On way to San Francisco

After coming back from the second USA visit, I was wondering whether there would be any point in going back for the third visit. USA is a young nation, and there is not a single organically developed settlement anywhere. In my first visit, I had been around even through the smaller roads, which went through very small settlements, but all of them had the look of being formally planned along the main high-way. The smaller towns and villages are all alike-you have the main village road with all restaurants and shops, and then all the rest is low-rise housing. Everywhere you go, you meet a similar townscape. It is only when you visit the big cities that the skylines are different, but there too, you have very little variety. Housing in most places is mostly low-rise, with the typical European/British style, built in wood with sloping roofs and large windows-and this has nothing to do with the climate. The style is mixed, Gothic windows with verandahs in renaissance columns, and many combinations of the european/british vintage. So if you have seen one american city, you have seen them all.

Then again, the journey from Mumbai to any place in USA even by plane, is arduous (it takes about 36 to 40 hours door to door) and has always made me wonder how Srinivas gets the energy to carry on all these years. He being an IBM employee, travels by business class, and may have been able to stretch his legs a bit more on the long-haul flights, but it is a tiresome journey, and to top it all, he is supposed to do some work at the end of all that travel.

The only redeeming feature of this kind of travel is that you acquire a bit of edge over people who have never made such trips, and may be able to show off a bit, but finding such people (at least in Pune) is becoming difficult these days, what with almost every other household has a Son or a Daughter (in many cases-both) in some or the other part of USA. Marathi can no longer act as a code language in any of these trans-Atlantic flights and you generally tend to find people who have been doing these flights much longer than you have ever done.

But Mrunalini was quite insistent, and we buckled under the pressure. And anyway, I had always had the urge to see San Francisco, right from the day we saw a mock-up of one of its street views in Orlando. It is a favourite location for Hollywood, with streets sloping in almost an impossible fashion, which is actually the result of putting a straight grid-iron pattern layout on a hilly ground. In some cases the slopes are so steep that the footpaths have steps and you keep wondering whether all those cars parked along the street can stay that way all night.

So it happened that we planned the third trip, and made it this far. Incidentally, we came via Zurich, which is a very straight-forward and easily navigable air-port. On the second trip, we had a stop-over at Paris, and the Charles De Gaulle Airport is a nightmare for the occasional traveler. It is built in stages, has a series of curved terminal buildings which are connected by an underground railway, and after making what seemed to be a correct choice at the time, we got off at the wrong end of the terminal E, and were cheerfully re-directed by the security people. Taking the train back in search of our boarding gate, when we finally reached it, the staff was in the process of closing-we could have easily missed our flight to Atlanta that day.

So when Pranav told me that there would be a stop-over of 6 hours at Zurich, I thought we had made a good decision. Not only we would have sufficient time to find the terminal, we would be able to have some breakfast and wander about a bit, both of which we had missed at Paris earlier. But the Zurich experience turned out to be an anti-climax. After reaching the air-port, which was virtually empty save our own flight, I found out that the incoming and outgoing flights would be operating out of the same terminal. So in a matter of minutes we were at the departure gate. There was virtually nobody around, and all the shops on the terminal were closed. True, it was 6.30 in the morning, but like a railway station, you normally expect the airport terminal to function 24x7. Probably the Swiss had never heard of this. The terminal had a laid back look, and all around the airport you could only see the sleepy hills, and not a soul around. It felt like we had come to a holiday destination when nobody was expected - something that happens when you arrive at Mahabaleshwar in the rainy season.

I also located a deserted smoking lounge, and toyed with the idea of smoking, but had packed all my stock in the checked-in baggage, and there was not a single shop open at the terminal where I could buy cigarettes. So when the duty-free shop opened I was the first one in, only to be told that you can only buy a minimum of ten packs, and that put me off. So finally I settled on a cappuccino at the inflated rate of $7.00, but the fellow at the kiosk said the change shall only be in swiss franks, which I had no use for, so I settled for some cookies at an additional price of $3.00 and gave him the $10 bill, and that was that.

Still, there was a lot of time on my hand, and wandering about I located a kiosk at the airport which promised a free internet for one hour-all set-up with laptops. It was thus I checked my email and sent message to Pranav that we had arrived safely at Zurich and were on our way to SF without any hassle. I even logged on to my facebook page, something that I do very rarely, but found nothing much to comment about except for the fact that we were at Zurich. Finally, around 10.30 am, people started coming in and the terminal was full, and after waiting interminably for the boarding announcement, we boarded at about 12.50 pm.

The flight from Zurich to San Francisco was uneventful, and almost like Zurich, when we landed, ours was the only incoming flight and virtually no queue at the immigration desk. We were outside in a matter of minutes again, and in fact had to wait for Mrunalini & Saurabh for some time. The weather was pleasant and the fresh air smelled exactly like what I had experienced at Jacksonville, when we made the first trip to USA. So here we were, all set for yet another visit to the New world.

Back to square one

This has been so long in coming. It looked as if it was only yesterday that the house was full of people, with so much of confusion and chaos everywhere in the house that I could not find a single thing, and Nishant moving all through the mess as if it was some kind of game.

But I think we should now get used to all this quiet. We started the family with only two of us, and then with Pranav & Mrunal, and now both have their life-partners, have moved out and we are back to where we started-just the two of us.

But this time there is a lot of difference-there is a constant reminder here of people who should be here but aren't. On the dashboard of my laptop, the US East coast timer is on, my mobile has weather forecast for Jacksonville & New York, and hurricane Sandy had a larger presence in our lives than would seem logical.

Of course the life is easier with gadgets, we can see & hear across all this distance through internet. But the first time I saw Nishant on Skype, I could not forget that there was about 20000 miles seperating us, and all I was seeing in front of me was a digital image - devoid of the sense of touch & smell. All this was make-believe-something like what you see in cinema.

Acting Grandfather in Florida

When I made my first trip to US to visit my son Pranav, I had toured most of the east-coast places with him, and had been to some of the great monuments of modern history, including the Guggenheim Museum at New York by F. L. Wright and Seagram building by Mies.

But when it came to the city-scape, almost all the cities had a discernible pattern, and barring the form of individual buildings, there was hardly any difference between one city & another. This similarity of appearance was more predominant in the suburbs than in the main cities, but that too was due to many of the old cities having a historical core, with dated buildings. All in all, I had my fill of the American cities. So after we did the east coast cities I was weary of visiting the west coast cities, though I was told that LA was one of the cities I must visit. I had seen enough, I said, and planned my return journey.

On the way back, little did I think of any more trips to USA. In the first place I was reluctant to make even the first trip, and did it mainly on the insistence of my son Pranav, and my wife, Sampada. After the trip, however, I realised that this was an experience worth having. I had generally known about USA, through literature and movies, but experiencing the spaces first hand definitely surpasses that. The experiential quality of space you visit physically is rich with all the senses - vision, touch, hearing & smell, while the images give you only a part of the experience, and that too has gone through a process of selection by the person who has shot that image in the first place.

But having a grandson changed all that. It was not the question now of visiting any place, it was only a matter of being where your grandson is. So if he is in Florida, you make a trip there, never mind the distance or the expenses. If Pranav had been a scientist working in a laboratory at the Antarctic we would have made a trip to Antarctic. The atmosphere of the place would only have made a change in the kind of preparation we would have made for the trip-a matter of logistics.

So what do you do when you first become a grandfather? It is actually very simple. When you become one, you get into the role automatically. The only difference in my case was that this was an american grandson and that put a lot of responsibility on his father. He had to be present at child-birth, and had to share the entire parenting process. I had not had any of this experience when I became father for the first time. In fact, as I remember, I was told to keep off, as childbirth and everything associated with it is a all-women affair in India.

So it should not come as a surprise that my son, who had become a father in the USA had gone through a training programme on parenting, and when I reached here, it was he who started giving me lectures on 'taking care of the baby'. Never knew he had it in him.

Dada (my father) turns eighty-Sequel 1

When we shifted to our own house in Aurangabad, a special slot in the new house was reserved for the old radio bought by my father way back in the '60s. It was neither working nor repairable - spare parts were no longer available. Still none of us could think of throwing it away, so many memories were associated with it. I remember as a kid the excitement we had when it was brought first in the house, none of the neighbours had it. It must have been very costly at the time, but Dada would never bother about minor details like cost.

In fact, in the matter of money, Dada was (and still is) an aristocrat, he would never mind the cost of things he had a passion about - like when he used to buy tickets for drama. Drama tickets in the sixties would cost about Rs. 8 to Rs. 10 per head (equivalent to about Rs. 1000.00 in today's terms), yet the entire family would be going for the drama.

And it was not that we were rich. We were not, and even at that age I knew it. That is why I remember once asking him whether we should buy used text-books (which were cheaper) in order to save money, but he would have none of it. Every year, each one of us three brothers would get brand new fresh smelling text-books.

Looking back, I think I have inherited this strand of his character along-with a lot of other things. Like most men, I have always been passionate about gadgets & stuff, and did not think twice before buying one of the first generation of mobiles (it cost Rs. 8500.00 in 1998 - about Rs. 30,000 by today's prices). I am a bit more cautious now, and defer a lot of my purchases- I have been planning to buy a bicycle for about an year, but that is a conditioned response.

Dada (my father) turns eighty

April 2010 was a month of happenings. Pranav (my son) & his wife Amruta came to India for a short holiday, which included a visit to our ancestral village in Belgaum, Karnataka, Mihir (my nephew) had his Upanayan ceremony, and Achyut, another of my nephews, got married to a girl of his choice from far away Dehradun. All in all we had a hectic spell of tours & events in a span of about three weeks.

Then there were other matters to be taken care of. We had some pending rituals on the agenda like Gondhal- a ritual you are supposed to do immediately after a marriage in the family, but got delayed by about three years in case of Pranav as he was not in India all this time. We were wondering whether we could fit all of this in Pranav's agenda, when on top of this, Sanjeev (my younger brother) realised that my father has now turned 80, and this should be celebrated appropriately.

In the Hindu tradition, completion of 80 years is a great achievement, and there is an elaborate ritual called 'Sahastra Chandra Darshan' that the family is supposed to perform : literally it means having seen 1000 full moon days - which takes about 80 years and 10 months. This was not yet due, and anyway, my father is very active and resents any reference to his age. I remember he refused to be called a grandfather when Pranav was born, notwithstanding the fact that he had a grandson now. He would have vetoed any event which had a direct reference to his age.

So the affair had to be planned without letting him know, and we planned it as a surprise event during Mihir's Upanayan, wherein we had already invited the entire extended family, and would be an appropriate setting for such an event. It was decided to felicitate him at the hands of his two younger brothers who would be present, and I, as the eldest son, would be talking about him at the event.

As it happened I had virtually no time to prepare my speech, and anyway the event was all informal, the audience would be all part of the family. So it came to pass that when I stood on the stage to talk about my father, most of what I spoke was extempore, and as it happens with most of the extempore speeches, left out a major issue - his contribution in grooming of his sons.

The thing that strikes about Dada when you meet him first is his forthright & loud manner of speaking as if he is acting out the part of a noble hero in a historical drama without loudspeakers, but all that is a front, hiding his honest & sensitive nature. He has a cherished image of himself as a person who brooks no nonsense and does not worry about the impact of his language on the listener. But on the inside he is a very sensitive person, a fact he does not like anybody to know - maybe it is a part of grooming - sensitivity in males is considered as a sign of weakness in the traditional Hindu household.

I now realise that most of my value system today is based on my father - truthfulness, honesty and acting the good Samaritan at all times. I remember him rushing to help almost anybody who would appeal to him, going to great lengths and at his own expense most of the times. And all this without expecting anything in return.

It was this side of him, which got him into the trade-union politics. But much before that, as a young lad he had participated in the Indian Freedom Movement. He may or may not have understood the larger context of the freedom struggle at so young an age (born in 1930, he was just 12 when the Quit India Movement started in 1942), but it shows his extrovert nature, and the will to act for the common cause, and that streak in his nature has continued throughout all of his eighty years of life. Even today, as a devout follower of Pandurangshastri Athvale, it is the public spirited activity of the 'Swadhyaya Movement' that attracts him most - going to the villages, staying & working with the villagers, and doing all this at your own expense - all this is so very similar to the good old communist movement of which he was once a devout follower. But I think I shall need a few more blogs to do justice to what my father is all about

Al Komero

The Nagpur experience had made us aware that in a well-enacted play all the characters have to be good, it would not do have only one or two good actors as happened the case with our Solapur drama circles. Most of the other actors in our groups were aspirants with very little talent, and the this affected the overall impact of the play.

After we came back from Nagpur, we had a brainstorming session on this, and the one idea that came up was to combine three to four amateur groups together to make a team of only good actors, to get a good director and a good script to compete with the best the next state drama competitions. As I and Arwind had worked with about four groups in Solapur, we had contacts and could start working in this direction.

Not that it was all an easy task-it took a lot of effort to take care of egos involved in a joint venture, but we had an agreement. The next problem was of a suitable script. The new composition had four good actors (all heroes in their respective groups) and no sidekicks. There was not a single script that we could find which would do justice to this phenomenon. After a lot of deliberation, we decided to write a fresh script ourselves. We knew the agenda, so we started with a cast of four heroes and one heroine. As to the villain and a side-kick, we got an old friend to the villain's role, and Arwind graciously accepted to be the sidekick-he too, was a good actor.

Having settled the matters thus, we started the search of a heroine. As the competition rules allowed the team to borrow a professional actor for the purpose, we had no problems on that score. The only problem was the cost of importing an actress from Pune, and organising her stay at Solapur for the rehearsals. Prakash Yelgulwar (who later became an MLA from Solapur and is now active in Solapur politics) solved both these problems. He was also one of the heroes of the drama.

Writing 'Al Komero' was one of most enjoyable experiences in my life. Though based on the life of Patty Hearst, we had changed the location to South America, and did a lot of research into the happenings there. We did work on the people, economy, social life and many other issues. We inserted in the play authentic sounding place names like 'San Marco' and so on. On the whole, it was a rewarding experience. The play had to end a tragedy-there was no other logical end possible.

When we read the entire play in a sitting in the group, there were cheers all round. We staged it with enthusiasm, and I was very happy as a young writer would be-the director did not interfere with a single line of the script. The only thing I remember now, is that after a few days of rehearsal, we found out that the length of the play was slightly less than what the rules said-we needed to extend the play-either by adding a few scenes or revising the script. This was a problem as the script was very tight, and did not have any scope of extension.

We toyed with the idea of giving more insight into the life in Al Komero (the fictitious state) but found that it would need additional actors, and sets, both of which was not acceptable. After two days of heated discussions, Arwind hit upon the idea of writing a soliloquy for the heroine. I still remember the day. It was about 4.00 PM, and the discussion took place in the front part of first floor of our house, a place that was free from disturbance from the rest of the house. We talked about what would be the content and so on, and suddenly I hit upon the idea of writing it like a poem. Then I said, give me a day, and it will be done.

I spent a good part of that night in writing up the soliloquy, and it turned out to be the best part of the entire drama. I had written poetry earlier in my college days (I was actually known in JJ as 'The Poet", and I remember people trying to avoid me if I had as much as a piece of paper in my hand). The difference was I was writing this on a theme, and the theme here had to relate to the transformation of the heroine from the high society girl to a sympathizer of Al Komero activists.

Writing this brought me back to the question of politics. As I look back now, it seems that I was trying to put everything I saw as the new entrant to study circles-issues of unequal distribution of wealth, poverty & injustice and so on-and the vision of a new world order based on equality. It seems all a bit naive now, but the attempt was sincere.

I shifted to Aurangabad to start a different career, and all this suddenly came to an end. But my political career extended there in a way I had not foreseen.

Solapur days

Because of Arwind, I had joined 'Natya-pushpanjali', an amature theatre group run by Nandu Kirpekar, and we started moving about the amature thetrical circles at Solapur. Majority of the members of these groups used to meet in the evenings in a 'Satkar' a small Hotel opposite Solapur railway station. It was here that I met Chandrabhushan Kulshreshtha, a dramatist whose frail appearance bellied his heavy sounding name. He was a sensitive & creative writer. Unfortunately, he never got the break he deserved, and may not be known beyond the amature theatre groups in Solapur.

The amature theatre groups used to participate in two main competitions every year-organised by the Cultural Affairs Ministry of the State Government-one was open to all and the other was reserved for workers. As we could be fitting in both the catagories we competed in both. The first stage of competitions was the regional level, and the two best entries were selected for competition at the state level. These competitions have a lot of prestige, and have given many good directors/writers/actors to the professional theatre in Maharashtra. We had hopes of making it to the State level, by winning the first/second position at Solapur, which was our only chance of getting noticed-and to make a jump to the professional theatre.

Drama thus became a major activity for me. In the competition season, there would be rehearsals every day, and discussions on the actual enactment of play, while for rest of the year there would be heated debates & discussions. And apart from the competitions, there were many other opportunities for presentation of the plays for various events, which kept us all very busy.

It was thus I got into the play "Prompting" by Chandrabhushan Kulsreshtha. I was hero's sidekick. Actually Chadrabhushan Kulsreshtha had written a one act play "I say no prompting" which had this hero rejecting "prompting" of any kind, was a rebel, and wished to move ahead in life with original thinking. The play "Prompting" was an extension of this.

We competed in the Workers catagory, got second place at Solapur for play, and got a chance to compete in the finals at Nagpur. I remember carrying all the drama property-the sets, drapery and son, with all the members of the team, and the long train journey to Nagpur. At Nagpur, somebody told us that the venue (Dhanvate Rangmandir) was very near the railway station (which was far from truth-as we found out later) and we walked all the way with all that luggage.
We did not win any prizes at the finals, but had a chance to see good plays staged by other amature groups, and there an ambition was born, which resulted in 'Al Komero', the first & only play conceived & written by me with Arwind Kulkarni as co-writer.