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I mean, seriously. Where does my 88-year old grandma go looking for the right "managed object model"?

These guys need to read this. And soon.

A bad Disney movie

Yeah, I'm terrified. I am absolutely terrified that "President Palin" is a real possibility at this point. I've been trying to figure out exactly how to voice this fear, but haven't quite found the words yet. But until I do, here's some echoing of what I am feeling:



My only addendum to that is, does she know what a dinosaur is? Beyond Barney, that is.

goodbye abhay mama...

About a week ago, I got an email from my father informing me that Abhay Mama, a long-standing staff member in my father's bookshop and a de-facto member of my family, had met with an accident. A couple of wayward kids on a motorbike had knocked him over on Fergusson College Road, as he was on his way to presumably execute one of the several hundred tasks he silently and uncomplainingly dispensed on a daily basis with an almost robotic mentality, adding his invaluable bit to keep the circus of the bookshop running. He had suffered serious head injuries and was, by all accounts, counting his minutes until he was granted freedom. As he lay in a coma in the hospital his assailants had been humane enough to deposit him in, I found myself unable to divert my thoughts away from this gentle soul. His soft voice, virtually a whisper, kept ringing in my ears stridently enough to subdue the cacophony of Manhattan down to muffled and inconsequential static. I kept thinking of him, remembering my moments with him that date back to probably the day I first opened my eyes, reflecting sadly on the ubiquity of this person in my family's life that had been permanently fractured by random tragedy. But most of all, I kept thinking and analyzing his short and almost ethereal life, so completely divorced from every quirk, idiosyncrasy, neurosis and ostensible flaw that most people file under the forgiving label of being human.

I think it was in the late 1960s that he was enfolded first into our bookshop, and almost seamlessly afterwards, into our family, by my grandfather. Gradually he became a silent and eternal presence in our world, occupying in it a place that he personally carved out for himself and earmarked as his only possession, one that he treasured with an ingenuous pride to the very end (when, asked for information about his home and family by the doctors, he unhesitatingly gave the name of my father and the bookshop). I've often heard my father say that we had adopted him into our family, but it was he in fact who had adopted us as his family and devoted his life to it. When I try to remember how he entered my life, I am immediately reminded of the absurdity of this effort. He never did; I entered his. He was always there, a pacific, dependable and unflappable presence, a loving and understated mainstay of the family who was only happy when he was doing something for us, expecting neither recognition of what he was doing nor any reward for doing it. His only expression of the joy he felt in it was to keep asking for more to do. Selflessness was not a conscious choice for him borne of any lofty ideological agenda; he just did not know any other way to be. His slightly subnormal brain and dimmed cognitive powers, generally perceived by all who knew him as a sad handicap, may have robbed him of the ability to count change correctly while buying vegetables, but they had done something far more beautiful. They had made him, as my mother often said, one of "God's people" - blessed human beings who are devoid of even a molecule of meanness, greed and any other of the myriad agencies of corruption; who retain their childlike purity and innocence for the best possible reason: they don't know any better. His brain was not equipped with enough fuel to distort his linear thought process, which for most of his life was aligned in the direction of service to my family. He did not know what it meant to want or possess; his personal life was one of monasterial austerity. He was a lifelong bachelor, disconnected as he was from any romantic or physical desire. He could not even process grief completely; I have never seen him shed a tear. When his sister passed away one night, all he could express the next morning was a broken "Sister.. gone..", with the briefest hint of a wistful smile. His modest brain had room for one sentiment alone, an artless affection for and dedication to our family. I am not sure if this level of detachment from self is a noble pursuit or a positive state, but his guileless embrace of it does serve as a stark reminder of how far on the other side most of us live.

Today, I found out that Abhay Mama has passed away, peacefully and painlessly. My family has been amputated of a limb that we spent the last four decades subconsciously leaning on and not massaging enough. I am not religious by any stretch, and any notion of an other world where peace, sweetness and light reign is resplendent baloney as far as I'm concerned. I don't know if any place exists that's benevolent enough to nurture the pure-hearted like him, but this planet is certainly not it. For the believers and romantics, he may have gone back to where he belongs, but for me, he has gone away from where he never did. All we can do now is thank him for trespassing here for a while. Our lives, while they will never be the same, are so much the better for it.

I've wandered...

...through the microclimates this city tosses at you. Hopefully someday this will become a real metaphor, for the reality inside my head.

Three glasses of Rodney Strong Merlot, one Manhattan, two Duvels and two Coronas justify such random thoughts.