Beaten offtrack

Well, you have heard of the beaten track and also off the track. But here I offer you a combination, the combo “Beaten Offtrack”.

Offtrack is the name of an editorial piece and on February 17th, the entry is titled Believe in action [1]. I took the message to heart and swung into action; I am beating the Offtrack!

The core message is actions speak louder than words. This is so commonplace, so platitudinous that to make it sound esoteric, words were twisted and religion was brought in. Now, most of the beatings I am going to give are of the trivial variety, but they add fun to the more serious issues later in this post.

This is about a train journey, from Allahabad to Delhi, in the night when the writer was travelling “with [his] family”. So far so good. But, unfortunately his wife was assigned an upper “birth”. Well, was that a Freudian slip or what! As this slip has been repeated quite often and hangs so low it is starkly visible. Then, it would not be out of place to point out to the writer, “Sir, your slip is showing!” To be fair, there is one and only one place at which “berth” did not transmute into “birth”.

There are some funny slips because of these transmutations. A gentleman had “offered his lower birth [my emphasis] to my wife”! I was wondering whether the writer’s wife had any discomfort in accepting it.

The next morning the other co-passenger who had so ungraciously not accommodated the request for the lower “birth”, oops, “berth” “was loudly chanting ‘Hanuman Chalisa’”. I was forced to think that the lower “birth” passenger was trying to lift himself up by his bootstraps to the upper “birth”. If he had instead gone on his own to the upper “birth”, he would not have needed to chant for the grace of Lord Hanuman!

One more small nit-picking detail. The Good Samaritan who did finally offer the damsel-in-distress (mixed metaphor) the lower berth chose to address the lady by her name, “Mrs. Srivastav, …” This, in my opinion, just somehow did not fit tight in the cultural context, the kind of familiarity or closeness implied. Or, could it have been that this gentleman had actually memorized the reservation chart!

Basically, the writer makes the argument that carrying a level of civic sense is a mark of one’s devotion to Lord Hanuman. Well, he is entitled to his opinion. Yet … now, the beating starts, in all seriousness.

Why is the writer silent on the berths assigned to the other members of his family? Perhaps his family comprised only his wife and him, not impossible. But, this can only be a generous post facto justification, and a weak one at that, when he mentioned that his “family” accompanied him. If there indeed were other members of his family travelling with his wife and him, did he ask the others to trade berths with his wife? The reader is none the wiser. The way the situation unfolds shows that the writer wants his non-family members to have civic sense while sparing his tribe. A nice way towards inclusiveness, isn’t it?

The writer says that he could not ask another passenger who had been assigned a lower berth – “a gentleman, a senior citizen, with grey hair and beards (sic.)” – to do his wife the favor of exchanging berths with her. I had to ask, why not? Was it because this passenger was a gentleman? Or, because he was a senior citizen? Or, because he had “grey hair and beards”? A series of stereo-types. Tsk, tsk … The irony is that it is this same passenger who obliged, without being asked!

The stereo-typing does not stop with this person. The civic-sense-challenged passenger is described thus: “healthy middle-aged person in police-uniform.” I look quite healthy, and I am straddling the line between middle aged and senior citizen. But I have a problem climbing up to the top berth – I lose my balance easily and rebalancing is far from instantaneous – a series of stuttering steps even for small missteps (the result of a head injury and losing hearing in one ear). What would have been the writer’s reaction had I mentioned my inability to accommodate his request? I dare say he would have chalked it up as lame (pun intended) excuse.

The worse is yet to come. The writer seems to have taken exception to the villain of the piece chanting Hanuman Chalisa the next morning. Lord Hanuman “had very high respect and regard for Sitaji – the symbol of Indian womanhood.” Skip the obvious implied parallels (calling a man in a police uniform Hanuman is a no go, if you get my drift!) and venture deeper.

Just suppose it was the Bhagavad Gita and not Hanuman Chalisa that was chanted. Would the crime have been any less, as Lord Vishnu is not necessarily a one-woman man (the Krishna Avatar), and Indian womanhood may have taken a hike?

Another question readily pops in my mind. What if the passenger who had been offered the exchange were a man? What would the unresponsive passenger have had to recite for the writer to take cudgels against him? Hanuman Chalisa and a woman passenger – OK. A male passenger and …? Still Hanuman Chalisa, as Hanuman was the supreme Ram Bhakta, wasn’t he?

The point, made million times over but always going unheard, is that religion is good enough only to recite platitudes! If you get any deeper, you get into a spaghetti dish, extricating oneself out of which is near impossible. Had the writer stopped at pointing out the difference in behavior between the two passengers, that would have been OK, as an anecdote in this world filled with them. But to delve deeper is to invite scorn.

I had taken Offtrack and beaten it off the track! That then is Beaten Offtrack!

Raghuram Ekambaram

Reference

1. http://www.hindustantimes.com/editorial-views-on/Offtrack/Believe-in-action/Article1-1013030.aspx#.USq12euS0fA.mailto