Mnemonic (Menonic) take on books, beer, and bonhomie

My earliest memory of Jairam Menon is linked to a hilarious poster titled "All great minds think alike" etched on the soft board of his humble L&T House cubicle which had him centre stage flashing a broad smile, surrounded by the usual suspects of the cerebral solar system, the Einsteins, Newtons, Edisons, and I don’t remember who else.

I knew right away I had bumped into a gem of a humourist, but the epic tragedy of that realization was Greek in essence although Indian in significance. Alas! I could not share an ‘uncorporate’ hearty laugh with him, given the protocols of the formally attired equation that defined our relationship earmarked by a long list of unwrit rules on office conduct and etiquette.

I was on the L.H.S of the equation, as the lonely and lowly PR and corporate communications in-charge of an unlisted L&T subsidiary sharing space with flagship plant and machinery in the distant suburb of Powai, testing waters in a swarming ocean dominated by the TCSes, Infys, Wipros and Satyams (till they turned Asatyams). He was on the R.H.S, the communications expert of the high and mighty conglomerate housed in a sprawling structure, a sterling landmark of Mumbai's pristine Ballard Estate area.

There were countless variables (read caricatured characters) – known and unknown - that played havoc on either side of our equation and did everything but help solve it. Sadly, that unresolved metaphysical equation will never find a place of pride in the mathematical hall of fame alongside the great Riemann Hypothesis, or conjectures bearing grand names like Collatz, Erd?s-Strauss, Goldbach, and Whitehead.

I still shudder recalling the horrendous time spent with an ‘HO-approved’ Bollywood-failed ad film specimen who made an inadvertently funny corporate film based on my shred-to-pieces script and engaging three desperate, wannabe actors of three different nationalities sourced from anywhere and everywhere including student hostels, embassies, Bollywood audition hubs, and God knows where else. The circumstances defining the making of the film were so bizarre that I could only laugh at them, alone at that, certainly not with Jairam, who I am sure would have found in the tragicomedy rich material for resounding laughs, only if we could mingle at Leopold’s café, instead of the L&T canteen. ??

How I wish we both had belonged to the pre-independence era; who knows, we could have ‘independently’ marveled at the acumen and etiquette of the maverick founding duo of L&T, Danish engineers Henning Holck-Larsen?and?S?ren Kristian Toubro. We could have soaked in their insights on life and work and packaged them for media and public consumption, while they made roads, highways, airports, metros, factories, nuclear reactors, power plants, defence equipment, and everything else for what was then an emerging India.

Years later, when I reunited with Jairam in a chance encounter, he causally asked me to approach thespian Naseeruddin Shah to write the foreword to his book. Now, I can safely call Naseer Saab a? dear acquaintance but being Naseer Saab, there’s always an element of intrigue and suspense about his exact responses which can be friendly, funny, puny, and even zany depending on his exact mood. He has always walked a different path and invariably drawn a sword to silence his critics and detractors at different points in time; some times successfully, other times not! ?He speaks his mind at all times, which doesn't mean he makes sense all the time, but his non-conformism, clearly a diminishing trait across all spheres, is so inspiring that you have no qualms to look past the occasional blip and slip.

So, I went ahead with my gut feel, placing my faith in a specific instance blessed with a phenomenal outcome: When the President of The Satyajit Ray Society, my good friend Arup De, asked me to request Naseer Saab’s attendance at a Mumbai event in honour of the great Ray, I had approached Naseer saab with some trepidation but he jumped at the opportunity stating that this was the closest he could get to the legend, not having had the good fortune of having worked with him.? His fiery speech at the event is fondly remembered to this day by his friends and foes alike as the glorious highlight of the evening!??

?In Jairam’s case, it was the hilarious content of his working draft that worked like magic. My conversation with Naseer saab went like this:

“Jairam Menon, my dear friend and former senior corporate communication colleague at L&T, is keen that you write the foreword to his book. I too hope and wish that you see merit in this work which I feel is ripe for endorsement from a thought leader of your stature.”

?“I hope it’s nothing like Chicken Soup for the Soul which I couldn’t get through! Anyway I need to read it first.”?

“Doesn’t seem so - but as you say will ask him to send you a copy. Am quoting him verbatim to offer a small window into his unique brand of pithy wit and playful wisdom:?

“This book is as politically incorrect as it can get. It is an?un-prissy,?irreverent,?cheery stimulant.?It takes?humour?where it has seldom gone before – on a conducted tour of everyday anxieties and fears. En route, it pulls the plug on much of received wisdom.? So standard Do’s and Don’ts are upended, and common fears debunked. A few dreams are deflated too – but?then?you can’t make an omelette without collateral damage.”?

Unknown to me, Naseer saab took to the book like a fish to water and sent this response to Jairam (which the latter shared with me later)

Dear Jairam,

Your book is hilariously tongue-in-cheek, I loved it and it made enormous sense even though I have no boss and attend?no office. Maybe some advice for bosses should?also have been sprinkled?about! Your opinion?of my statements could be valid and I have no issue?with that.*

You live in Mumbai I believe, it would be good to get to meet sometime.

With very best wishes and more strength?to your writing?arm.

Naseer

*This was in response to Jairam’s disclosure that accompanied the manuscript - “There is a brief reference to you on Pg 74.? It is not critical to the?text and so I can delete it if you don't like it.”

The page 74 reference goes like this –

“Shah Rukh Khan, Anupam Kher, the late Om Puri (after sunset), Aamir Khan and even the immensely gifted but mercurial Naseeruddin Shah. All of them are decent, level-headed gentlemen, yet each of them has at one time or another slipped on the banana peel of social acceptability.”

Can’t think of many who get to see this side of this great actor who is known for his (invariably nasty) contrarian takes, given that the thespian wilfully agrees to be disagreeable at the slightest provocation.

?My thoughts on Masala Chai for the Soul: How to brew this, that and everything else

This book is best read, not reviewed!

Don’t waste your time assesing it, rather lose yourself in Menon sir’s delightfully idiomatic expression that instinctively remind me of several legends including P. G. Wodehouse, Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, A C Doyle, Mario Puzo, James Joyce, and even Bertrand Russell.

Frankly, the title was seemingly and frightfully redolent of a self-help quiver full of sermonic arrows, a genre I avoid like the plague. But trusting the Bard, I looked past the name and uncorked the bottle discarding the label, and lo and behold, I found a perfect compliment for my favourite brand of beer.

Jairam has an inspiring thought leader quote at the end of each chapter which lends a beautiful perspective – rich in context and content alike - which inspires the reader to broaden his or her thought horizon without a semblance of preaching. Very few books achieve this monumental feat! ?????????

On the flip side, a few chapters probe the same theme all over again, albeit from a different angle, that doesn’t make for a compelling read ?(which is unavoidable given the genre) and Jairam seems overtly fixated on Donald Trump, Arnab Goswami, loft cleaning, and office promotions, which find copious mention throughout the book. Given Jairam’s towering stature as a prose writer, these microscopic holes hurt more than they should really!

Jairam’s humour is cent percent original and is hearteningly devoid of prescriptive claims; it helps you look beyond the mundane and the obvious and appreciate life which he aptly calls “a lottery, or rather, a series of lotteries, with multiple draws.” as also “a long bargain with the forces of the universe.”

Savour these gems:

"At a certain age many men and a few women begin to look at themselves in the mirror the way the world looked at Afghanistan after the Taliban took over—with mounting anxiety about what was going to happen next."

“It’s an unfortunate linguistic aberration that ‘mean’ denotes both the average as well as a selfish person.”

“The quotation mark is literally a cut above the run-of-the-mill punctuation. In its previous life, I am sure it was just a comma—one of the scores strewn across the text, with nobody, except grammar Nazis, giving it a second glance. But inverted, elevated and paired with its twin, it confers gravitas to content.”

“We complained that summer afternoons were getting warmer way back when Greta Thunberg was only the proverbial gleam in her father’s eye.”?

“Nostalgia is a seductive companion, and as we get older, we tend to believe that the past was an unending whirl of joy. Actually, that’s our imagination doing a con job on our memory. It has photoshopped the times gone by, cropped unpleasant details, glossed over embarrassments and left behind a gallery of rose-tinted remembrances.”

“If you are content with yourself, what can be more enviable than that?”

“The effective gossiper has to be on his toes 24×7. He knows that the tales he is carrying have the life expectancy of a Russian dissident.”

“Once we accept that potholes are a part of life, we can go one better and proceed to market them. The idea is based on the tried and trusted dictum: if you can’t beat them, brand them.”

“Trouble starts when you are overzealous about your religion, and the other fellow decides that he had better be overzealous too, lest his God feels left out (we are adept at transferring human insecurities to our deities). Before we know it, we have a divinity derby going. Competition will do to faith what it has done to the economy—shift attention to the packaging rather than to the product.”

“Since that is how the cookie crumbles, it makes sense to be prepared while the cookies are still in the jar.”

Jairam’s elegant wit is in the league of greats like Benjamin Disraeli who made attack their best form of defense but with such dignity and in such chaste language that is bound to make the enemy chuckle before launching a retort. Remember his famous lines: “A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity” ?to describe his rival William Gladstone (which were beautifully reproduced by Amitabh Bachchan in the chartbusting Kishore Kumar number “My name is Anthony Gonsalves”, substituting “inebriated” with “intoxicated.”)

Jairam is an awesome wordsmith, which is why I hope and pray he takes to more nourishing forms and genres of literature of more enduring shelf life, which will provide an organic soil to reap a rich harvest, of which humour will be an integral part, but not necessarily a cash crop! ?

Jairam, no education can beat primary education! ?Please pay heed to your school teacher ?M.S. Pinto like you heard Bachi Karkaria and A M Naik, and write (not more but only) for yourself. Journos, corporates, academicians, thinkers, revellers, celebs and commoners, let your readership know no bounds.

And adding to your long list of things to laugh at, let me add this bit to the line item “Laugh at statements of belief that are part pretence, part PR.”

?Laugh at the fact that PR itself has been reduced to pretence!

Here’s a tete-a-tete with our Jairam (K = N) Jairam whose rocking boat of wholesome wit and winsome wisdom has room for people of any number and gender as also all domesticated animals, unlike Jerome K. Jerome’s watercraft accomodating three men and a dog.

Can you recall the formative years of your upbringing and education? Also, a family snapshot of sorts - grandparents, mom, dad, siblings, friends…

I think my DNA has a lot to do with making me what I am - more in fact than any independent effort of my own. My father wrote articles for newspapers and he had a large, large library. My mom used to tell him - why do you buy so many books that you don’t read. I could not help my father then but I now know that buying more books than you can read is a recognized ailment - it’s called tsundoku. So, I literally grew up among stacks of book and I think I have contracted or inherited tsundoku myself. My library is full of books which are TBR. On my mother’s side, my grandfather was one of the first assistant editors to the legendary Sadanand at the Free Press Journal. So I thought if I did not take up journalism and writing, I would be letting down destiny.

What were your favourite subjects at school and college? How was your academic scorecard and how did you go about making the decisive choice of the educational stream?

I did not care much for arithmetic and Hindi. It was much later when I got to know more of Hindi film songs that I fell in love with the lyrics. And it is not as if I was fond of English - so my academic record was uniformly below average dismal. But my mother was a teacher at the school so the other teachers displayed commendable comradeship and gave me pass marks.

Deciding on the educational stream was made easy by my visible death-or-glory struggles with maths and science - those STEM subjects as they are called now. So it was obviously humanities for me. In my time, this fashionable term ‘Humanities’ had not come into vogue. It used to be called ‘Arts’. I am sure I would have done better in college if it were called ‘humanities.’ But then such is life!

What were your hobbies, passion pursuits and role models during your wonder years?

I suspect even the young JM observed people and made notes – could you share a verse or prose of that time… They were not really ‘wonder years’, Sudhir. I think it is the seductive influence of nostalgia which makes us feel that those early days, those college years were a whirl of bliss. They were ordinary days like any other. If anything, I feel more the present days are more pleasant.

Wodehouse, beer and bonhomie – do they date back to student years? Please recall a few sepia-tinted memories of friends, events, or situations. Besides Wodehouse, who are the other favourites…

Wodehouse has been a family deity all through. Beer and bonhomie, however, came later in my post-grad years at the University. I was one of those lucky guys when the University was still at Fort. What lovely, old-world buildings - they exuded gravitas. They shut out the world outside and welcomed you to their fold and you felt you could have a conversation with Shakespeare within their portals. And then, the old library where I spent so many wonderful hours. It had stained glass windows and it stood on beautiful lawns. They would make a scholar of even a regular guy like me! Contrast that with the unimaginative, prosaic campus at Kalina - looks like a mantralaya of education.

There were many restaurants in Fort, and I have the distinction of being kicked out of most of them for varying reasons. Most of my boon companions have left Mumbai - one left for Canada, one passed away in a car accident, and one is somewhere in Vasai but I am unfortunately not in touch with him.

?Apart from Wodehouse, there is an even older favourite - Jerome K. Jerome. My father had once joked that I was named after him. I took it seriously for some time until my mother brought me down to earth. Then there was the usual Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Chase - the staple of youth. A writer who is less popular was Stephen Leacock but he hasn’t written much. Actually I don’t read much nowadays. I am a member of a couple of book clubs and most of the members are much better readers than me. I have perfected the role of a parasite, feeding on the readings of others.

Given the awesome depth and dignity of your flowing prose, which is not your everyday word play, a full time teaching job at a marquee school/college/varsity, one feels, would have proved more fulfilling, leaving more time for authoring books and articles. Your thoughts please on this audacious surmise.

?Well, after M.A. in English, there were two roads open for us – teaching or journalism. One of my friends took to teaching and told me spine chilling stuff of having to face a hostile classroom full of rouges out to make a laughing stock of a hapless and nervous professor. The prospect of taking classes day after day did not appeal to me.

?Remember Gussie Fink Nottle trying to talk to the students of Market Snodsbury? Well I thought I could handle news reports better than I could handle a class. But you are right, it would probably have given me more time to write books. But then, as I said before, such is life.

How did you zero in on journalism? Sub editing and reporting – did you enjoy one over other or were happy to do both. Please describe the iconic FPJ of the bygone era…

?As I said, teaching was a frightening prospect. Even now speaking in public is a daunting prospect as long as I am sober. That left journalism, and then, I kind of liked journalism and writing. At that time, journalism used to be genuinely respectable and likable. We actually thought of ourselves as crusaders, and we spoke truth to power.

?I don’t know if that kind of idealism still exists among young journalists. Perhaps it does and it is me who has become too cynical to notice. I was taken in as a Sub-editor but I also used to write reports. I liked the rigour of subbing and the freedom to express oneself that came with reporting.

?And then of course, there are the seductive myths of the tribe. We used to talk about legendary journalists - Sadanand, Krishnamurthy of Indian Express, Behram Contractor, Khushwant Singh, Arun Shourie…. Sad to say, there are no such stories that you can exchange about PR guys.

How and when did the proverbial switch to corporate happen? Was it wilful or accidental? The journalist in you and the PR person in you – did they co-exist in spirit?

?While journalism teaches you a lot and gives you excitement and inspiration, there remained long durations when it was dull and repetitive. That happens with all professions. But when you are young, you want excitement all the time. Then there was the question of security - job security. Free Press had a fabulous name with a great history but at that time it was not a secure place and I led a precarious existence. My parents felt they would be happier if I joined a corporate. It was the equivalent of a girl marrying into a good family. As luck would have it, I saw this advertisement for a copywriter in Larsen & Toubro. I had not written a decent line of advertising before this but my future boss (herself a former journalist) went by my articles I had written and selected me. The switch was not without its downside, however. My former college professor - the formidable Mrs Wood - asked me why I had left something noble for something so spurious.

How was life at L & T? Your fondest memories, and the most formidable among challenges??

?There were challenges aplenty, especially in the early days. Copywriting for B2B applications - worse, E2E (Engineer to Engineer) was very different from the kind of writing I used to do earlier. But I think learning to be more precise in expression was useful to me professionally. Also useful was learning how to hold the audience all through. In journalism, the story used to be intrinsically interesting. But when you are talking about the features of a refinery or writing a brochure, you had to learn techniques to dissuade a reader from turning away.

I can’t point to a single big challenge or to a single proud moment. There were many. But the overall climate was encouraging. As a writer yourself, you will know that like all creative people, we need constant external affirmation. Fortunately, that used to happen all the time – the wah-wahs and the pats on the back.

What is the backstory of the Masala Chai book – any books to follow?

?To answer the second part of your question first - I will keep writing. I do not know how to fill in life in any other way. Whether all that writing will become a book or not depends on external factors over which I have little control. Inshallah, there will be at least one more book.

?Masala Chai for the Soul is a self-help book for all those who are sick and tired of self-help books. I was sick and tired myself and I said it is time to show up these writers who have made a profitable cottage industry with self-help stuff.

?It all began when I was asked to write a column for L & T’s house magazine. The editor told me he found employees getting worked up and worrying too much. He said ask people to turn the thermostat down and keep it light. So that’s what I did. I wrote a monthly column for ten odd years. Readers loved it. They told me to put it all into a book, and I took them at their word.

?When I advise people not to take things too seriously, I obviously need to do so myself. So this book is the Bible for the blithe. My first title was ‘Cutting Chai for the Soul’ but the publishers thought that was too localised, too Mumbai-centric. Maybe they were right - the book has done pretty well. Not up there in the best seller bracket but good enough.

Looking back, would you done any thing(s) differently given the opportunity to rewind – (whether or not you wish to).

?Honestly, I do not consider myself to be exceptionally bright or talented. And so, I think I am lucky to have got where I am. There are a few regrets of course. If I had continued in journalism, and if I was luckier than I am, I might have ended up famous. I could have ended up as Rajdeep Sardesai or even Arnab Goswami. Rajdeep or Arnab! On second thoughts, I am better off where I am.

What is the kind of world you see emerging from the mists of the unknown – would it be more Orwellian than Wellsian, or the other way round, or the middle ground between dystopia and utopia, or something else…

?Sudhir, I think our grand old Gandhiji sometimes said a few things that make a lot of sense. One of the things was ‘You must be the change you seek around you.’ I think 80 per cent of what happens, depends on how you react. If you resolve to be content with what you have, the forces make it possible for you to be content.

?I rarely look into the time telescope and appraise the future. But my guess is that things are going to be more or less the same. What I intend to do is keep at what I am doing. As I said, I am one of those lucky chaps to get paid for what I like doing.