Sairam Krishnan

A friend texted me last week from Europe. As we spoke about work and careers, she told me how living in another country was helping her rethink a lot of things.

Almost like meeting a new version of herself, she said.

I have found that travel does that to me, which is why I always find ways to wander. At the same time, it is my identity, my sense of history and home, that keeps me grounded in a world that seems to be trying very hard to implode.

So I go away, in a sense. But I find that I can’t go far.

I don’t know why. It’s hard to define that feeling, like that pang in your chest when you look out the windows of a train at night, wind rushing through hair and face, and wonder whose home that tiny pinprick of light is.

That thing I can’t name, that unknowable sense of longing, is a constant companion. I’ve made peace with it, sort-of.

My friend told me that every time she and I sat down to talk, she would always think this guy must have done a lot of introspection, a ‘crazy amount’. And how I always spoke with such clarity.

It’s always weird when friends tell you these things, because you don’t have that perspective. You are stumbling along on your own way, fumbling, falling, getting up, and trying again. You don’t look at yourself like that.

But, as I told her, it wasn’t natural to me. I sort-of fell into things, and let life take me along.

The thinking happened because of necessity. I lost too much once. And I told myself never again.

As the hurt and pain congealed, cleaned itself up, and became a scar not immediately visible, I acted on it. I subjected every little conversation, every little decision, really every move, to silly levels of scrutiny . I thought a lot about why I chose to do this over that, and what would really make me happy. It became second nature, and now I do it unconsciously: I’m acutely aware of what I say and do and feel.

Does that mean I have not made mistakes? No, of course not, I still fuck up all the time. I’m very human, as fallible as everyone else. Probably even more so.

It’s a journey, as most things are.

A couple of days ago, Pico Iyer tweeted something Emily Dickinson wrote: To be worthy of what we lose is the supreme aim.

Indeed.

Written in July 2020.

I lived in five Indian towns before I was fifteen. One of them was the capital, but Delhi in the early 1990s still felt like a town, my mother tells me, so we’ll call it that. I grew up speaking Hindi at school and Tamil at home. I picked up some Gujarati in Jamnagar and some basic Khasi in Shillong, both of which I’ve forgotten. 

At that time if you’d asked me where home was, I would have showed you a drab ground floor flat on a rained-out, beautiful hill. I had claimed that hill as only children of a certain age can: I knew almost every corner of it, where mushrooms grew, which berries were the sweetest, and which after-rain puddle was deep. It was mine.

Only when we moved back south in the early 2000s did I get that somehow innate sense of Tamil-ness back. 

To grow up around your own people, speaking your own language, in the town where your father was born, where your grandfather asked your grandmother’s hand in marriage, not far from where your ancestors bred cattle and goats and worked the land for rice and where the sweat fell from their brows: is a privilege. It’s not something I take lightly. This soil bears the weight of my people’s history. It is mine. 

If at this time, you’d asked me where home was, I’d have showed you my gorgeous little seaside town.

When I moved to Pune, I rented a flat with French windows that caught the waning afternoon sun. I filled that hall with books, and watched cricket with my friends on weekends. Once when I was returning to it after 3 weeks or so abroad, I remember feeling overwhelmed at how it felt, with my books, my vase full of dried flowers, and the comfort it seemed to give me. This was the first time I lived alone, and had made a home. It was mine.

If at this time, you’d asked me where home was, I’d have showed the corner beneath the window, where I read, and I would have made you a cup of ginger tea.

I started to understand how home can be something you are born into, and also be something you make, or choose.

I’d never thought about home in this way before. The first time I started to do so was when the Citizenship Amendment Act or the CAA, was passed into law by the Indian parliament at the end of 2019, and protests broke out almost immediately. I also understood its relationship to the National Register of Citizens or the NRC, and how a combination of the two could be devastating for the secular, equal polity that India aims to be.

I was alarmed.

I had believed for a long time that the wonder that is our country is open to everyone. That this huge, vast, unknowable land is mine, of course, as it is also everyone else’s around me.

Of course I was wrong. As I grew up, I realised that India has worlds within worlds, I learnt about caste, about patriarchy, and had experiences of casteism and classism. I tried to educate myself about all of this; I'm still learning. But I had been corrected and jarred to come to terms with the realities of a national history which is by no means simple.

But I can’t turn away from it, from my nation’s incredible contradictions, and from my duty to its ideals, just because there are no easy answers. India is home. It is mine, its is yours, it is ours. It is, and I have believed this with all my heart, saare jahan se accha. I have to do what I can to make it a better place.

And if someone challenges its very founding ideals, I have to defend it too. I owe it to the freedom generation, I owe it to the joy and happiness and privilege of growing up where you belong, I owe it to my father who spent all his life in uniform. But most of all, I owe it to my people, our people.

If someone, in all these years, had dared to ask me to prove that I am who I am, I would have no understanding of how to answer. I probably would not have understood. I am Indian, that’s who I am. I have no notion of how to be something else, someone else.

To challenge someone’s idea of home is to strike at the core of a person’s identity, to strike at their sense of who they are. It's cruel, violent, callous. Which is why it was the first time I too felt compelled to get on the streets.

Because I know and understand what home is, and I cannot imagine what it would feel like to lose it.

A version of this was written in January 2020.

I’m moving again, and I'm thinking about my books.

Growing up, I’ve always looked for spaces where I could sit down and think. And to me, thinking means writing, and reading. In the different houses I’ve lived in, I’ve tended to find these spaces and sort-of claim them at specific times. At university, this was the volleyball courts at 6 am, where I could sip my coffee, a magazine open in my hand, look up at the hills, and think. At home, this was the terrace in the evenings, where, refreshed by gusts of southern breeze, I could be alone for a while.

But this time, in this flat, I’ve filled a room with books, made up a sitting corner with cushions, and got one of those writing pad-things. 

I love it.

I’ve always known I’ve wanted this, a room full of books; From the time my old man took me to book fairs in Pondicherry, from when I pestered him to buy me books from those Scholastic brochures at school, from when he enrolled me in a local lending library, to when my reading matured and found its own way, I’ve always wanted this.

My books are ridiculously eclectic, there being no real theme in the selection, perhaps my love for travel writing and Naipaul the only stand-outs. There are more unread books than read ones, also because I acquire books constantly. And I think I like that too.

As Nassim Taleb writes in Black Swan, "Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books."

I think I believe in that more than is good for me.

There is less than a month for me with this particular space, to enjoy it a little bit more, to make sure I remember it a little bit better. 

And I really hope to remember all this: the slowness of the ceiling fan, the droning of my refrigerator, and the Madras humidity that makes me sweat as I hunch over my laptop, trying hard to get a sentence right, hitting backspace over and over again.

Written in January 2020 in Madras.

In 2014, I was invited by my alma mater, Amrita School of Business, to write a short piece about my time there. This was for a popular MBA student forum, advertising of a kind. But I couldn’t say no. 

I remember missing the deadline, but write I did.

I’m reproducing a few passages of what I wrote, edited for context.

The business school you attend will not just give you an education and a degree, it will give you a worldview. So do all colleges, you might argue, but no, business school happens at the age when you become aware of the world around you, how things function and why they don’t, and you begin to question things. Thoughts become ambition, and a young mind tries to figure out its place in the world. It’s a very important time.

I went to study business at Amrita. I don’t remember making that choice very consciously; I had a few other pretty prestigious places to choose from. I just looked at the choices I had, and said this is where I’m going, to this lush green campus at the foot of the Western Ghats.

And it made me who I’m today – a left leaning, bookish professional with a healthy distrust of no-holds barred capitalism. But that’s just one thing Amrita moulded me into. It nurtured the romantic in me, made a writer out of a lover of words. It made me a walker rather than a runner. It made me conscious of history, geopolitics, and the need to give back to the not-so-fortunate. It rounded me up, chipped off my edges as best as it could, and sent me off into the world.

Was I a good student? Not really. Though I tried sometimes, when I had time off from the endless walks on evenings when the wind brought rain and shook the trees. But something did happen to me, in the roads and paths I walked on, in the mountain rain, in those corridors and classrooms. Something happened, and I changed, and I became ready to go face the world.

Amrita was where I was first humbled under the weight of all that I did not know, a humility I learnt to carry and use. Amrita was where I learnt that the world isn’t all about money and ways to make them. But most importantly, it was where I understood that learning to learn is an education in itself.

If what you read makes you think I was in love with the place, I was. But it wasn’t just that. It was where I felt I was first taken seriously, where the sometimes ridiculous ideas of an idealistic 22 year old were listened to with attention by people who cared, and encouraged to pursue. It was where I could sit on a rainy evening and discuss Amitav Ghosh, old cricket advertisements, and your term papers, all in one breath.

That place was where I first learned to be me.

For those of us like me who come from India’s small towns, confined by familial expectations and the narrowness of mind that sometimes characterises the Moffusil, universities are the first real intellectual spaces. They are where we are first free to express ourselves. Without the physical space that Amrita gave me to be, and become, I would never be the ambitious, confident professional I am today.

It is this physicality that I lament today, as education moves online. It’s all well and good for the city’s young people, but it sends those of my kind, from the backwaters and beyond, immediately on the backfoot, especially young female students. And in all this din about online education and the obsolescence of universities, everyone seems keen to forget about the value the physical space of the university provides.

Those who are making the loudest noise about this either seem to be from the west, whose generalised wisdom seldom translates well to the Indian context, or from folks who are invested in companies which sell education online.

Except online education can’t replicate even in part what universities actually give us.

Because if it was just a degree, a piece of paper, a credential, sure, the argument works. But our colleges and universities are more than that. They are spaces where the befuddled, narrow young mind first opens itself up to new ideas, new people, new surroundings, and has the option to transform all that potential into something meaningful. Where it learns what it can be, what is open to it, what it can achieve. Where it meets the world and learns something about itself it did not know before.

None of this will happen in front of a screen, none of this will happen tap-tapping on a laptop, none of this will happen on Slack or Teams, however much you improve the technology and the experience.

And finally, in an India that has changed, where differences are being weaponised every day, where the other is for some reason an enemy, we need places where our young people can just be. We need places where our disparate cultures can meet and engage in the conversation that characterises community and democracy. We need places where we can learn about each other without judgement, without the poison of our politics. 

The university campus may well be the last of such places in our beleaguered nation. We it need now more than ever.

Written in August 2020.

It's 2003, you are 16, and you are in your maths tuition. You’ve claimed your place in the middle of the side-bench and resumed whatever nonsense it is that keeps you laughing like a maniac through those years, and which cement your reputation as an obnoxious, loud troublemaker. You are having the time of your life when in walks a girl who stuns you, and the entire room, into silence. 

You are smitten. Your friends notice, they tease you.

You don't know that a year later, you'll hold her hand as you walk through a Pondicherry evening.

But for now, you are just quiet.

The blackboard has trigonometry on it, which you are good at. What you aren’t good at is differential equations. You hate those. But those come later.

Your red bicycle is outside; you'll have bhel puri on the way home, to watch World's Most Amazing Videos on AXN at 8.

Dinner is mom's delicious fish curry with dosas, and you tease your little sister for a bit before your old man whacks you.

You are reading Michael Crichton’s Timeline, a weird time-travel book which you love because you are a bit of a nerd and there’s a lot of shit in it that sounds like science.

There’s a match tomorrow and you make a mental note not to go to your slower delivery early in your over. It tends to get hit. But if you get it right on the 4th or 5th delivery, you are in with a good chance of hitting the stumps.

The book sags, and as you nod off, you think of her.

Life is good. For a while, at least.

Written in December 2019.

I miss chai.

It’s a ridiculous thing to be missing now, you might say. And you will be right. But for someone whose rhythms of life are dictated by it, normalcy is chai. I miss it a lot.

Not tea, mind you. Not tea, the posh, dipped in hot water variety. You can have it all you want. It’s a soulless, vapid, foul thing, tainting chai’s name worldwide, and I want nothing to do with it. What I miss is the proper Indian version - boiled with milk, ginger, cardamom or other spices, had with a biscuit or two, downed with conversation and snark. The ones which always, always remind you that though life may be tough, the breaks can be delicious.

And if you are wondering if I’m one of those annoying, insufferable chai tragics, make no mistake, I absolutely am.

There are two shops in the lane where I live, and both serve the lovely, fragrant, Irani chai I’m so fond of. One is a sit down, get-a-biscuit-too version, which I visit in the early mornings with a book. The other is the very Puneri, very rude, take-it-and-walk stand, which I love even more.

These days, every time I walk past their downed shutters, I feel a pang, and wish they were open. 

But my favourite, the one I take all my friends to, is not one of these two.

It’s further ahead, past the Aga Khan bridge and the Kalyani Nagar crossing, past the Mercedes showroom, and the cooperative bank building. It’s barely a shop - just benches and a table, but at 5 am everyday, you can see groups of people congregating for that heavenly little cutting chai they serve. I have never had better chai, and believe me, I have had it everywhere, from Delhi to Varanasi to Madras to Lucknow to even Ahmedabad (their Wagh Bakri blend is what first hooked me on to the stuff). Once I observed an older lady getting off a car with a notepad, and writing down how the chai was being made. No one batted an eyelid, she seemed a regular. Noticing me watching, she told me that that she had tried to do this multiple times, but never could get that taste right.

Both she and I agreed then that she probably never would, and solemnly drank up.

I remember this one monsoon morning when a couple of my best friends had moved into my flat for a short while, having been driven out of theirs. I woke up very early, as I’m used to, and found Ashwin up. We started talking. We talked for a long time, about products, marketing, life and cricket. First we talked at home, and then got on my motorcycle and zoomed around Pune’s streets. We downed 5 cups of chai at (at least) 3 different tapris, including the one I described above, my favourite. We talked and talked and talked. I don’t remember any part of our conversation, but I remember the chill in the air, how the morning felt, and all that flavour.

Well, almost, but isn’t that enough?

In Madras, the tea is not as good, but I know where to get a decent cup. Our office had tea made for us inside too, but that misses the point. You have to go outside, have a couple of bajjis lathed in oil that are definitely not good for you, and talk. It is a communal activity - an excuse to get together at 5 pm and enjoy the balmy (okay, hot) evening. 

There are so many stories I have like this, and I could go on, but I won’t. Except maybe that Delhi’s best little kullad is from the man opposite the Hanuman temple on Connaught Place. Go there and have it, if you can. In the winter, preferably. After a Sunday morning trip to the Daryaganj Book Market, even better.

I’ll leave you with this video I love. It’s a creative for Society Tea, made by the agency Black Swan Life. It illustrates everything that I feel and love about chai as our country’s national drink. I don’t think it’s ever been made official. But who cares? 

If that’s not true, nothing is.

Written in Pune in June 2020, during lockdown extensions.

The new flat isn’t done yet. Especially my room. I have to get some furniture, more bookshelves, but obviously that isn’t happening anytime soon. There are books strewn around the house, TV shows paused in-between, work is an effort to get to, and every look at the news makes me anxious. It is a very strange time.

It started raining mid-afternoon. The skies went dark, and the air felt cooler, lighter. I lay on the bed listening to raindrops pattering on the air conditioning unit and fell asleep.

When I got up, the evening still felt empty enough to try to fill up with something. So I dragged a chair out to the balcony, put my feet up on the large pot with the dead plant, and started Paul Theroux’s Riding the Iron Rooster, an account of his overland journey to China in the 1980s. I didn’t particularly take to his writing the last time I read him, and this seems as good a time as any to give people a second chance.

The rain fell, slowly then quickly, then becoming one of those comforting, calming drizzles.

My first-floor balcony has no view. It’s blocked by thick, heavy boughs of what we call the golden shower tree, the Indian laburnum. I know it from university, it is the tree under which I learnt to dream. The rain makes its yellow flowers look prettier. The tree’s branches fall lustily over the railing, obscuring the three money-plants that travelled with me from Madras.

A conversation drifted in from below, it grew darker, and the watchman went by, switching on the apartment’s corridor and stairway lights. I couldn’t hear any traffic, and this is unnerving to me. I’m used to the noise and the bustle of restless, modern India, and I have realised, several times during my trips abroad, that nowhere else can be home.

In the book, Theroux was talking about the greyness of suburban Paris and the ugliness of most of modern Belgium; he was looking through the windows of a train.

I understood what he was saying, but I couldn’t see, couldn't place the scenes. I was thinking about something else. 

On train journeys in India, I wait and look for a scene that’s very important to me. Now that I think about it, it’s laughable, but I always look for the railway crossing in a small town, or a the sight of the station-master’s musty cabin over a lonely platform. Behind this is usually the railway quarters, recognisable by the compulsory rows of bougainvillea and jacaranda and gulmohar and champa, and of course, laburnum. 

I lived in quarters like these once, when my maternal grandfather worked in a sugar-mill, and the house we had looked exactly like this. Later, my uncle, his son, lived in Perambur in Madras, where the Integral Coach Factory is. When I was visiting, I would try to find some time to drive over to the road where the quarters were, and there that familiar scene would be, all the trees and flowers I knew but could not name, a few Anglo-Indian aunties sitting under them.

Something about these scenes of domesticity, of stability, have always remained important to me.

I read on, and when night fell, I came in. I left the chair there. Maybe it’ll rain again in the morning.

Written March 2020, in Pune, during the first lockdown.

I've been writing and publishing essays on startup marketing for a few years now, only lately assembling it all in a newsletter.

Every time I’m ready to publish one of these, I look for pictures to put it up with. As most marketers know, there is a (rather lazy) template for such accompanying photographs: laptops (preferably MacBooks), tables with stationary artfully strewn around, a few good-looking people pointing and gesturing, whiteboards with intelligent-sounding nonsense on them, and so on. I usually choose one with the least distractions, and don’t think about it beyond that.

Sometimes during such banal searches, a picture suddenly comes up that stuns me. I stop and stare; I know this is special, I download it if I can. But it saddens me for a minute, this travesty: this is not the place this picture should be. Someone made this photograph, a piece of art evidently of some aesthetic value, and this is where it ends up, on a random stock photo site on the internet, for strangers like me to peddle ideas with.

That’s how it is with all art, you may argue. Who decides what has value, and what doesn’t, you may ask. And you will be right. There’s so much stuff out there in the world now, and there obviously isn’t that much time in our lives. 

Or is there? 

With the amount of pictures, and memes, and gifs we make and share, aren’t photographs, in whichever way we engage with them, the predominant idiom of our age? The smartphone’s democratisation of creation, access, and distribution means that it is easy to see, rather than hear or read, in these times of short attention spans. 

In Known and Strange Things, Teju Cole’s wondrous collection of essays, he writes:

Photography does not share music’s ability to be fully remade each time it is presented. It does not have film’s durational quality, in which the illusion of a present continuous tense is conjured. A photograph shows what was, and is no more.

In a world where the future is uncertain and the past is subject to an incessant wrangling over its meaning, it is in the photograph that a generation is trying to hold on to whatever is visible to them. That is why Instagram is so important now, that's why it probably will remain important for a while.

Near the end of Wolfgang Peterson’s 2004 movie Troy, Brad Pitt’s Achilles has something to say to Rose Byrne’s Briseis. It’s probably my favourite movie dialogue of all time, and I come back to it often:

I’ll tell you a secret. Something they don't teach you in your temple. The Gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again

In the moments that we are able to capture, share, and go back to, we have paused the past, defeated it for a second, even. Who we are in that photograph is who we will always be.

We will never be here again.

Written in November 2019. Photograph taken by Karthik Pasupathy in Yercaud.

I was rendered useless by a fever most of last weekend.

Most friends told me to read a book and relax, or watch a movie and distract myself, but I am smarter than that. I remember a fever a few years ago in Madras when I decided to read the World War Two book Flags of my Fathers. I was beyond 150 pages before it dawned on me that this was a bad idea: I now had pictures of battlefields and soldiers and big blasts in my head, and I wasn’t able to get rid of them. That night was filled with nightmares and visions of soldiers, wars, and blood. I swore to myself that night, delirious and sick, that this would be the last time I went near a book with even a hint of a fever.

But as with such things, the promise didn’t hold.

As I sat around the house recovering this last week, I started a book called Against a Peacock Sky, about a British anthropologist’s years in a Nepali village. More a researcher’s lived experience than travel literature in the strictest sense, it’s still a good look at rural life in a country then very unexplored. From an Indian perspective, what is familiar are the religious rituals, poojas, and certain superstitions; what’s different is the landscape. The fatal winters, the livestock which had to go south for the cold season, the travelling tourneys of traders from Tibet and the southern plains of Nepal, all of this was coloured, transformed, and lent sharpness by the vagaries of the cold.

I don’t know if it helped me recover, but it certainly didn’t give me nightmares.

As I finished it, I started thinking about this particular and peculiar couple: books and fevers. The easiest book-memory at that intersection for an Indian reader is Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome, his absolutely brilliant novel of history, mystery, and myth. Published in 1995, it is still one of the better science fiction novels India has produced. I won’t give away spoilers, but If you haven’t read it yet, please do. It celebrates a kind of mysterious open-ended storytelling that is somehow, and you’ll understand this when you read it, very Indian.

Another book that comes to my mind when I think about fevers is Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis, a novel I absolutely adore. It is in every way a Bombay book (a genre in itself, this). The sprawling city is both the hero & the villain of the story, a story that will take you to back alleys, to the politics of Mao's China and back to the changing metropolis, which keeps trying harder to blow itself up. Visions of colour, light & dark, good & evil, haunt the characters, but they have no idea which is which, and neither, as the reader, do you. I was talking about fevers, was I not?

In 2013, the first real winter I was experiencing in years, I was in Delhi, and the bitter wind would freeze me half to death every time I stepped out. Not very surprisingly, I ran myself into a week of high fever and general misery that I only remember parts of. However, sometime around that episode, I summoned enough willpower and stupidity to go see the Taj Mahal for the first time in my adult life. I wouldn’t have told you this as I chattered my teeth away that night, but looking at that great marble mausoleum in the winter moonlight was worth it; every coughing, sneezing, wheezing second of it.

I remember thinking what a terrible, almost unimaginable potion of pain, loss, ambition, and vanity someone must have drunk to even think of creating something like that.

But then, isn’t love a kind of fever too? Perhaps the most potent kind?

Written in November 2019.