notesfromdruchan

[notesfromdruchan]

Aunty-ji

During my time in Vejalpur, a small little corner of Ahmedabad, i cycled through three neighbors. One of them was a middle-aged couple — the man was working with Asian Paints at the time, and the woman was a home-maker. A very typical northern-hinterland family hailing from Madhya Pradesh. For the length of my stay there, I called him "Sir", he called me "Shekhar ji". And "aunty ji" was met with "bhaiyaji" even though i could have very well been the age of her first-born.

Sometime during their stay, their daughter came visiting. She was pregnant, although there was almost no clue that she was, given her thin frame. One day, I got a call from "aunty ji" and she said there was a book in their house that she wanted me to remove. I think it was one of those uttara-ramayan copies that people believe should not be kept in the house when something auspicious happens. I dont know if I asked her why or if she proffered the information voluntarily but that was when she informed me that her daughter had given birth to a baby boy.

A month or two passed. One day, both the mother and the daughter were busy doing chores around the house and they had laid down the baby in the second room of the 2-room apartment which doubled as the kitchen. As is wont to happen with babies, he started to cry seeking some human attention. The kitchen of both our apartments (both 2-room apartments) opened up to a common balcony that also led to the common bathrooms so as I stepped out of my kitchen, I could see and hear the baby cry. I asked if I could entertain him for a while and they were happy to let me so I got in and sat near the baby, playing with him for a while. That was my first proper interaction with the baby in all those months.

Some days, auntyji and I would sit on the verandah and talk. With the baby-and-mother in tow, these chats disappeared because I didnt want to impinge on mother-daughter time. Yet, there was this one rare occasion when I was also part of the verandah chai-pe-charcha and somehow ended up with the baby on my lap for a long time. I would like to think he was happy to lie there for all that time because he didn't cry, and he was rather chirpy on that bright new morning. Eventually, as it happens with babies, he ended up peeing on me. Aunty-ji was apologetic for no reason and I had to pull out one of those old irrational beliefs of my people that "a baby relieving itself on you is a sign of bonding" to ease her mind.

Months before all this, there was this one late night when aunty-ji frantically called me. I found her husband sweaty, somewhat out of breath and complaining of a left-arm pain, queasiness and discomfort writ large on his face. He had a bike, fortunately (because I had only a bicycle), so I drove him to the nearest clinic late in the night. The doctor took a cardiogram and told me that the man had almost had a heart-attack and would need to be under observation and possibly shifted to a bigger hospital in the morning. During that week of hospitalization, I would chauffeur aunty-ji to and fro the hospital along with delivering home-cooked food to the recuperating man. Somehow, in the midst of all that solitude, it felt like I was a useful part of a family for the first time in my life.

[notesfromdruchan]

Atishoo

In many ways, I've never found closure after Atishoo's sudden death that I got to know a fortnight later from her daughter. I'd often start an email to the abyss, addressed to Atishoo, telling her how much I miss her English wit and her counsel and her irreverent wisecracks about everything under the sun and so much more but they would end up as drafts or get deleted. Nothing seemed to fit the bill to accept that this person, who I knew for a very brief moment in time, is no more here.

Friendships with older people – Atishoo was pushing north of sixty when I first knew her – are few and far between because it's not often that one meets old folk who can vibe with the younger ones. But those that do are a wellspring of youth even as time and disease cripple their physicality. I was lucky to know and be befriended by Atishoo.

That wasn't her real name of course. It was a "nick", a handle she used on an old internet hangout place that I sometimes frequented. When we exchanged emails, I got to know her real name but for this recounting, Atishoo will remain so, as she does in my memories and recollections of her.

She would regale me with tales of the garden she set up and tended to. She had recently set up something like a bird-feeder which a noisy, bulky pigeon – who she named Bert – toppled over with his friends, so she had to rebuild something stronger with the help of her son. Eventually, "Bert and family" would begin to feature a lot in our emails. This was her quip when I enquired about Bert: "Bert and his extended family are still eating me out of house and home but enjoy their new found – no expense spared I might add – spa!" She also had created a pond and let some tadpoles mature in it. When the time came, I received an email with the subject "Ungrateful frogs", declaring, "They all left overnight, never said thank you for your hospitality or even a wave goodbye for giving them a good start in life."

At the time I knew her, she was suffering from cancer that the doctors and the family were trying hard to keep in check. But all that pain could do nothing to her spontaneous wit nor to her stoicism. It was very rare for her to let an inkling of all that pain through her words to me. A lot of our chats would hover around about animals and her narratives would often crack me up good. She also had four dogs, one of which, in the last leg of my acquaintance with Atishoo, got lost and then found, all in a matter of several stressful hours.

Atishoo's presence coincided not just with the discovery of cancer in her but also the discovery of a lymphocytic ailment in my maternal grandmother. She (Atishoo) would have just come back from a bout of scans but was ready with an unassuming, serene dose of counsel for me. Somehow, she'd distill all her stoic wisdom into a pint of English wit and offer it to me and that would make all the difference.

More often than not, she'd lure me into pleasant conversations with her and other folks that used to hangout during times when I'd go under the radar for the recluse that I am. Her emails would always bring a sense of happiness, a sense of familiarity and inexplicably, a sense of home. It was also fun to watch her craft a new email thread in response to a previous one instead of just hitting "reply" and that first time she learned to "reply" instead of starting a new email and I almost missed it.

After a while, "where are you, it's been a while?"s became more frequent from me to her than in the other direction. And then, an email from her daughter in the middle of September informing me of Atishoo's death. Atishoo had managed to not let on that things were so bad that I was not the only one taken aback by the suddenness and the finality of the news. She was gone but it didnt quite register for months. Perhaps, more. Years have passed and this feeble fantastical notion that Atishoo is still here, just gone silent, lingers around.

Atishoo was gone before the pandemic years. She was gone before the sparrows made a brief comeback during the lockdown months. She was gone before I'd eventually adopt a kitten, or start volunteering at an animal shelter. And I've missed her presence all the more in my inability to share the zeitgeist with her and read her irreverent and humorous hot-take responses.

[notesfromdruchan]

Captain

"Captain" was never in the army, nor into any sporting activity, and nor was he a stocky, spitting-image of "Captain" Vijayakanth (a Tamil movie veteran of the 80s and 90s). Instead, he was short at about five-and-a-half feet, skeletally-thin, and quite dark-skinned to account for the unforgiving humid heat of Madras. I knew him at a time when Sunny, the two-wheeler, was in vogue and not quite coincidentally, he rode one of those. If you've seen Sunny, and if you'd seen Captain, you'd say it was a perfect match.

Captain was, as was common in those days, the de facto electrician-plus-plumber for our apartment (and a few more in the locality). He had this dingy-little shop right across the road from our colony but you couldn't find him in his shop almost ever. On the rare afternoon that he did exist in that small, dark 5x10 half-filled with the kind of dismantled clutter you'd find in an electrician's shop, you might find him leafing through a thin novella or a serious magazine. Yeah, he was one of those rare kinds – somewhat well-read, could dole out a good dose of English when required, could speak at length on realpolitik, wax lyrical about out-of-fashion Tamil-cinema legends and down a lot more than a few gulps of TASMAC whiskey.

Andaman Maami of the fourth floor once told me she was the one who christened him Captain. I can't remember if I ever did ask her why but if I did, I've forgotten her answer. Captain was fixing something in her house at the time, wearing a camo cap that he'd occasionally wear to keep his bald head safe from the scorching heat. The physique and the name had no business being together but he was Captain for all the time I had known him, even though eventually I would know his actual name.

Captain's notoriety was of two kinds. He was a hard man to catch hold of when you had a dysfunctional ceiling fan or a tube-light that suddenly wanted to be a disco one. He wasn't busy, per se. He was just uninterested being an electrician to the boring old families that resided in these apartments. I am sure if left with a sizable inheritance, he would have reduced it to ashes in a couple of years spending them on books and booze. The second thing he was notorious of was the ignominy of being a wife-beater. "He comes home drunk and starts scolding me, harassing me," was a perennial complaint. Counseling by the women-folk of the apartment – my mom included – did not really change him. By the time his son had come of age, the wife and son left him. That shattered him and while he seemed to have deserved it, it was unsettling to watch a frail man implode unto himself.

Much before those things happened though, I asked him with my schoolboy naivete if it was true that when people get drunk they have no idea what they're doing and end up harassing their wives and other people. Chuckled, and said, if someone gets that drunk, they'd vomit and pass out. All the other drunk-and-did-this is a pretense: if I weren't drunk, I'd get beaten black and blue. Being drunk is just an excuse. Appalling as it sounds now, he delivered it with such characteristic Goundamani-esque wit that I've remembered it all my life as a funny narration.

Captain was a very staunch supporter of the DMK party. There was a communist/trade-unionist living in the apartment and my mom was a talkative, politically-conscious, happy-to-debate person so our living room would occasionally be the staging ground of lively, humorous, but also very-pointed debates about politics. And it was in one of those moments that Captain declared no party was good and the one he chose to support was the least-bad. This logic is as old as the Greeks and even older perhaps, yes, but for a school-going teenager just being exposed to the vagaries of layman politics, the perspective seemed fresh and intelligent.

He was an inherently witty man, ready with an arsenal of situational comedy. The problem was that he'd manage to tickle himself with his wit in the most inappropriate of times. This one time he was supposed to fix the fan – heavy as it is, compounded by the fact that our man would've weighed no more than 50 kilos – and he cracked a joke that had me drop the tools (I was supposed to hand him when asked) on the table because I started laughing my lungs out. Contagious laughter happened and he started laughing with the fan precariously half-stuck on the hook from the ceiling, not yet fully screwed-in.

There was also this once when Captain and I discovered the wrath of a pigeon that was guarding its eggs that she had unfortunately laid in an empty house on the top-floor that Captain and I were set to clear-up. We didn't know that the pigeon had laid eggs in the house so we tried to shoo the bird away nonchalantly only to be met with a fierce attack that culminated in the bird deploying its weapons system – bird-shit ejecta. We came back with an umbrella but our attempts were completely thwarted. We had a good laugh about it the next day, but I'm sure the birds had a better laugh about it on the same day.

In restrospect, I think he might have found it disrespectful that a teenager no taller than himself was calling him by his moniker as the adults did, but if he did, he did not show it ever. Or maybe he did and I was just not smart enough to catch the cue. I'd occasionally split between Captain and his real name (or the way I'd use it – Gopal Uncle because in India, any man older was "uncle"). Interestingly, you could also place the people of the apartment on a timeline by the way they called him. The newer folks knew him as Captain but the OG residents (like my dad) would only address him as Gopal. On the rare occasions that they'd use "Captain", it was to add flavor to the funny anecdote they were sharing about him and his antics on any given day.

All our lives are peppered with interesting characters like Captain and it takes years to realize how deep an impression they've left in our psyche. The last I spoke to him – over a decade ago – he was managing a hostel on Nelson Manickam Road and was asking me about listing it online for greater visibility. I don't know if Gopal Uncle is alive for he seemed quite old even then but you can bet that if he is, he's just as witty and careless as he was when he was the quintessential "Captain" in the apartments and colonies of Choolaimedu.

[notesfromdruchan]

Once more unto the Vim, dear friends.

Ages ago, I fell in love with Vim just because I knew how to quit the editor with :q or :wq and could switch between insert and normal modes. But of course like all "beginner's luck" tales, this ended badly, exacerbated by the fact that I turned on vim-bindings on the IDE I was using at the time too enthusiastically with no clue of all the different problems that this would have brought along. Mostly because I didnt know over 90% of Vim's grammar, and muscle memory was all about classic IDE-style shortcuts.

Now, almost two years later, I have repeated half the feat but this time, I went in a little more prepared. I found a great resource that covered the 80% use-case first (while occasionally showing you a glimpse of the 20% use-case as well) and practiced somewhat diligently.

I dont know what constitutes success but I'm now at a comfortable point in using Vim-style actions. But I won't switch to Vim or Neovim because I'm too tied to VS Code and the plugins there. So I have this plugin that makes Vim out of VS Code so it's kind of the best of both worlds.

The best bit though is that I've gotten a little too used to the efficacy of the Vim grammar of shortcuts (while occasionally shifting to the classic Ctrl/Cmd sequences) that I want to use these bindings in every text-editor interface. And that's why my Obsidian interface now has Vim-style bindings enabled. Some small misgivings aside, great experience.

If you were a little too obsessive, you might also seek some similar way of navigating between tabs, searching on a page, navigating through history, and so on for your browser. And that's when you'll find Vimium.

[notesfromdruchan]

Andha Naal Nyaabagam

By now, it's clear that surprising miniscule details emerge out of everything you've watched if you rewatch it enough times. I've lost count of the number of times I've picked up some atomic detail from every Kamal-Crazy Mohan movie on the infinitieth rewatch. And yet, it comes as a surprise when you realize, in this Andha Naal Nyaabagam song from Uyarndha Manidhan, at about 0:50, Major Sundarrajan almost trips because his leg twists on a step as he runs towards the camera with Sivaji Ganesan.

Not being privy to what happened at that time (not just because I was unborn but I'd have definitely not been in the company of Tamil cinema and theatre greats), I can only speculate as to why this slip was in the film at all.

If Sivaji had tripped like that, I am certain the thespian himself would've asked for a re-take. Sundarrajan is no less of an actor (I know, bring the brickbats but I'll stand by my stance – it's a pity he did not get to play as many roles or movies), but he was no "Sivaji" of the time. Besides, by his own tone from interviews he's given where he has talked about working with both Sivaji and MGR (one of the very few who did that, and that puts him squarely in the league of Nagesh, Manorama, M.R. Radha, M.N. Nambiar, O.A.K. Thevar), he deferred to the greats. So, very likely, he'd have continued the shot because (a) the director did not mind and/or (b) co-actors generally did not dare ask for a re-take when the main actor has done their job well and would be inconvenienced by a re-take (not that Sivaji seemed to be of that kind, attested by Nassar in talking about how it took a few takes and an encouraging word or two from Sivaji in his tour de force of a villain in Thevar Magan).

[notesfromdruchan]

Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam

Note: this is not a review but more of an outpouring of thoughts that strike you when your mind is captivated by beautiful frames written, enacted and captured; maybe spoilers ahead.

Some movies are bold enough to force you to walk with the characters, often in sombrely long sequence of shots where nothing happens (nothing from the point of view of a regular movie-watcher). Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam is a spectacular example (and I am positive Malayalam cinema has a plethora of such examples, esp in recent times). But to do this, I would imagine, requires a boldness of a different kind.

I mean, imagine having an entire minute or two just of a sequence of shots showing Mammootty – a James who's just woken up as a Sundaram (but we dont know that yet) – walking into the village: first through lush-green paddy fields, then into the serpentine lanes of the village, turning around into a corner street, walking past an old man in his afternoon siesta under the shade of his thinnai, and finally to his house. and because this is no accidental placement, you'll find the same happen in the climax when Mammotty walks back to the bus all the way from "his" house – a beautifully-long sequence of shots, the whole sequence spanning almost three minutes, with Veedu varai uravu as the tonal backdrop.

Perceptions from such scenes are subjective and I can imagine some folks not liking it. Personally though, I feel these are very crafty scenes that force you – the viewer – to not just consume what's happening on the screen but, by the nature of the ordinariness of the sequence of shots, make you go into yourself and start thinking about the non-ordinariness of what just transpired in the movie. This is in some sense similar to the long-shots post-scene that makers like Spielberg employ where a scene is done but the camera stays on a close-up shot of a character (presumably in deep thought) subverting the viewer to actually do the same – think deeply about what's just happened or what's about to happen.

–

Isn't it such a wholesome pleasure to watch such a fabulous collaboration of Tamil and Malayalam characters, in such a luxurious mix of Tamil and Malayalam dialogues? I am probably biased here: I got goosebumps just watching Ramesh Thilak share screenspace with Soubin in Kumbalangi Nights because, to me, that felt like a greater cinema acknowledging the talents of a Tamil actor often overlooked by Tamil cinema itself (hopefully, not so true anymore), so watching a whole village (no pun intended) of Tamil characters employed in a beautiful Malayalam film (I'm calling it that only because the main shakers and movers of the film are fellow Mallus) is a paradise.

–

That the entire movie has as its backdrop not just a rural setting but the constant drone of old Tamil movie scenes and songs can be chalked up as a creative mixing technique, something oft-employed in a lot of movies but only for some scenes. But this film takes it several notches up: not only is the presence of these songs and scenes near-constant and near-throughout the film, but they are often outrageously spot-on and in-sync with the movie scene! I dont know better so I can only imagine that the director has an enviable encyclopedic knowledge of 50s-70s era of Tamil cinema.

[notesfromdruchan]

Aji tales

There is but one thread that connects me to my maternal grandmother who passed away on a confusing, no-time-to-brood day at the peak of the second Covid wave in India in 2021. We do not know what really killed her – pneumonia induced by severe downfall in Hemoglobin levels or possible-Covid – but death descended on her amidst a flurry of strenuous running-around to get her medical care. Around 2am that night, the family having decided to let her pass away instead of putting her through a protracted misery of sickness and treatments to lymphocitic leukamia, my mom woke me up to let me know that aji, on whom I had affixed the oxygen mask from the concentrator just a few hours ago, had passed away. She lay motionless, somewhat awkwardly, with her right arm across her neck, her bony elbow propping up, one of her legs bent, on the steel cot that my brother and I had assembled with some help from my father... the same cot on which I had lied next to her, watching old Tamil movie clips, or pattimandram speeches with her, not knowing when it was her turn to leave us all.

I've always nurtured this idea that aji was more fond of my other two cousins than I. That they got to spend almost all of their growing-up years with aji around them, almost being a second-mom to my brother and often being the first-mom to my sister, helped cement this notion in me. I'd only get to interact with her during the summer holidays when my mom would take me to the grandparents' place, or when the gramps visited us. And in those days, there was a side of aji that remained, in my knowledge, completely hidden. It took my brother's coming-of-age (and his prodding) for her to reveal that she had an outrageously smart, witty side to her and once that happened, there was no stopping her, even during the times she was in the ICU, fresh out of a near-death experience when the first sign of leukamia started rearing its head.

Sometime by then, we were all grown-ups and there was no causticity to the feeling of being the grandson she had spent the least amount of time with. As dire the situation was – she had to come stay with us because, at the time, only mom had the time to take care of her – the silver-lining to it (for me, personally) was that now this merchant-of-unexpected-wit would be living with us. Living with me. Just a handful of years before this was when I found in aji the perfect person I could talk excitedly about old Tamil songs, their nuances, their composers, their tales and more (besides my school friends R and S). It didn't strike me then as to why it was such a glorious moment but retrospectively, it's because I could finally, finally connect with aji in a way that was exclusively mine. While aji was a great aficionado of the songs themselves for the lyrics (and the lyricists), I went after the music and the arrangement and the history. She'd often quip, in response to me asking and then telling her that such-and-such song was composed by such-and-such person (usually MSV), that back in her day, she hardly paid any attention to who the composer was and all they cared about was the actors onscreen and the people who penned the lyrics. I felt proud (vain, I know) that I knew more about a song that came out when aji was in her prime than aji did.

I eventually discovered great acting (and greater dialog) in comedy scenes of old Tamil movies and, soon enough, these became a topic of conversation as well. Aji had a bad back that prevented her from sitting for more than a few minutes so she had to often lie down. You could try a lot of things to keep her entertained but there's only so much that could be done with the vagaries of a daily life lived as a middle-class, salaried household. Everyone of us tried ways to help her while away the time as she lay on her steel cot. Mine was to lie next to her, open up YouTube on my phone, clip in the earphones – one in my ear and the other in hers – and watch, with her, a Nagesh-Balaiah scene, or a Chandrababu one, or a Cho-Nagesh one (the options were endless, really). I'd often pretend that I was doing it because I was bored and that I just wanted to lie down and watch something and only plugged in and shared the earphone for courtesy but now that I think of it, I wonder if she was clued in to the pretense all along.

For many months after her passing, I avoided anything black-and-white like the plague – no old Tamil songs, no old Tamil movie clips, and sometimes not even anything that goes back to the 60s and 70s of the Tamil silverscreen era. But it had to give eventually and so I weaved my way back through contemporary artists talking about those days, few stray clips thrown in for emphasis and exemplification. At long last, I could watch everything again but always ending with the absolutely crushing emptiness of not having aji to talk, discuss, or share with.

I was never as close to my aji as my other cousins were, in all my life. But that one thread was plentiful enough to quench an inexplicable want to connect with her.

[notesfromdruchan]

Yuvan “Surprise” Raja

Although politically incorrect and replete with somewhat insensitive terminology, we tend to have this "high-art" / "low-art" classification to artforms - notably music.

For instance, Deva's roadside "gaana" is treated as low-art in comparison to many of Raja's choice tunes involving complex orchestrations and deft handling of Carnatic scales (raagam).

Spend any length of time being a fan of AR Rahman's and you tend to be in circles where Yuvan's music is seldom talked about and, if at all, mostly in a bad light. This is not to say all fans of Rahman's music dislike Yuvan's music but a vocal majority considers Yuvan's to be sub-par at best.

And it shows in many of the songs. Yuvan's collaboration with most directors is generally for "mass-appeal" movies, catering to a smorgasbord of audience-types. So the music, as a result perhaps, tends to be "mainstream", clichèd and lacking nuance that one can expect, say, in Rahman's creative outputs.

Album after album, Yuvan shows no inclination to handle raagas (unlike his father – the OG Raja) or to introduce layers of nuanced sophistication or have a distinct imprint of his style in his songs. It is technically hard to spot Yuvan's style if at all it exists.

So, to me, it's a natural surprise when he comes up with some songs so technically brilliant that I have to listen to them on repeat sometimes.

Perhaps not so coincidentally, they involve two non-mainstream directors who are a class apart.

One of the first songs of Yuvan that made me sit back instantly and take notice of – many years after the song had been composed, released and forgotten – was this one.

Songs that marry an Indian-classical raaga-based melody to picturesque Western backing and rhythms happen rarely. (Sure, there's a motley of songs that attempt such marriage but they don't meet the perfect-marriage criteria).

That Yuvan managed to accomplish this is a surprise given he has not produced something similar before or since.

And to pick bahudāri of all!

Then there are these two songs. One of them weaves magic – and cheats by involving senior Raja's voice – and the other is a rhythmic explosion. They don't have much classical-dependency as the previous song but somehow, there is a unique, non-mainstream-Yuvan touch to these.

As I write this, I'm also inclined to mention that this other song is also a masterpiece from Yuvan's stable and you will then notice a pattern emerging.

Yuvan's best, nuanced, thematic and layered work seems to emerge when he teams up with folks like Ram, Vasanth, Ameer etc.

[notesfromdruchan]

Coder’s block

In a recent conversation, I made a comment that came out of me unconsciously. Or so I'd like to believe because it almost certainly was not a well-thought-out remark.

I said, "I dont want to think when I'm writing code". It has been more than a day since I said it and I've been thinking about this remark all throughout. Why did I say it? What did I really mean? etc.

When I think as I write code, the whole process of writing some logic and making it work feels tedious. Almost like drudgery. Things go wrong in oh-so-many ways and it's more like fighting against a machine with an almost unconquerable will than writing logical instructions to a machine that is ready to do your bidding.

The opposite of this is when I know what needs to be written and I just write it. Sure, it breaks in a few ways but these are tiny annoyances that are remedied almost immediately - or with a slight pause - and then the almost-smooth-sailing resumes.

So the trick (to happier code-writing experiences) seems to be to know in advance what's going to be written. This completely avoids the "thinking while writing code" problem and - perhaps, as a result of that - gives a great code-writing experience.

But of course, I'm no genius so I can't really know what I'm going to write. There's always a trial and error even when I'm fairly confident of the kind of logic I'm going to implement for a specific feature/problem. But fighting through that trial and error is easier than doing that thinking while also writing code.

I didn't know it at the time and only realized it now while thinking about this that I had the same problem with writing (in general). If I had spent my days marinating in thoughts about something and, more importantly, forming the structure of the thing I'm thinking about, my writing on that would almost flow. If instead I fired up the editor with just the crux of a topic, I could go weeks with nothing to show except feeling battered. The coder's block is the same as the writer's block.

These lessons always sound blatantly obvious in hindsight. These are lessons we've read about, heard about, seen about in various forms. Visualizing the thing you are about to produce gives you a fair upper-hand in skirting the problem of a writer's, coder's and creator's block.

I am pretty certain I'd forget this lesson four weeks down the line and stare at stray pieces of code I'm completely unhappy about unless I re-read this multiple times a month. But there is one interesting meta-application here: I spent a better part of the day thinking about this whole write-up as well and that has paid dividends.

[notesfromdruchan]

To scale productivity in code

A startup founder - let's call him Nate - I worked with had this interesting philosophy of optimization where "automation" was a key to doing things efficiently. While PG wrote "do things that don't scale", Nate swung in the other direction – he would pick a thing almost only if it was scalable. And "can it be automated?" was one of the important yardsticks to see if something was scalable and, therefore, worth his time.

I think somewhere this notion is prevalent in many people. A co-founder from another startup - let's call him Abe - exhibited this in a different way. While Nate's automation yardstick was applied to everything in the business world (which is to say it encompassed everything from marketing to sales to engineering), Abe's was more pronounced in the engineering department. Perhaps this is because he was more of an engineer than an overall-product person in the scope/context I knew him.

In building the frontend, Abe came up with this idea that it should be easy to "compose" not just the components we write but also an entire app with specific features disabled. Not only was it helpful in the business sense (eg feature-flagged product) but also helpful in isolated tests of complete business modules. We were building an application (think super-app) with a bunch of sub-apps in it and his idea was for anyone with bare mininum tech chops to be able to build the modules together.

That idea morphed into a philosophy for the app we built (at least to a decent degree, I think). So now I was trying not only to write a build system that would allow someone to selectively build the modules that would render in the final app but also enable people to write components that plug into the database somewhat more easily than usual. As a quick example, I wrote an entire layer that abstracted the API interactions (think Vuex Actions) and store access to a level where a simple wrapping component was all you needed to get data (along with loading, error states plus HTTP POST/PUT/DELETE handlers) to all the APIs in our app.

At the time of writing such layers of abstraction that would automate a lot of things for the developer, I was not aware of such patterns pre-existing in other frameworks (React/Apollo for instance). Now, I see that pattern in a lot of places. The crowning glory however – not to sound boastful but still – was the fact that I was able to write something from scratch which ended up saving me a lot of time.

The seed for that endeavour, which I am sure I wouldn't have undertaken had it not been put on my desk as a requirement from who could often sound like a madman, came from Abe's incessant need to simplify writing code by using generators, decorators, abstractions and what other ideas have you to write lesser code. In that pursuit, you usually end up writing a hell lot of code in the first few weeks of your system getting into shape and then it pays rich dividends.

If some engineer were to say, "my goal is not only to build a great product for the organization I work for but also to make my life easier and write less code", most people would probably balk at the idea and not hire them. Yet, that is precisely the kind of ideas Abe has/had in his mind and that is what led us to build a frontend that had such levels of abstraction. A culture of "how can we create a tool here that will help us make building things easier?" should be in the minds of every engineer. While not all of us can create rich frameworks like React or Vue, we certainly can create tools with existing libraries or prior art that would help us in our everyday lives.

[notesfromdruchan]

What’s in a name

Not more than three generations ago, one of the relatives of my maternal grandmother went by the name "Singer" Balaji. Anytime this name was uttered in the presence of someone who wasnt familiar with the name, both my mum and her mum would be quick to add, "not a singer but he worked in a company called Singer."

On the way back home today, I saw a huge showroom of "Singer", the tailoring machine manufacturing company. This was the first time in my life that I noticed this company which had so far only lived as a reference point to "Singer" Balaji. I was under the impression that the company, like many, had folded a long time ago, back when the world was still in greyscale.

I caught myself thinking about the fact that some people somehow get interesting names or abbreviations by which they're called by other people. A friend from schooldays, who was called by the usual shortened firstname (eg. Jonathan -> Jon) through school, was suddenly "C.K" in the professional world. His colleagues (now ex-colleagues) knew him as "C.K". "C.K" were his initials. Elsewhere, in the past that my mum remembers fondly, she was called "S.V" (her initials) by her colleagues and boss.

Perhaps because I grew up thinking that to have an abbreviated (like "K.B") or a nominal prepend/appendage (like "Gemini" Ganesan) usually meant that you were someone popular and of the V.I.P cadre, I used to think one must be lucky or special to be regular folk and yet get such names.

When I spotted the "Singer" showroom, my mind wandered a little deeper and it struck me that what was more interesting and pivotal was that some random person - acquaintance, no doubt - decided to abbreviate or append a little something to someone's name and call them with their invention. So, apparently, at work, the boss or some colleague called my mum "S.V" and kept at it. Eventually, everyone around her at her workplace started calling her "S.V". And so, as is customary in the scheme of these things, you wonder: "what made someone start calling K. Balanchander (a legendary filmmaker in India) 'K.B sir' in the first place?"

Like Modi stealing the spotlight from Advani in the run-up to the prime ministerial berth before the 2014 elections, this random person became the object of import rather than the one who begot the new name.

Needless to say my thoughts went no further, very likely because my mind suddenly went meta, decided that this was something I should write about and started stringing words, coming short of what could've been a nice deep-dive.

[notesfromdruchan]

A Breeze of Wisdom

Mostly, enlightenment has come from capsule-like tidbits of words strewn by simple folk that you read over a weekend in Bangalore.

Knowingly and unknowingly, regret has accumulated like lint in pant pockets. I've wanted to travel to faraway lands, wanted to finally find love, wanted to find out the end of this unstructured exploration of life itself, wanted to find peace with parents … so on and so forth. At the end of the day, with such wants, your mind always ends up being in a deep, continuous turmoil, murking up "what ifs" in an infinite loop.

And then comes along someone like Ruskin Bond with his book on simple living which, magically, is not a self-help book but a rather beautiful, often poetic and mostly pagan work of words. Words that slow down time and expand space so immensely that there's this inexplicable feeling that everything is alright.

I've always found happiness at S's place. It is everything I've imagined a small family to be: close, happy, humble and simple. Some of the best things in life have happened to me in his company.

Perhaps, then, it's no wonder that he gave me the book to read and so the peace to relish.

This here now is a beautiful time.

And that is all that one needs.

[notesfromdruchan]

Canine Companions

After a certain point in time, I realized that the prospect of having an animal companion was too thin for me to day-dream about a home with a cat or a dog. Cat, mostly. The detached, zen-like existence is preferable to hyperactiveness.

The other day, coming late from office, I stopped to eat from a roadside "adda". Bhaiya, ek egg sandwich. Everything was INR 40 on the menu unless you chose to add extras. I sat down on a dusty, plastic stool (a seating furniture that looks very much like a barstool, only cheaper, for those of you wondering why I sat on fecal matter). And two furry dogs ambled nearby.

*

Many years ago, I was shit-scared of dogs any size. Man's best friend had somehow instilled fear so strong in me that I would refuse to go anywhere near them. My stomach would sink every time my parents took me to visit a paternal aunt who had a pet called Browny because, of course, he was brown. Not that I hated Browny, but it was a hairy experience every time we visited them or stayed for long.

There were at least two summers that I remember, some details very vividly: having a snake slither right next to my leg as two dogs – Browny and his neighbourhood friend, a doberman named "Tiger" – barked the hell out of kingdom come, watching a snake slither through an empty, dying trunk, hoping my aunt or her husband wouldn't let in the dog (he had holidays when he could be in the drawing room or the bedroom) because the dog wanted pets from everyone and would rub against you if you didn't – and rub against you if you did anyway.

Ironically, the dog that I feared the most – Browny – turned out to be the ice-breaker. One day, he was allowed to be a part of the drawing room committee and suddenly there was no one in the room but me. I was on the sofa and Browny, wagging his tail and looking every bit pleased with the day, came excitedly at me. There was absolutely no other human distraction and I had no other choice but to gulp heavily and put my hand on his head. There was this inflexion point where I suddenly went, "Hey, this is not all that bad or frightening! He likes it. I am okay with it."

After that, my fear of dogs receded very quickly. The only hounds I might be wary of are huge with a sombre look on their faces.

*

While the chef prepared my sandwich, I decided to engage with the dogs that had come by. One of them – a big, furry guy – responded immediately. I began petting him on the head and pretty soon he was guiding my hand all over his face. Eventually he rested his face on my lap and looked at me with a smile on his face (or that's how humans interpret it).

Stray dogs are notoriously dirty and this guy was no exception. Clearly, I needed to wash my hands much if I had to lay a hand on the sandwich so I decided to make it a take-away. This gave me a free hand (no pun intended) in petting the dog even more which I promptly did.

Excited, he made several trips under my legs as I sat on the plastic barstool, the game itself being interesting enough for him and for the onlookers. After a few rounds of this, he stopped for more pets. And that's when I realized he was shedding like a gulmohar tree at the end of a harsh summer. My trousers, cotton as they were, seemed to be magnets to the fur and I spent sometime trying to get them off. Someone on the road must've decided I was a prime lunatic to have let this happen.

Sometime during this encounter, my thoughts went back to Bangalore, to the street in Ashraya Layout where I spent a couple of years. Every street, as is quite common in many Indian cities and villages, had a bunch of dogs that took it upon themselves to act as the first line of defence against perceived intruders human and non-human. We had four of them on ours and none of them would allow me to touch / pet them because they were as scared of humans as I was of dogs several years ago.

My attempts to woo them were ceaseless anyway. Parle-G was only INR 10 and my income was sufficient to allow for a daily allowance. Of the four, one got cozy enough to eat from my hand (but got pretty defensive once your hand tried to reach him to pet). The other two would sometimes be okay to fetch from my hand but other times would want nothing to do with hand-feeding: put it on the ground and be done with it, mister. The fourth, the biggest of them all and looking like a veteran of several wars, was the scaredy cat of the pack. That one wouldn't even come close. I had to throw the biscuits a little far off for him to get his share. My brother and I called him the "Vadivelu" dog for the great comedian's many portrayals of fake strength and eventual cowardice.

*

The small colony of Giriraj Society in Ahmedabad with its small lanes branching out of the main one had its own pack too. Each lane had a few canine troublemakers. In wintry mornings, you'd find them sound asleep at 10.30AM, basking in the glory of the sun. At night, somewhere some dog would let out a hesitant howl and these would pick up from where that one left and augment it. For several minutes – sometimes going into an hour – the cacophony would peak. A man sleeping on a jute cot would wake up grudgingly, take out a stick and shoo them away. Sometimes, this fix would only be temporary.

I couldn't make friends with them in the few years I lived there. Somehow, they never felt like homies.

*

When I moved back to Chennai recently, I made friends with another "Browny" – a burly canine that lived in the apartment premises where my maternal aunt lives. One day, I decided to pet him and he put both his front legs on me. For a canine that looked serious some of the time, he was quite playful. For the first time in years, I realize now, I had actually played with a dog and a dog had actually let me pet it.

Trysts with Browny did not last long, of course, as I've had to move to Hyderabad where, on a warm night, I met a furry dog that would rub all of its fur on my trouser, smile and ask for more pets.

[notesfromdruchan]

Dispatches From Hyd: R – Part Two

That initial conversation lasted about an hour.

For someone who described herself as "mai bhi aapke jaise bohot silent thi", she spoke a lot. I think she chose well when she said "thi" instead of "hoon". What caught me by surprise though was that, near the end of the call, she said, "I thought you'd be very reserved but you do talk a lot!"

The broad contours of her story are interesting at least for someone like me who has only known city-bred women. She came from a town not too small to warrant a 1970s Ilayaraja background score but not too big or modern either. In those few glimpses of her, you could feel the rural vibe only marginally affected by the postmodern urbanism. She went on and on about her brief life in Hyderabad, about her parents living in the town, about her brother and about her sister, and about her being the youngest and "naturally" the most pampered. When it was time for me to describe my family, her first assumption was that I was also the pampered kid (by virtue of being the only child to my parents). Somehow, I've never seen proof of that stereotype as much as I'd like to: almost all the single children I've known have had some of the strictest parents I've known too.

Nothing quirky came out of the first call.

It was the second that had a whiff of something dubious. On the second call, which came perhaps a week or so later, the initial courtesies were about dinner. Her work hours ended by late afternoon so I asked her what occupied her after-work time. She said, almost casually, that she "did business". My first thought was to probe but it was not my first reaction so I let it slide.

But to an aggressive marketer the ice was broken.

In the next fifteen minutes, "business" was dropped half a dozen times and it was promoted — from her perspective, organically / slyly but for someone who read between the lines, very brazenly — in the brightest, greenest of lights possible in the spectrum. She spoke of how it did not feel like work because it was that interesting, waxed lyrical about the people she got to interact with, sang glories of some of the other partners who had attained high-end material wealth thanks to this and so on. Eventually we did get around to the elephant in the room. So tell me about your business. What do you do?

You know, Chandru, business ke baare me bolu to poora din chala jayega.

And with that, she effortlessly delayed the pitch for another episode and, after the call, I wondered if she had misinterpreted, in her relative inexperience, my courtesy as an insatiable craving to know about her "business".

Elsewhere, all the world including me had figured out what business is.

[notesfromdruchan]

Dispatches From Hyd: R – Part One

"Do you have 5 minutes to talk, Chandru?"

There was this visceral faux seriousness in her tone and I braced for impact: she was either going to spin an elaborate ruse to ask for money. Or worse.

*

I've heard many a tale about random, female strangers breaking the ice with my guy friends (the social ones usually). Then there is also Kirti, an introverted ex-colleague who has shared his tales of unknown women (or may be just 'woman') chatting him up. And I've wondered if that kind of a thing actually happens to people or if they're all just bluffing through their teeth. Secretly, I knew that these things happen; perhaps not as frequently as the movies make out to be. But I also knew that this shit never happened with me and that put a dissonance between reality and perception of it.

So it did come as a surprise when a girl riding in the same share-auto as I chatted me up. She was the only one in the autorickshaw when I got in and just as I got in, the driver let out a stream of Telugu with one specific English word: "police". That caught my attention (by which time he left the autorickshaw to recruit more riders) so I asked her, "Aapko hindi aati hai?" to which she said yes. Then I asked her if she would translate to me what the driver had just said and she obliged. I thanked her and automatically assumed that was the end of it.

As new riders trickled in while the autorickshaw and its driver stood waiting to fill beyond-full-capacity (5 people ride in what's typically a 3-seater auto, and that's excluding the driver; 3 in the back where riders usually sit and 2 on either side of the driver. Welcome to South Asia), she asked me if I was working here, where I was from, what role I had at work and a bunch of other common things a stranger would ask. She said she loved Tamil songs, that she preferred them over Telugu ones, and then just as my brain began anticipating a non-mainstream human, I heard her profess love for "Rowdy Baby" (the song from Mari 2) and I decided this was an open-and-shut case of mainstream boredom. She did the talking, I did the listening. She did offer, not with the cautious dispassion of courtesy but with exuberant enthusiasm, to be my guide to explore Hyderabad.

Having found 3 other people, we took off from Gachibowli. Since more women had gotten into the autorickshaw, I had to relinquish my seat next to this girl and sit next to the driver. The conversation couldn't happen across this specific seating arrangement so my mind was racing through options: may be I will get down with her if she got down before me and try to get her number and - eventually - do what the West and the movies have told us to do?

Someone got down before either of us so I got to sit next to her. The conversation resumed and her opening statement this time was, "Chandru, does your startup have any job openings?" Sadly, no. "May be if you know of some other startup or company with an opening, let me know?" Sure, thing. Now, the gentleman in me kicked in and I skirted the phone number part completely and asked, instead, for her email. "I'll give you my number," she offered. We exchanged our numbers and she called me three days later at about 9.45pm.

(To be continued)

[notesfromdruchan]

Dispatches From Hyd: Ecosystem

In retrospect, it's the most obvious economic thing that happens everywhere. Where people work, a slew of businesses setup shop and an ecosystem of livelihood builds in the vicinity, supported just by the working class people. Food shops, of all other types, are the first to come up and thrive.

My attention to this was drawn not by the food shops of course. Living as it is in the midst of a huge cluster of hostels for working men and women, I found many tailoring shops in the area. That is when I realized how an entire ecosystem of businesses emerges out of almost nothing in and around places where people work and have not much time (or inclination) to do certain things that an older generation would be self-reliant about. Things like cooking and sewing.

Tailoring shops tell another tale. It's a stereotype but an honest one at that. In our country, women have historically spent more time on dresses and fixing them (or tweaking them, perhaps). Sure, the tailoring shop workers are often men but the customers mostly are women. In a swarm of nests for men, a tailoring shop would've been a sinking business but since this place is a cluster of hostels for both men and women (albeit separately), tailoring shops win.

[notesfromdruchan]

Dispatches From Hyd: Nests

There was (and hopefully still is) a huge banyan tree right in the middle of an intersection a few meters off of S.G.Highway in Ahmedabad. Somewhat diagonally across was the first office of a small startup I worked with a few years back. It was a simple, one-room shop with a shutter more suited for a retail store than a tech office.

We wound up our work sometime between 7.00pm and 8.00pm. Just before sundown, there would be this enormous ruckus of birds' chitter-chatter from across. For several minutes, an otherwise silent evening would turn into a massive, audacious and sometimes near-ear-splitting event. The birds, from wherever they had gone for the day, would return to their nests on the giant banyan.

Gowlidoddy, with its mega-cluster of hostels for working men and women, is pretty much like that banyan tree. Every morning, thousands of people emerge out of their dens in one of the dozens of buildings around this tiny, congested place and fly away - some in buses, some in cabs, some in autorickshaws, some by walk, some in their private vehicles - to earn their daily bread. Some of us earn more than our fair share of daily bread but that is a line of thought for later. In the evenings, these people fly back to the nests. The whole place is awash with dust as footfalls and vehicular traffic kindles the dusty roads back into action.

You can spot a lot of pairs - perhaps colleagues at work or perhaps lovers through some fortunate incident that brought them together or perhaps just strangers that happened to walk in tandem at the time someone watched them. But of course the hostels are demarcated zones so the voluntary pairs have to split at some point and go to their individual nests.

The strangest thing of all is to find myself in this tree, emerging out of it every morning and returning back to it every night. For the longest time now I've built nests to live alone, mostly away from this milieu of modern-day breadwinners that define our movies, our culture, our indifference and sometimes our misplaced sense of importance to non-issues and immoral practices. A lonely nest tucked far away is an abode of solitude. It allows for a void which you can then fill with what you want to - the best of it sometimes being more nothingness. A nest in the middle of a thousand others lacks that luxury.

Not that I'm complaining. A Tamilian roommate who always has a very interesting perspective to share and fortunately is not embroiled in the mundane vagaries of livelihood is a welcome relief to look forward to every evening. A nice, flat television with some great channels is another albeit not in the same vein as the former. There are these things. There are always these beautiful things to relish the todays and cherish for the tomorrows.

Yet.