Krishna Shastri Devulapalli | An AI-free Ode To The Eighties

I found the recent trend of almost everyone on social media doing their ’80s look most perturbing. For me, the high point of the ’80s was that it was gloriously free of this bunch.

I present below a moving anecdote about what the real ’80s was like for those who actually lived it, you wannabes.

One of the greatest boons of the ’80s — other than the fact that vanity wasn’t as widespread — was that there were no mobile phones. (Come to think of it, it’s the latter that created the epidemic of the former.) Unless, of course, you were Krishna or Chiranjeevi, and had a make-believe one made of a cigarette pack and a transistor aerial, into which you kept shouting ‘over’ over and over.

I speak of a Saturday night — and Saturday Nights were big back then — when we were all gathered at the usual friend’s place. That a large group made up exclusively of hormonal young men meant that we had each — surreptitiously — tried to take a girl to the discotheque and failed. And were now hanging out together like this was our first choice. All of us except one, that is.

As we wondered where the crowd favourite was — secretly burning up that he may have found a date and gone off to the disco — the phone rang. (And this was a real telephone, mind you. One that did the only job it was meant to do.)

It was our missing friend.

“Hello, it’s me, come immediately, I’m being beaten...” was his short, clear, and not entirely surprising message. (Because our friend — let’s call him DB — had a reputation in the city for being a fairly regular beatee.)

That’s all we needed.

All adrenaline-pumped seven of us left our drinks as is, rushed out, jumped into the lone Premier Padmini (with floor-shift gears and a multi-branch exhaust, mind you) and vroomed off to our friend’s rescue. As the owner/driver of the car, made a screechy left turn on to the main road, his newly installed radial tyres showing impressive grip, we realized we had a tiny problem. We didn’t know where MB was. In our enthusiasm to swing into action, we had forgotten to ask him where he was being beaten (as in the location, not which parts of his body, which by his tone we had gathered were being covered comprehensively). And our very efficiency that had resulted in the coordinated fireman-style-double-quick response, had, alas, resulted in no one being around to pick up MB’s second call in which he had hoped to tell us where he could be located. (Of this, we knew only later, as you can understand.)

Our friend’s accosters, a considerate group for people who beat up people, had granted him permission for a second call and even lent him a fifty-paise coin to make it. And waited patiently outside the telephone booth for him to finish his call, so they could take a breather before resuming the old-style Madras thulping that had been halted to facilitate the call.

Obviously, we didn’t find our friend that night. What we lacked in direction, we did make up in intensity, though, driving round and round Nungambakkam High Road, Chamiers Road and Dr Radhakrishnan Road, which, to our mind seemed like the most likely venues for our friend’s beating.

We searched in vain. We even bought some more rum on the way. We couldn’t find any cola that late. But we drank the rum anyway. We cried. We spoke of our friend’s bravery, good looks, his many exploits and how, like a cat, he had nine lives of which only seven, by our count, had been used up, and how therefore there was no cause for worry. And finally, exhausted, we went to an all-night café and ate kheema dosa.

Our friend did make it.

When we visited him the following evening (we needed time for our hangovers to dissipate), though he wasn’t his usual ebullient self, which was to be expected, his body didn’t show any concerning signs of wear and tear. We had a bit of rum on his terrace and he was as good as new.

‘I am meeting those fellows for a compromise tomorrow,’ he said, as we were leaving.

Why would someone who had been beaten want a compromise, we wondered.

Apparently, by compromise, what the guys meant — we found out a couple of days later –was another light, top-up beating. Because, as opposed to showing the requisite remorse after the first beating, DB, while leaving — as was his wont — had abused the gang in choicest Tamil.

DB is around, by the way. He has proved beyond doubt that he has far more than nine lives. Hasn’t changed much, either.

Now, thanks to the magic of mobile communication, he sends us pics on WhatsApp when he is being thulped in exotic locations across the globe. We each respond with a heart, a thumbs-up or a smiley-with-hat-and-shades emoji depending on our mood.

Who needs AI.