Fair Weather

SO, it has been long. Contemplation is not on top of my priority list these days. why? For a change, Life is happening. Not only the ‘hep’ way, but also, actually commencing, going on, being proactive. When the mind is blissfully engaged in classrooms and libraries, and cafes and scintillating company, to be honest, and laughter (the real, gushing, blushing, heartwarming, gurgling, bright type) is as inevitable as feeling hungry, or hitting Facebook, it is completeness. And now, winter is in – Ta Da! After long, everything feels RIGHT. Doing what i want to do and doing it wallowing in constant mirth is what i call Doing It with Elan. Gosh, how i gush!

I hate to admit this, but I am a bit superstitious about talking of the good parts of my life. As in I feel, happiness, when shared, is often jinxed, the moment it is talked of loud. Like the proverbial butterfly, lounging on your shoulder – you turn to capture it, it is gone. And so, I wish you’d knock on wood right now for you’d be doing me a great favour and leaving me at peace, if only till my next outpour of joy. cheers!

I Ask You….

I’ve a few questions, which manage to surface everyday. Perplexing and general as they are, maybe if you said something comforting, you might be helping me!

1. Why does Delhi seem so much more unfriendly than I remember it to be?
2. What is wrong with men? Why do most of them have to think with their Ps  instead of their brains?
3. How on earth is Mayawati getting away with such blatant atrocity? Is it guilt of the ‘unjust victor’, a la Israel, all over again?
4. Worse, what is wrong with us? How have we managed to crown her CM? And how did she ever engender dreams of being PM?
5. Why does Delhi seem in a constant state of flux?
6. Where do Hindi news channels find all their breaking news? How do they get away with insulting their viewership of such stupidity, parading shit as vitamin supplement?
7. Why is my brain stuck on the loop needle? Why can’t I forget people, places, moments, conversations? Why do they keep rising up all the time?
8. Why is the weather so horrible?
9. Where is the ‘reality’ in reality shows? Do they all ‘really’ want us to believe that their botoxed, sili-con-ed souls (not to mention much else) are worth the torture?
10. Where does the time go?! (literally n figuratively!)

Go Figure!

Online, in line

bits & bytes

Have you ever come across that online portal called Second Life? You get a chance to live a whole different life at minimal payment. It gives you a chance to live your dream, like you never could in the real world. If I had the money to spare for a second life, I’d probably be living on Sunset Boulevard, an established dancer, with 3 beautiful children, two adopted. (NOT psuedo-Angelina Jolie aspirations, may i clarify!) But, reality does not allow it, as all my spare money is destined to go to the apparel industry. sigh!

Anyway, meandering back to the point of this rumination, virtuality is becoming evermore reality by the hour. And a space, identity and existence in this parallel planet ( that, in my imagination, hovers above the real one like a cloud of ghostly mirrors ) has become fused, almost siamese-d, with the more tangible, if mundane, one.

And you don’t really need Second Life for this. Daily accessories like Facebook, Gtalk, Linkedin, Twitter and the entire blogosphere are big parts of mine. As they are of almost everybody i know. A day’s not complete without sharing pictures on FB, thoughts on Twitter, gossip on Gtalk and presses on blogsites.

My most memorable class at ACJ had to do with virtual identities. Our dragon of a New Media prof decides to have a virtual class, just to prove her point. So, we were all to log on to the Yahoo group created specifically for our class. Upon entering, we encountered our first assignment – to discuss how our online life is different from the realtime one and how the new identity makes a difference in our behaviour.

True enough, I felt waaayyy more comfortable putting my points across and asking questions in our online class than I’ve ever been in concrete ones. Maybe it was the anonymity that sitting in front of a laptop afforded, or maybe it was the fluidity of identities that the Web encourages, that made us all so vibrant. The shyness and hesitation evaporates, or maybe just gets hidden behind a veil.

And this goes beyond the class. I catch up with friends more often on FB than over coffee. I am more relaxed when Gchatting with friends than when I am in person. I find, and this is a no-holds barred confession, that I am a cooler person in my alternate online life. And the reason for such public display of private emptions is that I feel I am not alone in this perception.

And while some of us may always find ourselves just a step or two faltering, technologically speaking, building living rooms, personalities and conversations in net cafes instead of Nescafes, can’t be hard ever again, thanks to the Larry Pages and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. The downswing, then, can only be a Wall-E kind of eventuality, where big Macs, obesity and one spaceship company owner rule the world. Horrifying as that may be, we’re going to continue surviving, if only in ‘bits and bytes’,  eh!

Literature Gurus

I’ve always had a tryst of sorts with my English teachers. I think most people do, if movies are anything to go by in – Dangerous Minds and Dead Poets Society (even though that was one really boring movie) for instance. They have this aura of the romantics about them that makes them so appealing, I guess. Or maybe it is the idealism or a general utopian aspiration or at least a hope for a beautiful world as words can paint, that makes them so enigmatic a species.

The farthest back that I can remember is my English teacher at DAV, Ludhiana, a Mr Yogesh Duggal. I was in third grade then, this man doubled as our class teacher as well. Apart from being obviously handsome, in a very Punjabi way, clean shaven, gora and well built, he knew his subject. What he didn’t know was how to treat his students. Most of the girls had a crush (or whatever you can have at age 8 ) of sorts on him initially, and he returned the admiration – he was hugely biased towards us girls, specially the smart ones who got good marks and all. The boys loathed him though, and what made it worse was that he created an achievers club of sorts that had the privilege of lunching with him. About five of us would be summoned to the back benches of the class during lunch, and we’d take our special seats with him. In retrospect, he wasn’t a very good man, since he used horrible physical force against students who did poorly, but that’s another story.

Then, at DPS Bokaro, there was Mr R K Nayak, who belonged to Orissa and was arguably the best teacher I’ve had till date. Needless to say, I did have a crush on him, as did almost every other girl in class. He was funny, vivacious, full of energy – he’d make us enact the plays in our text book, he’d make hilarious speeches at school assemblies about diction in different parts of the country, where others gave long winding moral monologues, which were certainly responsible for the high rate of girls fainting right at the beginning of the day. He’d be there for us when we wanted consultation about anything. He was my first experience of the chilled out fella, since I’d only ever encountered very authoritarian teachers before him. And his coolness made him quite endearing.

And then there was Ms Shubhra Chatterjee in grade 8 in Amity, Noida – beautiful, strict and all-round fantastic. She’d play kho kho with the older students, and we couldn’t wait to grow up to that age, just so we’d get the chance to get informal with her too. She had a high thin voice that was very distinctive, despite the umpteen jokes that cruel teenage boys would make of it. We were always on the lookout to impress our sultry, exotically grey-eyed gorgeous English teacher. And when she did bestow us with a 100 watt Colgate smile (she had really white really even teeth), our day would be made.

Of course, there was Ms Annie at St Josephs, Trichy, who I hardly remember anything about, except that I really loved her and her handwriting and that I’d ape her style of tick marking whenever we played ‘teacher-teacher’. And Mrs Meera Sharma, also at Amity, who was too principled at one level but appreciated my compositions.

And all of the literature faculty at Ramjas. Particularly Mr Debraj Mookerji, Mrs Ahuja, Mrs Chandra and Mrs Bhalla and Mr Hemant Sharma. In their classes, or interactions otherwise, we could feel that love for the subject, and they’d somehow transfer it to us. And so, we spent wondrous winter hours, toasting in the sun in the English lawns, discussing theorists or poets, and feeling generally warm and very pleased with ourselves.

And for all the bad times I had in school for lack of interest in a subject, peer pressure or just plain laziness, English or literature classes always made up. Partly, in all honesty, because it was always one subject I was decent at (and I say this in all modesty), but also because I’ve been lucky to have had awesome gurus. What a good teacher can manage is unbelievable, and the kind of respect they earn for life is something on the same lines.

You Are Here

You Are Here

I managed to finish reading Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan’s debut novel ‘You Are Here’  in about a week. Not that it is over-the-top intellectual, or just plain boring, but the story of Arshi’s ‘here n now’ is such that makes you pause and ponder, draw parallels, and meditate on how we all lead such similar lives. For all you know, the book could have been my story, with a few little adjustments, written just how i’d write it, again maybe not in such bold strokes.

The book is good.It is obvious that the writer is a blogger, because there’s that style of writing which gives primacy to telling your own story and your own thoughts. Long monologue type flashback sessions everywhere, intricate detailing of what she’s wearing and what he’s doing and even psychoanalysis make that much apparent.

But there are also glaring flaws that bring out the first-timer syndrome. Reddy’s thoughts and flashbacks sometimes don’t hold your attention like she’d like them to. In short, it gets boring at times. You can also sniff out a desperation to paint her protagonist and contemporaries as the new liberated Gen Y, where drugs, sex and alcohol are very important and unassuming parts of the misc-en-scene. I mean, sure, they really are part of this lifestyle, just not as glorified as she’s tryin to make it sound.

But despite these turn offs, the book managed to sustain my wandering attention, simply because i could identify with this twenty-something, who’s tryin to live it up in New Delhi and the New Times, and well, simply be part of the crowd. There’s a  description of how Arshi would have an Orkut-like social map in her head, where she’d link all her friends and acquaintances into a vast web of socialness. The book cover draws inspiration from this idea and flags the important chronological stations in her life. That’s probably the best part – deriving a tool for some semblance of organisation in life through cartography. Map up, i say!

A tribute to women’s magazines

in the 1950s..

We all have our little escapes, don’t we? The secret little worlds we build in our heads that become places of refuge when things are wrong, or just not that right. And those worlds get their expression and even engendered from objects and places around us…

The other day, not too long ago, Pree n I were passing a magazine stand. The new Marie Claire was out, and in an unnatural state of excitement, I picked it up. Pree bemusedly watched me through all this from outside the store, since she thought she’d catch up on her smoke, and later said to me: You know, I’ve only ever known one other woman who spends good money on these good for nothing, weirdly expensive magazines. And that one was such a weird ass, got married at the age of 18 and all she could ever talk about was clothes and sob about all the men who’d broken her heart and think that the tests that these mags have defined her. I’d never really have thought you were one of those!”

Now, I don’t know if that was a backhanded compliment or just a plain snide remark against those that read the ugh-so-lame mags, but later it got me thinking. Let alone the fact that I’d loathe to be classified as one of those females, there was something still in what pree had unwittingly (as always) said. Why do a certain class of uber cool women who are given to defining themselves and generally identified as intelligent, sort of denounce women’s or fashion mags as the dust on their prize bookcases, or even as a conspiracy against them?

And then I was reminded of myself circa 2003-04, when I’d look at my aunt’s ‘Grihshobha’ or my mother’s Femina, and go – eeeuuch! Ma, how can you read such rubbish? Don’t you have any self respect? She’d give me a puzzled look and say, what’s self-respect got to do with it? And for some reason, I could never really explain my ‘feminist’ anguish to her.

It was undoubtedly feminist because the associations we’ve come to make with these beautiful, big, glossy pages is another male conspiracy theory of yore that women rebelled against by burning bras: that of keeping the woman involved in her life, and defining this life as an involvement with homes and gardens, children, the husband and a woman’s office and temple all-in-one, the kitchen.

I got a forward from a friend that had a scanned clipping of one such magazine from the 1950s which was a list of directives on how to be the good wife. It included tricks of the trade in the line of ‘never sulk when your husband re-enters the house after a long day of work. Always look fresh, with perfume, lipstick and smile in place because he will be tired from work which he does to bring the bread in.’ and there was worse, believe you me.

In other words, subjugation. Structuring the place of the woman in the family as the dependent and the slavish. Of course this was masked under heavy jargon of feminine strength, dependability and the real driving force. After all, every successful man has a capable wife and all that jazz.

But really, being career-oriented, rebellious and wild wouldn’t necessarily make a woman stop from being slavishly devoted to a man, even a wrong one at that, and reading such mags might not make any woman a given walk-over or brainwashed enough to take the nonsense akin to that of six decades ago and live with it. Hell, we have pre-nups today!

My mother’s reason for reading femina then was that they used to have good recipes. She has a folder full of yumminess, scraps cut out, Xeroxed, even stolen from her sisters. She’s stopped reading the mag since then, simply because she can’t identify with it anymore. And to extend the point, she’s equally, no, maybe way more fond of Agatha Christie and Ruth Rendell. And an excellent cook. My grandmother loves to read ‘Sarita’ because it gives her stories, real and fictional, of courage and happiness that she says she never saw in her on life.

I guess we need to get over our prejudice against this gloss, because unlike then, they don’t really come with an undercurrent of compulsion any more. If the arts professor at Wellesley college in ‘Mona Lisa Smile’ is agitated, she has reason in the proximity of those stormy events, and the possibility of a relapse. We urban women of the 21st century, on the other hand, do not really need to have our guard up so much.

Be cautious and own pepper spray, but not act militant against the innocent.

And me, I am a fan of Marie Claire simply because it is one of my escapes from the mundanity of daily life, ugliness of this world and what not. It does have some good features on social cultural positions of women, but mostly, it is the still beauty of places, ideas, being, existence and movement in their sprawling pictures that is my pull-factor. Nothing criminal about wanting to get away, I’m sure.

Rock the vote 2009

vote

It is that time again. When we get our hands dirty in the local running stream. Or on a electronic machine this time round.  For, being part of the world’s largest democracy, it is our fundamental right and duty to choose our governing body.

And unlike ideal definitions, we really only get to pick those who can impress us with their rhetoric, and then it is their deal from there on. or at least, so it would seem to us urban middle class X/Y generation people, which is why an overwhelming majority of us do not even bother with the voting.

We’d rather sit in comfortable campus/cafe type surroundings and talk of how totally gone beyond point of return this country is. and glory in what name the Mittals and Tatas earn for the country in international circles, and say: now THAT’s is how things should be done. And then totally take our hats off to globalisation and privatisation, and say that all this time that the government was in-charge, LOOK at how effortlessly they landed us in the ditches, but THANK GOD for 1991!

And like those ’shiny people on TV telling us that enough is enough’, we also find ourselves slightly more driven this year to take matters into our own hands. not like DJ and Sukhi and Karan, no, we don’t want to shoot politicians and the corporate alliances, even if they’re like mai-baap to us, but yes, getting our hands dirty in the local stream this year seems like a bearable idea.  

And then if, because some corporate brings out an ad to ‘jagao’ us, and actually manages to hit a nerve, we do the right thing, visit their website, learn of all the myths surrounding our electoral process. register for Voter IDs online, but we’re soo afraid of bureaucractic red tape, and take it so much for granted, that it becomes yet another obstacle in our remedial road. sigh! kuch nahi ho sakta is desh ka. KYA KAREIN?

Live specimen of abovementioned helplessness:

Says a colleague, over dinner: “I am so disappointed that i won’t be able to vote because, KYA KAREIN, some screw up at the registering office has left me voter ID less and distraught. I KNOW my vote would count. And i nkow, it reflcts badly on a journalist not going to the polls, but really, kuch nahi ho sakta is desh ka. I even tried Jaago Re website, and they tell me that i’ll have to go to some office for signatures, and we all know how many hours in the sun that’ll take. Who’s going to bother? i really think they should make this easier for all of us, otherwise soo many people like me end up staying away despite really wanting to vote. what’s the use? It is just a terrible thing…”

And yet again, there is hope for this hopeless generation. In my circles, this year, i saw the highest voter turnout. so then, maybe, we’re not yet totally ditched. no?

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Smooth Slaughter

Butter And Mashed Bananas

(The following is a review of a play I saw approximately a year and a half back. An old piece, it is a play that should not be missed. )

 

 

There is an urban legend that talks about how the concoction of butter and mashed bananas is used to tighten a noose before a hanging. When it comes to strangling, be it criminals or innocent voices, the Indian democracy does a really good job. This is what the three actors on stage prove meticulously in the play- Butter and Mashed Bananas.

The play essentially follows the trajectory of one boy, born – upside down, after exaggerated coercing – out of an accidental night of passion, to parents of opposing political loyalties. The boy’s mother is a Leftist-feminist while the father is right wing. Their views are projected on the child where, they attempt to, literally, teach him the importance of putting the ‘left’ or the ‘right’ foot forward first. This leads to such utter confusion that the boy learns to make his way by hopping from one place to another.

Beyond this muddle caused to the one stuck in the middle, there is also the issue of censorship that is society’s answer to the constitutional right to freedom of speech. As the narrator sits on the pink bucket and tells the audience the tale of Karisma Kapoor’s ‘sexy’ sorrow, and its remedial through omission in the right places of the song, one can’t help but laugh and shake their head at the same time.

There is always someone who will get up and say: “how dare you say that??!” The boy, having been thrown out of his home for yelling ‘Papa!’ in retort to bullies who call him ‘chicken’, now writes the biggest, best-selling book for which he even gets awards and fellowships. He becomes world famous; only, India does not belong to that world. No one has read his book because it hasn’t gotten past the censor board. It dies just like the man who is shut up in a room with a huge poster of a woman’s breasts, as an experiment and isn’t given any food or water for a week. The experiment is successful: the man dies due to overexposure. Pitiful justification.

When, finally, the boy decides to take the plunge into politics, and form his own party based on his own ideals- “the truth shall be told” and “the guilty shall be punished”- he is accused of defamation by both the Prime Minister and the leader of Opposition. These two, though successful in suppressing the voice of this over-ambitious-new-age butterfly, fail miserably at quelling their pangs of burning desire for each other. More than hands are joined, as their combined party emerges stronger than ever before.

This is a 70 minute production by the Harami Theatre, directed by Ajay Krishnan who, in this season, plays the role akin to a narrator. He sits in one corner of the stage with his guitar, giving the background score and lending his voice to the prologue and the epilogue. The stage is minimally attired, as are the actors, who wear only vests and lungis. The supporting actors have ghungroos tied on one leg each. They use only one white sheet and a pink plastic bucket as props. Much goes on behind the screen and yet it does not hide the truly shameful tenets of the Indian administrative set up. The men dance to fill up the uncomfortable silences that come up when they make their points.

The play is not to be missed. From lewd jokes to serious slaughter, the play eases itself into the conscience of the audience. It makes you squirm in your seat, and not only because you’re laughing your ass off. In the end, you too might end up wishing you’d never left the comfort of your first home- the womb- all those years ago.

Re-discovered Patriotism

Michael Wood in Amritsar

I recently laid hands on (or more like, was persuaded into getting hold of, by Shishir, and all thanks to him) this BBC  TV series by Michael Wood called The Story Of India. A six part documentary, shot over 18 months of extensive travelling across India and the extended subcontinent, he traces India’s roots, the circumstances of the birth of its diversity, the richness of a land that has seen civilisations old, new and constant and varied. So far, I’ve reached the point of entry of the East India Co, with the Mughal era just about descending into depravity, aka Chapter 6 in this fantastic story.

Considering the fact that history was not my favourite subject at school, since then, I was still dreaming of being an engineer/CA/big shot corporate honcho at some MNC, it comes as a pleasant surprise that a lot of what the man talks of in his travels still rings a bell in distant dusty cabinets of the mind. And then again, a whole other list of things he talks about are completely new.

Like the fact that king Kanishka’s empire included Afghanistan and a sizeable part of Central Asia.

And that Ayodhya was not a precise location till Chandragupta Vikramaditya II decided to use that myth as a guiding force of governance and good living.

And then some even more astonishing revelations: India has, over the past 2,500 years or so, been under the rule of almost every dominant existing religion in the world today.

That the so-called hatred between Hindus and Muslims isn’t a product of Partition, but has been an ebbing and flowing undercurrent that has existed since Muhammad Ghazni’s invasion, but which came to a significant rest during Akbar’s reign.

What Michael Wood, the historian, does is build up an enormous tale of various warriors, religions, holy men, gods, kings, peoples, philosophies, events and look at how all the many traditions the land has hosted and what they left behind for this soil. Effectively, the point he’s trying to make, it seems to me, is that India’s richest attribute is its multiculturalism. There is such a depth behind what has happened here, when time and space have coincided, over and over again, to generate myths, legends and reality still more fabulous.

What Michael Wood, the presenter has done, is to stand in a busy Mathura street and chat with a party of 9 female pilgrims, sit down to lunch with a Tamil agricultural family, watch Krishna kill Kansa and rid Mathura of it’s evil king in one of our local stage performances, talk to professors, play holi and basically get wholly enamoured and embossed into the colours of the land. And he speaks with such awe, love, amazement, enthusiasm and what not, that you are intoxicated, not only with him and his unending warmth and readiness to embrace, but also by what our own country has to offer us.

After all, we do live in a country where there are maybe 3 million gods ( “Or is it 3,30 million gods?!” he muses many a time), where the monsoons have revealed the treasure trove that this land is to the West, where some of the greatest discoveries and inventions, and religions, it is important to add, have not faced the kind of stigma and trauma that Galileo was forced to undergo, whose GDP was the largest at more than one point of time in AD history and whose people know the art of adjustment and happiness, at least from a macro, Western point of view.

The man is proud of himself for having discovered this beauty. It would be travesty not feel proud of actually being part of it.