I started in a driving school

I know...it's rather late to be learning how to drive at nearly 30. But I guess it's better late than never. Actually "never" would have done pretty fine for me. But then , you know how it is. You get married, the wife does not like riding pillion on your bike because her hair gets blown around, blah, blah, blah... So here I am in the Maruti Driving School (Mandovi Motors). They look pretty professional, I must say that for them. When I come to enroll, I am given a notepad, two booklets on driving, and a neatly drawn up schedule, all inside an envelope. The fees are reasonable too. And then, I guess you can't go very wrong if you ride along with the Maruti label.
To be frank, driving a car has never appealed to me. A car seems to be too boxed up and too cut off from the outside world to really enjoy driving in. Besides, a car is big and clumsy when you have to weave in and around crazy traffic. And dont even get me started on parking woes. A bike has always seemed to me to be the logical way to transport yourself from point A to point B. But then, as I said, things change after you become a family man. The wife has different views and you have to compromise sometimes. The wife, by the way, also took me to the driving school. After a few arguments, I might add.
On D-day, I enter a small classroom where the first theory class is to be held. A man with an impossibly broken nose walks in and proceeds to murder the Queen's language with a panache I have rarely observed before. At one point of time, he even asks us "driving students" to read out aloud from the presentation slides on the board, flooding me with fond memories of my primary school days. I am also extremely skeptical about some of the explanations he gave about traffic signals. I guess I will have to get by on my wits rather than depend on my instructors to impart me with driving skills.
Meanwhile, I wait for my next class.

Shylock the Jew

The Billy Shakespeare play "The Merchant of Venice" has always confused me. I clearly remember being confused the very first time I read this play, when I was maybe 10 or even younger. Subsequent readings have not been successful in removing my confusion. The main reason for my confusion has been Shylock's portrayal as a villain. He has been portrayed as a vile scheming character in the play. Even his pictures in all books show him as a hook-nosed evil-looking character. As for me, I have never found him to be particularly villainous.

Yes, Shylock held a grudge against Antonio. But who wouldnt? If you are cursed and spat at by a guy for no reason except for your religion, wouldn't you be mad at him? Shylock's grudge against Antonio seems to me to be the most natural thing in the world. Then Shylock is reviled in the play for lending money at interest, while Antonio does so at no interest whatsoever. I have always thought that to be particularly stupid. Shylock, by all accounts, is a businessman. He knows his ABC of economics and therefore charges interest on loans. He is a professional moneylender for crying out loud. How else is he supposed to earn a living if he distributes money like a fool? Which is exactly what Antonio does. To me it seems that Antonio urgently needs a few lessons in banking and finance. The dumb-wit is courting bankruptcy at the very least. And at worst, he is undermining all honest and knowledgeable money-lenders.

Then Shylock's daughter leaves him to elope with Antonio's friend Lorenzo. In addition, she takes away with her, besides a substantial amount of Shylock's wealth, a turquoise ring which was a gift to Shylock from his late wife. In the absence of proof to suggest otherwise, I assume that Shylock was never a bad father. And he seems to have really loved his wife. This treachery from his own blood would understandably have made Shylock even more bitter towards Antonio. (Antonio seems to have encouraged and even aided Lorenzo in his rather lustful pursuit of Shylock's daughter.)

Antonio then goes and makes the stupidest deal ever. A pound of his flesh for a loan from his recognized enemy. Really how dumb could a person get! And to make matters worse, Antonio's ships get destroyed. (I have always assumed that he had appointed his worthless friends as captains of the ships. So it was no wonder they sank.) Now here is one theme in the play which has confused me the most. Shakespeare seems to suggest that Shylock is a dark wizard or something who telepathically caused the ships to sink. I have always felt that this attitude towards Shylock was extremely bizarre to say the least. How could he be the one to blame for Antonio's ships being destroyed?



Then comes the final scene when Shylock finally gets the chance to avenge himself. I admit that Shylock's insistence on getting his "pound of flesh" is a bit undignified. But I also believe it would have been really interesting if Shylock had been allowed to hack away at Antonio. Blood and guts flying everywhere, Antonio screaming his head off, Shylock laughing maniacally! Scenes straight out of a Grindhouse movie if you ask me. Anyway such scenes were not to be and Shylock was thwarted in his quest for vengeance.



But what followed was anti-semitism at its worst. From Shylock being proclaimed an "alien" and not a citizen because of his religion to his being forced to convert to Christianity, the climax is pretty disgusting. Shylock was incidentally also forced to bequeath all his wealth to Antonio's worthless friend Lorenzo. Shylock to me was always the one to be pitied rather than punished.



Which brings us to an important question. Was Billy Shakspeare an anti-semitist? If his portrayals in "The Merchant of Venice" are anything to go by, he definitely was. First of all, he demonises a perfectly honest moneylender solely on the grounds that he was a Jew. And throughout the play, he freely voices the opinion that Jews are an inferior species of human beings not fit to live amongst his fellow Christians.



But whatever the portrayal of Shylock the Jew by old Billy, to me, he has always been an interesting and tragic character. I certainly prefer him to the vain, arrogant and extremely stupid Antonio.

She walks in beauty

I was sitting in the classroom of Class 8 Section A HFC Model School, engrossed in an algebra problem I was trying to solve. I had this urge to look up for a second and there she was. I was stunned. Every line of her slim body, every feature of her happy face seemed to radiate beauty. This was a girl I had seen every single day in school over the past 5-6 years. Somehow I had never noticed her before. I wondered how I couldn't have? She walked from the teacher's desk to her seat. My eyes were glued to her every movement till she sat down. "She walks in beauty" I sighed to myself.

Blame it on my newly acquired hormones if you will, but something very different had happened that day. To this day, I struggle to understand what it was. Over time, it became love. But I still fail to understand that sledgehammer-hit I endured on that day.

Over the next few days, I could not take my eyes off her in school. I would lean my chair back and forth to dangerous angles just to catch a glimpse of that angelic face amongst the other interfering heads. For the first time in my life, I would hate having to leave school and go home. At home, I would be impatient for the next morning to begin so I could go to school and catch a glimpse of her. Sundays would be a torture for me.

By this time, I had realised that I was very much in love. But for a shy and reserved person like me, our school was a bad place to fall in love in. If a person like me was so much as seen talking to a girl, he would be teased and tortured mercilessly. Even without that danger, I wasn't exactly the smoothest talker around girls. Girls, especially beautiful ones, would unnerve me. I had a distinct stammer too at that time. And at times like these, my stammer would become so bad that I would literally be rendered speechless.

But I knew that if I wished to continue living, I would have to speak to her. I had a friend at that time who wasn't quite as bad as me around girls. I decided to pin my hopes on him. In our school, we used to have a seating arrangement where the students would be arranged in four columns of about 7-8 rows. The rows in each column would move up and down alternatively every day so that no student remained in the same seat for more than a day. I waited for the day when my friend and me would happen to be in the adjacent row to her's. I pretended that I had forgotten to bring along my pencil and asked my friend if he had an extra one (having verified earlier that he did not). I then casually told him to ask her if she had an extra pencil. He did so and I got the pencil. That pencil was the ice-breaker between us. The pencil gave me further conversational opportunities. The conversation was mostly carried out between my friend and her, but I managed to drop in a few words of my own.

From that day onwards, I spoke to her occasionally - a few words here and there. I would still keep stealing glances at her during classes. She would see me occasionally looking at her and would smile at me. I would do my best to pretend that our eyes had met completely accidentally. I was still a very very poor conversationalist. I actually would rehearse my future conversations with her at home in front of the mirror. Of course, once I stood in front of her, I would panic and more often than not blabber something hardly coherent.

And by this time, the teasing from my classmates had started in right earnest. I suppose most guys would not have minded a great deal. But I did mind, terribly so. Being very shy and reserved, I just could not take the teasing easily. Many a time, I resolved that I would not speak to her again. But staying away from her was even more of a torture. I continued to flit between the two horns of this dilemma for the next couple of years.

I think that by this time, she had started liking me too. She probably even expected me to declare my love to her. But I just did not have the guts to do so. I would be racked by self-doubt. She was the most beautiful girl in school. What was I? Why would someone like her even think about being with someone like me? On hindsight, those were stupid thoughts. But at that time, they seemed very reasonable to me.

I would pass out of Model School without ever having declared my love to her, a rather damp ending to this tale I suppose. 12 years have now passed since my last day in school. But even today, my memories of Model School and in fact my memories of Namrup are synonymous with my memories of the girl I watched walking from the teacher's desk to her seat. And in my memories, she still walks in beauty.