Ramu’s precocious cerebrum was taking a philosophical, Aristotelian walk beneath the mammoth shady canopy of an ancient banyan adjoining the school grounds on a scorching, infernal Shivajinagar summer afternoon. Taking a power nap right next to him was Somu, his right arm, Man Friday in his inexhaustible supply of eclectic schemes to supplement the meager one rupee lunch money their mothers grudgingly provided them. Somu was to Ramu as Huck Finn to Tom Sawyer. Pragmatic, not given to grand flights of the imagination, yet a loyal accomplice, more loyal than gang members to Al Capone, than customers of a computer company named after a fruit, than Congress workers to the Gandhi clan.
Ramu was disturbed by the general global trend towards bigotry and intolerance of all kinds. Asking questions was treason. Having an independent opinion was unpatriotic. All criticism was aggressively snuffed out. The wrong nationality, skin color, religion, caste, language became liabilities impossible to overcome. Governments became ominous Big Brothers, intruding upon every aspect of the citizen’s life in the national interest, the public welfare. Their megalomaniacal heads, dangerously detached from reality, projected themselves as saviors and messiahs, who would restore imaginary glory. Thugs calling themselves leaders goaded mobs towards violence in the name of patriotism. Flags and national anthems were in vogue.
Even piddling little Shivajinagar usually trapped in its time warp didn’t escape the frenzy. Ramu and Somu had recently found themselves in the dark, dank, derelict Shivajinagar Theater, crammed in among the diehard devotees, at Somu’s insistence on paying obeisance to the latest Shahbaz Khan inanity, little more than a trail mix of comedy, tragedy, shampoo, songs, dances, and cringeworthy dialogues deep fried in the stale, dark oil of overused emotion. Ramu’s protestations having been duly dismissed by Somu’s fawning adoration of the geriatric star, who was in the early stages of denial with regards to his age, aided and abetted by his delirious, delusional admirers.
At the end of a three hour Turkish bath courtesy malfunctioning air conditioners at the theater, as Somu was desperately trying to conceal having been moved to tears by the wholly expected and predictable ending, and Ramu was thanking his stars for the end of the ordeal, the national anthem started blaring at a monstrous volume designed to blast patriotism into the innermost recesses of unsuspecting eardrums, to deafen those of sound hearing and to give hope to the hard of hearing. It was like a hard metal band suddenly materializing at a tranquil cricket match with polite applause at Lords, like a whisper immediately followed by a nuclear blast.
As painful memories resurfaced of that high pitched whine in their ears following temporary deafness, Ramu’s neural network began firing electrical impulses like the multicoloured Diwali sparklers snatched from puny kids several years junior to them. Lofty goals were constructed. How to cure society, even just a tiny, seemingly inconsequential corner of it, of the metastasizing cancer of bigotry fueled by various flavors of prejudice? How to detribalize people and get them to tolerate, empathize with and appreciate each other’s differences rather than be at each other’s jugular?
An idea was hatched by sprightly neurons running unknown shortest path algorithms through Ramu’s dense neural graph. Assorted snippets of information from multiple corners of his capacious brain were assembled like lego blocks, snapping together with satisfying clicks.
Once the idea was formed by the legislature, the executive was unceremoniously woken up through a flying kick delivered to the rear end accompanied by a shrill Bruce Lee scream. Somu’s charming reverie of hitting the winning six off the last ball in the cricket world cup final thus being rudely shattered, he shot angry glances at Ramu while rubbing his sore posterior.
Ramu’s plan was conveyed to Somu, like a micromanager providing his minion with the task breakdown and detailed blueprint for a complicated project. Opinions were not required nor sought. Alterations were considered blasphemous. The brain could be switched off and the plan followed like a robot on auto-pilot.
From Ramu’s unorthodox mind emerged the insight that bigotry arose out of fear and fear in turn from ignorance. The ghettoisation of people into various tribes based on dividers like religion, race, caste had created an understanding deficit among people leading ultimately to an empathy deficit. To reverse the course of this vile gutter, the flow would have to be stemmed at the source. It was impossible to turn back the mighty Ganges mid course. It had to be shut off at its fount, the Gangotri glacier, where its flow was the merest trickle. People from diverse backgrounds had to get to know each other, walk in each other’s shoes, live in each other’s houses, inhabit each other’s skins at a young age, before their soft, clay-like minds could be hijacked and mis-shaped by the unscrupulous.
One day, Ramu had happened to read about student exchange programs in the Shivajinagar Times, glorified wrapping paper on most days. Since that day, he had been fascinated by the idea. He even harbored secret dreams of being an exchange student to Japan, hurtling to Mount Fuji in the world famous bullet train at absurd speeds, the verdant countryside and other sights reduced to a multi-colored blur. Regrettably, his school, the cravenly renamed Veermata Jijabai High School also known as VJHS, had no such program. Nor did it have funds to sponsor one, subsisting as it did on paltry government funds that slipped through bureaucratic fingers like water through a strainer. Not one to be daunted or discouraged easily, he hit upon the unusual idea of a local exchange program, with students from other local schools. Students could be randomly assigned to live with host families from the exchange school. This would ensure a fair bit of mixing of waters and equalizing of pressure, thought Ramu.
Noble, lofty idea. But ideas are 10 paise a dozen, cheaper than peanuts sold by Rambhajan, the vociferous peanut vendor outside their school premises, with his basket of roasted, salted, spiced peanuts slung over his neck, filling paper cones made from old newspapers with his little metal thimbles. Implementation in the real world with all its messiness and fractal complexity is where the devilishness lies, Ramu was well aware.
Somu’s contacts, his insane social network came to the rescue here. Nobody knew how Somu had developed his network of contacts that ranged across the whole spectrum of society, cutting across profession, income, class, religion and caste barriers. He was too modest to crow about it himself and Ramu too conceited to ask him about it. It turned out he had a 4th level connection to an assistant editor of a national publication, India Tomorrow, a forward looking, liberal magazine, struggling to compete against more established heavyweights. The editor’s name was Chinna Kannan Das, affectionately known as CKD, formerly editor of Valadi Times, a provincial newspaper nobody even pretended to have heard of. He was a lumbering, statuesque man reminding one of a sloth or a panda. When the Valadi Times had downed shutters following lackluster sales, CKD had relocated to Mumbai and got a job with India Tomorrow using his own considerable network of contacts. In India, who was a far more important word than what.
Ramu had read India Tomorrow magazine to which his father subscribed, and knew from their editorials that they would be receptive to a feel-good story about tackling bigotry. This was but one piece of the puzzle. The other piece was to get through to the principal of VJHS, SMS Namboodiripad, a small, eccentric man with a mercurial personality and a rickety stick frame topped off by a pencil moustache. Uncharitable students compared him to a stick insect perfectly camaglouged against its surroundings. Namboodiripad lived in mortal dread of a craft teacher called Mrs. Yasmeen. She had been hired by the unscrupulous Vice Principal, Mrs. Mote when Namboodiripad had been away on vacation. He would have vetoed her if it were upto him. She was a veritable giant from Brobdingnag to Namboodiripad’s native Lilliput. Given the acute contrast, he tended to avoid being near her to deny students any opportunity to have a snicker at his expense.
Mrs. Yasmeen despite her robust size, was an exceptionally gifted craft teacher capable of creating the most delicate constructions. She was scrupulously fair in teaching and assessment, yet with tendencies towards vicious violence against hapless souls who wittingly or unwittingly ticked her off by the simple yet deadly act of carrying on a conversation with another unfortunate.
She happened to have been on the receiving end of various unkind remarks concerning her size, some of which were sexist and religiously bigoted. She exploded and blew off her top like Mt Saint Helens being suddenly uncorked with a wine opener every time this happened and the unfortunate recipients of her spine-chilling, blood-curdling, Kali-like fury were reduced to shuddering wrecks.
Ramu being fully aware of this constellation of facts, had scapegoat Somu approach Mrs. Yasmeen with his idea, considerable trepidation and some samosas from the neighborhood Sharma Dairy, fried in fresh oil for an additional sum, to make it more palatable.
Mrs. Yasmeen, though initially reluctant, warmed to the idea after the 1st samosa, and gave in completely after the 3rd. She agreed to have a quiet and civil word with the principal, SMS Namboodiripad. She would try to convince him to endorse the local exchange student program, which had the advantage of virtually no implementation cost other than a few phone calls to principals of neighboring schools. She liked the idea and her personal scars provided further impetus.
She ended up bullying, browbeating and frightening SMS Namboodiripad into endorsing the exchange student program. Namboodiripad, who was rendered a nervous wreck by the ferocious encounter, made the phone calls in front of her following her script verbatim, which of course, was provided by Somu, and craftily written by Ramu. One incentive for Namboodiripad (besides raw fear) and other school principals came in the form of free publicity and fame through an article about the program and its aftermath in India Tomorrow magazine. Namboodiripad had always secretly harbored thoughts of moving from musty, moth eaten Shivajinagar to dynamic Mumbai or high-tech Bangalore. He told himself the publicity would do no harm in boosting his credentials and helping him land a plum job in a shinier city. The truth is, he had no choice whatsoever in the matter.
The exchange program, predictably named “Chhatrapati Shivaji Exchange Program”, was announced in all participating schools with much platitudes and fanfare. Ramu and Somu arrived in school the day the student assignments were to be announced, swaggering like Viv Richards, the peerless Caribbean cricketing maestro, known to deflate opposition players before a ball had been bowled through his majestic walk to the middle. Ramu Somu had thrown their hats in the ring to be exchange students. They were always looking for an excuse to skip school, which they felt was little more than a sophisticated prison with hardened jailers masquerading as teachers. Skipping class in the exchange school would be easier than stealing eclairs from puny Kalpesh from 1st grade. Who would notice a couple of missing backbenchers? And maybe the exchange school had teachers less heinous than the VJHS mafia.
The draw for student assignments happened in the crowded, fanless, airless cauldron of the VJHS atrium, cruelly exposed to the beastly Shivajinagar summer sun. After what seemed like an eternity spent baking inside a tandoor oven, Ramu and Somu’s names were eventually announced as being assigned to the host family of Thappad, a teacher from Morarji High School across town. Thappad, formerly a Civics teacher at VJHS, was an ex-wrestler, with a penchant to slap at the drop of a hat.