Last Sunday, I was on my way to South Bombay to meet a friend. I was in a local train. It was a Sunday, so the train was quite empty (it's usually like the Black Hole of Calcutta on working days) There were couple of young people sitting next to me who were speaking in a beautiful Oxford-Eton-SouthMumbai accent I'd give my right arm to learn. Not that these things don't come with their own problems.

Sheela and I were in Goa for a few days. The reason for our being here is unusual. We were visiting temples. "Haha, nice one" you might say, cynically. "I'm planning to go to Las Vegas on a pilgrimage next year" But it's true. We were from Goa, till a few hundred years ago, when our ancestors prudently relocated to villages around Mangalore, because some marauding Portuguese had arrived.
They stopped marauding in due course but our ancestors never returned.

When i was doing my MBA, we shared a campus with the Sardar Patel Engineering college and a regular science arts college. Most of the engineering guys were like the rest of us, scrawny, ugly as hell and girlfriendless. But there was one engineering guy who, despite being scrawny and ugly, had a bomb of a girlfriend from the science arts college. She would not only hold hands with him and walk around the campus, she would buy him cigarettes and chai. We gradually forgot his real name because everyone used to call him Naseeb.

The talk on the whatsapp group turned to BARC and I couldn't help remembering one of the awesomest examples of quick thinking I've heard of. Here's the story Long long ago, one of my friends, call him Bittu, who ran a small manufacturing business, got empaneled as a supplier of machined parts in BARC in Bombay. As a business, it sucked, because BARC doesn't have, or didn't have at that point of time, much work for someone like him.

Some days ago, Wordle managed to piss everyone off by having 'CAULK' as the puzzle word. It's not a word most people would even suspect was in the dictionary. However, I did know, and here's the story of how

So there's this guy who was my best friend for a while (lost touch now) He had a hard time finding a job (was a recession year). After a while, he was so desperate he told us he'd take anything. Back in the day, Eureka Forbes salesman was a thing and this poor guy was even considering that.
After sometime, he found a job with a small company.

My mom and I usually have our best conversations in the morning, over breakfast. Sometimes she's trying to explain some upanishad to me (YouTube has been a trove for her). At other times, it's a quick update about the extended family (I don't keenly follow our family WA group) And sometimes it's a precious excursion down memory lane. Today was one such
The other day, one of my neighbours called me over for chai and gupshup. His wife, who's simply a marvelous cook, gave some chicken biryani for Gau and me (Sheela's away in the US)

WhatsApp is (correctly, in my opinion) frowned upon as an enabler of the spread of fake news and vile thoughts but it also allows old friends to share thoughts and feelings with satisfying candour and openness.
I generally avoid being on groups. They either wish other members for birthdays, anniversaries, bereavement, festivals and achievements, or forward some complete nonsense like we invented flying 50000 years ago or.... well, many things.
But some groups I do cherish, groups of old friends who, in the course of

Bappi Lahiri's passing has broken a personal link with the past for me.
It was 1984. We had some kind of fancy dress competition organized by some kind of social club. Normally, 8 wouldn't touch these things with a barge pole but there were GIRLS! To be honest, not only was I scrawny and awful looking, the Girls were in such a minority, i doubt even a movie star would have stood any chance. But Girls were there. So i participated.
I had had a decent experience of fancy dress competitions. These were popular everywhere

I went to the MTNL office today to surrender my landline. It was a kind of hard decision. I mean, we've had that number for 5 decades now. Of course, it's added some digits. That's the telephone equivalent of us adding waistline. But the last few digits, been there for 50 years! Why did i surrender it then, you ask? Well, it's in my dad's name and he passed away last year, so it's either surrender it or get it transferred to my name. Plus it doesn't work. So that's one easy decision there. Give it up. I don't need something that doesn't work.

In other news, the good @SudhirSarnobat took me on a batata wada walk in Dadar, and what a great experience it was! We started with Shri Krishna Batata wada near Chabildas school, dadar West. Sudhir knows it as Manju ka wada, Manju being the original guy there Shri Krishna's wada is melt-in-the-mouth, the filling blended to mashed potato consistency. They also sell a samosa filled with -this is peak marathi- Kanda Poha! It's accompanied by a coconut chutney and is pretty tasty, though I thought the wada was the masterpiece

The talk on one of our WhatsApp groups veered to mistaken identity, always the source of jollity (unless, of course, sinister circumstances prevail) and I felt obligated to share one of my own anecdotes. As is usually the case when I tend to get autobiographical, everyone urged me to save it for some other time, so I decided I would inflict it upon my hapless twitter TL, so here goes:
The year i would've got into the IITs, had I written the entrance exam, another Narendra Shenoy appeared in the merit list. Some AIR 7.

After that unusually dark tweet thread (if you missed it, good for you. I'm usually a ray of sunshine but i was a wee bit upset when i wrote that. Anyway, back to the res), here's something you guys might enjoy. We've been invited out for dinner. If the question that crossed your mind is "Why would anyone in their right minds invite old Naren?", you can pat yourself on the back for your extraordinary Sherlockian skills. And if you instantly found the answer, which is "Ah, it was Sheela they invited" you can add Poirot to

Hello dear TL
I don't know how many of you run small scale manufacturing companies. Probably not too many, given how cheerful and chirpy my TL usually is. Because times are tough. First there was the lockdown, which forced us to keep factories closed. Closely followed by the sharp rise in the prices of everything. Steel, plastics, non ferrous metals, every imported thing, became suddenly and dramatically more expensive. Like 1.5x to 2x. This knocked the stuffing out of sales because the proletariat was broke because of covid

Introspection: From time to time in a guy's life, there comes a moment when he wonders if he hasn't been a bit of an underachiever. I mean, all your friends from school and college are captains of industry and you're having to be nice to the watchman in your sister's building so that he lets you park your car inside. If you were captain of industry material, you wouldn't be giving him weak, ingratiating smiles. You'd be making him wilt under the power of your gaze. But you can't, and you wonder why. Then the words of Hal Abelson, legendary professor

My mom sent me out to buy bananas. "I want slightly unripe ones. Bananas that will be perfect for eating tomorrow"
Ok.
"Tell him 'kal ke liye chahiye', ok?"
Mom, I'm 56 years old. I am married. I have two grown up sons. I have lived all my life in Bombay. I KNOW what to tell him I reach the guy's stall. A WhatsApp message arrives on my phone. Full of some really crazy stuff about how China, Russia, America, the middle East and Nehru are the ones responsible for the current situation. I write a stinging reply on the group, heaping scorn. The banana guy

My dad, who passed away recently, had one incredible quality. He was just not afraid of dying in the way the rest of us are. Let me give an example. Way back, in 2001, he was diagnosed with oral cancer. The treatment was radical. They would remove half his jaw and most of the tissue surrounding it. There was a problem though. Just the year before, he had had angina and chose not to have a bypass surgery. The oncosurgeon warned that while the mandible surgery itself was quite straightforward, his heart condition posed a significant risk. My mom and I

I was chatting on a friends group and as we shared anecdotes, I remembered this one. Many of the details are hazy so I've left out specifics but this is what broadly happened.
We used to live in a hostel called the D blocks. These were at the edge of the campus and beyond them was a barren, rocky waste. In the evening, all the wise and worthy of MIT Manipal would gather here and basically stare at the aforementioned waste.
On one such day, someone had a brainwave. "Let's perform an experiment", he said.

I'm not usually given to dark, depressing thoughts - indeed, the sunniness of my disposition has been known to elicit comment from actual rays of sunshine - but I must confess I feel low this morning. Why, you ask? Well, two incidents. First one - a month or so ago, a bunch of us college friends on a zoom call decided to get some tee-shirts made with stuff written on it that would evoke memories. One of our classmates living in California got them made and decided to ship them to everyone, including those of us living in India. He decided to ship them to