My Publicized Life

My earliest memories of you are a little vague...intermingled as they are between your first two houses, one in Aspirin Gardens and the other in West Mambalam. Memories of a model MiG plane, the drives to the beach in the Matador van, the same Russian slideshows that you showed us year after year after much begging and pleading on our behalf, your prized coin collection from which you invariably let us keep a coin or two each, the anecdotes about your interactions with Russians. In fact, despite later events, I guess I owe you, more than anyone else, my lifelong fascination for that country. And then, there was the chess. So far as the rest of the family was concerned, you were the undisputed King of Chess. I cannot recall how often the phrase "Nobody plays chess like Balakrishnan thatha" would pop up in family circles. You knew the fact and were proud of it. I still recall your earliest lessons, where you meticulously showed me how the pieces moved and taught me to count the...

Do you ever feel like you're made up of multiple layers? Each layer as vivid and real as the next. Like so many of these abstract concepts, it’s easy to understand but hard to explain. It's like there's several different me's inside of me. The closest (and most cliched) example I can give is of Russian ‘Matryoshka’ dolls...the ones where you open one up to find another, smaller replica inside, and so on so forth ad infinitum. And the different me's take turns to come up to the surface. While there's one on the outside, interacting with the world, imparting his wisdom to the poor sodden souls who have the misfortune of stumbling across him, the others sit inside fretting, fuming and generally building up steam, until one of them finally breaks through and has his moment in the limelight. Kind of like how the cute little alien breaks out of Sigourney Weaver and trashes around...but a lot less visual. For instance, it’s the travel aficionado part of me who's cu...