Vanakkam Doctor !

Mahesh stores - 5 As I had mentioned before, we sold everything in “Mahesh stores”. It was seasonal brilliance and opportunistic business ideas, based on timeless and seamless observations. Those ideas were most likely to have come from my brother, who is currently a big shot Regional Sales Manager in Ranbaxy. He used to sell things and stuck his finger in most of the pies known to human fellow beings, before he landed for good in Ranbaxy in 1987. He had sold TV antennae, furniture, cotton wools for the factories, insurances, Video cassettes, and possibly few others. In fact he owned few other shops those days; definitely a video shop and possibly a furniture shop in Choolai medu area, whose existence was and still a mystery to all in our family, except him! The seasonal opportunism was very eagerly taken on by my Appa, possibly took it very seriously to his heart, when one fine day evening, in January, just before Pongal, he landed at our gate, in a cycle rickshaw, ...

That’s how we arrived in London from Madras, via Delhi! Aeroflot airlines, the official airlines of the then USSR, or whatever was left after Gorbachev and his Glasnost and or Perestroika, carried us from Delhi, via Moscow to the busiest airport in the world. Needless to say that those words of Gorbachev got into Oxford English Dictionary of the 80’s, similar to WMD, i.e. Weapons of Mass Destruction in the new millennium courtesy George Bush. Perhaps the words are as obsolete as they were, when came in vogue. I, Hari and Ganesh Moorthy! We roughly paid around Rs 20,000 each for the return journey to London from Delhi. It was March 1994 and the aim was to attend PLAB exam in London, pass it and find a job in United Kingdom as a Trainee Doctor and earn the whopping Rs one lac monthly! Perhaps, this is what I had told my poor mother and managed to convince, before she pledged her Jewellery for the same journey and the examination fees. The journey from Chennai, to L...

It is PLUS two (+ 2) results , this time 23 years ago!!!! However, first I would like to apologise for the boring length of this blog. Life is a mere chain of incidents and possibly co- incidents, I suppose. I still, vividly remember a mallu friend of mine called Suresh, arriving breathless on the doors of my brother’s video shop to drop a bombshell on a May hot week day afternoon of 1986! Yes, I was blown off completely by the news. I had just become the top achiever in our school. The exams were State run Plus two exams, which provide the gateway for higher studies, on merit basis. Well, I scored a meagre 1086! It shows indirectly, the standard of my other classmates in St Gabriel’s School, Broadway, in 1986. The state record was around 1180 out of 1200 marks, awarded that year. The top notches from State toppers went to students with primary aim of scoring high marks and with ease, by taking up FRENCH, instead of Tamil. However, we in our school studied Tamil ...

What swayed me over to the kites? We lived in North Chennai, that millennium and that was the entire pre requisite for flying kites. There were no barriers to kite flying in terms of caste, religion, class or anything for that matter. You just have to have kite and thread kandai or a lottai, sooner or later you will be surrounded by anyone from the list above! I have seen upper middle class mingling with ordinary class people very easily when it came to flying kites and I still feel that it was the common bonding factor that was widely prevailing in 70's and 80's North Chennai, a sense of camaraderie, which may possibly still exists in that part of Chennai.........I love and admire! Yes, My father did it, his brothers and uncles did it and I am sure, their fathers did it and we all did it! I was possibly four or five, when one fine day; my appa came home with bundle of black maanja nool, a meesaii baana kite and a cooler on his eyes. Here we go! That was the...

I was introduced to Barbie by a good friend of mine, a while ago, when we were living in Isle of Wight. He visited us with his then Spanish girl friend, now his wife, for a hot summer weekend. We were renting a terraced house in IOW and it had many luxuries, amongst which are Barbecue pot and a mooring site for boats! It was a moment of reckoning for me and my then pregnant wife! The Spanish friend prepared and in fact shopped very meticulously all the necessary ingredients and here we go!!! The highlight was the thin slices of lamb coated with garlic and olive oil along with full loads of home made “Shangri-La”- a Spanish cocktail. Needless to say I was hung over for the next few days and my friend puking as usual! Brilliant days! Anyway hope to do one this weekend and hope we stay sober!!!

The kites came in different shapes and sizes. There was a tiny weenie one, the shape of the 5 paisa coin and sold for the same and the biggest of all the BAANA kite, which was sold for anything between three and twenty rupees depending upon the season and availability. Amazing names, they had. The lists goes like this: Tube light, Meesai, Thalai pattai, rocket, korai thalai pattai, rettai meesai, othai meesai, thai pattai with korai, and my favourite were tub light and rettai meesai. There were also similar patterns in Bombay kites, which had a funny size and shape to the local vannarapettai kites. They literally looked like an obese bombayite with a big tummy, whilst the local ones were very sleeker, especially the baana kites. Having said that the baana kites were mainly used for colouring the thread or the nool in Tamil, which is also called Maanja! The baanas were also mainly used by the big league players, who enjoyed showing of their prowess with a big kitche...

மகேஷ் ஸ்டோர்ஸ் - 2 In Chennai, the odd sprinkler of kite will appear on the sky, late July or August and soon it will occupy the entire clear blue skyline of Chennai or the old Madras, especially around North Madras, where I grew up. My so called Maa Niram (euphemism for brown skin) would become an African by the time the season was finished, which was the month of October or November, depending on the day Deewali falls. The last day of the season would roughly fall on the weekend after Deewali , as a kid, I would be loaded with tonnes of thread and stacks of kites, caught in our catchment’s area. Kite flying was a sheer delightful past time or a hobby and for some or most in North Chennai, used to be a pride issue. Neighbours became enemies overnight, thick friends became thinner, girls were won or lost, you become nomadic or forgotten in your own household, become thick skinned and in the process become a Delhi erumai or a bullock ! Wars were fought ...