the spirit of the times

strain at gnats and swallow camels

2011-10-22T16:42:00.002+05:30

Quiet!

Why have you brought here,
this tambourine mouth?
To wreck the afternoon—

A peep shall awake the devil,
if he flinches.
A drop, below the eddy of his ear,
will lurch and skate
down the rings on his neck, and
the auburn chest hair.
That he will scratch in a sour rankle

Who will be responsible then?
Your tambourine mouth?

Togetherness

How can I promise the best of me?
Every day is a gamble.
Who I am is hinged to
everyday indiscretions of strangers:
how many mind the signal, who honks how much, if the order comes on time, how the service is…

I’ve forgotten
what it used to be like
to not mind.
My tongue slurs like wheels
moments before a collision,
the stew
only a breath away, always.
If I make any promise
it’ll have to be in another world,
for this one I go to sleep in
strains at every gnat,
makes even velvet chafe.

the perfect new world

2010-08-07T22:17:00.004+05:30

In the perfect new world, we all will accept that we're whores. And then the playing field will be level. There'll be war on an equal footing. Self-denial will be the only evil. Rest all will be the truth.

At the risk of immolation

2010-07-31T08:24:00.008+05:30

When you break a bulbous drop perches itself in the corner of your eye
waiting to chart the path of unleashed emotions

Those eyes become shimmering sheets at the mercy of,
reflecting the pain of old bedroom mirrors

No dewdrop is wholly new
fed as each is by smidgens from previous nights

growing in pennies strained from
the inequitable taxes of a shared life

Then you let it trickle or gush
and fetid things run down your puffy cheeks

He twitches, shifts, mouths half-eaten mumblings
Leave me alone, says your voice wadded with grief and phlegm

and he says what doctors say when they can’t save a life:
I’m sorry.

Enough to wipe clean, start afresh
give another chance to that incorrigible demon of habit

It is forbidden: like toadstools, or candy from strangers
yet you do it

What flames you let singe your heart
what burning you endure

Just to feel what it is to have loved
at the risk of immolation

Baby are you down down down down

2010-05-18T01:13:00.001+05:30

In the eleventh, N and I went to Calcutta. It was our first trip on our own. The next few days we roamed around the falling city, stayed here and there, got our pockets picked, watched movies at practically every theater we passed by.

After we returned, things started falling apart for N. Or that’s the way I put it because my imagination is stunted. His dad was out of a job, disinherited from ancestral property, they had to move out, his brother was an incapacitated recluse—getting by became this angry, insistent visitor who sat at your threshold every morning, waiting for you before you even woke up. The business of the house fell squarely on N’s shoulders. He dropped out of college, started giving tuitions, counting every penny.

More than ten years have passed since. N finished his twelfth somewhere along the line, a few years belated. He couldn’t do his graduation, hasn’t yet. Between then and now, he has taught tens of school kids, been in Amway, taught spoken English/personality development/all sorts of things to BPO aspirants, aspiring MBAs, all and sundry.

I don’t take stock of N when I meet him, which is every year and a half or so. I mean I ask him what’s up and he tells me animatedly—non-perfunctorily—and I listen interestedly. But that’s only what it appears to be. What I do instead is listen to the story of dignity. And it’s a tale that grips me ever tighter because everything he does is a metaphor. He doesn’t slog to pay the rent or take his family to Esselworld. He’s giving dignity a story to be remembered by. How else could we even begin to teach our kids about it? Without people like N, we would sound so vain and pretentious mouthing words we have no business bandying.

And the life-reassuring thing is that there are others like N. I know a few myself. What each of them inadvertently says is that it is never too late to pick a dropped stitch. It’s never wise to throw our fabric away, thinking there’s nothing more we can do with it. Because if we do—if we let ourselves believe that it will unravel to shreds—we just choose to exclude ourselves from the story of dignity. And that would be a pity.

I wish Gujja the very best for his first performance at Zero G, Residency Road, Bangalore, this Friday the 21st. Who would have thought.

The Cleansing

2010-05-08T06:40:00.006+05:30

I wake up at five am
before the ghosts have been buried,
sudden, to a sticky back on a marble grid
and
to birdsong on the western coast before
it is mowed by revving engines
in this place they call the metropolis in weather reports
how long has it been?

Yester night’s remnants in system ridden of
beer mouth rinsed, beer smell scrubbed
clothes dumped
huddled in red bucket in shame
a roundabout way of undertaking
project ‘I’m going to clean myself’

Fridge checked for happy surprises
water gulped down parched throat,
some cake bitten into
through the window I can see
clumpy wet hair draped over
ironed polyester salwar

Stray thought: fifth standard, picnic day
killed before it began
by pop and mom
playing ‘I blame you’
why did we go then?
something bigger than happiness
showed up at the door
mr. and mrs. neighbors were ready to leave
lunch packed, extra tissue taken, ambassador purring at the turn

Old blood swirling in my veins
thickened with self-pity
a caul of disgust enveloping
no illusions harbored,
i have been riffled the same cards
will be singed too, to the roots if i don’t

Call, find those numbers
and call
‘hi! sorry i can’t come to your party
i’m not sure i want to, actually something came up’
you social rat, still wriggling the old leathery tongue?
no, brace and say: the truth
then call after call
no, i don’t care anymore; it doesn’t matter what you think
voices thick with sleep soothe
awww! it’s just a meltdown
don’t worry, it’s only the stress, nothing really
relax, we still love you

By then I have hung up.

Revolutionary Whiskey

2010-05-04T18:42:00.014+05:30

Just finished reading Revolutionary Road again. Took a rather long time even by my standards. I can’t finish a book in a few sittings. I don’t try either, makes me feel like a sieve when I want to be a sponge. There’s some collusion between my reading and whisky-drinking habits. I also just happened to use up a Jack Daniels a friend had gifted last December. I’ve been sipping at it for as long as I can remember (ok I might’ve tempered my greed because it was scotch) and last night was the last of the swigs I took. And there haven’t been any conscious periods of whisky abstinence much the same way the story of Frank and April Wheeler has never really left me. I’ve kept going back: a page here, a small there. They’ve always been around the bend, just a few steps and I bump into them.

So, the book, yes: the writing is sublime, Yates is unforgiving. Harsh or unforgiving is not the word actually; I don’t think it’s any one thing at all. It’s definitely not a style unless you think holding a mirror to the deepest recesses and the darkest motives is. It’s just relentless dissection of what appears to be the truth. There’s a line where Yates could as well have been explaining how he wrote that book. If you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone. The book’s embarrassingly beautiful, really. To think that some of those who have read it will draw on the experience to merely engage in social conversations, fill out silences with their grasp of things, (‘Have you read it? It’s so depressing but so nice.’ and then in the same breath, ‘You should also read Three States. It's unputdownable.’) is pretty deflating (and very cynical of me).

What does having read the book mean but? I’m in circles. Reading about the Wheelers doesn’t bring me closer to any realization. (Self-deception is no realization, I think I know it well enough after years of trying to fit in.) Writing something as singularly honest wouldn’t change a thing either. Yates picked up some numbers in his time: two marriages, two divorces, nervous breakdowns, drinking binges. Writing is a release, I guess; a simple but excruciating business: going to a dark place, pouring your heart out, hoping to be understood.

Awareness is not a gift, in fact it can be rather unsettling. At least when the take-home is that you are not the only one to have fucked up, people have messed up in eerily similar ways. It’s a fairly non-usable purport, you know. Like when facing an incomprehensible problem, you suddenly have a private Eureka moment: you have finally managed to figure out what the problem is. That gives you a kick, even if you are still as clueless about how to fix it. Living is the same beast. Taming it is as slippery.

desultory prose, desultory living

2010-04-27T00:07:00.004+05:30

The security guards in my building seem to be on a rotating employment roll, they keep changing. From the heartland, they come tumbling like humpty dumpties. The yadavs, the ojhas, the kumars. There are never any south indians, they seem to be opening udupi joints. What remains uniform among these guards, like symptoms of a disease, is how they greet building tenants. Like bound by some feudal custom, they rise from their chairs and stand up when you pass by. It’s an act of obeisance, this relinquishing of the comfort of the chairs, though they are inexpensive PVC ones. Anyway, the point being the show of deference and, to a certain extent a corollary, the dignity of labor.

I keep telling them not to bother, to remain seated, what I don’t say is that they make me uncomfortable more than anything else. I also don’t dare utter that I’m scared, sometimes morbidly, that a civil war might erupt. That this subservience will turn into vandalism. They’ll steal your Nokias, your Dells when you’re sleeping.

But they keep doing it, as if programmed genetically. Their spines are coiled springs, ready to be straightened at your look.

Class—there are unwritten codes everywhere. You may or may not have quotas but how do you remove this vermin from the minds of thousands. Why can’t they—and we must allow them to—do their jobs with quiet dignity? Is it too much to expect respect if you are working class?

This shouldn’t disturb me, it’s none of my business. But I don’t know what’s my business. We live in our small worlds, connected but estranged. We choose things, little things, make them our life, and slip into disaffection like a second skin. All the information—this ocean, this tide after tide—washes our doorsteps unable to touch a single molecule in our hearts. We have become animals already, alive only to survival, numb to living. But then by some cruel irony, a little bit of the human lingers like fish smell on hands. It reminds you of what the hands had once touched, what they have since dropped. And this hardens you a little more, puts a little dead weight in your heart so that at least it is not empty. The truth is what doesn’t kill you kills a little bit in you.

The Hurt Locker

2010-03-02T00:22:00.003+05:30

What can make a man unafraid of death? If his life is not worth living—irredeemable—and the end of it is a decidedly better alternative to its continuation. What then if it is the irreverence that injects the sublime into living? The utter disregard for the most primal fear frees him in a way nothing else can. Because his mind is unfettered, his actions are not crippled by the (potential) fatality of consequences. They are compulsively reckless; they release the being from the cage of fear and foreboding. Two sides of the same coin?

This is my single most important takeaway from “The Hurt Locker.” I will skip the chance to analyze and rate it (though I think I have said more here than I could have through a review). It is a movie unlike most others on war. It simply tells you, War is a drug. And let me add, for people like Staff Sergeant William James.

Toward the end of the movie, you realize that the choice for James is between love and fear. And he chooses both, in a way. His fear of ordinary, grounded existence pushes him as much as his pure love for what he does best drives him. To him, the life most others lead is probably even more terrifying than death. Surely, he is an escapist then. Yet, you see he’s anything but one. Both judgments are deserved, for both crimes are committed.

Everything I say about James seems insipidly worded, pablum. For he is that kind of a mystery. You can only watch the movie and then maybe you’ll get what I’m trying to say. Long after you’ve seen it, as you’re sitting by the window, wondering, things will fall into place.

excerpt

2010-02-23T14:14:00.004+05:30

Her body fights and extricates her mind from those bubbleheaded years. Memory is a living thing, she thinks. Where it is amputated, severed, it swiftly grows itself into a whole again. The completeness in her memory makes up for the void in her present. The laws of compensation. It is a game, she believes, where the conscious and subconscious are at play. The objective of the game is to salvage the self, to not let it lose respect for itself. Now she understands self-respect. That’s what her life has become: a pursuit to earn her self back. She is returned to her world now. To enterprises undertaken in another bubble. A space of reason and practicality that she has to furnish with the living furniture of honest toil and reparation. She feels ready.

PS: It's an excerpt from what I'm working on. Just wrote this bit and felt like putting it up.

i’m so sorry!

2010-02-20T21:41:00.004+05:30

I don’t know—maybe I know but don’t quite get it—why Tiger Woods has to apologize to everyone and anyone. What possible crimes could he have committed? His public apology would have been fitting in magnitude had he mortgaged the world’s oil fields to Martians for a romp with nubile, supple aliens.

International sportsmen seem to have made Faustian bargains with their sponsors, their media managers, and the general public. The “with great power comes great responsibility” dictum has been twisted beyond context. How can it be that people are stupid enough to look up to public figures as perfectly moral archetypes?

What a pity Tiger Woods is such a wimp! If his only “problem” is that he likes sex with multiple women, he should just never have married and spared himself the effort of doing it on the sly—given his list, it must’ve been like hiding an elephant in a cupboard.

How wonderful it would’ve been had Tiger Woods just carried on with his business, unapologetic and unperturbed. He would’ve lost the sponsors, half his wealth in divorce settlements, his media-created public image—basically everything extraneous to his actual talent. With a media wave of derision behind him, he would have returned and won a major just like old times. But that was not to be. This world is warped. Here we have to issue apologies and publicly atone to be deemed cured.

to cut a long story short

2010-01-29T18:25:00.002+05:30

I was ready to resign
To the fury of indifference, convinced
That inaction will (at least)
Shelter me from the heart of feral hatred

The immediate aftermath—
I wanted to grow my usual carapace that
Saner days and weeks had worn down
Like water sheets ploughing soft earth
Leave me alone!

But you stood. Rooted.
In the corner of my eye
Refusing to budge: “I’ll be here”

I shrank and withdrew
Indignant and stubborn
Hurt and accusing,
Burning bridges to the island

Oh what hubris, how selfish!
Reading of the balance statement
Actually, it’s quite clear
He’s wrong and you’re wronged. Pronounced.
Advice to you: Don’t you bother looking out.
Tch tch…not worth you

But you stood. Rooted.
In the corner of my eye
Refusing to budge: “I’ll be here”
Even when

Shadows grew long
Night after night
And wildflowers became weeds

What happened then?

While I was doused
By apathy’s anesthetic
You (must have)
Cut open my empty chest
And like a helping to the famished
Left a warm heart inside
For when I woke up that morn
It throbbed

Epilogue: to cut a long story short

A firefly blinking
I relayed my signal to
Where you stood rooted, refusing to budge
Saying “I’m here”

intellect and cleverness

2010-01-06T12:35:00.003+05:30

Being intellectual versus being clever. There’s a difference she apprehensively explores. Cleverness works in a tightly packed arrangement; she uses some very common form of it, which she finds in abundance in engineers and programmers, to make moves in her life (like a videogame with made-up rules). It’s a quickness she discovered and exhibited in school, where the brightest always answered first. It’s a sharpness she finds comforting, yet wants to grow out of. It hangs on to her—reminding her of the many occasions when it has propelled her from the contrails of competition.

Now is too late to escape. Her constitution has been altered. She doesn’t have a core that is worth an honest investigation. There’s nothing unknown in her, so there’s nothing unknown in her world. Convenience has turned out to be lastingly seductive; she cannot, is powerless, to leave her arms. What lies ahead?

Will she outwardly ridicule art and abstractness and intellect and the spirit of exploration to quell her inner dissatisfaction with herself? Will she marry self-mockingly? Will she deny her inner misery and dreams and undertake a normal existence? Will she never pursue the intellect and challenge the verdict of fate? Will her life be a series of limp undertakings and therefore protected from the depths and darkness of true exploration?

I choose to

2009-06-28T23:55:00.003+05:30

You choose who comes into your life. You choose what becomes of it. If you get yourself in a mess, you better get yourself out of it. Forget the past; you can’t improve history. No matter what, you can choose to start afresh. If you believe in this, you’re ready to take the blows without looking for excuses.

Where the spirit falls short

2009-05-05T21:28:00.001+05:30

My voice slumps
In conversations with you
What do I talk about?
My tongue hangs dry like tinder
Ready to catch fire at petty provocation
Then, as you say, I keep the phone

The new sun beams cold rays
On either side of the peninsula
Where we lie, at the mercy of geography
Chained to the remains of last night’s dreams
Distance is a poor excuse for what separates us

I bank on memories
To offer you some vestige of lingering affection
Being apart breeds new images
It stiffens the soft cotton of your sari
I somehow forget: Of the nine yards you draped
You kept the longest to shield me
From His harsh gaze

Now, I think of you as the Past
A temporal truth
The Present has saddled me with a different version of it
Teaching me the composition of silence,
And the war that wages when human beings retreat into themselves
This is a more lasting truth, I tell myself

You and I
Travellers of different landscapes
Cannot concede
That we are separated by a wilderness called human nature
Intermittently, we make cripples of ourselves
In trying to reach out

The boundaries between are not physical
They rise where the spirit falls short
There’s little place for largesse
In hearts that have shrunk with time

Yet, like all cruel/blessed things in life
You dare to believe in your notion of me
And allow selective ignorance
To eke out pounds off irrational happiness
Preserved even in a deluge of ready evidence
Against a son
Who is frugal with love

a solution/problem

2009-04-10T18:41:00.002+05:30

A solution is composed of words
Them strung together in an order
With pauses and gestures—wafting, floating,
And agreeing to your mien
A solution is an inching closer
To delightful experiences of living and learning
Of distant music in familial gatherings
A solution is an arrangement

A problem is an arrangement
(1) Of phrases and their turns
That travel determinedly to reduce you
(2) Of silence and empty vocabulary
That crush hopeful will like a sombre second opinion
Once they reach, overcoming space
They create fissures anew
Of anxiety, dependence, and life

moving around in circles

2009-03-22T13:11:00.003+05:30

It was in the 1980s that some popular Hollywood movies began offering consolation, by way of jingoism, for America’s losses during the Vietnam War. It’s hard to imagine Rambo and Uncommon Valor being made between ’64 and ’74. In the late 60s and early 70s, the public mood was more of snowballing rebellion against a war that didn’t stand up for anything that the American people valued. There were Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket.

Was there any one point when the public realized that the war had gone wrong? The answer, in all probability, is no. The war continued for more than 6 years after the My Lai massacre in 1968. In fact, Nixon started a new war—by ordering an invasion into Cambodia—in 1970. The so-called Christmas bombings happened in 1972. The war moved around in circles.

The US won every battle, yet as the majority believes it lost the war. Or did it? Either way, it’s hard not to be a cynic. The US entered the war to contain communism. It was the height of the Cold War. Maybe US involvement was justified. Yet, if you trace back steps, you find giant Pandora’s boxes strewn along the way. These boxes lock ugly, enervating truths that make you echo Tommy Lee Jones’ words in No Country for Old Men: “I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand.” That’s the overriding feeling I have.

Sometimes, it pays to be a spectator. There’s more room for solace. Ignorance, while probably not being bliss, is definitely a good sedative.

----------------------------------------------

I visited my friend’s dad in INHS Asvini, a reputed naval hospital, this weekend. Asvini is located in Navy Nagar in Colaba, south Bombay. Not often you see a yawning ocean through hospital windows. The place doesn’t quite exude sickly gloom, or maybe it’s just me imagining things. Uncle has been an eccentric man all his life. I was wrong-footed by his second question—a deep backhand volley when I was at the net, exchanging pleasantries: “So how is life? How much do you earn? 25,000?”

I burst out laughing. It hit me that he hadn’t really changed. Don’t know why I had assumed that he would have mellowed. He pulled me closer to him and held my hand for a long time. Very unlike him. Later, I realized why. Diabetes has eaten his retina. It has also fucked his kidneys and weakened his heart. We had a regular conversation. I didn’t ask him anything about his health, how he felt, etc. He asked me if I had visited Siddhivinayak, Haji Ali, or the Mahalakshmi Temple. And then chided me for being a nastik (atheist). I said I was too scared to visit Siddhivinayak because a friend—a deeply religious guy—had had his pocket picked there. He looked at me and then we both burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of the answer. He showed how swollen his legs had become, pressed the skin near his ankles to show the depressions that would form. When we were about to leave, he asked my friend to level the bed. It was one of those beds with a handle you can use to lift the bed. As he raised his head, I saw tufts of hair on the pillow, like a puppy had slept on it. I felt the saddest then, don’t know why.

Old age is not inevitable, not depressing. If you were to ask him, he would shout back at you, “It’s just ridiculous.” He’s that kind of a man.

My plan

2009-01-19T22:54:00.001+05:30

I plan to take myself
by the scruff of the neck
turn myself upside down
shake myself
until the last drop of poison
spills on to paper
and soaks it

And after that
who cares.
There’s absolutely nothing beyond that.

Time

2009-01-15T22:37:00.002+05:30

My hands—brothers in arms—keep adding bogeys to this toy train called continuum. The hands are three: the long and short, and the frenzied. Together, they keep ticking. They keep everything running.

When early resplendence slides in through doors ajar, I am there to witness musty corners shrug off their wimpy edginess and mingle with the smooth whole. The world as a brave whole…aah…where does it begin?

When the silence of after-lunch siestas eats the day’s vigor, and activity gives in to abeyance, I stand moved. I continue my merry-go-round. Lending substance to naps and dreams that appear and vanish like meteors. When lurky servants pinch off sleazy magazines from under mattresses and spill themselves on Persian carpets, I am there. When they remember the spots of spillage and smile at having stained a rich master’s possession, I am there too.

When shadows make two of each, I am there. When old memories return with long shadows on deserted walks, I walk too. When aggrieved patriarchs rant endlessly in after-dinner outbursts, I do not pause to stop them. When the socially respected take off their contraptions and defenses for others like them before retiring, I bear testimony.

When my hands meet—seduced by coterie—I egg them on. And they start all over again. And they make you start all over again.

Mine is just a job. I don’t know why you do it.

witness to life

2009-01-04T20:26:00.001+05:30

I read somewhere that one of the reasons people marry is that they want a witness to their lives. Like much later after things have happened, a married man will have someone to testify what had happened. In conversations, he will not be the only one rambling; there’ll be someone to finish his sentences, to furnish details of the past, to lend credence to his claims.

Which is partly why long-distance relationships are difficult to sustain. Because there’s no constant witness. Witnesses change, and more importantly the ones that are there don’t pay much attention. Or else your work friends would be your best friends.

Solely as proof, the “marriage” kind of a permanent association isn’t worth it. Photographs and home videos should suffice. That marriage rewards you with a guaranteed history is a given. But exactly what sort of history?

I dislike the kind of history that paints pictures in broad, sweeping strokes. I find it irrelevant. There’s just very little detail. It follows then that I don’t particularly like to know about what couples have to say when they sum up their lives together in a few pithy sentences. Such remarks are more like comments fit into a small box in a report card. Like you had to deliver a judgement, so you did it. The judgement is not the truth. Truth is in the details. And at different points in time, truth is different. And part of the truth is that when you do choose to marry, you’re offering yourself as a witness to your partner’s whims and fancies, his vices, his unacceptable traits, his irritating habits. And also his absolutely adorable qualities.

The question I ask myself is whether the virtues redeem the vices. Whether it’s only the sum that counts—not what goes into the final figure.

X

2008-12-09T00:00:00.003+05:30

It’s that time of the day when the chutzpah starts to melt. When you realize the fight Obama needs to put up is gargantuan. That all the mayhem around you is not your life, yet is maybe not something that you can extricate yourself out of. That you have no obligation, yet you somehow can’t let things be. It’s that time when every minute is a new thought connected to the previous. When truth is close at hand, but only as a nightly visitor who shall leave your bedside in the morn, is.

Is there a burden of truth? Should truth just be left on its own? Should you not carry it on your shoulders, listen to where it wants to go, help it get there? There’s a waking life in these questions. Yet there’s too much to be lived beyond them. Beyond them, in the territory of farcical democracies, dysfunctional societies, staged performances.

Life is the bubbles you chase behind closed eyelids. It’s ever elusive, yet you know it’s so bloody easy to see those bubbles. It’s a fucking tease, like a little show of naked skin. A possible indulgence.

success and escape

2008-11-12T00:39:00.007+05:30

I work for an editing company. A couple of months ago, my bosses took me off editing documents and put me on something very vaguely defined and unstructured. (You may call it business development.) This was because they thought I could add a lot more value and deliver what they wanted. Between then and now, I’ve conceived of and implemented a very important change in the way we edit. I’ve also worked on and launched a new editing service. I’ve written pages of web content and news items and press releases for promotion; created content and design for two ads; written job ads for 4 different positions; created and compiled training material for editors working on the new editing service; written content for internal purposes; worked on the design of a few web pages; held numerous meetings with the most important people in the company; modified work processes and briefed teams about changes; written 45 seconds (150 words) of the script for a show on CNBC in which one of my bosses was featured; and tried to avoid documentation as much as I could.

Today, I was working on case studies. I had to showcase some of the interesting tie-ups my company has had with clients in the recent past. I went to my boss with 4 case studies that I had written. He liked the text but wanted some images to go along with it for impact. So, he gave me 80 minutes—until we met next—to work on it. I decided to try something different. Instead of using flowcharts and diagrams to show how we have helped our clients, I drew stick figures on the back of the printout of each case study. I wanted these stick figures to illustrate the “before” and “after” situations in each of the cases profiled. As I continued to work on it, the idea behind the sketch became clearer and I began to visualize how it would look on a web page. It was only when I was sketching for the last of the 4 case studies that I realized I had something good on my hands. I thought the figures were very different, carried great visual appeal, and conveyed the point succinctly.

When my boss first saw the stick figures, he seemed amused. He looked at them carefully, turned each sheet to read the case study. He seemed ok with the first and the fourth (they were the simplest) and undecided with the rest. After a fairly long time, he mumbled “hmm… very creative.” It sounded more like “good, but sorry we can’t use them.” And they won’t be used.

***********

I enjoy reasonable freedom in my job, and I’ve got a conventionally bright future with my current employer. However, I like the disappointments that arise from working for yourself much more than I like those that come with working for someone else. And I don’t like authority.

I’ve tried to compartmentalize myself into the “work me” and “me.” But I’ve found it difficult to separate one from the other. The work me tries to ignore Sylvia Plath and Charlie Kauffman, but me is absolutely rivetted to them. The work me admires catchlines like “Be Born Everyday” but me detests the sophistry in them. When the work me runs after something during the day, it’s me that feels exhausted in the evening. When the work me has to give something, it snatches part of that from me. And “I” end up poorer. I end up looking for escape in social intimacy and beer.

I don’t want an escape. I want a better life. And all of me.

run of the mill

2008-10-21T06:30:00.000+05:30

In order for you to fully assimilate life’s teachings—the ones that are neatly encapsulated in one-liners so as to save you the toil of peeling off meaning of Rushdie-esque paragraphs—you must learn painful lessons first. And one of them is that you’re just run of the mill. Proof of that? If any vestiges of a maverick were hidden in you, the years gone by should’ve sucked them out for public perusal. But they haven’t. So, there it stands. You’re run of the mill.

jaunty collar bones

2008-10-14T22:07:00.001+05:30

Her fate was in her body, not in the stars. It resided somewhere in the sheen of her face, her jaunty collar bones, her full lips. She had thrown her horoscope away many seasons ago, and had invested energy in preening herself.

On beauty

2008-08-21T10:45:00.003+05:30

Nabokov, the author of Lolita, on being asked about how American he was, had replied, “I’m as American as April in Arizona.” I read it in an article in the Economist and thought that it was beautiful. But like many things beautiful, the writer of the article stated and I agree with him, it meant nothing.

From my recent trip along the Konkan coast, I brought some coasters that featured picturesque vistas: sunsets, sunrises, beaches, sand, shells. Decidedly appealing. But what did they mean? Did they appeal because they were photographs—moments when time was caught static and developed on print. Isn’t that merely a manner of speaking, with little underlying substance?

And why did I like what Nabokov had said?

Human understanding, as Phaedrus saw, can be divided into classical and romantic understanding. Function and form is how I have come to understand it. Classical understanding deals with the underlying basis, the meaning of things, while the romantic mode is concerned with appearance. What things mean versus how things appear. Art can be said to belong to the domain of the romantic. You can’t write an algorithm to produce a good painting. Art is a product of intuition, imagination, inspiration. Science is primarily classical: it looks for reason and logic. In the romantic mode, the distinction between “good” and “bad,” “ugly” and “beautiful,” is made mainly on the basis of esthetics and outward form. In the classical mode, such divisions run deeper. They cut to the bone, expose the underlying form, in search of a compact structure. To the proverbial artist, the scientist is boring. And the scientist generally has no time for the artist.

There appears to be a wedge driven straight between the romantic and classical edifices. However, there has to be something that lends meaning to them in conjunction—that sheds light on their separateness in a manner that builds a bridge between. That is very fundamental—the crux. This is what Phaedrus set out to discover.

*******

The reason I enjoyed myself so much on the trip was because I was myself throughout. Every day, people enter rooms—not merely physically enclosed spaces but sealed containers in their heads too—and start talking and behaving in a certain way. It’s like something’s in the air: the whole milieu changes. The you starts to watch out and has his hands full watching out. It’s exhausting, not to mention debilitating.

Travelling alone, or with a close friend, is like getting back into your own skin. To use the words of J K Rowling (although in an entirely different context), the inessentials are stripped off. You can wander aimlessly; you don’t have to show purpose; you don’t have to care. You become a tent by the beach, not a fully furnished house. No keeping track of bills, no closing doors and windows before going to sleep, no checking of taps and switches. Just listen to the waves and lie in the sound.

Groundhog Life

2008-07-07T03:58:00.004+05:30

Repetition—the implement to turn the hands of time. The old man’s utterances and actions prosper in iteration. In a distinctly personal manner, he orchestrates quotidian happenings. Putting the electronic shaver to his skin, first thing in the morning. Driving to the tender coconut vendor after lunch. Paying him the exact change. Folding the newspaper in exactly the same way. Watching the Great Indian Laughter Challenge every evening. Opening the doors for perfectly expected mirth at the appointed hour.

Everything in order and everyone as expected. The maid who is always faced with the same enquiry: did she buy bread and milk? did she mop the bedroom floor? The gatekeeper who is always asked if the car had been given a wash. The bhaajiwala who is queried about the freshness of vegetables.

Immersion in simple, continual needs.

Empty, urgent, itchy needs. The machinery attending to needs chugging along like clockwork. A clockwork orang. To whom is known all the hues contained in the portrait of life. No sudden realizations, no discoveries; only a quiet manner of putting brush to canvas.

Engrossment in tasks that do not pose dilemmas. Preoccupation with positively conditioned reactions. Life as the inversion of childhood. Life as the answer to the perfunctory ‘How do you do?’

Shame

2008-06-26T14:55:00.004+05:30

For a few fleeting moments, the colors of shame mellowed, fading to merge with the color of his skin. And he pondered.

Shame is not debilitating
The feeling it induces inside is.
Each buffet endured, pushing life closer to tipping point.
Shame, an entirely personal possession on a distinctly public occasion
Armfat hanging slack in a row of taut arms,
And the accompanying sidelong glances
Bits of an entirely personal belonging distributed among a thousand minds
Opinions collected as a token of involvement
Challans dispensed for remembrance, and a precautionary measure too
The overt character of shame
Shame is ignominy, embedding a public construct

Free verse buoyed by his thoughts, flew unmindful of gravity. It was his mind that was the most stubborn leech. It was what went on in his head that made him squirm and want to rip it out. It made him want to sleep; be a cat, a dog; be blind and deaf; to inflict physical pain that could mock at what was immeasurable mental anguish. Deep in moments of shame, it dawned on him that nightmares are known for their tenacity. That they accompany you to doors of despair; leave you to suffer; then escort you on more miserable journeys.

On these journeys, his fixation was pulled away from all the beauty in this world and he couldn’t but be preoccupied with a single crippling feeling and he felt worth his most embarrassing deficiency and his mindspace was littered with humiliations—it was after he had been through all this that he had begun to view his destination: nakedness.

Snapping out of his deconstruction, he managed to smile and resolved to enjoy the sedateness while it lasted. Until the next wave hit him and the thin fabric that was his skin turned see-through.

self-doubt

2008-06-24T23:43:00.007+05:30

If I can get the fact that I haven’t posted anything on this page for a long time out of the way, maybe I can ignore the difficulty I’m facing right now, in writing after a protracted hiatus.

During this hibernation, gushing emotions have been checked, their course altered, their energy redirected, distributed among everyday doings. The huge village fire around which the entire community gathered has given way to small earthen lamps that light selfish households. Now, evenings aren’t spent together anymore; shared drives and a common fate have been supplanted by favourite sitcoms and cheap promos—lures accompanying newly acquired wealth.

There is a certain unmistakable despair in the dispersal of a platoon. Especially when that platoon is you and the soldiers pushing for victory thus far, who have now ceased to fight for a cause worth living for, are aspects of your self: conviction, confidence, esteem, faith. And particularly so when it is a war of choice. The exhortations have lost their capacity, replaced with mutterings of “I do not want to fight anymore.” The commander is at a loss for words that can turn rising tides. Before he conjures a summons though, gathering their forces around his diminishing authority, are swarms of self-doubt—buzzing and alive.

Self-doubt is seldom given due importance, partly because a commander isn’t supposed to entertain it or he doesn’t believe strongly enough to perceive a diminution in his creed. Self-doubt is indubitable, inevitable, and, if not limited by a strong embankment, inexorable.

I’m the wobbly commander. Sometimes, he, who has been tongue-tied, finds a loudspeaker to shout into. After the initial amplitude demanding attention, my platoon hears the anguish. Stabs, stings, aches, throbs.

I feel it in moments I revel in professional success or among social friends, A set of eyes, a pair of ears, a nose for banter, hands to drive home points, and a body draped in acceptable clothing—all seemingly indicating participation. With mind in knots, gallivanting, galloping to distant lands, sketching, tending to imagination.

Yet, I have to make a living as much as I have to live. Finding meaning in existence is a digression from an understanding of the cost of living and the means required to pay for it. Decades and years are apt spans to judge lives; for the meaning of existence, every hour is a yardstick long enough.

chinatown

2008-03-26T23:54:00.005+05:30

A couple of months ago, I did something really stupid, or so I was told. I voiced my reservations not through a carefully worded mail, nor via polite requests or practical suggestions that smacked of an implicit acceptance of the status quo, but by speaking my mind. With incisive humor. On the company intranet.

And very soon, judging from the reaction, of which there was a flood, I came across roughly 3 kinds of employees: (1) absolute suckers/dumb duds/enemies of reason and logic/those who don’t know they are being taken for a ride; (2) those who want change but are afraid to speak up; and (3) those who belong to the happily-aloof-as-long-as-I-have-my-paycheck category.

Of the first category, two quit almost immediately after singing paeans of praise for their employer. Several members of the second type conveyed their support, but only through online chats or in person. The third species probably didn’t know that something was on until they overheard office gossip and then were mostly like “Dude, that was really stupid!”

The last year and a half have been a learning experience. Not because of the career progression that I’ve made but because of how closely I’ve observed the “corporate culture.” And I’ve realized, totally internalized, the fact that the only shade that will always be in vogue is grey.

I do not know why exactly Stanley Kubrick was a misanthrope but I can vouch on my epitaph that had he worked in the services industry, he would’ve surely had a very valid reason.

In this age when everything sells, why isn’t integrity being put up on shop windows? How do I explain to all these people that it is not I who needs a reality check. It is them. It is they who put their sugarcoated words on company newsletters; it is they who learn the company’s “mission statement” by rote; it is they who, in full knowledge of their actions, compromise on their work and on the manner in which they let themselves work.

And here I spend my time trying to scrub off the filth that sticks to my skin every day.

It is now that I fully understand Jerry Macguire. That there’s a big difference between what we think and what we say or do. And were we to be unafraid to do the right thing, or try to, we would be driven to despair. And fired.

I’m not taking the moral high ground here. I’m ranting because of a very selfish reason. I cannot imagine how I can survive selling myself like this. I can only see very lonely hours. I may speak to you, crack a few smart jokes and impress you, but I will find it difficult to bring myself to respect you.

In the twilight of life, should you choose to look back, remember these words: Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough. And this is exactly how some of you will have earned respect too.

P.S.: The quote in italics is from Chinatown (1974).

poetry

2008-02-28T09:52:00.002+05:30

Freedom arrived
With heavy wings
Where I wanted to soar
Only flitted low
And did not bite the dust

Joy in self-acceptance
Left a trail of unpaid debts
Swarms plagued nights, turned slayers of mirth
Doused sunshine and blurred days

Love arrived
Accompanying clauses and conditions
Fine print and punitive damages
Where I wanted to live
Could only breathe
A little easy, just a little

Consumed by wants
Convince, cajole, coax
Choices make up identity; let me make mine
And live them
Listen to me! Trust me! Believe, please!

Revelation in self-deception
Glory, acclaim—pleased as punch
A naked solitary man, before mirror
Skin peeling off: ugly, ugly, ugly!

Now: Reconnoitring lands for satisfying truth
Saddled, though, with an unabridged version
Leaf pages, jot points, make notes

anagramloverfriendshipimaginationhope: haikus

2008-01-30T14:38:00.000+05:30

Anagram

slipshod letters of
incomprehensible life,
arranged: fragmented

Lover

a touch for a look
while spent by lover’s brook
cymbals—best when paired

Friendship

hiss, burnt lips: common
shared junk, dutch fares: together
moving images

Imagination

on sick bed, wasted
in dreams distant, yet vivid
runs free, wind in hair

Hope

night crescent broken,
small pieces cached for weeks
like treasured toy

Delightful coincidence

2008-01-07T23:16:00.000+05:30

Free will and imagination are entities that I’ll always hold dear. During my formative years, I rebelled against, in various measures, efforts at oppressing me. And through such experiences, I realized that I can be threatened through multifarious channels and that the adversary is a shape-shifting thing. Coercion can occur in subtle ways, through effective blackmail, via open subjugation, or by fomenting a sense of guilt. It can happen in daily conversations, by regular conditioning, courtesy public rebukes, or by demands of love’s labor. Sometimes, the perpetrators are well-meaning people—family, for example—who seem to know what’s good for you. You become an agent, a medium, that is driven to act toward goals you may not cherish. It’s not black and white. That is, you can’t distinguish between the forces acting upon you as entirely positive or entirely negative. The magnitude and time for which such forces act determine their impact on you.

When you choose your actions, you accept total responsibility for their consequences. And that in turn makes you work harder and better. Thereafter, what you’re guilty of is not some half-baked effort but a full-blooded charge. Everything else falls into line. Your priorities are arranged in a perfect hierarchy. Free will and imagination—two life-sustaining forces—act on you then. Without the influence of these forces, however, life starts to decay. You’re cut off from the wellspring of eros.

Self-preservation is the greatest gift you can bestow upon yourself. It’s the most timeless quality; yet, it is the most difficult to cultivate. People corrupt themselves all the time, everywhere. What is the average man capable of? And what does he come up with? And then he still has someone to blame for his bungling. I do not want to have lived a life that respected elders, served as a model citizen, obeyed the law, cared for family, helped friends only because it was expected to, and was commanded to. I want to choose to do any of these moral deeds or not commit any of these crimes, depending on what I hold true. No one should dispute this right to me.

From what I’ve written, it may appear as if I’m an extremely difficult person to deal with. Like I abide by a straitjacketed, claustrophobic code. Should give the impression as if I suffer people and those who stick with me merely succeed in surviving me. But that’s not quite true, at least not apparently. I’ve got plenty of friends, if I may say so myself, and my family loves me. I may not call my mother as frequently as she would like me to, but she still doesn’t think that she has lost me, or worse that I don’t deserve to be loved. And for the said intangible possessions, I haven’t had to lie or be anyone but myself. I’ve just done what I’ve felt to be right and have tried to live by it. In the life that I await, I see myself doing the same and not bothering about anything else. It’s not my business to make the most number of people happy; it’s my moral obligation to be true to myself. And free will and imagination are tools that’ll always come in handy. That they’ll also lend an exalted quality to life shall be a delightful coincidence.

I'll live like a hack

2008-01-02T23:43:00.001+05:30

I feel like a hack—is one who exploits his creative potential to come up with dull, repetitive, menial work, for money. I don’t get that much money, and may be my professional work isn’t so trite after all. But that doesn’t make me any less of a hack. I’ve come to realize that talent means next to nothing. See me, for example. Things I have been for a living: software professional, editor. Things I can be: film critic, copywriter, scriptwriter, travel writer, teacher, columnist, cricket commentator, and may be mechanical engineer. Except engineering and scriptwriting, I’m sure I can be on the job with immediate effect. So, what should I make of it? Nothing. I only need enough money to do what I want to do. But for the money, I have to do something that incidentally files my core, making it fit snugly like a dovetail joint. May be then, I should decide on how much of a hack I’m prepared to be and how much money would fill my pockets.

One evening, about a year and a half ago—one of those evenings when my professional life was in limbo, those days of joblessness yet sheer ebullience at having given expression to thoughts simple and deep, at having distilled life into words that carried me to the threshold of a magnificent portal, that dressed up in the wardrobe of ideas and looked askance for my approval like a child up to antics for a share of his mother’s attention—on one of such days, I remember listening to Baba O’Riley for the longest time ever. And while the piano and the violin were played for me, I discovered my mojo, as if saying, “If you can make something brilliant, so can I.” And I wrote this as a part of something else.

Life in its myriad forms came forth and claimed territory. Dominions were disrespected. Fat, croaking frogs laid siege to unseen corners of houses and paid no rent. Lazy creepy crawlies stood their ground. When poked, and asked to move out, they coiled with insouciance and pretended to nap. Gregarious crickets carried on noisy conversations with aplomb. Bees hummed, guiding their brethren towards teeming hives in fusty garages. Butterflies floated from petal to petal, like promiscuous bodies, drinking from many bowls. Colonies of ants marched along damp walls in a single file like medieval infantries. Bugs formed clubs and societies and congregated with needless regularity to discuss trivial issues. Spiders roamed about intrepidly with open mandibles. House lizards preyed walls and chomped careless flies like hungry horses chomping oats. Greedy-gutted caterpillars gorged on leafy branches.

Maybe I should just fuck the money. Let everyone else take my share, if ever there was anything for me. I could not, should not, care less. You go fuck your money and lead your fucking mediocre lives. I’ll live like a hack one half of each day, and go home to create something brilliant.

I walk on bubble toes

2007-11-19T22:55:00.000+05:30

I sit cross-legged, twiddling thumbs and dusting off
Yesteday’s scurf
Choosing whole seasons to efface
That spring of apathy, there goes the summer of skeletons

I turn with a swish, and shoot off a thinking man’s look
Asking “what is that?”
A mirror or a photograph of my best self?
Am I the one who clings or lets go?
Is that the one who spills beans in a drunken stupor, or
Then who do I lie to?

Before the winter too there was cold
Yet hope was there
Hope only stayed faithful to young years
Crossed-out calendars hence, they live apart and fragile

Time has been stripped off, shred
And all that is left now is a want
Without history or chronology
I may say more, or less
But all that will come out is a version of that want

I lie here in the sink
A crusted, burnt pan
Dumped under a column of running water
Waiting to be wiped shiny clean
Then put on the stove to stew flavors

It’s a peculiar feeling when expressed in these many words:

2007-11-11T22:32:00.000+05:30

I do not understand why nothing really hurts, nor why I’m never truly happy. On occasions, I’ve wondered if there’s something wrong with such a feeling, and I’ve conjured up dire scenarios and wondered how I would act were they to come true. And even then I’ve seen that my life would go on. That I would find a way out. Does this make my sorrow, my happiness any less important or worthy of attention? I’ve been in situations that would demand self-castigation or would make others label me indifferent or selfish, but nothing matters, really. There exists an equanimity within me that draws its strength from impassivity. That nothing is really important. That there are replacements and substitutes, and remedies and workarounds.

I play so many roles, yet none seems to seep under the skin. Insincere and superfluous, my roleplays may be called. It is true, yet is it only that? I laugh, I advise, I appear, I indulge, I joke, I talk, I am just present sometimes, I work for people, I listen to them, I lie, I restrain, I share, I deter, I correct. And all of these are essentially fleeting—their realities are visiting guests. They do not stay long; they cannot. If they did, they might rot my life because their foundations are flimsy and they start to decompose in a matter of days. People do not and cannot pause to think of such truths because they’re busy stuffing their lives with more. They’re engaged in keeping up with the consequences of one reality, or working hard to acquire a new one. Either ways, they are neck-deep in life or at least busy trying to.

Rob a man of his subterfuges and you’ll see him desperate and lashing out. That is why people are so lonely when they’re alone. No, it is not a sequitur. It is almost an irony that when no roleplay is asked of men and women, they feel lost. Is it because the subterfuges, however short-lived they might be, define their lives?

Human existence is a difficult phenomenon to deliberate on because sometimes there remains no frame of reference from which to plot, to measure, to relate to, or to extrapolate. You love someone the way he is and your love is unconditional. Is it not sloppy too that it leaves his inadequacies unattended, his blemishes intact? Is it blind, or short-sighted, in that case? Should then your love be correcting, demanding, strong and harsh? Is apathy as a middle path worth choosing? Can human discretion be trusted on to mold a newborn who is without habit and possession? Are there adequately strong moral codes for raising a life?

The quality to perceive the human condition is a double-edged sword—the brave will want it to feel what it is like to live, while the meek will say “no, thank you very much, I’m happier with my desensitized life.” Yet, I do not belong to the meek because I can still feel. Does that make my life any happier? No, certainly not. Yet, at least, the life I live in has a window. And sometimes, when I open it, I can see a fantastic imagination rising over fragmented and disagreeing realities. And then I feel truly free, without allegiance and bondage. It’s an awareness without joy nor sorrow—only a deep realization. To even begin to grasp this hint of a feeling, you shall have to step out of that swamped nest in the attic.

Nobody tells me what to do

2007-11-01T23:10:00.000+05:30

After watching No Smoking, I remembered what had most stayed with me after I had seen 2001: A space odyssey: the director had real balls. More so, when he has in his reportoire one film that was never released and another that ran into big problems with the censor board; because until he strikes gold, everything he touches is looked at with circumspect. More importantly, Stanley Kubrick could afford to produce 2001 himself, and his name did command an audience in 1968. Anurag Kashyap is a much poorer cousin who has dared to present before an audience that is quite content with neatly packaged routines a very selfishly made 140-odd minutes of footage. I stress the minutes because it takes hardly one to turn a viewer away from the hours of thought and effort invested in filming that footage. Also, these days, it takes just one bad/thanda review to drive viewers away from an outing at the theater. In the last five days, I’ve listened to more than a few people talk about No Smoking’s poor ratings when I’ve asked them if they were interested in watching it.

The film says nothing about smoking. Some other personal habit could’ve been shown without altering the import of the movie. And it is definitely not a film that carries a social message: smoking is bad. If they show it, and you’ve heard it on TV, then its probably a marketing gimmick, or just a ploy to please the powers that be, or simply the flavor of the season.

No Smoking, to me, is about insolence. As K, the chain-smoking dapper protagonist, asserts before the mirror, Nobody tells me what to do.

I’m not sure about the stereotype, but a male chain smoker isn’t always as in-your-face as K is in the movie. There are subdued, subconsciously apologetic, smokers who are almost sorry about their habit. But K takes the crux of the matter and shakes every vestigial and societal aspect off it. He is man in his most unmoderated form, untamed too. He elicits very strong, definte opinions because he doesn’t bother to round off the edges, nor cover the blemishes. He blows smoke on his wife’s face; yet it has got nothing to do with his love for her. He loves her, as he does love his brother; yet, he will not change for them. Without a hint of apology.

What does society—the living beast that manifests itself through appointed and sometimes self-appointed sentinels—do to such an impertinent man? It tries to prune him, chop off his fingers, snatch away his remote control. If he gives in, then his existence is rendered incomplete. He then is admitted into a diabolic fellowship and looks for another to pare down so that he can be recompensed for his own deficiency. Imagine losing your fingers in an exercise but having the chance to get them back if you refer another, who then will indoctrinate yet another and so on, for the same undertaking. It’s an unending cycle. However, there’s a catch. The spirit cannot recover; only the body can. Once sacrificed, the essence of existence cannot be procured again. This is all that No Smoking has to say.

I’m not even trying to separate the quality of the film from its intent. Because this film has been made for the love of the art. So self-indulgent and so striking.

runathon

2007-11-01T01:41:00.000+05:30

I could write more, but I'll only give the details. I finished in 1:47, way more than what I had aimed to. A 7:45 am start meant a scorching sun halfway through the race. By the 10th km, my calves started twitching, and I tapered off without even realising it fully. Thankfully, I got Bahn, who finished 2 seconds before me, alongside from the 14th km onward. Having someone set the pace helps when your body isn't responding too well. In the end though, I was glad I finished it.

The heat got to most, I think, from what I gathered from people after the race. Milind Soman, who was faster than me by less than a minute in Mumbai earlier this year, lagged a fair bit behind when I finished. My rank jumped to 323 from 750 in Mumbai with the difference of only a couple of minutes. Gujja finished in 2:02; he had hardly practiced and that showed. Reports claimed a participation of over 7000 professionals (which is exactly what, I do not understand). So, comparatively I did quite ok.

In truth, however, I can't quite see my effort in perspective. A part of me is disappointed with the timing; another is more appreciative, considering the heat and cramps. I do not feel the need to patronize any of the two. So, I just let them be.

I shall always remember the stretch leading up to the India Gate. Prior to the race, I had imagined about what a lovely sight it would be to behold. But once there, when I started cramping, all the romance just ran thin. I could only manage to concentrate on the next few steps; I started counting numbers cyclically. You need many such hours of trial to fathom what you can do and how far you can go. It's either a painfully or an exhileratingly pure experience. Every time I touch the finish line, I will have learned something more about myself in ways that no one can teach me. I wish I could explain it; sometimes words are just too cumbersome a tool to use.

I'll try harder in January, in the Mumbai Marathon. Until then, all I say is bluster.

My eyes are silly silly silly

2007-10-25T16:07:00.000+05:30

Hawkins: I’ve got it! I’ve got it! The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true! Right?
Griselda: Right. But there’s been a change: they broke the chalice from the palace!
Hawkins: They *broke* the chalice from the palace?
Griselda: And replaced it with a flagon.
Hawkins: A flagon...?
Griselda: With the figure of a dragon.
Hawkins: Flagon with a dragon.
Griselda: Right.
Hawkins: But did you put the pellet with the poison in the vessel with the pestle?
Griselda: No! The pellet with the poison's in the flagon with the dragon! The vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true!
Hawkins: The pellet with the poison’s in the flagon with the dragon; the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true.
Griselda: Just remember that.

---------from “The Court Jester”

The king smoked a Cuban cigar
And there coughed the old vicar
Cigar, vicar, vicar, cigar
What difference does it make?
A c here, a v there
What does a king care?

My eyes are silly, silly, silly
They make me dilly dilly dally
I’ve arrived in life a man
But with my moustache in the make-up van

She was hard, she brandished her might
For the kids she was an absolute fright
She never let them fly a kite, never tolerated a slight
“There, there,” the kids shouted, “there goes the woman in uptight”

------------Lines for a few of my own musicals

I’m leaving for Delhi this evening. Last Sunday, I did 15 km in 66 min. That tells me I’m sort of on track for the 28th.

I’ve a feeling I’ve arrived in adulthood whole
Only if I were shorn off this worldly parole
I should not go down without a try
Because sometimes even turtles can fly

Wish me luck, fellas.

Is serious talk diluted by humor?

2007-10-16T23:38:00.000+05:30

Imagine a teenaged girl on her first trip with friends. She wants to fit each of her dozen favorite dresses into a tiny bag for just a weekend outing.

I’m having trouble keeping a reign over my choice of ideas. It’s like I’m going to author only one book ever; hence the urgency to stuff everything in it. Make it an expression of all my thoughts—everything that I’ve felt, ruminated over, understood, deconstructed. This is the Achilles heel of first timers: too much, too soon.

Sometimes, when I read what I’ve written after a reasonably long interval, I’m rather surprised for someone who’s reading his own writing. The purport appears much diluted than what I had apprehended at the time of conception, or the analogies are jarring. Words of value have the power to weather time and situations. They should make sense, carry the same punch, at all times: marshmellowish in or out of love; deeply moving before and after pregnancy; funny on bad as well as good hair days.

Or they should carry the tang of abstract metaphysical shit. Whose shit it is, then, is entirely left to your sense of smell or to how clogged your sinuses are.
I love Murakami for the nothingness that he portrays.... He’s a nihilist, yet so much of a believer.... I mean, his words say nothing, yet everything.

--------------------------------------------------------------

I’ve always wondered about the truth in *discovering* oneself. I think its usage is clichéd and inaccurate. I don’t think there’s a complete, definite *you* waiting to be discovered. A more accurate word is *evolve*. It’s by putting yourself in different situations that you allow yourself to grow, in whichever way, and evolve into the person that you subsequently become.

A staunch Church-fearing Catholic is most certain to not discover her sexual side before marriage, if she abstains from premarital sex. Give her a riding crop, banish the Church from her mind, or hand her hope with batteries, and you may just trigger a perpetual hormone surfeit in her system.

You think cricketers in the 70s and 80s had more integrity than the present crop, which made them keep their hands off match fixing? No. They just didn’t have the opportunity. So, although it is commendable that they were honest, hardworking working-class sportsmen fighting to win each time they stepped onto the field, they managed to stay relatively squeaky clean because a good enough temptation hadn’t presented itself yet in their time.

You may strongly oppose abortions and have reasons aplenty to substantiate your choice. But, you still may not have carried an unwanted life inside you. Or you may not have seen a friend or your own child go through the travail of a teen pregnancy. Having experienced any one of the above, you may very well switch sides. Would you then find who you truly are?

Nothing determines us as much as the part of the human spectrum that we’re witness to.

fear and loathing

2007-10-10T21:17:00.000+05:30

Too many people know me here. This place seems like a ghetto where everyone knows everyone else, where eventually we all have to perish. No one comes out alive. Before that, there shall be some moments of respite, but punctuating these moments will be a fierce countenance stretched taut over the hours—millions of them one after the other, like an army of ants. The thought of it makes me cower. All the tenacity melts to unmanly wuss and rises up in guttural convulsions. It sucks me out hollow and vacant. And then fills me with hunger for the same things again. I look through the same recipe again; I cook the same poison; I stuff myself with it.

And the turnstiles to the park rotate again. I make a full circle to find myself at where I began, veritably rooted. My system can never assimilate the poisonous air—I turn to smoke coarse desires, I slake my thirst with cheap money. Such a warp. The forces are at it, twisting that which has been eulogized as unbending—the spirit. But it’s dead and it’s famous. That’s why everyone is brandishing a copy of the neatly written eulogy.

I can’t fight the future. I can’t fight when I’m asleep. I can’t fight because I’m busy. People, listen! Come together and destroy each other. Let’s all fall apart because there’s a private solace in witnessing a collective fall. Damn he who doesn’t participate.

Let us fall in love, fuck our brains out, and fuck some more. Let’s fuck, fuck like rabbits. Fuck until we can’t even see the cobwebs. Or let’s reign in our fucks for now, and be moral. Better still, let’s save ourselves for the eventual fuck. Let’s then have kids and sit at interviews offering donations for admission to kindergarten. Let’s turn teachers and preach. Do this; don’t look up a lady’s skirt; don’t cheat in exams; don’t lie; speak your mind, albeit when mommy and daddy are in a good mood. Let’s push them to excellence; to thinner air. Let’s make educated piggy banks out of our children.

Let’s smooth all edges in hindsight. Let the obituaries of sick, devouring parasites read well. Let’s all write them in good English.

“Son,” the father said, “Do you see this?”
“Yes, father.”
“This is a machete. Learn to wield it.”
“For what, father?”
“Learn to use it on yourself; learn to chop, to pare down yourself so that you fit in.”
“But won’t I kill myself then?”
“No son, you’ll only learn to grow in ways that agree, that blend with the landscape.”

with great difficulty or with foolish abandon?

2007-10-05T23:21:00.000+05:30

The other day, a friend, while chatting online with me, spoke about an interesting incident that had occurred about a decade ago. It was mundanely interesting—the kind of interesting some of us need to hear every day to feel a sense of amusement. So, I thought about the incident after that and made up a story revolving around it. I narrated the story, or rather my version, to three other friends. Didn’t tell them about my concoction; just recounted it with some friend of mine as the protagonist. I liberally added details (not as far as sub-plots) as I expatiated upon my story, as they occurred to me. When they asked me questions, I proffered answers that seemed plausible given the fabricated circumstances.

Sometimes, I do this; it is rather engaging.

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I’ve run a decent distance this week. More than 30 km in 5 days. Tomorrow, next morning that is, I plan to run 10 km. I’m excited about it, but I’m not too excited by the sameness in the morning sights. I hate the old woman who puts her sac down at roughly 6:30 every morning and starts wailing for alms. It beats me. Her motivation toward this daily activity seems redoubtable. There’s this hunk who runs as if he’s in a photoshoot, swinging his hair wildly. And, the aunties in salwar-kameez and sneakers who parade woodenly and gossip. All of them quite fit their respective stereotypes too, which is what adds to my miff. I like watching the kids waiting for their school buses though. They are lost, sleepy, curious, and bright. There was a phase in the 2nd standard when I dreaded going to school. A wave of melancholy would sweep over me—or rather I would allow it to do so, so as to loll in it—every morning. I used to go in a rickshaw (not auto), and throughout the duration of the ride I would be grumpy. The rickshawwala, I forget his name, had a big mole like a watermelon seed fixed near his nose. It’s funny I remember him by that. My mum used to be paranoid about him, always checking if he was drunk.

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I’ve been wanting to blog, and now I’m writing about wanting to blog. Reminds me of “Adaptation” and Charlie Kaufman. It’s about a writer trying to adapt a book into a movie screenplay. Anyway, I haven’t been able to blog because I just didn’t want to blog for the heck of it. [This is how unstructured thought reads.] So, this movie, Adaptation, has twin brothers Charlie and Donald. “Charlie writes the way he lives... with great difficulty. His twin brother Donald lives the way he writes... with foolish abandon.” Donald is the more successful writer, of course.

I’ve been on this extended movie trip for over a month. Have watched quite a few brilliant movies, the experiences of which I cannot do justice to by elucidating in a blog. Have been paying attention to a few things—most importantly, to how footage is shot and compiled.

In “Central do Brasil,” an old woman is shown working at the busy Rio central station. The camera follows her weaving her way through the crowd enroute home from work. When she reaches home, however, the camera is already inside the house. The shot is that of an observer in the house looking at someone entering it. This shot is not her point of view; it’s that of an outsider who, ironically, is inside the house. A little later, a window of the lady’s house is shown being opened, from across the street. Again, it’s the view of an observer who’s outside the domain of the lady. These scenes evidently do not showcase her vantage point.

Flip to “Le Fils.” The camera follows Olivier, a carpentry instructor, as he moves, whenever he moves. When Olivier looks around a corner, we look around the corner. He looks at a boy huddled up; we look at him too. The shots are very faithful to what Olivier sees.

Given the fact that these examples belong to different movies, it is quite interesting to understand their relevance to the themes portrayed. I don’t agree with “Central do Brasil”; I have a feeling the director didn’t pay enough attention to why he wanted his shots the way they were shown.

This is why I prefer watching films by myself. I’ve been ribbed about this habit by friends. Anyway, some of the movies I’ve seen—persona, blowup, wild strawberries, 12 angry men, bleu, the double vie de veronique, color of paradise, seven samurai, the tenant, sonatine, blue velvet, 2001: a space odyssey, talk to her, the big lebowski, central do brasil, le fils, mountain patrol.

Ram Sethu and Gujja

2007-09-23T09:08:00.000+05:30

Let’s catch up on the buzz of the week.

On Saturday, Bharatiya Jan Shakti Party president Uma Bharati filed a police compliant against Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi, and three ministers.

What led her to this?

The government hurt her religious beliefs with its affidavit on the Ram Sethu issue. The former BJP leader was upset over the government’s affidavit, filed before the Supreme Court, and since withdrawn, in which it had stated that epics like Ramayana provided no historical proof of Lord Ram’s existence, angering many Hindu groups.

What led the government to its affidavit?

The government was responding to a petition against the Sethusamudram Shipping Canal Project (SSCP), which has been billed by maritime experts as the “Suez of the East.” The much delayed project proposes to build a canal that will reduce the distance between the east and west coasts by up to 424 nautical miles and sailing time by up to 30 hours.

In a separate, though related, news story, Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) international general secretary Pravin Togadia asked the organization’s activists to file as many as 1000 FIRs against Tamil Nadu CM Karunanidhi for his disparaging—and rationalist?—remarks questioning the existence of Lord Ram.

In related developments, traffic was held up across several North Indian cities on Wednesday as the VHP protested against the planned project.
Also, Ram Vilas Vedanti, a former BJP Member of Parliament who is also described as a senior VHP leader, remarked on Friday, in Ayodhya, that VHP saints would weigh in gold anyone who beheaded Karunanidhi and cut out his tongue.

Skepticism abounds on the project as certain quarters have raised the issue of a cost-benefit analysis and damage to the coral reef. However, maritime experts say that once completed, the project would bring immense economic benefit to India, and an environmental assessment has put to rest all fears of coral damage, indicating that the dredging will steer clear of coral reefs.

Trivia:
• The SSCP was originally conceived in 1860 by the British Commander A D Taylor of the Indian Marines.
• The SSCP was first cleared by the Jawaharlal Nehru cabinet in 1955.
• After independence, almost once in every decade, a committee or a prominent expert made a recommendation in favor of the construction of the canal.
• The Suez and Panama canals were opened in 1869 and 1914 respectively.

What I glean from all this is that inertia isn’t an Indian trait. Want to build a canal? Set up a committee. Want to stop a canal from being built? Stage dharnas and protests and burn everything. Want to justify such actions? Ram naam satya hai. In school, I learnt about the Suez canal and about how ingenious a feat of engineering it is. Also, while having to memorize the Preamble to the Indian Constitution, I recognized that India is a “secular” country. Both these nuggets of information underwent an essential, if not factual, correction.

In the next few weeks, I see historians and people from the Archaelogical Survey of India (ASI) leaving no page unturned nor graves undigged to prove/disprove the existence of Lord Ram.

Scenario 1: Mr. Singhal, top ASI man, is sent onsite to Ram Sethu to assess the age of the purported bridge. Before leaving, he is asked for a small favor by his mum.

Beta, will you please get me paao kilo (250 g) of soil from Ram Sethu?
Umm... ma, but... ok ok
Also beta, Mrs. Gupta, our neighbor, also wanted some. Her son is really ill.
Ma, this is an official trip!
I don’t know. You get me... and don’t cheat this time, get a clean handful. The last time from Dwarka, the soil smelt as if someone had just crapped on it.

Scenario 2: Ateet Mishra, reputed historian, meets an expert on the Ramayana to trace the chronology of events that led to the construction of Ram Sethu.

So, how can you be so sure that Ram existed?
What’s there to be sure? Ram was, is, will be... always. Now, some people also question whether there was a Holocaust or not.
But tell me how can a man from Lanka get involved with someone from Ayodhya in those days?
Arrey, distance was nothing for Ram... He was omnipresent.
Then, why did he build the bridge? He could’ve just gone there and fought Ravana.
Tch tch... you don’t understand... That is how it was, or else how would have Ramayana happened?
You mean to say all these elements just further the story?
Arrey, now, don’t ask me irrelevant questions. Ask Valmiki who wrote it.

Scenario 3: After the Ramayana, it is the sleazier Mahabhrata that is the center of attention. In this regard, a respected gynaecologist testifies in court.

Dr. Agarwal, tell me, is it realistic to say that it is possible for a woman to have given birth to 101 sons, as Gandhaari did.
Medically, this is unlikely. However, it is not impossible. For example, say, she gave birth to quintuplets each time. So, 20 pregnancies and you have a hundred Kauravas.
Brilliant analysis! However, tell me what are the odds of 101 boys and not a single girl?
It is difficult to say, but one possibility could’ve been female foeticide.
Ouch!

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Personal update

Three evenings ago, I get a call.

Dude, Delhi marathon is happening.
When?
28th October. You coming?
No yaar. Broke now. Blew up everything in Goa.
Dude, don’t worry about all that. Just come.
Umm..uh..
I’ll call you up tomorrow.

Next day, Gujja, my co-runner at the Bangalore and Mumbai half marathons, books tickets for the both of us for the Delhi Half Marathon on October 28th.

One day hence, I borrow money and buy running shoes, vests, socks, and shorts—the ensemble (this damage will be smoothed by my quarterly medical reimbursement due next month).

Gujja is smart, adventurous, responsible, straight, besides being tall, dark, and handsome. He swims, works out, knows how to salsa, is a complete athlete and cricketer, was really slick with Flash (when in college), and smells good too. The only possible loophole is a dicey sense of humor. But I’m told he’s working on his narration and content.

Why is he single? What’s with the girls? They land up with total jerks, have their hearts broken, binge on chocolate, and go on shopping sprees to get over it. But how can they miss someone like Gujja?

Anyway, I’ve upped the ante, having already started practice. I’ve beaten Gujja at the last two half marathons, and if things go well, I’ll do that again. Imagine, paying for someone’s fare and being beaten to the finish by him! Gujja, if this doesn’t set your sculpted ass on fire, nothing else ever will.

And this time it’s 21 kms within 1:30:00.

cries and whispers

2007-09-14T04:48:00.000+05:30

The street was enveloped in cries and whispers—soft sobs and wispy utterances. The early evening facade had worn itself out. The honking and buzz that would normally stun eardrums had retired to basements and garages. Now, all that one could catch from the insouciant air were cries and whispers.

He hacked and took a swill from the quarter. The whiskey had sunk down to its dregs. “Soon, it’ll be over,” said he, “and I’ll be down on my knees.” And yet he couldn’t think of anything to stave off the vermins. They were drawing closer in search of a decrepit mind to lay eggs in, to hatch and multiply, to build a home in. What a maze, he said to himself. Every moment is a step toward the inevitable, with that tautness of resolve a little weaker.

Engrossed, he almost stumbled upon a scraggy lump on haunches. An unkempt kid was sifting through the garbage for something meaningful—a discarded loaf of bread, a rotten apple, a few morsels. Anything that would stop the walls from closing in. The boy was rummaging through a pile of filth with a single-mindedness borne out of hunger. “Here, take this,” said he and dropped the bottle onto the heap. The boy didn’t look up, and he waited, for no one, before continuing to walk ahead.

A distant light shone upon a fetid pool by the street, like a bitter moon, making him look up at where it came from. The letters above the iridiscent source were delicately woven into one another in a tapestry, to form a name. His strides lengthened in the direction of the glow; he was almost running when he reached the wide glass doors of the store. The exterior had the signature of someone who cared for it; yet, it wasn’t pleasing to the eye, possibly because it was not done in a tasteful, social kind of way. The mannequins on the storefront did not resemble any that he had ever seen—a group of magnificently clothed women eyeing a female nude. Her eyes were barely open, as if the lids had cascaded a moment earlier, and her body was in a reposeful posture like it didn’t depend on balance. She wasn’t sculpted to perfection; only her blemishes were sculpted perfectly. If she was suffering, she didn’t show it, although disguise didn’t seem to be one of her ways.

Pulling the glass doors apart, he entered the store.

“I’m sorry, sir,” a very respectful voice ventured. “We’re
closing now.”
“Are you? I have barely come in.”
“I understand, sir, but we really are closing now.”
“Really?”
“Yes, sir, we are closing. Now.”
“No, I mean you really do understand?”
“Uhh...what do you mean?”
“I saw your shop from a distance and I came in, almost running. It is beautiful.”
“Well, thank you, sir. We are glad.”
“Who is we? You keep saying we. Who’s we?”
“I mean our shop, this shop,” stuttered she, unclasping her hands and spreading it outward to indicate the domain of we.

The light from the rows of lamps fixed on the ceiling and walls, turned up or to their sides, had bathed the floor in a sheer, yet private, shadow. The softness of this ambience contrasted with only the unfiltered shafts illuminating the rows of clothing hanging languidly on trolleys.

He gazed intently at each piece, mindfully soaking a pristine charm while disregarding the fumbling requests of the storekeeper. It was as if he was in the thick of one deep emotion, while the edges of another had blurred themselves.

The clothes were all hand stitched, each waiting—uncompromisingly, patiently—to blend with the personality of the discerning buyer. Above each was a snippet providing the idea behind it or photographs related to it, as if each were a persona with a singular history. Halting, continuing, he read the notes attached or peered at the snaps, reading between them or blowing them up in his head for finer details. Then his gaze fell upon the photograph.

It was an open coffin. An old woman lay in repose inside, her eyes sunken, and her body shrouded with petals strewn all over. A beautiful wreath circled her torso. Surrounding the woman were a group of people, her bereaved family possibly, captured in a grieving moment. All but a little girl, who was looking straight at the photographer. Her lips had parted into a wide smile and her shiny set of whites spoke of two brushings daily. Oblivious of any need to conform to an accepted emotion for that moment, her eyes entrusted the onlooker with a sublime innocence. She vested all the belongings of her newly lived years with the gazer, asking nothing in reciprocation.

It was a summer long past. He was two weeks from turning five, and life was just beginning to lend itself a shape. It was the evening his nana had died; it was a time when grief incited in mourners a silent wish to destroy all existence in their purview; it was when the photographs were being taken, during the funeral. An aunt first noticed it.

“Look at this child! He’s smiling! What a wicked little thing this child is! Aye, why are you smiling?”
“Because mummy said you should always smile in a photo,” replied he dutifully, slowly, and then rolling his eyes upward, trying to fetch another important reason from his young memory, lisped, “And mummy also told that nana went to heaven; so, I should be haaaappy.” He had always been a sprightly little one, always happy to explain and seek.

“How dare your mummy say that! You little brat, don’t you know that your nana died? And do you see the others smiling?”

In a fit of rage, she slapped him hard. His mother, always subdued and demure, took him away and locked him in the storeroom until the end of the ceremony.

Long after he had been brought out, he still remembered those burning cheeks and a pair of eyes running itself dry.

“Sir, we need to close now,” reminded the storekeeper.

“Why do you have this photograph?”

“The dress below that, you see, was ordered by the old lady in the picture, ironically as her funereal attire. But she passed away before that. So, our M’am has put it up for sale. She also has put this photograph up, I don’t know why or how she got it. She has weird tastes, I can tell you. But if you’re spooked by that kid in the photo, then ya I know how it is. Looks creepy, doesn’t she?”

“Yes, she does,” he replied, sealing the conversation shut.

he’s the dude, i tell ya

2007-09-06T23:09:00.000+05:30

How often had I heard the phrase “commentary on our society” and how little had I grasped it that I so marveled at 12 angry men huddled, locked, inside a cauldron of a room to decide the case of an 18-year-old boy. All this on the hottest day of the year—soaking handkerchiefs, sweaty swathes on buttoned shirts, glistening foreheads, and grimy minds full of prejudice, indifference, hatred, rigidity, and ennui. So, 12 Angry Men please watch.

Behind the veneer of societal decency, how do real men decide? Not everyone puts their feet in puddles of reason; most of them, perhaps, sidestep the slush. All that sangfroid is for sermons. Its bollocks. People sweat, they stammer, they shout just to be heard; choices are made in fits of emotion, apathy, duress. And then stands are stuck to, to not appear whimsical and fickle. Were there no one looking I would’ve swicthed like that—this way or that, who the fuck keeps an eye.

Its eerie to gauge the magnitude of discomfort of someone asked to make a decision—a conscious, rational decision. Its the possibilities that stump. “I’m not used to supposing; I’m a working man.” I tell ya what they don’t ask at job interviews: Are you the freedom-seeking type? Would you surrender more than half of your waking life just to earn enough vada pav to keep you off stomach cramps for the length of the other half? Anyway, long question. They probably would have to repeat the question to get the idea across.

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Ok, pertinent query. Would you be ashamed of yourself if you woke up in a gutter after a night of getting soused? I mean ashamed of your very own self. Now, this is my list of things to be ashamed of (not a comprehensive, all-encompassing one though):

If you are picky about food. Corollary: you fucking can’t enjoy the variety that is on spread.

If you overcompensate for the lack of a certain quality, which you desire, with another vice. Corollary: you not just are unable to save your ass, you succeed in getting it flogged like Zorro’s stallion, too.

If you heap the harvest of a stoked anger upon somone else. Corollary: not only will the person you are angry with not know that you are pissed with him/her but the inheritor of your misdirected anger will also wonder “why me?” and nurse a real sore grudge against you.

Ok, three should do fine.

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Now, my old man is stuck. It’s this guy in my story. When it first happened, he came around to getting stuck that is, I gave him my hours. Then, I reasoned, let’s give him some space. So, I sort of let him loose, not scot free but on a leash to wander yonder. But that stubborn sonofabitch! He just refuses to return... it’s not like I can’t get him around to do stuff, you know...

Can he smoke pot? Of course, he can.

Can he want to fuck younger women? May be he wants more.

But listen, I tell ya... Motive... MOTIVE. He needs a fucking good motive.

Everyday, someone gets up on a heavy dose of Jack Kerouac and decides to explore. And ends up sloshed and disillusioned.

Right now, therefore, as you can very plainly see, my old man is staying put... he thinks he’s the “Dude,” the big lebowski, you know. May be I should just get someone to pee on his rug. Ha! So much for creative abilities! Its a fucking lie, I tell ya.

debauched devdas and Anurag Kashyap

2007-08-29T23:56:00.000+05:30

Sumit recounts his story as a 19-year-old here:

During my B.Tech 1st year I made a play with my seniors on the life of AIDS patients and during the whole process, everybody claimed how much we FEEL their pain and how we wanted to work for the CAUSE. Well, I never felt their pain nor did I work for the cause, I just enjoyed working with one of the most talented people I had met till then, I enjoyed writing the script, I enjoyed writing the poems on the posters, I enjoyed playing the charecter. But all that claim of CAUSE-thing by my revered seniors left me confused. I felt that something is wrong with me, probably they feel something I am not capable of feeling.

This theatre lover chose to not be a part of street plays that his group had organized to collect funds for the Tsunami relief fund (he put his contribution in a charity box, instead). His friends accused him of “running away from the responsibility of a theatre person.” He didn’t agree with the “this-is-why-theatre-is-done” (to help people, that is) philosophy. What was his reason for not doing it then?

My reason for not being a part of their endeavours was that they all were not doing it in a very creative way.

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Anurag Kashyap’s (Black Friday, Paanch) struggle to make films that he believed in, without sacrificing or compromising his vision, is worth a read; if this trait percolates into the quality of his movies, then I can hardly wait to see them. His efforts at making his version of Devdas “where Devdas doesn’t pity himself, he discovers himself... that he is a debauch, a hypocrite, he is a sensualist, hence self-destructive...but he doesn’t know he is destroying himself” led him to knock on the doors of many potential producers, one of whom bestowed on him this priceless piece of advice.

Producer: This is your problem, you are always angry, no one can talk to you, do you know nobody here hates you as much as you want to believe it...even people at Yashraj say, he is a nice guy, all he has to do is stop being so angry...they really want to help you.

Anurag: Hello, do I look like I need help, I need people to believe in me, I need them to stop trying to help me, I want you to stop trying to make my life better, I want someone who can see I am not trying to make someone bankrupt, I am not an art filmmaker, I am not trying to sell philosophy, all I want to do is make films that everyone sees, I also want to reach out to the same audience that everyone does and how would you know I can’t if I am not doing what I want to.

What does Anurag Kashyap feel about the Devdas we know of for which, I presume, he wants to create his version of it?

Saratchandra always regarded Devdas as his worst book ever, which ended up becoming his most celebrated...Indians loved to pity themselves...hence songs like ghungroo ki tarah bajta hi raha hoon main.

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1. Laxman had no identity of his own. Take Ram out of the equation and Laxman seems to have lost his personality.
2. Gandhari chose to lead a blindfolded life because Dhritarashtra, her spouse, was blind.
3. Bhisma vowed lifelong celibacy, distributing his hormones among those less passionate about life, and forsook his claim to his father’s throne as an act of pure sacrifice.

For the Hindu child, the acculturization begins rather early. Two memes of their society—sacrifice and pity—are like constant reminders, admonishing, motivating, driving, directing them toward lives lived in their throes.

While sacrifice, as an Indian emotion, is pretty easy to identify with, pity is cloaked in the garb of kindness for the unfortunate; the unfortunate are buffeted by fate; and that is beyond their control. Thus, to feel pity for them is inevitable; it is destined and beyond the ambit of human control. And hence, the unfortunate need your pity.

I’m not convinced.

a long evening

2007-08-24T04:24:00.000+05:30

On Saturday, 18th August, at about 10:30pm, we began to realize the consequences of my carelessness. Earlier in the evening, lounging on the soft sands of Benaulim, I had kept the keys of our rented Pulsar on my slippers next to me only to conveniently obliterate it from my fleeting memory.

And, with the evening air pregnant with impending rain and the sea gathering its forces like a medieval army, it was such a beautiful setting that we could do nothing save go on a wild sheep chase, rummaging through a sandy plot where we conjectured to have most likely lost the keys, and now our minds. Tracing long straight lines with the backlight of our cellphones and demarcating our respective areas, we tried to bring a semblance of order to our search. More than a few long minutes of such travails and simultaneous futile attempts at procuring a torch hence, a rather helpful chap joined us, throwing off new ideas. He fetched a dry coconut branch and a matchbox to start a fire, but the soggy, wild winds were a literal damp squib. Sumu, meanwhile, decided, rather apologetically, to interrupt a cuddling couple on a bike nearby on the road leading up to the beach. Although the headlights lit up a sandy sweep, the keys remained ensconced, away from our sights. Shrugging off the urgency that such situations threaten to saddle with, I couldn’t but marvel, albeit fleetingly, at the setting, the grandeur of it.

On Sumu’s suggestion, I called up Francis, the rental guy, in Panjim. He had 3 sets of spare keys but couldn’t tell if any were of the Pulsar. After some reasoning, Sumu and I decided to spend the night at the only shack nearby since it gave us the heebie-jeebies to leave the bike in the open. The plan was such: search once more in the morning. No luck—go to Panjim, get keys and try them out, and get a duplicate made if keys don’t work. Lucky—go to hotel and collapse on the cosy beds (the romance of the night was already drenched as it had started pouring, with mosquitoes at us like hags). So, we spoke to one of the waiters in the shack who advised us to wait until the husband-wife duo who owned the shack left for home at 12. We bore a frustrating wait, watching lazy tourists trickle in, cursing them.

Sometime after midnight, Devendar Singh, the tandoori-chicken dishing chef came around to chat with us.
Haan, yahaan so to sakte ho. Bas bhoot aate hain. (Ya, you can sleep here; except that ghosts visit this place.)
Ha ha ha... kahaan aate hain? (Where do they come?)
Yahin pe, baahar, jahaan hum sote hain. (Here, where we sleep)

His words were laced with an earthy accent, typical of a rather docile UP wala with a penchant for recounting anecdotes. He was from Uttaranchal, he told us, and had been in Goa for about 12 years, working at sundry places. The other night, his patraam ( matron) had jumped from slumber on hearing his dead father call him by is nickname (“Damu, Damu”). On other occasions, the deceased patriarch had been seen counting money like a teller on the table that served as the cash counter. On asking him whether he himself had seen the apparition, Devendar casually remarked, as if to an impertinent query:
Main nahin dekha lekin sab bolte hain. (I haven’t seen but everyone says so.)

Changing tack, as evident in smooth conversationalists, he proceeded to acquaint us of the reda-fighting custom in Goa.

Yahaan ke log ekdum jaanwar hain; ladte rehte hain jaanwaron ke jaise. Apna patraam bhi ladta hai. Pichli baar, pachaas-pachaas hazaar do baar lagaya. Jeet gaya. Phir poora ek lakh lagaya. Hum logon ki mehnat ki kamaayi. Dedh ghante lada vo; beech mein vo haar maan liya tha. Lekin phir vaapas aaya mudke. Phephde phat gaye thhey uske. (People here are animals; they fight one another like animals. Our matron also fights. Last two times, he bet 50k each and won. Then he wagered a lakh. It was our money, from our efforts. He fought for an hour and a half. In the middle, he gave up; yet, he came back. His lungs burst.)
We were dumbstruck. I asked, “Kiske? Patraam ke?” (Whose? Patraam’s?)
Nahin, reda ke. (No, those of the reda)

On the verge of chortle on realizing the misplaced sense of drama in the narrative, we reconciled ourselves to the seemingly palatable truth that human beings didn’t fight or burst their lungs; instead, it was redas on whom rode big money and who were pitted against each other. We were further told that reda fighting starts with the rounding off of the tourist season. Several Goan households keep redas, some employing helpers to take care of the animals, who are fed only to be braced for bloody tussles in summer.

At around 12:30am, Vicky, another waiter from the shack, came to us swinging a small pencil torch in his hand and turning about a bigger proposition in his mind. He wanted a favor from us in return for helping us look with his torch. Since he was not allowed to drink during work hours, nor buy it from the shack after that, he wanted us to buy HoneyBee (brandy) for him. He placed a Rs 50 note in my palm, asking me to wait for his signal before proceeding to the shack. He went back, and I waited. When I went in, I bought him a quarter of kaju feni since the brandy was beyond his budget.

A little later, when patraam and his wife had left, he came out and downed the feni, neat and bottoms up . Having had his shot, he decided to stick to his side of the deal. So, the 4 of us—Vicky, Devendar, Sumu, and I—ventured to the beach armed with a pencil torch. The search resumed with the 4 of us combing more or less the same area except Devendar, who had gone further to one side.

Meanwhile, I conversed with Vicky, who I learnt had arrived in Goa only a week ago. He had been a captain (main cook), working in Bandra, Bombay. After a bout of illness that kept him away from work for a fortnight, he was greeted with a booting out when he returned. He shifted to Goa. The simplicity of his situation did not escape me; rather, it hit me smack on my face. Not more than a month ago I was thick in the search of a place to stay—calling up brokers, bargaining deals, answering mum who wanted daily updates on the house-hunting process—and here was this guy who relocated his life in hardly a week. Just like that. Where do we, he and I, rank in the scheme of things? And what are the limits of the human spectrum?

After Sumu and I had almost given up the search and were looking forward to a night in the shack, Devendar lifted the pall of resignation and how—hurrying toward us with a beaming smile, keys in hand.

Main apna dimaag lagaya ki aap chappal haath mein leke chale honge. To chappal ke saath saath chaabi bhi thodi door tak jaake giri hogi. Isiliye main us taraf dekh raha tha. (I figured that the keys would’ve been carried along with the slippers for a short distance. So, I was looking further that side.)

We just hadn’t thought of it.

A happy feeling gripping us like a fever, we offered to buy both of them—Vicky and Devendar—drinks. They unhesitantly declined. We decided to sit and chat with them, time suddenly displaying an agreeable mien. I offered Devendar a cigarrette, and he appeared visibly excited about smoking a Gold Flake Kings. Basking, like a school kid who has outscored his classmates and seen his world shrink to the walls of a classroom populated with lesser beings, he laid bare his reasoning for us again with “Main apna dimaag...” (I figured...) to which Vicky, sensing a hogging of credit, countered with “Lekin yeh torch nahin hota to kya chaabi milti.” (But if I didn’t have the torch, would you have got the keys?) A sense of balance appeared to be restored.

L to R: Vicky, Devendar

On being asked to pose for a snap, Devendar wore his happiest expression, his large, round eyes unmistakable; Vicky took his time, lighting up a cigarrete before looking at the camera.

When we left them, my cellphone showed 1:40am. The human condition that I understood had stretched a wee bit, encompassing a few more lives within its purview.

And those who were in wanted to be out; those out, couldn’t wait to get back in.

P.S.: I’m not very sure what a reda is. I’m guessing a fighter bull.

prologue

2007-08-21T02:51:00.000+05:30

After lunch at Viva Panjim, we—Sumu and I—sat at the entrance to the Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception clicking photographs and soaking in the sights offered by the surrounding old Portuguese buildings. Inside, we were informed of a special mass to be celebrated to commemorate the silver jubilee of Mr. and Mrs. Paulo’s marriage. Having edited a document on Sunday mass sometime ago, I bubbled in excitement at seeing what I had read about; I found a listening ear in Sumu, whom I familiarized with pews, procedures of the mass, vestment of the priest, and some more jazz. I flipped through the smell of freshly printed words, in hymnals kept on pews, that tried to hem in a quarter century of memories and experiences in speeches and hymns set within the narrow margins of each page.

Driving in Panjim, through the labyrinth of one-way roads, I managed to escape even the faintest drift of swatantrata-divas hoopla; I did somewhat feel like living in a democracy where some of us could safely afford to choose to not be vocal and exhibitionist in patriotic histrionics. Almost all shops and establishments were closed, and it seemed as if we were rustling the soft down of a giant creature—otherwise living and breathing—in a state of afternoon dormancy. We crossed the Mandovi River on a ferry with our bike—a rented Pulsar 150—piled on it. It was amusing to see people and their vehicles, including four wheelers, stacked on a motor-driven ferry.

Off at Betim, we rode northward through Calangute and Baga to Anjuna. I recognized a few places from last time and proceeded unasked to proffer information on them to Sumu. The Wednesday flea market at Anjuna being our target, we went there in the hope of getting good bargains. But it was not to be. Off season. I wonder if families could go through such seasons—a period of estrangement or feud to be immediately followed by a purple familial patch. Would you accept the deal, thus ensuring the inevitability of good times after bad and that of living in no fear of a permanent breaking of blood ties?

At Anjuna, we watched the waters shimmer the brilliant yellow of the setting sun. Some kids seemed up to their antics under the guise of raucous soccer, my recollection of an amputee distinct. She must have been around 7 or 8 and was without most of her left arm. In the shack, a firang uncle kept to the beats throughout with a frugal version of trance dance.

Later, in the evening, we strode up to vista point at Dona Paula. The first thing I noticed in the soft light of the waning crescent was the rippling waters that roared like an engine as they crashed into the shore. The lights from the Marmugao Harbour twinkled bright even when I closed my eyes. Behind my eyelids, I traced long streaks punctuated by short, staccato ones. A silence descended over me as I mulled over how my violently shaking hands had attracted much attention during a reading test before the class in kindergarten. I remembered Brodingnag—that place in Gulliver's Travels where everything was of a bigger size. Sometimes, memories resemble the inhabitants of that place—they are bigger than the minds nurturing them. Also, over the years, you dab colours to dog-eared, yellowed pages and read and reread them, drawing newer purports each time. And questions bounce off the pages, flitting in and out of your consciousness, to the horizon and back.

Much later, I couldn’t remember if it was a young boy’s dream. I grabbed at the earth, and the chunks in my palms were of the most beautiful hue. I dived into a tunnel of water, listening to the quivering inside and breathing out wondrous silvery bubbles, and I immersed myself in breathless seconds.

stealing mesmerizing beauty

2007-08-12T15:31:00.000+05:30

Tweaking words for a living conditions you to occasionally feel only watered-down thrusts of their sinew. Like the tick marks you perfunctorily injected as soaring birds in your primary-school sketches, thereby lending the most everyday hue to one of man’s deepest desires. Flight. In your doing so, flights of reality--of freedom, of aspiration--were perhaps reduced to prosaic chores. Gushing verses became mundane prose, news briefings. What did you pay attention to in your depiction of a range of low-necked hills, its valley bedecked with a rivulet that flowed by the threshold of a small cone-roofed hut with a garden and fencing and its plunging neckline covered by a rising sun with distinct rays of alternating lengths? Why did you sketch such grotesque distortions of reality and fantasy alike?

Slash and burn the produce of truly mediocre minds. Although this can perhaps be the gravest sin to be committed on dull faculties, running the risk of rendering them absolutely infertile, any semblance of cultivating herded blunt heads--conditioned collective mindsets--has to start with the disposing of indoctrinated soil and its poisoned harvests.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

In The Blue Umbrella, Rajaram, wily appropriator and helping hand to Khatri, a tea-stall owner, questions him about the sense in fixating on an oversized umbrella. Khatri, with a face that is peppered as much with pocks as it is engrossed in the cost of living, retorts by asking him about the use of a rainbow, about the need for watching the sun sink below the hills, about the intelligence behind a crazed craving for pickle, if I may add.

The movie is about everything mentioned in its reviews; it’s also about stealing mesmerizing beauty in the twilight of life and suffering the consequences of a losing bargain thereafter.

I’m a big fan of the sensibilities of Vishal Bharadwaj and Gulzar; however, what pulled me along was Pankaj Kapur. He’s worth every penny his character Khatri swindled off patrons.

To Goa

2007-08-06T12:11:00.000+05:30

For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been trying to gather a few friends for a trip to Goa between Aug 15 and 19. Although there were a handful of takers initially, no one seems to be up for it right now, work being the main reason. Nonetheless, I’ve decided on making a solitary trip if need be, rather than can it altogether.

Travel can so often be a vanishing act, as I have realized myself. Sometimes, barely a week after a memorable trip and I’m looking at the last vestiges of it, nostalgic. Travel can also be an escape. Ever watched a movie where the dialogues and characters are funny and entertaining but you can’t follow the narrative at all? There may not be any central theme of your journey or any one thing that you may bring back home. You may alternate between feeling like an insider and outsider, shuffle between unfulfillment and peace, or swing from end to end, but be gripped by a host of feelings throughout.

For each one of us, there are places and situations we wouldn’t want to be in. But time and again, maybe at regular intervals, we still have to pay our visits. It’s like being under the weather and still having to go to your nemesis to answer disconcerting questions. Although you may have people for support, the intensity of the journey almost transmutes it into a solitary trip for you. Traveling is a reprieve from running such enervating errands. Time and space assume bigger dimensions than they really are, but then do you know their ambit? Travel, above all, necessitates being selfish and being with yourself, sharing a little less of you, and trying to make sense.

In trying to reproduce a sense of familiarity in excursions, much of the meaning of travel is lost. There are more memes to be imbibed in a cup of coffee at a café that is seemingly estranged from humdrum than at a watering hole that resembles your favorite bar.

What I do with my time and space is an experiment, and if I choose to recount my expeditions, it wil be a to-and-fro between memory and reality. While I’m there though, I’ll raise many a toast to crisp mornings and balmy evenings, and to Goa.

P.S.: If you have any suggestions to offer to me before my Goa trip, please do so. I may try out your advice and in turn give you feedback.

The inner life

2007-07-19T08:39:00.000+05:30

I shifted to a new place.

On Sunday evening, quite late, I stood watching the waves from my basement. The waters seemed far from me—a wilderness stay put right in between. Milky hoods rose up from the surface, stretching and commingling, before crashing into the embankment along the periphery of the row of buildings. There was once a beach there. Was once a beach there, there? There, there was once a beach. Now, there is none.

Over the years, the waters have slowly, certainly, inundated the shore so much so that residents of the buildings survey the watery expanse with eyes that are daubed as much with a lurking foreboding as with an accustomed, yet sheer, thrill.

What’s wrong with this world? Nothing whatsoever. Except that even birdsongs might not be to everyone’s liking.

I trod on ground laid thick with granite chips that had been wet to an almost black by the mist in the air. In the windy cool of the darkness, my body broke a thousand bubbles of spindrift that floated in the air.

The sky was patched in a nightly shade—billowy, rippled, shifty—and collapsing. An aircraft flew through the clouds—its lights helping upward-cast eyes follow the trail—before being muffled by cottony blankets.

Within me, there were a thousand voices speaking in languages that I couldn’t talk in. All assumed personas spoke forth with immaculate articulacy. I remembered weak smiles that had chapped the corner of lips. I could not remember when I spilt into two or even more. A wall was the only thing I had carried along with me, like a treasured item of furniture. And wherever I set my dump, I surrounded myself with it. Sporadically, when the need arose, I filled up the thin, craggy lines of fissures.

Why do people come together? All associations based on loneliness, ennui, a desire to vent, to pour out—what is their destiny? What reduces the strongest relationships to the sharing of everyday banalities? Why is a celebrated form of dependence called love? Does it occasion a loss of individuality in exchange of a secure companion? Can two people who do not need each other, who are complete in themselves, who do not pursue company for want of a listening ear—can’t two such people—come together?

I feel empty, incomplete, like hastily strung words that have not arrived at their denouement. The crux is within. The lights that will guide me home will shine on me while I’m wandering alone on streets that have no name. The door within will answer my knock on a murderous night.

Nowhere…can the world exist except within us.
Our life passes in transformations,
And what is outside us grows steadily smaller, until it vanishes…

Anonymous

growing up again

2007-07-05T14:51:00.000+05:30

Growing up meant outgrowing polka-dotted, fancy 'durga puja' shirts for less gaudier, plain ones... it meant wondering how actors changed costumes in the blink of an eye during song sequences

growing up meant learning about the worlds of Right and Wrong, Dos and Donts, and then witnessing their boundaries dissolve.. it meant watching the black and white blend into solemn grays... it meant learning that the 'ever after' in the 'lived-happily-ever-after' ending stories was actually a Short, Finite period of Time

growing up meant asking questions to which there were no answers: in a fight between a hippo and a shark who will win? do you love daddy more or me?

growing up meant watching adults make funny faces and laughing at their foolishness... or breathing life into battery-powered toys, favourite pencilboxes, and fragrant erasers such that losing them sapped you of reasons to be happy

growing up meant letting school teachers build edifices in your memory that lasted more than a lifetime... it meant piling up birthday candles until there were too many

growing up meant not letting a drop of pee out until mother said 'ssssssss'... it meant learning to tie shoelaces by yourself... or lisping 'baba black sheep' before proud, indulgent Mamuni

growing up meant saying 'god promise' to be privy to deep, dark and mysterious littlechildren secrets... it meant swearing to be 'best friends for ever'

growing up meant dreading when you had to look mother in her eyes and lie and realizing that it was futile... it meant listening to grandma's fantastical stories with rapt attention and then believing in them... it meant being petrified by the palpable dread in ghost tales

growing up meant having an idea of 'adult' questons and wondering who to get their answers from... it meant watching a world of infinite possibilties shrink when you fathomed those answers

having grown up means biting nostalgic pies from memory and almost smiling out loud at the lucidity of bygone years... it also means losing an artlessness and not mourning the Loss...

it means spinning a life gone by on memory's wheel and lending an acceptable shape to its corpus... it means letting wondrous eyes turn into hard marbles and living with the consolation that it was worth it... it means measuring words before others... it means adulterating friendship and gathering and dusting off soulmates... it means fighting against everything and everyone to protect that little something that is still unscathed

P.S.: I had published this post (except the last part) about a year ago

I am a pang

2007-06-17T20:20:00.000+05:30

I’m perished. I’m blank. Tissues of torpor have invaded my core. Moments of pith have deserted me.

My body is a sheet that shrouds and protects the dignity of the corpse underneath; only my eyes belie. Of late, the sense of déjà vu has been unmistakable. I’ve been looking for an alcove to find shelter in at every possible opportunity. I’m afraid that my efforts at separating myself from the outside may just peter out. I may become a vegetable.

I need space and time. I need a place to myself. I do not want to escape into a world of fantasy; I want to create one of my own. I cringe at the idea of what a normal weekend entails but have been partly subjecting myself to the same. Because I can’t write at home—with the TV, phone conversations, and people—I sleep, read, surf, and waste precious hours.

Everyday, I need to string words for myself. It’s only when I’ve penned them that I feel a sense of living. But, by not being appeased, this appetite is eating me from inside. The days smother me but are cruel enough to let a few faint glimmers in through slits. The nights perform the coups de grâce, blemishing hope and snuffing out life. And I can’t even lie naked on the floor and stare at nothingness. For every unit of space has twisted itself into a diseased shape; across every patch of the floor are strewn banal lives.

I feel like an immovable block of stone has been placed on the fountainhead within me. I just can’t displace it.

While I sleep, the hours are slipping away from under my pillow. They teach me—as they have proselytized many before me—that life goes on. I am a pang.

Rain-washed and sun-soaked
Imagination—frosted,
Culled by incubus.

world’s deadliest animals

2007-06-13T09:49:00.000+05:30

With the human habitat rapidly encroaching upon the wilderness, several species are being rabidly threatened. This has led to a status quo wherein the butterfly effect has emerged as a conspicuous and frequent phenomenon.

When socialite Paris Hilton handed herself over to the authorities soon after attending the MTV Awards Show and a day before her scheduled date, the Sheriff’s department was caught napping. “Such a high-profile client, and you don’t even have the basic amenities for subsistence celebrity living,” he fulminated. “Get your shoddy asses to the Walmart store, and get Ms Hilton all the lip gloss and mascara that she needs. Now!” Meanwhile, in the penitentiary, there was a huge ruckus, for its most visible boarder did not have a cell for herself. This led to an ad hoc arrangement, and it was decided by the powers that be that for the time being, Ms. Hilton would be stocked in a makeshift tent a little away from the main block.

But first things first.

In the 1950s, African honey bees were brought to Brazil for cross-breeding with the resident European bees. Little did they anticipate the ferocious speed with which the African breeders would pommel their European counterparts, turning what the farmers thought to be a bee-hive of activity into mass orgies that Kubrick had visualised for Eyes Wide Shut. Very soon, the beeziness spread across the Americas and the swarm annexed countries like the Roman Empire in the heighth of its fashion. Thus, by the 80s, they had arrived in Hollywood, O my Brothers.

Anyway, so, for putting up Ms Hilton’s abode, a rare teakwood had to be chopped off, much against the vibrato of vocal environmentalists, and in the doing of this, a beehive that thrived in a knothole of the tree trunk was displaced. Evicted out of their hearth, the cross-bred buzzers went berserk, wrecking havoc, pushing their tribe further up along Amreeka. After much reconnaissance, they finally selected a patch close to a placid lake (hereafter Lake Placid) where the Augusta Masters (goalf tournament, Dinesh bhai?) golf course. Now, the crocs in Lake Placid had already been much bugged by the prying wannabe NGC explorers who in the pursuit of croc-footage (that would get them a primetime slot) had disturbed their habitat. With the constant drumming by the newbies, the ghariyals were at the end of their tether. Now, all this oblivious to the human world, the preparations for the Augusta Tournament were in full swing (or birdie). So, when Tiger (no, not a species but a goalfer, remember Dinesh bhai?) shook his butt—taking the earth’s rotation and spin into consideration—to hit his approach shot into the green, he went a little too deep into the marshy rough, where the lazy alpha ghariyal was basking. Peeved no end, he snapped at Woods’ Achilles heel, (no, one person only) sending the latter’s title-deprived competitors into spontaneous rapture.

This broke open a Pandora’s box—on one hand was the Damocles’ sword of the Gogo Green Earth environmentalists’ group, who cried foul against the senseless human intrusion into natural habitats, while on the other hand was Mr Bush who ordered a high-level probe suspecting the crocs to be Al-Qaeda trained.

Across the oceans, Mr Mush, extracting full juice out of the potential squeeze, asked his media honchos to shoot a croc-training footage, and sent the same to Mr Bush, with the P.S. of the mail requesting Amreeka’s help in saving Mushy’s domestic ass.

Not to be left behind, with the intent of parrying media frenzy, Manu and Sonia are meeting today, in disguise, at PVR, Saket, over a show of Dharm (which they expect to be snail-paced so as to enable them to continue their emergency talks).

P.S: There are no typos in this post. All the puns are intended. No mammals were harmed during the making of this post.

my sunday brunch

2007-06-10T11:23:00.000+05:30

Big B sits on the steps of a circular platform in the main party area and waits. Nathulal, owner of the proverbial moocchhen (bushy upper-lip appendage), gifts Big B a huge bottle of some brand of alcohol from the License Raj. And, behind him, waiting in line are several other well-wishers of the Budday Boy, that is Big B, with bottles similar to Nathu’s. After the gifting-shifting is over, one of the guests, quite nonchalantly, asks Big B as to why he isn’t indulging himself in cake-cutting and subsequent eating. To which he, Big B that is, remarks, in a demonstrance of his unsurrendered volition, Amaa, hamara janamdin hai, hamaari party hai, jab hamaara man kare hum cake kaatenge (my birthday, my party, i’ll cut the god-damned cake when i feel like). In the delivery of this fiercely individualistic line, though, a dil ka taar (string of heart) is strung, and Big B, reeling under the weight of the absence of a certain one in his party, accuses Munshiji of being culpable of a great, emotionally punishable, crime. He reminds the latter, though not in mockery, of what he, the latter that is, had said about an aurat (woman) lending wazan (weight, gravity) to a mard ki baatein (man’s words). Ho hum, hum mein hai dum (we have the guts; the introductory phrase only for musical impact, much in the lines of chhaiyan chhaiyan, tamma tamma, humma humma) may have cried the feminists. Munshiji, to his credit, doesn’t babble arey bhaagwaan (common form of address used by rural Indian husbands for their respective better halves). Instead, buoyed by his well-tuned gut feeling, he says, Mujhe yakeen hai woh aayegi, chaahe qayamat aa jaaye (I have faith in her coming, even if disaster striking). Big B orders all the lights to be switched off save one—that which glows pure as a flame, literally. He lays down his terms: He shall wait until the candle melts to wax, and dust grounds to dust, and if she does not turn up by then, his faith in candles shall be destroyed. The guests, mute spectators thus far, bow in shame served aplenty with hunger, and wait. So, Big B waits, Munshiji waits, Nathulal and his moustache wait, and the sidekicks in the crowd wait.

Unable to bear the wait now, with three-fourths of an hour past, Big B picks up a guitar and starts rendering a song about intehaan (test) and intezaar (wait) that is languid only to emphasize its synonymy with the purport of the song. Gradually, as he croons past the mukhda (opening line of the song), he picks himself up and asks pertinent questions such as aaaina kuch khabar mere yaar ki (mirror, do you have some news about my beloved?). The melancholy in the air runs itself thin and slips into the realms of the bizarre. However, just before this process is consummated and the mysterious sightings of an unidentified dancing object mindfuck Big B any further, attired in glitzy-glossy appropriated from the wardrobe of Baapida (legendary music director who weighs as much as his jewellery and speaks a language in which the last line of this post is written) appears the weighty (t)issue that is Jayaprada. The trumpets and the trombones give way to drums, lots of them, and those instruments that squeal disco Baapida sounds. A muhalla (neighborhood) crowd gushes in, in dated suits, sarees, and chappals to bestow significance upon the occasion. Jayaji, dances to Baapida’s beats and lip-syncs to the voice of Asha taai (rhymes with baai but men have lesser sexual motor response for this species). Gyrating, pirouetting, serenading. Big B, catatonic, with two left legs and two right (he is a leftie, ya) hands. Plays the drums, sings the song, and cavorts. All at once.

In Baapida’s words, it would hab been bhery phoolish to hab bhizualijed this song in any aather way.

P.S: (1) This post is my version of the song Intehaan ho gayi from Sharaabi, which I happened to catch on Max. For reference, Munshiji is Om Prakash and Big B is…now c’mon guys .

(2) I think the cellphone operators can use the waiting-period footage to make far better ads than the daadu-chessplaying-pota-traingoing Airtel version.

He who could have been

2007-05-29T21:24:00.000+05:30

Epilogue

Did you go to his funeral? Did he even have a family? Of course, he had one. Why do you ask? Didn’t I tell you they had all come wearing black armbands?

In mourning? Of course.

What did I see?

I saw them going home, into their loos. “Fucking long funeral,” they said and perched over their shitpots. The radio was on full blast. Turn it loud, Captain. A little jig, a little swerve, and a spray of sallow pee all over. And the band came undone and fell under. Then they flushed their loos. Or they remembered to save water and didn’t.

The next morning the obituary read

Loving father and caring husband passed away in his sleep.

He was bereaved by his 2 children and wife, who inherited a sprawling 52 acre estate and a plush bungalow.

Many years ago, as a child, he had looked up to his parents and had inherited his father’s stupidity and his mother’s perfidy. He led a life blissfully unaware of that, tinged only with the regret of a moment when he had been weak enough to believe in himself.

He went no further than a fetid shitpot. That is where he had to go.

At least, he didn’t have to suffer. He met a painless death.

That moment

A ray of light darted in his head. Yet, it did so like a streak that belonged to a lingering sunset, casting a glow over the remains on the shore. Memories shone resplendent like wet, glistening rock faces only to be extinguished, awash, by the returning waves. A shadow had come upon some parts of the world, while the others waited for their turn. Something told them their moment would come, and they must blaze in all glory then. “I must not forget. I must not,” the words jetted out from between his teeth.

He wanted to learn to enunciate each sorrow, each prick, each punch. And let the pain seep in like faith seeping out during acts of infidelity. Hold every image against the fading light and see through the negatives. Let them dance, with nakedness as their sole guise. Under the naked guise of pity, promise, and fatherhood. Stand with arms hanging lazily by his side and witness the collapse of institutions. Throw his head back insolently, proudly. And say, “You can’t touch me.”

Quality

2007-05-28T00:20:00.000+05:30

“There’s so much nonsense about human inconstancy and the transience of all emotions,” said Wynand. “I’ve always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place. There are books I liked at the age of sixteen. I still like them.” (The Fountainhead)

I don’t remember examining this “human inconstancy” anything beyond the usual life goes on…people change bromide*. We ascribe the change in our feelings (toward something static) to the notion that life itself is dynamic by virtue of transient circumstances, situations, settings, moods encompassed within it. Every song, movie, book, play, poem—any work of art, anything that is not subject to intrinsic change once it has been brought to fruition—is evaluated by the subject in a state of mind. Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. So, if the beholder’s perception of an object wavers with time, then it translates into a situation wherein the aspects of beauty that are perceived have changed. Thus, the judgments we pass on works of art are not merely subjective (with respect to the subject), they also change temporally, i.e., with time, even when the subject is held constant.

However, there’s a more fundamental character to our judgments. While it is explicit that we perceive different things differently, what is implied in the context introduced above is that we also perceive the same thing differently at different instances. There are books I had liked when I was younger that, now, I wonder how I possibly could have (What did I see in them then? What don’t I like in them now? Are they the same things?). More pertinently, sometimes, this chasm in one’s opinion may widen with age or fluctuate in phases.

When we look for one essential trait in any object, our perception of the object cannot change solely because the object is immutable. The crux that questions every judgment is whether or not the object has integrity. Does it have a purpose, a meaning, a central function? This quality is exclusive of the subject/observer and intrinsic of the object. This meaning holds, regardless of any criterion that the human mind may impose to evaluate. What an object stands for, to the greatest degree, is not transient. Those who understand this, and look for that one shining trait, are unlikely to change their opinions of things.

I’ve a feeling this is one of the things that Robert Pirsig tried to put across when he tried so hard to define Quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He essentially imparted an absolute nature to his Quality and removed any duality in the process. And that is how he could ascertain whether or not a motorbike or a restaurant had that Quality, regardless of who drove the bike or who dined in the restaurant.

Coming back, I wouldn’t have been able to understand the reasoning behind such a view as Wynand’s had I not read Rand.

*Bromide is an interesting word. Also check sulphite if you’re amused.

At 1:52

2007-05-24T20:14:00.000+05:30

Right at 1:52, a tingle will run up their spines. A fluid sensation, swiveling upward like a young flame that laughs off the wind, will gush forth. The flowers—golden, merry, purple, auburn—will pick themselves up and float wavily, waft, and stow themselves in no particular order in the heart of a hutch burrowed deep in a sunny patch. Creatures of the earth, ye little puppy, creepy-crawlies, grounded feathers, and the tiny girl with lips wearing a riot of Holi and the listless simian Heckava nestled in her arms will meander from their businesses. They will, no shall, arrive with the crackling of dry leaves underfoot, flitting back and forth, humming now and then, rustling awake other tiny lives. All of them—members of the most recent family—will wind up near the flowers. The tiny puppy will sniff with a liquidy nose, the millipede will glue itself around the stalks with a thousand feet, and the girl will have the shape of wonder in her bulbous eyes. She will keep Heckava down but not before asking the assiduous ants to vacate the patch. The irascible teeny-weenies will pay no heed and continue to stomp from here to there. They—entire colonies of them—will chomp Heckava’s soft behind, gifting the simian a red rind. He will try to act strong, in spite of his immaculate composure being stretched thin, and will present a brave, bland face. The puppy, timid and small, will have never had smelled a petal. Until then. He will lick off the finespun petals, as if they were caked with something sapid, and the blades will then shimmer. The ants, seeing the glistening petals, will blitz toward them and clamber up the stalks, over the millipede, in search of manna. The little sparrow with plumage that had not yet met the winds will tip-toe and peck nervously. The blazing, tender, riot-colored lips of the girl will part and a soft zephyr will drift. A violent commotion will occur—the ants will cling tight to the surface with all their might. “That was not funny at all,” will they shout in unison. The girl will giggle with little pink-nailed fingers over her mouth. A delighted Heckava, having tasted redemption, will remove the pretty, green scarf from around his neck and, in a display of exhibitionism, will swing it in the air. The puppy, satisfied with his grasp of the goings-on, will wag his tail in a display of shtick. The lonely house lizard will look wistfully from the window opposite the patch, and yearn. For a moment, he’ll forget his household and consider inviting himself over to the proceedings.

Then I shall pull the shutters down on my world. And that will be it.

unleashing a self-seeking spirit

2007-05-22T00:33:00.000+05:30

Sometime later, or earlier, a bus passed by. It was as packed as packed could be. Suddenly, unsurprisingly, I had this pang of pity.

People’s lives, hard as flintstones, and peopled lives smacked hard by myriad everyday gavels, grunts passing off as breaths, making ends meet only by burning at both ends. And then? This hard anatomy turns brittle. As brittle as rickety bones. Or glass. And breaks into shards that pierces their bodies or makes them crumble into amorphous masses, shapeless, and brings them at the mercy of a solitary gust. During moments of weakness, they measure their stretched existences in all or nothing. During moments of joy, they try to forget their moments of enervation.

But then, I thought, it is their choice. Haven’t they chosen to expend their waking hours under the shade of a dubious shape, in the quest for a greater pursuit. Comfort, security, insurance against bouts of profligacy, endorsement—a higher ideal, nevertheless. Higher than their horizontal, flattened lives. A Shangri-La where their lowly hunger—this extreme desire to come good, deliver, meet the expectations of others—should be appeased. Why, then, do I find solace in pity? Shouldn’t I be proud of, and happy for, them; should not this very awareness embolden me to lay claim to being selfless, by virtue of being happy without a stake?

Selfish—it sustains an odor. The odor of something concealable. Garlic on breath. Or that of censures, mock and otherwise, that condition to an extent wherein should the very word be uttered in anything addressed to us, all elements of our existence react to throw out its sheepish smell with a single-minded sincerety only replicated in affairs beneath the sheets. Huge endeavors are undertaken to mask a guilt-ridden smell by periodic, convenient, intermittent altruistic deeds and thoughts. Like my pang of pity that tried to camouflage the odor of my ignoble, selfish existence by sensing the poignancy of the bus-laden lives of my less fortunate brothers. In the span of that one thought, I atoned for my sins. O, Father! I know I have sinned. Let my path meander with the bends of your hallowed course such that at every opportune occasion I can let your waters cleanse me. And thus I did wash my sins clean.

Opulent, ornate facades of buildings are gloriously analogous to the empty designs that we showcase in the course of the tirade to fit in, in society. The ostentatious archways only expiate the dingy matchboxes inside, stacked unimaginatively, laboriously upon one another. What could I have been? When did I realize that I’m as corrupt as the ones I despised in fables? When did I become one of them?

So that we are valued agreeably in societal eyes and earn good riddance of our compunction, we propitiate by offering alms and acting meek. This by far is the most popular path to selflessness: The duties include satisfying the presumption of others, being projected favorably onto them, and, in doing so, sacrificing the absolute ideal—the purpose of existence. Should I quell my spirit to bargain for an acceptable apology for a moral code? By being flung to the streets at throwaway prices, it is demeaned, rather ironically, to a more humanly character.

I earnestly aspire to offer my selfish self at the altar of altruism. I, as the embodiment of self-absorption. Why do I need to ask for forgiveness? Nothing, but the individual spirit, is absolute. I have a purpose that far outruns that of bandy altruistic legs. There is no end to the means. It is only the means. Perfect happiness is not in its realization. It’s not in retrospect, nor in summing up. It’s in the moment. In the somersaults without a crowd. In the lonely smiles. In the process of being unleashed. Like a rabid spirit.

On board

2007-05-10T13:56:00.000+05:30

The thing about the Defence Forces is saab. Captain Jay has a flunky (a sipahi assistant) who attends to him all the time. He takes care of his dog Leo, succumbed to motherly worry when the canine was bit by a leech (may very well have squashed that bloated bloodsucker had he chanced upon it), knows what saab wants on each day of the week, and fights with the cook to get those dishes prepared.

When Jay left home to join the NDA, he left as the son of a father who had a watch shop. He had bored his family and friends to death with Paramvir Chakra stories and other tales of its ilk. A mediocre runner until then, very soon, he became quite competent at cross-country running. If he was hurt in tournaments between squadrons, the entire squad would go all out to help him. Because he had started boxing well, too. In due course, he could perform more than 40 cream rolls (a front and a back roll in succession) a minute. The Indian Government has invested 17.5 lakhs in him at the NDA, and a few lakhs more at the IMA. Every round that he fires from his firearm costs the exchequer a few hundred bucks. In practice, he empties rounds after rounds at dummy targets. In encounters, he has seen magazines being emptied into a single militant.

Jay is posted in high insurgency Assam. Bodo and ULFA. Now, he’s on vacation, though, and ogling at girls with as much religiosity as he practises running.

Jay’s friend, Lieutenant Dhara, junior to him by one year at the NDA, joined the Navy. On board INS Tarangini from Muscat to Kochi was by far his most excruciating experience ever. He would keep watch for uninterrupted lengths of 4 hours on the crow’s nest, at the very end of a 33 m long mast, with a pair of binoculars. In freezing rain, amidst strong winds, under starry nightskies, and with twinkling shorelines on the near horizon. He would of course have someone (they work in buddy pairs) with him at the top, who would be puking as the ship rolled and pitched. It was quite similar to the descent in a Ferris wheel, he quips now. When the deck tilted by even 5 degrees, at the crow’s nest, both would trace a huge arc of vomit in the drenched air.

Dhara is with INS Mumbai, a Delhi-class destroyer of the Indian Navy. Very soon, he’ll be shifted to Vizag. Every shell that he fires from his vessel burns 6 lakh rupees. He handles equipments whose costs run into crores. He’s chiefly in logistics now—managing the ship’s mess, organising functions that entail the participation of officers from the entire fleet, and catching up with old friends like Jay (with whom I have tagged along to the Sailing Club of the Indian Navy Waterfront Training Centre at Colaba in Mumbai). He opines that if he quits the Navy and works for an MNC as an HR consultant, he would earn a fortune.

Both of them, Jay and Dhara, are eagerly, with breath that’s just about on hold, anticipating the 6th Pay Commission that promises to, at least, double their salaries. They want working spouses who can lead their own lives and who do not expect their husbands to be there at their beck and call every morning. Maybe, they can deal with it if their spouses want the same from them too. Both are slightly amused when punctuality and discipline come up in conversations. For them, reporting at 8, when you are supposed to report at 8, is actually late. On time is 745. This is what they have learnt and what they hopefully practice beyond their work too. Both sometimes use the word civilians when referring to the populace outside their cocoons. Both live for themselves and their band of brothers; both fight for a geographical construct called nation, where strangers are differentiated as countrymen and infiltrators.

when i unraveled

2007-05-02T11:26:00.000+05:30

On the edge of the cliff, I was in a straitjacket—my arms tied, my mouth clamped shut, and my brain washed. A credulous seeker like me was an easy prey for charlatans promising ethereal bliss. So much so that I had started to see the vacuity in almost everything. And then as yet again I pushed myself back from drinking the tenuous poison, I fell.

As I fell, the stubborn chains in me refused to give way. The barnacles did not unhinge when I tried to break free. But this was only at first. I closed my eyes and noticed the spidery snares that had built themselves inside of me. On removing them, I saw the center of my mindspace littered with personas. I had let them inside, and insidiously, their thoughts, their memories, had held sway over me. They were regular characters—friends, lovers, colleagues, family—who had set up their shops on my thoroughfare. Luring me for business, offering bargains, dictating terms.

Without feeling, I evicted these tenacious tenants. I ripped their belongings apart, yanked their clothes from the clothesline, expelled the damp, soggy air and the cares that had infested my days. Everything went—the taste, the smell, the touch. It was not hate, nor indifference, that made me do it. It was an attempt to salvage.

And then when I fell, I unraveled. Factions of me—the entity—spouted forth like marbles from a bursting pocket. I fell far and wide, in meadows, on treetops, on thatched roofs and verandahs, in the wilderness. My soul, though, gravitated steady. Quite blandly, it fell freely. After the myriad Is hit ground and dribbled onto distant lands, they marched toward a focal point with purpose. They promenaded past vistas and vantage points along the way, and on assembling, they fused into an ensemble to reform a single me.

This new me had a repertoire but no baggage. It traveled light, backpacked, built houses and brought them down with the same regularity. And when in need, it unraveled.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Last evening promises to steadily climb up the charts of memorable outings. Jew town, Paradesi Synagogue and the last remaining Jewish family of nine that patronizes it, Fort Kochi, sea-facing, antique-hoarding Ginger restaurant, Kashi art café and the cleaved bamboo with a slender tube of light inside, cute single firangi women crowding distinctly touristy restaurants, street houses with quaint doors lining narrow roads like palm trees, “you buy fish we cook them” open-air eateries, sprawling old mansions transformed into heritage hotels, respectable uncles in starched white mundus and their unerringly wrong directions, and this line that I saw on the boundary wall of a school: Do good unto others and share what you have, for it is pleasing to you.

P.S: I just changed the last word of the graffito to turn it into an aphorism.

the theory of (in)equality

2007-04-13T00:10:00.000+05:30

If we were equal, where would we be? Imagine billions jostling for the same space, elbowing each other along the way. And a street kid getting equal opportunities as you did. Wouldn’t, couldn’t, he have done better?

Our dreams aren’t in perfect harmony; they are realized only by outdoing those of many others. If one rises from the dust, a score others rot like cadavers. Thrown to the hyenas. When a million palms unfold before you, which ones do you deem as worth redemption? Your peace can only be paid for by someone’s solace.

As you pay for your education, you begin to notice things they never taught. If the law sees everyone as equal, can justice be ever dispensed? While the more equal from amongst us snake out unscathed from trials that set dangerous precedents, the lesser majority have to painfully learn to moult.

If we weren’t equal, where would we stand? The upsurges accompanying our rites of passage are the same. And the insidious insecurity in mundane interactions sweeping across an arid expanse of timid hearts too. We, the living, bob our heads in perennial search of pigeon pleasure; we fly away at the slightest tremor that threatens; we poop out when no one is looking at us. We all bear the hours while awaiting the moments.

We, the rational beings? Individual existence is based on actions that hold meaning for oneself and are not necessarily rational. To label us as rational is to define us woefully out of context. There’s more convenience in method than is palatable. At some point, we do realize, and maybe acknowledge, that our lives are carefully nurtured lies. We wish we had lit a bonfire of our vanities. Now, vanity is all that remains of us.

Our lives, across conveniently constructed dominions, constitute the free history of a nation that has forever been encompassed by revolutions violent—within and without. Yet, as the gates of sovereignty were flung open, the door to the free mind stayed locked deep. With its key, corrupted by a plethora of dogmas and opinionated inheritances, dropped into a swirling mass that flowed into a common nothingness. This key has been, by virtue of being searched for, lost.

Love conquers all. Every cloud has a silver lining. Faith can move mountains. Everything happens for a reason. Where there is life, there is hope.

For a semblance of sanity, you need to be fed something at least.

Perspective mostly strolls in, in retrospect.

Let me ease out of this hallway please

2007-03-29T23:39:00.000+05:30

If I say esoteric, people say it’s a word difficult to fathom. But then, I point out that exoteric—the well-known and the widely understood—stumps them too. Do these words mean anything at all?

When I drink, I smoke. And I try to maintain an optimal proportion of both, when in simultaneity. 3 drags and a swig. I’m never satisfied though. Therein lies the puzzle. I’m happy, but the niggling details refuse to let go. Too much for the lungs, too little for the liver, or viceversa. If I concern myself with the details, I just cease to enjoy the moment.

At bedtime, I agree that it has been a happy day. The hours conflate, translating into a balmy feel; yet, the analysis of the minutes vex me. If I choose, still, to be happy, the other me reminds me that there has been disregard of slights. Thoughts have not been thought over. The saner me says, “Rub those stains off for tomorrow, please. Or else they will notice and comment.” I’m many different persons while talking to myself.

So, smart and sprightly, up and running, I stand at the threshold of existence to welcome the daylight of life. Shuttling between existence and life though are the moments.

Between the perfectly done hair and new shoes lies a trepid heart, and beneath it are two cold feet.

She grew up by the sea with the rustle of sand-filled breeze. I step out and the blare of incessant honking and the cry of too many babies stupefy me. Reality distorts dreams many times over.

It has been seeping into me that no lesson lasts a lifetime. The agenda always outsmarts the plan.

Full circle in half pants

2007-03-25T12:17:00.000+05:30

When I was in the 3rd standard, my uncle took me along to play cricket with his friends. For the next 4 years, I was almost always the youngest one on the small rectangular field, bordered by houses on 3 sides, with a cemented pitch at the centre. With Cosco tennis balls for which all but I contributed, we would play 16 over matches in the summers and 14 over ones in the winters. Since there were so many waiting, batting came at a premium. And as the kid on the field, batting was all that I could do. I almost never got a chance to bowl. I would be sent out to open in the hope that I would come back soon.

I remember the first ball that I faced. I just didn’t see it. I closed my eyes, swung my bat, and then, seeing the ball in the gap, ran as hard as I could. For quite some time, that’s all I did. I tried to see the ball, put bat to it, and ran desperately. Seeing how badly the odds were stacked against me, I held onto everything. If I was out first ball, I would spend the entire evening sulking, and my mom would’ve a hard time cheering me up. But come next morning, I would be up and looking forward to afternoon. Always the first one on the field, putting the stumps, sweeping the dust off the pitch.

In my 4 years at the Universe Cricket Club, I never realized what it bequeathed me. It all came back a full circle much later, during engineering. As the 2nd year Mechanical team in the inter-branch tennis ball tournament, we didn’t really have a chance. Our college has a huge cricket culture, and guys there are really good (FYI, Kumble is an alumnus). We got a scare in our first match. From then on, everything was a blur. We won match after match against much more fancied teams. I don’t even remember how many 50s I scored in those 10 over matches. I guess while the others just wondered how I was so good, I knew what fighting for each of those scampered runs had taught me.

a tale of 2 Ants

2007-03-20T20:50:00.000+05:30

On a spiteful afternoon, two ants scooted on the face of a parched patch. They flitted aimlessly on tip-toes, not resting anywhere. The crevices that had opened up the dry land offered a quick respite, but therein lurked great dangers. The Great Black Ants hunted there—laying low, waiting for easy preys. The darting minnows were mindful of this; their trepidatious existence had taught them better than to succumb to such everyday temptations.

Amidst this flurry, they, with a big fat chunk of luck, chanced upon a morsel. Forsaking this crumb meant forgoing a sumptuous meal. Pausing for a few moments that labored slowly in the hot spell, they deliberated over the status quo.

The weight of the grain slowed them down considerably, and now every step of theirs was fraught with an ominous possibility. Trudging under the shared load, they sighted a man sleeping under a small tree. Only his face was in the shade; the rest of him lay bare in the sun. Even then he was in a sound nap, with a spluttering chainsaw for a snore. With a gargantuan effort, the ants pulled themselves up along with their prize onto the man’s nose. Once there, they sighed in relief. The black ants wouldn’t dare venture there, for their heavy steps would immediately invite their host’s attention.

“Such a barren expanse! Nothing grows here these days,” the older ant remarked. The younger one, too spent to be bothered by the bleakness in the comment, just gazed into the distance.

“It wasn’t this bad earlier. We used to chance upon something without much effort,” the patriarch continued, shaking a helpless head at the turn of events. Now hollering his lament, “There is hardly a blade left on this earth, and we still haven’t stored a thing for the rains.”

Unmindful of these words, the younger one was already nibbling at the morsel. Perching his legs high over its surface, and rolling it to and fro to get a good bite, he feasted on the speck. Stretching a wee too much, he lost his grip over the slippery grain and down it trundled. Aghast, he stretched every sinew of his in a desperate attempt.

Resting on the bridge thus far, the elderly ant now sprinted as fast his creaky legs could carry to salvage the lost meal.

Just then, the rumble stopped. Only the hustle on the nose hung heavy in the dry air.

A hand rubbed the nose, crushing both the ants.

rock concerts and capital markets

2007-03-03T01:15:00.000+05:30

Although I say this to convince myself, let the others be privy too: Academicians aren’t always that boring. While spending their lives doing research, examining studies, and developing frameworks with quirky names, they sometimes freak out and do something worthwhile like attend rock concerts. 2 such rather sociable geeks, at a concert, question banks that they were, funnily wanted to know the reason for the huge attendance. They asked, “Are people here because of their personal/individual choices or is there a collective preference that drives mass choices?” After an analysis they proposed the theory (in ways you wouldn’t want to rack your brains about) that most individuals were influenced by their immediate environment—friends, family, place, etc. These people then made their choices, which is to say they duplicated those of a few others, and thereby formed groups based on such common behavior or herd mentality. Slowly, such groups grew in number and size. If things went adequately well, many stable groups sprouted, and the concert was a hit, or at least the tickets were sold out.

This inference just whetted the appetite of the geeks in question; they then attempted applying it to a more understandable field—economics. Capital markets. They studied how individual investors made their choices.

Investing in the stock market simulated attending a rock concert. What?
Investors were swayed by a similar process of “imitation.” How?

Initially, a few enthusiastic potential investors tried to make sense of the financial condition of firms: balance sheets, revenue statements, and the likes. These enterprising ones realized that they understood ECG reports better than all those annual statements. All that financial information didn’t light a Mentos bulb in the brain (those big bands you somehow didn’t have a clue about: awesome bass, brilliant rhythm, strong vocals?) So, they did the next best thing. They looked at others with similar interests (friends, family) and tried to imitate the ones who were making the most in stock markets or were sure of big payoffs (the most die-hard fan maybe, who made you feel that the concert was really worth something). In the market, such entities were the big institutional investors, funds, or even high net worth individuals. On a more specific level, the investors matched sectors, discerned trends, and made their choices (better rock than Carnatic; this alternative shit is in, man). That is, they decided upon whom to follow. This started a process. Each of them in turn influenced several others and a group began to be formed. Such a group, and many such groups, snowballed, witnessed a sedated increase, or just sank, depending on the spread of information. New members begot newer ones. More people, more money, more secure investments. The value of corporations swelled (tickets of the concert sold at inflated prices).

However, there was a hitch. Not everyone in a group was of the same stature. The old ones, the more experienced ones, if geometrically represented, lay in the centre of the group. The newer ones, ones with low investments or a more roving eye, sat on the fringes. These peripheral members were the ones who, maybe, had eggs in other baskets and were weighing the more lucrative baskets among them (a cheaper concert of a lost pop group (Viva?), or a 4 starred movie reviewed in TOI (K3G?)). These fringe members were the most liable to change. Their decisions could be easily swayed, any change in them easily triggered. Now say, investor X, a very old investor/fund/institution moved out of the group. All of a sudden, the value that had been built up fell (your rocker friend, the one whom you thought was crazy about the band, around whom your group of friends revolved, decided to sell his ticket). The confidence of other lesser investors dwindled. Their choices (imitation) were now changeable. If all this happened quickly enough, a collapse in the group(s) was triggered. Investments were pulled out with immediacy and market erection shrunk.

Now, a little peek into the past. Ethical accounting practices have been perceived to be important. Firms released true, accurate information on their financial condition. But sadly, since the average investor couldn’t differentiate chalk from cheese, all that voluminous financial truth made little sense. This sowed the seeds of collusion between accounting firms and companies. Shady stuff like window dressing and creative accounting happened (tweaked information was spread: 6 million copies of the band’s last album, which perhaps included 3 million pirated copies in China that didn’t bring a penny to the label). And while all this went on very dynamically, we, even the Economic Times conversant ones, saw the effects of such deep, widespread causes turning awry only when we, surfing channels, heard about the bankruptcy of Enron or World.com one fine morning.

However, capital markets, free markets, possess stable self-correcting mechanisms. So, even if false information is disseminated, investor interest is revved up, which is what ultimately matters. If this hype is strong enough, the stocks in question perform and people make money. Purists would say the market fundamentals are shaky, or that it is being driven by temporary bullish runs (your die-hard pro-Kishore Kumar uncle would proclaim that this rock-shock won’t last, quality music is what will eventually be heard).

However, what about spontaneous order: the social theory that says individuals follow their own self-interest, without a central authority designing a “plan” for everyone, thereby creating an ordered system? Don’t free markets subscribe to this?

Perhaps, what constitutes a voluntary choice isn’t really clear. But, anyway, the next time you decide on something, ask yourself how you really made that choice. And dont forget nerds can be cool too.

managerial quotient

2007-02-23T23:42:00.000+05:30

My roommate comes back from a motivation session at his office to tell me that his manager knows exactly when to pat an employee on his back and when to prick his ego with a pin. He rambles on that his manager keeps every little thing in mind when he dishes out dispensations, and that his actions are invariably timed. This manager doesn’t interest me a wee bit. But the whole image of his profession does. I’ve never been able to entirely understand the need for sleaze in the shrewdness required of people who manage others.

By acknowledging the smartness of a manager, we understand his tactics, i.e., we know the motive of his actions. And by that, mostly we realize that his motives are ulterior. So, in effect, we know that what he does or say may not truly reflect what he feels about us. Armed with this realization, we still gloat over public pats and frown over dressing downs. This reveals 2 things: (1) we’re smart enough to figure out genuine accolades from fake displays, and (2) we still fall for it and take it at face value or just refuse to see through the veneer.

It’s like your brain that would’ve shouted out, “saala, dikhaawa hai,” if your colleague would’ve been wowed, now, when heaped upon with praise, revels in the sweet shit. As much as it is no earth shattering revelation, it is one of those helpless things in life. To just understand it isn’t enough. On the other hand, your reactions will just insult your intelligence time and again and make you wonder if you would’ve been better off without the knowledge.

Until here, of course, we have been passive agents, the ones who have been at the receiving end. Very soon, we’ll become one of 'them,' serving opinions with very precise motives in mind. I don’t know if we shall pause to think about how we viewed this tribe of managers or, even if we do, just banish it out of mind like when asked upon to account for a bad habit.

Is there a honest way to go about managing people? How much will being genuine cost? Or is this the scrupulous way?

living and leaving

2007-02-06T22:55:00.000+05:30

The thing about having spent your childhood in a small town is that a sort of indelible identity, a signet, is left on your persona. This thing just pops up time and again like a turtle’s head.

Right now, I wish I were home, throwing out buckets of dirty rainwater. Come the monsoons and our house would be flooded on at least two or three occasions with a mixture of rain and drain water. And then all of us would get together with buckets, trousers rolled up, saarees folded, working in a frenzy. Sometimes, if we were lucky we would catch a fish or two. Mostly, kowoo maacha (Sadly, I don’t know its Hindi or English name).

I’m glad I lived in a small town for as long as did. Only then could I come out and appreciate the difference. It suprises me why we want to travel abroad, especially when we have seen so little of India. There’s a vibrancy, so unmistakable, in every nook and corner. As a part of the huge migrant populace that shifs jobs, hopping from here to there, but does not care to belong to the places it stays at, I have the chance to see things somewhat objectively, rather than be disinterested and stay as an outsider in my country of birth.

There’s so much to see. In Bandra, the other day, I eat the heavenliest malai ice-cream, then walk past ancient houses (like Sir Dorabji Tata's), with a burial ground in the middle of a residential place, into a small building that houses 5 theatres at once. It isn’t a multiplex; far from it actually. I then understand why the place is called "getty." Gem, Gemini, Glamour, Gossip, and Gaiety. English Gaiety is Indian getty. Like as a child what I used to hear as "septi pin" (safety pin) and "salu tape" (cello tape). Indian twists to English legacies.

The one screening “Flags of Our Fathers,” Gem, is no bigger than a spacious drawing hall. It is so cosy, like a Sunday afternoon movie at a friend’s. In the same complex, a Bhojpuri film is being screened (I forgot its name!). The guy beside me, on phone, in fluent English, schedules a meeting with a client in Bangalore and the one to my right speaks crass Bambaiyya Hindi. And both of them aren’t really disparate; just a similar kind of people caught in different situations. We, as Indians, stand for this dispersal within. An expanse of defining traits encompassed within each entity.

Where do I belong to? My fealty lies with finding this out. Nothing else is as riveting, as worth it. The other day, I bought a Lonely Planet guide to India and went to a recommended restaurant for lunch, book in hand. The lady opposite me, a firang, was leafing through the same tome. Both of us smiled at each other in the shade of a common ignorance, a shared zeal to discover. I realized then that I have as much to explore, more maybe. Because this is my country, and it is not enough if I just know it like any tourist with a travel book.

mere lab taras gaye: the parched lips

2007-01-31T22:03:00.000+05:30

We possess a remarkable capacity to think logically for our good, greater and individual. However, we are owners of an exceptional ability to twist all logic for our immediate benefit.

Dry days curb drinking. On dry days, the tanked stay with wife and kids, celebrate birthdays mumbling the correct words, and measure things in units other than pegs. Yet, they are sober enough to formulate a foolproof plan to compensate for the substantial loss in hung-over hours.

Side-effect: they make the other days, at least the ones immediately after the dry ones, incredibly wet.

Fellow swiggers and all those too inebriated on life,

Bombay has decided to celebrate the oncoming of the auspicious month of February (according to the Gregorian calendar) by observing 5 DRY DAYS, namely, Jan. 26, 30, 31 and Feb. 1, 2.

God save Bombay on Feb. 3. Providence has dictated such a momentous occasion be a Saturday. And until then may all bootleggers celebrate by unleashing their cache of spirits.

Lets drink to dryness!

Check This Out

six degrees of separation and none of freedom

2007-01-28T17:24:00.000+05:30

Imagine entering a throbbing disco. The beats become this invisible being that holds your limbs in taut control. Suddenly, you’re pulled into that world. Rhythm, melody, harmony and their overlapping into each other’s spaces. Trampling on domains to create a mélange of implacable sensations. Your ears are filled—the entire audible spectrum—with sounds you never thought possible. You need no cue; the ambience directs your actions.

Now see, feel all of this, with your ears wide shut. Look at people, the language of their bodies. Feel the silence, so far removed from this illusion. Live on this oasis and experience. So less, so much amiss. There are no pauses that heighten the effect, that elevate the music. And a wave of people, seemingly stupid, dancing, moving, grooving to some unfelt agency.

This scene from Babel is so wonderfully shot; it has just stayed with me since.

The silence rises to a feverish pitch. And beyond, its one long silent story—birds with pulverized beaks, choir girls with severed tongues, tigers who can’t roar, and songs that don’t sing.

----------------

Six degrees of separation are really too many sometimes. Our worlds inhabit our realities so tightly, in so complex yet familiar a manner, that virtually everyone is a few nodes of separation away, close at hand. We’re balanced right on the edge of our tethers like we’re repelled by this proximity amongst us. Drawn apart against the inclusive forces like electrons in their orbitals. Such encompassing forces bind each one of us that any small piece of the puzzle displaced entails a reorganization of our existences. Values, rights, wrongs—everything collated into perspective again.

The irony is this trigger can’t be controlled. What can cause this hint of a displacement that may go on to move continents is really un-forecastable. What is culture for some is sacrilege for others; religion for some, sin for others; even our ideas of fun find no common ground these days. No wonder, with such disparate beliefs, our faith in humanity is tested with a far greater frequency. A whole lot of skepticism and insecurity has fallen into our plates. It chaps our lips, chafes the lining of our stomachs, but we just can’t stop eating.

-----------------------

There's this friend from Chicago, K, a major in psychology and international studies. At TGIF the other evening, we chanced upon a picture on the wall that looked like Che Guevara (it was Bob marley's actually). K remarked that she had spoken to Camilo, Che's son, at her university and knew him quite well. Our conversation suddenly assumed importance, like what we spoke about on a carefree evening mattered in a bigger perspective. Meanwhile, for a few minutes while we were on the subject of Che, I was wondering to myself: small world na?

mumbai marathon!

2007-01-22T20:11:00.000+05:30

fuckety fickety doo
i ran, did u?

150th from amongst 7500 odd half marathon participants...

1:49:38

I motivated myself by mocking all those runners whose Nikes cost more than their spirits...Yes, it felt good, especially whenever I looked at my ancient, restiched pair of sneakers...

I can't tell how I feel because I feel so alive...And I just can't wipe that smile off my face...For the time that I was on the road, everything else became a distraction and how much did I enjoy it!

My volition and imagination are entities that no one can dare touch...Running is just one way of claiming my individuality...Any words expressed about how it went and what it feels like is just beacuse of a failure to communicate...

The feeling is one of utter chaos--absolutely indescribable!

I miss the high-rises from the roof-top

2007-01-18T20:19:00.000+05:30

Standing on a roof-top (the higher, the better) is like standing on the fringe of society--the geographical somehow replicates that which is in essence.

People like lizards, wagging their restless tails, waiting to hop onto kites that will make them soar above. A sense of dissociation so strong, you feel like a visiting supervisor when you look at your brethren. Things such as "up there" and "down below" mean something exact.

It's the height, is it?

You experience a clarity, a sanctity, that is so obvious yet unfathomable on analysis. A kiss on the 9th floor roof-top, it becomes extra-special; smoke, and the drags turn almost philosophical; when you eat, the food can become incidental. You remember the ambience, the feel. So much is about this feel--this thing that defines moments.

These moments, these fleeting units, then define experiences. In retrospect (the way we usually decide) we label these experiences, placing a huge serving of permanence on our memory plates that'll keep us nourished. And this will decree that life has been such and such. To evaluate something as questionable as the quality of our existence, we cling on to equally dubious parameters.

Goa has to be fun, lectures boring; junk food delectable, gyaan unacceptable. A collection of interests or a set of acquired biases?

What explains this?

say no to angsty posts

2007-01-18T19:13:00.000+05:30

You cannot be unfaithful if you don't know what it is like to be faithful.

Outrageously absurd na?

sometimes the nipples say more than the face

2006-12-24T21:29:00.000+05:30

Susan Sarandon said: “I’ve never been comfortable with nudity on screen because nipples always upstage you. For the first 15 seconds, nobody is listening to what you’re saying.”

If you watch European cinema—I can vouch for French and Spanish at least—what comes across especially is the explicitness. In language, in visuals, in subjects. There’ll be movies with women, and men, roaming around naked without the motif being Viagra-esque. Their audiences have that taste. At least, I hope for that.

Back to Sarandon. When you’re showing flesh on screen, the objective is to show an aspect of the character that is being portrayed. But if the viewers don’t hear what the filmmaker wants to tell, what is the point? Is it because of this failure to communicate that moviemakers and scriptwriters shy away from absolutely realistic cinema? There’s a nine minute long rape sequence in Irréversible. That nausea just swells up inside.

And the question of selective nudity too. If the bare body is that of an attractive young woman, comfortable with her sexuality, it should precisely be because the script demands it. But, the naked body could also be that of a middle aged virago. Why isn’t that shown? Don’t such women exist? Or does the script ask for taut anatomies in working condition? Get an old hag to strip and let her act her skin off and then see the movie for what it’s worth. I can hear this coming: Dude, you wouldn’t want to watch it. Well, I also am not particularly interested in paying to watch women raped or people slash and cut each other up. But then, I do that. We all do that.

Remember that scene in Fire when Mundu masturbates before Biji. How ironic--and fascinating--that a woman director canned that. And, as an entity, we’re the largest movie watching populace in the world.

And how do our films excite our female audiences? What do our actors do for them? There's a big mismatch somewhere.

A huge chunk of India's mainstream cinema is meant for titillation of the family in the living room. In the cheapest way that embarasses both father and son, and if you've a large enough family, both grandpa and dad.

the big strip tease

2006-12-13T09:04:00.000+05:30

Living off jobs which didn’t interfere
With their primary interest—perfect gratification
Unfeeling voyeurs rose from their chairs

It was the big strip tease
Taken off, sliding down satin legs, thrown off a now bare torso
Items of societal dignity

The audience, whistling and hooting
In cahoots
Fate in open connivance with the living

What they desired,
The law-abiding quotidian,
Mayhem.
Their loins ached for
That bit of flesh—ravishing, succulent

He sulked in his chair
Glug, glug the pegs burnt
The lampshades turned upside down
The existences murky

Desires flitted like bluebottles
Imagination begot dirty wings
The untouchable was here
In the face

Yet now, he thought
Her mystery hidden in a hutch
She invited more

The face, it had to be
The false bravado
The surety
Where did it come from?

She was there,
Glowing naked as a bulb
Yet she wasn’t bare

What the madhouse couldn’t hide
The flesh couldn't show
That mask on her face
That isolation
What did she feel?

How does one feel?
In a place where men are so true
For her to melt into an aphrodisiac

prizes in knotholes

2006-12-07T10:06:00.000+05:30

A few days ago I ate Bombay duck, a fish dish (no ducks!), for the first time. Imagine my glee then when I read about it in ‘The Inheritance of Loss’. Haven’t you ever felt this way— the joy of reading about something you’ve experienced personally, with the memory of it still crisp? And then I was awash with the same thrill all over again when I read about Kalimpong and Teesta in the book. Wow! I remembered the chill, the inundated noodles for 25 bucks, the smoke-breath, the icicles, the rapids. Crimson throbbed in my veins again.

------------------------------

The urge to write, at times, is like a driving demand of a child; you’ve to attend to it and worse, or better, you can’t discipline it. On such occasions, when this craving takes you over, the need to satiate it in a respectful magnitude looms like the physical immediacy of a new spouse. Always there, in your face. Irresistible. I want that passion back in my life again; rather, I want to get to live it again. Last evening, I tossed around wistfully, recompensing for travails, navigating through dusted alleys, clinging to a past treasure, wanting to lay my hands on the loot again. I want to resume my visitations. Into minds of siblings, into torn families, through a pin hole in old asbestos, to a single patch of light on a dappled floor, to prizes hidden in knotholes. This inheritance cannot be whittled down. At all.

to bombay

2006-12-05T12:03:00.000+05:30

Imagine entering or being pushed inside a jam-packed compartment —your feet almost dangling in air, your body (not even the skeleton is spared) contorted in shapes unimaginable, inexorable forces moving up and down your shape. Inside, the crowd is bristled up by a motive not grander than reaching their everyday destination—office or home—but as urgent nevertheless. The invaders—you—are welcomed by pushes, shoves, and gropes; cries of andar, andar fill the air that has been stifled between and beneath tumultuous bodies. And after much warfare, when you do acquire a foothold on a patch that has not been annexed by another sole and as you struggle to keep a clammy hand hinged onto something, you’re treated to extraordinary sights: comrades nestled cosily, shuffling a pack of worn-out cards, a gentleman reading ‘Kasturba: a life’, or a group chorusing Marathi songs.

And imagine going through almost all of this all over again, twice a day, everyday, for days and days.

Bombay takes you by the scruff, turns you over, and shakes the last ounce of you from your piggybank. The experience is exhilarating, disgusting, exacting, refreshing—all at once. Two nights ago, at 1130, I saw one having a haircut, and one giving it too! When the narrators in Bollywood flicks say ‘the city never sleeps’ this is what they mean.

The contrast of India cannot possibly hit you harder anywhere but here. My office, in central, posh Lokhandwala, is opposite a string of huge malls but adjacent to a line of jhuggis and chawls. While there are coumtless eateries nearby, the streets are lined with makeshift huts that dole out lunches at dirt-cheap prices.

And public transport is the greatest leveler. Classless commutes. Everyone travels (rather has to) by local train or bus. The hottest chick to the oldest uncle, to the loudest mawaali, to the most straitjacketed buzurg.

Today, as I got down at the bus stop near my office, I saw Hrithik’s bare chest shouting out loud from a giant poster. I couldn’t help grimace. That instant, nothing was further from truth, from reality. After a bus-train-bus ride of almost one and a half hour, after the jostling and huffing and puffing nothing was more absurd. I think that’s why people are so passionate about movies—to escape a harsh, shared reality. To saunter in a place so unimaginable that it refuses to acknowledge their depressing and exhausting truth.

There’re a hundred things to write about. But I’ll give myself time to sauté them, then deep fry and relish them.

from bangalore

2006-11-28T17:42:00.000+05:30

From Bangalore:

Last days at a place involve you before releasing you altogether, for better or for worse. There’s the meeting up and final words with friends and then coming back to your solitary thoughts. Within the last minute chaos is a new direction. Everyone else knows about it but only you are entitled to feel it.

I’ve 2 more days in Bangalore. I had arrived here quite inauspiciously, having forgotten my 10th marks card that had, to cut a long story very close to its denouement, resulted in 4 weeks in a pigeonhole with a dastardly patron to survive. I survived, if this post isn’t proof enough.

Back then, I had a better plan for the future; right now there’s a much stronger conviction.

Yesterday I went to 3 shops to sell off old furniture, understood soon that their keepers didn’t think much of my belongings and ended up making the deal with a very good friend. It’s uncomfortable to do business with a friend; you are wary about hurting his sensitivities by quoting a high price, and too low a price only ends up making you rue the transaction. And with a close friend you’re afraid something untoward may creep into, and then disturb, the mutual equation and with barely a friend, the deal shall set the tone for future affairs.

Non-sequitur: my mother is unconvinced about my skill at packing. She pesters me with questions that concern vexing details. I’m not as concerned. Is this skill gender specific or am I just too bad to notice my level of inaptitude? My checquered career has had a few blemishes (refer to the story of the missing 10th marks and the sneaking patron) which, my mother feels, don’t give me the liberty, or audacity, to pacify her worries.

Going off a philosophical tangent, most choices you make aren’t that momentous. They only set the tone. It’s what you do afterwards that bake or burn. Such a vantage point can work both ways: it can keep you more focused on action and keep your mind off unnecessary regret or elation, or it can take the sheen off the finality of any occasion and make your approach towards any decision lackadaisical.

I wonder about friends though. Will it be the same ever again? Something very sublime inside of me asks, ‘Why can’t it be better?’ I’m bad at keeping in touch. But I hope the sublime outlasts this something so commonplace.

The next 2 days will pass off and arrange themselves in a week, which will tuck itself in a month that will fit in a year. Just a number: 2006. As I’ll remember that figure with events—personal and national—I’ll probably never pause to ask: what did I learn from it? Did living become just a force of habit? Or did it actually matter?

The nub is to travel the journey and not to canter to any destination.

that name on the merit list

2006-11-16T15:14:00.000+05:30

They hadn't cost her a dime, her dreams. But there, in that very public of places, they melted into tears. And fell off her luminous eyes. Slowly and softly. She didn’t mind them, slipping away. There were enough happy, sparkling, bulbous beads to spare. She remained glued to that name on the hastily written list, checking every letter, her lips mouthing every syllable. That was the one, she told herself. That had to be her child.

She pulled herself out from the cloud of nervous parents. The glistening film on her upper lip was wiped away by an impatient hand that longed to be clasped with the other in prayer. She looked upwards and then inwards. Her God had a heart, surely.

That night she rode up the crescent moon and pitched her nascent dreams into the night sky. Before she came down, she broke a small piece off the lucent concave, heedful that it would disappear into an emptiness soon. She would try to make it last until the end of the month. Like an item of grocery. And then wait for it again.

She couldn’t believe that name on the merit list still. How much would an English school education cost? For then, it didn’t matter. Neither did the blisters wedged between her toes.

my plough, my land

2006-11-03T12:39:00.000+05:30

Ladies and gentlemen, seraphs, elves and pirates, exhibit number 1: a star-studded plough.

What would you think if you’re pointed out a plough in the sky? Any sense of wonder? Gasps--audible and visible? Diminutive dreams tumble out from your imagination, swell and threaten to turn real. Oh, back to the plough. A plough with which to till the skies, with glittering stars for beads of your perspiration. Clouds who had been reconnoitering, though aimlessly, waiting to pour down on, now gather with an unmistakable urgency. Something debatable, worth talking about, has led to their most recent caucus. After much deliberation they decide on a plough–-that one with stars.

And drop it onto my backyard. A plough with which to till the skies, with glittering stars for beads of my perspiration.

And guess what? I got the job.

black-faced happiness

2006-10-25T16:28:00.000+05:30

This time when I had been home I went to Keonjhar, as promised, to spend a few days with my mom. All through my engineering I had tactfully avoided staying there stating the value of the precious few days of my semester breaks.

Keonjhar is a sleepy little place laden with huge iron and chrome ore deposits, coal mines and tribals. That is an extremely uncharitable statement and it doesn't say much more than it says.

When I went for a run early morning I saw hordes of locals being trooped onto trucks that lined the streets. Men were paid as less as 60 and women lesser for an entire day’s work in the coal mining quarries in nearby Mayurbhanj. Evenings would witness black-faced happiness with soiled currency in hard hands. Life happened one day at a time. When they saw me running in my Benetton T-shirt and Reebok tracks I wonder what they must’ve thought. I felt inexplicably embarrassed, although I reasoned there was no particular reason why I should be. It was my hard-earned money which had allowed me life’s comforts and no one could take that away from me, much less the happiness I derived from enjoying them.

One evening I accompanied mom to an acquaintance’s (rather an old employee’s) house. She had a 5 year old daughter who was asked to sing rhymes and the latest songs before me. The house comprised of one room with a detached, makeshift bath-latrine. When I arrived beds were dusted off and utensils, books, clothes were cleared. I was offered Sprite when I knew they wouldn’t have it themselves. That 8 rupees would go into an account where every penny mattered. Every rupee saved would bring a smile of relief. It would buy an ounce of happiness which came cheap for people like me. Still, there was this genuine largess sitting right across me in a single bedroom of hope. That belittled.

Baba, will you have anything else? Kurkure, Cadbury?

Such memories mean much more than can ever be fathomed. They bring forth a wave of emotions. A surge of guilt mostly. But to do anything out of guilt would be just not it.

Some duties are not obligatory. They're just more important.

Which bubble should I fill and which one will burst?

2006-10-25T14:22:00.000+05:30

Should I trust my instincts? This always crops up like an assiduous turtle called to race against the profligate hare – not in full measure but just enough to keep me interested. There’re intelligent guesses and then there’re blind ones. Then there’re some absurd ones which come across as veritably brilliant and vice-versa (don’t flip-flop all the adjectives).

I’ve been though phases. To guess and proffer phase. To stay mum and withdraw phase. And an in-between, mishmash phase. Poignantly and retorospectively I’ve had complaints against and during each of them. When I’ve been forthcoming, on occasions, I’ve shot off absolutely dumb momos and when I’ve kept the jackpot answer to myself I’ve been left with randomly uprooted clumps of hair from my scalp. I’ve tried to get people (teachers, instructors, friends, etc) to understand that genius sleeps with stupid for better and for worse and hence they should accept esprit and dumb momos with equal receptivity. This phenomenon has not just been restricted to classroom (or similar face-to-face) situations. Its ambit include MCQs with negative marking. On countless occasions, when I’ve narrowed my choices down to two, the battle between the possible and the probable--that strife between instinct and reason (though not in such clear terms)--has just thickened. Leaving me nowhere. Dammit! What’s the use of eliminating 2/3 choices if you’re left with options you can’t decide between? It’s all the more frustrating. And then Murphy himself has to be countered. If I trust my intuition it turns out wrong and when I don’t I rue missing my chance because that just would've been bingo!

More about the strife. For all these years I’ve believed myself to be one. Except of course when I’ve had to choose between having junk food during jaundice and drooling in public. Or similar moral dilemmas. But faced with two tussling MCQ options I’m split asunder, along the seams. There sprouts a reasonable, play-safe alter ego who cants me to see the truth: discretion is better than valour. And the just-do-it second self who requests me to trust my hunch. I oscillate between the safety of a staid spouse or the thrill of the enticing other in a backless choli. Precisely. (I dare not draw the analogy for the fairer sex for fear of a dumb momo)

Back to MCQs. What do I do? And before I’ve made up my mind the clock hands have changed numbers. Generally, I refrain from choices or take the safe highway (rather than my way). And am ensconced in my cocoon. In this CAT season I suppose this dilemma has great significance for our burgeoning aspiring-managerial populace. I wonder if someone can come up with an algorithm that can be customized to suit every user and thus maxmise his or her usage of intuition. What an invention!! And stupid me, as a child I thought, while going through long GK lists, that all great inventions had already been, well, invented and there would be nothing worthwhile left to, well, invent in the coming years.

to be the one you want to be

2006-10-23T13:22:00.000+05:30

Five years ago I started studying to be a Mechanical Engineer. A year and a half ago I became a Software Engineer. A few months ago I was on the verge of studying to become an MBA, having got through 2 IIMs. And now, I’m doing something I haven’t been formally trained in at any point in my life. If a pithy statement is necessitated it is this: sometimes we may/do spend years climbing up long ladders only to find, at the top or somewhere in the higher rungs, that we’ve been snaking up the wrong ones. Or even that we’re way too up on some ones to get down and climb on to the right ones the--ones we would love to.

When I quit my job and subsequently forfeited my chance of pursuing an MBA I didn’t have a career path chalked out. I was only beginning to feel strongly about one particular thing: of all the kinds of imprisonments that we find ourselves living in one of the worst is to carry a question mark as a legacy of our past or as a precursor of the future. And this was just one aspect. Another driving issue was reason. Why one should be doing what one does. There should be at least thousand reasons for a thousand of us. Quite often the best of the worst lot comes up for serious consideration. And elimination. I can’t be this, this and this. That leaves this. So let me become this. Voila!

While the possibility of putting safety/security over choice/interest looms large at every junction, there is also the period of drifting along saying ‘let me find out what I want to do in life and then I’ll do something about it’. We (the ones who are reading this blog) are in a far better position to decide our destinies than many many others. When I was involved with a group of volunteers in teaching underprivileged kids the basics of computers a question had cropped up as to what lasting, tangible benefit the kids would extract out of a sporadic, even solitary, exercise such as learning computers. They may very well never have to do anything with it again. But then were we willing to bet on it? And wasn’t it better to give the kids a certain level of acceptance and a few choices which could help them later in life? It struck me that we, by virtue of our position in the scheme of larger things such as status, acceptance, and comfort in society, are far better off. And if we don’t make efforts to avail ourselves of it then isn’t that a pity?

I’m expecting a few to ask: is it entirely possible for us to decide our own fates? To decide one's destiny and to evaluate oneself on evident, more acceptable yardsticks are not two exclusive areas. For every Kiran Desai who wins recognition as a practitioner of a lonely, reclusive art there may be hundreds others who live in oblivion. But then, is the Booker the criterion for her success? What about the absolute joy she had while stringing together each of those thousands of lines? And herein is my point.

That when we truly enjoy what we’re doing we will think before we (or even will not) measure ourselves against hikes, bonuses, awards and start looking elsewhere when they don’t come our way. Or feel disenchanted about our lives.

Today I’ve a telephonic interview, possibly the final round, for an editing job. If I get through it’ll be redemption of sorts. Solely because I’ll be able to do what I want to do.

My Experiences With Older Women

2006-10-16T21:29:00.000+05:30

As did Bapu learn from his episodes with truth so did I benefit from my flings with women who preceded me temporally. This talent of mine was discovered quite early. The time was around puberty. A few newly secreted hormones had announced their arrival as well spaced tufts of hair on my upper lip. There was a buzz in the air; curiosity demanded investigations to be conducted with urgency. In such an age - when lives are led astray; when impulses and pimples acquire a power of their own – I committed my first act of sin.

She was the daughter of a friend of my uncle. (Just) A year senior to me in school, she had by then built a reputation of being an accomplished Odissi dancer. I had eyed her in school on some occasions. And smiles had floated still in air then. Such moments had lingered on in memory whenever I imagined as to what great associations could have been formed between the two of us. Pretty and dainty, silent and smiling, she veritably came into my life one evening when I was huffing and puffing on my study table (after having dashed from a session of verandah cricket on hearing the approaching croak of my uncle's scooter to bury my head into a book and fit into the role of a studious ward). Poor little rich beautiful girl had come after a dance performance at the Kala Vikaas Kendra (faithfully translated as ‘Art Enhancement Centre’) to say ‘Hi’ to a sweaty little rickety boy and offer her enticing hand of friendship.

Attired elaborately in a yellow blouse and a heavily bordered saree, with chunky jewellery around her neck, a broad silver belt hugging her waist, ghungru around her ankles, and all accompanying finery she must've looked, well, a woman to me, or else, what I did to her in return can never be excused.

As she came into my room accompanied by my uncle and a coterie of simpering elderly women I dared not look up for I was sweating badly and ran the risk of being asked a few uneasy questions. As my uncle introduced her to me (not having known that we had already locked eyes), I, as any decently schooled and brought-up boy would do to someone who he was expecting to be an elder or elderly, got down on my knees to perform a mark of respect that is called mundia in that side of the world.

Mortified, she jumped! And shrieked, “What are you doing?” And the aunties? What did they do? In a breaking into of fanatical peals that their ages didn’t merit, their mouths rang out ‘hihihihihi’.

And imagine me! In a room full of chuckling aunties, having already doused any fire beyond re-ignition between my now ‘elderly’ love and me, and sweating profusely (that just heightened my chickened-out situation) I started counting six digit numbers in reverse.

But if you thought this early lesson might’ve taught me somewhat then . . .

During my Art of Living Basic course I sat across someone whom, for want of a more apposite name, I choose to call a woman. Now we were required to narrate our lives to each other in 5 mins. While I had rambled on and let her gain a much too private insight into my happening life and times this woman was very concise and to the point. How she fit her god-knows-how-many years into the smallest nutshell possible was this:

I was born in place X. Our family consisted of dad, mom and a younger brother. Stayed with them till graduation. And now working for company Y as a designate Z.

Done! Over! Before I had even registered her name in my brain. Not even a minute had passed. What were we supposed to do? Sitting right across with half a feet between us, the uncomfortable silence made me queasy, if not her. Unable to bear the thought of lip-locking (our respective ones), I blurted out something.

“How many kids do you have?”

Suddenly the woman acted like a living thing. And asked, rather loudly that made a few nearby heads turn curiously towards me, “What kids? I’m not yet married!” Again numbers came to my rescue. Only this time seven digit ones. In retrospect I think it was because of the calming ambience that nothing remotely physical was done unto me. Otherwise, my patron (who, in my defense, let me propose looked a potential aunty) could well have treated me better.

Age and women do not make a couple. It is better you take my word and not find this out from experience. And putting their feet into mouths comes naturally to a few deserving men like me.

Munna and Circuit

2006-10-10T11:19:00.000+05:30

The institution of friendship has been delineated to some extent by the movies we’ve seen; while such portrayals carry much meaning, when looked through the prism of our everyday lives, they are difficult to be duplicated. This being true, the purport of the message conveyed assumes greater significance.

Jai-Veeru, since 1975, have triggered billions of tear ducts into action. Their acts were the epitome of companionship. And before you only notice, and infer from, the male bonding there are female duos as well. Like Thelma and Louise. It’s because male camaraderie, while being more visible, is easier to be captured on screen while girl bonhomie in movies is usually typecasted under the genre of chick flicks.

Munna-Circuit, bond terrifically - and decidedly so - on screen; though, it’s very unlikely, if not unpalatable, in reality. It's one way: Circuit giving, Munna taking. The absolute selflessness of Circuit makes Munna’s self-interests stand out a little grotesquely. Imagine what could’ve happened instead.

Circuit comes to Munna and vents out, “It’s always your life, your problems, your worries. Only you, you, you. You know what? I’m done. I’m through with this. I can’t take anymore of your shit.”

Camera focuses on the sheepish expression of Munna – that expression of sudden realization; that ‘Damn! I must be a real piss-off’ look - and then zooms out and the viewer sees an aerial shot that shows Circuit turn away. But of course you also notice the growing distance (figurative) between the two as Circuit walks away (physically apart). Cinematic brilliance. You nurse biting pangs and take out your handkerchief.

Lamenting that finding true friends today is a rarity, and a matter of luck, is a matter of emphatic convenience. It's as if you've nothing to do with finding a true friend. You've sinned as much as you've been sinned against.

Reel altruism is there to make a statement. It’s better to fathom this and not try to measure real friends by that yardstick. To take, without giving, is asking for the moon, and, to be true, the taker deserves it much less than the friend who gives.

shade and shadow

2006-10-05T14:33:00.000+05:30

This one is between shade and shadow.

Shade of a friend; shadow of his expectations. Shelter of companionship; shadow of the accompanying responsibilities. Shade can never remain itself for long; sometime, during the ticktock march of the clocks, its solace turns into liability. The shroud that protected you from the chill now threatens to smother you. The blanket that shielded you from harsh glares paints your identity in its own blackness. Discomfiture sneaks into what was, once, a cocoon and your benefactor, now, can only make you uncomfortably silent.

Shade asks questions: Why did you do that? Did you think about anyone else (me) before doing that? How can you be so selfish?
Shelter turns peremptory with injunctions dissimulated as things softer like advice and suggestions: Don’t do this. I suggest (I insist) you decide against it. You’ve made the right decision . . . I’m glad for you!

What the protected – shaded and jaded – says: Don’t worry about me. It’s best you be honest with me. I’ll let you know when I’m hurt.

Inwardly, collapsing like a house of cards, what does a shielded voice murmur: Honesty comes with discretion and a little care for feelings. Is this so hard to fathom? And my freedom? Have I lost it?

Despair, and fear, and you hear the perfect sad pitch.

Bonds of love become barnacles; favours become the unmerciful edge of guillotines; all old accounts are dusted and tallied - How much is owed? How much has been left unclaimed?

The interplay of shade and shadow continues. Father mother brother sister uncle aunt husband wife boyfriend girlfriend friend - all function, in the world of umbra and penumbra, by the rules of shade and shadow.

I did it!!!

2006-09-18T15:07:00.000+05:30

The traffic stopped for me at junctions. I swear it stopped. I was the only one running and long trails of bikes, cars, and buses laden with people with Sunday morning plans waited for me to pass. Some cheered me, some just gazed with a palpable curiosity and some, I guess, just wanted me to pass quickly. And it wasn’t just for me. It was the same for very single runner and yet each felt like royalty.

There was an old lady at the end of the Vidhan Soudha road who shouted ‘all the best’ at the top of her voice. Children were the most visibly excited, and puzzled too as to why such a motley congregation was running itself dead. But mostly there was the curious onlooker who was too shy to root for outsiders.

The loneliness during a marathon can only be contrasted with the assemblage at the start. You are rounded up in a flock and then the gunshot. Galloping, ambling, walking - people start in their own ways only to lose contact from there on. The sights and sounds that you encounter along the way come with an exclusive ownership. You've to run to understand.

The organization was shoddy although the full and half marathons did start on time. There were hordes of volunteers who sometimes didn’t have an idea of what was where. Let me have the pleasure of mentioning the Good Day guys who never as much gave a single biscuit as they had useless paper caps thrust into everyone’s hands. In contrast Real Active juice packs were distributed like small change. But all this was more than made up by the enthusiasm of the participants. Early morning Kanteerava stadium came alive when a gunshot was fired and a procession of chest numbers sprang into delirium.

Shashank ran for the cause of underprivileged children, Mr. Anil was dressed in fake tiger skin that had ‘Save Nature’ written all over it, one firang’s iPod flung itself loose and crashed on the way, an uncle ran with supplies of water strapped onto his belt, many ran in T-shirts with slogans, many with earphones plugged deep into ears, a few checked their cell phones every now and then, and a few others gaped at Deepika Padukone on the walls (at least I did).

There were a good number of oldies running and it made me wonder if they were running for a lost age. And considering Bangalore is teeming with software professionals why were they so less? I know you’ve mock CATs to write and Monday mornings are important and Saturday evenings even more so. When people ask me “How was it?” I don’t know what to say. It obviously doesn't concern you much and you'd rather sleep than participate or come to cheer. And where were the ladies? How can there be so few interested? How can so many be into the same things?

We spend a third of our lives in the shadow of death and soon let our waking time become a litany of hours to be passed. We are convinced by Rang De Basanti as much as we are by Munnabhai. But that’s about it; we still can’t make choices for ourselves.

Lester Burnham (American Beauty) had said, “It’s great when you realise you still have the ability to surprise yourself. Makes you wonder what else you can do.”

Yesterday I surely did as did so many others who I ran with.

I finished the Times Bangalore Half Marathon (21 km) in 1h 46 mins and Gujja in 1h 53. Initially we had looked at a realistic 2h 10 and then at an achievable 2h. But we had not even half-expected it to turn out so well.

Finishing a half marathon is the craziest impossibility that has turned possible. And completing it in good time is indescribable.

A huge thanks to Pj, Chandu, Ravi and Ritesh for turning up to cheer us.

MUMBAI MARATHON is on Jan 21 next year!!. Of the top 15 finishers in Mumbai m'thon this year there were 12 Kenyans and no Indians :(

Run Forrest! Run!

2006-09-14T06:30:00.000+05:30

I had quit my job, gone for a trek in the Himalayas, came back home – a visitor after almost 2 years. As my luck would have it I chanced upon an old school friend Jay. He had become an Army Lieutenant. I, a truant engineer. He needed some company for his early morning runs. I agreed almost immediately. The casualness of his offer subsequently vanished during the runs. On the first day I jogged 5km in 25 minutes. The distances stretched - 7, 8 10km - (with a concomitant improvement in time) and what had started as a filler became a whole routine. We would run, exercise and then hang around in chai shops for long. I had been doing fairly well until one day he decided to put me to test. It was a 20km python in which I was sure about getting stuck in the middle somewhere in the innards. And I was afraid I would spoil the reputation that I had so recently and so painstakingly built. Jay kept telling me: abbey, daaru, sutta ke baad bhi tu kaafi fit hai yaar.

But I ran. We shifted the time to evening since the summer sun blazed by 630 in the mornings. We walked till Deer Park and from there ran till the Annicut at Naraaj and back. We couldn’t complete the entire length (I was in a dilapidated state). And when I announced 16km at home rather agonisingly there was no jubilation. (and it was at that very moment I pledged to show them that I could run a marathon . . . not so melodramatic of course)

That evening Jay gave me some gyaan on running in particular: (1) It’s your hands as much as your legs which can exhaust you (2) It’s best to know your optimum speed and then stick to it faithfully.

And we talked - I having run out of thoughts to accompany me and he to give me food for thought. He said the clincher was boredom more than fatigue. You thought you were run down when in fact you had been just done in by the sameness. He said one should just run without thinking things or wondering about the route or even noting how much was left to cover. I thought that was a very unimaginative and mechanical way of doing something. But I ran.

I ran every day for about 2 weeks back home and then I continued by myself at NGV in Bangalore. Then I had to go home again and my ritual stopped for almost two months until last week when I heard about the Bangalore Marathon. Sometime after I had started I had promised myself I would run a full marathon but that needs some reckoning still. This time I’m making do with the half marathon i.e. 21km. I collected my chest number the other day and didn’t tick any cause for which I would run on the form. For the love of running if ever there was an option like that.

Yesterday I clocked 15 km in 86 min and there was still some pizzazz left. I felt good even though I was pushing myself after a long time. My target is 21km in 2h 10min.

My preparation has been punctuated with rather long breaks and too little conditioning. But come Sunday morning and I’ll forget. My legs will tell me they can carry me a few yards more, my heart will pump in excitement and my brain has already assured me (during the run only) it won’t meddle with other more important faculties.

The great philosopher Nike(as a sales pitch?) had once said:

"There are clubs you can't belong to, neighborhoods you can't live in, schools you can't get into, but the roads are always open."

Wish me luck!

BANGALORE MARATHON
P.S: The reporting time for the half marathon is 530 am instead of 430 am as has been printed on the handouts and website (in true Indian ishtyle). Better clarify before landing up in the dark at Kanteerava Stadium.

Match Point

2006-09-11T16:46:00.000+05:30

1. Guilt

Nola walks off, from the innuendos of the mother of her fiancé, into the rain in the countryside. Chris, boyfriend of Nola’s prospective sister in-law, sees her and follows. Then:

Nola: I don't think this is a good idea. You shouldn't have followed me here.
Chris: Do you feel guilty?
Nola: Do you?

And they kiss in the rain.

2. Lust

Chris: I’m contemplating leaving my wife for another woman. But when the time came to tell her I couldn’t do it. It’s crazy. I can see no real future with this other woman and I’ve a very comfortable life with my wife.
Friend: Ya but then you don’t love her.
Chris: I’m not saying I don’t love her. Just not the way I feel about this other woman. Maybe it’s finally the difference between love and lust.

3. Greed

Chris: I don’t fool myself that I haven’t got used to a certain kind of living. Am I supposed to give it all up?

4. Luck

Chris: The man who said "I'd rather be lucky than good" saw deeply into life. People are often afraid to realize how much of an impact luck plays. There are moments in a tennis match where the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, remains in mid-air. With a little luck, the ball goes over, and you win. Or maybe it doesn't, and you lose.

Sometimes luck follows you like a faithful puppy; for the aspiring criminal luck’s like the Hand of God. But guilt is a permanent scar; you’d rather be apprehended and punished than see it everyday in your reflection. Guilt can’t be washed off the face. On the contrary I wonder what are the possibilities if luck helps us in our transgressions – little and big. If we get that little push at the hour of the crime and then things turn out favourably can’t we be led further into our ignoble pursuits?

Match Point is a welcome departure from Woody Allen’s romantic, neurotic comedies although the latter are brilliant in their genre. It’s as the critics say: ‘darker’. I feel at times reviews just shoot over the heads with their fancy talk (called ‘spiel’ which is what I want to avoid to make my point) but then if you watch this movie carefully you’re bound to come up with little clues - that otherwise would go unnoticed – that just make it jump the threshold between a good and a better-than-good movie. Like which book Chris is shown reading at one point and why when Nola says that her building has been burglarized and the woman down the hall has mice it’s something to be kept in mind. The plot is tight and has been lent an ingenious tweak at the end.

The title had led me to believe it was something else altogether but you never know. I’ve practically said nothing about the characters and the setting because I believe the message is sweeping. London, Chris and Nola are just excuses to show human beings as they are wherever they are. It could happen to your best friend if not to you (if you're relieved at reading this don't be surprised)

THIS is for starters.

If you're going to try, go all the way

2006-09-05T16:03:00.000+05:30

The cliche of ups and downs, crests and troughs, snakes and ladders croaks rickety; it sounds outrageously banal especially when I'm forced to listen to humdrum speeches by preachy orators. But when I feel all that ebb and flow, high and low within me I realise the reality of it overshadowing it's commonness. I don't have to wait for significant occasions to feel that and God forbid those moments may pass with hardly as much as a flutter of a butterfly wing inside.

Its there everyday; I only have to pay attention. To the abyss I say I can only rise from it; to the sky I tell the fall shall hit hard. And to everything I murmur: this too shall pass.

Every passing day there come a few moments, a handful maybe even less - a solitary thought, where I feel myself. Nothing much happens to me then but its the afterglow that I bask in. It's like a shot of adrenalin, of resplendent beauty, that eggs me on for the oncoming hours, days, weeks. It pedals me on and my wheels run hard. As barriers, uphills threaten to cut me short, slow me down, the inertia of my happy juggernaut keeps me rolling. I pass by the morass without sinking, I ride through the stench without stinking and I roll on.

My life, each life, is such a story. The rough and the smooth, the evil and the righteous coexist, not peacefully or staticaly, but locked in a tussle as profound as any great battle - dynamically. I live my life consoling myself that my happiness will outlast my living. I dream the momentary will outlast the eternal. I wait for a few drops of rain in what can be an endless summer. And in a way - this way - I root for the underdog. And while I'm at it I learn I don't need to. It'll come when it has to. Bon courage!

May the living keep flying and may the dead rise from the ashes.

The hospital IS NOT RESPONSIBLE for your valuables

2006-08-31T17:55:00.000+05:30

As we - D, our domestic help, and I - entered the Emergency Medicine Dept. at St. John's the guard at the entrance halted us to ask the patient's name which I dutifully said adding that it was a head injury - an emergency case. Then he asked me my name which I mumbled before he relented to direct us. A few metres on at the other end of the corridor the second guard, making sure he disbursed his duties well, stopped us again to carry out the charade. And as all this transpired D was bleeding profusely - the towel wrapped around his wound soaked like a cigarette butt in public loos. Finally after we were let in into the Priority - 1 room a doctor (a lecturer in medicine) took an interested look and asked a few questions before he asked his junior - a PG student Mr. T - to diagnose him. Mr. T now enquired his quota; he hadn't paid attention the first time they were asked. He wrote down the rather lengthy report - left lateral laceration, 8 cm long, 1.5 cm deep, weapon involved: kitchen knife, address, thumb impression, etc) during which a few nubile interns gathered around him and invited him to their world with enticing smiles and he in turn blushed baby pink. And after a good 20 mins of entering the premises we were asked to get an X - ray done of the skull ( Anterior-Posterior and lateral). The X-ray room was a 100 metres walk. And after it was done the operator refused to give me the X ray saying that it'll be sent to the Priority -1 room. So I went back only to be asked by Mr. T for the X-ray. After listening to me he ordered someone to fetch it from the X ray room since they normally took a long time to send it across.

As we waited a few Sisters got together for some chit-chat. I hadn't paid them any attention until then and what I saw made me rue it. Miss I was telling Miss J about this new intern from Germany, "I've heard he's very intelligent. He has won many prizes and all." I turned to stare at a 6 ft 5 in giant. Meanwhile the X-ray report arrived and it became the cause cèlébre as every soul worth an ounce of medical literature decided to look into it. It was determined beyond the reasonable doubts of a few too many noble docs, interns,etc that there was no damage to the cranium (thats why the X ray had been done in the first place) . There was a brief 'pehle aap' fiasco between the German Mr. G and the Indian Mr. T as to who would treat the patient. By seniority Mr. T won the vote. The stage was set. Or so I had thought.

In the emergency ward of a hospital as big as St. John's at any given point of time there are 8 - 10 suture sets. But right then there wasn't a single one. All had been despatched to be sterilised (hygiene is of paramount importance of course) My patience running thin while having already waited 15 mins for the suture set I asked Mr. T as to why they couldn't/didn't send the sets in batches instead of all at once. He reassured me - "It happens man."

When the suture set arrived a trolley was rolled on wheeled legs with the necessary equipment. Mr. T put on his rubber gloves only to find: there is no razor to shave off the hair off the scalp surrounding the laceration. So another hunt began, and the razor wass hunted down after 10 odd mins but it turned out useless without a blade which was eventually got from a simpering Sister. And then the suture started. Since it was quite a long and deep incision it took time. While Mr. T was on his 3rd stitch the Sisters and attendants had vanished and a swelling beacuse of a blood clot (haematoma) had developed. I was asked, "Do you fear the sight of blood?" I said, "No" and I was invited over to assist Mr.T !!!

Now because of the fresh blood that kept collecting at the site of the wound a soft, pulpy mound had formed. When a stitch was put blood would ooze/ gush out of the puncture site because of the pressure built up by the rupture of the blood vessels in the area. Increasingly it was becoming difficult to tie it up. I helped by pouring Povidine-Iodine solution into a cup, giving gauzes to Mr. T by forceps, replenishing the saline in the saucer and asking D, the victim, to pinch himself hard to take his mind off the pain. 12 stitches were put in place after a drawn out hour. Mr. T taking the advice of a senior surgeon put on Dynaplast (a kind of elastic band) over the tomb that had formed by now. Wiping off the blood off the face and hair took another 10 mins after which a Sister who had vanished earlier handed me 3 prescriptions.

The St. John's pharmacy is overworked and understaffed. It took me an hour to get the medicines. And finally after enquiring about the doses and outpatient facilities it was time for home.

12 stitches, 140 cm of non-absorbable suture wire (Ethilon), a huge quantity of blood, 4 and a 1/2 hours and an extremely frustrating experience later all I remember is this:

1) During one of the many waits I asked the German guy as to 'what if there is a serious emergency?' (I had to put it that way since a plain, simple emergency had lost it's effect). He said 'but there isn't one now.' I stressed on the 'what if' part and regretted it because he told me next, ' This is India. It happens all the time.' After enquiring I came to know he had been there for 5 weeks but he said he was sure of what he said. A German has the audacity to say this about one of the premier hospitals of Bangalore.

2)Doctors are esteemed a lot. They are veritable demi-gods. But one who is insincere can make you sick to your bone and you get to know this the hard way. We all cheat and fool around at our jobs but a doctor in the emergency dept. simply cannot afford it. It's a God-forsaken place where tempers run high and patiences run thin and to look at Sisters having crushes by the minute, interns make silly passes, or male attendants mistaking boobs for faces is a blood-boiling thing. There are genuinely sacrificing doctors and nurses no doubt and I understand how difficult life must be for them. But the ones who are not - God forbid them from you.

3)And all this had started because of what the security guard of an adjacent building had to say to D: that the hair on his chin was more than the hair in his (D's) loins.

4) The hospital is not responsible for your valuables. (This was written in the Emergency dept) If your life is a valuable then bad luck!

right to live. live to write

2006-08-18T17:07:00.000+05:30

A pen. A paper. And you're ready to write? Alright, some food for thought.

Is it that simple? (rhetoric)

Writing at all times is a personal experience. But within that there are so many demands to be met and so many things to be kept in mind. In school it was to write some sense in 350 words. In college it was to stretch out 'one liner' answers into full pages until the examiner got so confused in your clap-trap he was convinced "iss bandey mein kuch hai". And all the time we never really had to think

Unfortunately, if you want to write..no I mean really write..no you still didn't get me.. i mean really, truly write then the situation gets a trifle tricky.

Pen, paper and food for thought are all mandatory ingredients but you need that something..that spark to ignite the fuse.. and then write as it sets your imagination on fire. Then repeat the process over and over again until it becomes a habit, a second skin. I'm not sure where to get that and I doubt attending creative writing classes help.

Sometimes, or maybe at most times, its easier to write pages about one incident, like in real time, than club huge chunks of time in a single paragraph. When you recount an anecdote there loom a thousand finer points. Some important, or rather relevant to the story, and some not so. Its absolutely necessary to thresh the chaff from the grain. Because if you don't the reader may look upto the wrong pointers to relate to. And in the end, its how much anyone relates to, or understands what you want to say, that makes him harbour any feeling from adoration, love to hate, disgust for your work.

Midnight's Chilren is a brilliantly written book. Its a veritable training module on how to narrate. Yet when I first tried to read it, it just left me with a collection of new words. And when I asked a few of my friends they shared my sentiments ( and I was relieved!). But guess what? It has won the 'Booker of Bookers' award. That means it has been held as the best book to have won the Booker prize in its first 25 years. Yet more people (atleast in the 20-30 group) must've read 'One Night at a Call Centre' and maybe even enjoyed.

Does it say anything about the readers or is there something wrong with being critically acclaimed?

Its the same thing as masala potboilers setting box-offices on fire and crtically hailed, landmark movies coming a cropper at the marquee. Filmmakers never blame the viewers when serious and good cinema falls flat on its face. Instead they say the audiences' taste is different or may be there was something wanting in their product. Its called biting the bullet

It can happen with anyone with creative products to sell for a living ( I mean arts..so all you engineers, doctors, MBAs dont come at me..). But when you're at it, when you're writing...no I mean really really writing... thats the last thing that comes to your mind. You don't measure yourself by any standards. And all you need is just a pen and paper. Because an imagination has run amok. A storm has been raged. You can't ever catch the wind, can you?

I'll end with this piece from 'The God of Small Things'

"Anything's possible in Human Nature," Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice. Talking to the darkness now, suddenly insensitive to his little fountain-haired niece. "Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy."

Of the four things that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that Infinite Joy sounded the saddest. Perhaps because of the way Chacko said it.

Infinite Joy. With a church sound to it. Like a sad fish with fins all over.

??????????

2006-08-10T19:20:00.000+05:30

For a generation, a society, to believe in a philosophy took one man, really.

Think of how difficult it is to convince a populace of a tenet, to unite them under the aegis of a single idelogy, by thinking of how unsuccessful a generation, that India which was unified before independence, has been in making its children understand what they believed in. Non-violence died long back, sometime before Gandhi did. It was as if Ahimsa had a meaning only until the fight for freedom from imperialists was on. Once that battle was won it lost it dissolved - corpus and will.

I'll be a trifle defensive and say rightaway that I'm not vouching for Ahimsa. I don't know if its right or if it can withstand the quicksand of practicality (we call it realpolitik these days). I'm too naive for that. Or maybe I'm too informed without having being there and done that. But I fail to understand how a path of action followed by so many billions could be so summarily abandoned especially when they so strongly and so obvoiusly believed in it? You can argue with the non-aligned movement and how atleast under Nehru we were a peace loving nation which we're even now. But still how could parents not teach our midnight's children what they stood for? Or did they actually stand for it?

I'll look at it from the other side. What about war? Is there anything called victory in war? With all the abstruse terms floating around - psychological victory, strategic vic, tactical vic - somewhere even the focus has shifted from the noun onto the adjective. History has taught us that men and weapons make bad bedfellows. The judgement of human beings simply cannot be trusted to save humanity from disaster. Muhammed of Ghazni attacking us 17 times or Alexander conquering most of Eurasia after bloodbaths didn't cause as much damage as a World War did. Japan has learnt its lessons well. There is more intelligence, more life, more beauty at stake now. What is meant to be a deterrent doesn't take time to become an agent of pre-emptive attack. Victory in war can at best be Pyrrhic and even that, most of the times, is overestimated. You can say Israelis have been more sinned against than sinning or the Hezbollah militia have a right to their freedom but it doesn't change a thing and that's exactly what is sad. Someday it'll become so complicated, and absurd, that our collective fate - the kind that you must've read about in sci-fi novels - has to be decided by a throw of dice. Words like Cataclysm, Apocalyse, Armageddon will be in our newpapers once and after that no word shall ever be printed.

I respect our soldiers. They put their lives on the line. For people like us who care about them mostly when they die and maybe moreso if they have saved a few civilians before dying. If this is repugnant it's as much of a truth as the view that soldiers are perpetrators of some of the worst human rights violations in high insurgency areas all over the world. The concept of a nation is an epic truth, that of safeguarding it is sounder, and even the rationalism that it's a job like the doctor's or engineer's and everyone has to contribute in their own way makes sense but . . . Why is it that today in our armed forces there is a growing shortage of personnel? Maybe our youth have found better, less riskier alternatives to earn a living. Does that make fighting for one's country a last resort, or one of the last options? Is the concept of patriotism losing relevance because you can't see the bad guys from the good ones?

Life verily exacts its revenge when something that you've stood for all along stands compromised. Soldiers make such choices and I respect them for that. You read first hand accounts of the World Wars, or watch Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line and you'll get an idea. The only thing that war gives for sure is scars. It leaves countless sentinels who have fought for freedom, with guns and death, with a numbness that makes the rest of their days a living hell. The saddest thing is to come back home a hero and then lock yourself up and question whether whatever it was that you fought for was right. Was worth it.

Someone said 'everything's fair in love and war' after which people have been repeating it for ages. This thing is so old I bet no one even thinks about it before saying it. This statement in a nutshell says this: the goals of love and war are the highest ideals for which any man can strive. So all actions stand redeemed in the process of accomplishment of those ideals.

But really if you ask me maybe most things are fair in love (ok can I have some more time to decide? :-)) but war? .. no comments ... you should ask the guy who first said it.

err...bhaiya apothecary there's a fly in the ointment you're selling

2006-08-09T02:04:00.000+05:30

The other day in the middle of a seemingly regular conversation a friend asked me if I remembered my sister, who's long been dead, often. For many years I had been indifferent to this requiem of reality, alternately banishing and stowing it away. Maybe there was unwashed pain. But of late, and that accounted for my reply in the affirmative, I've been opening long locked boxes. An occasion like Rakhee evokes special memories and makes me wonder what it would've been like..

One of my very good friend's little sister started tying me rakhees sometime back in school. And now several years hence she goes into an overdrive every year before rakhee asking me to visit her several hundred miles away and hardly ever reminding me of the gifts she so rightfully deserves. I would have had never imagined what had started solely because of how regularly I used to go to my friend's place would grow into something so redeeming. It brings a smile to the lips - one that outlives seasons until the next year.

Schooldays were witness to quite a few rakhee tales. The one that I especially like occurred in the 8th class. This girl S got to know of this guy P (a big bully in class whom the girls frowned upon) who was interested in her. It didn't help when we told her of how serious P was about her. Scared he might do something, she hatched a master plan. A day before rakhee she brought a box full of chocolates and a 'cute' rakhee to school. In the recess she cornered P literally and told him he had to be her brother. P, in a show of manly defiance, clenched his palms together ( to-get-her) in the back. She held out her token of sisterly trust before him and enticed him with her forbidden fruit (chocolates!!) while he steadfastly refused to give in to it and thus give up hopes of his amorous liaisons. This continued for a good 40 mins until the teacher had to separate the desperate sister-to-be and the brother that never was.

But credit should be given to our man P for choosing the path of righteousness because guys did use rakhee to get up, close and personal..you see they could always pass off a little mischief as brotherly concern. Whoever spoke about the means justifying the ends!

the poorer me

2006-08-05T07:11:00.000+05:30

The thing with the death of a loved one is that it doesn't make you sad per se. It's when you remember small things in context and you realise how much it means to you, how much you miss it, and how little you appreciated it that a poignancy gushes out through the spillways that bereaved eyes can sometimes be.

These days my grandmother keeps visiting me in an image of a hapless old lady frantically looking for her grandson on a strange, long school corridor. A curfew had been imposed in town after communal riots had broken out post Babri Masjid demolition. The teachers were brainstorming about the students' safety when she hotfooted into and out of classrooms with an urgency only duplicated in labour rooms. I saw her on the corridor and shouted, without fear of the looming pedagogic figures, 'Aai'. And then the entire class screamed out at the top of their lungs 'Aaai'. She saw me, came running over, and hugged me tight with my face buried in the soft of her belly. That was it - an old, uneducated, and stupidly doting grandmother making a mockery of a curfew to come to her grandson and a roomful of boisterous schoolkids united with him for a moment in the love for their grandmothers that they each wished were there. I had won that day.

She lost a few days ago.

My life will be all the poorer for it.

more verse less terse

2006-08-04T00:33:00.000+05:30

sometime back when I was drunk I scrawled this (retrieved from the archives of my cellphone):

for all punch drunk in love,
what lies ahead is a treasure-trove,
the keys to which cant be bought in a mart,
but only to be found in your beloved's heart

and then when I was a little sad, and drunk still, I drawled this:

all mothers that send their sons to war,
in hope leave their doors ajar,
but even if the battle scarred return from afar,
their souls have changed beyond repair

she cant see rhyme from chime, she doesn't know mirth from mime!

2006-08-04T00:22:00.000+05:30

Quite exuberantly I started with:

Pitter patter amidst the clatter
a little brain is in a batter
sifting through all the clutter
to pen verses that glitter

and then when she didn't quite get my line I wrote:

Hither thither into the gutter
O these poems full of butter
vanish with hardly a flutter
and there wails the rhymer's letter

and then when she still didn't get any of it I composed:

Bitter poet at the end of his tether
his ballads as cute as a pup's litter
but his princess of frowns and jitter
fails to understand his poems better

a short fuse and a long memory

2006-07-14T08:30:00.000+05:30

A short fuse and a long memory; a poisoned stream and many plants of hatred along its course; a moment of madness and long years of stoking. This is all it takes. That is what it took. The RDX exploded but only after the timer in a few twisted minds, possessing the energy of vindictively coiled springs, had been set off.

After every attack the clock starts ticking; while we’re haplessly busy cleaning up the mess of the last blast the next one is on its way. What we think is the aftermath of a tragedy is actually the deathly calm before the next one. Before the past is sutured and stitched up the future arrives yet more spectacularly with grander manifestations of a million grudges – ancient and new. And the present? Oh, it’s just too painful to talk about.

All we do is tend to the effects on the surface while the venomous causes have percolated into our blood. Right now in madarsas young minds are being fed rancour; in open fields a hundred minds are being closed shut (while their torsos parade in saffron and khaki); some vengeful hearts are being born.

Without doubt, across generations, our people have evolved into stupider societies. Such a society can’t tell black from white, let alone distinguish between shades of grey. So many bio-datas today read in bold : Educated and Stupid. Whoever accused poor, old illiteracy of all problems! SIMI is a students’ organization; RSS, Shiv Sena, VHP comprise of a reasonable proportion of literate participants. The peaceful morningwalking Shiv Sainik who was outraged enough by the soiled bust of Matoshri to call upon a mob of dangerously indoctrinated, unthinking men (instead of just wiping the mud off and carrying on) was, in all probability, decently schooled and colleged too. I wonder if the defilement had been caused by a wandering, disrespectful pigeon what fatal reverberations would have savaged the avian world.

While the victims’ (of any of the many tragedies halting our busy routines like festivals) families wipe away tears, or, being too spent, just let it dry, a few others are savouring a bitter taste in their palates and looking for reasons, ramshackled and recent, to justify and map out a destructive course of mis-action. Are some terrorists being born out of 7/11? And did anyone keep count of how many popped out post Godhra?

Amidst the hiss of a billion sobs of a brave city a few millions are already bandaging their hearts in readiness before the next blast.

What our progeny is going to remember of our trauma will be encompassed in a few death tolls and dates. But some sons will carry the legacy of their embittered fathers as worthy torchbearers and satiate inherited vengeance. God save us. Amen.

here I go!

2006-07-12T01:35:00.000+05:30

When you stare at a blank screen and write just about anything and everything that comes to your cognisance its scary and exciting... whatever I'm going to write from here on in this post will be without a break taken, or pause enjoyed....so here it goes

Right now my mind is blank and I'm typing slowly so that some thoughts can be gatherd without breaching the clause that I've laid down at the beginning..and I've this tremendous urge to lengthen my sentences to buy time which I'm so evidently doing as anyone can see from the redundant phrases and clauses... My grammar has gone haywire..I'm not obsessed with it but I'm particular about it and it makes me squeasy if I come across a wrongly, or badly, put sentence...and so you see as thoughts grow older add some wings and either fly away beyond memory or land onto the penned runway..right now I escaped a mistake..I was just about to spell it 'runaway' but some agency told me it was wrong..this is getting too difficult with every strained out word dropping off the tip of my fingers..lethargy and inertnesss are beginning to emboss themselves onto my grey cells and I'm reeling under its weight..Aha.. I got it..I'll talk about hallucination, elevated plane of thought, reveries and stuff... When you smoke pot the most engrossing activity is linking up your thoughts..I mean to every untrained mind there is no logical sequence to thoughts, mostly..we just meander here and there and hop and skip between the fanciful and the rational..but try remembering what comes to your head one by one as they come and go..the chain of thoughts keep growing longer until your brain runs out of space to stash them..the cache overflows..(ok the last sentence was to buy time:))..and then you bamboozle yourself and can hold no more...but when you've had 'bhaang' it's slighlty or maybe more different..you cant think normally..which is good cos most of mormal thoughts are random and useless..you fly, scream,sail, soar, run, gallop, swear, roar, and i 've run out of verbs..and ideas too..
i got something for you..the feamle praying mantis is known to bite off the head of the male after copulation..so the males run off as soon as the mating is over..some of them are lucky while some 'veergati ko prapt ho jaate hain'..
I can talk about Zidane also and it would be a lot easier but I feel too sad to think about him...Instead I'll talk about this one time when we were playing an Inter house match in school..I was at the non- striker's end when the batsman, a good friend of mine, slammed the ball straight back and it hit my balls..I've never ever felt like that..It wasn't awesome..
When someone asks me about my favourite movies I'm at a loss for words cos I don't want to choose from among them..its unfair and unreasonable too..
When i think of all those people who've changed the world, and the people in it, for better or worse, its the common trait of conviction which shines through..A dictator like Hitler or an activist like Martin Luther King or Albert Einstein or Gandhi - all of them believed in what they did and they did so till death.. maybe we, the masses, miss out on that..cos I think if we firmly believe in something there's no way we can't make a difference...
I want to write about bombay blasts but again its too disturbing..
so i'll end my breakless monologue with whooooopppppp:)
and shit I didnt note how long it took to pull this off:(

today

2006-07-07T19:34:00.000+05:30

today he's happy
for himself
today he can stare sympathy in the eye
and say that he doesn't want Him
today he created something on his own
and felt it
seeping into his skin
like rain

today someone can give him a million reasons
to change the world and time
but he wouldn't let the hands of time tick
nor the tides move a yard faster, nor slower

today he turns his back on the past
his old clothes are shed, as he walks around bare
today he sees his fears pass him by
as he drives his caravan to paradise

today his heart is filled with light
and he looks within for a reason why
today he closes his eyes and sees
through cobwebs and traps

today he's me
he's I
today is what I will not share
today I'm ready to walk alone
into the sunset

passing it on...

2006-07-06T11:44:00.000+05:30

Pj thank you for tagging me to this string..

I'm thinking about...

how people on the streets will look like Naked..and if some people'll form an opinion of me cos of this statement

if all of those who claim to have had happy childhoods have reached the peak of their lives while as a child and it only has gone downhill from there..and if this is true and someone told this to them there would be more suicides

I want to...

travel across India - everything in it.

to never forget, even a little, all those moments when I felt truly happy

stand up to what I feel is right and not complain

I wish...

to understand and to be understood by a few people whom I want to, atleast

there were no hangovers after the highs

to make a movie

I hear...

one song in a loop for hours on end

I wonder...

if retired judges are guiltier than criminals

if school teachers realise how important a difference they make to students

if movies can be a very good teacher as I feel they've been to me

if for a hero to exist there must be his evil alter ego.. and we want villains cos without them there would be no heroes

if I've wasted my education and if I'm doing something now which I've never been taught.. if self-education is the only thing worth having

if I really know what I want..so much depends on the moment - how you're feeling, what you've been thinking - that I find it hard to believe that given a slightly different set of circumstances I would've made the same choices

if there's anything called true love and if I can ever experience it

I am...

what I think myself to be..( it's a bit of each one of you)

I dance...

almost everyday when I'm alone listening to music

I sing...

It hurts to set you free
But you'll never follow me
The end of laughter and soft lies
The end of nights we tried to die

This is the end

I cry...

at movies (thats why I prefer watching them alone :))

I write...

stuff which I'm not really, truly sure makes sense

I confuse...

roads. I've a very finely tuned non-sense of direction

I need...

food for thought and a bike trip across the himalayas

I tag Pasta and kING bONG May they spill their beans with aplomb!!

dizzying, dazzling nocturnal lights: the final chapter

2006-07-04T06:30:00.000+05:30

At the outset, I request anyone interested in reading this to first go through part 1 and 2, and in that order. Else its better to skip the whole thing altogether.

What I wrote in the first post about my nightly activity of staring at a computer screen throwing off dazzling visual effects was the most original thing I had ever written. I had never been conditioned about it, nor had I heard anything about it that I could've repeated. I wrote what I saw and it was as simple as that. The effort may have lacking in quality but not in originality.

And then I had people asking me, with noble intentions, if I was alright. Now if I had written something about, say, Indian culture there would surely have been a more expected response, possibly a more favourable one. But thats beside the point.

I ask you this: even though I know shit about Indian culture, or heritage, or any such subject which I've been hearing about since the faculty of memory took shape in me why is it people accept me better when I opine about them. Why is it that second hand originality, if there's anything of that kind, is so rampant and appreciated? Do people revel in it or do they not realise what they claim is theirs is actually borrowed? How good are we?

2 years ago I had had a chance meeting with someone which, I can claim unabashedly, made me think. He said, "If you're not learning something right it's better not to learn at all. Otherwise later, if ever you seek real education, you've to unlearn your past, and that'll cost you time."

We're like that movie-cartoon character who has walked beyond the edge of a cliff but hasn't fallen because he hasn't realised it yet.

P.S: The story in part 2 has been taken from 'zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance' by Robert M. Pirsig. I've modified the narration a little to help me make my point. This book holds the record of being rejected by the most publishing houses - 120 in all - before becoming a New York Times bestseller.