‘Wipe everything. That’s the only way out,’ advised Murali Kannan, senior systems manager at UMS Interactive. I gawked at him. Thirty odd months hard labour. Cherished conversations through email. Official and personal. ‘Can’t something be done as an alternate route to save my hard disc?’ I posed the question to Shamir Ravindran, another IT wizard at the Muscat office. His effortless extended lower lip as response convinced me of the impending misery. Money, I can afford to lose out. Memory? I can't.
They were helpless. Not that they did not try. For a week, my life came to a standstill with my official email id – the only link with family, friends and colleagues, business partners (existing and potential) – getting jammed. I was literally crawling and bawling .
What the heck? Information is power. Suddenly I became powerless in the absence of access to business intelligence stored on my mail server. I was in a soup. A month ago, a truck ran over my flash/pen drive on the National Highway 8 linking Delhi with Jaipur in a bumper-to-bumper drive during peak hours. Soon after that, my laptop hard disc crashed – yes, cleaning my information bank in one stroke – thus forcing me to go in for reformatting. So I have to begin from a clean slate. Triple tragedy, did you say? Ohmigod, mercy pleeze!
‘What options I’ve! Do it,’ I told Murali grudgingly. At least, my mail identity will be restored immediately. My circle of acquaintances will be able to recognize me once again. Otherwise, my missives sent from unofficial ones were spiked at the recipients’ end. Loss of face and business.
When I logged in a few hours later, my official email id was restored, bereft of any back up files. Inbox, Sent and other folders appeared like ghost house. Empty. A severe pain shot through my spine. What cannot be cured must be endured!
What if my mental – instead of cyber – memory were to be wiped out? This quirky thought ran through abruptly as I sat on the hard bed in my seventh floor guest accommodation. Except a few sparks of lights on the nearby black and grey hillock on the horizon, Muscat was in deep slumber. What do you expect at 2 in the morning as I blog this? That too on Friday early morning! Floodlights on the court yard behind my building was switched off to save energy perhaps. The row of white multi-storeyed (not more than 7 floors, as is customary in Oman) concrete edifices stood up clearly giving a good contrast to the pitch dark backdropp.
Suppose, I lost all my memory but alive! I was fully drenched in cold sweat from fear in no time. Got up, toothbrushed, gulped my daily quota of blood sugar and b.p. medicine. Made a cup of hot tea – sugarless, of course. Powered up ipod and laptop. My college days hot babe, Zeenat Aman began to woo the one and only saintly Manoj Kumar with ‘Hai hai majboori’ from the 1970s flick, Roti, Kapada Aur Makaan.
My memory began to unspool fast. The day I saw Roti, Kapada.. was a red letter day in my life. Know why? I saw three movies – back to back in a single day, hopping from one theatre to another on the busy Mount Road, Chennai (then known as Madras) for the first time. (yes, I have repeated the 3-flicks-in-a-day format last year in Delhi and Bahrain a few weeks ago. Details soon.)
It was in 1974-75. Midsummer Madras heat. With two friends in tow, began the day with Cleopatra, featuring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton for a 70 mm screen presentation at Safire (the first multiplex perhaps in the southern metropolis. Or is it for the entire India?). The next halt was at Devi complex, three kilometers away for Roti, Kapada cinema hall. For the third and record breaking day, I did not have to scoot because the next film chosen was playing in the same complex but at Devi Paradise, Selvam (meaning wealth), featuring the evergreen Tamil matinee idol and thespian Sivaji Ganesan. An English movie, a Hindi flick and last, but not the least, a Tamil entertainer.
As I fast-forward to 1990, how can I forget getting pushed to the ground outside Larsen & Toubro corporate headquarters by bodyguards as I had chased Mukesh Ambani after a board meeting in Ballard Estate to get a quote for Mid-Day whom I was reporting for? The Ambanis had clandestinely taken over the multi-crore engineering conglomerate and the V P Singh government was trying to disentangle the powerful business family from L&T and I was covering on a daily basis.
How can I brush aside the sweet memories of chasing my first crush – a junior girl in the neighbourhood – by rolling a discarded rubber tyre a few yards behind her en route to the vegetable market every morning? Was it the early 1970s? Or the maiden public kiss on a crowded railway platform in Chennai and the embarrassment of facing co-passengers inside the compartment till the Bombay Mail reached its destination in 1980?
Or trying to recollect the October 2005 situation just outside the Seeb International Airport, Muscat. Emerging out of the airport for the first time, I scan the horizon for camels and sand dunes! Or the smelly experience of living with just one pair of pant, shirt and a black jacket in Dubai for three consecutive days after Gulf Air for strange reasons routed my baggage to Amman in Jordan instead of Muscat, Oman – leaving me clotheless, brushless and everything less.
Memories, sweet and sour. Nevertheless, educative, expressive and soulful. Saint, I was. Sinner I was. More years to go, perhaps. Sober maybe. What if my mental disc gets cleaned out for whatever reason and kept alive?
By the way, who am I? What am I doing? What’s the sound I am hearing? What’s that? Where am I? And, who am I talking to?
More to follow….
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