ExpertDabbler

Time and again, I am exposed to this famous dialogue from various damagers aka managers who have crossed my life.

Damager: So, you are already working on this right? how long would it take to finish this task?

Me: Hmm.. I’m already half-way through this.. should take 20 more days.

Damager: Yeah, but yesterday I attended a senior manager level meeting, the business unit is targeting for XX,X, we need to complete this by 10 days.

Me: But I am afraid it’s gonna take 20 more days anyway. We gave this estimate when we started and the BU agreed. I’ve worked on similar projects and it’s a realistic estimate.

Damager: That’s fine! see, we need to come up with creative solutions!! Think out of the box! You are saying 20 days if you alone work on it, right? Leta add more resources! What is X doing? I think he is free for now. We can use him.
That way 1 x 20 is the same as 2 x 10. We can reach the 10 day time line.

< I would’ve crossed half the bridge alone, and now this guy says ‘add more resources’. >

Me: (within myself: Naan enna sengal adukkara velaya panren… che..kothanaar ai ellam damager a potta ipdi than… ) But I’ve already done half the work, adding more people now will only mess things up! I need to spend time talking about this project and hand hold X before he comes up to speed. All this will take time!

Damager: No no no, do not jump to conclusions. See you are resisting this idea even before trying this out!

Epilogue: Both guys would’ve spent 20 days and it typically takes a few days more to finish the task. Andha payyanavadhu nimmadiya irundhirpaan. Sani oruthanai mattum dhaan pidichadhu nu irundhirkum!

That ‘adding more resources is the one stop solution to all problems’ is a myth among desi IT project damagers that cannot be condemned enough.

And I used to wonder how things work at damager’s personal life.

Damager to his wife: Darling! It’s been 3 years since we got married, we are already behind schedule, we need to plan for a kid fast. That’s there in my 2010 roadmap. H1 goals.

Damager Wife: What’s there to plan? It takes minimum 9 months anyway.

Damager: No No No, we need to push up things, 9 months is the time line only if you try alone.

Damager Wife: What do you mean??? Me alone?? How can…You’ve lost all your brains ever since you became a damager!!

Damager: I know.. che..no no..what I mean is, I will add more resources.. two more women along with you and the eqn is 1 x 9 = 3 x 3 = 9, so our baby will be out by Dec 2009, ahead of schedule!!!

I am a total alien to the world of Siddhars and Siddhar samadhis. But my uncle is a firm believer and has been visiting various Siddhar samadhis for the past four years. And thanks to my uncle I had a very interesting ‘full moon’ night about a fortnight ago.

The place my uncle took me to is called ‘Singampunari’. Singampunari is a small town just 5Km off the newly four-laned Madurai-Trichy highway before Melur, if one comes from Madurai. It takes about an hour’s drive from Madurai to reach this place. This place also falls on the Dindigul - Karaikudi route. More importantly Singampunari is the place of a famous siddhar called ‘Muthuvaduganar swamigal’ who attained samadhi in 1833. His believers have built a small temple for him in Singampunari.

The place is by no means sophisticated. The temple as such is unremarkable. But the specialty of this temple is that the pujas are conducted for this siddhar every full moon night. The puja starts at about 11 PM in the night. with 23 abhishekams to the idol. It takes about two hours for the abhshekams and 1008 ‘potri om’s. The prasadhams, the remains of whatever fruits, and flowers that devotees bring as their offerings, are distributed after the puja (well after 1 AM). Entry is free. All are treated more or less the same there - no balcony or box tickets business. I could see tired people inclining themselves on the temple walls as the abhishekams were performed. Most of the folks looked like working class. The fact that they catch public transports to come to this place after a full day’s work in the middle of the week well into mid-night for this occasion conveys their belief.
In that sense places like these are antithesis to the ISKCONS and Sripurams. This trip also made me realize that there are more people who believe in siddhars than we might assume. My uncle tells me apart from a series in sakthi Vikatan, there is not much media coverage of these places.

We returned back to my native at about 3 AM the next day.

While going to Singampunari, my uncle also showed me the samadhi of one great ‘Kuzhandhai anandhar’ in Kaalavaasal in Madurai.

Why would people visit a Siddhar samadhi in the midddle of nowehere, sacrificing a night’s sleep? Apparently, worshipping Siddhar samadhis leads one to his or her true spiritual guru. At a more material level, worshipping Siddhars is believed to be an effective shield from harmful planetary afflictions. I am not aware of any authoritative literature on Siddhars. I could find a few websites but not sure if I can rely on them completely. Much of the information on Siddhars seems to be shrouded in mystery.

At one level I do see a feeble connection between the Dargahs and the Siddhar samadhis. Loosely defined, both are Samadhis of supposedly saint-like souls though ‘wahhabism’ stoutly opposes Darga worship in Islam. I think Siddhar as a concept transcends religious boundaries. One can argue that even Jesus Christ had the elements of Siddhar, I suppose. All in all, the trip made me more curious about Siddhars, which I think is only a good thing.

Have you ever been to Sri puram, India’s second golden temple? Now, please let us let’s brush aside relevant pointers like the need for golden temples considering the number of malnourished children in India, the very Indian obsession with gold, etc. My mom was very keen to see this ‘thanga kovil’- she was under immense pressure from relatives who had traveled all the way from down south and managed to visit. I suspect she had endured the ‘Ennadhu madras la irundhuttu innum parkalaiya?’ dialogue more than she liked. Yesterday we decided to put those questions to rest and off we went to Sri puram. It was an interesting experience though this again reinforced some of my beliefs on temples.

First the positives, to conceive a project of such scale, persuade investors/donors to part with their hard earned money, mobilize human resources to execute the plan, and put in place systems and processes for operations and maintenance on a daily basis requires tremendous, I repeat, tremendous organizational skills and enterprise. I am sure those behind the project have that ability in abundance. This project has pushed Vellore into the limelight. I guess lot many families are making a living out of this enterprise. I’ll bet Vellore’s GDP, inflation, real estate prices, black money and all such things would’ve gone way up ever since this project became operational.

If you noticed, the above paragraph might have looked like a straight lift out of a Forbes cover story on Ratan Tata’s dream car project. But that was intentional. The reason being that was the way I saw this whole thing. Setting up a venture of such scale deserves respect, but that’s just about it. To me, Sri Puram is more like a corporate, five star-ish theme park leveraging the Hindu form of worship than a temple. What I find even more curious is the predictability in which such religious theme parks have spring up in our country in the recent past. This increasingly looks like a model which will never fail in India : Build a crazily fantastic structure on an insanely huge budget, fix an object of worship inside, a person is made the architect of all this endeavor, the person becomes a god-man, unleash media hype, and lo, you have an institution which would take on an MNC in terms of organization strength, and revenue flow.

‘Amma’ is the celebrity here. ‘Amma’ is smiling in giant posters with hands raised as a way of blessing the masses from all possible directions inside the premises (360 deg. Blessing). ‘Amma’ runs schools, hospitals, anna dhaana schemes; I suspect ‘Amma’ will soon start engineering, medical and dental colleges, maybe a B school later on , and then integrate it all under, ‘Narayani’ University, will go on to plant thousands of trees, will meet CM/Deputy CM on a regular basis and so on. In India, its amazing that in some ways, the more we change, the more we stay the same.

‘Old is the real gold when it comes to temples’ is my take; And the less corporatization and the institutionalization of Hindu religion the better. I wish I’d taken my mom to the magnificent Thiruvanamalai which she is yet to see. One glad thing was that even mom is with me on this assessment. ‘Ellam paisa dhaan…’ was her assessment when we were made to walk into several stores which sell everything from gold coins to silk sarees for Narayani when ones own bags and cell phones are required to be deposited outside.

Sri Puram is an outing spot for the rich and affluent with religious pretensions.

What is the common factor between Thol Thiruma valavan and Ivan Pavlov ? This rhetoric might seem silly at first but dig deep and you will realize that there is indeed a common factor - the immense power of association and conditioning.

Thiruma’s posters in Chennai is usually associated with LTTE, V Prabhakaran in identical laughing poses, next to each other. Below that will be the lines ‘Thennaatu Prabhakaran’. There is also a ‘Che Guevera’ variant doing the rounds.

Our local politicians may be uneducated but they are shrewd enough to adopt a Russian’s scientific genius before the average educated Kumars and Rahuls even become aware of it. However, here comes another twist. None of this LTTE association was depicted in the posters that I saw in Madurai, I think it has been downplayed intentionally in areas where there is a risk of the tactic backfiring. Only the community angle is projected in Madurai hoardings as far as I could see. Talk about localizations and adaptations of brand strategy!

What if, say 25 years down the line, Thiruma gets to be a bigger force to reckon in TN? I bet most would associate him with LTTE as naturally and effortlessly as one would associate saliva with tasty food. And 100 years down the line, some one might read volumes on how the ‘Thennaatu Prabhakaran’ fearlessly fought for tamil eelam.

I am sure Pavlov would have done a complete anga pradhakshinam in his grave if only he had heard about hack implementations of his principles like ‘Thenagathu Gandhi’, ‘Karuppu MGR’, Thennagathu Arasar of Madurai (post independence era).