Miracle

I received an SMS. ‘It’ asked me to recite a couple of lines softly that stated that I believed in a certain saint. Further it asked me to forward that SMS to eleven others. If I did so, I would see a miracle by night. For a change it did not threaten with dire consequences if I did not forward it.

Since the sender is a dear friend of mine, I called him up and told him that I was not sending the SMS further. He being what he is, a dear old friend, understood.

Then I told him that if all the recipients of the original forwarded it and the subsequent eleven also further down without a break, the only miracles that would be seen were at the cash registers of the mobile telephone operators and that I was not interested in creating miracles for them. I did not want to send them “laughing all the way to the bank.”

The reason for not naming the saint in this post is that I have a lot of respect for him as a man. Humane. If the SMS had said that if I did not forward it, something unspeakable would happen, it would not have made sense. I am glad. The saint was the farthest a man could be from malevolence.

The Mystery of Palmistry

I was a very thin teenager. Perhaps, “painfully thin”.

I had gone to Bangalore to attend a wedding. After the wedding I visited an aunt of mine. Her husband dabbled in palmistry. He casually ordered me (he was that type of a man) to show him my hand and I meekly thrust my hand out. He brought a powerful lens and studied my hand.

After some time, he asked me, “Do you suffer from constipation?” I was impressed. I did suffer from it frequently. I nodded apologetically. As if it was my fault.

He growled, I will teach you an exercise and if you do them regularly, (the heavy emphasis was on the ‘if’, mind you) “it” will go. He taught me sit-ups.

I surprised myself. I did do them regularly.

I was very bookish. I was so bookish that my father had to drive me out of the house, in the evenings. (Oh, I am ever so grateful to him). Now, I developed some interest in my own body and learnt a few more exercises. Push-ups, pull-ups and many other free hand stuff. As coincidence would have it, “Science Today” published an article called the “daily dozen” which taught a dozen exercises to keep one reasonably fit. I started doing them all except the one with the bar bells. I did not have one.

After a few months I went to my tailor to get some new shirts stitched. He enquired, “The last measurements?” I said, “No! New ones!”, proudly. I can imagine him suppressing a smirk as he took out his measuring tape. He took the chest measurement and gawped. He checked his tape to see if he was holding it right. He was. He rummaged through his drawer of his cutting table, fished out his note book and located my earlier measurements. There was a 4 inch difference, in the chest measurements. (Tailors did use inches in Metric India then)

“Ye kyaa baa! Kyaa hogaya there ko” he started off in his “chaste” Mysore Urdu, forgetting that I did not speak or understand that language. I could still divine the gist of it. The wonder in his eyes spoke for him. I had a semblance of a masculine figure now in comparison to my, perhaps, 28-24-30 figure earlier.

Well, a little later I went to Bangalore again and my uncle promptly accosted me and asked me, “how are you and how is your constipation?”. It was then that I realised that I had not had an incident of that in the intervening year or so. I was amazed. (We do tend to take our good health or fortune for granted and crib when we lose it) I told him that I had not had it for a year. He looked me head to toe with a satisfied smile. He was genuinely happy and proud. He was in deed fond of me.

I have often wondered how he knew I was prone to constipation. Was he so ‘good’ a palmist?

I do not think so. He was, in fact, a body builder in his younger days. My father had actually seen him pull a car with a rope as exercise! I had seen him bend fairly formidable looking iron rods with his hands in his workshop. His understanding of the human body must have told him of my state as soon as he saw my palms. It used to be clammy, pale and had red spots.

Then on, I have never suffered that particular ailment again.

After all, it was my fault that I had constipation. I was not taking care of my own self!

So much for the power of palmistry . . .

Sphice of Life

There was this hoarding of Spice Jet Airlines, at the junction of Residency Road and M G Road near Mayo Hall. Perhaps, driven by the fear of incurring the wrath of the self-styled defenders of Kannada the hoarding had the name in Kannada too. It was as shown in the lower line in the picture above. Transliterated, it would be Sphice or Sfice. The line at the top shows the correct way of writing it.

I wrote to the marketing department of the company pointing out the error. I also asked them if the advertising agency's bills had been paid. I also wondered if the bill would have been paid if the same mistake had been made in the English version. I received no answer.

The self-styled defenders of Kannada blacken boards and hoardings in English but never boards which have bad or wrong Kannada. What a pity.

With no Comments

Karma and DNA

I read the obituary of Maharshi Mahesh Yogi with great interest. I too learnt TM popularised by him, in the seventies. I have practiced TM, off and on, and have benefited from it. That would be grist for the mill for another post.

What is of interest at the moment is the report that says "as told to Anubha Sawhney Joshi" by Deepak Chopra, about the passing away of the Maharshi.

It describes the incident of Deepak Chopra giving his blood to the Maharshi. Very interesting! The Maharshi at first refused to accept blood from Deepak Chopra because he did not want Chopra's Karma to flow into him. When Deepak Chopra convinced him that red blood corpuscles do not carry DNA, the Maharshi acceepted the blood.

So we carry our Karma in our DNA! That is news to me and am sure so is it to the thousands of people who work in the field of genetics.

What a load of rubbish!

Pranab and his Award

Padma Vibhushan Pranab Mukherjee said that there should be no room for controversy about is getting that award.

He is absolutley right. No room for controversy. It is WRONG that he was given the award.

To see the contrast, see the conduct of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad here.

Another similar story is that of the First Bharat Ratna awardee Sir M Vishweshwarayya. When the cabinet decided to honour him with that award, no one wanted to inform him! Because of his reputation as a man who did not mince words.

Prime Minister Nehru himself wrote to him and requested him to accept the award. True to form Sir M V wrote back sayaing that he did not want to accept that award if it curtailed his freedom in anyway to criticise Nehru's government if the need arose. Nehru, equally gracefully wrote back that it was for such upstanding ways of his that he was being given that award. It was only then that Sir. M V accepted the award.

Alas, unbelievable, in these days of "moral pygmies"

Measles?

I saw hoardings all over Bangalore proclaiming as above. It says Amma in Bangalore.

When I saw it the first time, I could see just the top part of the hoarding. My immediate reaction was one of consternation. Was there an epidemic of smallpox in Bangalore? Or was it chickenpox or measles? There is already gastroeneritis - cholera. Now this?

Then the bottom part of the hoarding became visible. It was announcing the presence a religious/spiritual person, popularly known as Amma.

Even though amma means mother and I call my mother amma, seen as a banner headline, it could mean what I first thought!

Uffff...

Einstein and Religion

Einstein is once supposed to have said something like, "Religion without science is blind, science without religion is lame". This is often quoted to say something like "See? Even Einstein said that religion is important. Most do not realise that Einstein had his own definition of religion, which was quite different from what most people usually take it to be.

Here is the original article: "Religion and Science" - New York Times Magazine, November 9, 1930

Here is an article in Kannada on the subject by my father, J R Lakshmana Rao, published in the January 25, 2008 edition of Prajavani.

The same article English, is coming soon. . . Here it is!

For your reading pleasure. . . .

Bombay?

There was this Englishman friend of mine, Peter, who visited Mysore frequently. He had fun by going to an autorickshaw and asking the driver "Bombay?". The drivers would melt, fidget and grin. Then he would pat the driver on the shoulder and tell him where he really wanted to go.

One day he met his match.

There was this autowallah, sitting in the drivers seat, with his legs crossed, reading a news paper. Peter goes and asks him: "Bombay?"

The driver unhurriedly uncrosses his legs as he folds his paper, with his eyes still on the job of folding the paper and says calmly, "Yes, Five Thousand Rupees". You should have seen Peter's face!

He recovered, guffawed and shook the driver by the hand and said, "OK, OK, for now, Saraswathipuram will do"!

Auto Wisdom

Autorickshaws in Bangalore are painted on their backs with names of the owners' children, names of movies, "Hi - somebody-or-the-other" and sometime some aphorism. Some of them gross, some are hilarious, some are even wise.

I love looking for them. Here is a gem that I saw today. For those who can not read the Kannada script, here is the transliteration as per the Baraha translitration aplication:

aaDu muTTad soppilla . .
aaTo nuggada galliyilla

It declares with pride that "there is no leaf that a goat does not eat (a famous proverb in Kannada) . . There is no alley that an auto does not elbow its way into!"

That is definitely pride in his work I admire it.