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?