Parameswaran

“Life is bogus!” cried my elderly neighbour who just had his leg amputated owing to a diabetic foot, just the day my father died. His remark shook me up deeply at its unembellished truth and leaving me open mouthed, staring at him. He had also lost all his savings in a bust co-operative bank and was barely eking out his own rations. Yet I marvelled at his wide smile and a grin that betrayed his bad and severally missing teeth each time i knocked his door with trepidation. He would have crawled on the unrepaired floor dragging himself across the room, barely reaching the door latch. “Cheenu there you” are he would beam in his thin underpants and bare chest, plentifully covered by his sacred thread. “Come come, you must have coffee with me” and he would instruct his patient wife who would have been reciting the thousand names of Lalitha to prepare some coffee as i protested guiltily wondering whether i was drinking up the little milk he bought. With the small cup of coffee were also some biscuits or ‘Kozhukottai’ with ‘Moru Kozhumbu’ that i would eat sparingly as he eagerly urged me on.

Mandar

He had a strange knack of calling at the wrong time, sometimes just when i was boarding a bus or train, or sitting on the pot newspaper in hand or when i was knitting my brows with my lawyers at the cases i was saddled with. Moreover there was always a sense of urgency in his call. If i told him i would call back he would plead that i should do so without fail and till he unburdened his mind of what seemed to trouble him he would remain restless. My mother often annoyed at his lack of timing, dismissed him off like many others as crazy. But with the closure of each call he would pronounce his prayers that the good Lord keeps me in good cheer and how indebted he was to my listening to him. Embarrassed and amused i would ask him to reserve them for others. He suffered from Schizophrenia for more than three decades and to my mind was one of the most heroic people i have known. John Nash will be remembered for Game theory but a ‘beautiful mind’ is no euphemism for the state of mind of such a patient. Most of them live in the dark fringes where none notices their furtive movements, plagued by their own demons even at noontide.

In Search of The Guru

The Indian tradition describes the supreme Guru Dakshinamurthy, as seated in front of his pupils in a profound silence that is itself the highest teaching (mouna vyakhya). Yet there are instances when silence is not golden. I was amused to read “Schumpeter’s” column in ‘The Economist’ (whose subscription was gifted by an old student) “Twilight of the gurus” (25^thApril 2015) claiming that ‘the management pundit industry is a shadow of its former self’. Indeed i assent vigorously and also wonder whether it is a good thing. Yet Schumpeter is too dismissive rather than trying to understand the phenomenon. This is a most loquacious industry trying to outshout other gurus quite like competing guru akharas in their grating microphones at the Kumbha Mela. Competing gurus might be in good humour analogous to management gurus in that they are voluble, mystically wooly, elliptical in quotation also economical with the truth of their research and methodology, giving away gyan to the great unwashed willing to buy their cure all snake oil panaceas. Yet not all gurus are quacks.

The Flower Pickers

I used to make fun of my boss and old teacher who would tell me how he woke at 4.00 am and commenced his day with some deep study. Young as i was, i mocked his insomnia and even suggested that he probably begins to plot against his many minions in those wee hours to gain a ‘Competitive Advantage’. Nothing brought me as much amusement as the anecdote that this gentleman who graduated from Harvard once received a call at about 2.00 am claiming that the caller was Prof Michael Porter from HBS wanting to discuss Industry Structure. Obviously the prankster was some student much inebriated and vexed by his assignments or studies at the cheap bar called Raj Palace just outside the college.  Given that sometimes i was found there too, i was viewed with as much suspicion. As i myself age and take refuge in the same strange and ineffable silence that pervades the early morning hours between 3.00 and 4.30 am, I feel guilty at my childish jokes of youth gone by. But the sounds of the summer silence are soon broken by cuckoo calls to mate before the crows unravel their devious designs to mix their eggs with those of crows. I might even chuckle; no wonder cuckoos lend their name to adultery and are not the only ones horny so early in the day. As i sit in the silence i fathom the stirrings and the sounds, which by 5.oo am is a grating ringtone of the gardener trying to wake up and start his day or that of some rickshaw driver asleep with a hangover after drinking a quarter of whiskey whose evidence is just beside his vehicle. Soon the ragpickers would arrive with large Santa Claus plastic sacks, some Tamil speaking women who move furtively scouring the edges of the road picking up bottles and sometimes booty that conferred oblivion to some after a tiring day or quench the thirst of many a scorched soul through the day in plastic bottles. They speak in hushed voices though their harsh tongue betrays them sooner than their feet. Their feet don’t shuffle but move fast and with agility that only calculation and illegality can confer.