He had his first operation when he was six months old and has had four more since then. When he was twelve, his nose had to be rebuilt taking bone shavings from his pelvis. He went back to hospital when he was in college, on his own initiative, to have his ears reshaped.

Ananth once told me that kids used to throw stones on him as he walked back from school. He wet his bed till a late age, was on anti-depressants at the tender age of five.

Once at a wedding, a doctor saw him and remarked loudly that he was mentally retarded and started describing the ‘condition’ to people around. Ananth was nine. He ran to his father crying. His father calmed him down and Ananth poured out the whole story. ‘He said I was retarded! I feel like… I feel like… smashing his car!’ His father was silent and then said ‘Go do it.’

That night Ananth let fly a huge rock into the windscreen of the doctor’s fancy car.

His father was superman. He made Ananth go up to strangers and strike conversations. He pushed him to take tabla lessons, football, art. Though short and not quite athletic, Ananth became the captain of his school’s football team. But this had its own pressures, and his art teacher who he was close to, sat him down one day and told him, ‘The problem is that your father wants you to be good at everything. You don’t have to be.’

Contrary to what one might have thought, Ananth was popular in middle and high school. He had a close-knit gang of friends who were responsible for all misdeeds in school – fire-crackers in the loo, frog’s heads in girls’ bags, deflating the principal’s tyres, climbing the school walls to attend rock shows.

In college he went through the whole drugs and rock n’ roll gamut. He got laid before any of his pals.

He got some friends together, they formed a band, each arbitrarily assigned a musical instrument which they had to then learn! The most good-looking of them was chosen to front the band, Ananth was supposed to play the bass. But due to some mix-up during one of their first shows, he found himself in front of the mike. His high energy stage act, inspired by his tortured grunge heroes Cobain and Vedder, soon got the band a cult following in the university.

He has progressed since then, has appeared on several TV talk shows, has been written about in magazines and newspapers, even asked to pose for Page 3.

I would have put links here, but I don’t think he would like that. People in the rock scene will probably know who he is.