I Am Now In The Local News

Some fifteen days or more ago, shortly after I had published the post "To Helga, With Love... " which contained the ditty:

Life without Helga,

Is really mighty fine,
We're three men on a footpath,
And things are quite divine.


If Helga had been here,
I'd be getting screwed,
She'd take the fucking beer,
And throw it down the tube.

Well, shortly thereafter I found a huge amount of public attention focussed on me here in Pondicherry. It seemed that a local Tamil language eveninger had published a report on me and my companions - the saintly sadhu and Abdullah, the one-legged beggar - with the headline that I was a "retired Indian Police Service Officer" now living on a footpath.


To all who cared to listen, I took pains to explain that I RESIGNED from the IPS right here in Pondicherry in 1986 - and that my next job was as an Editor of The Economic Times in Nude Elly, a job that is much more powerful than any IPS officer can ever hope to be. I also told them that I resigned from this editorship - because my editorial against Sonia Gandhi had been published in totally garbled form.


Later, a TV team came to interview me - and two local journalists also interviewed me in depth. The TV interview was however truncated midway because they said their camera battery was dead. They said they would return in half-an-hour - but they never did.


In both Pondicherry as well as NIMHANS, Bangalore, I met ordinary people who said they had seen me on the Tamil SUN TV channel. 


Now, this good man, Germain, who runs this Internet outlet where I have been working every day for over a month or two now, tells me that the Tamil papers also published an interview with MY MOTHER!


That's why I put a "Cover of The Rolling Stone" as the illustration accompanying this post, for the song goes:

Gonna Buy Five Copies For My Mother

Anyway, I arrived here last morning, and its been quite relaxed. Just me and the sadhu - and the Good Firemen who help when it rains.


This morning, as I sat on my perch looking at the world pass by - children on motorcycles and scooters; children crammed into auto-rickshaws on the way to school - I noticed that a good many people stopped to wave me a friendly hello. In fact, while at the tea-shop this morning, two young boys in sports outfits, headed for a game of badminton, SALUTED me!


I am very happy to be here in Pondicherry - with so much LOVE from The People. I hope that my four lectures scheduled for Pondicherry University work out soon - and I can repay your love with KNOWLEDGE that will be EXTREMELY USEFUL to you - and your children's children's children.


But all I have to say is that if you want to know me - then you must interview ME. Not my mother. Not some cop.


I conclude with an old Louis Armstrong song:


As I walk down the street,
Seems every one I meet,
They give me a friendly hello,
I guess I'm just a lucky so-and-so.


The birds in every tree,
Are all so neighbourly,
They sing wherever I go,
I guess I'm just a lucky so-and-so.