Amar Chitra 'katthe'

It’s the first day of college and we’re all sitting in the quadrangle having just introduced ourselves to one another and Bharath decides to open his oversized food trap and comments – “ I don’t know why people are so addicted to the internet. I have never found anything interesting on the internet.” Knowing Bharath today, few people are going to believe that these words actually emerged from the great katthe/gardhi himself but back then Bharath was … well Bharath was just this silly little kid, a mere shadow of what he would turn into over the next four years. It goes without saying that these words of ‘wisdom’ disturbed me immensely which lead me to retort in a slightly inappropriate manner especially considering that we’d all just met.

If you’re wondering how it came to be that Bharath was christened katthe/gardhi, well, here’s the story. Back in the days when caller ID phones were still a novelty, I got a cheap Chinese made one installed in my room. During a visit, Bharath had to attend to a call from his mom and unfortunately received the call in ‘hands free’ mode. Bharath’s mom seemed extremely distressed about a certain gardhi which had escaped from its pen that morning without telling her where it was going and after a torrent of choice abuses, she decides to stick with just gardhis in her sentences. All that us shell shocked friends of Bharath, sitting around him could hear were random Telugu words punctuated by a ‘gardhi’ every two words or so. Well, that was the first and last time, we ever heard Bharath getting verbally assaulted by his mom as he was clever enough to receive calls in the drawing room from that day forth.

Having had the privilege of knowing several people who’d studied at Christ college it has often bothered me to no end when I'd try to figure out how on Earth Bharath could have passed out of both Christ school and college untarnished by the bad bad world and with all of his innocence intact. I still remember the day we forced Bharath into watching his first XXX porn flick. Well, the dude rather liked it but he spoils the atmosphere 10 minutes into the video by asking a typical ‘gardhi’ question – “Do they really do that in real life?” Nishant and I nearly passed out laughing. Then, the genius cracks us up even further by alleging that it’s all ‘morphed’ and rendered using a computer. I have never seen Nishant look as dumb founded as he looked that day when these words splattered out of Bharath’s toothy aperture !!! Later that night, we actually had a serious discussion as to how and when we’d have to tell the kid about the birds and the bees so as to facilitate the propagation of his clan… Flash forward a couple of years and we're all relying on Gardhi for the latest videos which for some reason only he could lay his hands on ... sigh ... We knew then, that we'd created a monster!

Gardhi’s a nice guy and all but he’s got a destructive streak. I’ve never seen Harsha ever lose his temper with anybody but even he blew his top and told Gardhi something to the effect of – “Shut the f*** up for five minutes and sit in one corner.” One incident in this regard which is particularly hilarious involves the kid removing a solitary hair from the back side of a very pissed Manju. How and why Bharath noticed that one strand of hair that had never hurt anything or anybody in its entire life and that too in the middle of Maths class lacks any kind of plausible explanation but the fact is that one moment, the teacher’s teaching us about some arbit transforms and the next moment, the entire last two rows are in splits after Manju lets out a heart rendering scream of horror on realizing that he’d just been ‘violated’ by Gardhi …

The dude’s strong as an ox. There’s even proof of him molesting poor Kaddi on tape shortly before he nearly decapitates yours truly with a take-down from hell. Bharath’s weakness ? – his spellings and his handwriting. He’s got brains and all but the bloke honestly must revisit his spelling and hand writing classes in kindergarten because he spells and writes worse than a dyslexic baboon. Words of all shapes, sizes, hues, colours, etymology and language have been brutally butchered by ‘the angel of death of written language’ !! But he could get away even with murder by flashing that bright sinusoidal smile of his which could have brought even Atilla the Hun to his knees. I swear to God, some female profs had actually fallen for the kid and he didn’t even know it. Poor kid!! If Nishant slaughtered jokes by missing out on the punch line, Bharath just slaughtered jokes, period ! I mean, the kid probably had the noblest of intentions when he decided to tell us the jokes in the first place but dude “YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO GIGGLE THROUGHOUT THE JOKE AND THEN KILL THE JOKE BY LETTING OUT AN INCOMPREHENSIBLE ‘GIGGLLGLGLLGGLGGEEELGLGLGEEEMUAMPHHHPMPHHH’ INSTEAD OF THE PUNCH LINE” !!

Bharath’s a foodie just like me and that’s another reason why we hit it off so famously from the word go. He loves chats, hell, he loves anything that could be classified under the umbrella of ‘fast foods’. He even tried to drink (the getting drunk kind of drink) once during the infamous Ooti-Kodaikanal trip. We’d just finished a whole quarter of rum amongst 7 or 8 of us (we really drank a lot those day, huh ?) and we were all pretending to be woozy and drunk when Bharath walks into the scene and decides to sample the contents of one of the bottles lying around. Soon he’s ‘drunk’ too and joins in the revelry and that’s when someone realizes the fire had to be started again. Nobody could figure out how the kerosene bottle had gotten empty all by itself, until some bright spark suddenly has an ‘aha’ moment and realizes what’d just transpired. Turns out, our hero’s managed to drink the content of an arbit bottle and having tasted neither kerosene nor rum before, just assumed that it was rum. Well, that pretty much wrapped up the party … sigh …

Bharath’s mom and my mom have this evil nexus thingy happening and they were great friends without ever having met face to face even once. What drew them to one another was their immense lack of respect for everything that their sons did. They’d often spend hours on the phone just talking about they’d ‘brought us up’ and how they ought to have …
Bharath’s tried to learn the drums and even the guitar but his only passion even to this day is – ‘computer gaming’. He’d manage to squeeze time out of anything to crack the new level that he’d have reached just that morning and he would succumb to the lure of his PC even during exams.

Bharath too was a member of the awesome foursome that did it’s project at NAL and if it weren’t for him and Harsha, some SARAS pilot would have been really sore with the scientists at NAL for having written a program to find out whether strings of flight data were palindromes or not :D.

Bharath’s been one of the closest buddies I’ve ever had and I could always tell him anything I wanted. I love the dude for the prick he is and wouldn’t ever want him to change. I will never forget his selfless sessions explaining concepts to me and Nishant before exams and how he always came to my place after his own practicals got over to teach me how to perform all the experiments correctly. Dude, I passed some of those exams because of you !!

Rock on ‘Gardhi’ and invite me home for Raggi muddhe like the old days when I get back to b’lore …

Love ya bro …