IT HAPPENED ONE AFTERNOON

Twenty years ago, I was in ninth grade and quite a loser. I lived in a dream world that I’d doodle in my notebook while the chemistry teacher spoke of Mendeleef and his termite ridden table. It kept me happy but the teacher, who wouldn’t know the Mona Lisa from the Tower of Pisa unless they had valencies, refused to recognise the genius in the runny-nosed maestro before her and routinely banished me to the ‘wall of shame’. I must’ve been okay with a paintbrush in those days because of all the certificates at home but I never heard a word of encouragement from anybody in school, simply because the subjects I enjoyed like ‘art’ or ‘Bible history’ or ‘GK’ were given about as much respect as Jews in concentration camps. But I don’t blame the school. I guess the times were such…

So in this climate of darkness and dismay, my parents and I left for Jabalpur to visit an aunt that summer. There, I met this group of young people in the neighbourhood. There were a couple of boys, younger than me, three girls, about my age and then these two sisters, eighteen and sixteen year old angels… None of them ‘knew’ that I was a loser. Here, I could be whoever I wanted to be. Afternoons and evenings were spent playing ‘four corners’ and after dinner I’d just sit and hear the two girls talk. Until now, I had never known that the world was home to such divine creatures… I was in raptures. I had never felt this about anyone at school but here for the first time, wanted them to like me.

One day I heard one say to the other… “V didi, why do you like Sanju bhaiya so much? He’s handsome but talks a lot…”

“Renu, you should see him playing cricket. When he is batting, the crowd asks him to hit a six, and he does… just like that… I love him… Wish he was a fast bowler like Imran Khan, but as long as he’s playing cricket, I’m happy.” Then she looked at me and asked “Do you play cricket in Delhi?” Well, I was only allowed to field and bowl while the grownup kids batted, but I heard myself say, “Yes I do… I play for my school too,” I lied. “Really? What do you do?” she asked. “I’m a fast bowler, V didi,” I said, and then added “like Imran Khan…” She rolled her eyes, pulled my cheeks and laughed and said “theek hai, I’ll ask Sanju to organise a match and you could play with them.”

Matchday, and I was nervous. I liked drawing. But I did it for myself, without caring for opinions. Exams I believed I was destined to be poor at and never tried to prove otherwise, to myself or to others. Marks, passing, failing just happened. But here, for once, I wanted to be good at something because I wanted others to acknowledge that I too mattered. I ran in and bowled as fast as I could, working harder than I ever had in all my young life. And whaddya know… Sanju bhaiya wasn’t so hot after all… he tonked me around but then I surprised both of us and slipped one through which was too quick for him… it missed the stumps. I didn’t get his wicket but I did have his respect. He was quite sweet actually. Afterwards, both V and Sanju promised to come to Delhi and see me play for my school.

‘Ei moreychey’, how do I get out of this one? I really wanted to see V again but forget the school team, I wasn’t even in contention for the class team. Once in Delhi, I toiled to make it to the school team, and I did… The first time someone picked me for a team was the first time I felt wanted by people beyond family. Suddenly, I was a boy with ambitions. Finally, I understood what confidence meant, what it meant for people to have expectations and for me to live up to them. Success, howsoever minor, woke me up, to things around me, inside me.

That feeling of being wanted, wanting to be liked and being appreciated rubbed off on other aspects of life and except for Mendeleef and Pythagoras, I found most other acquaintances in school, and life, rather agreeable, eventually…

It didn’t matter that I never met V again. And it didn’t matter that I never played for India. What mattered was that long ago that summer day in Jabalpur, I had taken my first step towards self discovery.

We all have ‘gift s’, and gift s whether academic, sporting or artistic, are not necessarily meant to end up as careers. Some are just meant to help us reach out to the world and say ‘I exist’. Perhaps you and I were lucky to find ours but if you know a ‘loser’, then do pull his cheeks and make him feel special, for oft en that is all a child needs to really become special...

HOW GREEN IS MY VALLEY?

I was sitting at a street-side café outside the train station in Geneva, waiting for my train to Salzburg and thumbing through a dog-eared copy of Fodor’s Europe on a Shoestring when I heard a female voice, “I don’t care if this doesn’t look like Switzerland. Austria se nikal ke any place is paradise…”. I turned around and saw a sprightly young lady with frizzy hair that looked like a bunch of spring coils. With her was a tall young man, who also seemed to be from the sub-continent. He looked at me and I smiled. He smiled back. The girl whipped around and waved. I waved and invited them to join us at our table. They were both in business suits and seemed to be heading for a meeting…

We introduced ourselves and took our seats. The two of them were colleagues on a business trip and had just reached Geneva after wrapping up a few meetings in various Austrian cities. And since I was heading that way and had never been there earlier I was naturally curious to know what they made of what I had heard was a spectacularly scenic country.

“Don’t go there!” said Anubha. She, and her colleague Ismail, work with a training and development firm in India and were traveling through Austria, Switzerland, Turkey and Germany, meeting clients. “Don’t go there because that place looks like heaven but feels like hell! I’m glad we took the first train out as soon as we could… I couldn’t wait to get out of there”. Anubha spoke with a lot of animation, her head bobbing and shaking, emphasising her intonations. The coiled spring set on her head shook in rhythm and I was surprised not to hear them jangle. She didn’t look like she needed a train to go anywhere. All one had to do was point her in the general direction of her destination, press her head to the wall, hold her there for a moment, get out of the way and then let her go…

But Anubha spoke with authority and erudition and gradually her voice drew me away from speculations about her preferred means of locomotion… “We were in Innsbruck. It is a beautiful place with sloping roads, cobbled squares and mountain vistas, but what do you do… the *@$# #@*## Austrians do all they can to make you forget all that is good and ensure that you remember only the bad and the ugly”. This girl was seething… it must be all that smoke from her ears that must’ve gotten her hair to be that way… she downed a glass of juice and asked “you have some trace of dignity in you, right?” I nodded feebly… while she rattled on “So what if you are a few shades darker than me (which I was)… does it give me the right to humiliate you and feel superior to you?” There was a pregnant pause, and for a brief flickering moment I thought I saw her toying with the prospect, before insisting “No it doesn’t! ...but who’ll explain that to the Austrians and who’ll tell them that it’s been half a century since the Third Reich fell” Ismail, who’d been quiet until now interjected, “But Anubha, it really isn’t about colour alone…” He turned to me, “I’ll tell you what happened. We were walking along some nondescript ‘strasse’ in Innsbruck and suddenly this group of teenaged boys, perhaps no older than 16 started barking at us. We dismissed it as just a disturbed bunch of youngsters with a dysfunctional sense of humour. But the next day, in a busy market square, there was this group of slightly older boys, all skinheads, screaming at us in German and then as we got closer, they shouted ‘Paki go back! Paki go back!!’ I was shocked and Anubha was scared. In fact she was shaking like a leaf for an hour after that incident. We would walk into restaurants and hotels and people would smile at us and it would all seem fine but every now and then you would feel that behind our backs they were sniggering at us. It was unreal… ”

I was shocked. Modern day Europe, as a continental community, had always struck me as the most law abiding, just, racially sensitive and egalitarian people on the face of the planet. Their history of colonialism, intense nationalism, anti-Semitism, religious intolerance and the centuries of violence fuelled by these deep dark emotions, culminating in the near apocalyptic World Wars had taught them vital lessons in humility and tolerance. This new found respect for peace and diversity has led to most of Europe voluntarily surrendering a fair degree of its sovereignty and congregating as one economy under the aegis of the European Union. Squabbling neighbours had turned into partners for progress. These nations are amongst the first to mediate when wars break out, the first to offer humanitarian assistance when Nature strikes. I had experienced racial discrimination in Europe earlier but it had always been subtle and an isolated incident, frowned upon by others in the community. I was surprised and I said so…

“Why should you be surprised?” chimed Anubha. “Austria is the country where Adolf Hitler was born. It is a country which has always been notoriously anti-Semitic and xenophobic, long before the Holocaust.And Hitler, the Austria born German might have walked out on the country of his birth and returned only to conquer it, but even long after his death, while every Christian in Europe looks upon the dictator’s legacy as a shameful stain on the face of Europe, Austria still holds on to those hateful ideals by backing extreme right wing parties… parties that would be banned in Germany today… parties uncannily similar to Hitler’s Nazi party in terms of original ideology. And Ismail, what is that chap’s name… The Nazi President? ” I turned to look at Ismail… “Kurt… Kurt Waldheim. This man was born in a village near Vienna and after Hitler’s army annexed Austria, he joined the Nazis and while he denied being party to any of the crimes of that time, thousands of Jews from areas in his jurisdiction were sent to the death camps of Auschwitz. And after the war, while Nazi officers and party members all over Europe were being tried for war crimes, this man became the President of Austria. His blatant anti-Semitism even stopped him from condemning the heinous murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. So in a country which has celebrated the murder of innocents, should we really be complaining about a couple of catcalls?”

What about local authorities and the police? Couldn’t you have reported these guys? “The police are Austrians too aren’t they?” said Anubha. “In fact I’m glad the police didn’t show up. Otherwise our scars might not have been emotional ones alone.” It turns out that since 2003, a couple of African men have been beaten up and killed by the police. One of them, Seibani Wague, a Mauritanian student, was pushed to the ground and crushed under police boots. We all fell silent after that…

It was late. Engrossed in the discussion, I had forgotten about my train to Salzburg. I had missed it. But at least for now, I didn’t really regret it. I exchanged e-mail addresses, paid the bill and left . Austria’s picture postcard beauty surely had more to recommend it than just xenophobic conservatism. But for now everywhere I scratched about Austria, beyond the Mozart memorabilia, all I could find were accounts of Austrian racial intolerance. It has been some years now since that day and I still haven’t been to Austria yet. And I’m yet to meet a traveller from that land of unbridled natural beauty whose tales will draw me to that land again. Wonder what it is about the past that some of us, from the barren mountains of Waziristan to the green valleys around Vienna, from the streets of Harare to the deserts of Darfur, cling to with such passion, such pride and such hate, that it holds us back from embracing the new… or the neighbours…