3:2 Debate Is Life, The Rest Is Just Prep-Time. Chapter 4, The End Of The Beginning

This is the final chapter in the series, scroll down to find earlier chapters

The morning crept up on us. Momentous mornings always seem to arrive before you expect them to.

Quarters.

Butterflies.

Adrenaline with a crazy gung-ho high.

Anticipation.

Nerves.

Three guys cheering for us, two of us in the team.

The next few hours went by in such a flurry that it in hindsight it seems unreasonable to think that so much happened in that span of time. The morning began when we all woke up to find Suddu completely dressed and ready to leave. When we told him that he was up and ready way too early for the debate, he informed us that he was going elsewhere.

Else where? This was the first time we’d broken, where the hell was he going? He wasn’t going to watch the debate? He wasn’t going to be there to cheer us on? Bastard! Too sleepy to say much, we bid him goodbye. While leaving he mumbled something to the effect of, “Oh comeon guys, I’m assuming you’ll win the quarters and I should be back in time for the semis comfortably, alright bye, see you at the semis.” Sure, he was assuming we would win the quarters. Like we won quarters everyday, like it was no big deal.

Later we got to know what prompted Sud to cook up such nonsense. He was going to meet a girl. Some girl he knew from his stint at LSE. Like I said earlier Sud’s experiences with the ladies have been terribly disappointing, to say the least. Which is why that morning when he realized that this girl wanted to meet him, he found himself in a deep moral dilemma. On the one hand he wanted to hang in there for his team, on the other hand was a woman. A woman. Suddu had been looking for a woman for many years now. So drastic had his desperation become that he saw a prospective partner in every female now, with little regard for quality, compatibility, age, anything at all. Suddu often exclaimed, with much self pity, “I’ve never even held a girl’s hand and I’m nearly twenty two!” Sud reflected on all this early that morning and it came rushing back to him in frightening detail. The choice was suddenly a simple one. He was going to meet the girl. Of course, he had to justify missing the debate, more to himself than anyone else. Suddu likes to do that, justify things to himself. So in his mind he envisioned Shobhit and me as Denny Krane and Alan Shore. The opposing team (ranked 1^st thus far), in his mind, became a couple of school kids who would be flattened easily by us and he would be back in time for the semi-final. All was good, life made sense and Sud skipped away happily.

A couple of hours later, the rest of us were at the debate as the motions were released. We met our opponents and after the mutual cancellations, we arrived at “Pornography is good for women on the whole” as our motion. Ironically we, the so-called desperate engineering guys, were opposition. Anyway, before you knew it, the twenty minutes of prep-time were over and we entered the tiny classroom.

They made their first speech and it was nothing like we expected it to be. Their case seemed to be modeled on the notion that pornography was protest against patriarchy and this protest made it a symbol of the liberation of women. The problem was, however, that they didn’t say so in so many words. They kept trying to sell the idea that porn was choice, porn was freedom, porn was occupation, porn meant equality. A little confused, I got up to make my speech. Controlled aggression, I told myself, controlled aggression.

I went sequentially, trying to take down every point made by them thus far. The response from the adjudicators seemed to be good. They were nodding at just the right times, noting down stuff at what I believed to be our stronger points, laughing along when I made a joke. Seven and a half minutes later, things seemed to be going well and I sat down again. The government responded next in their deputy’s speech. His seven minutes added, in my opinion, nothing to the debate at all. No new lines of attack, no new arguments, not even rebuttals of any value. With respect, it was a redundant speech. Smelling blood, Shobhit rose to give his speech. They were on the defensive. In most debates, this is the turning point, when one team has the distinct advantage and can go all out on the offensive. In the three member team format, I often give the whip’s speech and know exactly what it’s like to be in this position. Shobhit did exactly what he had to, he nailed in our points, cementing our edge. He had all the time in the world too, since there was nothing new from their end. The adjudicators were clearly on our side by the end of his speech. We were making the other team bleed now, dragging them by the neck. Cross questioning, which was our forte, hadn’t even begun and we were already in the driver’s seat. We could see them giving up too, their shoulders were sagging and their smiles had disappeared. Cross questioning went well too, we answered well and they were defensive all along. As far as I was concerned, their game was up. Anything they said in the closing could only be a perspective on what they had said during the debate, and we were confident all that was well covered.

There was a slight glitch just before our closing. Neither of us was prepared for it, each had assumed the other would be handling it. In truth we weren't used to delivering the closing so shortly after cross questioning since we had been government for most of the tournament, giving the second closing. Here we were opposition and the closing had just sort of crept up on us. Anyway, I made the closing and it went as well as it could have given the circumstances.

Then came the next glitch. The guy in the other team came up and delivered a fantastic closing. He introduced new matter disguising it subtly in the form of perspective and shifted focus from the meat of what the clash in the debate had been to certain seemingly irrelevant constructives mentioned in passing in their first speech. Most of all, he harped on how we hadn’t tackled the symbolism attached with pornography that they had spoken of. After his closing, I experienced my first chill. But we were still more than confident of victory and left the room to the adjudicators.

Outside, everyone who had witnessed the debate seemed to regard us clear winners. Pranay also expressed his confidence freely. We expected it be a quick and easy decision for the judges. Fifteen minutes later, none of the judges had left the room and we began to get just a little bit worried. Pranay’s views were now, “If they give it to the other team, it can only be because of that closing.” Thirty minutes in, things got pretty tense and we were all going through every bit of the debate in our heads to see where the difficulty in deciding who could have won may be arising. Finally after forty minutes, the judges were ready. As I walked into the room Pranay yelled out from behind us, “They can’t give it to you, the government made just the symbolism constructive and you didn’t answer it.” With that ominous message still in ringing in my ears, I entered the room behind Shobhit.

Suddenly the room was full of all kinds of weird things. Dogs, airline seats, headlights, brawling drunkards. Then just as soon, they disappeared and were replaced by five very quiet panelists. The head panelist, or chair, stood up and everyone went very quiet. He asked us to take our seats and we did. Not a sound was made as he cleared his throat.

“The decision is a 3-2 split” he said, and paused for effect. A long “ohhh” went around the room. Then he spoke again, slowly and deliberately, “The side receiving three votes is…..the government” That was that, we lost our first ever quarterfinal on a 3-2 split. One more vote and we would have made it, just one, but we didn't.

A section of the crowd broke out into cheer. Our opponents came over and shook hands, and our tournament ended there.

Meanwhile, in another part of town a young man was just about to meet a pretty brown eyed girl. She came from around the corner and walked towards the café where they were supposed to meet. He took one look at her and was floored. She was even more beautiful than when he had last seen her at LSE. As she walked towards him, he felt the same stirring that every young man has felt at least once. Oh the twinkle in her eye, the curls of her hair, oh the gentle delicacy of her gait. Heart pounding, beads of sweat forming on his forehead, he knew it was love. When she reached him, he blurted out, “You look….you look really great….”

“Really?” she replied with a smile that only worsened the fellow’s condition, “I do hope my boyfriend agrees with you, he’ll be joining us here soon….you don’t mind, do you?”

Flummoxed, he began to mumble incomprehensibly. “Boyfriend!...Boyfriend?....but I skipped my friends’ debate for this….I missed the debate!”

“Sorry?”

Suddenly he delved into his pocket and fished out his phone. He fumbled with it on the for a few seconds then put it to his ear, all the while mumbling under his breath. When someone picked up at the other end, he started off, “I’m coming for the semifinal, I’m just leaving guys….I’ll be there soon enough, don’t worry I’m rooting for you fellas….I’m coming. ” When he finally stopped talking, the person at the other end told him that we hadn’t made it past it the quarters. On hearing this he sat down slowly and held his head between his hands. For the next few minutes, he just kept shaking his head from side to side, completely ignoring the girl's concerned banter. After a while, he resigned himself to spending the afternoon with the girl of his dreams, and her boyfriend.

Ahh, poor Suddu, how could he have known. She had looked single enough on Facebook and we had seemed like such a strong team.

Teams from our college consecutively made it to the quarters of two more tournaments right after this one, losing each time on a 3-2 split. The jinx was finally broken at IIT Delhi when our team (Shobhit, Pranay and myself) went all the way to the finals and finished second. The team then went international to the Malaysia Debate Open and reached the semis, losing, once again, on a 3-2 split. The same team will compete at the Asians Debate this May. This will very likely be this team’s last tournament as Shobhit and I are set to graduate soon.

Suddu, meanwhile, has established himself as an adjudicator of repute, ranking very high at the Malaysia Debate Open and being chosen to judge debates up till the semi final. He is also adjudicating at the Asians in May. He still hasn’t held a girl’s hand.

3:2 Debate Is Life, The Rest Is Just Prep-Time. Chapter 3

This is chapter 3 of a series, scroll down if you're looking for the earlier chapters.

Some of us, of course, take this freedom a little too seriously, as the story will show.

Back to the where we were. The six of us were walking along Rajpath after Shobhit and I made the break. Suddu was sulking. Suddenly we noticed a group of well dressed people, perhaps just out of a club, looking at us. Not looking, staring at us. In the way that one might stare at a dirty dog that’d sneaked into a presidential party. Quite obviously, we were a little taken aback by their unfriendly demeanor and more than just a little confused too. We looked at each other, befuddled. That’s when we realized that we were only five, not six. Pranay was missing. It didn’t take long to find him, however. The strangers’ stares alternated between us and a point behind their fancy car. We followed their stares and there he was, standing just behind the car with his back towards us. Legs spread out wide, hands disappearing to the front of his body, somewhere near the abdomen, a sound similar to a small mountain stream pervading the otherwise silent night.

For those who don’t know, Rajpath has lush lawns on either side separated from the road by foot high milky white pillars connected to one another by chain link. After Pranay’s little misadventure, one of those pillars is now a sickly brownish yellow instead.

Extremely embarrassed, we put on our best “Oh we didn’t know him, Oh we just happen to be wearing similar sweatshirts with the same college name on them, we’re just the five of us, we don’t believe in urinating on Rajpath” smiles and walked away quickly. Pranay meanwhile whistled the sweet whistle of relief and walked past the strangers nonchalantly smiling at them. When he caught up with us, we expressed our extreme disgust at his distasteful behavior. Shobhit told him off for his peeing in public and for the desecration of our sacred Rajpath. Suddu repeatedly said, “Yuck dude, yuck”. Salhotra shook his head in disappointment. Pranay, of course, couldn’t understand this at all and defended himself with arguments that are unwelcome even in a debate.

“Isn’t this a democracy? Don’t we have real freedom? We should be free to do what we want, it’s Rajpath! I say we should all pee on Rajpath to send a message to those trying to destroy our freedom. I’m going to call it ‘squirting against terror’ or…’piddling for protection’ …or….” he let out in a tirade against all those who thought public excretion was incorrect. I’m not sure what part of this was Pranay and how much the liquids in him were talking but in any case I felt the need to step in at this point. To try and convince him in a gentle, patient, logical and completely non judgmental manner about what he was doing. So I went up to him and said, “Pranay if you ever bring that thing out in public again, I’ll break it. Not kidding. No seriously, I’ll personally rip it off.” Ever logical, Pranay couldn’t deny the weight of my sound argument and looked convinced that peeing in public was not a good idea.

After spending the next couple of hours in the lawns outside the Rashtrapati Bhawan, it was time to head back. Thanks to his Facebook addiction, Shobhit was wont to click pictures all over the place in what he believed were realistic poses. As expected, on the way back, he kept instructing us to “stand here, look that way, put your arm around this one” etc for the benefit of his camera. In his attempt to recreate the evening in its entirety, at some point he asked Pranay to pose as though he were relieving himself.

Pranay had other ideas.

“It looks quite obviously fake unless I unzip.”

“So unzip then”

“Only if Suzie is willing to make an exception”, he said looking at me with a wicked smile.

“Yeah ok, but just for the camera”, was my reluctant answer.

At this point, Pranay turned his back towards us, blatantly unzipped and before anyone had the slightest idea what was going on, created a huge puddle right in the middle of the road. Then he turned his head behind, looked at us smiling and with a hint of madness writ on his face intoned, “Freedom”.

Life is funny. Sometimes what you think is a rabbit is actually a snake in disguise. Other times, who you thought was a civilized Khar boy turns out to be a public urinator. But life plays its finest card when the Khar boy thought you were clicking a picture but you were actually shooting a video. That’s right, we have a video of Pranay piddling on Rajpath. As you can imagine, this puts an enormous amount of power in our hands. So great is this power, in fact, that I have no idea what to do with it.

This perverse turn of events had a profound impact on Suddu. While he’d been sulking all evening, now he just couldn’t stop. He was literally bouncing up and down, yelling all the while. Imagine a chubby, ninety-something-kg, near bald guy rising and falling while intermittently screeching out, “Dude he peed on Rajpath, he peed on Rajpath. Dude dude dude, he peed on Rajpath…..he peed on Rajpath hahaha, he peed on Rajpath…….duuuude.”

Most folks would agree we’d already had a pretty crazy time that night but like other things on that trip, it wasn’t over just yet.

Tired, we decided to head back and get to sleep. Which is when we discovered that Delhi isn’t quite Mumbai when it comes to getting a ride back home at two in the morning. For the next forty minutes we tried stopping every rickshaw or cab that passed us by. Some of them didn’t want to go where we wanted them to. Others just wanted to go home. With time, our frustration grew and so did our madness. Beyond a point we start hollering out to virtually any vehicle in sight. We must have seemed pretty nuts, six guys yelling out to everything on the road. Some drivers even acknowledged our requests with a polite display of their middle finger. Still, intoxicated by our recent adventures and compelled by lack of another option, we kept calling out.

At some point a bulldozer appeared. The kind they use in construction, mechanized arms at both ends and a small glass cabin in between where the driver sat and controlled the whole thing. We thought it was funny to call out to it for a ride. You can understand our surprise, however, when the huge machine paused suddenly, took a U-Turn, then headed in our direction.

The driver couldn’t have been more than 25 years of age. He leaned out of his window and asked with a smile so fresh it seemed out of place with the 2 am setting, “Kahan jaogey bauji? (Where to sir?).”

“Kahin ley chalo yaar (Wherever you might want to take us)”

“Chalo aa jao (Hop on then)”

And that was that, we were riding on a bulldozer in the middle of the night on the streets of Delhi. Some of us sat on the huge wheel covers, others crowed in the cabin with the driver. It was interesting enough that this bulldozer was moving on a 5 lane high speed expressway but what made the experience particularly special was that we were driving in the direction opposite the traffic. Oh yes, we also had no idea where we were going. Ever so often, a car would come speeding from the opposite direction and honk loudly. The driver, unfazed, would then scare him off by raising the mechanized arm in front of the vehicle threateningly.

The driver, Aazam Khan, was as talkative as a schoolgirl. In the short while we were with him, we got to know he was from Gorakhpur and that he had a brother and an uncle in Mumbai, not far from where we lived. He was ambitious too, and would be off to the gulf soon, to pursue greener pastures. His one complaint with his current life, though, was the loneliness that came with driving a bulldozer around the city at night. That explained why he seemed so thrilled to be doing us a favour. Awesome fellow, Aazam Khan.

At some point we crossed India gate, where armed guards stood around with rifles pointed at anyone who happened to cross in front of them. Spotting this speeding bulldozer with six ruffians hanging at the sides, they raised their guns and took aim. For a moment everything froze. Even Aazam Khan’s ever-present smile seemed to fade. Then as we came closer they realized we could hardly be a terrorist threat and broke off into the raucous, uninhibited laughter that only law enforcers are allowed to have.

Anyway, we got back to the hostel after a ride that beat anything else I’d ever been on. It was quite a night but something else lay ahead of us. A quarterfinal was scheduled for the morning and for once we were in it. We went to sleep hopeful and elated but with little idea that an entirely new chapter in life was about to begin for all of us.

The Delhi story wasn't over just yet, not by far.

To be continued...

3:2 Debate Is Life, The Rest Is Just Prep-Time. Chapter 2

This is Chapter 2 of the series, scroll down to the next post if you're looking for Chapter 1...

continued....

[The cab that took us to our accommodation had a weird set of headlights. More accurately, there were flashlights attached to the front where the headlights should have been, three on one side and two on the other]

The next two days saw us competing fiercely for the elusive break. We made constructives, refuted arguments, cross questioned aggressively, made closings, did everything in our power to win each of our debates. Each team had five debates before the break, one on one with another team. The top eight teams went through. If one achieved a score of four wins versus one loss (4-1) it was mathematically impossible to not qualify and we were targeting that at least. At a score of 3-2 however, qualifying would be difficult since a large number of teams typically tie at that score and then the ones with the highest speaking scores go through. Not more than one or two 3-2 teams can make it, mathematically.

The first day ended in mishap after we lost our second debate. That left us at 1-1, meaning we would have to win all three debates the next day to qualify. Towards evening, I began to notice a peculiar something about my teammate Shobhit. He seemed to be hanging around one particular adjudicator quite a lot. She adjudicated our first debate and I thought she was reasonably good. However, when she was reassigned to us for the second debate, I wanted to call in an objection because I thought we could do better. Shobhit however was vehemently in favour of having her judge us. I tried convincing him that in a close match she may not be the most rational adjudicator around and that she seemed to construe arguments to her own liking. He would hear nothing of it though and kept insisting that she was the “right person for us”. I dropped it then because clearly, his belief in her far overshadowed my skepticism of her talents.

[We witnessed a bar-fight that night, three guys teamed up and beat two others. It wasn’t fair, it was three on two]

All through the next day, Shobhit seemed to be spending an extraordinary amount of time with the adjudicator girl. I would sneak close by in the hope of catching juicy bits of what I was certain was a debate fling. However, each time I would hear nothing but detailed discussions of arguments, their rebuttals, case statements etc. To say that the rest of us were completely puzzled would be an understatement. I mean, this was Shobhit, and the last thing he spoke to random women about was debating. Sure, he hit on them regularly, flirted incessantly and tried to “pick them up”. I’m also sure he regarded doing well at debates as a way to further his cause with the ladies. But discuss cases with them? Not in living memory. This was a first, by far.

We won debate number three next morning but tragedy struck in the fourth round. A head-adjudicator took forty five minutes to come to the most abhorably abysmal decision in debating history. He ruled against us citing numerous points, all of which had never been mentioned in the debate. Badly stung, we complained about him later, only to find out that he had been admitted to the hospital almost immediately after speaking to us. At any rate, that left us at a pathetic 2-2 with little or no hope of qualifying. Beaten and demoralized, we entered our fifth debate to find Shobhit’s adjudicator woman waiting for us.

The next hour we spent angrily contesting the idea that pre-marital sex was bad for Indian women. In debating, as in any sport, the result of the previous round often influences one's performance in the next. Thanks to the fiasco in round four, we were inclined to be just a little vindictive in the fifth. Through the course of the debate, we did a lot more than present arguments. We mocked the opposition's claims, we ridiculed their points, we ridiculed them, we made a mockery of anything and everything they'd said. Shobhit spent some four minutes out of his seven joking about how foolish it was to claim that contraception may not work. I dedicated my entire closing to how the opposition's style of debating represented a crafty expertise in the art of digging one's own grave. To summarize, we managed to ruin their evening quite completely. Towards the end of the round, we knew we’d won, but we also knew that we were out of the competition. 3-2 wasn’t going to cut it, especially since one of our victories had been a split decision. So we accepted defeat, Shobhit took refuge in his cigarettes, Suddu began to sulk (his team was also at 3-2) and I began planning to lift the team’s spirits with a little spirit.

After a somewhat morose dinner, the breaking teams were announced. We couldn't get ourselves to seem very interested and clapped along politely as every team was announced from the first position downwards. Little did we know that as we looked on uninterestedly and waited for the formalities to end so we could get out of there, our lives were about to change forever.

At eighth position, the last of the breaking teams, the only team to get through with 3-2, all the way from Mumbai, was us. We broke, for the first time ever. We broke. To everyone else it was nothing, to us it was a historic moment. We broke. More than a year after the formation of our debating society, we broke. All the effort, the travelling, the night-long practice sessions, the unending research, the case making workshops, the daydreaming, it all suddenly seemed worth it. We broke!! We stood around in a stunned kind of silence, disbelieving. Shobhit said later that night, “It’s a funny feeling, getting what you’ve wanted for so long, it’s a funny feeling.” For my part, for once I was at a loss for words.

But we broke.

Of course, we still had no idea how it had happened. There was no way our speaker scores could have been high enough, and numerous teams must have tied at 3-2 for sure. We took a look at the tabs to see what had really happened.

Turned out our speaker scores were high, very high. So high that though we’d qualified at eighth position, our speaker scores were at position four. This was largely due to three of our debates. The simple minded may conclude that these were debates where we did well, and scored well. To the even slightly more conspiratorial mind, however, the presence of “Shobhit’s adjudicator girl” at each of these debates would seem like more than just a mere coincidence. At any rate, we were through!

[We had a hard time leaving the dinner venue because there were five dogs blocking the entrance, three black and two white. This was the signoff in the 3-2 messages, I assumed.]

After the initial jubilation, we headed out for what would soon be a memorable night on the streets of Delhi. After the guys had had enough to drink at some place called “Blues” in Connaught Place and were significantly loosened up (except Suddu who was only sulkier after the drinks, if anything. His team hadn’t gone through), we headed out to cover the trademark Delhi-trip-sites. Just like no trip to Germany is complete without a Münchener beer-garden, no debating trip to Delhi is complete without a celebratory walk amidst the high houses of Indian democracy at Rajpath. We do this every time, to breathe in the freedom that comes with being an Indian and to experience firsthand most of what we debate about. We go from the Rashtrapati Bhawan at one end to the India Gate at the other. It’s something else, walking in the shadow of the parliament, intoxicated by liberty and inebriated by alcohol.

Some of us, of course, take this freedom a little too seriously, as the story will show.

To be continued...

3:2 Debate Is Life, The Rest Is Just Prep-Time. Chapter 1

This is part 1 in a series of 4 parts. Scroll up for later parts....

In the north of our country, storytelling is not just a way of life but also one of its basic necessities. A man may have no qualification, no job, no woman, he may be penniless but he’s never really poor unless he’s out of stories, at least not up north. Anyone who’s been there will know what I’m talking about. Come sundown, the towns and cities retire from their bustle and scatter into little groups. In these groups they narrate tale after yarn after anecdote, the stories being rooted equally in fact, fable and hearsay. Around their fireplaces they gather, and listen wide-eyed. The lady of the house serves an unending stream of tikkas, kebabs and pakoras. The grandfathers tell tales from the partition, the grannies stories from the Mahabharata and the dads recount old Tendulkar lore from the nineties. The mommies do their bit with the story of how Mrs. Sharma next door hasn’t fed her family anything but khichdi ever since she had her second child.

One might wonder what business these people had doing any of this when they could be watching Ekta Kapoor’s gems on TV or surfing the internet mindlessly, just like the rest of the country did. One might ask what sense it made to spend every evening doing something so utterly unproductive and useless, especially in the midst of a recession.

Without offence to anyone, the questions are laughable at best. As anyone with even a slightest sense of the Indian north will tell you, this ritual is not optional and storytelling is not a choice for the people to make. Such a way of life is pre-ordained by the land and its rich history. The more logical will tell you that this is how things inevitably are when a region is so gloriously encumbered by hundreds of intermingling cultures sprouted from all parts of the last 5000 years. They will tell you that when there is a tale around every nukkad and a legend surrounding every mohalla, then no other way of life is preferred. Nay, not preferred, possible. No other way of life is even possible.

Many of you disbelieve me I’m sure. You think I exaggerate. So did many of my friends in college, especially the debating ones who thought they could argue against this evidence. Then the epic Delhi trip happened and they never doubted me again. This is a story from that land of stories.

3:2

We were a motley group of six, travelling to Delhi for the same reason we always did, to debate. Turns out most of the good parliamentary debates in the country happen in Delhi. Ever so often you would find us aboard a low cost airline or a train headed to Delhi to try our skills at some national debate. To be honest, we were minnows at these competitions, historically disadvantaged (no seniors had ever been good at this and therefore we had no-one to coach us) and educationally challenged (engineering doesn’t help much with debating, and we were often up against law schools). Yet we participated often, and practiced eagerly, in the hope that we would, one day, some day, far in the future, perhaps, maybe, hopefully, God willing, amount to something at a national debate. To complicate matters, the institute didn’t pay a penny for all this travelling, in fact they didn’t even approve of us skipping lectures and labs to attend these debates. If that wasn’t enough, our debating society wasn’t granted official recognition by the cultural council either. Damn, they didn’t even let me mention it on my resume.

But we still debated, risking attendance, cajoling professors into letting us miss that one lab, adjusting marks for that one quiz, passing us this one time. We still debated despite getting severely clubbed by the competition on each occasion. There was something noble about it, not giving up at something you really wanted to be good at, despite biting the dust so many times. And there was something innocent in the way Suddu, at the beginning of every trip, still believed that this would be the one where he would finally “get it with a girl”.

Anyway, this time around we were there for the Premchand Debate, Hindu College’s national debate. As always, we dreamt of breaking. For the uninitiated, “breaking” in debating terms refers to making it past the league stage of a tournament, into the quarterfinals. Few teams from our college had ever broken at any debate, and none at Premchand.

[The airplane taking us there was oddly asymmetrical. It had three seats on one side of the aisle and two on the other.]

As soon as we landed in Delhi, we began to see representatives of the storytelling culture. These people are everywhere. They seem to be ordinary citizens performing ordinary tasks but in truth they are the appointed upholders of the tradition of storytelling. The ones dressed as taxi drivers tell unending tales of “fuel price hike” and “having to come back empty” and “how the poor man suffers”. The ones pretending to be bathroom attendants sing ballads of how the government forgot to pay them and how tips from good Samaritans were keeping them alive. Then there is always the one who is dressed as a software engineer fallen on hard times. He tells a good tale and is the chief of the storytellers. To listen to his story you have to pay with your baggage, though you’re usually unaware of this little detail till the narration is over and you look behind you where your bags used to be.

In Delhi, storytelling isn’t a mere pastime, it’s an industry.

[The cab that took us to our accommodation had a weird set of headlights. More accurately, there were flashlights attached to the front where the headlights should have been, three on one side and two on the other]

To be continued....

Of Menstruating Men and Peeved Women

A friend of mine recently landed himself into a remarkable and unexpected kind of soup. The results of this incident were so shocking, at least to my friend and I, that days 1 through 5 of the female cycle will never be the same to us again. Without any delay, here’s what happened:

It was about a quarter to seven in the morning. No, no one was fresh and bouncy, everyone had been up all night preparing for PAF (Performing Arts Festival), which is quite a major event around here and taken rather seriously too. Anyway, my friend, always cheerful, was doing his best to keep the spirits of the team high. His attempts were directed in the only direction he knew anything about, that of one-liners and situational guffaws. As is always the case, the opportunity to yank out a laugh presented itself soon enough.

A freshie (first year) had decided to become the centre of all attention. Not for very fun reasons either. This kid had a presentation at 12.30 the same afternoon. You know, the kind of presentation that you uninterestedly make in class to elucidate some irrelevant point to a bunch of other uninterested no-good freshmen. He was cribbing that he needed to go, that this presentation meant the world to him, that they couldn’t keep him here like this, that this whole PAF thing was a sham etc etc. Funny story, no one was asking him to stay either. To quote the director verbatim, he said, “Arey jaa na yaar, kaunsa bahut badaa role kar rahaa hai tu (Whatever, leave if you will, its not as though you’re playing any major character anyway).”

Of course, this only sparked the freshie’s anger even more and he began to make faces that can only be analogized with the mating behavior of a baboon. He danced around yelling his dissent. He called out names that in another institute would call for some serious ragging or at least a thorough washing of his mouth with soap. He threw his hands around in a funny little tantrum, much to everyone’s amusement. In short, he was behaving erratic. Perhaps even hormonal. In fact, if you thought about it in a funny way, you might even say that he was PMSing. Yes you might say that, but would you get away with it?

Back to my friend, who was noticing all this and waiting for the right moment to quip in. As this kid jumped off the stairs in the Open Air Theatre and was just about to leave, my friend found his chance. He called out, “Toto,” this was the silly name his character had in the play, “Tera period chal raha hai kya? (Toto, is it that time of the month?)” Just as expected, the crowd couldn’t stop laughing for the next minute or so. The solitary girl who was still around at this hour was having difficulty standing because of how much she was laughing. Toto, of course, walked off in a huff.

Anyway, when practice was supposed to resume again that evening, there was a very noticeable dearth of ladies. A grand total of zero had shown up. Somewhat irate, the director called up the ladies. The response at the other end was startling, to say the least.

Director: Hi, how come you guys aren’t at the practice yet?

Ladies: We’re not coming.

Director: Not coming, what? Why not?

Ladies: Why should we come, if you guys talk like this…

Director: Like what?

Ladies: Hrmph…you know what I’m talking about, we’re not coming.

As one can imagine, the director, with only a day left for the PAF, had little choice but to beg and plead with the ladies. The team spent another hour or so cajoling the ladies into showing up and assuring them that nothing of the sort would happen again, even though none of them had any idea what had happened. They came ultimately, they were always going to, I mean a lot was at stake for their hostel as well.

When they did ultimately decide to turn up, word trickled out slowly that their reluctance to practice may have had something to do with someone having said something disrespectful about women and their periods. A little shell-shocked, my friend began to investigate. He knew one of the ladies better than the others and asked her what had happened.

“Some bastard thought he could get away with being a Male Chauvinist Pig”, she said to him. When my friend gently indicated that he may have been the aforementioned pig and tried to explain himself, he was greeted with a tirade of the sort that one expects only from parents, teachers or bosses.

He tried telling her that the kid was behaving erratic, that the joke was directed at the kid and not the lady. That it is common to ascribe hormonal behavior as menstruating, that the joke was a joke because it was directed at a guy, that he meant no ill, that he had picked up that kind of joke from certain women itself, but all in vain. The lady was convinced he was sexist. She talked down to him and told him, “I can’t believe it’s you who I’ve been abusing all day, I had a higher opinion of you.” After some more chiding, she left him with the classic, “Periods hona koi gaali hai kya? (Is it a bad word (sin) to menstruate?) ” and walked away.

By this time, even my friend was quite convinced that he was, in fact, a sexist bastard. The discovery that the girl he had seen laughing so hard that morning had gone back to her hostel and spent the larger part of the day crying didn’t help his happiness levels much either. Confused and seeking redemption elsewhere, he narrated his tale another one of the ladies. She summarily dismissed his explanation with, “Don’t lie, you made the period joke because he wasn’t dancing with the others, didn’t you?”

Finally, one of the ladies told him the only thing that made sense to him that day, “Just don’t say anything about this periods-weriods at all yaar”. Exhausted and convinced of the force of that argument, he gave up and resumed practice.

I’m not sure what really happened to spark off such a reaction that day, but one thing’s for sure, my friend has deleted PMS/Period jokes from his repertoire for good. Quite a pity too, I rather enjoyed them while they lasted.