Filter Coffee #044

On May Day & Relativity

Dear Readers,

In 🔗 FC #43 I made a faux pax. While describing Akshate I said it was rice smeared with tamarind instead of saying ‘turmeric’. An avid reader, Krupa, within minutes of reading FC, wrote pointing me to the mistake. Vijayaraghavan, my long time friend in Chennai, and Viswanathan, a professional associate in Mumbai, took a dig at me by informing me that rice and tamarind make excellent puliyogare (tamarind rice), a south Indian delicacy. Touché.

Many of my readers ignored this faux pax but went on to appreciate the narrative on invitations. My friend Ashvini is of the opinion, rightly so, that many more stories can be told on the subject and sometime later I could write Invitation 2 and so on. The suggestion is very inviting 😉. If you have an interesting anecdote, please mail it to me on mrprasanna@gmail.com and I shall publish it in the coming editions.

The day FC #43 was published, my friend Manjunath received a WhatsApp invitation from a person living on the same street to attend the wedding of his daughter and it read “Please find below the Zoom link to watch my daughter’s wedding”. E-Invitations hit a new high when Manju was not ‘invited’ but given a link to watch a marriage happening across the road. I wonder if they asked him to switch off audio and video to preserve bandwidth. I must also check with him if shaadi ka laddoo was Swiggy-ed to him!

Shahji received an invitation out of the blue but could not connect either with the boy’s side nor the girl’s side. He thought if he ventured to attend he may well be regarded as a gate crasher if no one recognized him.

Gatecrashers at weddings, parties and other functions are quite common and they come properly attired and walk-in confidently and sometimes they manage to get the invitation (soft or hard) and to lend credence to their presence, they approach one of the people stationed to receive invitees and show the invite asking innocently “am I at the right place?”. He is shown right in and he gets in with a smirk, leaving the gate intact!

One such brazen act reported by TOI happened in December 2009 at a major film award, function when A R Rehman was declared the winner and since he wasn’t there, and no one got up to receive the award, a man clad in kurta churidar walked on to the stage confidently and received the award. Later someone suspected something was amiss and he was nabbed backstage. But the guy managed to hog a moment of glory holding Rehman’s trophy.

🗓 May Day

The connection between May Day and labour rights began in the United States. During the 19th century, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, thousands of men, women and children were dying every year from poor working conditions and long hours. The Federation of Workers Unions demanded that the working hours be restricted to eight hours. There were demonstrations and clashes that took place between the Chicago police and the workers, where some workers were killed and many wounded. To protest this atrocity, a rally was organised at Haymarket which turned violent and the police were blamed for the mayhem that followed. All this led to the recognition of May 1st as International Labour Day by more than 60 countries.

MAYDAY MAYDAY! This has nothing to do with May Day but is an interesting anecdote regardless. Apparently, way back in 1923, a radio officer in London came up with a word that would be easily understood by the staff and pilots in case of emergency. He came up with the word ‘mayday’ since it sounded similar to “M'aider'',  a french word for “come and help me”.  ‘Mayday, mayday!’ has now become a distress signal for airlines, seafarers and anyone who is in distress.

↔️ Relatively Speaking

Speaking in relative terms is about comparing a person or matter with something similar. It connotes a positive sense. For example “the cost of living in Kolkata is relatively cheaper than Bangalore” puts Kolkata in a positive light. If you said “Bangalore is relatively a more expensive place than Kolkata” it would then imply that Kolkata is also expensive but less than Bangalore and so there is a bit of negativity there.

Well, my intention here is not to speak in relative terms but to speak of relatives in terms of their profound influence on our lives. When I refer to relatives, speaking relatively, they are not people who live with us but those who either come visiting us (in a few cases uninvited) or who make an untiring effort to know all that we do or all that happens to us and offer unsolicited advice on every matter. 

Close relatives and distant relatives are again, relatively speaking, those who are within our family circle and those who are outside of it. This again depends on your family compass and how wide the circle it draws. As more and more families go nuclear, the family compass has grown shorter.  Close relatives are also those who are on your familial horizon and distant relatives are those who are on the other side of the hill but materialise all of a sudden, reminding you that they are relatives. You get a distant feeling that these relatives are now trying to get closer to you for reasons that you may discover later.

In Mysuru, our house rule was that the front door opens at 5 am and shuts at 10 pm when the last of the family members returns from whatever errand he was on (I am consciously not using ‘she’ because way back in the 60s, a female member of the family could not go out after 6 pm max — and that too for a good reason, like praying in the temple, a prayer often misunderstood to be to get a good husband).

This open-door policy made many near or distant relatives walk in unannounced and have a meal or sometimes stay on for a few days. During their stay the line that separated the host and the guest became blurred and there would be a kind of role reversal. The relative was relatively more at home than the host even if the host had the presence of mind to not tell the relative “please consider this as your own home”.

There are ‘touring relatives’. These are a dreaded lot. Imagine you are posted in Delhi or Goa or Mumbai or Andamans or wherever. The touring relative will have all your coordinates and one fine day he lands up at your doorstep with wife and kids in tow for sightseeing. You recover from the initial shock and summon enough courage and decency to welcome them. You may be slightly better off if this relative is from your wife’s side. This relative may well ask for toothpaste, a spare toothbrush, perhaps a disposable razor. You now begin to thank your foresight for having remembered to pick up toiletries from the hotel or the in-flight toilet.

When the relative extends the stay you begin to recall the movie “Atithi tum kab jaoge?” (Oh Guest, When Will You Leave?). If you haven’t seen this movie, I recommend you do. Paresh Raval as Atithi is hilarious. It’s available online.

After sightseeing and ‘purchasing’ the relative is ready to leave but not before giving you enough hints that you are supposed to give each of them a farewell gift, with coconut and betel leaves thrown in. Just as the relative is leaving he says “I wish you too could come visiting us but there’s hardly anything to see in our town and you will all get bored,” a hint as broad as an eight-lane that this is a one-way deal.

Then there are relatives on business travel. Their company pays them a flat sum if they make their own arrangements and not tax the company with hefty hotel bills. So this travelling relative, like a predator, turns up at your house to stay for three or four days, and doesn’t mind if you can make a short detour and drop him off at his office every morning! “Oh no, no need to pick me up” he says “just give me a ‘pick me up’ when I return, hehe.” You ask sarcastically “single malt will do?”. The sarcasm is lost on him and he says, “Of course, I’m now single only, no?”

So the next day you pointedly didn't offer him a drink but the relative is now so much at home, he asks “why no drink today?” and if you say “I don’t drink on Thursdays,” he would say “I have no such restrictions, you can give me.” You double up with the agony of parting with your expensive single. To save your wife the trouble of cooking another dinner, you suggest eating out. When the check arrives, our man makes no move to pick it up and as you swipe the card he leans back in his chair and says “Hey, you should let me host you when you come to our place”. You are relieved that there is no ashtray. Your problem is not the money but the swipes your wife takes at you back home for swiping the card.

There is another class of relatives who are called ‘remote relatives’. No, not to say they are remotely related, but to say that they remotely have control over you and your movements. They track you on social media, particularly Facebook, and send you WhatsApp messages starting from what is for breakfast to, “you were looking tired in that picture”. 

Nothing said here should be taken in derogation of relatives or your own preference to relatives. This is just a jocular narrative about distant relatives in a lighter vein.

Before I conclude let me narrate a park bench conversation between two septuagenarians:

“My distant cousin who is also my age and build came to visit me. I let him sleep on my bed wearing my pyjamas but it became too much when he said good morning with a grin wearing my dentures!”

That’s it, folks. Please take your shots or make a reservation, now. ‘Agony Akka’, who writes humorously in the space that previously featured Mathrubhootham in Hindu Magazine says, if you take your shots you will have ‘Jab Satisfaction’!

Cheers!!