To earth, Yours truly

Dear earth people, 

My name is...well, it cannot be communicated in any of the languages you talk on earth. In our planet we name people based on the body fragrance they carry as new born babies. Just like the fingerprints you have, each one of our babies comes with a unique odour at the time of its birth. And we name a baby based on the way the newborn baby influences our olfactory setup. But, unlike your finger impressions and the palm lines, the body fragrance of our babies remain exactly the same throughout their lives - no matter what. (Even when someone is turning into ash, her body still gives out the same fragrance that she had as a new born, though for one last time.) It means the names we give remain relevant forever. It also means we do not have to bother about remembering anyone's name; we can know the name of a stranger walking down the street by just taking a deep breath in that direction. It is as simple. And if I were to tell you the greatest beauty of our planet, I would vote for the uniqueness in the names we carry. There are no repetitions in our names; the 33 billion of us carry different names. I am sure you will find it hard to grasp that, just like how we found it difficult to understand what was meant by a lie - until, that chap whom you referred by the name PK, kept hitting all of us with that thing called lie.

Things were okay during the initial days of his return to our home, over twenty years back. PK (allow me to use the earth name, please) manned our 17th mission to your planet. Though he was not as smart as the earlier ones we sent, he had an inherent charm that helped him gloss over his certain lack of substance. Yes, we do not talk to each other in our planet, as PK might have told you. But things changed. We had huge expectations from his mission. One of its objectives was to study the life expectancy of the desert animals in various arid zones of the earth. But a rude shock was in store for us. Our efforts to trace anything relating to the mission from the samples PK had brought turned disastrous. There was not a single item that was related to the mission. All that we could find was loads and loads of worn out cassettes; and much worse all the tapes had the very same human's voice. It was just baffling and annoying at the same time. I mean, you spend something around $75 billion and all that you get in return is some strange earth lady's voice? We just could not believe it! PK had taken us for a very long ride. The Body for Inter-galactic Travels and Studies (BITS) immediately blacklisted him from all future missions and slapped a handsome penalty too.

Well, from our earlier mission notes we were aware that something called as love existed in earth and it drove people real crazy. Perhaps, PK was a victim. He was the first recorded case of alien love in our planet. Soon, our fraternity ended up empathising with him. But that is only one side of the story. 

As I said, all this happened before twenty years when PK got back to us. Within a few days of his arrival, we could see there was something strange with his actions, behaviour. But he said "Aall is well". (He actually started talking.) One fine morning he invited all of us to come to his two bedroom house, apparently to have a look at a sample he had collected from the earth. Reluctantly, for the sake of friendship and science, some of us went. It appeared to be something like a brass coin flicked from one of our highly guarded museums. But he said it was a magical talisman that an earth godman blessed him with. He did not stop there. Closing his eyes, he started chanting incoherent and cacophonous couplets, and claimed them to be the namtras taught by the earth god himself. He said the earth god and godmen chose him. He claimed he had acquired supernatural powers. He boasted he did not have the need to go to earth anymore. He announced just by sitting at his home, with eyes closed and the namtras on his lips, he would be able to know what was happening in your lives. He said a lot more. We were all thrilled by his words. The director of our 16th mission, who happens to be me incidentally, was the man who was the most excited one. I wanted to learn every bit of the namtras that PK uttered. He declared he knew the techniques to transfer his super human powers to us. Is there someone whom greed has not touched? Temptation trampled our scientific temper.

Soon there was a beeline in front of PK's house to learn the namtras and acquire the advertised out-of-the-world powers. Everyone wanted to be like that Kryptonian who landed on your planet and who whenever wanting to fly had only to raise his hand towards the sky. Naturally, it was impossible for PK to teach all of us who pestered him, or perhaps he did not want to teach all of us. So he started an education centre with a capacity of one hundred pupils in its first batch. He fancily called it zero2infin2years. The classes were for two hours every day for two years. Good so far. But our jaws dropped when he told us his tuition fees. Normally, we spend about $70,000 for a reputable 2-year MBA course. PK's course was priced at an astronomical figure of $1,50,000! But, though most of us will not be comfortable wearing the briefs over the trousers, who does not long to be a superman? The entire batch got sold out. Most of us took study loans. As planned our classes ran for two hours every day and went on for two years. By then PK had left his job with the laboratory. He acquired two husbands, three wives, and a lot of stones and trees. He just rocketed into the zone of elites in no time. All he did was just sit at his home, make us utter (yes, we too started talking) some gibberish, eat and sleep. 

I was simultaneously pursuing a fellowship program with the linguistics department of the Sentre for Advanced Alien Studies (SAAS). It was the third year of my study on earth languages and it involved analysing about 17,600 fully developed language formats of your planet on a daily basis. And to cut a long story short, gradually, towards the end of the second year of PK's course, I realised four things - that I was poorer by $1.5 lakh, that PK was richer by $15 million, that I was not getting anywhere near the promised infinity, and worst of all, that the blabber of PK did not conform to the syntax of any of the earth languages.

Luckily around the same time I remembered what one of your best detective characters had said "...when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." At last, I realised what he meant by truth. I understood what was a lie. Truth was something like air to us. We were living with it, but we did not know or realise or understand or even define what it was, as it was the default and the only setting we had -  until I realised PK was not speaking the truth; until I realised he had acquired the functionality of telling lies from you, the earth people. 

As you say truth alone triumphs, very soon most of us were aware that there is something called lying. It was an act by which you cover or misrepresent or twist or deform certain events for various reasons like profiteering, wooing others, making fun, seeking attention, so on and so forth. We had the best quality of life among all the planets of the three neighbouring galaxies, including the Milky Way. Perhaps, as I realise now, it was due to the fact that none of us lied; rather we did not know what was meant by lying though we were vaguely aware of such a thing existing in various planets including the earth; we also did not know what was a truth. We just had a mind that was understood by one and all instantaneously, and exactly in the same manner - all without exchanging even a single word. We did not have any hassle ever.

But PK changed everything forever. A lie. Two lies. Many lies. Liars. Good liars. Better liars. Best liars. Super liars. Petty lies. Pranks. Big lies. Betrayals. Crimes. Scams. If you have seen closely in some BBC videos how a zygote multiplies and ultimately becomes a bubbly baby, you can appreciate what I am trying to say. The only difference is that, in our planet a mother lie multiplied uncontrollably unleashing an over-sized, despicable demon. Okay, I think it was more of a cancerous cell than a zygote. 

Today, PK is in total control of our planet. He has assumed the title "The Supreme Lord". No wonder as he is the inventor of lies in our planet. People like me feel earth is a safer place now. I am planning to come there soon.

Yours truly,
.

(PS: By the way, that initial part about the unique fragrance, etc. is not true. Lying is fun.)

I

Whenever Sachin walks back to the pavilion, he is not judged by the numbers of hours he spent in the nets the day before the match; he is judged only by the score he made while at the crease during match. The same thing is applicable for most things in life. Outside the Bhagavad Gita, what matters is only the results. I has been in the making for about three years. (Roughly about one year for one screen hour.) During this period, the most bankable, mega scale director of Kollywood collaborated with the best of the talents around, the lead actor Vikram proved he was ready even to die for I, some Rs.100 crores got pumped into the project, Arnold electrified Chennai and we got to see an out-of-the world Tamil movie trailer. But apart from the trailer shots, there are not many scenes in the movie that will make your eyes light up and jaw drop. Shankar is known for making lengthy movies, but unlike Sivaji or Indian I runs for 3 hours plus - without the backing of an interesting and intelligent script. The movie is around love, jealousy, betrayal and yes, revenge. Body builder Lingesan goes behind a set of four guys (or is it three?), who for various reasons like love, fame and money, destroy his career and life by injecting a virus that nastily deforms his body. And Lingesan takes revenge in Shankar style, or to be precise in Anniyan style - the only difference being Lingesan does not want to kill anyone; his motive is to make these guys experience hell every single day of their lives.

I is a mix of The Elephant Man, Anniyan and a typical Tamil movie of the 80s - unfortunately, with the last one dominating. Right after the initial scenes, the movie fails to take you with it. So you have accessories like Power Star comedy, heroine intro songs, etc. making attempts at entertaining you. But such things do not come to the rescue of a weak script that swings between moments of technical brilliance and long footage of boring dialogues. It is very hard to state the central theme of the movie, as it is undecided between a revenge drama and a love epic. Boredom and confusion march behind indecision. In a way, the main plot of the movie could be construed as the absolutely unconditional love of a rich girl for a innocent boy punished cruelly by some cunning minds. But the poorly made love portions, especially the situation that lead Diya to propose to Lingesan, make you sit and wonder if love were the central theme at all. There is no build up. There is no fresh thinking. There is no magic. Then you start thinking perhaps the movie is all about revenge. But when Santhanam tries to make fun of the deformed, contorted, wasted villains in the end, you start doubting even the revenge theme as you do not feel the usual vicarious satisfaction and fulfilment that you have when a hero demolishes a villain.

The initial portions on the lives of body builders are novel and interesting. But the script could have paid more attention to the characterisation of business tycoons and models. Perhaps, the team should have seen a movie like Fashion a couple of times before sitting for a discussion. Many dialogues remind you of mega serials that come on the weekdays across all TV channels. But the Chennai slang chat Diya-Lingesan have in China is enjoyable to a good extent. In Shankar's signature style, the punctuation marks of stunts and songs are painstakingly executed by his top notch team of technicians and a composer - even to the extent that they are no more mere commas and colons. But do they necessarily engross you? Probably, no. Shankar has reached a level of predictability in the way he picturises the songs. It is time to reinvent. It is time to get over the obsession of making grand songs at the cost of a good movie. The bicycle stunt atop the Chinese rooftops stays afresh in your minds. But a hunchback fighting a six-pack model on the roof of a running train - that is beyond any reasonable logic. And a movie, as we know, is not just a collection of brilliant stunts and breath taking songs.

Lingesan uses various forces like fire, electric power, honey bees, virus, etc. to deform the physique and destroy the psyche of the villains. But after seeing the Garuda puranam inspired Anniyan, such methods appear childish, if not outright dull, to a large extent. More than that, the script has failed to capitalise on the pity generated by the deformed Lingesan. So, when you see various levels of damaged and deranged villains in the second half, you just feel a little uncomfortable - you do not feel satisfied that ultimately justice has been done, that the good has won over the evil. And this is a major failure. This blunder makes me to think if the audience (especially the ladies and children) will be comfortable living with a lot of distorted guys with burnt skin, hairy skin, and other degraded body types in the second half. I was not.

With a good amount of trimming and very basic care for the lip-sync of non-Tamil artists including the heroine, I could have been a well-made movie. But even then it will be been nowhere near the standards Shankar has set for himself - and for us.

I belongs to Vikram. Watch it for him.

The maths teacher

In every town there lies a house that does not find any takers. Kalavai, a small town near Vellore, was no exception. The one bedroom house near the Girls' Higher Secondary School, Kalavai has been lying vacant ever since Sankaran moved in nine years back. Sankaran did not know much about cats, or for that matter about any animals other than algebra. He was a mathematics teacher with the state government schools and he belonged to the rare category of teachers, who were passionate about teaching. He taught for the Class XI and XII students in the Government Girls' Higher Secondary School, Vellore. Apart from the trigonometric functions and sundries, his world contained only two others - his wife, Chitra and daughter, Savithri. Ever since their wedding, there has been only little interaction between the couple and their relatives. The trend continued even after the vivacious Savithri came into their lives. The girl was gifted with an immense memory power that helped her excel at the school exams. She was in Class VI, when Sankaran was transferred to Kalavai. Normally, the teachers getting shifted out of Vellore to the nearby smaller towns did not shift base. They did daily up-down trips from Vellore to their small town postings. Sankaran too could have done that with Kalavai. But he did not.

Savithri almost in tears, said 'Don't leave us pa...be here'. 'I will be here whenever you want to see me.' 'Don't lie! Only on Saturday-Sunday you will come home. Don't go.' Chitra and Sankaran looked at each other. 'Five days will fly like that Savi..' Chitra pitched in. 'Okay...let us also go with father ma. I will join in your new school pa’. It took a while for the parents to comfort the kid and put her to sleep. ‘Even I am not okay... Can't you try and cancel your transfer order? Or why can't you travel daily as everyone else does?' ‘Take care of Savi... it's a matter of just one year. Now sleep'. Sankaran's philosophy was that a teacher should be accessible to the students any time even after the school hours. Though most of the students were not particularly fond of meeting their mathematics teachers after the school hours, most of the parents felt otherwise. Sankaran did not want to disappoint any such parent in Kalavai. So he had found himself a tiny house on rent, less than 500m from the Girls' Higher Secondary School, in Kalavai.

He was the very first human occupant of the house. Kalavai school's principal had helped Sankaran with finding the house. The house had been lying vacant ever since it was completed about four years back. 'The brothers had some... misunderstanding soon after the construction got over. I have sorted it out now. Thyagarajan is the eldest one, you handover the monthly rent to him. He is a perfect gentleman, working with the EB.' During the year, the vacant house had already seen three litters of kittens. The last two were from the same mother. Unlike the earlier feline, who had given birth to three cute kittens in the bathroom, this queen had delivered her four kids in the pristine kitchen sink that she had turned tastefully into a cozy Moses basket. But cruelly, only one of the four kittens survived beyond a fortnight. After some four months, her second litter of three shiny black kittens presented themselves to the world in that kitchen sink. That was when the principal succeeded in settling the family dispute to help Sankaran.

Sankaran's family was with him in Kalavai to set up the place for him. Some of us do not like cats. But Sankaran did not particularly hate cats. But as a very normal part of the house cleaning routine, he had to remove those three tiny, lovable, week-old kittens from the kitchen sink. 'I will leave them in a safe place. The mother cat will come and take care of her babies..' 'Ok pa..', Savithri replied weakly. 'Good girl! Chitra, you both be here.' Chitra too was not feeling fine. More than the actual act of separating the babies from a mother, what troubled Chitra was the colour of all the three kittens - black. Sankaran carefully placed those lovely things in a textile shop carry bag and carried it till he reached the unused pump house amidst the coconut groves, almost a kilometre away. Then he left those three black kittens at the pump house. He took care to cover them with the piece of old cloth that he carried along. Before leaving the place, he lovingly glanced at them and smiled. The tiny ones were too tiny to even realise what was happening to them; they were no more at their home. They were not aware it would be their last day; they were not aware they would be eaten up alive.

By the time the queen returned to her home after a good meal, the pump house was left only with the dried up blood of the jet-black kittens. A few dogs and crows loitered around the pump house.

Over the next two days while Chitra and Savithri got the house ready for Sankaran, the queen rummaged the entire place for her babies. She roamed as though she was possessed. She even kept a watch on Savithri for a while. But after long hours of maddening and frustrating search around the house, she just fell asleep in the unused cupboard of the Class VI room of the Girls' Higher Secondary School, Kalavai.

Surprisingly, none of the parents in Kalavai wanted extra maths classes for their kids. During the initial couple of days the loneliness almost drove Sankaran mad. Gradually, he got used to it. After the school hours, it was only a routine of news papers, old magazines, cooking and eating and sleeping alone for Sankaran. Though, on a few occasions he caught up with his neighbour for a small chat. The heaven is where the home is. The weekends in Vellore were heaven for Sankaran. Every Friday, he took the first bus that started after 5:00 PM to Vellore. Monday mornings, after an early breakfast and with a heavy heart, he would take an early bus to Kalavai and directly reach the school. Monday evening onwards he kept counting the hours till Friday evening. Friday nights, he was back in his heaven again. It was one of those Monday evenings when he reached his house from the school. The very moment he entered the house, he heard the noise of rolling vessels. He rightly guessed it was a cat. It was the very same cat.

The queen was trying to reestablish its home in the kitchen, in a corner of the loft this time. She finished off the eggs, milk and other likeable leftovers in the kitchen. Sitting in a corner of the loft she made weird noises in the nights. She would tear off the pillows and towels when Sankaran was busy in the school. She would push around the utensils every single day, probably she loved the noise of the rolling vessels. She also loved training her claws on newsprint and she developed immense affinity for the low quality vernacular daily. Very soon she upgraded to clothes and tore off a piece from Sankaran's trousers. She also scattered her fur all over the tiny house. The queen always made her way through the narrow ventilator above the kitchen loft. The locked kitchen windows did not matter to her. Sankaran's loneliness and boredom started to transform into fatigue and frustration. He was at his wit’s end. It was the first time in his life he experienced utter helplessness, that too because of a female cat.

After another weekend in heaven, Sankaran was all alone at his house that Monday evening. Sankaran could feel a strong stench. Very soon the odour turned unbearable. It was about nine in the night when he peeped over the loft to see dried and decomposed leftovers of a chicken. Little feathers were all over the loft and big, black ants were making a beeline to the bits of tissues. The smell and the sight made the maths teacher almost slip off the chair that he had climbed to have a look at the loft. Bastard! he told himself. Over the next few hours, he scrubbed the loft and before falling asleep he sealed the ventilator completely with a worn out gunny bag. From the next day onwards, he kept the window open only while he cooked. The queen tried to get back her home over the next few days, but she was not strong enough to clear the gunny bag. The maths teacher had a peaceful time thereafter. 

But Sankara's relief did not last long. It was a Thursday evening. The next day, by the same time, he would be in his heaven in Vellore. Sankaran was sitting with his newspaper outside his house, under the filament bulb light, when his neighbour called him over for a chat. They had an unusually long chat touching up politics, cinema, cricket, weather and other usual stuff. By the time they concluded that no one could ever redeem India it was eight. Sankaran planned to prepare rasam that night. But when he entered his house after the chat, he heard the same sound of rolling vessels. You bitch! he told himself. We don't know what exactly went on in his mind that moment, but suddenly he closed the main door of his house and rushed into the kitchen and frenetically closed the kitchen door too. The queen that was in the sink area was stunned; she deftly jumped over to the loft via the window grill in no time. Not knowing what to do Sankaran shouted at the queen, who was trembling in a corner of the loft. The maths teacher chose the best of abuses. Soon, after a quick glance of the kitchen he undecidedly picked up the old broom that was lying below the sink - the very same sink that was once the bed for the kittens. He caught the broom at the cleaning end and started waving at the queen with the broom's tin sheet rolled handle. The queen was into its eighth week of pregnancy. Sankaran was not aware of that. Even if he had known that, probably it would not have mattered to him that day.  The cat had been keeping herself busy with lots of food and ample rest. It was to be her third litter during the year. With four, ready-to-be-born kittens in her womb, she was not been able to jump around freely to escape getting thrashed by the metal handle of the broom that almost reached her corner in the loft. Come down bitch! Sankaran screamed. The broom's next swipe almost grazed the queen. She jumped from the loft towards the kitchen door, hoping that it would open. But it did not. Sankaran immediately charged at her from the sink side. The queen hurriedly crossed over to the window side and quickly got back to her corner in the loft. The cat-and-man chase continued for quite some time before Sankaran stopped to have some water. He felt hungry. 

He renewed his attack with a new vigour. Soon, he climbed over the kitchen slab and shooed at the queen sitting on the other extreme of the loft. The cat's energy was draining out and she could not think of any way to escape the trap. With just the broom, Sankaran too could not succeed in doing what he wanted to do. The chase was always following the same sequence of loft-door-window-loft. It was well past ten in the night when Sankaran got that idea. With his feet on the sink slab, looking right into the beautiful, green eyes of the queen, he grabbed a steel tumbler from the shelf and threw at the queen. Sitting at the other extreme of the loft, she was shivering with fear, her heart was racing. The tumbler missile missed her by a whisker. The maths teacher was never into cricket. Next was a copper-bottom vessel that Sankaran usually used to make rasam. He bent down and grabbed it and almost when he had thrown it right at the queen’s abdomen, it happened. The cat jumped on the door, quickly flew towards the window and undecidedly pounced on Sankaran, who was still starring at the corner of the loft with the killer vessel in his hand. Though she was not sure of what she was doing, the pregnant cat was fast, strong and accurate.

When something really sharp digs into your neck, and that too in the right places, you can either have a slow and agonising death or an instant, painless death. Sankaran could not go to his heaven ever after. The tiny house near the school has been lying vacant ever after.