back to front, as I usually do) and suddenly stopped. The words “an anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock Holmes” caught my eye and I assumed my standard reading position - lying on my right side, head resting on my upturned right palm and wrist, the book supported by the fully spread four fingers of my left hand, with the little finger acting as a bookmark - and read on.

***  

“ ‘It is rather an absurd business, this ritual of ours,’ he answered. ‘But it has at least the saving grace of antiquity to excuse it. I have a copy of the questions and answers here if you care to run your eye over them.’

“He handed me the very paper which I have here, Watson, and this is the strange catechism to which each Musgrave had to submit when he came to man’s estate. I will read you the questions and answers as they stand.

“ ‘Whose was it?’

“ ‘His who is gone.’

“ ‘Who shall have it?’

“ ‘He who will come.’

“ ‘Where was the sun?’

“ ‘Over the oak.’

“ ‘Where was the shadow?’

“ ‘Under the elm.’

“ ‘How was it stepped?’

“ ‘North by ten and by ten, east by five and by five, south by two and by two, west by one and by one and so under.’

“ ‘What shall we give for it?’

“ ‘All that is ours.’

“ ‘Why should we give it?’

“ ‘For the sake of the trust…’ ” 

***

“That must have been difficult, Holmes, when the elm was no longer there.”

“Well, at least I knew that if Brunton could do it, I could also. Besides, there was no real difficulty. I went with Musgrave to his study and whittled myself this peg, to which I tied this long string with a knot at each yard. Then I took two lengths of a fishing-rod, which came to just six feet, and I went back with my client to where the elm had been. The sun was just grazing the top of the oak. I fastened the rod on end, marked out the direction of the shadow, and measured it. It was nine feet in length.

“Of course the calculation was now a simple one. If a rod of six feet threw a shadow of nine, a tree of sixty-four would throw one of ninety-six, and the line of the one would of course be the line of the other. I measured out the distance, which brought me almost to the wall of the house, and I thrust a peg into the spot. You can imagine my exultation, Watson, when within two inches of my peg I saw a conical depression in the ground. I knew that it was the mark made by Brunton in his measurements, and that I was still upon his trail…”  

***

In an instant, I was transported to the time I first read The Musgrave Ritual, the night before my Class X Maths Board exam. And, much as I did all those years ago, I found myself stopping at the end of each of these passages, suddenly very aware of my surroundings and able to sense a quickening of my heartbeat--those precise little signs that convinced me that I was reading something quite out of the ordinary. 

Absolute Truths - II

Mango Tang > Grape Tang > Strawberry Tang > Orange Tang > Pineapple Tang > Lemon Tang

"Kill is going to Debra you."

I just finished watching my first episode of Everybody Loves Raymond in many, many years and, for that half an hour, I felt like I was sixteen years old again. Peter Boyle - God bless him - was one of the greatest and most under-appreciated TV Dads of all time. 

Guest Night

There has been a routine behind guests coming home for dinner for as long as I can remember. It usually begins in early afternoon in the kitchen and ends with dessert and/or a cup of kehva (which inevitably results in someone asking my Mum about the recipe/ingredients). Over the years, even our little skirmishes before the arrival of the guests - what each person should wear, when we should emerge from the bedroom (we have a tendency of never greeting the guests at the door as a full complement), what should be laid out on the dining table - have started to follow similar patterns.

We tend to visit the same topics over the course of the pre-dinner conversation as well - a wide range of moral-of-the-story anecdotes, the state of higher education in India, how everything around us is now a big business, a few funny stories about mutual friends, a couple of semi-stories that never reach their conclusion because it turns out that the acquaintance one person in the conversation is talking about is unknown to everyone else, a couple of stories about how some acquaintances are known to everyone else (and hence the 'what a small world' conclusion) and, more recently, owing to the direction my life has taken in the last few years, everyone's two cents on law and the legal profession. 

Dinner draws those threads into an even bigger tangle - more stories emerge and it turns out that we know more people than we did an hour or so ago. However, the dialogue is less intense now, due to the greater attention to the food on the table. From a culinary perspective, the dinners we host are never too complicated - we're restricted by my Mum's refusal to present at dinner something that hasn't been made in the kitchen that day (cumulative conditions) and by the inability of the rest of us to cook anything at all. Hence, the focus tends to be on ensuring that the guests have eaten enough, though we're not nearly as bad as some of our relatives for whom guests refusing a second (or, in cases of extremely disagreeable relatives, a third) serving is a treasonable offence, or at least a reason to put those guests at the back of the line of people to be invited to dinner again sometime. 

Once dinner is done, there is a five-minute interlude where nothing seems to happen - this appears to me to be a combination of the satisfaction of being well-fed, the minimal turnaround time we (as hosts) have in getting the next leg of the evening ready and moving the venue away from the dining table and back into the living room, the guests' awkwardness in not knowing what to do while we go from being perfectly normal fellow dinner-eaters to suddenly scurrying around trying to wind up the dinner table and move dishes to the kitchen (any help by the guests in contributing to which is, of course, cheerily and summarily turned down) and the lingering thought in the back of everyone's mind that all the threads that have been so carelessly laid out now need to be packed in. 

The dessert and/or kehva part of the evening is like the recap to a saas-bahu episode - it is great that you could find the time to come, we totally have to do this again (on a larger scale, inviting all the hapless unknowing people we dragged into the conversation this evening, if possible), a reciprocal visit demand to the home of the guests is placed on record and immediately accepted, with a vague time-frame mooted but never finalised and a bullet-point plan of taking some discussions forward, sharing contacts of the abovementioned hapless unknowing persons and a promise to stay in touch and plan the next such dinner is drawn up.

We hosted one of these dinners today and I realised that no matter how long it's been since the last one and no matter how different the surroundings are of what we now call home, some things will never change.      

God and other things

I re-read the following extract from an email I wrote to a close friend about two-and-a-half months ago, which articulates my views on God and other things probably better than I have ever managed anywhere else - read, share and feel free to disagree:   

"I honestly believe that the shortest distance between two points always seems most appealing to people and even if you, individually, grow up to resent it, there isn't much of a chance you'll make other people think the same. And that's because taking the shortest, easiest route rather than a longer, more enriching one is a genuine dilemma - you'll wake up one day thinking you should pick one, you'll wake up another day convinced about the other. 

And given that most people have other things to worry about in a more immediate sense than the procedural propriety of their ways (and that's exactly what it is), they're more likely to fall on the easier side of the line. Which is why people always want disproportionately more than what they've worked for (or, in [my] eyes, deserve); which is why most peoples' lives ([mine] included) tends to be a constant exercise in finding a way around their limitations rather than embracing them.

If you push this line of thinking to its breaking point, someone in defence of the majority of people will say something to the effect of how a lot of our circumstances are either insurmountable or pre-ordained and therefore there's no harm or wrong in blaming circumstances (or explaining our shortcomings or failures with reference to circumstances). Now, I've searched for a long time for an effective counter to this and, at least vis-a-vis the "pre-ordained circumstances" part, I don't have an answer. Which is perhaps why belief in God or a supernatural entity is so common - it becomes this repository which we debit with all that we don't understand. 

That line you quoted ("whereas in earlier ages, religion led to a degree of fatalism, contemporary understanding pulls paradoxically towards an acceptance of risk but away from a tolerance of results when they occur") is extraordinary - not for how cynical it is, but for how unpolished and central an expression it is of what we think. Think about it - the earliest people who first started debiting the God account with everything they didn't understand would've noticed, over a period of time, that human development, especially science, started to chip away at that debit account and started to place more and more power with human reason. Assuming humans have not regressed significantly, it would seem to suggest that, at this point in human civilization, we know more about the world than humans before us did. Yet, stubbornly, we hold on to that earliest form of faith which taught us to attribute everything outside our control to God. And, naturally, we find it difficult to accept that things are often in our control because we just don't want to act on it.

But your other question - where do we go from here - is the harder one, of course. I think one thing we must do is keep questioning. It is what has brought us this far and it is, paradoxically, the reason why, today, we think we know less about the universe than anyone before us when, in fact, we know more. But alongside that questioning, we must arrive upon and stick by a settled core of meaning that we're comfortable with on most mornings when we wake up. You can make this settled core of meaning as narrow or as broad as you want - you could encompass religion, spiritual belief, self-belief, morals, ethics, values or any combination of them, if you want. 


My own experience has taught me that the larger your settled core of meaning, the more peace you see in the world around you. To me, that's the immediate benefit - I like feeling a sense of order around me and, in fact, I've grown to want it. The long-term instability/uncertainty, of course, is that I will often try to fit things into this picture that can't be fit. But that frustration, over the last couple of years or so in particular, has also come with the growing acceptance that there's no harm in admitting that there still are things about the universe that I don't understand. There's no shame in that whatsoever because to insist otherwise, I feel, would be to say that I've got it all figured out. And that, of course, doesn't agree with my settled core of meaning.

A lot of this struggle, predictably, will be with faith and what you believe in. I'm in no position whatsoever to prescribe anything to you, of course, but I did start feeling at some point that God must exist because there's just no point to existence otherwise. It's very emotive and it's very instinctive, but it hasn't let me down so far. :-)   

But to be entirely honest with you, I don't have answers. I'm only trying."