Doodles of a crazy man!

I have no clue when exactly I got introduced to cricket. I try hard to recall my first memory of cricket. It must be having a light cream colored plastic bat and a red plastic ball. I still have a photo of mine holding that plastic bat, head still in deep concentration, stance as balanced as you could get. I wonder how I had learnt about the stance - considering that there was no television those days. How did I know that I had to place the bat just behind my toes? How was it that when you hit a straight drive, the elbow stayed parallel to the bat? Television ensured that an interest turned into obsession. My earliest cricket memories are not pleasant. I remember the way Graham Gooch used to sweep the Indian spinners as though he was cleaning the pitch off the minutest dirt; of Javed Miandad hitting a last ball six; a joke of a batsman otherwise known as Mr. Maninder Singh getting out in the last ball against Australia when India needed just a run for a tie. I presume those were the ma...

The biggest change in the transition from your mid-twenties to the wrong side of twenties is the exponential increase in the invitations to kids' birthday parties. If you were born during the seventies-eighties like me, I can bet most of you would not have celebrated your birthdays as a kid. Celebration, as it is known today. When I was a kid, mom would make bisi bele bath, curd rice, some sweet and invite a few relatives over to breakfast or dinner. " Mane maTTige " was the mantra then. The old people would bless me with vidya, buddhi, ayassu, arogya, aishwarya - all combined together did not make much difference to my happiness as lets say a Lacto King candy did then. The not-so-old ones would gift a pen set - an ink and a dot pen - with a clearer instruction - "You should study well and get good marks". Go to school, the class teacher would announce that you were the birthday kid. Yes, we could wear "color dress" when mere mortals suffered in their...

I have always been fascinated by curse words or abusive words. Though I am quite familiar with abusive words in other languages, I will give more examples from Kannada, as those were part of my growing up. Let me start by analyzing how cursing works. The main intention of abuse is to insult and also hurt the other person. Thats the key. If you have a set of vocabulary that your recipient does not understand or does not consider derogatory, sorry sir, its a waste! Kids begin their cursing using simple words like "stupid" , "idiot" , "fool" etc. And it does not take too much time for them to realize that these qualities are so common and acceptable, they cease to be curse words in the long run. And as kids, our abuses were mainly restricted to the animal names. A typical kid fight when we were young would go like this: Kid 1: "Kaththe" (Donkey, not ass ;) ) Kid 2: "Kothi" (Monkey) Kid 1: "Naayi" (Dog) Kid 2: "Goobe...

If you ask me why I respect my parents, this one would definitely figure in top five. The name they have given me. :) Now, there are lots of trivia behind my name. The tradition in our family is that the eldest son should have the name of Subrahmanya or of the Snake God. Fortunately, my parents did not settle for a Nagesha or a Nagaraja (No disrespect to anyone with those names, its just that they dont define me!) I would have preferred even obscure names like " Sakala Kalaa Vallabha " or " Bhaktha Jana Samrakshaka " to those Naga-prefixed names! ;) While discussing the alternatives, they bumped into the name ' Karthik ', but it was dropped (probably feared being called 'Kar-thika' by people - as it does not sound too good in Kannada!) I dont know who suggested this, but they opted for the name 'Vasuki'. If Vasuki was not unusual enough, my parents decided to name me 'Vasuki Raghavan'. There is an interesting story behind this too. ...

Its a small barber shop in one of the oldest localities in Mysore. And my regular haircut saloon for the last two decades. As I went there for a hair cut, the main barber salutes with his usual exclamation "Saar". He has 3 other co-barbers who are employed there from a long time (no attrition here sir!). "Your father and brother are not seen nowadays?", he asks me concerned about the reducing business from my family. "Oh is it?" I mumble, not sure what to say. "What?" the co-barber asks him. "Vallu thammudu...", he translates my incoherent answer into a weird combination of telugu mixed with kannada. I just say "Medium, comb-able (not too short)" Too easy, he has done that for years! I just wondered how this place looked in the 80s. Quite unsurprisingly, its exactly the same. Two huge mirrors placed on either walls, parallel to each other. It was almost like magic for me when I had first visited that shop as a kid. Reflect...

Venu has tagged me to write 8 random facts about myself. If you are self-obsessed and running out of ideas to write a post, is there any better option than getting tagged? ;) Okay, here it goes! 1) I love black n white photos very much. Its a great pastime in our home to browse through very old albums. Even now, I take at least a few black n white photos with my camera. Sepia is my second favorite. Color photos are a distant third. 2) I had diphtheroid at the age of 8. I was easily prone to cough, cold and fever at that age and I could not go out without a monkey cap. From then on, I've been taking Homoeopathy medicines and my resistance has increased dramatically. Now I constantly eat at hotels and roadside chats and I rarely fall ill (apart from the occasional visit from that dear old friend called 'common cold'). The cap has gone, the monkey stays! 3) I learnt cycling when I was 10. After a very minor accident, I had not tried cycling for 3 years, till I got myself a re...

Well, as they say, movie is a religion in India (by the way, who the hell are "they"? ;)) I think its very hard to find a person who is completely uninterested or ignorant about movies. I was just thinking about how my movie journey has been. As a kid, it was just the occasional movie we were taken to during some sundays. I dont remember feeling any movie as "bad" at that time. Typically a movie would have a hero and a heroine. All we needed was a "hero" who could fight. And we used to come back home and replay that fight with my granny's soft pillow, visualizing a villain in that. Then came television, and the sunday movie got added to our basket. During our pre-teens, our movie watching was pretty much restricted to Sterling and Skyline. These theatres used to screen only English movies then. Apart from an occasional Ten Commandments or a Mackenna's Gold, our syllabus consisted mainly of action movies. Our movie world was full of Arnold Schwarzen...

Lately I am remembering lot of things about my childhood. Am I getting too old? Is it a premature midlife crisis? Or is it just the outcome of subconscious self psychosis? I dont know! We were supposed to write using pencil till 4th standard. In the summer holidays that year, we had gone to Bangalore and my dad had got me a couple of reynolds pens. Yes, the same Reynolds 045 Fine Carbure! Getting an opportunity to use pens was a great feeling - it was one way of declaring that we were no longer kids (though this feeling was not as satisfying as wearing pants in high school!) And most of the kids in 5th standard were using Reynolds pen. It was a very simple looking pen, mostly white with a blue cap. The pen was very good, but the cap was so badly designed that keeping the pen in the pocket was so difficult. And we had a group of highly creative minds who would play around with the words on the pen to give new meanings. One of them was like this. In "REYNOLDS 045 FINE CARBURE",...

Just a couple of days left, to go back to India, I still have to do some shopping - at least one thing I cannot afford to miss - chocolates! When I was in LKG, my grandfather used to take me to school in his bicycle. He used to get me a chalk piece or a chocolate everyday. I still cherish those moments and probably they were my very first memories of chocolate. Even my dad likes chocolates very much and he used to spoil us by getting them (that too in those "chocolates-cause-toothache-preaching" era) He still keeps a few chocolates in his pocket all the time. The cheapest chocolate available when I was a kid was Kadlekaayi Peppermint (made from groundnut), which costed 5 paisa for 3 chocolates! It was at that time when Cadburys Eclairs was considered a great luxury! I still see kids loving Gems or Poppins, and the reason might be, it gives them satisfaction of eating more number of chocolates! Jujubes or "joojips" as we used to call it(its soft with sugar coating), ...