The writer, The showman and ‘The Guide’

This one was a difficult story to research, something I had avoided for a long time. Two of my favorite persons tussling with each other and the question of who was right was a determination I did not really want to make, mainly because I felt that one had to be wrong for the other to be right. Anyway I was determined to find out if there was indeed a real story behind all this posturing and so I decided to get to the root of the matter. Armed with a lot of research and archival material, I dived deep into the topic, and read much on the lines and between the lines, to come out with a much better understanding of the issue. In this narrative, I will move back and forth between the first person accounts of those interesting personalities, newspaper reports and other material to keep the story going.


The people are all well known, and we traverse to a period 1958-1965. RK Narayan, in his middle ages and a widower then, had already completed and published some 6-7 novels and was well regarded in India and the West. Some of his best books - Swami and fiends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark room, The English Teacher, Mr. Sampath, Waiting for the Mahatma and the Financial expert had been devoured by many happy fans and critics. He had quite a following and kept to his strict regimen of writing a few thousand words every day, in the pursuit of creation of many more fascinating literary works. Dev Anand, by that time was a popular Bollywood (the term did not exist then) matinee idol, some 20 years younger than RKN, having acted in wonderful films like Baazi, Munimji, CID, Paying guest, Kala bazar, Bombai ka babu, Hum Dono, Tere Ghar ke samne and Kala-pani, just to name a few.

Read more at Maddys Ramblings

VP Menon – The architect of modern India

While perusing the stories of Nehru, Krishna Menon and many others I had covered in these blogs, I came across VP’s name now and then. And like the man he was, he and his character were such that they remained largely hidden in those niches and corners. It took me much effort to prise open some of that persona behind them. It could be so that VP wanted to remain hidden, for it is certainly curious that a person of such greatness has not a single biography or major biographical article written about him.  In fact even in encyclopedias, his private life is given a couple of paragraphs of space, though much is written about the actions he took and his work. So this article tries to keep the long narrative connected to the person while only gleaning over his majestic work.....................................

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Menon resigned from the service in 1951 to settle in Bangalore. And thus he came back to his beloved Bangalore, moved to his house in Cooks town and the old timers of Banagalore still mention the big car and the presence of Menon in august functions and as the fighter for civic rights in Bangalore & Mysore. Here he sat and wrote the two great and oft quoted books, The transfer of Power and The formation of states. In addition he contributed frequently to newspapers and magazines, also writing great euologies about people he had difficulties with such as CP Ramaswamy Iyer who had once fought long with him on the accession of the kingdom of Travancore.

Menon was a serious Bangalore resident, mentioning many a time of his having owned a house there for thirty years and having lived there for 10 years. Well, it was in his house that he sat to write the two great memoirs on the request of Patel. But once Patel was gone, Menon had hardly the great drive he possessed once before.

NottuSwara – Muthuswamy Dikshitar’s European airs

Now some of you must have heard that Baluswamy Diskshitar - Muthuswamy’s brother introduced the Violin to Carnatic music as I mentioned some months ago while writing about Ettayapuram in the article Cat (Kattabomman) Etappa & Dumby.


Well, the British rule in India has to be thanked again for without the violin, there is no way a Carnatic recital gets complete today. How Baluswamy learnt violin is also a matter of contention. Some opine that he learnt it in Manali thanks to the Mudaliar sponsorship; others say it was at the courts of Ettayapuram and a third faction states this happened at Tanjore with the help of Vadivelu.

Anyway it is difficult to figure out how that happened, but Baluswamy learnt Violin and bits of Celtic music. He practiced it at home in Manali and the master composer and elder brother Muthuswamy took note. Later Muthuswamy set Sanskrit shlokas to the tunes and we know it today as the Nottu Swara Sahitya. There are some 36-40 of these works set around the Raaga Sankarabharanam. The song you heard was one of Dikshitar’s compositions.

The Chinese fishing nets at Kochi

Now and then a question comes up – about the origins of the Cheena Vala or the Chinese fishing net in Cochin. Some opine firmly that they are of ancient Chinese origin, dating to Kublai Khan’s times (mid 13th century); some others say it arrived even before that and others grandly announce they actually date to Zheng He’s arrival (early 15th century). To get to a factual answer, one has to try & search hard and long, possibly fruitlessly, even though the very name of the net signifies that the connection had to be Chinese. My own introduction to the Cheena Vala came by a (non detail) textbook which we studied in school titled so and written by our lecturer CKC Nair (I did not see one though until much later). A wonderful collection of short stories, this specific story detailed the life of a Cheena vala operator in Cochin and I still remember the laborious attempts of his in placing a Petromax gas lamp into position before he retired for the night, near the net, for fishes to get drawn to. Though I had forgotten the story, the net remained in my mind, a majestic but forlorn contraption, which remains operational to this day even after so many hundred years (I am not saying the wooden poles or nets date that long back and I do not know if at all that is the case anyway), now an object of intense tourist scrutiny. These nets can be found only around Cochin and people look at them with much curiosity and awe and walk away consigning them into their notes and diaries written about their fascinating trip to the backwaters, penning in memories of the ‘karimeen’ fish fry, the local ‘kallu’ coconut liquor and the boatmen in the covered house boats as they traversed the backwaters. All this time, these Chinese cantilever fishing nets, suspended like giant webs along the tip of Fort Cochin, silently watched millions pass by.

What are they, where did they come from? We will find out. Are they indeed centuries old? Possibly the only surviving 800 year old machinery, man made? Are they found in China? We had never seen a picture of an installation in china in recent times, mind you - said a friend. Unable to resist the challenge, I donned my research cap (like an ancient Viking with his helmet) and set about into the not so dusty digital annals of history with my trusty weapons, the PC and the mouse, right hand clad in a special glove making it look like a medieval gladiators hand (though it is actually meant to tackle telltale signs of a carpal tunnel issue cropping up) holding a trusty sword. Ah, you can see that I am losing it, must be age catching up..

read on

The Primus stove and Gandhiji

It was Maaji’s nostalgic article on the Janata Stove that took me back to our bachelor days and some connections between Gandhiji and the Primus stove.


I remember that mom had the same green and red Janata stove and as a kid I used to play with the lever that raised the wick up and down up and down till I got a sharp whack on the back of the head and was shooed away from the kitchen. But it was a big relief for the women from the smoky adupu’s (even though the sawdust ones we had in Calicut were virtually smokeless) or fireplaces and the ‘kozhal’ that was used to stoke the flames. I used to blow (plooom – that was the sound) and blow through it when I passed the kitchen, for the fun of it and as usual got a crack on the head from any elder in attendance in the kitchen for destroying the peace and getting on her already strained nerves. If I remember right, there was a circular thing that you had to lower from the top to shut down the flame, by pressing on the wick from the top. ...........................

Chennai days – Part 2

It is all in the mind, I kept telling myself again, this is free country, there is no problem out there and there is nothing to worry. I do not recall now if it said, ‘private property – keep away, entry by permission or trespassers will be prosecuted (or castrated)’ or some such thing. But I definitely know that there were no skull and bones pictures and the watchman seemed a ‘namke vaste’ geezer, the remains of wealthy days of the Nawab, vestiges long trimmed by the passage of time. But the sharp nag at the back of the neck and chest remained, for I was convinced I was in a place, a place I should not be in – maybe due to everybody else saying I should not go there. At that time I did not know that the Nawab and the people inside were a gentle lot.


It has always been like that with me, some friends may remember my experience with the taxi driver or the jump into the pond, articles published elsewhere. Act first, think later was my motto in those impulsive younger days. So that morning, on my way to the bus stop, on a Saturday, alone and lonesome, I was out planning to go for the Mardi Gras at IIT Adayar, which none of the others in Ambika Nivas were the least interested in, I decided to step into Amir mahal and take a look at the prohibited grounds, the place from where all those burkha clad females and shehenai wadan had emanated. I had to clear the mystery in my mind.

The Charition Mime and Udyavara

The heading would be mysterious to most people save a few from the Manipal or Udupi region of Karnataka, or those favoring Kannada & Tulu literary discussions. Most others may have heard a passing snippet referring to this in the middle of an uninteresting conversation, and so I thought it a good effort to cover this subject, for it is remarkable in many ways...............

This story takes us down to a place some 100 miles south of Alexandria and today’s Cairo, to an ancient Nile river city called Oxrynchus .......

Among the fragments they discovered at Oxyrynchus was what we now know as fragment 413 or POxy 413. Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 413 (P. Oxy. III 413) is a manuscript of an adaptation of Euripides' Iphigeneia in Tauris (Iφιγένεια Ταύροις). The setting however is shifted from Greece to India. The anonymous adaptation is known as Charition after the main character. The manuscript is held by the Bodleian Library as Ms. Gr. Class. b 4 (P).


Ok, so what is great about it? We do have writing samples from Greece, but this one was a very interesting play. This Papyrus 413 and the whole play was what they termed a ‘farce’. It was a farce with plenty of farts, a princess, devadasi’s, booze, a king and many big bodied amazons with bows and arrows and so on. OK, that is also familiar, at least some of it. What is unique?

The interesting part was that the entire play was set in a Malabar coastal kingdom and the ‘Greek’ play has liberal doses of an ancient South Indian language. When it was first discovered by Western historians, nobody had much of a clue. Then word spread around, Indologists were involved who eventually determined it was a Dravidian language. But as you can imagine, experts were divided in opinion. Some said it was an ancient Prakritic language, while most others agreed that it was Tulu or Kannada. The Tulu and Kannada factions have been discussing ever since on which one it is. But I will get to all that eventually. Let us get back to the play and the situation.....................

Chennai days - Part 1

The wheezy old bullock is there because nobody wants it. How it reached this market is a matter not worthy of thought, but suffice to say it did. It had (so far) luckily escaped the people who chop such defenseless animals up to make beef fry’s and serve it at places like the Tajmahal Malayalathan hotel down the road. The bullock is busy chomping on the tasty banana leaves and various other leaves left behind by the vegetable market merchants in Zam Bazar......

As I sit back & think, I marvel at those nostalgic days at Pycroft’s road which is called Bharati Salai these days, of the clean beaches of Marina which were rather nefarious locations on balmy nights, of Royapettah Woodlands hotel which has been razed down and replaced with multiplex theaters, it was also home to many bachelors who lived in the many ‘mansions’ and guest houses, in the middle of these markets, temples, beach and so on…Some days I would go for dinner to the koya place, the mallu tea shop cum hotel Taj mahal where they even had a juke box.  ..........................

The Dak Harkara

The Harkara literally ran with the mail, not necessarily from point A to point B, but as part of a relay system. In the Moghul days, they ran 8-10 miles in each direction and back (i.e. 20 miles a day), but in later EIC times, they ran 5-6 miles per direction, before they handed it over to the next Harkara. The harkara was not only a delivery man of letters, but also a person who conveyed news to both ends, officially and unofficially, publicly or surreptitiously. They were sometimes purveyors of intelligence to authorities of far flung areas, reporting on troubles and important happenings at both locations. In many an instance, they were letter writers, transferring the word of mouth of an illiterate man to paper.............

This is the story of one such harkara.

Soliman the Elefant

This is the sad story of Soliman the Elefant, one that is quite familiar to Europeans of an older era, and they are reminded of it constantly by museums, pictures, hotels where Maximillian stayed and where the elephant is still being proudly shown off in a sculpture or a picture.

If one has to juxtapose something in between, he needs something of equal grandeur. Thus I choose the story of Suleiman from Malabar in Europe. It is a very charming but at the same time sad story of a man’s indulgence and pompousness. If I were to tell you that this magnificent creature (presumably from the Nilambur forests, but I must admit that one source indicates it could have been from Sri Lanka – nevertheless my love for the elephant does make me tell this story) died of loneliness and poor diet while in a rich king’s stable, you may be surprised. I will get to it by and by, for when I delved into the story, it proved to have a life of its own, the story of an emperor’s pet that had captivated Europe since 1505, has been immortalized in currency, medal’s and sculptures, and has finally been resurrected into a Spanish novel by a Nobel Prize winner, soon to be published in English.

A Pack of Cards

Ramnath was a contented man; he had retired after a long career with the IAS, and it had been a no mean achievement surviving the bureaucratic minefields. He was back at his village in Pallavur – Palakkad, spending the remaining part of his life ruminating the past, reading religious texts and building up a new social circle. Parvathi his wife, took good care of her soul mate. It had been difficult times for her too, running around with her ‘transferable job’ husband....

The story of an old man and his journey to America.

The International Indian

I must thank Shashi Tharoor for this. Not that I know him or anything. But like all of you, I know of him. Recently, thanks to the internet and the forward mail industry, I got a link from my wife to his speech at the TED forum. As I watched it, I must say I truly enjoyed it. Well, Tharoor is from Palakkad, my maternal hometown and though I disagree with what he said about R K Narayanan, I think he is a pretty neat guy, charming and all that, with a twinkle in his eyes, set to warm many a girl’s heart and a Hugh Grant style demeanor and a Brit accent to boot. But gals, unfortunately this is not about Tharoor or how to charm a woman. It is a little bit about the roaming Indian in the big wide bad world, something Tharoor reminded me of..

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But well, this goes back a few months, and I was at my favorite haunt in Temecula, a place which is fast becoming a memory. It was the public library. After a bad week, I was trudging my way in, a little hunched as usual, not a cheer on my face and wondering if I would get the book I wanted.

When Martin Luther King Jr visited Kerala

It was I think around the year1953, that MLK discovered the light in the teachings of the Gandhi. Many years later he recounted thus – ‘The inspiration of Mahatma Gandhi began to exert its influence. I had come to see early that the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhi method of non violence was one of the most potent weapons available to the Negro in this struggle for freedom’. ...

Interestingly King Jr was also one of the few who observed another Gandhi technique, as he observed “Mahatma Gandhi never had more than one hundred persons absolutely committed to his philosophy. But with this small group of devoted followers, he galvanized the whole of India.”

One fine day he came into contact with such a follower of Mahatma Gandhi who was convinced that MLK should visit India to see all of this for himself. After discussions following the unfortunate incident involving the Curry letter opener stabbing, MLK Jr finally decided to tour India. In February and March 1959, the 30 year old Dr. Martin Luther King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, traveled throughout India. King aptly told a group of reporters gathered at the airport, ‘‘To other countries I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim”.

While much of King’s visit to the big cities of India is well remembered and documented, most may not be aware of his days spent in Trivandrum and the glorious weekend that King and his wife spent at Kanyakumari.

Read the full blog post here

Two facets of Krishna Menon

Anyway I was in the indoor stadium in Calicut named after him to check out the books displayed at an Onam book fair (Now tell me where else in India would you have a book fair during a festive holiday occasion? Only in Kerala!! You will never see a Navarathri or Diwali book fair). Well, there I was, and Lo and behold, I found the very book I had wanted to peruse some time back, but had forgotten about. It was a book titled ‘Not a nice man to Know’ by the writer journalist Kushwant Singh. I wanted to read it only because it had one of those rare articles on the persona of Krishna Menon. Singh had been roundly abusive of Menon in his biography and had done another article in this very book. Strange is it not? Buying a book reviling Menon from the very stadium grounds named after Menon! Well, such is life. I will not write here all that stuff that Singh enjoyed doling out in his book, but I will give you some of the more contentious and salient points.

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The ‘Kuri’ systems of Kerala

It was certainly interesting to trace the beginnings of this system. While the Kuri system itself has very ancient connections to Kavu Tattakam’s and other monetary schools practiced in various primitive civilizations, the system as such was social banking, created for the good of the needy...More

The Goddess at Pompeii

Many more years of painstaking archeological digging followed. In 1939, Italian archeologist Prof Maiuri, discovered an artifact in the ruins, that had a very Indian origin. This ivory statuette which survived the disaster and lasted all these 2000 years was identified by Prof Maiuri as that of the Goddess Lakshmi...More

When Gandhiji met Chaplin

Eric L Flom provided more details the meeting in the book ‘Chaplin in the Sound era’. Following an excursion to Spain, Chaplin made his way back to London where he hoped to have a few months of rest before returning to California. There he received an unusual invitation to meet Gandhi at the house...More

Himmler and his Aryan theories

It was after 1936. Heinrich Himmler, the one man responsible for the murder of over half a million people, had become the Reichsfuhrer and had just founded the Ahnenerbe (Ancestral heritage) department in the Nazi machinery...More

Joly 20th 1969>39 years ago

The street was full of activity when we got there, as a retail market place where carts and lorries from various other smaller towns had congregated to collect their quotas of commodities. Tamil and Malayalam were freely used, with a smatter of the special ‘rowther’..More

Malayalees in Pakistan

Due to the deep cultural divides in Malabar after 1921 Mappila revolt and the subsequent partitioning of Pakistan a sizeable number of Malayali Muslims moved to Karachi . . .More. ..