The Karur Chronicles

I

I had just finished watching Panchayat on Amazon - a fascinating series of an urbanite struggling to adjust to work in rural India, leading a lonely life, peeling lauki and rueing his days. A brilliant portrayal indeed! Television switched off, hands cradling my head, I stretch my back, and jog my memory - and think of the closest I have come to such an ordeal. Yes, I have stayed in a village and a mofussil, but work? Oh yes, how can I forget my days in a small town in Tamil Nadu - this adventureland being called Karur.

In a sort of antonym of worlds, it all started in the bedazzling glass towers of my office in metropolitan Mumbai. At 9 pm - still mid-day in consulting jargon -my manager, Rana, an extremely erudite yet pragmatic leader (a rare combination, trust me, in a post MBA world) walked up to my desk with an ask - if I would volunteer to work for a fantastic project, the caveat being the need to work out of Karur.

‘Karur what? Where is it?’ I asked and swung back to my desk to google-map the location. 

Rana had done his homework, ‘It’s a never-been-there-never-done-that sort of a location, somewhere close to Coimbatore. There’s huge learning and revenue potential but no one’s willing to go because it seems like a village of sorts!’

Travelling is considered the other side of the consulting coin - saying ‘no’ to travel is like heresy here. Don’t be surprised if a consultant ever tells you he had to take a steamer or a bullock cart as the last mile-reach to the mine or smelting factory where he had to work for months. In our case, though, being in Financial Services advisory with a cornucopia of clients in metropolitan Mumbai, we had become spoiled children. We had the audacity to say no to all-expenses paid, four star upwards stay in other metros. Imagine then, when someone walked up to you and uttered a name you have never heard of all your life, say Karur for example, you had every right to wrinkle your brows and mutter in disdain, ‘What lawless land are you exiling me to?’

I was about to replace ‘lawless land’ with ‘godforsaken county’ in my response to Rana, when the location of Karur struck me as interesting - it was central to a range of hill stations and popular tourist destinations in the south of India. The traveller in me found an opportunity to explore Idli-sambar country as never before, as I scoured through more Google results. By the time I read of the proximity of Kodaikanal, Ooty, Madurai and to top it, ancient Roman age coins having been found in Karur, and housed in some museum there, I knew I had made up my mind. (That the museum only housed cardboard cuttings of those coins is a different story for later on, but by then, the damage was done).

‘How many flights do I get back?’ I asked Rana as Google spewed the distance from Pondicherry to Karur.

‘Once a month, or maybe even two, if the budget adds up…’ Rana replied.

I was wondering if Rana was wondering how stupid could I be to warm up to the possibility, when I checked the distance to Trivandrum  and asked again, ‘And can I travel elsewhere instead on that budget?’ I was mentally mouthing Kerala.

Rana understood my intentions and responded, ‘Yes, as long as you don’t think of going to Andamans or Lanka!’

I smiled, ‘And will you be leading this project?’ My ulterior motive was to run away from the real badlands which was the office itself, filled with zealots, despots, and crackpots. There was no way I would sign up for exile with one of these rogues as my prison warden.

Rana mumbled a bit. He was not sure when I showed him the map and the destinations we could cover on weekends alone. 

‘No coming back to this Mumbai office for three months, think about it’ I gave my sales pitch, reverse-selling to Rana to accept his own offer himself.

‘We will need a bigger team, no one has signed up for it!’ he was serious now.

I was mentally doing my maths, one analyst here, two consultants there, hand-picking the choicest rogueless guys for this incredible mission. There was still the need for two senior resources.

‘Tell me,’ I asked Rana, ‘this is not a teetotaller town, is it?’

‘Shouldn’t be - this is not Gujarat, are you thinking of Kamal by any chance?’ 

I grimaced, one senior resource accounted for. Few more wanderlusting heads and Mission Karur was nearly on…

A few weeks later, I was standing with a small strolley in front of a tiny, double-storeyed, whitewashed building, meaty roosters and idiotic guinea fowls prancing all around me in the bucolic outskirts of Karur.  

I was thinking of free range chicken and exotic meat when a short-statured guy, with well oiled hair, a red tika and a white safari suit came out and asked me if I was the babu who had come to change the bank’s fortunes. I didn’t know whether to say yes or no, when he grabbed my strolley and asked me to follow him, as he spewed out the rules of the bank’s sanctimonious guesthouse, in a typical dragged south Indian accent.

‘No drinking allowed inside the guesthouse saar,’ he bellowed. I nearly stopped on my tracks. Kamal was arriving on the next flight, as our caretaker, a Mr. Balu continued, ‘No smoking either.’

Rana’s efficiency was halved in no time.

Balu then saw me eyeing the plump roosters as he continued, ‘And no non veg food allowed in the house,saar.’

Okay, we had clearly missed the fine print, and had not read the offer documents at all. 

‘Are there any restaurants nearby?’ I asked

‘There is one on the other side of town.’

‘And in the nearby village centre?’

He smiled - there were a few idli thelas nearby. 

I gulped, this was just Day 1 in the three month stint. And no better way to sing, Welcome to Karur, suckers….          

16th Jan’2021,

Cover Image: En route to Kodaikanal from Karur, Author's archives