By now, the whole world knows that Rishi Sunak, at the ripe young age of 42, is the youngest Prime Minister that the United Kingdom has had over the past 216 years. If you are not aware of this earth-shattering, historic statistic, you must be in deep meditation in the dark, damp caves of the Himalayas, your blissfully ignorant body encrusted with anthills. These political milestones are invariably expressed within the limits of certain time frames. Reason being, prior to a couple of hundred years and a bit, there was one William Pitt the Younger, who took the oath of office as PM when he was barely 24 years old, just a few years after he passed his driving test, always assuming one drove cars during the Younger Pitt’s reign. Wet behind the ears? Tell me about it. If William Pitt the Younger made his precocious mark in British politics, could William Pitt the Elder have been far behind? Not on your nelly. The father of the son was also the Prime Minister several years before the chit of a scion walked into No.10, always assuming there was a No.10 during that time. Not that it matters really, as one is merely employing the expression No.10 as an imperishable symbol of Britain’s highest executive official residence. Anyhow, as we in India know only too well, these things run in families – fathers, daughters, sons, grandsons and granddaughters – they all tilt ever so frequently at our own political windmills.

As for Rishi Sunak, since we set much store by numerology, there is a statistical, serendipitous symmetry at play, if you’ll excuse the serendipitous alliteration, between him and the Younger Pitt. Sunak is 42 as he takes over as PM. Flip that number round and what do you get? 24 of course, which was Pitt’s age when he took over the reins to reign. This must be a good omen for Rishi. Why that must be so, I haven’t the foggiest, but then, the logic of numbers brooks no argument. Rishi, his wife Akshata, their two daughters, pet dog Nova and the Downing Street cat Larry, are by now, well ensconced at No.10, toasting their feet with the logs crackling merrily at the fireplace, what with winter almost at their doorstep and energy costs soaring through the chimneys.

When I say, ‘the Downing Street cat’ in that off-hand way, I am doing a great disservice to this brown and white tabby, Larry. This is no ordinary cat mate, this is the officially designated ‘Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office’ who has served for 11 years in that distinguished capacity, seeing off four Prime Ministers, namely, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. And now the fifth, Rishi Sunak to contend with. Most people would view Larry as just a regular house cat but in political circles, his status is akin to the magical Jellicle cats of T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, later set memorably to music by Andrew Lloyd Webber for the musical, Cats. In her immensely readable, best-selling book of satirical columns, the incandescent Marina Hyde posits thus on PM David Cameron’s priorities, ‘The Prime Minister was at pains to address one of the dominant news preoccupations over the past 48 hours. To wit: the future of Larry, the Downing Street cat.’  Furthermore, Downing Street’s tryst with cats goes all the way back to 1929. Among the many cats that have served at No.10, two of them in more recent times were christened Humphrey and Sybil, named after two unforgettable characters from British sitcoms, Sir Humphrey Appleby from the Yes, Minister / Yes, Prime Minister series and Sybil Fawlty from the hilarious Fawlty Towers.

When I started writing this column, it had entirely skipped my mind that only a few weeks ago, when Boris Johnson was eased out of office, while Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak went hammer and tongs at each other, attempting to cajole the British public to make the right choice for PM, I had written an extensive piece on Rishi’s chances, how such a result might resonate in India blah, blah, blah, the relevance or otherwise of his Hindu Indian origins, his billionaire Indian in-laws – in fact everything that everyone is now talking about after Liz Truss’ brief and disastrous sojourn at No.10, and Rishi’s dramatic entry into that storied residence. We will have to live with American Presidents murdering the new incumbent’s name, Biden called him Rashid Sunook, for crying out loud. No better than Trump’s Swami Vivekamundan!

Point being that rather than going over all that guff again, I thought it would be better from the point of view of public interest, to speak with Larry the tabby cat and get a unique perspective on these amazing goings-on at one of the most famous addresses in the world. After all, no one has had a closer view of the frenetic comings and goings in and out of No.10 than Larry, the residence’s celebrated feline mascot. Accordingly, I approached Larry cautiously. You never know with cats. They can be temperamental.

‘Good morning, Larry. I trust you are well. Can you spare a few minutes and take some questions?’

Larry looked at me with suspicion, his hackles rising ever so slightly. ‘Have you been cleared by Security? I cannot speak to any old hobbledehoy without the PMO’s clearance. No offence.’

I quickly scribbled “hobbledehoy” in my note pad. Some vocabulary! For a cat, I mean. ‘None taken Larry, I have obtained permission from the authorities. Here’s my card issued by the PMO. Can we start? I hope you don’t mind the cameras. This will be a great photo-op for you.’

‘Look I will give you 10 minutes, not a second more. And what do you mean, great photo-op for me? More like, for you. I am the most photographed cat in the world, and you should be grateful I am giving you the time of day. Better get a move on, because waiting in line are the New York Times and Washington Post, those rags The Sun and Daily Mirror from my neck of the woods, and nearly a dozen newspapers and television channels from India. Pravda and Izvestia from Russia are also trying to muscle in, but I have refused on account of the Ukraine – Russia war. I am a very busy and principled cat.’

‘Right, Larry. Noted and understood. Why don’t you give me a quick, snappy sketch of the four PM’s you have served so far?’

‘I am prevented by the Official Secrets Act from saying too much about them but just for you, here goes. Cameron was fairly pleasant, a hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy, May was up a gum tree, tying herself up in knots over Brexit, Bo Jo was a one-off, gave the impression of being mad as a March hare but he was sharp as a tack. And great fun when in the mood. He scratched my belly every time he stepped out. And that hair! As for Truss, she was hopping around like a cat on a hot, tin roof. She was not here long enough for me to judge her properly, but she blinked a lot.’

‘Blinked a lot? Meaning?’

‘Meaning, blinked a lot. Are you dumb? It must have been the tension. Makes people do strange things.’

‘And now you have Rishi. What do you make of him?’

Larry took a long stretch and yawned before answering, ‘Yes, now as you so shrewdly point out, I have Rishi Sunak. Early days yet, but he was occupying No.11 when he was Chancellor under Boris, and he used to keep popping into No.10 frequently. However, I am the Chief Mouser at No.10, and don’t fraternize much with the lower orders at No.11.’

‘What, by the way is a mouser?’

‘That’s Mouser to you, with a capital M. Show some respect.’ Larry was pretty haughty at this unintended solecism of mine. Mouser, because I make short work of the rats and mice that keep scurrying around these parts. Ever since The Plague.’

‘The Plague? Spotted those capitals this time. But that was way, way back in..…never mind. Getting back to Sunak and family, are they looking after you well, Larry?’

‘I have to wait and watch. For a start, he is a teetotaler, which is fine with me as I am abstemious myself. Three saucersful of milk is my limit. But I am dead in the water if he is a vegetarian, as some rumours seem to suggest. Where will I get my daily supply of fish from? I’ll have to swallow my pride and sidle through Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s cat flap at No.11. He is bound to have a portion of salmon or tuna, or even a tin of sardines in the fridge.’

‘Good thinking, Larry. And how are you on the subject of Rishi being the first brown Briton from an Asian background becoming the PM of what has thus far been a Caucasian preserve?’ I thought that would fox Larry, but I was wrong.

‘Aren’t we getting a bit racist here, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is? We did have Gordon Brown, but that doesn’t count. Ha, ha that was just me being witty. Look, I am more or less colour blind, so it does not make a blind bit of difference to me what colour Rishi is. I am only worried about the food. I’ll go batty if they keep dishing out rice and dal, morning, noon and night. Can’t eat rats all day long, either. My digestion will go for a six.’

‘One last question, Larry, after that I am out of here. I hear Rishi has brought a dog, Nova, along with him. Where does that leave you in the pecking order?’

‘A brown Labrador, yes. Had to be brown! Look, as long as the canine keeps to herself, I have no issues. I’ll stay aloof, but if she pulls any tricks and tries to be super Nova, she will feel the benefit of my sharp, manicured claws. Previous PMs have also brought in dogs to No.10, but the dumb chums knew their place. One good thing, though. I can’t see the pooch surviving on rice and dal. So, I am looking forward to some left-over mince or steak or something I can get my teeth into.’

‘Brilliant, Larry. Bon appétit. Unlike your PMs, you have nine lives. Make the most of it. Thank you for your time. Much appreciated.’

Before I knew what was happening, the security detail had thrown a ring of guards round Larry. It was time for his afternoon siesta. As I walked away, I could hear a gentle, musical purr, which, to my fevered brain, sounded like Memory from Cats. Larry was in dreamland, tucking into a juicy halibut. The Chief Mouser may or may not have been awake, but he showed himself to be very woke.

How well he’s read, to reason against reading! William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost.

I have long since come to the profound conclusion that really good books ought to be read more than once if one is to derive full value from all the riches of the language that the author has sought to so joyously share with his or her readers. Not unlike listening to your favourite piece of music, repeatedly. It is entirely possible that a whodunnit could have been written extremely deftly, but once you know who it was who put the strychnine in the soup, there is little point in revisiting the narrative. The suspense has been laid to rest. You will always know that it was the butler who did it. As a category, by definition, murder mysteries do not generally merit a second reading, however well written. With due apologies to Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Ruth Rendell and their ilk. The other issue I have with best-selling crime novels, even those written by éminence grises of the supreme quality of Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers or P.D. James is that most of their works have also been adapted to film and television serials, and very well produced too. In fact, in the case of the Sherlock Holmes oeuvre, over the decades many of his famous stories have been filmed in a variety of adaptations such that we have a surfeit of The Hound of the Baskervilles, A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, et al. There is such a thing as having too much of a good thing. Let me reiterate, lest you get the wrong impression, that I yield to no one in my admiration for these great authors and their works. I am merely emphasizing that the genre tends to preclude a second reading for its own sake. I am open to a divergence of opinion.

Speaking of building suspense and climaxing with the final denouement, I would urge readers of this blog to key in on YouTube, The Missing Page, featuring that lugubrious British comedian of the 60s, Tony Hancock. The episode hilariously demonstrates what happens when our protagonist, Hancock, borrows a murder mystery novel, Lady Don’t Fall Backwards, from his local library, only to mortifyingly find the revelatory last page missing, presumably torn out by the previous sadistic reader. He spends sleepless nights trying to outguess the author and takes the librarian to task for his lack of diligence in keeping books with pages missing. He even attempts to locate the author to uncover the mystery only to learn that he has died, and the book is out of print. It’s a laugh-a-minute episode, not slapstick, brilliantly scripted and wonderfully acted. A single viewing will not suffice.

Let us now take P.G. Wodehouse. Between you, me and the gatepost, I can take Wodehouse all the year round. Weaned on the master of farce, as he has often been described, from an early age, I have read most of his famous novels at least twice, if not more. You may well ask why. As I write this column, I am well into chapter five of The Code of the Woosters, a Jeeves / Wooster classic. This could quite possibly be my 10^th reading of this ageless wonder involving Bertie Wooster’s escapades in an old English country pile, with his gentleman’s personal gentleman, Jeeves, on hand to rescue his master at every turn from a fate worse than death. A silver 18th century cow creamer plays a sterling part! There are, of course, several other novels by Sir Pelham featuring the likes of Lord Emsworth and his frightful sisters, not forgetting his magnificent sow, the Empress of Blandings, Galahad and Freddie Threepwood, Uncle Fred, aka Lord Ickenham and his greatly put-upon nephew, Pongo Twistleton, the Mulliner tales, the Golfing stories, Ukridge, Psmith (the P is silent), Gussie Fink-Nottle and so many more. On reflection, why do I waste words when I can quote one of our contemporary comic geniuses, Stephen Fry (who essayed Jeeves on television) on Wodehouse.

‘Had his only contribution to literature been Lord Emsworth and Blandings Castle, his place in history would have been assured. Had he written of none but Mike and Psmith, he would be cherished today as the best and brightest of our comic authors. If Jeeves and Wooster had been his solitary theme, still he would be hailed as the Master. If he had given us only Ukridge, or nothing but recollections of the Mulliner family, or a pure diet of golfing stories, Doctor Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse would nonetheless be considered immortal. That he gave us all those – and more – is our good fortune and a testament to the most industrious, prolific and beneficent author ever to have sat down, scratched his head and banged out a sentence.’

I will move on from Wodehouse, but not before leaving you with a couple of gems, among hundreds, that demonstrate why we read the man over and over again. ‘The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.’ The Adventures of Sally. ‘The great thing in life, Jeeves, if we wish to be happy and prosperous, is to miss as many political debates as possible.’ Much Obliged, Jeeves. The last quote resonates like a ton of bricks with me every evening when I tune in to the chaos that is our so-called television debates here in India. As to those unfortunates who have never laid their eyes on a Wodehouse tome, they are more to be pitied than censured.

Evelyn Waugh, a contemporary of P.G. Wodehouse’s, had this to say of the great humourist, ‘Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.’ It is a quote that adorns many of Wodehouse’s book jacket covers. Waugh himself was no slouch when it came to the telling phrase that rousingly celebrates the English language. Author of some of the finest novels you could hope to get your hands on, special mention must be made of Brideshead Revisited, Put Out More Flags and The Decline and Fall. Mr. Waugh clearly did not care much for newspapers, about which he said, ‘News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead.’ As with any great writer, words are Waugh’s stock-in-trade. As he memorably puts it, ‘One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.’ That’s one in the eye for the lay person who keeps carping about writers ‘who use big words.’ Evelyn’s son Auberon, himself a journalist and satirist of note during the 80s, didn’t quite achieve his father’s everlasting fame.

It is rare, in the world of English Literature to witness a father and his son achieve stardom almost contemporaneously. The exception to the rule, Sir Kingsley Amis and his son Martin Amis, managed to do just that. Overly fond of his daily libation than was good for him, Kingsley Amis nevertheless wrote a clutch of highly acclaimed novels, most notably his 1954 debut Lucky Jim, a trenchant, rollicking send-up of the literary world, academia and those who peopled it. Here is the highly articulate atheist commentator, gadfly and essayist, the late Christopher Hitchens on Amis’ novel. ‘If you can picture Bertie or Jeeves being capable of actual malice, and simultaneously imagine Evelyn Waugh forgetting about original sin, you have the combination of innocence and experience that makes this short romp so imperishable.’ Lucky Jim requires to be read twice, at least, to savour its subtle and heady flavours. Again, not to miss the reverberating Wodehouse reference. Two great quotes from Lucky Jim – ‘If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.’ And this classic, ‘His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.’

The Amis scion, Martin, a close friend of Christopher Hitchens’ has earned the sobriquet of being the enfant terrible of contemporary English Literature. A prolific novelist, essayist and memoirist, Martin Amis is a modern-day literary celebrity on a par with the likes of Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and of course, Hitchens himself. Among his many books, he may be best remembered for three novels, collectively referred to as the London Trilogy – Money, London Fields and The Information. Martin Amis’ stories and essays are often dark, dense, thickly portentous and his descriptions and dialogues can take you into uncharted territory. Hence the need to re-read and get a grip on his amazing felicity and razor-sharp observations. His elegant prose can traverse comfortably from high-minded sublime to absolute down and dirty, but the Force is always with him. ‘Someone watches over us when we write,’ he says disarmingly. ‘Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.’ How true, even if we are not aware of it and even if we are non-believers. And my personal favourite – ‘What we eventually run up against are the forces of humourlessness, and let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don’t just not know what’s funny, they don’t know what’s serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn’t be trusted with anything.’ Strong stuff, but as a lifelong follower of humour as a genre, I concur unreservedly.

What I have shared with you, dear reader, is only a smidgen of a sample which does not even begin to scratch the surface of the riches that are available in terms of reading material. Before you hastily order your next best-seller from Amazon, take a quick look at the stack of books in your home library and ask yourself this question, ‘Should I be re-reading some of these great novels and discovering hidden literary treasures that might have escaped me at the first reading, ‘born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness in the desert air,’ before splurging on new books with no space to keep them?’ You might duck that issue by turning to the digital Kindle, which obviates the space problem but that, in my humble opinion, would be indulging in prevarication.

As Oscar Wilde, who can never be kept out of any literary discussion, said, ‘If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.’

PS: In case you’re wondering, I have excluded Shakespeare from the ambit of this discussion for obvious reasons. We quote extensively from the Bard’s complete works, as I have at the top of this piece, but we do not pass an idle hour reading his plays from cover to cover, inviting cervical cricks. Unless, of course, it was part of our school or university syllabus, or if we were treading the boards in fancy dress, playing Richard III or Hamlet.

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times. Mark Twain

How times have changed. Not all that long ago, actually it was a long time ago in the 70s, when I first started working in an advertising agency in Calcutta, smoking was all the rage. I’ll come to drinking in a while. At the ad agency, pretty much everybody, men and women, lit up a Wills Filter or a Charminar or, if you belonged to the higher echelons of the corporate ladder, India Kings would be the order of the day. Those privileged few who returned after a trip to the United States, United Kingdom or any other part of the world, flashed a duty-free carton each of Dunhill, Marlboro or Benson & Hedges, courtesy Indian Customs’ munificence. A pack or two was all it took to grease the palms of some of the customs officials to chalk a tick mark on your bulging suitcase, enabling it to pass unhindered through the green channel. If you were an inverted snob, as some of our creative writers and designers at the agency were, even the humble rolled up beedi was in the mix. For the more discerning, a pouch of Prince Henry scented tobacco (peeping out of a shirt pocket) was also part of the smoker’s paraphernalia. Pipe or cigar smokers were sighted, though rarely, but there were the odd big shots who sported them with much ostentation.

I am not certain if the poet and novelist Rudyard Kipling was a male chauvinist of the porcine persuasion, but he is ‘credited’ with the quote, ‘A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke,’ whatever that was supposed to mean. Speaking of women, in the late 60s in America, Virginia Slims launched an eponymous brand of elegantly slim cigarettes, with the women’s lib inspired catchphrase, ‘You’ve come a long way, baby.’ All in all, there was so much smoke swirling around the office you would have been hard pressed to see the person standing in front of you. All right, so I am exaggerating a trifle here, but put it down to literary hyperbole to drive home a point.

This was a phenomenon that was not unique to our organization. The whole of corporate Calcutta, or for that matter corporate India and possibly the world, was lighting up like there was no tomorrow. To employ celebrated British author Nancy Mitford’s coinage, very au courant during the 60s and 70s, smoking was U and an abstaining non -smoker was, well, non-U. In other words, if you smoked you were ‘with it’ while the non-smokers were out of the charmed inner circle. ‘You’re never alone with a Strand,’ was a famous cigarette ad slogan in the UK. Here in India Wills’ ‘Made for Each Other’ swept the honours boards in the popularity charts. When you consider the fact that one of India’s largest advertisers of the day, ITC Ltd., market leaders in branded cigarettes was headquartered in Calcutta, the biggest client for some of the leading ad agencies at the time, one smoked the company’s brands almost out of a sense of bounden duty. If ITC told you to jump you asked, ‘how high?’

In sharp contrast, in my own family circle, smoking was considered not just an abhorrent habit, but calculated to shorten your life by at least a third. Medical science strongly supported that view. More to the point, the filthy habit was seen as the worst kind of moral turpitude. Smoking was placed on par with immorality of the highest, or do I mean lowest, order. Debauchery might have just about pipped smoking to the post, as far as scraping the bottom of the morality barrel was concerned, but not by much. My father would view anyone seen with a cigarette dangling from his lips like something the cat had brought in. If it happened to be a woman puffing away, she was a gone case, banished to everlasting perdition. Even if he had to reluctantly tolerate a smoker in his midst, say at an official party, if the showoff smoker had the temerity to blow smoke rings in the air, that spelt the end of their relationship. Since my pater was still in service when I started my career in advertising, I would dread the day he would decide to casually walk into the agency to see ‘how his son was faring.’ That is, of course, if he could have floundered through all the smoke and found my cubicle in our ‘den of vice.’ Fortunately, that day never arrived and he retired soon after and settled down in pious Madras.

Speaking for myself, I was not a great fan of the habit. However, on the specious reasoning that one had to keep up with the Joneses, one would puff the odd fag now and then in a spirit of camaraderie, just to show there was no ill feeling. As I was a bachelor at the time and living with my parents, a couple of strong mint chewing gums on returning home provided rigorous exercise to my dentures, in the hope that any residual evidence of tobacco odour would have been obliterated. I think it worked, else my mother would have thrown an apoplectic fit and my father would have had to manage anger and depression (my mother’s) at the same time.

A quick word about drinking. Alcohol, I mean. Much as my folks would not have been patting me approvingly on the back for downing a couple of beers or something even stronger, the lack of overt visual unsightliness while drinking, unlike smoking, did not seem to greatly bother them. Gin and water would look just like a plain, odourless glass of water. An uncle of mine was overly partial to this innocuous looking, but lethal, potion. Kindly bear in mind that we are talking about someone, that’s me, who had just broken out of his teens, in his early twenties, stepping out into the big, bad world where vice and sin stalked the innocent lamb at every corner. Or so it was perceived. Another uncle of mine, who did not wish to utter the word beer within his wife’s earshot, would invite me to go out with him for a spot of ‘malt and yeast.’ By the same logic, chewing paan with treated tobacco and shaved betel nuts, was considered kosher. Subterfuge was the order of the day. My father was an occasional, social imbiber. He sedulously stored a bottle of Chivas Regal in his cupboard for what I believe was at least twenty-five years! Whether that gave it an extra vintage halo or not, I could not say. What little was consumed of it was usually by our next-door neighbour, who would pop round once in a while to down a convivial peg or two, much to my mother’s chagrin.

At some stage, I found even casual smoking provided little joy and much discomfort, and the world had started talking aggressively about the ills of the habit. Advertisements of tobacco and related products were banned and even cigarette packs carried ghastly visuals of skeletal bodies at terminal stages of cancer or lung disease. Ad agencies were going bankrupt. International airports were fitted out with special booths for smokers to congregate, shoulder-to-shoulder and smoke their hearts, or lungs, out to kingdom come. In fact, it’s been a complete turnaround. Mitford’s U and non-U appellation has been totally reversed. Smokers are now almost treated like pariahs (outcasts). In offices, they need to step out of the premises if they desperately need a drag. Thankfully, the little I myself indulged in the habit, after a fashion in the 70s, I gave up soon thereafter. You wouldn’t catch me touching a fag with the proverbial bargepole. Hardly anyone I know smokes nowadays, barring an occasional gasper or two at a party where alcohol is flowing freely. Somehow, even those who puff on a ciggy infrequently are tempted to light up when they are involved in some serious elbow-bending with a glass of single malt or Bloody Mary.

As for drinking, as I had suggested earlier, if you are an alcoholic beyond repair you don’t belong to the land of the living. Abandon hope. However, a glass of beer, a goblet of wine (red or white), or even something stronger in strict moderation, comes under the definition of social drinking, and not too many eyebrows will be raised. Assuming, of course, that you are an adult and know how to hold a drink. This hocus-pocus of ‘my doctor told me two large pegs a day does wonders for my heart,’ is just that, absolute balderdash. The problem is that most doctors lead tension-filled, hectic professional lives, and feel the need to let their hair down once in a while, and who can blame them? Have a civilized drink or two by all means, but don’t justify it by pretending it’s great for health. Only a loony doctor will ever actually say that. Let’s face it. At the end of the day, there will always be smokers in our midst, but at least they cannot say they were not warned of the consequences.

I’ll raise a small peg to that!

Those of you who follow current affairs in India will doubtless have heard that a recent pronouncement by the big nobs in the Maharashtra Government has declared that, henceforth all telephone calls to government offices or officials will be greeted by a cheery Vande Mataram, presumably spoken and not sung. In other words, it’s goodbye to hello. Or as The Beatles so presciently and harmoniously put it all those years ago, Hello, Goodbye. This edict will need to be strictly followed by all government and quasi-government officials. In due course, it is hoped the habit will spread to all sections of the society in that state. While I have yet to read the small print in the form of an official circular, if there be one, presumably it would have been written in Marathi for starters, a language I am not familiar with, then translated into Hindi, thence to English, by which time the trial run of greeting all and sundry in the corridors of Government establishments in Maharashtra with a Vande Mataram, will have run its course. Or run out of gas, with any luck. This is not unlike forcibly thrusting the National Anthem down our throats in cinema halls at the start or at the end of watching three hours of Ben-Hur or Gone with the Wind. Doesn’t quite gel, if you get my meaning. Thankfully, wiser counsel prevailed, the courts took a dim view of it and we are now spared the ignominy of watching people rushing to the exits to get to the loos first, while the anthem is just about gathering up a nice head of steam.

Loosely translated, Vande Mataram means ‘salutations to the motherland.’ Written by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in 1875, it is officially designated the national song of India, not to be confused with India’s national anthem which, of course, is Rabindranath Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana. One should be mindful of how one employs those two terms – anthem and song. Why we need to have a national anthem as well as a national song is beyond all understanding. There was much heated debate in our media on the subject, but as with so many such controversies, it all came to nought and we are back to the comfortable status quo. What is more, Vande Mataram has so many musical variants that its real personality gets obfuscated. From the 1952 Anand Math film version, based on Bankim Chandra’s story of the same name, down to A.R.Rahman’s latter-day, much-loved rendition (Maa tujhe salaam), the song has gone through several gears – lyrically and musically. What is more, in south India over the decades, Carnatic musicians have rendered in a garland of ragas (ragamalika), the Devi shloka ‘Vande Mataram Ambikaam Bhagavatim,’ an essential part of a Carnatic music concert repertoire.

That said, the thought of tinkering around with two anthems is not without precedent. When the great British mystic poet, William Blake wrote his rousingly patriotic poem Jerusalem in 1804, little did he know that it would be set to music a century later and dubbed Britain’s national song, as opposed to their anthem God Save the Queen / King. Musically, Jerusalem is more melodic and rousing than the preferred anthem, but these are matters for the denizens of Great Britain to mull over. Even now, Britishers constantly debate if Jerusalem would make for a better choice as their anthem. As we in India usually tend to follow our erstwhile masters in many respects, it was refreshing to see the present dispensation in Delhi take the road less travelled and replace the hymn Abide with Me with Kavi Pradeep’s seminal poem, Aye mere watan ke logon (immortalised by Lata Mangeshkar) at our Republic Day parade. This has not gone down very well with the many who go misty-eyed and nostalgic for all things past. That Mahatma Gandhi too was reportedly extremely fond of Abide with me only added to the contentious confusion.

For myself, I love the movingly composed Biblical hymn. We sang it often during chapel service in school, but I can see where the government is coming from. We are making moves, whenever an opportunity presents itself, to divest ourselves of long-time symbols of colonial subjugation. Thankfully, this patriotic logic has not been extended to great monuments and the like (Ye Gods!), though replacing British royalty with Indian stalwarts on existing plinths and canopies is perfectly acceptable. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in place of King George V at India Gate was widely welcomed, and the current political masters in New Delhi milked it for all it’s worth. However, being a contrarian fellow, I would hate to see the magnificent statue of Queen Victoria sitting on the throne at the entrance to the grand Victoria Memorial Hall in Calcutta, being replaced by someone like, say, Ashoka the Great. Not that I have anything against the great Mauryan Emperor. It is simply an artistic genuflection, nothing to do with patriotism. Meanwhile, cities and street names all over the country are constantly renamed such that the Post Master General is tearing his hair out trying to keep abreast.

While on the subject of British relics, there is an interesting, and somewhat saucy, footnote pertaining to the Queen’s recent funeral ceremonies. On television many Indian viewers were pleasantly taken aback when they were shown a group of British children reciting, most proficiently, a well-known Sanskrit vedic shloka from the Upanishads. It was wrongly assumed this was performed specially as part of the dedication obsequies for the late Queen Elizabeth II. Now here comes the twist. It turns out that the video, which dates back to 2009, showed the children reciting the shloka at the Commonwealth Games, The Queen’s Baton Relay 2010, which was held on 29 October 2009 at Buckingham Palace, London. Whether this was stated upfront by those responsible for the telecast or not is unclear. To give the organisers of the funeral telecast the benefit of the doubt, they probably meant well and most of us were impressed with the recitation.

Little wonder that some states in India like Karnataka have arranged to have their own state anthem in the local language, in this case Kannada. There has been much argy-bargy over this issue and I am not sure if a final decision on the matter has been taken. Depending on the length of these anthems, the start of an international cricket match, say between India and Sri Lanka in Bangalore could be a long-drawn affair. The Indian team will have to mouth the national anthem and keep their eyes closed during the Kannada anthem, since the players will not know the lyrics or the tune, followed by the Sri Lankan anthem which, I happen to know, goes on forever. The toss will, literally and metaphorically, go for a toss.

To get back to the raison d’etre of this piece, it would be fascinating to speculate on what prompted the Government of Maharashtra to come up with this knee-jerk decision to disband the familiar ‘hello’ salutation with part of the first line of our national song, not to be confused with the anthem. One assumes the Chief Minister and his colleagues have more pressing issues on their plate, including the vexed question of which of the two warring factions of the Shiv Sena has the right to take legal possession of their brand name and symbol. The courts are still chewing the cud over that matter.

There must be so many other everyday problems to be tackled by the ruling coalition in Maharashtra. The problematic question of which faction of the Shiv Sena can address their multitudes at the legendary Shivaji Park in Mumbai during the Dussehra celebrations has been settled by the courts, and they have many more issues to fight over. Yet with all these distractions, out of nowhere the Chief Minister walks into his morning meeting with his cabinet and declares, ‘From this moment on, we stop using anglicized words like “hello” to greet one another. It is going to be Vande Mataram. Got it? Please pass this message down the line to every single government servant. Thank you. Vande Mataram.’ Caused quite a shindig, did CM Shinde. All that would have, naturally, been said in Marathi. I take it that ‘thank you’ will pass muster for the time being till an acceptable vernacular alternative can be agreed upon. I shudder to think what would happen if this initiative from Mumbai’s Mantralaya becomes a national movement! Tamil Nadu’s Vanakkam some of us are already familiar with, though not enforced officially and Bengal could have the time of their lives and go the whole hog with Nomoshkar.

This naming and nomenclature sickness, not to speak of language politics, always on the boil, has reached endemic proportions in our country. It keeps happening in dribs and drabs but, like the proverbial canary in a coal mine, could presage a major linguistic fracas in the making – a Tower of Babel we can well do without in polyglot India.

I went window shopping today. I bought four windows. British comedian Tommy Cooper.

A few weeks ago, I had sounded off on the unintended perils of online shopping, regretting our inability to actually shop at shops, if you get my drift. All that is fast changing. What with the pandemic and everything, for the past couple of years or so, we have hardly ever stepped out of hearth and home to do a bit of shopping. The operative phrase there is ‘stepped out.’ Shopping, as in finding a place to park the car, wheeling around the premises pushing a cart, looking at packs and bottles, squinting at the almost unreadable expiry dates and price tags, going through that touchy, feely, tactile experience that real-life shopping entails.  The other kind of shopping we have done aplenty, all of it online from the comfort of our drawing room or study or wherever the mood took us. Highly impersonal of course, but the convenience cannot be denied. Press a few keys on your smartphone, select the items, approve the amount, tap in the OTP and literally in the blink of an eye, 4 tetra packs of mixed-fruit juice and 2 packets of salt have arrived in place of the 6 cans of Coke and 2 packets of sugar you had ordered. No problem. The complaints procedure online is smooth, somebody will rush round to your place by the evening to collect the erroneous deliveries, but you will have to re-order the original items you wanted. No, the amount will not be refunded, but will be held in suspense and adjusted against the fresh order, which will be delivered the following day provided said items are in stock. Which is often not the case. Some of them agree to send the money back to your credit card account, but tracking the credit to see if Rs.153.40p has actually been returned is tedious in the extreme. The only hassle with this arrangement is that we might have invited guests over that very evening. Woe is me. Let me try another portal.

I should not be too harsh. Fair’s fair. Most of the time the online giants get it right, but until we have actually opened the delivery bags, we will have no clue what surprises and shocks are in store for us. That said, now that the pandemic appears to be behind us, more or less, most of us have ventured out to enjoy the real, and at times dubious, pleasures of real-life shopping, something we had almost forgotten about. Virtual shopping will be there till the cows come home but now we have an alternative option, one that we are accustomed to. I am, of course, referring to those of us who were born before the new millennium.

The nearest departmental store is just a stone’s throw away from where we live, so thither we repaired in good spirits, the wife and I, suitably masked up. Parking was not an issue as we set out fairly early. As we approached the entrance, we observed, to our dismay, that the shutters were three-quarters of the way down, and there was a handful of other customers waiting to get in. I turned to the nearest gentleman and inquired of him what the problem was. ‘The uniformed chap at the entrance says they are taking an audit of the inventory, and that the sales boys and girls are being given a quick briefing. All this could take some time and we will have to wait.’

 ‘Was the shop burgled overnight or something?’ I asked. ‘It’s 10.30 in the morning. Surely audits and stuff take place during the small hours of the morning.’ The equally miffed customer merely shrugged his shoulders.

Anyhow, after another 20 minutes or so of idling and goggling (and Googling) at our mobile phones, the shutters clattered up. Open sesame. We all rushed in like there’s no tomorrow. An assortment of smells assailed our olfactory senses. Fishy from the meat corner, heady perfumes wafting from a nearby shelf and spices catching our throats and nostrils from the condiments and provisions space further down. A strange, smelly concoction this, one that I was quite happy to experience though they could have spared us the fishy pong. It was time to hurry along and not waste time tarrying. The poet might have said, ‘What is this life if, full of care / We have no time to stand and stare.’ Unless we were standing and staring at our mobile phones, naturally. The adrenalin was now coursing through my veins as I looked forward to that touchy, feely experience I was talking about. While my wife traipsed off to some section specialising in branded astringents and cleaning agents, I made tracks for the food section. I was looking for some interesting salad dressing and dips for our cocktail snacks. My intense searches having revealed zilch, I cast around for a shop assistant. There were not more than three in the entire shop, so I walked across and cleared my throat behind a slender, uniformed girl, who looked not more than 17 years old and who was bending down inspecting some nameless bottles in a cardboard carton. She turned round, startled, on hearing my catarrhal throat-clearing.

‘Yes Sir?’

‘I need some help. Can you please point me to where I might find dips and salad dressing?’ That was plain enough but the adolescent looked out of her depth.

‘Fruit salad, Sir? This way, please.’

‘No. no, not fruit salad. I am looking for salad dressing. As well as some interesting dips.’

‘Dips?’

‘Yes, got it first time, well done. And salad dressing.’

The girl scrunched her nose, raised her eyebrows and said, ‘Sir, we have got chips. Also clips in that section,’ she pointed vaguely towards the middle-distance behind her back. Why she would word-associate chips or clips with dips and salad dressing was a mystery, but I let it pass. I felt like giving her a clip round the ear, but wiser counsel prevailed. I decided to put her out of her misery. ‘Why don’t you call your supervisor?’

Relieved of the inquisition, she rushed off to some back office. After another ten minutes had passed, a tall, not-so-young man presented himself – an authority figure. I felt reassured.

‘Good morning, Sir. I understand you are looking for drips. Saline, would that be? Sorry Sir, we do not have a pharmacy section here. There’s one just across the road.’

What was wrong with this place? Was everyone hard of hearing? ‘Thank you,’ I replied not hiding my irritation very well. ‘How about salad dressing? Are you going to send me into the waiting arms of a nearby Italian restaurant?’ He didn’t quite catch my bitingly sarcastic dressing down.

‘Salad dressing,’ he repeated thoughtfully spelling the syllables out, like he had never heard of it, which he probably hadn’t, ‘you mean like that gooey liquid they mix all those leaves and vegetables with?’

Now we were getting somewhere. I had wronged the man. I knew how to leap on the back of dawning intelligence and make it gallop, as I once heard someone describe it. ‘Exactly. Gooey liquid. I couldn’t have put it better myself. I am talking about Vinaigrette, Thousand Island, Honey and Mustard, Bleu Cheese, that sort of thing.’

The dawning intelligence took three steps back towards fading dusk. We were back to square one. He whipped out his mobile phone and called up someone, presumably another colleague sitting in that mysterious back office. He moved further away from me so I couldn’t follow the conversation. After five minutes or so, he stuffed the mobile into his shirt pocket and returned with a half-smile.

‘Sir, we can do some imported olive oil and vinegar dressing, nuts and seeds, beans and legumes as well as a variety of dried fruits. Not to mention baked tortilla, pita chips, shredded hard cheeses and fresh fruit. I am told you can make an excellent salad from these ingredients. We are well stocked with all these items.’ I was irresistibly reminded of the Waldorf Salad incident in that hilarious television comedy, Fawlty Towers.

I was on the verge of stealing Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry copyright with a threatening ‘Go ahead, make my day,’ but by now, in a strange turn of mood, I started feeling sorry for the staff of this establishment. I mean, they have also been suffering without a single customer walking in for over two years. This sudden deluge of walk-ins had left them unprepared and caught off-guard. Fresh, wet-behind-the-ears trainees were being put through the mill. Inventories were out of whack. It was a mess. Still and all, actually interacting with another human being made for a refreshing change. I was simpatico.

‘I fully understand, my old Supervisor. We have to give you all time to differentiate between dips and drips and salad dressings can be tricky. Tell you what, I’ll take 250gms of all that stuff you just listed and we’ll see how it goes.’ The supervisor beamed and the adolescent was all smiles, 32 pearly teeth in good order. I had made their day!

As I was proceeding to the check-out counter, I saw my wife approaching with what looked like a fancy, stainless steel pedal trash can and a roll of black, perforated rubbish bags. ‘What happened to the branded astringent and cleaning agent?’ I asked. ‘Not in stock, but they helpfully gave me these’ she replied, not without a touch of irony. We paid for the items, after some drama with the recalcitrant credit card machine and soon were home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

Settled in my favourite reclining arm-chair, I got my mobile out and logged on to my Amazon account.

Ever since Roger Federer announced that he is hanging up his racket for good, there has been an avalanche of goodwill messages from all over the world wishing the maestro well. Copious tears have been shed. That was only to be expected, given all that the great man has achieved in the world of tennis. Nadal and Djokovic, Federer’s greatest rivals, have been leading the charge with their emotion-filled missives on social media, followed by any number of other tennis personalities, both from the men’s and the distaff side of the game singing hosannas to the player who defined elegance, style and class on a tennis court. We saw it coming, his exit that is, over the last couple of years (he is 41 years old) but when the announcement actually arrived, most tennis aficionados felt that this was a vacuum that may never be filled. Nadal and the Djoker are still there, not for long one suspects, and brilliant, young upstarts like Alcaraz and Sinner are putting down a marker on the world stage. The moot question is, can anyone capture the public imagination like the genius from Basel did? Time, and it will be a very long time, will tell. The GOAT debate has raged for a while and depending on whether you are from Spain, Serbia or Switzerland, the accolade for the greatest will vary. If the vote was not based on sheer numbers and only on emotion, the Fed will win hands down. For when the dust has settled and the fat lady has sung, that is how Roger Federer will be remembered – an Emotion. As our magnificent Lone Ranger rides off into the sunset on his white steed, swinging for one last time his Wilson Pro Staff RF 97 Autograph racket, we can hear a distant ‘Hi-yo, Silver! Away!’

I have been asked by some of those who read my blogs (about five of them when I last checked) why I have not yet joined the clamorous bandwagon of gushing fans penning an appreciative paean on arguably the greatest tennis player ever to whip a single-handed, backhand cross court winner past a bemused opponent. I have succumbed to pressure as you can see, if you are reading this. My initial hesitancy was due to the fact that I could hardly add anything of value to the reams of copy already circulating around the globe, across media, telling us why we are all going to miss this icon of the game. Not that we needed any telling. Furthermore, Federer’s timing of his retirement coincided with the passing of a much-loved British monarch, give or take a few days. That meant the King of tennis had to vie with the Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for public attention. For all that Federer is an adored superstar, Her Majesty, regally holding nothing more than her Sceptre for some 70 years, now interred at Windsor, was going to win that particular contest hands down. Queen Elizabeth II could not do much about when she was going to pass on and join her royal ancestors at the great palace in the sky, but the sultan of the tennis court could have deferred his announcement by a couple of weeks. That may sound facetious (I speak as a tennis buff) but Federer certainly deserved to be given a proper send-off without high-profile and protracted royal obsequies raining on his parade.

Roger Federer may not be a royal in the sense in which members of the Windsor family are, but anyone who understands the difference between a second serve and a double fault will tell you that the balletic Swiss is regal. Regal in a way no tennis player before him has been, certainly not on a tennis court. Federer’s racket skills can only be compared to Zubin Mehta’s baton waving while conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic. His personality off court was as winning as his achievements on court. Measured purely on the scale of fan following, he reigns supreme. All he needed was the Ermine cape, the Orb, the Sceptre and the Crown and he could have walked into Buckingham Palace, no questions asked, though King Charles III might have thrown a hissy-fit like he did recently when his fountain pen leaked. However, Federer is certainly the King of Wimbledon measured by the number of singles titles won, unless Djokovic goes past him in the near future. However, let us not get completely carried away. Roger Federer was and is human. Almost. As a callow youth, he had to deal with anger management issues and was known to throw temper tantrums like you wouldn’t believe. The broken rackets at the Federer homestead would have kept the family warm at the fireplace during the chill winters of his home country.

Fortunately, unlike some other famous tennis stars I could name, Federer quickly learnt how to disport himself on the world stage, particularly when he started winning the biggies on the circuit. All the world was, indeed, a stage for him. He smiled a lot when he won, cried a lot when he won, and lost. A lachrymose chap, our Roger. I had mentioned earlier that Federer was an Emotion with a capital E, but he was also emotional on court and wore his heart on his sleeve. And didn’t his fans love him for it. It’s not that they loved Nadal less, it’s just that they loved Federer more. As for Djoko, even he knows nobody loves him (his compatriots aside), and the feisty Serb draws strength from that. When the crowd yells ‘C’mon Roger,’ Novak hears ‘C’mon Novak.’ But that’s another story. Incidentally, I am glad Roger got rid of that pony tail he flaunted in his initial days on the circuit.

Federer’s retirement has also unleashed the dreaded punning epidemic amongst headline writers in the print and social media. A rash of puns, some clever, some plain asinine, mostly overwrought has assailed readers this past week. ‘End of the FED-ERA’ screamed one, ‘PeRFection’ was not bad, ‘Roger and Out’ went another, ‘Roger that!’ was repeated ad nauseum. War comics clichés are clearly still an inspiration. The transportation major, FedEx lapped up a lot of cheap publicity every time Roger won somewhere with copywriters falling over each other to come up with lines like ‘Fedex delivers on time.’  In slightly cruder, impolite usage, we have also heard the phrase, ‘So-and-so was Rogered in straight sets.’ I need hardly elaborate on that. One headline in the French newspaper L’Equipe puzzled me slightly. The paper dedicated its front page to Federer with the phrasing ‘God Save The King.’ Apparently, the tribute to the tennis legend is a reference to the accession of King Charles III in the United Kingdom but as an attempt at the telling double entendre it was a bit of a stretch and did not quite make sense. That is the problem with punning for its own sake. You can miss the wood for the trees.

It is axiomatic that you cannot compare players of one generation with that of another, purely on the basis of numbers. By any reckoning, Australia’s finest sportsman (a photo finish with Don Bradman) would be Rod Laver, the tennis colossus who won, back-to-back, all the four Grand Slam singles titles in the same calendar year, and he did it twice with a 7-year gap in 1962 and 1969. Djokovic came within a whisker of achieving that feat in 2019 but fell at the last hurdle at the US Open. The ongoing Laver Cup, pitting Team Europe against Team World being played in London, featuring the present-day giants of the game, including for one last time Federer, is a fitting tribute to ‘The Rockhampton Rocket.’ As I put this piece to bed, I have just seen Roger’s final match partnering Rafa at the Laver Cup, post which the tears flowed freely. Roger, as is his wont, choked up while trying to speak, Rafa was almost inconsolable as was the sobbing full-house at the magnificent London 02 Arena. Rumours that a super-sopper had to be employed to mop up and dry the court for the next game, was a tad exaggerated.

 Over the last century many changes have been wrought in court conditions, quality of equipment, physical fitness and so on. Then there’s the money. Enough said. Even taking all those changes into consideration, for three players to win, between them over roughly the same period, 63 Grand Slam singles titles (and counting) is staggering. Longevity is being redefined. Novak and Rafa will enjoy superiority in numbers over Federer and that is not to be pooh-poohed in our unabashed adulation of Federer. I would only like to end by throwing one challenge, the ultimate acid test. Just walk out onto the street and buttonhole one hundred people at random, and ask them who their favourite tennis player in the world is. If Roger Federer does not overwhelmingly win that statistically valid dip-stick survey, I will eat my non-existent and metaphorical hat. Vox populi! King Federer has retired. Long live the King!

Now then, where’s my box of Kleenex tissues?

I am always deeply suspicious of anyone who starts a sentence, particularly in answer to a question, any question, with the words, ‘To be perfectly honest with you…’ It matters not a whit what the question is. I have watched several eminent personalities resort to this reflex-induced, often irrelevant, for the most part dishonest, kick-off to their response. I suppose it is slightly better than the patronizing ‘I am so glad you asked me that question.’ Then there is the present-day abomination where almost anyone on television starts a sentence with the monosyllabic So. ‘Do you think inflation will be a problem in the near future?’ ‘So, let me be perfectly honest with you.’ You get the picture. This does not include Indian politicians at the very highest echelons because most of them prefer to converse in Hindi or some other vernacular of their preference. The local lingo does not quite possess an equivalent to ‘To be perfectly honest…’ Not literally, but metaphorically. Furthermore, most of our political top guns are never unduly worried about whether they are going to be scrupulously honest (ha ha) or, as some prefer to describe it, ‘economical with the truth.’ There are exceptions of course, even in political circles, but finding such gems of purest ray serene would be akin to hunting for a needle in a haystack.

Take Shashi Tharoor for instance, the silver-tongued Congressman, who speaks English as to the manner born, Oxbridge accent et al. Not that he went to Oxford or Cambridge, but he somehow developed his plummy, English accent while studying, debating and treading the boards in Calcutta. That helped him enormously at the United Nations and other august international bodies where doors opened for him the moment he sonorously intoned, ‘Good morning, Mr. Kofi Annan.’ He even gave a lecture at the Oxford Union (so he did go to Oxford after all, in a manner of speaking) and told the Brits off in no uncertain terms for their 200 odd years of misrule in India. However, if I have heard him say this once, I must have heard him several times. To the question, ‘Mr. Tharoor, how did you come to speak English with a pluperfect accent and in such an orotund a manner that even the English are floored?’ His answer? ‘I am so glad you asked me that question. To be perfectly honest with you, your question incorporating words like “orotund” and “pluperfect” leads me to the inescapable conclusion that you are having a spot of risible fun at my expense.’ That may not be a verbatim reproduction of the hypothetical question posed or the imagined answer proffered by the loquacious parliamentarian, but near enough. I’ll say this in his favour, he does not start his sentences with the semi-literate So.

One last, if contentious issue about our eloquent MP from Trivandrum (or Thiruvananthapuram, if you want to be pedantic). I recently watched him on YouTube trying his hand at stand-up comedy and my sincere advice to him is to cease and desist. Just not his bag. I found his jokes contrived, flat and very unfunny. That he was reading these one-liners off handwritten notes made it only that much worse. He is much better off taking the strips off his political rivals with his Shakespearean flourishes and Wildean wit as his potent weapons. For one thing, his opponents don’t know what on earth he is saying which in itself is half the battle won. Only that they are being vaguely put down. Stick to your strengths, Shashi. As an incidental aside, dear reader, try saying Thiruvananthapuram slowly, provided you are sober, without tripping up around the fourth or fifth syllable. It is not easy if you do not belong to Kerala or the south of the Vindhyas. BJP’s cherubic and feisty spokesperson Sambit Patra tried it several times recently on television and came a cropper. He kept saying Thiruvanthpuram on numerous occasions without hitting the bull’s eye. I invite readers, even while ploughing through this blog, to closely compare Thiruvanthpuram with Thiruvananthapuram to spot the difference. The doughty Sambit Patra struggled manfully, unaware of his dysarthria. In similar fashion most of our news readers and north Indian politicians can never pronounce Karnataka. For inexplicable reasons, they will insist on pronouncing the name of the state as Karnatak. Ditto Keral for Kerala. Are they dyslexic or something? How would they take it if I pronounced Haryana as Haryaan?

To be perfectly honest, our Prime Minister set the ball rolling to send out friendly smoke signals to his fellow brethren in south India, Tamil Nadu in particular, when he quoted a line from poet and freedom fighter Subramanya Bharati, in Tamil, during the newly named Kartavya Path inauguration and the Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose statue unveiling in New Delhi. As a Tamilian myself, I would give the PM full marks for effort and displaying great courage. However, as the complex Tamil syllables (for a Gujarati, that is) Parukulle nalla nadu, engal Bharata nadu (India is the greatest nation in the world) hesitantly escaped the PM’s lips, many of us might have been excused for feeling that discretion could have been the better part of valour. Aren’t there any great Gujarati poets? I can do no better than seek recourse in Hamlet’s words, Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc’d it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. The Bard of Avon was the master of the mot juste.

My point being, what is there to be ‘perfectly honest’ about while making a simple and logical point. Let me now take another example, this from the world of management and business. ‘You must learn to think outside the box,’ is a phrase much favoured by business school students and their bosses in the corporate world, most of whom are also products of the same hallowed portals of management academia. As I had not graduated from a business school, I had problems with some of my better qualified colleagues and superiors in corporate life, who had the wood on me and kept asking me to think outside the box. Or square, if they wanted a bit of jargon variety. When this particular cliché was first thrown at me, my immediate response was, ‘To be perfectly honest, I am not sure I follow you. How do you mean outside the box? What box, which box?’ I was quite pungent with my reaction, which endeared me not one bit with my toffee-nosed colleagues. It was suggested to me that I might not climb very high in the corporate ladder, if I insisted on being ‘too clever by half.’ There’s another one, I thought. My response was a real zinger. I replied vaguely, ‘Ah well, what you lose on the swings, you make up on the roundabouts.’ The recipient of this remark had no clue what I was talking about, as I flounced out of the room in high dudgeon.

Clichés, when used sparingly, can help one make a telling point. However, more often than not, we tend to scatter them around like confetti, more to impress than to advance a serious case for its usage. I was once scolded by my history teacher in school for ‘taking one step forward and two steps back,’ and told that I will not make much progress in class.  At the time, I was happy just to put one foot in front of the other. I was 12 years old and I used to walk around the school grounds taking one step forward and retreating two steps back, wondering if that would throw some light on what my teacher meant by that strange admonition. In so doing, I discovered that I was standing at the same place and not making any progress in terms of moving forward. Then the meaning of the phrase hit me. Voila!

At the end of the day (that’s another favourite), my heart is heavy with whatever hearts are heavy with. To be perfectly honest, I concur with the homily that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and that you can’t go through life with your head buried in the sand. What’s more, no man is an island, necessity is the mother of invention and one should always let the shipwrecks of others be your seamark, so long as you remember that for things unknown there is no desire. Always keeping in mind that there are horses for courses, so long as you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and never forget that you can take a horse to the water trough but you can’t make the stubborn equine drink.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t know what on earth I am talking about any more, my head is all abuzz with aphorisms and other sayings we tend to come across and employ in our daily lives, oftentimes without even knowing what they mean. Nevertheless, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I take refuge once again in Shakespeare from ‘Measure for Measure,’ Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.

C’est tout.

After well over six decades of watching sport at the highest level, either live or on television, I am now able to say with a clear conscience, that top quality tennis is what I would like to sit and watch goggle-eyed till the end of my days. Like most Indians who are wedded to the arcane joys of cricket, I too belonged (I stress on the past tense) to that sturdy band of faithful who would follow the fortunes or misfortunes of the Indian cricket team to the ends of the earth. Well before our boys started strutting around the Elysian cricket fields of the world in blue-coloured clothing and before the ‘Men in Blue’ became a catchphrase in Indian cricket, I was rooting for the likes of Umrigar, Borde, Durrani, Pataudi, Jaisimha, Bedi, Prasanna, Chandra, Viswanath and Gavaskar, all attired in virginal whites and doing their country proud, even if we lost more often than we won. The last named, Gavaskar, was also witness to the advent of coloured clothing and instant cricket, albeit briefly, and captained India in one of their famous ODI multi-national tournament victories in Australia in 1985, defeating our nemesis Pakistan in the final. Oh, what joy! Nowadays we have started losing to those men in green which kind of evens things out, though the ignominy of it all hurts. Only a game, did you say? Go tell that to the marines.

There is a piquant irony attached to Gavaskar’s involvement in that 1985 tourney I mentioned. This monumental Test opening batsman once, I blush to state, during a Prudential World Cup game against England in 1975, played an inexplicably soporific innings, scoring 36 runs while facing 174 balls at an appalling, cringe-worthy strike rate of 20.68. I’ll remind you this was a one-day game! Maybe they forgot to tell him that. If this had happened in another, bygone era, he might well have been hauled up for a public flogging. Gavaskar made amends, as stated earlier, before hanging up his boots, more as a leader than for any hurricane effort at the crease. Today he holds forth on the game on television in a statesmanlike fashion, though he tends to be a tad touchy and thin-skinned, ready to lash out at anyone who is critical of his era. Quite rightly too. The man is a legend, for God’s sake. Show some respect.

I have just consumed around 400 words talking about a game I have vowed never to watch. However, I needed to pay homage to those cricketers who did draw me to the game in the first place and who were a lasting advertisement for all that was good and decent about Test cricket. Gavaskar was one of its finest ambassadors along with several others, across nations, who graced Lord’s and the Eden Gardens with equal aplomb in sparkling white flannels and ‘walked’ when the umpire raised that dreaded forefinger, with no recourse to DRS. Let me tell you there were some appalling umpiring decisions those days, with neutral umpires an unknown entity. Gavaskar blotted his copybook when he threatened to walk out in a Test in Melbourne in 1981. The little master felt, justifiably, that he was the victim of a horrendous umpiring howler, though he proffers his own version as to why he almost left the field and potentially forfeited the game. However, as my games master in school used to chide us if we made a fuss about a decision that went against us, ‘Does the scoreboard say you are out? Then you are out. The umpire’s decision is final.’ Thus chastised, we sat glumly licking our wounds and feeling sorry for ourselves.

The problem with watching cricket these days, even on television, is that there is far too much of it. Shakespeare’s Give me excess of it was all right for music, but cricket is a different kettle of fish, particularly the limited-overs version. T20 tops the list in terms of popularity, followed by the 50 over ODIs and those two versions of the game financially buttress Test cricket. The five-day Test sporadically produces interest whenever one’s own country does well. Otherwise, it seems to be living on borrowed time, surviving precariously on oxygen. There are those who aver that the death of Test cricket is greatly exaggerated, but I am ready to read the last rites. As I was saying, on our own television screens in India, international cricket is telecast wherever it is played in the world. Half the time, you are not sure who is playing whom and in which country. All these games kind of blur into one hazy, unrecognizable mass. Is it any wonder that many of us would rather watch something else, like tennis for instance?

Which gives me a little breathing space to talk about tennis. Only early this morning, I sat up to watch a quarter-final game at the US Open between two of the brightest young sparks adorning this lovely game at the present time. 19-year-old Carlos Alcaraz of Spain took on 21-year-old Jannik Sinner of Italy. For a little over five hours, these two youngsters served up an exhibition of tennis fit for the gods. Some of the rallies were simply off the wall, while the bemused spectators gawped open-mouthed in admiration. When the game finished, it was 3 am local time in New York. That Alcaraz eventually prevailed over the indefatigable Sinner is a minor detail of little consequence. To repeat that tired, old cliche, the game of tennis won. Move over Rafa, Novak and Roger. And probably Medvedev, Zverev and Tsitsipas. The future of tennis is here in the shape and form of Alcaraz and Sinner. While I say that, someone else like Casper Ruud or Frances Tiafoe might sneak in and win this last Grand Slam of the calendar year. Which only underscores the point I am making about so much fresh talent in the tennis world to keep us riveted. The women are equally exciting with fresh names like Świątek Sabalenka, Jabeur and Garcia filling in the vacuum created by the exit of Serena, Venus and their generation.

To get back to my original theme, I am done with following cricket, primarily because of its excessive and endemic presence in the sub-continent. Also, too much needless non-cricketing controversy, particularly when India takes on Pakistan. Frankly it’s getting to be boring in the extreme. Then again, that’s just me. And let’s not forget the IPL which grindingly fills in the gap whenever we are not involved in international fixtures. Cricket is now an industry, no longer a game.

Anyone for tennis?

‘Cause we’re goin’ out of business / Everything must go. Steely Dan.

A few years ago, I wouldn’t have known the first thing about booking or ordering stuff online. You know what I am talking about – airline tickets and hotel rooms, to name just two. And I am not even getting into Amazon, Swiggy, Zomato, Big Basket, Dunzo, Ola, Uber and the like. The whole world seems to be waiting to open up for your sole pleasure, between the tips of your fingers and that magic touch screen on your mobile phone. It is by now a well-established fact that most of us keep ordering things online we would normally never even have remotely thought of, simply because it is so infernally convenient to do so. Ironically, we now do everything remotely.

The fact that you are not actually shelling out hard currency from your wallet, and that the expenditure is being debited to some invisible, bottomless pit of an account in your bank, only to surface a month or so later in your bank or credit card statement gives you a cushy, if false, sense of well-being. Long live UPI. It is almost as if you have just helped, or rather, gifted yourself to that pair of ankle weights you would never have dreamt of buying a few hours earlier. Of course, when you actually study that bank or credit card statement, you do wince and go, ‘did I actually order that?’ Ankle weights? All you have to do is tap on the ‘Add to Cart’ or ‘Buy Now’ tab and a couple of days later the ankle weights duly arrive courtesy Amazon. You admire the item in question and put it away somewhere safe. So safe that you forget all about it until you guiltily discover its forlorn presence six months later. At which point you push it further back into the loft so no one can spot it, including yourself.

Like everything else, these online marketers or aggregators as some of them are fancifully called, have allowed success to go to their heads. They are now beginning to show those tell-tale signs of slackness, the result of extreme hubris. I guess that was inevitable. If you aggregate so much you don’t know what to do with it! In recent times, many items that you would like to order are out of stock. Of course, items you don’t particularly need, like ankle weights, are plentiful in supply. I would have thought these smart chaps, who are supposedly wizards at forward planning would have been able to analyse their customers’ needs based on past buying behaviour and so on. But no. Pepsodent G, my regular toothpaste brand, not available (my gums will start bleeding again). Heinz ketchup, try again next week. Heinz baked beans, you must be kidding. Heinz Means Beanz, but not here. Kellogg’s Almond and Honey cornflakes, try the plain ones. Coca Cola, we can give you Diet but not Regular. Cadbury’s Silk Plain, sorry we have Hazelnut or Fruit and Nut and in small 250 gm packs only. As for Ching’s noodles, velly solly prease. I think you get the idea.

I can hear some of my patriotic, tricolour-waving friends going, ‘you buy only American and Chinese brands? Shame on you. Why don’t you try Mohun’s cornflakes or Amul Chocolates or Kissan ketchup?’ Yes, point taken, but those American and Chinese brands are being made in India and sold through Amazon India. So, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

 Bottom line, what with no one talking of Covid any more, we drive to our nearest departmental store, suitably masked, and get those very items the aggregators said ‘no’ to. As far as I can tell, more and more people are visiting brick and mortar stores to do their shopping. This is as much because of the supply problems online I spoke about, but also to once again experience the pleasure of walking around a departmental store, browsing, touching and feeling the products. Something by definition and inherently not experienced with Amazon. Or Big Basket, come to that. This is further accentuated by a nameless dread. ‘What if Covid comes back with a vengeance? Let us enjoy going out while the going is good,’ about sums up the general view.

Since the Amazons of the world do have a window to talk to one of their representatives over phone in case of some intractable problem, I felt I must let off some well-worded steam and let them know that their standards are clearly slipping. Press 2 for English and you will get someone greeting you in Tamil, ‘Vanakkam.’ Wiser to press 5 for Tamil, and you will be put through to an English-speaking representative. On no account should you press 8, unless you are fluent in Swahili. Always pre-supposing that in order to be able to have this conversation, you need to first get across to them, which involves navigating through several options and hoping fervently that the line does not suddenly go on the blink. If that happens, God forbid, you will have to go through the whole painful process once again. However, if at first you don’t succeed and you try, try again, ultimately your perseverance will pay off and you will win through to an almost human voice, as I did.

Almost Human Voice (AHV) – ‘Good morning Sir and how can I be of help to you?

Yours Truly (YT) – ‘I shall dispense with the courtesies and get straight to the point. No chocolates, no baked beans, no toothpaste, no noodles, no cornflakes, no Coke, what the hell is going on? You call yourself Amazon? You should be renamed Lilliput.’

AHV – ‘Lilliput Sir? I do not understand.’

YT – ‘I didn’t think you would. Go and read Gulliver’s Travels. What about all those items I listed that you are stocked out of? All pretty much standard items.’

AHV – ‘We do have other toothpaste brands, Sir. Likewise for chocolates, noodles and so on. You should patronise some desi brands, Sir. Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali range of ayurvedic products is highly recommended.’

YT – ‘Baba Ramdev, eh? Next, you’ll be telling me to stand on my head for 20 minutes! I don’t need a lecture on patriotism from you, young lady. It’s not good enough. Always assuming you are a young lady, and not a 14-year-old boy whose voice has not yet broken, in which case I shall complain to the authorities about employing underage children. Anyhow, I am a very brand loyal person. You, of all people, must know that, since you keep quoting from my past purchase records.’

AHV – ‘Sir, it is very difficult to follow what you are saying. But Sir, we do have ankle weights and you have purchased them from us. I can see it on our records. I hope you are happy with them.’

YT – ‘I am sorry if you cannot follow proper English. Look, I can’t brush my teeth with ankle weights now, can I? Nor can I have them for breakfast. What good is ankle weights when I am starving at breakfast time?’

AHV – ‘I can help you there, Sir. Why don’t you try our MTR idli or upma mix? Easy to prepare, the instructions are on the pack. Even a child can do it. And we are well stocked up on these items.’

YT – ‘I am sure you are. All the things I am not interested in, you will have abundant supply. Right now, I am not in the mood for idlis or upmas. Or, for that matter, Mohun’s cornflakes.’

AHV – ‘How about porridge or oats, Sir. Very English. You sound very English, and we have plenty of brands like the world-famous Quaker Oats.’

YT – ‘All right, maybe I’ll give it a try. My apologies if I have been somewhat abrupt with you. Not your fault of course, but you should play this recording to your bosses. A disembodied voice did say at the start of this dialogue that this conversation is being recorded for “training purposes.” So there, I shall cry off for now and hope you will be better stocked next time round.’

AHV – ‘Thank you, Sir, and I hope the ankle weights are serving your ankles well.’

At which point, I disconnected. I thought she was being a tad cheeky with that ankle weight send off, but I had to appreciate her tongue-in-cheek gumption. However, the conversation had gone on long enough and it was time to terminate. My final view on the subject is that, taking it for all in all, warts and all, I would greatly welcome being able to shop once more at physical stores without let or hindrance. Good exercise too, walking round and round those aisles. The Amazons, Big Baskets and their ilk will continue to rule our lives, but at least, if I do not find my favourite brand of sliced cheese at the shop, I can gently vent my spleen at another human face, and not at some telephonic, faceless juvenile delinquent who will remind me of the availability of ankle weights when I am desperately hunting for my favourite shampoo brand, in addition to those cheese slices.

I don’t know about you, but for some time now, my mail inbox has been inundated with all manner of freebie messages. Notoriously regular among them are offers of ‘full body medical check-up at unbelievable prices.’ There are others such as servicing of my car (including free washing and special chemical cleaning), free inspection of my apartment for delousing and routine electrical line checks, and not to forget, combo cleaning offer of all our carpets and curtains by specially imported machines, all done in situ. However, it is the medical check-up wallahs, pounding my inbox daily like there’s no tomorrow, who hold my particular attention. A word of caution. Do not get taken in by the seductive ‘free.’ There is nothing free in any of this. What they mean, in their own elliptical way, is that they will not charge you for coming over and taking a close look at your carpets. Once they unleash their sales spiel, they have you by the short and curly. When they start the actual work, the meter starts ticking. Caveat emptor applies. Get a close look at the estimate first, sign on the dotted line and the devil take the hindmost.

That said, let me get back to the subject that interests me most. Every day, without fail, I will receive a mail from some pseudo-medico organization (their provenance a big question mark) stating dramatically that ‘YOUR APPOINTMENT FOR A FREE MEDICAL CHECK-UP IS CONFIRMED FOR 11AM ON SEPTEMBER 1.’ When I first came across a message of this nature, I naturally thought I had fixed an appointment and that it had slipped my mind. I had no idea all this was being offered gratis. Perhaps I should check out one of those ayurvedic concoctions to aid memory power. Closer inspection revealed the truth, that this was just a crude, sales hoax. One has to read the small print carefully with a magnifying glass to figure out there’s nothing free here. The following day I would receive an almost identical message from some other lab testing company. It did not take me long to realise that these messages should be ignored and deleted straight away. I even tried to block these evangelical messengers so concerned about my health. No way, they just kept coming back like a reverberating echo. Skins as thick as buffalo hides.

Gone are the days when you just trotted round the corner to a pharmacy, behind which in a small, dank room sat a sad-looking general practitioner reading the daily newspaper. When you told him you had a slight tummy upset or thought you were running a temperature (actually it did not matter what you were ailing from), his course of action was unfailingly the same. ‘Stick your tongue out, say aaahh,’ then out comes the stethoscope which will be pressed at different points on your chest and back during which you had to essay a cough or two, just to ensure your lungs are clear. When all that was done, he will write out a prescription for some awful-tasting patent mixture to be taken for three days. The ‘compounder’ at the pharmacy actually mixed the liquid concoction. No second visit to the doctor was required. Life was simple.

Truth to tell, I was a bit of a sickly child. Every couple of months or so, I would invariably come down with some form of streptococcal infection (sore throat), graduating to high fever and if the mood took me, my stomach would start playing up and all in all, I was a miserable wreck for about a week to ten days. I was once told I had para typhoid, which sounded very impressive to relate to your friends who hadn’t had it, like some dubious badge of honour! At heart, we are all hypochondriacs. The funny thing though, not that anyone was laughing, was that I do not recall blood being drawn and ten pages of platelet count, red blood cells, white blood cells, hemoglobin, clotting factor and all manner of other nauseating details of my A+ blood group being revealed. Maybe I was too down in the dumps to have noticed all these sly tests taking place behind my back. I think the general theory those days was that you just lay around feeling like death warmed up, drank plenty of fluids (provided you didn’t bring it up) and your natural immunity system would kick in and fight off those awful germs attacking your frail body. However, if the doctor came round to administer an injection, you feared the worst, the jab being worse than the disease.

Let me stress that such treatment as one received in the days gone by happened only when you actually fell ill. Things are different today. You could be in perfectly robust health, but you are encouraged to take an annual medical check-up. Just in case. Any number of hospitals and private clinics offer this service, and it is an excellent revenue stream for these institutions. Now, I do not wish to sound too cynical about all this, but the fact is most of us have fallen prey to these medical blandishments, and we dive headlong into the waiting arms of their seductive offers. Next thing you know, after another ten months or so, you get a call saying your next check-up is due in a fortnight’s time and can we confirm your appointment. Rather like the reminders you receive nowadays from your car service company.

It helps that if you are over the age of 60, you are entitled to special discounts on the tests. Medical insurance does not provide coverage for diagnostic tests, but you had better take one out on the off-chance that you might get knocked over by a bus and be wheeled in for emergency surgery. Or worse. It is a carefully calibrated world, this whole medical check-up lark, but you have been sucked into it, so you had better lie back and enjoy it. A brief word on medical insurance. When you actually need it, you have to work doubly hard to get the compensation you deserve and have paid for, year on year. Extracting blood out of a lump of rock could be easier, such is the runaround you are given by the companies. That said, I must confess that if you have the ability and the patience to fill up hundreds of forms and answer all their questions to their satisfaction, they usually cough up. My own advice is to take out a policy by all means, but try not get into a situation where you must make a claim. Better you take advantage of the ‘no claim bonus.’

I come back to these regular advertising mails one receives on one’s mobile phones luring me to come and take a medical check-up on the never-never, because they have apparently actually ‘fixed an appointment’ for me. Do not touch these invitations with the proverbial bargepole. If, out of curiosity, you respond in any shape or form, you are done for, my friend. You will get calls, day and night, at the end of which you may need to actually go and get yourself tested for high blood pressure. Leave well enough alone, is my sage counsel. Stay with your trusted family doctor, if such a tribe still exists, or visit a reputed hospital and consult the same doctor every time, as he or she will get to know you, your family history and will ensure that you do not need to go haring off to get tested for all manner of ailments, real or imagined. I do realise that I reckon without those who simply love visiting doctors, and spend a pleasant morning or evening chatting about their innards and perhaps politics and the cricket scores. To them I say, you are beyond hope and you may as well have the time of your lives discussing your gout, lumbago or sciatica in excruciating detail with your doctor. If that is what gives you your jollies. Speaking for myself, if I do not have to visit a doctor or wait to take a blood test for the next five years, it will be too soon.