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.

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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.

One Hundred Years Of Solitude

Here’s an old piece, rediscovered. I love this book. And the man behind it.

one hundred years of solitude

When human nature endeavors to survive the arid desert of Time with all its might, Time too brings out its most ruthless weapons to quell it. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ most famous novel, One Hundred Years Of Solitude, dictates such a hopeless predicament, while bringing forth much more of the fantastic in the face of the gross mask of reality the world feigns to wear. The novel talks of the rise and fall of Macondo, a secluded civilization in a distant plain somewhere in South America. More specifically, it talks about the trials and tribulations of five generations of the Buendia family, who are the founders of Macondo as well as the last ones to die in its ruins. We are given a vivid description of characters such as Ursula Iguaran, an unlikely but powerful matriarch, under whose rule the Buendia family as well as Macondo prospered; Colonel Aureliano Buendia, who had 17 boys during his days in the war; Remedios the Beauty, who ascended to heaven (literally!) as her rightful place of being; and Aureliano Segundo and Jose Arcadio Segundo, the twins, who changed names in juvenile mischief and whose identities remained confused till their death as a consequence.
Macondo,a fascinating place, is endowed with all the characteristics of growth and existence and enriched by the imagination of the writer. Written in the post colonial form of writing called Magic Realism, the novel contains a myriad imagery, where storms of butterflies, clouds of yellow flowers, blue houses and incessant rain for four years seem more believable than the ugliness of civil war, the capitalism of a Banana Company, Guerilla warfare and a dictatorial government.

What is most fascinating, however, and what essentially is the crux of the novel is the final, irrevocable and endless solitude of each character of the Buendia family as well as of the whole community. Trapped in the cells of their minds, tortured by insomnia the characters seem to transcend the normal and exist on an exotic plane making them very enticing to the reader.

The novel is a masterpiece of read-between-the-lines revolutionary ideas, and what we as readers can enjoy is his somewhat satirical notion of a civilization. The existence of a strong political statement makes it intellectually stimulating and issues of life, love, identity and death are brought up without any answers. All in all, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a must read for all those who would like to indulge in a bit of contemporary reading. And otherwise.

Reclaim Road

Now, check THIS out…

inspired rebellion. this, in addition to the Smooch Republic Rally that plans to descend at Anil Kumble circle this Valentine’s Day. Oh ,what fun. only the flowers in my head and the joint between my fingers shall be missing. oh, you can never have it all.

http://thepinkchaddicampaign.blogspot.com/2009/02/welcome.html?showComment=1234169880000#c6669848476604319330

Father Figure

These few lines, penned in a few moments of weird homesickness, dedicated to my father…

You held me by the arms, so I could feel the thrill
As the waves crashed on us, 
And you hung on to me while I fluttered
Like a dry petticoat on a clothes line,
And laughed and spluttered while
Salt water went up my nose.

You threw me into the air,
Only to catch me again in upturned arms,
And I’d giggle in mid-flight
Through my exhilaration at my freedom,
And be tickled by that unbearable lightness of being.

You’d make pens, watches, books, my dolls
Vanish into thin air.
And re-conjure them from under your arms
You’d laugh at my childish wonder
While I’d be ecstatic that you were a magician
And I’d laugh because I was your child.

You slapped me hard across the face,
You wanted me to concentrate –
Maths was my weakness, insincerity caused you anguish,
You taught me the subject with a number of blows
And I was happy when my report card read Maths: 94.

You sat me down while I bawled,
Because ma had just yelled at me “for no reason”
“its not fair!!” I shouted – “I want my life!”
Well, you said, you have it: go to your party,
But remember, you’ll know someday,
LIFE is hardly ever fair.

You held my hand as we took a post-dinner walk,
We talked of this and that; him and her
You gave me perspective,
You allowed me opinion, you did all you could,
To make me understand the value of both sides of the coin.

You sat at the edge of my bed,
With tears in your eyes – why did you lie to us?
Your disappointment poured out of your eyes,
We were all heart-broken at my deceit,
But you gave me my second chance,
You still let me leave.

Open your mind! Read! Look out the window!
No point staring straight ahead!
You’d be irritated when I showed signs of brain-deadedness.
This one life is a gift, you’d say,
Live it, my child, you’d implore.
For you, today, I see, feel, read and chronicle.

We stand waist-deep in the sea again,
We’re happy today, with blue water and white sand
All around us. Your troubled back makes you wary
Well, I’m just your girl pa, not your strong(er) sons,
But I’ll hang on to you, And we’ll ride the high crescent
And then scatter the Bay of Bengal
With broad smiles and our exuberance in the sun.