Pigeons under the floodlight

Over the years I have seen several pigeons fluttering around in day-night cricket matches played under floodlights. While I must have mouthed the cameraman to turn back to the match, I have always been short of asking the pigeons what the hell they were doing at this time of the night.

I now understand why. No, I have not been bit by a pigeon and I have not become pigeon-man. The bright sunny summer is gone now and in place darkness and gloom have encircled the place I live. To add to the eeriness, I, from time to time, add my bit of background music with the clattering of my teeth.

But that aside,the clocks are moved back an hour in winter. Some call it day light saving or something like that while many intellectual men like me suspect that the real reason is behind the Big Ben that needs a battery change. There is no advantage changing the clocks because it is dark all through the day anyway - it is dark when you wake up, it is dark when you go to office and it is dark when you come back from office. The only time you see sunlight is on the weekends.

Although the time change seems to have done nothing to the natives, it is causing havoc to my system. For instance, I am waking up at 3AM when logically I should be waking up at 5AM even with the time change. I am hungry for dinner at 5PM but don't feel sleepy until 11PM like usual. I tried to convince my manager that I don't work night-shifts and so will come to office only when there is sunlight. He can't seem to get my logic.

My inventive mind is planning to create artificial daylight in my own little room with the sodium vapour street lamp from the next street. There is some planning to be done to get it materialised. I have to steal the lamp and bring it home, hammer it on to the 6 inch wall that separates my room from my neighbours' and draw power from them to keep the lamp running 12 hours a day.

But getting back to the pigeons, I now sympathise with the pigeons for having to battle out blinding floodlights when they are supposed to be making out with pigeons of the opposite sex.

May be I should help the pigeons. I should write a note to PETA that day-night cricket is preventing Pigeon Ecology Thriving Activities and use the pigeons to deliver my message. But I am afraid PETA will sue the pigeons for using PETA's acronym without paying them license fees.

Amidst all this world ending problems I realised that the only way I can continue to watch cricket happening in India because of the time differences is when there are day-night matches. Now that is a bigger world ending problem.

So there is now a slight change in policy. I suggest that we catch all these menacing pigeons that distract us from the game, fry them, sell them and make money out of it. I suggest we call the venture KFP - Karumathur Fried Pigeons. The world needs such bright ideas during these testing recession times.

Cross-belt Land

When Jinku and I first started to work for money, we shared a 1 bedroom house in the heart of a slum in Chennai. For weeks none of our colleagues knew where we lived. And then came the rains that flooded the whole of Chennai. Jinku would tuck his pants upto his knees and hold his shoes in his hands while I rode my motorcycle to drop him at the main road. This continued until my motorcycle's engine was filled with water. And then I had to go on my first overseas trip. Or atleast that was what we told our super sweet landlord's family to get out of the place.

We found yet another one bed room flat. But this time in the second floor so no flood would do anything to us. But unfortunately, we found a flat in the heart of cross-belt land - west mampalam.

West mampalam can be a great or a lousy place to live in; depending on your mind set. But the original inhabitants of that land had certain fixed notions. Such as - Unmarried men are evil (Unmarried non-cross-belts were more evil). Unmarried men eyed all women in the family that included daughters, wives and mothers - even if the wives were 55 year olds and the mothers 85 year olds. Unmarried men smoked cigarettes from the balconies and dropped ash on alpha male cross-belts' bald heads seriously pondering over a cure for cancer. Unmarried men drank beer and puked in other people's door mats.

We did not know all this background and were surprised for the first one month when everyone in the flat scattered like flies whereever and whenever we walked. It took a while to realise noone spoke to us either. No one used lifts when we used it.

But like I said, it can be a great place or a lousy place depending on what you wanted it to be. We wanted it to be a great place. And it was a great place. We felt like tigers in a herd of deer as everyone scampered for their lives as we walked around the place. We felt like Maharajas as people stuck to lift walls like lizards or sneaked out of lifts to let us ride up to our floor. We had our occasional fun as well as we walked as close as possible to our next door neighbour as he walked home from office. We could have added fuel to fire by striking a conversation with their wives, but we were concerned the husbands' heads would turn so hot that we could fry our eggs on top of it. Obviously, we didn't want eggs fried from used coconut oil.