Chaddi

 

You meet a lot of people in life. Some, you remember (i.e. Aruna Mehta, Class XI, SIES 87) , some you forget ( i.e. Aruna’s muscular boyfriend, who told me in detail how he could squeeze me into a toothpaste tube) and some you try to forget but you never do.  “Chaddi” ( we shall come to his nomenclature soon enough ) was nowhere in any of those categories.  Chaddi was like that innocent little mannerism you acquire by stealth. Like a casual shrug of the shoulders that becomes a habit or a small cough at the end of the sentence that becomes second nature and which before long , has become you.

Our paths crossed meaningfully in that hallowed institution called IIM, Ahmedabad.  An institution so radiating with the overwhelming brilliance of academic aura that most visitors entered squinting downward,  with extremely contracted pupils but Chaddi was to prove an eye opener.  We actually studied in the same engineering college too in the early 90s, where our paths seldom crossed. For, he was a year my senior. In an engineering senior’s frame of reference, Juniors were only oxygen consuming dumpsters to sell your journals to, unless you were a girl, in which case you ranked marginally above oxygen in terms of raison de être to attend college.

Chaddi, at IIM, was not a senior at all. He was however a philosopher , an intellectual , a batchmate …..and also a leading cause of ulcers.  He would elevate the casual humdrum post dinner dorm conversations of mates into a very deep intellectual debate

Yaya : “ Yaar, did you see Malini ? She was hot “

Bosky : “ Hot ? Dude, she was lava ….pure lava “

Chaddi : “ As per classical Spartan thought, postulates of  unrequited love were symbolic of an irrelevant methodicism “

Ahmedabad : “ Huh ?”

Chaddi : “ Of course , the neo classical platonic school turned this rubric of existential depth upside down…….Ha …what a hoot was Epiphanus , who saw the paradox of elitism in what was fundamentally a whataboutery of  civilisational sophistry “

By now, Chaddi had closed his eyes and taken off like a Hindustani classical singer in this babble. The audience would have had diminished rapidly to a few malaria carrying mosquitoes and the dormmates would be  silently tiptoeing back , shushing each other , with their hands held high ….with a cricket bat which would be used with the fullness of human strength, lest Chaddi open his blue-gray eyes, spot them and insist on continuing the conversation in his self conscious vernacular accent.

Chaddi was a 70 year old professor who had parachuted straight into the body of a young man.  A 70 year old who was real smart. In the first few courses involving probability , when the rest of us came back to the dorm with the cheer of captive men on a POW march, Chaddi used to trot back in to the dorm , hold forth and rapidly give out the answers

“Problem a , answer is  0.27, Problem b answer is root(3) – 7!/11! , Problem C  was ..Ha ..Ha ( heavy chuckling)  a trick problem. You  ignore Lot C as that is a subset of Lot D anyway and eliminating for the obvious..blah …blah “

I used to put on a brave face as my answer to all 3 questions was “Blue Hat” but this self esteem shattering show of radiance by Chaddi used to make me reach for the cricket bat real fast.

Time moved and we all  moved with it. Past the Malinis and the cricket bats and started the real life where the answer was neither 0.27 nor Epiphanus’s constructs. We still stayed in touch and as phone calls/emails got cheaper , we were increasingly speaking for no specific reason. Chaddi chose to work for a bank, where he stayed put for the next 25 years. Educating his colleagues against their will on the origin of money as an instrument of credit rather than value and disagreeing with Keynesian economics to expound on Friedrich Hayek’s monetary views. Having this anchor of security presumably allowed his worms of intellect to freely scour the libraries, the bookshops and increasingly the penchant for “la dolce vita”.

Late in his life the travel bug got to him, the way facial hair has  gotten to the Indian cricket team.  He spent time overseas in South Africa and Russia and came back a changed man, with an international outlook. He started doing the “propah” things. Enjoying steaks , sipping wines, zipping up his trousers etc. Somehow the 70 year old professor started aging in reverse and started enjoying life as a performer rather than just viewing it as an audience.  We went on travels together to Australia ( Read “All Over Down Under” on FB) . Even now, he hopes for  a road trip from London to Istanbul and is planning a drive around France post COVID.  (Psst, Don’t tell the French yet…it’s a surprise)

Needless to say, he is widely read. From Pushkin to P L Deshpande and from Karl Marx to Kalidasa. However unlike the rest, Chaddi does not merely read books. Like probability, he studies them and tries to understand their math. He is the sort, who bought Debonair in the 90s and read the entire magazine without even once having to hold it sideways. There was no flippancy in him. Every book , a subject to be studied and every song , a composition to be analysed.  But age seems to be making him into a young man finally. The intellectual force field which his presence once generated in abundance weakened enough to stop repelling the Untermensch. Everyone needs that one “Chaddi” in life. A final port of call when you do not find berth elsewhere for your ship of thought.

This brings us finally to an unstated but heavily pregnant question , “ Why was he called Chaddi ?”.  And “Why?” indeed. There were several other honourable equivalents like “Phuddu” , “ Goti” , “Naada” but he was christened as “Chaddi”, way back on his first day at IIM. To be honest , I do not know it either and one day, when he was done explaining to me the carbon content of water in Highland and Lowland whiskies, I asked him “ Why were  you called Chaddi ?”. He took a deep breath, closed his blue-gray eyes and sighed. Said he,

“The  sartorial superficiality of the self reflects but humanity’s mirrored view of the social ennui” ..and would you believe it , I just could not find a bloody cricket bat fast enough.