Hemantha Kalam: May 2021

Friday 14 May 2021

Hemantha Kalam - 94 'Calculative, Callous and Charming?'

It was sometime in June-July 1990. We boarded the luxury bus of the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC or Karnataka Rajya Rasta Saarige Samsthe) and settled down comfortably to do the approximate 560 kms of journey before us. I would have preferred a train but my colleague dear Mr. Nagaraj had advised that bus journey would be as comfortable. Being in the prime of the youth it didn’t really matter for me though.

At about 5.00 pm the bus started from the Majestic Bus Centre in Bangalore and rolled out smoothly. It was a journey that I was looking forward to. My knowledge of Kannada language at that point of time was zero. So I was oblivious of the mild conversations taking place in Kannada, Konkani and Tulu languages among the other passengers. As always I was drinking in the passing out scenes that appeared through the bus window till it became dark and I couldn’t see clearly anymore. It was monsoon season and once we passed Peenya, it started drizzling slowly and by the time we reached Hiriyur it graduated into a steady downpour. It was cosy in the clean bus. KSRTC buses by comparison have been cleaner than buses of their peers elsewhere in the country. At least they used to be, as I haven’t travelled by KSRTC buses after 1994.

I think we stopped on the outskirts of Davanagere for dinner and slowly all the passengers, including me, dozed off. When we woke up it was about 5.30 am and we had reached Panaji or Panjim as it is referred to in the state. We got into a lodge (how sad that I don’t remember the name of the place) whose rooms looked like those out of a colonial house and had a little nap just in time to wake up for the breakfast.

Post breakfast we hit the market on our work. The next day we boarded a ferry to cross the beautiful Mandovi or the Mahadayi River. It was the first time for me to visit Goa and also board and ride a mechanised ferry. In my native state of Andhra Pradesh I had crossed rivers on manually oared ferries but this was an experience for me where I saw motorbikes and cars being ferried across. I was enjoying this new experience and in less than 10 minutes, we hit the other bank. If I remember the other side was Bardez and from there we needed to travel to Mapusa for our work in an auto-rickshaw for about eight kilometres and the time taken was about 15-20 minutes.

While on our way, I was savouring the beautiful sights of the river Mandovi to our right and the terrain was rocky which is typical of the west coast. When we were passing a particular stretch at Porvorim, the auto-driver made sure that we didn’t miss a restaurant and pointed it to us saying “look at that O’Coqueiro restaurant which has now become very famous. Know why? That’s the restaurant where CS was arrested in April 1986 (apparently on his 42^nd Birthday) after his daring escape from the high secure Tihar Jail, India, just within a few days of escape.” (https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/offtrack/story/20041213-goan-restaurant-uses-statue-of-tourist-killer-charles-sobhraj-to-promote-tourism-788874-2004-12-13)

The incident, for no reason, has been filed in my memory.

Now during this compulsory home stay for over 14 months, for lack of any other entertainment, I have taken up to watching varieties of programmes on the Netflix and a couple of such are ‘The Serpent’ series and the Hindi film ‘Main aur Charles’; made with CS as the central subject.

Well, CS is none other than Charles Sobhraj. It is understood from several sources on the internet that he was born in 1944 at Saigon (presently Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam, as Charles Gurumukh Sobhraj, the son of Sobhraj Hotchand Bhaonani, a Sindhi international tailor from India and a French-Vietnamese lady Tran Loang Phun. It appears that he didn’t get much of his biological father’s attention right from his childhood and this might have had an impact on him.

In any case, Charles Sobhraj became notorious for the several murders that he apparently committed in several countries that included India, Nepal, Thailand and other crimes in countries like Greece. He is known as ‘The Bikini Killer’ as the corpses of many of his victims were apparently found in their bikinis and ‘The Serpent’ due to his ability to slip through the fingers of the law.

Apparently, several countries had look out notices and warrants issued for his capture. While Police from several countries were kept busy in working towards his capture, one person was persistent - a Dutch Diplomat in Bangkok Mr. Herman Knippenberg – and who seems to have worked tirelessly in gathering evidence against Charles Sobhraj, who then was operating from Pattaya, Thailand as a gem dealer.

Eventually Sobhraj’s luck appears to have run out and he had been arrested in India to spend time in Indian Jails for about 21 years between 1976 (when I was just getting out of college) and 1997.

It is strongly suspected that his flamboyant escape from Tihar Jail was a well orchestrated one and facilitated too. Theories have been afloat that Thailand had issued a notice for his capture and extradition, eventually leading to a death sentence. However, the notice/warrant has a life of only 20 years and if he can escape being extradited to Thailand after serving his sentence in India, he can escape death. It is firmly believed that his escape from the Tihar Jail and eventual re-capture in Goa was a carefully calculated scheme by him making the police just roles in his drama. As desired by him, he got his punishment extended and by the time he was released after fully serving his sentence, the Thai warrant apparently lapsed.

After release from the Indian Jails he seems to have taken a French citizenship. Evidently he is an excellent negotiator who sold his photographs, his story, his time for interviews and whatever, at very lucrative if not stupendous prices. Books have been written about him and films have been taken with him and his life experiences as subjects.

Yet, for some reason, known only to him, he returned to Nepal in 2003 where the notices and cases against him have not been fully closed and he has been arrested and presently is serving his time in a Kathmandu Prison ever since. Meantime he has raised a family it appears.

His story appears to be having all the ingredients to raise anyone’s intrigue – charm, trust, greed, intellect, intelligence, efficiency, inefficiency, luck, dogged determination and grit. And what more, it is international!

How many of the crimes attributed to him were actually committed by him would, perhaps, be known only to him. However, apart from being a hyperglot (it is believed that he know some 14 languages) and suave, that he was calculative, callous and charismatic seems to be beyond any doubt or debate. The internet is filled with content of such stories about him and so does the film and the Netflix programme.

Well, what do you say? Till then,

Krutagjnatalu (Telugu), Nanri (Tamil), Dhanyavaadagalu (Kannada), Nanni (Malayalam), Dhanyavaad (Hindi), Dhanyosmi (Sanskrit), Thanks (English), Dhonyavaad (Bangla), Dhanyabad (Oriya and Nepalese), Gracias (Spanish), Grazie (Italian), Danke Schon (Deutsche), Merci (French), Obrigado (Portuguese), Shukraan (Arabic and Sudanese), Shukriya (Urdu), Sthoothiy (Sinhalese) Aw-koon (Khmer), Kawp Jai Lhai Lhai (Laotian), Kob Kun Krab (Thai), Asante (Kiswahili), Maraming Salamat sa Lahat (Pinoy-Tagalog-Filipino), Tack (Swedish), Fa'afetai (Samoan), Terima Kasih (Bahasa Indonesian) and Tenkyu (Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea), Malo (Tongan), Vinaka Vaka Levu (Fijian)

Hemantha Kumar Pamarthy

Chennai, India

Sunday 2 May 2021

Hemantha Kalam - 93 'How I ended up as a writer too'

Thanks to COVID-19 (Corona Viral Disease-2019) there is almost a military routine lined up at home. Anything that comes in from outside, except milk, needs to be quarantined and thus I am given the newspapers to be read two days hence. Inevitably I am behind the ‘latest and hot news’ by two days, when it should have become cold. One such late but news that is quite important to me triggered my thoughts on what prompted me to take up writing, making me end up a writer as well. There have been several reasons for this.

At school, I was frequently taking part in the bi-lingual essay writing competitions and have won considerable prizes rather consistently. The praise that comes along with the prizes was sort of, er, intoxicating. Yes, you would notice that in this era of self projecting social media exposures, even very humble people like me are forced to shun off the modesty.

Apart from the essay writings, some of my articles were being published in the primary school magazines too. Of course those subjects were very mundane such as describing a cow or a mango tree etc. And right from school I had been a bi-lingual writer – writing in English and my mother tongue. And those days I was credited mostly as ‘P. Hemanta Kumar’ and not with my present elongated name which came to me much later due to some clerical gimmickry at my high school.

Somewhere in the latter half of 1972 I was relating a tiny half paged funny story to my neighbour who was just bringing out a children’s magazine called ‘Bommarillu’ in my mother tongue. He got my story published (he wrote it himself) and paid me a princely fee of Rs.5.00 (valued at about Rs.200 today) for the story. Thus my first earning was when I was about 16 years old and from a literary work literally. I am not counting the earnings that were given to me by my uncles and aunts whenever they used to visit our home.

Between 1972 and 1984 there was a lull in my writing activity. My maternal uncle and also my mentor in photography Late Jonnavitthula Purnaiah Sastry always used to goad us (his nephews and nieces) telling us that when we read so much, if we don’t attempt writing, we were wasting our education. He never appeared to have thought of or worried about the talent portion of it. Apparently this worked silently at the back of my mind, in a latent manner.

Meantime, the travel bug hit me after I acquired my first camera sometime in 1980-81. I was virtually using all my Leave Travel Assistance (LTA) from my company, sell part of my leave to en-cash the same for buying film rolls and used to travel. Over time, the hitherto dormant writing bug also started working again.

So sometime around 1986-87, I wrote a quick article and titled it ‘Will Rayalaseema become an Isuka Seema?’ (Will Rayalaseema become a desert? – Isuka is sand and Seema is area in Telugu and Rayalaseema is the south-western portion of Andhra Pradesh state of India). The article tried to elucidate the plight of the people in the water scarce and impoverished place reeling under severe drought conditions at that point of time.

But I didn’t know to which magazine I should send this article to.

I don’t remember for sure, but my favourite and regularly read magazine ‘The Illustrated Weekly of India’ seemed to have stopped publishing by then. That left me with little choice than to send to some newspapers or another magazine called ‘Caravan’.

Interestingly, I have to mention here a side story. The publishers of ‘Chandamama’ brought out a magazine called ‘The Heritage’ from January 1985 (but which closed down in December 1989 exactly after bringing in the 60^th issue, for lack of feasible patronage). This magazine was to showcase everything about the culture and heritage of India in its entirety. And I was living within a mile’s distance of the publication place.

So I had sent my impeccably and neatly typed out ‘manuscript’ (I always squirm when writing the word ‘manuscript’ for typewritten or computer printed matter) along with several relevant photographs, to the editor. From that day I was looking forward to receiving their response and after a month of waiting for their complimentary copy of ‘The Heritage’ with my article published inside. Not to emphasise, I have to mention that we have been subscribing for that magazine at home, right from its inception.

However, after about a month, my manuscript and my photographs were received at home by my mother from the postman. When I came home from my work and eagerly opened the envelope, I was disappointed to see my manuscript and photographs and a small paper, the size of a ‘Postit’ slip, on which it was written that while my article was good, it should have been sent to some news magazine as it had more news value and not to a specialised magazine such as ‘The Heritage’. At the end of the message there were the initials ‘MD’, that of the editor, I presumed as I knew that the managing director of the company for sure would not have meddled with the subject of story selection.

MD could have simply ignored my manuscript or just returned it without saying a word. But he had taken the trouble of showing me the path and thus he became my guide star.

Accordingly I repacked the article and the photographs, changed the covering letter and sent it to the fortnightly magazine ‘Frontline’ honestly, with little hope of it being accepted for publication. But from that day I was buying the magazine’s issues to see whether my article was published or not.

Only a writer could experience the agony and the ecstasy of waiting to hear, for being rejected and her/his article being accepted for publishing. I had abundant experience of all these three dynamics.

About a month later, lo and behold, I could see my article in Frontline albeit under a changed title of ‘Thirsty Rayalaseema’ and also tweaking a bit here and there in the story. Trust me – first I couldn’t believe my eyes. Having studied in a slum, in a hardly respected school, to getting my article published in a most respected and reputed magazine of the times was a matter to be celebrated – at least I thought so. I went out to buy the copy during lunchtime at my work. I silently came back to my seat with the magazine, though I was literally bubbling with joy. No recommendation, just my work and my effort has fructified, on its own. Later I just showed it to a few of my close colleagues but interestingly I remember that it hardly evoked any great response I had expected from them. It was like ‘oh you got it published yeah, OK good!’

Having thus started, I found my works were later published in ‘Swagat’ the in-flight magazine of Air India and Indian Airlines, Newspapers like ‘The Hindu’, the ‘Deccan Herald’, ‘Andhra Pradesh Times’ and in Telugu magazines like ‘Andhra Prabha Sachitra Vaara Patrika’ and ‘Priya Datta’. My articles on management were published by ICFAI University both in their magazines as well as in their compendiums.

In Telugu, I have to say that while my writing is influenced by the eminent Telugu author Late Palagummi Padmaraju (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palagummi_Padmaraju) it certainly has been shaped and moulded by Late Vakati Panduranga Rao (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vakati_Panduranga_Rao) who was editing the ‘Andhra Prabha’ weekly. My interaction with him has been mostly over phone as he was in Hyderabad and I was in Bengaluru at that time. Yet, he had trust in my work and spoiled me by never editing whatever I wrote for him for four years between 1990 and 1994. My work for him, on lesser known places of Andhra Pradesh was mostly published as a ‘Centre Spread Photo Feature!’ And I had a real good fan-mail that was regularly published in the magazine every week. That’s a different high!

Emboldened by the slow but steady acceptances of my work, I approached Mrs. Susan Ram, who was then with Oxford University Press (OUP) as an editor and requested her to commission me for writing a book on lesser known places of Andhra Pradesh. She was kind to give me an appointment in her office only to politely tell me that they cannot commission any work unless I bring at least a synopsis of my writing. After about 35 years or so, I am yet to make and take that synopsis to her. Meanwhile I heard that she had left OUP and also the country.

She also was curious about the period (full stop) after my name and before my surname which I used to have those days. Only then did it dawn on me as to what an unnecessary period it was. Promptly I removed the period from my name but my signature, which I cannot change, continues to have a period after my name and before my surname. Man lives with some anomalies and so do I, with several of them, alright.

I made some money through writing, but it never was enough to sustain me as a livelihood though. The journey continues and I am curious to see how many different turns it is likely to take for me.

Meantime, coming back to the news in the newspaper that triggered this blog, it was that Mr. Manoj Das, (MD) the man who had put me on the right path in writing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manoj_Das) had apparently breathed his last on the 27^th April, 2021. May he find the truth and peace and may he attain satgati. Today I still hold almost all the copies of ‘The Heritage’ edited by him in my collection among various others – I may be one of the few or even only one to be holding them. Now the collection should serve me as a good remembrance.

And as I write this, I realise as to how much we owe to others knowingly and/or unknowingly for existing in this society, as I do to these great writers and so many others who I came in contact with and who came in contact with me in this tiny winy life of mine.

So, to all of them and you, my

Hemantha Kumar Pamarthy

Chennai, India