Zooland

Went to the Jawaharlal Nehru Zoological Park. I had visited it about 30 years back and had been pretty impressed. But then, when you are 41, it’s a depressing experience.

Weekend, right? Lots of people. We entered the zoo, lone patches of colour in a black sea of the burkha clad. And their children. Twenty bucks per adult, ten rupees for a camera. No Plastics, please. Pushed our way through the crowds to the first enclosure.  Chelonidis Nigra. Why Nigra, I wonder. They looked more gray-green than black. There were two in the enclosure. The first had splashes of paint – or some other white stuff on its side. The other had several pieces of well masticated chewing gum stuck on its shell.

I usually like kids, but at that moment, I admit I wanted to commit absolute and total childicide at that point. Starting with the ones hooting and giggling and trying to add their contributions to the poor creature’s shell.

Things got slightly better when we went through the monkey enclosures.

There were some good specimens – lion tail macaques, the ubiquitous langurs and there was this specimen – Captain Allan from Tintin would have wondered who this guy reminded him of. “What a conk” Indeed.

And then there were these. I had to take a picture of her bottom.

I don’t know if you’ve read Gerald Durrell’s The Stationary Ark. The book details the setting up of the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust at Les Augres Manor in Jersey. There’s a bit where he recounts a visit by Princess Anne (The horsefaced Brit one)  and he’s showing her around and he comes to the baboon cage. The baboon courteously shows the princess his bottom, and Gerry, at his babbling best – says something like – “What a splendid bottom, wouldn’t you love to have a bottom like that?”. The princess examines the proffered posterior closely and then, replies –“No, Mr. Durrell, I would not”.

Then it was off to the carnivore cages. The first one we saw was a reasonably large enclosure. And at point at the greatest possible distance from all visitors, a white tiger lay sleeping. I don’t know if he was moth eaten or magnificent, all I could feel was a bit of disappointment that he had neither company nor energy.

The next enclosure was paisa vasool. This one contained a full grown male tiger, and was he magnificent. Huge bugger, and obviously hungry. He was prowling up and down the the  keeper’s door and didn’t mind posing for pictures.

Beyond that was the Jaguar enclosure. After Cormac Standish Varadachari, the lone jaguar wasn't impressive. But the keeper was feeding him, and he drew the crowds. The jaguar enclosure was much more of a cage. A green painted dome of green painted wire.  Beyond the jaguar enclosure was an identical dome – this time for a distinctly mangy looking leopard. From there, it was onto the large and comfortable layout of Hyderabad’s own Keith and Roderick – a couple of sacked out lions.

The board outside their quarters was titled “Panthera Leo”. So when did that happen? The last I knew, lions were Felis Leo. So when did they stop being Felis?  And another thing. There were two males in the enclosure. No females. And both seemed content with the situation. Have they resigned themselves to permacelibacy? Or just occasional buggery? Don’t they have issues over territory?

Things got bleaker from there. A single  dhole. A single striped hyena. A single Asian Black bear, looking sad and forlorn. It was sitting alone in its enclosure, looking at us, as though begging us to get it out of there. There were two trees in its territory, and both had their trunks covered by rusted sheets. Didn’t they need the wood on those trunks for their territorial markings?
It’s possible the bear was completely happy in its solitude. Maybe the metal sheets rolled around the tree trunks were for its own protection. But I couldn’t shake of the feeling of despair that seemed to radiate out from the creature.

I couldn’t take much more. I just had to get out of there. But my cousins were tired of walking, and we went to a soft drink and snack shop within the grounds. The place was packed. Every now and then a pair of trash collectors would struggle their way through the messy picnickers, picking up discarded “Mineral Water” bottles – to be returned to the stall for Rs. 10 per bottle. Tetrapacks and plastic bags don’t fetch anything, so they remain as litter.

We went down to the reptile house. A rat snake. A rock python. A reticulated python, fresh from moult, its old skin discarded near the glass. A Russel’s  viper. A cobra. A vine snake. A monitor lizard or two. No hamadryads. No kraits. No pit vipers or saw scales. Seemed pitiful, compared to the Snake Park. 

The place left me with mixed emotions. One part was irritation at my own ignorance. Were the animals happy? The Hyderabad zoo is supposed to be one of the biggest in India. They claim to

“ have successfully bred exotic and indigenous animals and birds in captivity including the Indian rhino, Asiatic lion, tiger, panther, gaur, orangutan, crocodile, and python. To counter the depletion of the natural populations, we have bred several animals at the zoo and rehabilitated them in various deer parks and sanctuaries.

But I didn’t see orang utan or rhino. And most of the carnivores were single specimens. Its possible that they had their mates stashed away in zenanas, out of sight. This is Hyderabad, after all.

Why is it so hard to realize that zoos are vital here. That you have a better chance of building tiny but increasing captive populations than saving them in the wild? Oh yes, saving them in the wild is better, no arguments there – but how is anyone going to do it with our gluttony for resources – land and firewood and everything rapacious and steadily affluent populations need? It’s quite probable that the last wild tiger in India won’t last the decade.  Or for that matter, any tiger in the wild, anywhere.

And its not just tigers. There’s a whole list of endangered creatures in India – none of which seemed to be in the zoo. I mean – how many of us have seen Salim Ali’s Fruit Bat? Or the Red Panda? Let’s not even go near the Snow Leopard – which seems to be approaching Unicorn status. Or the great Indian Rhino.

It’s not that the Hyd zoo is noticeably short of funding. There’s construction work happening. The crowds are huge. But the money doesn’t go to the animals. Its for the junta who come to watch and hoot and throw chips and spit gum at the animals. Oh, and the best kept enclosure? The curator’s home.

I don’t want to whinge, but I can’t help doing it. I mean, isn’t conservation a fashionable cause? You have "Save the Tiger” ads starring Dhoni and Jackie Chan. You have Bollywood starlets giving each other prizes for environmental activism. Zoo Tycoon sells hundreds of thousands of copies. Why is it hard to have a good zoo? Is it because in India, we really don’t care for our fantastic fauna? It’s certainly not because we place poverty alleviation or suicidal farmers higher on our cause list.

I know the answer, of course. It’s easy to wring your hands and moan about the nation, its much harder to actually do something. But surely there must be some NGO or the other that does work with zoos? A smart ad/publicity campaign to raise funds, and a couple of committed NGOs could do wonders. I am, as doubtless many others are, willing to contribute money. But the actual work? SEP. 

So I’m back now. Feeling down. Feeling fucking impotent. I would have been better off playing Civilization V or DoTA all day. Not Zoo Tycoon, though.

The Mazes of Menace

Recently, you have begun to find yourself unfulfilled and distant in your daily occupation. Strange dreams of prospecting, stealing, crusading, and combat have haunted you in your sleep for many months, but you aren't sure of the reason. You wonder whether you have in fact been having those dreams all your life, and somehow managed to forget about them until now. Some nights you awaken suddenly and cry out, terrified at the vivid recollection of the strange and powerful creatures that seem to be lurking behind every corner of the dungeon in your dream. Could these details haunting your dreams be real? As each night passes, you feel the desire to enter the mysterious caverns near the ruins grow stronger. Each morning, however, you quickly put the idea out of your head as you recall the tales of those who entered the caverns before you and did not return. Eventually you can resist the yearning to seek out the fantastic place in your dreams no longer. After all, when other adventurers came back this way after spending time in the caverns, they usually seemed better off than when they passed through the first time. And who was to say that all of those who did not return had not just kept going?

Asking around, you hear about a bauble, called the Amulet of Yendor by some, which, if you can find it, will bring you great wealth. One legend you were told even mentioned that the one who finds the amulet will be granted immortality by the gods. The amulet is rumored to be somewhere beyond the Valley of Gehennom, deep within the Mazes of Menace. Upon hearing the legends, you immediately realize that there is some profound and undiscovered reason that you are to descend into the caverns and seek out that amulet of which they spoke. Even if the rumors of the amulet's powers are untrue, you decide that you should at least be able to sell the tales of your adventures to the local minstrels for a tidy sum, especially if you encounter any of the terrifying and magical creatures of your dreams along the way. You spend one last night fortifying yourself at the local inn, becoming more and more depressed as you watch the odds of your success being posted on the inn's walls getting lower and lower.

In the morning you awake, collect your belongings, and set off for the dungeon. After several days of uneventful travel, you see the ancient ruins that mark the entrance to the Mazes of Menace. It is late at night, so you make camp at the entrance and spend the night sleeping under the open skies. In the morning, you gather your gear, eat what may be your last meal out side, and enter the dungeon...

So begins the Nethack guidebook. Your only introduction to the Mazes of Menace. One of the hardest games ever. One of the simplest premises ever. Go down a bunch of dungeons, recover an Amulet. Get out.

Oh, you can go in as a human, a gnome, a dwarf, an orc or an elf. If you are playing the Slash’em variant, you could be a Drow, a Doppelganger, a Lycanthrope or a Vampire.

Your could be lawful, neutral or chaotic, and will have an appropriate aligned deity.

You could be – oh – so many things – an archaeologist with a fedora and a bullwhip, a barbarian answering the call of Crom, a caveman – a newly trained troglodyte, heralded as the Chosen one, a healer- starting off as a Rhizotomist. Perhaps a tourist - praying to Blind Io, Offler or the Lady, trying to find the Amulet with the Platinum Yendorian Express Card.

Whatever you are, whoever you are, you start off at level one of the Mazes of Menace - a series of randomly generated dungeons - with ASCII characters representing everything from you - @ , a white at, walls , armour  - boxes and chests.

And the bestiary?

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. ABCEDFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ. ':

How do you fight? By moving on to a square with a monster on it. But thats not the only thing you can do. You can dig through walls. You can find secret rooms. You can drink from fountains and use toilets. And if youre lucky - and lawful- you can dip a longsword into a pool and have the lady in the lake transform it into Excalibur. You can eat a mushroom and start hallucinating that your pet is a Mother-In-Law or a PushmiPullyu Llama. You can kill a long worm and enchant its tooth into one of the best dagger based weapons - a crysknife.

You can polymorph yourself - and if you can cotrol your polymorphism, you can become a dragon  - or even better a cockatrice. Why a cockatrice? Because you can lay eggs. No ordinary eggs. You can lay petrification grenade eggs. Or if you are a dragon, you can use your breath weapon - burn your enemies, freeze them, melt them in acid - or disintegrate them.

You will come across all kinds of stuff as you travel. Good stuff, bad stuff, artifacts. Say a prayer if you find a named lawful silver saber - the amazing Grayswandir. (Withywindle isn't there though). If you are playing the Slashem variant - you may find the Wallet of Perseus, an artifact Bag of Holding with 6 times the capability of a normal Bag of Holding. Or you may find the Houchou. A weapon that instakills if it connects. What kind of weapon, you ask? It's a spoon.

There are special dungeons, too.  There are the Gnomish Mines, leading on to Dwarftown. There is the Oracle, who gives you answers to questions you don't need answered.There are the quests - tailored by class. A samurai deals with Ashikaga Takauji. A Valkyrie has to fight Lord Surtur. A caveman or woman Tiamat. A barbarian has to fight Thoth Amon for the hear of Ahriman. Lord Carnarvon instructs your archaeologist to retrieve the Orb of Detection from The Minion of Huhetotl. Or youre a knight? King Arthur commands you to retrieve the Magic Mirror of Merlin from the Dragon Ixoth. A tourist? Twoflower wants the Platinum Yendorian Express Card- which unfortunately is in the Thieves Guilds Hall, deep in the Shades. And you know what they call a horse in the Shades.

So what can you do? Fly? Sure. Walk on water? Get the right boots, and no problem? Genocide entire species of monster - no worries. The fabled scroll of genocide will do ya. Bless em - by dipping them in Holy Water and you can wipe out the entire class of families of the monsters you wish to destroy. Tip - start with the Liches.

And then theres all the things you can do with cockatrices. I won't even get into that.

If you’re lucky, you get the amulet, make your way past the elemental planes of Earth, Air, Water and Fire to the Astral plane to sacrifice the Amulet to your God – and you meet three of your compadres – guys mentioned in the Bible – Revelations Chapter 6 – Pestilence, Famine and Death. By now, you are the other Horseman.

Oh – and how long does it usually take you to get this far? Anywhere from a year to a decade. It took me seven years for me to complete the game. My only ascension, Tez the Samurai. Haven’t done it again, though it’s supposed to get easier.

It doesn't matter what your games are - whether you’re the Solitaire/Minesweeper corpo type, or the hookey playing Seal Clubber from the Kingdom of Loathing or the master of multiplayer Halo – the Pwner of N00bs across XBox live – or the Raja of the RPG, the boss of Bethesda, Blizzard and Bioware – you have not seen gameplay that comes close to the gameplay NetHack provides.Or as this guy puts it -While the graphics may seem primitive by today's standards, today's gameplay seems primitive by NetHack standards. So will gameplay twenty years from now. By NetHack standards, positively paleolithic.

There’s a Telugu proverb about books- some are like grapes – pop them in your mouth, and you get their sweetness, others are like bananas – you have to peel them to get the edible stuff. And there are those like coconuts, where you have to take a machete to them, before you can even think of peeling after which you have to crack the nut to get at their sweetness.

NetHack is the ultimate coconut. Once you get past the shells and the fibre, the payoff is incredible

Bumming Around

Right. Unemployed for more than a month now. Not looking for a job. Its been different.

This was not my original intention. I was looking to switch jobs. Two or three interviews later, I decided to screw it. I am forty years old and discovered the thought of remaining a honourable salaryman for the rest of my life repellent.

But being jobless leaves an eight hour hole in your day – and surprisingly, it hasn’t been too difficult to fill that gap. The first couple of days, I was at a loss. I used to drive around. I hung around at coffee shops smoking endless cigarettes and watching people come and go. I hit the gym again, after years. Spent hours at bookshops, reading stories of the green lantern corps.

Played games. Naturally. Red Dead Redemption, Assassin’s Creed, The Force Unleashed, Mass Effect (1 & 2). DA:O.

I reread the Wheel of Time. I would sit on a stone bench at the Independence Day park and lose myself in Randland. Compare Brandon Sanderson’s books with RJs. Reread TGS and TOM over and over. Make lists of plot threads needing resolution.

I reread Robert Fisk’s fantastic The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East . Artemis Fowl. Identity and Violence. Most of Grant Morrison’s Batman run.  Even got used to the idea of Damien Wayne as Robin. Oh and Edgar Wallace – The Iron Grip. The Feathered Serpent. The Four Just Men. The Council of Justice. The Law of the Four Just Men. The Reeder books. The Avenger. The Traitor’s Gate. Reread my favourite James Bond books. OHMSS. Casino Royale. You Only Live Twice. Read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Tripped on the verses in Sylvie and Bruno. The Hunting of the Snark. My Lucky Lukes and Asterixes.

I watched BtVS, every episode from Season 1 to Season 7, from “Welcome to the Hellmouth” to  “Chosen”.
Watched “Hush” and “Something Blue” and “Nightmares” and “School Hard” and “The Pack” multiple times. I watched “The Prisoner”. The Star Wars  six pack. Jeeves and Wooster. And the Astaire/Rogers eight pack. Avatar, The Last Airbender. (The DiMartino/Konietzko masterpiece, not Shyamalan's dreck movie version)

Listened to music. Listened in a way I hadn’t listened to music for a long time. To stuff I hadn’t heard in years. Love. Fairport Convention. Traffic. Supertramp. Roy Orbison. Watched all my Springsteen Videos – from the early Rosalita recordings to the London Calling at Hyde Park. More on that later.

Started cycling. Madras in January is wonderful for cycling. Went around the city, listening to 80s songs, the synthesized sweetness of OMD and TFF and Madonna gently offset by the tearing in my thighs. Went to the Marina beach in the morning and stood in the water, playing like a child in the waves.  Riding around with nowhere to go makes even the worst gridlocks and traffic signals enjoyable.

Spent four days at an ashram. Meditating and yoga and other new agey stuff. Watched a concurrent sunrise and moonset. Spent more time at peace with myself than I have before.

Of course, its not all been roses and fractals. Its not exactly pleasurable to deal with parents who make no secret of their displeasure at your unemployed status, or a sister who wields guilt like a scalpel, in conjunction to a mother who prefers the spiked club approach. Its no fun to hear melodramatic sniffs that you are meant to hear. Its irritating to be told how your cousin – who’s been respectably employed in Oracle for a decade, is now planning his sons’ upanayanams. It’s painful to hear the bile in your mother’s voice when she discusses the US employed or the newly married members of the family, with a meaning look in her eye. It’s frustrating to listen to sister who asks if my current status means that she has to prepare herself to take care of a fading parent – if such a thing is necessary, of course. And all this is over and above your own self doubt and all the questions you have no answers for. Maybe I will have to go crawling back to one of my old bosses and beg for a job. Maybe I am doomed to cubicle hell. Maybe what I think I want is completely screwed up. Maybe I’ve fallen for too many homilies and platitudes. So many maybes…

But then, there are all those lyrics -

Little doubts, little doubts, they keep coming round. Carry On. Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time, its easy. It's my direction, it's my proposal, it's so hard it's leading me astray...

So I don’t know. On balance, there has been beauty and grace – a great deal more in my world since I quit my job. It should do, for now. Even if the mermaids do not sing to me, its cool that I hear their song.  

Revisiting Buffy

I’m sitting here, watching Phineas and Ferb – Got Game, and all the stuff about the F games got me thinking.

When Buffy was shown in India – it was the turn of the century – liberalization was well underway, Cable TV had pretty much penetrated the cities and I was in my second job.

I had come to satellite TV late and probably the only thing that I watched was reruns of M.A.S.H, which was considerably softer than the movie I loved. I remember seeing promo ads for Buffy, and dismissing it as another 90210.

I usually watch TV while I eat – Daljit Dhaliwal on the BBC World news during breakfast was a regular, and one diner, I channel surfed to see a guy in monster makeup chanting “The Sleeper will wake” in front of a pool of some kind.

The scene cut away and there was this pretty little blonde examining dresses in front of the mirror – “Hi, I’m an enormous slut”. I grinned. I was interested, despite being sure that I should be looking down at this and thinking “Ah, for the days of good British Comedy”. . What followed seemed to be mom/teen stuff, until the blonde says something like “Oh, I plan to hang out with the living”?. (WTF, Necrophilia? Really interested now). By the time the encounter with mysterious stud who gives her a cross and tells her that she needed to kill them all, I was into it.

And so I watched the attempted staking of Cordelia, Rupert Giles (Rupert? Really?) thumping the thud book with “VAMPYR” on its cover, chuckled at this exchange

Buffy: Oh, please! Look at his jacket. He's got the sleeves rolled up, and the shirt! Deal with that outfit for a moment.
Giles: It's dated?
Buffy: It's carbon dated. Trust me, only someone living underground for ten years would think that was still the look.

and watched the Master rise and ask for “something young”. I watched Willow try to seize the moment and end up in the master’s crypt with Darla and Jessie and watched Buffy really kick ass until Luke appears and do some ass whipping of his own, till the Batman style ending.

Thankfully, the next episode came right up. The Harvest. “Sunrise”. “….in about nine hours, moron”. 

It was the show I waited for. “The Witch” was OK, as was “Never Kill a Boy on the First Date”. I never got to see “Angel”. Consecutive power cuts drove me to my sister’s house for the repeat, but wouldn’t you know, the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board got in ahead of me just as I entered her apartment.

It’s funny, but the show was the only thing I could talk about. My evangelism was always met with rolling eyes and snorts at work. “You and your Buffy!” my co-workers would say.  I even tried to push it on my coworkers when I was in Italy – and I remember Sergio telling me – “It was nice, but nothing great” after watching Teacher’s Pet.

I couldn’t explain why I enjoyed the show so much. This was when the internet was something that was as ubiquitous in India as it is now. Even at work. Not for the first two seasons. I began to think that this must be some kind of shameful trip – like  - searching the internet for topless photos of Marina Sirtis.

It was only when Buffy was in the 4th season on the US and on hiatus in India that I started visiting websites for my Buffy fixes. I mean, if you’ve just finished seeing season 2, you need your fix pretty desperately right? You’ve watched some 88 minutes of the most amazing TV ever – Becoming, parts 1 & 2 – with those unforgettable lines about Happy Meals with Legs, Spike and Joyce on the sofa – “You hit me on the head with an axe…” and the whole heartbreaking climactic swordfight.

So, it was buffyworld.com, spoilerslayer.com, buffyguide.com, buffistas.org and almost every site I could find. Lurking, of course. But with the comforting feeling that there was this whole group of people who were as rabidly obsessed as I was.

So anyway, here I am, several years after the series finale, going through all my DVDs, scrounged from various amazons and still squeeing like fangirl teen at the familiar scenes, still cheering at that rousing Nerf Herder score trying to come up with a top ten.

In no particular order

Nightmares

Hush

The Body

Fool for Love

The Gift

The Pack

Becoming

Something Blue

Passion

Once More, With Feeling

Oh, there are sure to be so many more, but at this point of time….

The Girl with the White Parasol

One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl.

Bernstein, Citizen Kane

The point Bernstein makes is about how memory works, but there’s another – it’s something that every guy has experienced. Or at least something that every guy has experienced.  The girl you saw, somewhere – maybe when you were a teen or a twentysomething – a theatre, a bar, a shop, an airport or a railway station.

One of my friends described one such incident – involving the Triplicane Parthasarathy temple just after dawn during Margazhi. He talked about the dark blue sari she wore, and the flowers in her hair – jasmines, if I remember right. He called the experience holy.

Mine features a woman in white, as well. It was when Nilgiris was the only “supermarket” – if you can call a place with room to park no more than four cars that. This girl walked in with her boyfriend – or her husband or whatever. Oval face, shoulder length hair, small dash of ash on her forehead, lovely eyes, soft voice. She bought some stuff – dal, milk, chips and some fruit. I don’t think I gawked, but I remember moving through the aisles so that I could keep looking at her.  She paid for her stuff – or the boyfriend did, and she went away on his bike.

She must have been a local, I thought. But I never saw her again. And like Bernstein, not a month has gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl – twenty years now.