The day I became an Urbansaint

Pet names are much better than real ones. You get your real names by birth. You don't work hard to get them. You work hard to maintain them through. 

But pet names are gifted by those who know you well. Those who sense the minutest traits in you. Otherwise you are never aware of them.

Till I got baptized to a new pet name, I was just one among thousands.But my pet name made me 'the one'.

I had a friend from Wisconsin who visited Kerala out of serious academic interest. I was curious and a little enthralled to meet someone who visited god's own country not for kathakali, ayurveda or tourism but to know more about the Dinesh Bidi movement.

We talked a lot, bantered, argued and got to know each other more.He had his camera all the time and kept clicking. There's something about the visual imagery of the landscape. There's something about my curly  hair & unattended beard. There's something in the fuggy rooms in the researchers den at our campus. His clicks caught them all.

On the day of parting he threw a campus photo exhibit. Mostly my pics. All eyes got hooked to an unusual pic of me. 

A bearded, long haired, 5 foot plus something walking into the gates  in the midst of wind blown acacias through a rainy passage of just-lit street lights. Something was peculiar in the pic. It was the order of things around.

The mediocre concrete of the buildings nearby. The slight drizzle caught on camera and the wet gleam of the street lights. It was a pic of the world that we lived in and the world that lived in all of us. His camera had trapped our sensibilities. Everything. The past colonial years and the living eighties.The broken lights in the campus and  even the contrasting neon of urban world that existed outside.Somehow the pic didn't even miss the smog curls that wandered like souls set free from a prolonged era of disillusionment. 

The photo carried a caption, a single word in three syllables.Urbansaint.

The name had it all. The voice of dissent. The desire to break apart.The urge to walk alone with a crowd. The peace that we sought in chaos.The passion to deny and the openness to accept.If ever your soul would have a surname, this was it!