Google Talk, Yahoo Chess, Cricket and more....

I just happened to be cleaning up my Google mail box and I discovered an old voicemail that Appa had left for me on my birthday last year. This one was unusually long. A whole 30 seconds. What a precious find!! This would be the last time I receive a message from him for my birthday.

Its been 4 months to the exact day now. For the first few days, I was counting the minutes, then the hours, then the days, and now its been 4 whole months. Time is surely a sly thief of your memories, slowly fading the images and sounds in your mind. Maybe that is not so true anymore with the digital age. Each of us has volumes of digital pictures, videos and sounds that are stashed away in hard disks on our computer, ready to be recalled at our command.

Appa had a different way of keeping his memories fresh. He recounted so many incidents and people on such a regular basis that, his past and present were all coexisting together. That was one of the reasons his affection towards people was always true and fresh in his mind. He never forgot what they meant to him and that was the very reason he felt the urge to keep in touch. It was only the last 2 or 3 years that he really started using GoogleTalk to keep in touch with the family. What a blessing it was!! I don't think anything else brought him as much pleasure. Just the simple knowledge that he could communicate (for free!!!) at the click of a mouse gave him an immense sense of closeness towards his people.

Of course with the GoogleTalk came the Yahoo!Chess as well. The hours that he spent on it, oh boy! was he hooked. You could not peel him away for his chair if he was in the middle of a game. I think it started in 2003 when I introduced him to the online chess site during one of his visits here. Never thought it would be such a big part of his life. It brings back memories of when Ashok (Viji athai's son) used to visit us during the summer holidays and we would play easily about a 100 games of chess over the course of his stay. Appa was an avid chess player. Not great by any means, but you could not find a more enthusiastic player. He did not care so much for the nuances of the game, or knowing every gambit there was, or studying great games of the past. He wanted to be in the thick of it, playing. If you did not think chess can have a nail-biting finish, well, you have not seen appa play. It was sight, to say the least. A sight that I shall surely miss.

Cricket was his first love though, when it comes to sports. I don't really know if he played much, but he had to be the most consistently enthusiastic fan of the sport. While I was home this summer, I got a chance to see some of his cricket score books, and he had scorecards of games from around 1950. Almost every visit of his to the US seemed to coincide with the World Cup, and his pre-condition for coming over was that I would arrange to have the telecast at home. Among my friends, it was a given that if appa was around, then I was definitely subscribing to whatever cricket packages were on TV. Long before the TV days, I have vivid memories of waking up early in the morning and seeing appa lying down next to his ShortWave radio tuning into the commentary of a test match in the West Indies. I don't think he ever missed an India match. His mood (sometimes) reflected India's performance, that was the degree of his involvement.

GoogleTalk, Yahoo!Chess and Cricket ...

On a parting note. Appa always wanted to go to China. Well this time, I guess he got the best seats at the Olympics after all.

math problems and all that

it is funny how we keep coming back to this space hoping to discover something new. perhaps hoping to re-discover something old, hold it in the present, re-live it and make it our own again. the summer is over and the kids are back in school, only this year thatha won't be there to pick them (well one of them) up or drop them off at a moment's notice. he won't be there to ask the random math question or to argue with about leaving pens and pencils lying about where they shouldn't be.

one summer when appa went to the US achala was worried that she wouldn't have enough help with her math homework. she needn't have worried. before he left, he filled three notebooks with solutions to every single problem in her maths text, some with two or three alternative solutions, complete with comments and explanatory notes on why he done it one way or another! now he has left behind several diaries; some with just a sentence or two about the day's weather did or what india scored in a cricket match. others hold insights into things he felt and thought.

of course, words on paper are never quite enough. but unlike so many others, not only do we have those words on paper, but we also have the thoughts in our heads to share and relive. and that's one of the reasons i, for one keep coming back here. hoping to discover bits of my father that others might hold in their minds.