After an enjoyable stay in my sons newly acquired apartment I returned on Sunday, Oct. 12. While in Bangalore I spent an evening with my old classmates from CET who have settled down there. We met at the residence of Robin, a successful industrialist who made transformers in his youth and added for pleasure a hotel to his empire recently. Jayvant Rao had a long career as an international corporate executive, beginning his career in 1962 as a Management Trainee with English Electric in UK and finally retiring after company mergers on the Board of Alstom. There were two ex soldiers, General John and Brigadier Joseph, Gopi who retired at Board level in BHEL, Stanu who had a great career with Kolkatta as his base and Iqbal who worked for IBM and chose to retire to Bengaluru. As I was alone the party was stag but Mridula proved once again that she was a good cook. The appam was one of the softest I ever ate. Mridulamaya appam indeed. Enough to drink for single malt enthusiasts like Jayvant and Teetotalers like me, and enough to eat for chicken mongers like most Keralites and vegans/vegetarians Bengal-style like me. These get togethers have now become a practice, whenever a classmate visits a town those who have settled down there get together. That is in addition to get togethers on fixed days every month, like our meeting in the Trivandrum Club every first Wednesday. Of course it does not happen when I visit Kochi, it is reserved for the rare birds! I looked up a few relatives too. AirCommodore Warki, former BASF chief for SEAsia Thampi and Thomas Mathew who served the WWF deserve special mention because we had very interesting conversations about their respective fields. The common point of course was Modi. I recall an interesting experience narrated by Mammen Mathew many years ago. He was a guest at the Buckingham Palace. When he was introduced Prince Philip who is also famous as the Prince of Gaffes asked the Chief Editor of Indias largest language daily whether he belonged to the same family as the famous Mathew of WWF. This Thomas Mathew is the son of the late N T Mathew, world renowned statistician and father of the branch of Statistics called Cultural Statistics. The old man Mathew used to live here in Trivandrum. He was almost as holy and as impractical as Jesus Christ, forgive the blasphemy. On Sunday I attended the service at our Cathedral on Queens Road. The priests have a habit of asking me to preach the sermon if they spot me in the congregation and the priest here was no exception. I preached on the Gospel reading for the day, on the impossibility of serving two masters simultaneously. And when I came back it took two days to clear my accumulated snail mail.
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 02:26:50 +0000
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