Weekends are sometimes more demanding than the work days and you end up wishing that Monday was Sunday-II, to rest for leisure activities strenuously undertaken on Saturday and Sunday-I !

I am quite a voracious reader and am too scared to get my paws on to a book fearing that I might get stuck to it like a leech until I finished it – while the beautiful wife, blinking her natural eyelashes with great frequency and longingly watched from the sidelines! (for pleasures beyond book reading? What are weekends for?). To keep the reading urge on a tight lease, I buy The Economist and ‘without wax’ read it page to page! In my opinion there isn’t a better newspaper!

However, this weekend my teenage son handed over Dan Brown’s ‘Digital Fortress’ and I could not resist the temptation. To quote, The Times review said, “Engaged me instantly….keeps up a cracking pace as the mystery depends and disaster follows disaster”. Absolutely true! I like racy novels with beautifully brainy heroines and an equally smart hero offering intellectual competition. Susan Fletcher and David Becker fitted perfectly. Like I guessed upfront about the Jesus bloodline in the Da Vinci Code, I guessed the difference between U238 and U235. May be Dan Brown should make me his next code cracking hero (thrown in with the mandatory just mentioned beauty… of course!)

One word (actually two) left a lasting impression beyond the beauty of encryption and Dan Brown’s unraveling -’Without Wax” with roots traced to the Renaissance when Spanish sculptors who make mistakes while carving expensive marble often patched flaws with wax, to cover up ! Hence ‘Without Wax’ came to mean anything honest or true or “sincere”. Yeah! another way of saying “Yours Sincerely”.

We all like using a new discovery and why not? The following are a few “without wax” facts:

• No matter what, a man cannot help looking at a beautiful woman –provided you keep it under seven seconds (to avoid smelling the slipper!)
• Every Indian is a frugal natural artist - experts in expressionist variety of painting using every available medium, walls of buildings, pavements, passing cars etc and squirting paint only in red!
• India is slowly becoming one of the cleanest places on earth with men religiously hosing down streets, buildings, everything, with streams of (salt) water almost continuously. Indians are great story- tellers thanks to the two great National epics and five great Tamil epics and many other! They stories do the rounds every five years on whenever we have something called elections.
• Democracy in India means story-telling or voting or winning elections rather than discussion or engaging the people. Our Prime Minister for example talks to his people once in a blue-moon or rather allows his ministers to tweet, with a brush of the mane of the hair and then sacks them in afterthought! He himself uses locally available GRPS guidance, led at the elbow by a Chairperson.
• The Indian Govt. holds a (actually many) doctorate degree(s) in “No”, and a Masters degree in ‘erecting obstacles’. It denies everything or controls what it can from food prices to gas. Recently the highest court in the land dismantled one obstacle to investment only to create another-power to set prices for natural resources! Why give it for less when you can do it for more (forget the ultimate beneficiaries).

Well,

"Without Wax"

Kumar Govindan