Show me a Hero

Aditya Sudarshan, a great friend, comedian, metaphysicist, and a ball of slime, has written his second novel, Show me a Hero. Don't get fooled by the cricket-centred cover, the novel is about a lot more. I will share his thoughts on the book here soon. Until then, one paragraph I loved:

"The next morning, which is always the best judge of the night before, was confusing. Many times in the small hours I'd written foolish, sentimental emails to people I barely knew, only to wake up kicking myself. On more than a few drunken midnights I had told myself I was going to change the world, and then decided at 11 a.m. in the streaming sun that it was doing all right as it was. I was used to having my eye-openers in the dead of night and looking away in the morning light. That was normal. But waking up today, with a strange sense of clam and a strange sense of mission, was not. I wasn't in my comfort zone. I wasn't sure how I ought to feel."

Watch this space. Full length interview coming up.

You pray his soul may rest in peace,
I want it to haunt me.

Remembering Tyagaraja

It is funny that the average modern Indian isn't big on aesthetics, given our artistic history. But again, I might be ascribing the ornamental indulgences of the monarchs of yore, the architectural show-offiness of a few, to the entire population. Who knows, the average Indian might have always been of the jugaad variety - functionality over art.

The Tyagaraja Aradhana is on television as I blog (just heard TM Krishna's Kedaragowla) and the physical feature that dominates the scenery is the microphones. Four to an artiste - one screams 'Sekaran' in white lettering on a harsh, blue background, two have AIR written on them (why does the radio need two?) and one is nameless, but presumably not orphaned (I wonder if it will sing in Jingala. Please excuse, it is my Tyagaraja joke for the day). And from behind these microphones, bits of artistes peek out - it is like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle, or one of those game-shows where you guess the celebrity from the pieces on the grid revealed. This is a fallout of the jugaad - the different people who need the feed don't bother with the co-ordination in advance, and so they bombard the stage with their equipment. All this happens under a shamiana dominated by plastic chairs.

The background isn't easy on the eye. It is a mesh of raucous lettering in English and Tamil, a gaudy Tyagaraja portrait and a Vodafone banner incongruously meshed in on the right. As usual, the sabha takes it upon itself to make it clear to the world that they are registered. Really, I don't think anyone doubted that. City Union Bank hollers at you from below the stage, complete with region and branch details along with pin code. (Then again, sponsors are unavoidable - Tyagaraja himself practiced uncha vritti!)

The concerts happen on the banks of the Cauvery, in a town that comes to life only once a year, and you can't help but wonder: so much more can be done with that setting.

Still, it is Tyagaraja's melodic, rhythmic, lyrical and devotional genius - handed down to us through two centuries of interpretation by artistes of all varieties, from art musicians to bhakti musicians, from ace reproducers to ace innovators, from laya exponents to raga past masters, from the oral tradition to obscure manuscripts - that occupies centre-stage, making us forget, for as long as the songs last, the jarring environment in which it is sung.

Pop-philosophy moments

Real flashes of pop-philosophical brilliance come in situations like this - at 2 am, somewhere in the Western Ghats, in a place whose name I still don't know, at a biryani-chai-cigarette-dirty-loo place, during a break from a jataka-bandi-level bumpy bus ride, with the temperature at around 8 degrees, having missed a train and no clear plans for the onward journey.

For three days, I lived under the delusion that my waitlisted train ticket would get confirmed by that Indianest of methods, the nomenclatural red herring, the Emergency quota. Apparently, I had access to the Minister of State for Railways, who would recognise my 'emergency' and get me a seat. 99% confirmed, I was told. Somehow, I've always been in that 1%.

I had been looking forward to this train journey for a while - seventeen hours of solitude, good books, good music - a chance to catch up with myself. Hello me, what's up? Even on the car to the station (its an hour and a half from home), I was quite excited, listening to Ramani Sir and MSG trade fireworks in a 1980 concert, yapping, driving, cursing bus drivers. This was a journey I wanted to make. So, when it fell apart, I was quite heartbroken.

Then came this random travel, last minute tickets, a phone running out of balance, doubts on the state of the road, the time the bus will take as a result, and slight tension about morning flights, trains, buses (also booked last minute). It was in this background, when I got down from the bus at that unknown place for a chai, unsure but strangely confident of making to Madras, that I had that pop-philosophy moment.

It's nice to have a confirmed ticket, yes. (It's not often that a Mamidipudi has a confirmed ticket.) It's nice to know where you're going and how - that brings with itself an excitement - you can pack some dinner from home, . But it's funner to not know. It's funner to realise you've mistaken 20:00 for 10 pm, landed up late at the station, and then hitchhike on a lorry. It's fun to land up at the bus stand and find that you have a ticket to Madras instead of Bangalore, and go to Madras for the weekend instead. It's fun to decide where you want to go for the long weekend at the ticket counter. It's fun to find you have booked a ticket for the wrong date, and then run around Paradise looking for shady buses and tickets. It's fun to spend nights in the unreserved compartment, spreading newspapers on the floor and catching up on sleep (or standing by the door without a sweater - only the romance of the whole thing keeping you warm).

There you have it - pop-philosophy for the day - unplanned journeys are more fetching than planned ones.

Finding Shebait

This piece first appeared on mylaw.net.
***

In the wake of the Ayodhya judgment, I learnt a lot of law. The place of birth is a juristic person, apparently. Wait till the income-tax department, always looking for newer people, juristic or otherwise, hears of this. Two of the cases were dismissed on the grounds of limitation. That's rich. You're deciding whether some character called Babur built a mosque in 1528, and whether he destroyed a temple to do so, and you dismiss suits because they're filed beyond limitation.

Merits aside, the judgment threw up some interesting concepts - the "next friend" and the "shebait". Both terms sound shady.

I've heard that in Indian politics, the major political parties have their outwardly democratic structures - the President, the Vice-President, the Spokesperson and so on. But most politicians, apparently, also have an important figure around them, called their "best friend", who wields enormous power over their decisions - right from what he will have for lunch, what he will wear for a meeting, whom he will meet and what course the economy will take. A "next friend", I discovered, is someone like that. That treasure house of authoritative legal knowledge (I'm serious, ask the dudes in the big firms to swear that they've never relied on it to figure out what futures and options are), Wikipedia, defines it as "a person who represents in an action another person who is under disability or otherwise unable to maintain a suit on their own behalf as a result of their circumstances, who does not have a legal guardian". Our politicians are mostly in disability, they are usually a product of rather unfortunate circumstances, and their guardians tend to be illegal.

"Shebait" was harder to crack. Wikipedia has no entry on this word. A google search only reveals a lot of judgments from Indiankanoon.com, which suggests that beyond Indian temple law, the term does not have much use. A friend and I found the term highly useful. "I wish the High Court had more shebait." Or, "Dude, shebait, 7 o clock." "You're coming for this party?" "Depends on the shebait, macha."

And there were the jokes.
Q: How do you describe a Goan prostitute who specialises in temple administrators?
A: She baits shebaits on the sea shore.

My first hunch was that the term was Latin in origin. (I also had a feeling it might be French, given their shebaitic tendencies, but I rejected that thought immediately. Well, almost immediately.) I went through a large compendium of Latin maxims - a delightful old book that a family of rats had colonised. No luck there.

Then, I tried reading those old Indian judgments. They were of little help.

"It is true, it was a suit by some of the shebaits against the other shebaits, for the proper management of the debutter property but it cannot be said as contended on behalf of the appellant that two sets of shebaits were fighting with each other about the management of the properties...."
- Rangacharya v. Guru Revti AIR 1928 All 689

Sounds like quite a cat-fight. These judgments, though, threw up another curious word - "debutter". Who the hell is this guy? "I am putting on too much weight. I must debutter." The context suggested that "debutter" meant the Lord himself. But there was no assistance from Google on why this should be the case.

A friend at the bar, whose office has dealt with a fair number of debutters and shebaits over the years, told me that the term could be of Egyptian or Hebrew origin. He even pronounced the word as "shebayat". I spent a whole night on Hebrew and Egyptian dictionaries on the internet. I now had a collection of some choice swear words in two more languages, but no leads on the word "shebait". That night, I dreamt of shebaits and debutters locked in combat over a copy of the Bible.

In Court, the next day, I remembered - some kindred soul, whose family had no lawyers left, left me a thoroughly soporific book called "Essays on Classical and Modern Hindu Law." Flipping pages of this tattered tome, I came across a sole beacon of hope contained in a lengthy footnote, "... prefer the Bengali term 'shebayat' to describe these persons." Bengali!

One more fevered night of Googling ensued, at the end of which I found the entire story on a book on Sir John Woodroffe (the dude who wrote that book on evidence). "Shebait" came from "shebayat", although the origins of that word are still unclear. "Debutter", funnily enough, is a corruption of the word "devata".

"Dude, that shebait is quite the debutter!"