Growing up in Hyderabad, Ravi, Sridhar and Srinivas were very common names, with there being 3-4 in each middle school class. So, by necessity we had to add a descriptive prefix or suffix to the names. There was choTa Ravi, moTa Ravi, PeddA Sridhar, chinna Sridhar etc. Ravi was – choTa Ravi, potti Ravi, MN Ravi Kumar, MNRK, Kannada Ravi and more recently Ravi Mysore. ChoTa Ravi, with a baDaa dil left a void for all of us that is much bigger than his physical self. We recently gathered to reminisce about the fun times we had with Ravi all these years and to honor his memory. Please join me in this walk down memory lane
Open House @ Pratap Mahal
Picture an old apartment complex. Two floors of tightly packed units seemingly representing all of middle class India. There was plenty of open space, and all this was enclosed in a compound wall. This was the famous Pratap Mahal complex of Khairatabad. It was just a few blocks from the main road and you’d get to it by walking on a narrow road that straddles a naala (creek) on one side and the Institution of Engineers building on the other. At the end of the road, you will enter Pratap Mahal, which was next door to Nasr School, which was a prestigious school for girls.
My best friend Ravi and his family lived in the corner unit and I was a fixture at their place from 1975 onwards. We were classmates from 7th grade in Kendriya Vidyalaya Golconda, KVG (“passed out” in 1977 🙂 ) and all the way through engineering college (@ JNTU). There were 5 members in the family. Murthy uncle, Rathna Aunty, Ajji (grandmother), Ravi and his younger brother Manju.
It felt like it was always open-house and open-hearts at their place! While we were classmates and friends since 7th grade, we became even closer during college days (Engineering at JNTU).
Ravi, Ravi Shankar, Ashok, Aditya and I became very close during the last few years in college and we used to study together. We used to call it “combined studies”, and to be sure, there was some amount of studying involved too! Coincidentally (wink-wink) it was almost always in Ravi’s house (or Ravi Shankar’s sometimes). I am sure it had something to do with the inviting-atmosphere or the awesome music or yummy food during breaks!! This is where I got my intro to Kannada language and Kannada oota – anna, pallya, saaru, thuppa, BisiBeleBhath, uppitte, dosa, sandige and proper Mysore coffee with just the right amount of chicory (that aunty used to get it ground up at this coffee mill in Khairatabad). Aunty and Uncle were always the most welcoming and gracious hosts ever. Aunty would talk in slightly accented Telugu. I have never heard uncle talk in Telugu. Ravi could manage Telugu quite well, although it was heavily accented and did not have the finesse for some people or situations! When Ravi tried to talk to our classmates Shobha and Jayalakshmi in Telugu, they appreciated his efforts but politely encouraged him to switch back to English. BTW, through all these years of interaction with Ravi and his family – I have picked up enough Kannada to understand the language and manage a few sentences in a pinch!
They had an awesome stereo system with amazing speakers! I had never experienced such a sound system before! By contrast – we just owned a basic cassette player (not even a stereo). Fun fact – Murthy uncle was an avid audiophile and had built several powerful audio amplifiers. The powerful amplifier and large speakers could have easily powered a decent sized discotheque! So, you can imagine what they did to the small living room (or the neighboring apartments)! They had an extensive collection of vinyl LP records. The western collection had Neil Diamond, Simon and Garfunkle, Boney M, Abba, BeeGees, Beatles, Carpenters, John Denver, Cerrone etc just to name a few. The most notable Bollywood one they had was Sholay, which they bought as soon as the movie was released. RD Burman’s score for Sholay blasted from those speakers was phenomenal. We used to spend hours on weekends copying the songs from his extensive collection of vinyls on to cassettes. These were our version of “recording sessions”, and my introduction to western music. We used to come home with all these recordings and blast them away in our puny cassette player. My parents used to freak out and complain about the “racket” we were creating! “What’s all this noise? Why don’t you listen to some nice Indian music?”
There is no better blend of east and west or spiritual and material than listening to MS Subbulakshmi’s “Vishnu-Sahasra-Namam” immediately followed by Boney M’s Daddy Cool or ABBA’s Waterloo or BeeGees’ Stayin Alive!
This was part of the morning routine at the Ravi household. Aunty or maybe Ajji would request Vishu-Sahasra-Namam and then right after that we would start off with the loud BOOM-BOOM-BOOM of BoneyM or Abba or BeeGees! We pretty much monopolized the music. Very rarely did any other (Kannada or Hindi) music get played. I do remember they owned a couple of 45 rpm vinyl records with good Rajan-Nagendra hits like “Neerabittu Nelada Mele Dhoni sagadu” and “Jeeva Veene neeDu miDitada Sangeetha” from the movie “Hombisilu”.
Quizzing Times
In the first year of college, Ravi, Sitaram and I discovered our common love for quizzing. We participated in the college annual quiz competition and beat all the other teams easily. We repeated that for the next 3 years! Ravi was our pop culture expert who came up with the correct obscure details about Rock Stars, western movies etc. to save us in competitions! At various intercollegiate level competitions in Hyderabad, we got a couple of 2nd place finishes and a first place in Nizam College festival! It was always fun showing off our knowledge of the trivia and we made some good friends in the quizzing fraternity – who we kept running into at every competition. We later started our own (short lived) quiz club called “Quizibisa”. I covered all the fun we had during our quizzing days in an earlier blog entry: Who or what, is or was… ?
Bindaas
Both Ravi and I came out of our “shell” in college. We were reserved and kept to ourselves in school. In college, the differences in our basic personalities became apparent and amplified. He became a more spontaneous, free-spirited, outgoing and ”bindaas” type of guy. In contrast, I remained a more serious and reserved one, although, his nature did rub off on me over the years. He would make friends easily with folks from other branches of engineering, seniors, juniors, girls etc. He was very approachable and didn’t have the traditional airs of someone who is a couple of years senior in college. He was always helpful and would dole out advice to the juniors on which topics to focus on for exams and which professors repeated old exam papers etc. By the time we graduated (in 1983) and I moved to the US, he had a large group of close friends from our junior classes who were in touch with him all through these years. Since JNTU days he moved to IIT Kanpur, Gainesville Florida, New Brunswick NJ, Freehold NJ, Conshohocken PA, Ridley Park PA, Bangalore and Columbia Maryland, with one summer in Amsterdam. Since his last move back from Bangalore to Maryland (around 2008), he has continued that “open house – open heart” tradition and helped out his extended family and friends with whatever was needed. Ravi and Chandrika have helped children of several of our friends who were either going to school in the area or moved to the DC area for jobs. Just a couple of months ago he had sent a whatsapp message to our friend and classmate in India offering to help his daughter when she comes over to the US for grad school. He said “Don’t worry, I will help her out! She is the same age as my kids and is like my daughter. That University is only 3.5 hrs. from my house!!” That is so typical of Ravi!
Torrent of Memories
- When black and white television was first introduced in Hyderabad, Doordarshan used to televise one movie per week (on Sundays). I used to come down to Pratap Mahal to watch the movie (as we did not own a TV back then). It was always a fun experience! We would sit outside and watch through the window, because there would be a sizable crowd already in the living room and also it was more fun goofing off with friends (and trying out one-liners) than sitting and seriously following the movie! Sweet memories..
- As a goof, we all decided that Ravi should contest in the student body elections (for General Secretary) to represent the cool and nerdy non-political students! There were two extremely polarized politically supported candidates representing ABVP and PDSU, who could not give a proper speech in English (we thought) and that was where Ravi would come in and dazzle everyone, we thought! Of course, these were not intellectually challenging times or elections, so nobody cared about this “independent candidate”. As expected, one of them won and Ravi came in a distant 3rd place. But on the bright side, while we did get threatened with violence (which was quite normal during student elections, in those days), we actually did not get beat up. We did have a lot of fun networking with the student body and also provided much needed comic relief!
With Sashi. Modelling the ‘election campaign look’ 🙂 - On the college trip to the Thermal power plant, we had a sumptuous lunch at Ashok’s relative’s house in Vijayawada. After that Ravi, Ravi Shankar and I came back to the hotel room and on the way had some MeeTa Paan. We got back to the room and passed out for several hours. We were so out-of-it that we did not even shut the door of the hotel room. We suspected that the Paan was spiked with some kind of drug!
- Ravi and I came up with an original approach to calm ourselves before stressful exams. We picked a Neil Diamond song (“Solitary Man”) that we both loved and then used it to calm our minds for weeks before the exam. Then on the day of the exam, we listened to this just before going to college. This Pavlovian method worked wonders! Looks like we came up with an early form of “Mindfulness”!!
- I have vivid memories of experiencing my first (and only) full Solar eclipse with Ravi at Pratap Mahal on Feb 16th 1980.
- Ravi, Ravi Shankar and I did a month of summer Internship at HAL – Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (thanks to Murthy Uncle who worked there). It was here that we saw the application of what we had learnt in the dreaded “Antennas and Wave Propagation” class)
- Ravi and I were regulars at all the movie theaters in the city that showed western movies – Skyline, Sangeet, Liberty, Plaza and Paradise. I have fond memories of watching some of the classics in these old stand-alone theaters – Saturday Night Fever, Jaws, Godfather, Airplane (released in India as “Flying High”), Raiders of the Lost Ark etc.
- Just before we graduated from college, the gang of 5 (Aditya, Ashok, Ravi, Ravi Shankar and I), went on an outing to Ananthagiri Hills, which was a nice forested area and had a government guest house on the top of a hill offering amazing panoramic views. It was about 50 miles to the west of Hyderabad. We took 3 scooters. On the way back Ravi’s scooter died! We could not find a way to get it fixed. So, we did the next best thing – to tie that scooter with a rope to another one and tow it all the way! This was some precarious towing over 20 miles while Ravi Shankar balanced the dead Vespa being pulled by a rope. Obviously there was no easy mechanism for him to know if the guy pulling would need to brake! How we managed to pull that off (pun intended) is one of those youthful miracles that cannot be explained!
- Over the years our typical phone calls would always start off with a mock Kannada conversation (remember that my Kannada is limited to basic pleasantries) : “Yo Ravi.. Yen MaaDthaide?”, “Yaenu iLLa Yashodhar.. Chenna Gi Dira?” “, “Of course, Chenna gir gaya”! , “Yaaru Beku ree?” “Meena Bakery”!! Ha.. ha!! I had a very similar conversation in the 1st week of May when we talked about the kids and long term plans etc. He was his usual mellow self (which was a gradual change over the years from his boisterous college days). Before we ended the conversation he touched on his and Chandrika’s plans of moving back to India for retirement. That would be our last conversation, as he passed away 2 weeks later on May 20th 2018, quite suddenly, drowning all of his loved ones in shock, dismay and sorrow.
I would love to hear your personal fun stories of/with Ravi. Please add them in the comments section below..
RecoveringNostalgic 
Waves of nostalgia, Yashodhar. Pretty much identify with everything here, thanks to Manju. The music, the quizzing, the same memories… And Ravi will always be remembered. – Venkatesh