When I Grow Up

I’ve been dying to introduce my mother on the blog, but she doesn’t really like blogging. So this is a story my mother told me. My mother was a schoolteacher for a period of about 30 years and this is one of the writing pieces she got to correct during that time. What’s so exceptional about this is that it was written by a boy in Class II. Read on.

One day, I had a pain in my stomach. My father was worried. He picked up the phone and called someone. In about half an hour, a man came. He had a bag. He took out something from the bag. It looked like an elephant’s head. He stuck the upper part in his ear and held the circle against my chest. He told me to breathe deeply. Then he poked my tummy and that made me laugh. He took a piece of paper and wrote some words on it. My father took the piece of paper and went out. He returned with some white tablets. I took one of the tablets. The pain in my stomach went away. The man with the bag was a doctor. When I grow up, I want to be a doctor.

Author Unknown
Student of Class II

I do not know this kid, but I hope he got to be a doctor.


The Bilge Master (and his mother, for telling him the story!)

Ode to the Bulky Wallet

Rajesh was late for school again. His mother forcing him to guzzle down his milk was not helping matters. Still, he managed to shake her off and set off at a dead sprint for the bus stop. He managed to make the bus by the skin of his teeth.

Rajesh was in class ten, at the HN National School. He hated the uniform there. It was lemon yellow with a green tie. Ties were mandatory. If someone arrived without his tie, that person was doomed to spend fifteen minutes being lectured to by Mr. Chakravarti, whose only bad habit was the fact that he had no good ones. He spat at you, he was fat and rude. Suffice to say no one liked the dude. The students had a nickname for him- Bedwetter. As luck would have it, Rajesh had forgotten his tie.

Rajesh spent the next few minutes trying to figure out what he could do to avoid his “Bedwetting session”, when his friend Arjan boarded the bus. Arjan had this air of nonchalance about him. He was sort of a show off, because he got fifty rupees from his father as a week’s pocket money. Rajesh was a bit jealous of him for this reason. His parents didn’t believe in pocket money.  To be fair, whenever he asked for cash, he was given it. Still, it felt odd to him.

School was a complete drag. The day went really badly. First there was the “Bedwetting session” with old Chakravarti. Then, the maths class. To top all that off, Rajesh got his Bio test scores back. He’d flunked.  Again. He was very happy when the bell went at the end of the day.

A short bus ride later, Rajesh was outside his gate. He opened it and went in. His mother greeted him with hot samosas and a cup of steaming milky coffee.  “Things are starting to look up”, thought Rajesh. But the biggest event of the day was when his father came home and called Rajesh over.

“Son, you are now in class X. About 16 years of age. It’s fitting therefore that you have something  that every man has”, said his father and handed him a package. Inside the package was a black wallet.  “I want you to carry this wallet with you at all times, and keep your money in it”, his father said.

The next day, Rajesh proudly dressed up for school. He didn’t forget the tie and he stuffed his wallet in his trouser pocket, intending to show it to Arjan the first chance he got. But then, something about Arjan’s wallet hit him. It was fatter than his, seeing as Arjan had a lot of spare change in it. That’s when an idea formed in Rajesh’s head. He would cut up pieces of newspaper and put them in his wallet, in between the notes or pennies. His wallet would be as bulky as Arjan’s. Or once, he wouldn’t feel small.

The plan worked. Arjan seemed a bit more accessible to Rajesh now. That feeling of not having pocket money left him. School was fun too. For once he understood the trigonometry and the different factors that caused the Russian revolution. He was having a great time.

*************

School had ended and Rajesh was on the bus back home. He wanted to walk a little so he got down a stop earlier than his and started to walk down the road towards his house. He saw the beggar on the pavement and gave him a rupee out of his new wallet. A few minutes later, he wanted to buy some ice cream so he reached in to his pocket for the wallet. His fingers clutched air. He was shocked. He noticed the beggar had vanished and realized that he had been robbed. There was a huge lump in Rajesh’s throat. He went home, went up to his room and began to cry.

*************

The beggar had reached the riverbank. He squatted down and took out the wallet. When he opened it, some pieces of newspaper fluttered out. That was all there was in the wallet. Just pieces of newspaper and two flimsy five rupee notes.The paper pieces fluttered off, some settling in the water. The beggar sat there watching them float away and he began to cry.

The Bilge Master

Duality

“You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain”. That was a tagline from the 2008 film “The Dark Knight”. To be honest I had some doubts about this movie, since it featured a “new” Joker. On one hand, I was excited, on the other I was sceptical. the fact that I had never heard of Heath Ledger, and that he was about to assay the role of one of my favourite characters in fiction, did not help matters. But this isn’t about the movie, though perhaps the intro to this post seems to point in that direction. This is about the Batman-Joker situation. Yeah I’d say it’s a situation. A very interesting situation. What’s interesting you ask? It’s you. And me. Two sides of the same persona really, staring out in their undiluted splendour.

Ask anyone you know, they’ve all heard of Batman and if you ask them to name a villain, most of them will blurt out Joker. Ever wondered why that is? I mean Batman has a HUGE rogues gallery, with the likes of Mr Freeze, The Riddler, Calendar Man ands Ra’s Al Ghul to contend with. But he keeps coming back to The Joker. Funnily enough, the Joker’s sort of earned this attention really, because he’s done Batman the most amount of damage.

And then, there came this movie “The Dark Knight” where somehow, my view of this rivalry altered. I was scared of Ledger’s Joker. I shuddered when he walked into the room. But, one quote from the movie stood out in my head, long after it had finished. The last part, where Joker’s suspended from a building and goes “You won’t kill me coz of your stupid rule, and I won’t kill you coz you’re too much fun." That got me thinking. What if we had it all wrong? What if Joker was actually a good guy?

OK no. That doesn’t work. What kind of good guy shoots a girl through the spine, sells nukes to Saudi terrorists and kidnaps the police commissioner and tries to drive him mad? A good guy doesn't have go around town holding up the Mayor at gunpoint nor does he get his kicks out of poisoning the water supply of an entire city. Joker’s done it all, with a huge grin on his face. He’s driven Batman up the wall and down again. He’s toyed with him, he’s pushed him to insane limits and he just won’t quit. No matter how many times Joker gets locked up in Arkham, he always busts out. One time, in the comic “Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth”, he just upped and held up the entire asylum on a whim. The Joker doesn't care about anything. He has no morals or a conscience for that matter. Joker is the personification of Chaos in a way. This makes him dangerous, it makes him capable of anything. I guess that’s why in the opening pages of “The Killing Joke”, Batman screams into the inmate’s face.

Batman. The Dark Knight. As a boy he lost his parents to some criminal in a dark alley. He vowed to keep Gotham safe. He donned a suit, trained himself to the zenith, mentally and physically and took on the mantle. He’s kept crime at bay, protecting and watching. Yet even he has his weaknesses, such as his love for Dick Grayson, currently Nightwing. The loss of Jason Todd, who later became an enemy in the form of the Red Hood and of course there’s Barbara Gordon, who took a bullet to the spine. All on account of a madman with a trigger happy finger. Batman feels responsible for the Joker somehow.  So I asked myself, what exactly am I looking at here? On one hand, there’s the hero. He’s got an entire city to protect. He’s pledged allegiance to it and he upholds his vows. Batman sees things and does things that a lot of people wouldn’t even dream about much less have the capacity to even imagine doing. Taking on a half man half crocodile? Going up against one, no two of your best friends, namely Hush and Harvey Dent who are baying for your blood? The psychopath Zsaz, the Penguin and of course Ra’s Al Ghul.

Then there’s Joker. Before he became the self titled “Clown Prince of Crime”, he was a normal guy. He had a job, that wasn't paying, a pregnant wife who got killed. He got angry. That anger was festering in him on the night of that accident in the Ace Chemicals building. In a way, Joker isn't a man. He’s a personification. A personification of a feeling. The feeling of anger, and what it will do to a person if it is turned inwards and allowed to implode. This anger in the man, made him the Joker. Even if he hadn’t nose dived into the chemical vat, he would still have become something to reckon with. perhaps that’s why this entire situation strikes a chord, because in a way Batman is also angry. Just as angry as the Joker is. but the difference is in their paths of execution. Joker uses anger to unleash chaos. Batman uses it to curb damage and protect.

As Plato said “The measure of a man is what he does with Power”. The Batman-Joker situation shows us two distinct ways of using power. I guess that’s what makes the situation appeal to me. Somehow I identify with it, having had an anger management issue myself. So that brings me to one question, and that question is- what if tomorrow, something bad happens and anger surfaces in you. What are you going to do? Are you going to grab a gun and wreak some havoc? Or are you going to try and deal with the situation? Who do you want to be? Batman? Or the Joker?

More importantly, we have seen Superman flip out on us in the comic “Injustice”. But somehow I doubt Batman will follow in his footsteps. The thing is, what happens if he does and the Joker succeeds for once?

The answer is Chaos. Chaos that has led to wars, to loss of life and has never led to anything but pain. So you see, the Joker’s there in the world today. I guess he’s a character intended as a comment on the bad stuff going on. Batman is good, Joker is bad. And we humans are shades of gray. Maybe that’s why this situation is iconic. Because, it’s personal. It’s more than just ink on a page. It's a struggle being played out in our minds. Just as the struggle between these two characters in the comic books.

 

The Bilge Master