Calendar Recall

Yet another New Year has come and gone. The spate of greetings on WhatsApp (ugh!) has abated and The Man from Madras Musings takes time off to look back at New Years of the past. Over time New Year celebrations have changed in style and even more so have the visible markers of ringing in the new. MMM alludes to calendars, diaries and greeting cards.

If you ask MMM, he will say he misses the greeting cards the most. There was a time when they were collectors’ items and there would be a competition of sorts on which household got the maximum number of cards and of the most variety. MMM’s favourite was always WWF cards which featured endangered animals. Now of course greeting cards themselves are an endangered species. You can even consider them to be extinct with most people preferring to send the E variety. When MMM says send, he means forward, because that is what most people end up doing anyway.

There was a time too when people would pester their social superiors for diaries. MMM is not aware of what people did with these, for writing a personal account each day is not one of India’s best-known practices. Probably they were used for daily accounts, milk accounts and dhobi accounts. And now with everything getting on to the laptop, diaries too are on the verge of extinction.

The daily calendar is the third of those endangered species. You got them in essentially three varieties. The first of these was the tabletop calendar which still is somewhat in vogue. You flipped the months as the year progressed and the only drawback was the wedge-shaped base which lost shape over a period and would insist on tilting over just when you extended a hand to lift a sheet to look for a particular date. The next variety was the wall calendar. You got them in two or three different options. The upmarket ones were those issued by the big corporate houses. And then there were the standard ones where a month was a sheet and at the end of it you either tore it away or flipped it over to reveal a new month. The last one which in MMM’s view was a true excrescence though he is sure that it had its fan following, was the single sheet date calendar with a metal rib at both ends, top and bottom. This was hung from a nail and when you switched on a ceiling fan, which was all too often in a humid city like Madras, the calendar would swing to and fro. Therefore, a circle would begin to be inscribed on the wall on which the calendar was hung.

The third variety was the daily calendar where you had a small square sheet that gave you not only the date but also a tally of good and bad times and in MMM’s view, most fascinatingly, details of festivals at temples on that day in faraway towns and villages. At a time when the Internet was completely unknown, just reading the names of those pilgrim centres and the festivities that were taking place there on the very same day held a certain magic.

The greatest drawback in MMM’s view was that very often these calendars featured pictures of gods and goddesses. These were not of the elegant Ravi Varma kind but of the more pedestrian calendar art for want of a better word. And after the year was over if you had a religious senior in the family, you could not get rid of the calendar. They would remain hanging on various walls with nails protruding from below indicating that those were the supports for those daily sheets. The sheets themselves came in handy – to make boats on a rainy day, to scribble notes, and to make a convenient packet to take away sacred ash, vermillion, and sugar crystals. MMM also recalls that the young un’s in the family vied for the honour of tearing off the sheet and in the interests of peace, a strict rota system was maintained.

Today, dates, months, and years are all off the laptop, the desktop, the tablet and the cell phone. You can do all that you did by way of scribbling dates and events on the calendars on these gadgets as well. But something of the old magic is missing. Or is it just that MMM is growing old?

Party Cars in the Mofussil

‘Tis election time, or rather like Santa Claus, elections are coming along in the none-too-distant future and so the action is hotting up in this our State. Those in power are going around inaugurating, foundation stone laying, scheme announcing, tom-tomming, etc. with a vim. And those not in power are gathering, aligning, coercing, relating, bonding, etc. to claw their way back. Everyone is doing what they are best known for – promising this, promising that and promising just about everything else. In all this there is a lot of to-ing and fro-ing around not just the city but the rest of the state.

The Man from Madras ­Musings was always of the view that the cars of the political class are a class by themselves. Party flags fly on the bonnet, and on the windscreen is invariably a sticker, often illuminated, of the leader to whom they owe allegiance, at least for the nonce. The drivers of these vehicles recognize no traffic rules and above all they discovered the automatic gear shift long before automobile engineers invented them. They operate the car only in the fourth gear, keeping their foot as firmly pressed on the accelerator as their hand is pressed on the horn. But if you thought the city political cars are bad enough, you need to really see the ones in the mofussil.

This aspect came forcefully to MMM when he was driving around the countryside last week. He then concluded that the lesser the functionary in a party outfit, the louder and more outlandish his car. Some of them need to be seen to be believed. There were a couple that had the party symbol by way of stickers painted all over the body. Others had on their rear window a large photograph of the leader. And all these vehicles had lights of various sizes on the front. These were not just headlights but more floodlights. As these cars careened on their way down highways, the drivers would keep switching on and switching off these lights each time they found a vehicle going ahead of them. This was kept up till the vehicle in front moved to one side probably after the driver in it was blinded temporarily.

Some have a loudspeaker attached which belts out songs on the way and then speeches of the leader when at a central location in a town. The decibel levels are so high that those in the car must soon be deaf from prolonged exposure. It must take them five years to recover, which is why, in MMM’s view, post elections nobody, be it winner or loser, can be bothered to listen to us, the people.

– MMM