Tea And Sympathy: Cal Chronicles 2

Second week in Cal, and things are already better. Much more interesting than the first one, in any case. For one, the Sherlock Holmes was a better one, The Speckled Band. To think of it, the tv series isn't really as great as it could have been. Of course, as a kid, it seemed fabulous, but parts of each episode do seem bland. I mean, Jeremy Brett is still intensely fascinating, and the title tune is haunting, but...um...well, maybe it would work better as a Sunday morning show- or even a Sunday evening show- than a Tuesday night show. The Speckled Band did have one great thing though- Dr Grimesby Roylott, scary as hell. I think what I'd like is some more darkness in the stories. So far its just been the lighter cases, not the really intriguing ones. I long for post-sundown foggy hansom chases, and flashing Colt .45s and blood-curdling eerieness. Ah! The modern youth I tell you.
Earlier that Tuesday, I got a better treat- a performance by the St Xavier's choir. Now, I will never profess to understanding what goes on in the making of a good choir, but I do know that I like a good one when I hear it. This one was fabulous. The harmonies were mostly spot on and sometimes the force of the singing really got you. The carols sounded exactly the way I had hoped they'd sound. Full credits to the guy playing the piano, and the arrangement of Xaviers' much loved prof Bertie. I love how these things just happen so unexpectedly in Cal. I was loafing about Park Street when my friend Dana called me up and asked if I wanted to go hear the choir. Her brother was one of the singers. Now, I wasn't even aware of such a thing here. Well, a nice surprise.
The days passed by in a daze. Met my ACJ friend Virat for lunch at Flury's (excellent Chicken Strogonoff) and then made a short trip to New Market to pick up some of Nahoums' legendary brownies as a Christmas gift for Suhrid and Payal. The good journo was in a rotten mood when I met him at his office, fuming at some beaureaucratic turd from the Planning Commission who'd dared be insolent with him! Had to help him down four pegs of gin in record time at 4 in the afternoon! Then, dunno why, I blithely got on the Metro and travelled a couple of stations the wrong way before switching tracks...
Lemme tell you about my friend Dr D. He first earned my gratitude by sheltering me for a couple of weeks in his Vasundhara Enclave apartment in Delhi when I was without a place to live. While there, he entertained me with a stream of excellent movies which made a cine fan out of me. As if that wasn't enough, he entertained me further by fleeing the city following some fuck-up in office (which involved angry, threatning Jats, go figure). This meant packing up all our stuff and slipping off to the railway station at 6 in the morning for him to catch a train at 4:30 in the evening! A very eventful day it was too. He earned my gratitude some more by carrying my books and cds back to Cal. Now, he has his defects- horrible English which he pigheadedly feels proud about being one of them- but I love him al the same. I messaged him cause I wanted to meet him and get my stuff back. He replied, "Am shifting to Dargeling (sic) tomorrow night. Meet me soon." The sentence threw me a little, but I recovered to realise that he couldn't possibly be shifting there for good. I went to his house the next day. The journey was short but interesting, taking me into little-known depths of Jadavpur. He has the habit of spending all the money he earns, which is a tidy bit, on books, cds and dvds. Quite a stupendous collection. His profligate philosophy is that if he can buy it, he won't burn it. Reprehensible case of wastefulness, but it means a lot of entertainment for reprehensible me. So when I got back home a couple of hours back, apart from a sackful of books, I had two Traffic Live dvds, two Traffic albums, a Thelonius Monk album and the George Harrison Concert For Bangladesh dvd...hmm. As you can imagine, he's well stocked.
What I needed was loads of sleep, but I could only get fitful snatches of it. This left me a lazy lout with a killer headache. This meant I missed my morning appointment with Virat. I had promised him that I would show him the sights and sounds of this fair city, like the museum and BBD Bag (where all the fab colonial palaces are). Hungover and bullshitting, it was the last thing on my mind. Afternoon came and went, with it a random Hepatitis A shot which my lunatic doctor of a father thought was good for me. I finally met Virat at sundown, skulking outside the British Council, Poor soul, I had wanted to ease his lonely soul, but booze had got the better of me. Had coffee, walked about, and went to his place at the YMCA on SN Banerjee Road. Man what a place to stay. Old Calcutta personified. My regard for the Markandeya (for such is his name) went through the roof. Its tough not to have friends in an alien place.
Anyways, was meeting Dana for SomePlace Else, as she had been working her ass off and I felt she needed some fun. Yeah, I'm the messiah of the work-oppressed. So this meant reacquainting myself with my old haunts at the Park. Some things don't change. Some P is one of them. Well, the silly cover-charge routine is gone, but that bunch of octogenarian noddy-heads, Hip Pocket still play "Classic Rock" in bland-out mode and the croud feels they have to appalaud it to be hip. So me, Virat and Dana hung around, got a table, and to keep it had to drink. Well, me and Virat did anyways. So Hip Pocket lumbered through some shit they called jazz, and was soon playing Doors and Scorpions. Then came the slap in the face. Oh yeah? the band seemed to say. You think we can't add stuff to our repertoire? Well, here's Linkin Park!
I died a little.
One of my oldest pals, Arj the energetic messiah of every down and out soul, showed up, as I knew he would, with two more old chestnuts from school, Kakeesh and Boy (not their real names, but real enough.) Things change, so while Kakeesh is set to marry, Boy's planning to open a Lebanese restuarant. A lot of bullshitting and some cigars later, Hip decided they need to sleep, so they played some more Rolling Stones. I was disgusted. Dana had had enough and wanted to go home. So I left Virat- who had become a part of the upholstery by then- in the care of nobody in particular and stepped out to see Dana to her car. Wham, wham wham!!! I meet people and places in the lobby whom I've not met in years, including a girl who I last met in a Presidency orgy. She had left before the orgy, but well, here she was 6 years on, asking me about jobs in Delhi!! Then other kids, juniors of mine from College and finally Rohan the Riddermark, a Chris Martin-Pete Townshend lookalike, my favourite guitar player and good friend. He was suitably rude, especially as I seemed too eagre to get people's numbers. Oh well, he asked me if I wanted to sing with his band who were going on after the sleepy fogeys. I said yeah. So we enter the cavern- smelling of beer and cigarettes- again, and I find Virat has vanished. Oh woe, what'll I tell his parents? But he was there somewhere, and I soon found him between a woman about to pass out and a man about to feel her up. I got to him before he could get traumatized and hauled him out. The bunch of wobbly knees also known as Hip Pocket were looking as if they needed some life support system to keep em up and duly retired. Rohan's band took to stage, with Malmshi the frontman, a dedicated bassist, a zen keyboard player, and Chotu the drummer. The are, a bit unfortunately, called Supersonics, and they play their own stuff. Whch is laudable, given the lounge-core old men who had preceded them. Supersonic were punky, their words couldn't be heard, Rohan was rocking as only he can- laconica morosa- and they kept getting electrocuted. While their songs sound the same, they are energetic...well, a ROCK band. I stood around and looked disdainful at their originals. What was funniest was that these guys have an awestruck fan-following of their own -the present college kids, who hover like proud parents, go "ooh aah" at Rohan's leads and hold on to harmonicas when they're not being used...Rohan has developed into a mean harp player as well...Soon enough they limbered up to play "their only cover" which turned out to be "I'm Free" by the Rolling Stones. While in the middle of the song, Rohan asked me to come up on stage. I was a bit embarassed but well, how can I be asked to perform and refuse? With the music muted, Rohan says, "I'd like to introduce an old friend of mine, Beq!", and he leads the band into the bouncy rhythm of "Sympathy For The Devil". What ensued was frenetic dancing (me), loud singing(me), wild cheering (a packed SomeP, with Hip Pocket induced dozers finally waking up), and a happy happy Rohan. By the time I started howling "Won'tcha tell me baybee, what's maai naaaime," the place was going wild, which meant an extended chorus, tearing my voice to shreds!!! Anyways, it ended in a stream of flashlights, and screams of encore...The song ended, and I did a Beatle bow, and said, "Ladies and Gentlemen, The Supersonics!" Mamshi, clapping over his Gibson hollowbody, "Bibek!"
"No no. Beq." Rohan.
So ended my rockstar -in miniature performance.
I came off the stage in a barrage of back thumpings from enthusiastic revellers. The overawed kids, seemed overawed yet again, and some offered me their beers. Virat who had never seen anything like this in Delhi, was simply loving it.
Then a drunken hand grabbed me by the hair and a voice bawled, "Vivaaaash". Arj, of course.
A splendid time was had by all.

Of Fruitcakes and Seven Percent Solutions

You can't have the Christmas holiday season without the flavour of fruitcakes from New Market and brownies from Nahoum's. In fact I'm already salivating at the prospect. Ah, to see the shops on Park Street and in New Market drowning under a deluge of Christmas trees and stick candies, and Santas of all shapes and sizes. Ah. Totally missed the feeling last year in Delhi, doing a night shift...Christmas isn't as important to people over there still recovering from the rigours of Diwali partying. I can't say how much I'm looking forward to this.
On another note, History Channel is showing Sherlock Holmes with the incomparable Jeremy Brett in the title role! Ah, the joy of hearing the violins giving me the willies and the hansom cabs and the gaslight....I was a tiny little kid when they used to show the series on Doordarshan in the 80's. But, along with the title track, some images were forever ingrained in my soul. For example, the snake sliding down in the Speckled Band, or Holmes and Moriarty tumbling off the cliff at Reichenback Falls, or the wax models showing up against the glass windows in The Empty House? But I guess my favourite is the Sign Of Four. Who can forget that chase on the Thames? Or the jarwa pigmy with the poisonous arrows? Or the cocaine? What joy. Come to think of it, I've forgotten a lot of the episodes, and frankly, the series couldn't have come at a better time. What better way to be of good cheer?

Weekly Cal Review

This evening I complete a week in Cal! A week?! I mean, it seems just yesterday that I was forced into chatting with my co-passengers in Poorva just becasue I had run out of ways to be bored...yes the train was 3 hours late! Anyways, I'm less stunned with Cal this time around than May. Probably because it hasn't been able to come out with anything newly shocking in the past 6 months or so! But the occassional thig still throws me, like the Dhakuria overhead pedestrian passage. I still gwap at it. It just so doesn't belong there (not that anyone much uses it!) I mean, half the fun of crossing is to be blithely unconcerned about which mad cabbie or bus might be hurtling at you from where! Oh well. But among older haunts, I was saddened by the fact that the road from Jadavpur PS to JU hasn't changed a bit. The pavements seem like out of some post-holocaust movie, never mind the garbage.
One good fun thing that I did see was this dog show I went for yesterday. My first ever, I'm proud to say, and good fun. The first thing that strikes you are the variety of barks coming from everywhere. Despite the variety, they are all predominately friendly yelps - or, in the case of lost daschunds or spoilt labrador pups- yelps for love and affection from errant owners. Even the poor Dobermanns were primarily curious, not ravenously baying for blood as popular myth would have them be. But who can blame you for having a temper, if you spend hte best part of a lazy Saturday morning, trotting round and round in circles, and having your teeth looked at by crummy old men? I even saw a carefree dobermann. Yes, such things DO exist! This one was a blithe spirit with floppy ears who just wanted to have fun, not run around as if he were a conscript at some elite army barracks. As a result, he never looked straight, couldn't straighten his ears, didn't look ferocious, tried to run at the judge when he was supposed to be trotting around him like a shetland pony, and understandably, didn't win anything! Bu he did have fun I'm sure, more so than the other losers who won beer mugs(??) as prizes.
So that's been the sum toal of my life so far, apart from Suhrid's lil daughter Shreya, and a classic Bengal bandh!

A Board Or Two

I love board games. I miss boad games. So I was wondering what's out there. While nothing can beat the universal appeal of Monopoly, Battleships, Scotland Yard, Pictionary or even Ludo and Snakes and Ladders, here are some other new ones that are worthy successors of the old chestnuts!

Ticket To Ride:
This multi award-winning game was published in 2004 to wide acclaim and popularity. It is designed as an old world travel game. Up to 5 players choose "destination cards" showing two cities between which they have to travel. Every turn they choose "railway car" cards -and in some versions, "ferry", and "tunnel" cards as well. There are even "locomotive" wildcards. Each player has to build unique networks between the two main cities as they go along, capturing different stations in the process. No two players can share the same route. This calls for a lot of delicious strategising. There are other secret goals to meet, the ultimate prize going to whoever completes his journey first. Its a beautifully designed game, and comes in three different map versions- the United States, Europe and Germany. Its popularity has seen it get a computer gaming avatar as well.
Another game in this tradition: Age Of Steam

Tigris And Euphrates:
This is a much more complex game, taking over an hour to complete, and all the better for it. The premise is simple. You will have to compete with at least 2 other players to build communities on a map between the two rivers. Like many other board games, it is played with coloured tiles representing religion, trading, farming and people. Then there are playing tiles, catastrophe tiles and unification tiles. The objective is to develop a fully functioning ancient civilsation with a careful balance of the four main components. A lopsided civilisation will get you lesser points. The player with the biggest score wins. This is, though, only the tip of the iceberg. This wonderfully complicated game has entire websites dedicated to strategies. Like all modern European board games, it is beautifully designed.
Another game in this tradition: Civilization

BattleLore:
This one's for the fantasy enthusiasts. Combining elements of history and outright “Lord of The Rings”-like fantasy, each of the two players is given the command over a vast array of armies- human and supernatural- and mercenaries like the Iron Dwarves and other mythical creatures. The objective is to capture the banner of the competing player through a series of adventures. Each player has his own war council, made up of lore masters, wizards, clerics, and warriors. Each stage is governed by different possibilities, which lead to an unforeseeable outcome. The "Player Powers" depend on the success of the adventures. The battles are card driven, and the different sculpted creatures, and hundreds of plastic figures add to the fun. If your troops are brimming with confidence, you can ignore enemy threats, and bring in the archers to gain the upper hand in a hand-to-hand conflict. Epic fantasy on a tabletop!
Another game in this tradition: Commands And Colours.
-Bibek Bhattacharya