The Token 15th

Ah, the Independence Day again. The supposed day of freedom from exploitation, economic drain, received notions, opprobrium, imperialist intervention. As of today, most of those ideals represent work-in-progress. Which is not so bad. As the ubiquitous Kalam speech that everyone emailed everyone points out, we must not brood and breed negativity.

Among the many things that I did not do for India on this special day are as follows:

•     I did not place an Indian Flag in my orkut profile picture

•   I did not forward Kalam’s speech to anyone. I detest chain mails and forwards, no matter how great they are. My inbox is a cruel cul-de-sac where unwanted stuff goes straight to the bad bin.

•    I did not send “Happy Independence Day” short messages, scraps, greetings et al. I however replied to those who did to me, with a modest ‘Jai Hind.’

It is great that so many people on and off social networks are engaging in communicating their joy or whatever on a particular date. I cannot be one of them. If a tenth of the effort that was wasted in tokenism today and is wasted every year could be channelized to do something concrete for the country, there would be, I am sure, visible differences. For the better, if I may add. Although in a complex democracy like India “better for whom?” is always a thorny issue. But achieving and assuming dignity, self sufficiency, civic responsibility, a sense of ownership and belonging about a nation, lesser pollution and more participation hardly ever hurt anyone.

Am I engaging in rhetoric? Perhaps yes. So what DID I do?

Nothing much. I am as guilty of criminal passivity as most. However, back in India, ever since I remember, I never threw an empty wrapper, a can, a cigarette or anything that our public spaces are full of into any place except a dustbin. If I couldn’t find any, I’d stuff my external wastes in my handbag. I never spit on sidewalks and walls. I made sure my dog (bless his soul) was toilet trained to NEVER do anything outside the confines of our home, or indeed, outside his designated space. I stood up to offer my seat to anyone that seemed to need it more. I never stopped public transports at places where they shouldn’t. Never much of a leader or organizer, I took part in most community initiative as a volunteer…. to clean up, or plant trees or campaign for something I believe in. I missed an army officer father while he was away on field postings. I placed my faith in the police and government offices to be snubbed time and again. Still I always tried to hold on to that faith.

The above-mentioned things are not things that make me exceedingly proud. They just point at the meagerness of one person’s efforts to try and be a citizen that lives in a community, a citizen that was served independence on a platter. Not a good citizen. Just an ordinary one.

Considering our millions, even ordinary efforts can make extraordinary differences. Efforts that involve minor sacrifices, respect towards one’s community members, politeness, concern for environment, a sense of stake holding, a sense of not wasting the indepence like one throws away a free sample.

 

Environment, Politics, Injustice and other ills represent elements of drawing room conversation for us. Community members and fellow citizens are faceless entities best ignored, for they are the ones that spit, litter and encourage corruption. The environment is something to disown, leaving the job to others and to, of course, everyone’s favorite whipping boy, “the government”.

Probably it’s needless to point out that we get almost exactly what we deserve. In terms of ‘government’, ‘the system’, ‘the (mischievous but forgivable) celebrities’ and everything else that figures in our endless powwows.

Amartya Sen points out our history of being a non-reticent people, our ability of reason and dialogue, our spirited engagement at public debates and discussions, and our vibrant civil society in ‘The Argumentative Indian’. Participation, even at the level of communication and dialogue is representative of a wholesome democracy. But what if that is ALL participation amounts to?

And the way I see it, tokenism is slowly replacing the argumentative tradition. We forward a mail, send a flash card, write a scrap, a blog, or use sms to feel complacent. We somehow begin to believe that we have done something. That somehow our duties are over until the next 15^th.

There are people that make genuine efforts, at social and individual levels. They often do it more for themselves than for their country, community or environment. Hence I do not lose hope, even if there aren’t many of them. Because doing something for ONESELF is the best start one can have, the best reason.

If we were to implement just one thing mentioned in that Kalam mail everyone forwarded everyone, things can change. Some people perhaps did that one thing. There is no need to disdain just one effort, one action, one step.

The wise ones however kept forwarding the mail every year, having found the perfect shun-tactic, muttering “so true” for the nth time as they hit the send button. There are things I regret not doing for my country. This little farce isn’t one of them.

Jayati

She looked like a freshly plucked Gardenia that belongs more amidst dark green leaves than skillets and scoops in a cramped kitchen. She spoke in a low clear voice that sounded like wind chimes on a day of light breeze. Her eyes were dark and smiling. Her lap was my favorite napping place.

She had told me that she loved ME the most on this earth, on a hot summer afternoon when I was sore about losing exclusive rights on her with the arrival of my baby sister. Today, twenty-five years later, I remember that tantrum-filled afternoon distinctly. She patiently fed me chicken stew and explained the absurdity of her ever loving anyone more than me.

Those days she took me out on walks, pointed out constellations from the roof of her house on clear starry nights and taught me how to make garlands from flowers we got from her garden. She also surrounded me with books that I chew, tore and looked through. Soon I developed a deep craving for them.

Later she introduced me to Robi Thakur, Bengali magazines from Kishor Mon to Desh, and a vast corpus of Bengali literature. She taught me to look people straight in the eye. She taught me to be truthful and forgiving and trusting, values I experimented with a lot (and still do). She believed in the fundamental goodness of people and hoped that someday, I might, too.

She was my friend, my confidante, my maternal grandmother. We were intellectual co-explorers. She was the most affectionate person I ever knew. Tipu (our big black dog : ), Sarbani (my sister) and I fought for her attention and her lap space all the time. She smelled faintly of turmeric and other spices, Basanta Malati (the brand of her moisturizer) and of the garden she tended to. She was a part of me, a part that you cannot imagine losing.

Yet I lost her eight years back, this very day. I wasn’t there in Calcutta where it happened. She was ill just for two days before that (which didn’t stop her from fulfilling her household duties of course). No one quite knew what went wrong with her. She was in her mid-sixties. The end had come through a cardiac failure. But what initiated it is still unclear.

But I know. She literally died of a broken heart.

Why, how, where constitute a long story and this is not the proper place for details. With her, a part of me consisting perhaps of goodness, love, innocence and compassion died as well.

I didn’t cry when I heard about her. I haven’t properly mourned her loss yet. The tears just come sometimes without warning, after all these years, so do the memories. I am still quite indignant. You don’t just leave someone you averred you love the most on earth like that. Like I didn’t matter.

I inherited her library and progressively, her handwriting. She loved seeing new places, meeting new people, cooking (marvelously) for everyone. One thing that she didn’t learn however was, how to assert herself.

I often feel she is with me whenever I see beauty. “Look didima!” I murmur under my breath. “Fireflies! And I never thought I’d see them here!” How she loves the new places I go to, the exotic dishes I order at restaurants, the new books I pick up. She taught me to enjoy the gift of existence without guilt or reserve. I sometimes hear her voice in my head, “Khub bhalo, bhai !”…

The Joy of Hiking in Arizona

Hiking makes sense to me. In these days of mind-numbing alienation, and manifold pretenses of adulthood, it makes sense to get away. Get away from the computer screen, and the familiar walls and ceilings of office and home, the known faces and vending machines and the mundane hums of the fridge and the AC. To get away and get out into open spaces where the skies are vast and dramatic, the plants and trees verdant and the nature unabashedly flourishing and claiming every inch of land under the sky.
Hiking in the West Fork of the Oak Creek, Sedona I sensed a kind of lush green pleasure not unlike the deep foliage all around me. Living in Tempe, a small hot dusty university town in the middle of the desert, the eyes yearn for some real greenery, not the painstakingly artificial kind planted for the purpose of urban beautification. The tall magnificent cacti reaching out for the sky are spectacular, but not green. The Tempe Town Lake is very pretty, but tame, if you know what I mean. The Oak Creek is only a slender, shallow brook, but it flew along the forest, free and full of golden ripples this particular day. I was mesmerized by its beauty and its freedom, and how it reflected the emerald beauty of the forest and the fiery red rocks of the canyon!

The hiking trail was along the creek, and in more than a dozen places, we had to cross the creek, either stepping in the ice cold water or using logs laid out from one side to the other. There were tall conifers along the way, and wild roses, and flowers of every imaginable color whose names I do not know. There were gorgeous dragonflies and spiders and chameleons. Butterflies flitted in the tall grass. Tiny olive fishes frolicked in the sunny, transparent waters of the creek. I was completely mesmerized only to be twitched back to reality now and then, when some cactus thorn or the other pricked me in my bare arms. While coming back, we lost our way sort of, so we had to wade in the gushing water of the faithful little creek to finally spot the designated hiking trail.

The next day was Grand Canyon. Perhaps the syntax of that sentence is not quite right, but there is no other way to describe a day when you experience something that is so mind-blowing, so majestic. It is so unlike Sedona, which is pretty in an intimate, picture-postcard manner. The mind cannot take in the wild, forbidding vision of vast spaces walled by rocks 250-1200 million years old. The beauty of the canyon is distant, menacing, dangerous. No picture postcard can ever capture that.

The tall canyon walls composed of sandstone, shale, limestone, and basaltic lava drop sharply to the dark mysterious rifts more than 1600 feet below. The canyon is more than 450 km long. The formations are strange, they look like temples and ziggurats, castles and cathedrals. Untouched and uninhabited by humans. Water, wind and ice have done a persistent job of erosion creating massive and magnificent sculptures. Apart from some hiking trails, every bit of the canyon lies as distant from civilization as it did thousands of years ago……. unscathed in its primal, unreachable beauty. The only creatures that can pretend some familiarity with the canyon are condors and squirrels, mountain goats and strange insects. The huge harsh rocks do not support vegetation. They do not support any form of life. They are unforgiving, arrogant, and distant. They commune with the sun at various parts of the day to cast bizarre shadows along the rift that look like prehistoric monsters. The strong howling winds brush the red walls in a gesture of unending intimacy. The Colorado River meandering sensuously below is only visible from certain points in the rim. Together they create an atmosphere that seems to cut out all human agency and importance.

There are sturdy trees and shrubs along the hiking trail. We hiked contrary to all accepted hiking rules, when the sun was up and angry, when we didn’t have enough water and when I was experiencing bouts of dizziness looking at the fissures far below. But between gasps and parched throats and aching legs and a drumming heart, I experienced beauty that completely overwhelmed me. The canyon walls— now orange, now ochre, now greenish grey, rose valiantly all around me and above my head, making me feel as if I was inside a giant Cambrian well. The azure sky, the unforgiving sun, everything made up for a kind of psychedelic atmosphere that I couldn’t totally grasp.

After reaching the rim, I perceived a sense of accomplishment and unfettered joy difficult to express in words. My boyfriend, who had hiked in the Grand Canyon all the way down to Plateau Point some years before, (we did not go that far down this time) said he felt the same way every time he completed a tough hike. There is a sense of glory that is rare and unmatched, a far cry from the regular business of life.

We decided we needed to hike to Colorado River, someday, which looked mysterious and beckoning, hundreds of feet below, like a translucent golden brown saree. The wild winds that touched the river and the rocks cooled our sweaty brows. There was an indistinct murmur. Was it the wayward river beneath or the wind blowing through the Utah Junipers? We couldn’t say. Wordlessly we surrendered to the wild beauty and grandeur of the Canyon, as the last rays of the sun painted the rocks red and gold.
(Photographs: Prabuddha Dasgupta. Watch out for more at http://www.pbase.com/p_dasgupta)

Fairytale blues

I was having this inexplicable craving for fairy tales for some days. “After the finals” I kept telling myself. So last Monday I combed through Hayden’s catalogs and managed to lay my hands on folk tales from Russia, Israel and Africa. I also picked up, as an afterthought, the ‘Legends of Greece and Rome.’ I needed to re-socialize myself in to the world of valiant gods and gorgeous goddesses.
Folk Tales from Israel disappointed me a bit. Here was a book that was more or less an academic rendition of the tales, with lengthy footnotes and endless references. The front cover had an interesting three-color illustration of what looked like a group of really evil women. But inside the book, there were no pictures. The tales were too short, too simplistic. The talking animals talked stupid. The kings and queens lacked their emblematic élan. The commoners seemed endlessly cunning.
The Russian Folk Tales were better, more flamboyant, more dramatic. The fair Vassilissa and Baba-Yaga the witch, were as enthralling as they were fifteen-twenty years back. But what is a Russian fairy tale without rich, vibrant, colorful pictures? I really missed my collection of fairy tale books with their silky pages and pretty pictures. I remember this book of Estonian folk tales, which had such beautiful oil painting plates that I wanted to make watercolor copies. A book of Russian fairy tales in black and white is no fun.
Yet, I was overwhelmed by Déjà vu, as I read about Apollo and Eros, Ivan and Marya. I remembered those sweltering days in Calcutta of my childhood; when the lazy vacation afternoons stretched into breezy summer evenings as I lay on my grandpa’s gigantic mahogany cot, book in hand, under a noisy ceiling fan. The legends were so outlandish and so broodingly sexual that they left me mentally gasping for breath.
I also constructed my image of the ‘hero’ based on the qualities of Zeus and Apollo, a construct I carried in my head until Howard Roark took over. But I think even Ayn Rand’s conceptualization of the hero, both male and the female was heavily influenced by Hellenic mythology.
Reading these stories as an adult made me question the value systems integrated in the stories, made me wonder about the nature of politics then. I also wondered what the feminist take on the gender roles portrayed in the legends would be.
And the violence!! It appalled me how gruesome some of these stories were. One Israeli tale talked about a king making ‘mincemeat’ out of one of his disobedient subjects. Put me off my kebabs at Copper Kettle Express tonight. Then there’s this Russian one where the evil step mother and her daughters are charred alive. Somehow the violence never bothered me as a kid. I just accepted it, unquestioningly as a part of the fairytalish excitement. Those were the days before the walling of my consciousness, the structuring of my thought processes. As a kid, the world seemed too beautiful and promising, and violence seemed to be tucked away in illustrated fairytale volumes. It was never really real enough to be disturbing.
Things change. I changed too……not so much perhaps, but with every passing year I’m becoming more wary, more skeptical. I prefer peace to excitement, satisfaction over ecstasy. I am learning to accept reality, I am learning to compromise. The fairytales have not come true; the heroes never did quite materialize. The violence crept out of the multicolor pages and invaded my consciousness and my life. The colors diffused away.

‘The Namesake’

It’s not that one writes about a movie that deeply moves her a week and a day after watching it. I am doing it because I cannot put it off any further.

I meant to write about ‘The Namesake’ last Saturday after I watched it with Nan. To tell the truth, ‘The Namesake’ was one of those books that I hadn’t read beyond a few pages. I do that sometimes with books. And people. Just skimming through them, reading a few pages, knowing them only superficially makes me decide that I would not like them. Sometimes, later, when I somehow mange to read them whole, I am faintly shocked at how absurd was it of me to think that I wouldn’t like them. Like ‘The God of Small Things’. It had managed to convey an adverse first impression. But when I did read it later it haunted me for days and nights together.It made me cry. It made me grin. It made me restless. Ammu and her children refused to move out of my head after repeated notices. I didn’t want them there, they did not make me feel good. Their pain got at me in a way that was too personal, too achy. Finally I had to allow them to stay. I have even been brave enough to go back to the book again, and again, and again. Like a masochist.

The Namesake that I decided warranted a little more than casual dismissal after the book has started inhabiting my bed since last Wednesday when I picked it up from the library. I am wondering what made me abandon it unfinished last time. I love it. Not like The God of Small Things though. There is no lingering sense of sadness associated. Just a strong sense of wonder and admiration for Jhumpa Lahiri’s flawless craft of story telling. She makes you relate to her protagonists in a way you feel one with them. You hope their hopes, you clench your fingers at their frustrations. I have noticed this while reading her other book ‘The Interpreter of Maladies’ too. I have felt like Lilia, Miranda, Sanjeev, Gogol. In spite of differences in ages, gender, life situations. Arundhati Roy on the other hand makes you feel for her protagonists as an outsider. Just as well. I don’t want to not feel sane and safe.

Going back to talking about the movie, I liked it. It seemed a little slow, but thirty years is a long time. You cannot race through it. I would think that ‘The Namesake’ is a difficult, long and complicated novel to make a movie of, but Mira Nair as usual is effortlessly brave and brilliant. She knows her stuff. I winced at the decaying Calcutta it portrayed, teeming with people like ants on an anthill. I felt unreasonably embarrassed at Ashoke’s and Ashima’s accents, at their protectiveness, at things I would not have particularly noticed had not an American lady who confused a saree with a salwar kameez been sitting beside me.

“Oh, really, Calcutta isn’t just that. Not anymore, anyway.” I told her. She pointed out that the movie made a fine job of showing both the cities of Calcutta and New York back in time. She asked me about many things including the Bengali wedding rituals, shown twice in the movie (Ashoke’s and Gogol’s). She said she found Tabu very pretty. When I asked her how did she find the movie overall, she said, “it was poignant.” In the undulating semi-darkness of the theatre, I had found her wiping her eyes at the same places that I did.

The movie made me relive my distant, unreal, irrational fear of picking up a phone call and receiving ‘bad news’ from a home located halfway across the world. It made me re-experience my frustrating generation gap with unreasonably loving and protective parents. In Ashoke and Ashima I saw the same sense of resignation overwhelming my parents when they realized that imperceptibly, with time, they had lost control. They had to let go. They now had to be happy because they supposed I was too, fearing somewhere deep within that I was simply not matured enough to make my own decisions. Scared that I would commit a life-spoiling blunder.

To tell the truth, I have the same worry about me. But I cannot let them know can I?

I found Irfan Khan’s acting powerful beyond measure. His portrayal of quiet strength and undemonstrative love was very real, very touching. Everyone was convincing in their roles. Tabu is not just beautiful, she acts in a way that does not seem like acting. Kal Penn is intense, Zuleikha Robinson breathtakingly sexy. It’s a well made movie. It’s a movie that comes back to me now and then, making me think of it in the most unexpected of places. Perhaps writing down about it is going to reduce the frequency of its intrusions in my head.

Intrusions not totally unwelcome, i assert.

my ‘first person’ piece for the magazine writing class:

well there’s more to my experience in the United States than what follows, but these things just ‘came’ to me, you know what i mean? Displacement can be overwhelming at the beginning, but slowly …you come to terms with it….

Culture Shocked: Culture Surprised

        As I struggled to lock my apartment door, I realized how very hot it was outside. The sun barely overhead and the doorknob was already warm. A hundred and three, someone had said. I wondered how much that would be in centigrade.

Another fifteen minutes and it suddenly struck me. I was using my mailbox key. I tried the other key, and it worked. Back home in India my mailbox did not have a key, I mused. Actually, there was one single enormous mailbox, for common use of all the six flats.
Flats. I wondered why nobody uses the term here. Or does it only pertaining to footwear. Wasn’t a-p-a-r-t-m-e-n-t too long? People used ‘FYI’s and ‘ASAP’s in verbal conversations here, abbreviations I disliked and even avoided using online. I wondered, walking down the clean sidewalk, why Americans could not come up with something shorter for apartment.

        It was my first week in the United States and I was in a state of alternate shock and surprise. With bouts of disorientation throw in.

        The roads here made me uncomfortable. Sometimes there was, at a given time, no pedestrian on the road except me. Not even a cow, stray dog or a tramp. Cars swept past in both directions in a blur. No blaring of horns, no screeching of brakes, no loud curses. Wait! They were blowing horns this hot August morning, what’s with them suave drivers?

        Then I discovered to my horror that I was the reason. Like yesterday, I had not waited for the walk sign; I had not pressed any button. I was crossing the road unmindful of the very very fast traffic. As two more cars screeched to a halt, I recoiled under the intensely indignant gazes of drivers. I sprinted over to the other side, mumbling “sorry” under my breath to no one in particular.

        I missed my home in Calcutta. I also missed the city where I spent six years of my adult life alone, juggling my roles as a research student and magazine writer in the morning, and party hopper and lone star watcher on the roof at night. I missed riding my scooter. I missed getting narrowly killed by the crazy traffic on roads. I missed the cows and pigs and dogs and cats on the road. I missed the din, the gay confusion and the unpredictable weather of Pune, my city of loneliness and unrepressed liberty.

        I wondered why all of us at our group in the University of Pune had to end up in the United States sooner or later. I was the last to come. I could not defer the experience any further. India is the largest sender country of international students in the United States. I was one now a part of the 76503 official figure for 2006.

        But was this the experience I was looking for? I only felt like myself—enthusiastic and articulate in the classroom. The pedagogy here was liberating. Everything outside the classroom seemed standardized, sterile and contrived. Everything was too clean, everyone too polite. I almost wished someone would snap at me over something.

        At work, every little bit of thing I did was rewarded with profuse praises. Whether it was conducting a survey or doing some online research, the praise began with –“Team, Debjani has taken the leadership on…. and has done a fine job of………” and so on and so forth. Back home drawing out a word of praise from ‘superiors’ was as difficult as opening a bottle of wine without the corkscrew. No matter how hard you worked. And the concept of weekend did not exist. Every workplace ranging from the slickest corporate firms to the diminutive offices permitted one grudging weekly off. The Sunday.
There were aspects of my new life that I was really beginning to enjoy. The effervescent campus life, the speedy freeways, the two storey high cacti, the constant traffic of airplanes in the sky, the pumpkin pie; yet somewhere deep within I felt disoriented, unreal, bothered. Plus I had this extended jet lag, or whatever condition it was that made me drowsy in the afternoons and sleepless after midnight. However since I had located all my familiar stars and favorite constellations once again, star gazing on clear, typically Arizonan nights filled me with a sense of contentment and constancy. I would sometimes look for my grandma in those stars who had believed until the day she left me behind to die a pointless death that I would be the first among her grandchildren to go ‘abroad’.

        I kept on asking myself if I was happy to be here. I just wasn’t sure yet. I was helpless without a car. I stared wide-eyed at couples kissing openly by the fountain in Cady Mall. I was upset at not spotting jackrabbits on A-Mountain as promised in the plaques across the trail. I hated the dry heat. I was terrified of out of state tuition.

        “What am I moping about?” I wondered later that day in the restroom, looking frantically for a way to get some paper towel out of the holder, the huge white roll so visible yet so inaccessible. A rosy-cheeked undergrad came to my rescue.

        “ You press this lever here and tear the paper, see?” I was surprised again at a simple functionality that so utterly eluded me. I thanked her, still eyeing the towel dispenser warily.

        She looked curious. “Where are you from? …India? Awesome! This is your first week? Your English is so wonderful already!”
I was about to inform her that my ‘wonderful English’ was the result of twenty-eight years of constant use. Or perhaps, of two hundred years of imperial rule, which imposed British education on culture-shocked traditional Indians, grappling with fragmented identities. English was not just a language; it was a device of empire building. I wanted to tell her all that –make her understand. But something in her youthful naiveté told me she would not get it.

        I smiled at her and said, “Thanks.”

I was still smiling to myself as I walked absently out of the restroom. Smiling in nameless irony, and in a sudden spell of pleasurable excitement. This was one hell of a journey of discovery. “I am here,” I decided, as I stepped out in the atrium bathed in golden light, a feeling of sudden joy engulfing me, a joy born out of traveling almost nine thousand miles to be ‘culture shocked’—“I am here, I am going to enjoy myself.”

what i scribbled on the back of a magazine on January 1st

Another year. Full of promises, hopes, fresh fears. Uncertainties that are stressful but usually worth it. Problems that seem never ending, but deep down I desire them. I just as any other intelligent animal enjoy solving problems. More than the cosy reality of a problem solved and done with, more than the relief, every problem efficiently solved gives us a sense of bright little achievement. We need these achievements to carry on with the business of living.

 

Technology is making the (user’s) brain more and more redundant with time. The accumulated stock of culture and customs tells us what to do, when how and where…..how to live life. How to think. Throughout human history we weren’t as better equipped for life as we are at this point. Not much thinking is needed to carry on the day to day life affairs. Not much original thinking is needed any more.

 

Oh yes, that is what makes problems so important.

 

They restore our faith in our rational human mental capacities, to salvage whatever pride we have left after being pampered as consumers and ignored as citizens, valued as human resource but disdained as original thinkers and creators, decision makers and rebels.

 

diet coke or diet pepsi? cricket or sprint? the silver iPod or the green? —-we are lulled into a false sense of comfort and a false feel of control. I don’t despise development. I don’t scorn technology. I love the good life. I am just worried. Whether or not technology too like a potent drug can be abused and be the cause of severe life-ending withdrawal syndromes.

 

It can. It can. It makes us too dependent.–too chained. It makes us expect the impossible of it and expect lesser and lesser of our own selves. It makes us believe that we must be wired, ‘on’ ‘hooked’ connected to each other via some electronic media and not directly. Our eyes resent paper and adapts to the blue glow of the computer. Our fingers prefer typing to writing. We begin to believe that writing a letter on handmade paper, putting it in an envelope, putting stamp on it and posting it amounts to regression. Keeping daily journals, scrapbooks and sketchpads is uncommon ….but blogging and photo-sharing is cool. That conversation on a park bench may or may not take place, but with IMing….why bother. I like to remain regressive.

 

I am glad I was born at a time when I could have a relatively technology-free childhood. Imagination did wonders for me. It still does. I am not yet thirty but suddenly so much in this world does not make sense anymore.

 

Of course trying to understand is another problem I will be glad to ’solve’. Adapting to it unquestioningly is NOT an option.

The Sensual Kandinsky

The semester’s over, TG. My fingers are dreading the feel of a keyboard. Yet I want to do nothing more now than write about Kandinsky.

You can take refuge in Kandinsky in the orange moments of a Bombay sunset,or a pink Calcutta winter dawn. Or an ochre Arizona mid-day. When you look too long at a Kandinsky creation, emotions blot away. You only feel colours.

Thus I feel green-content,yellow enraptured, or brick-red turned on while savouring a Kandinsky, running my eyes up and down the painting, tasting colour and madness. I occasionally feel violet-confused.

Small Pleasures, Autumn in Bavaria, Improvisation VII, Composition X, Yellow, Red and Blue…..not terribly clever or arty names for paintings, but again what they represent are beyond conventional art criticism either. They defy description. Language as a shared system of symbols begin to lose significance in the Kandinskian context. You have to evolve your own symbols, place his art in your own interpretive space, surrender and lose yourself in the mad or gentle riot of colours, flurry of shapes and sensual possibilities.

Kandinsky(1866-1944), the abstract painter, the impressionist (expressionist?) the intellectual, the creator ….nah, almost as difficult to describe the painter, as describing his work. Wikipedia has done a good job of that (oh yes it occasionally does have good posts).

I cannot help but wonder about each of his paintings, and the story it might be trying to tell. What was the artist going through while creating Composition VII? What was he feeling, contemplating,calculating? How did his eyes look? How did his hands move? Impossible that a professor of law and economics represented such unfettered passion and mad joy on canvas.

That is Kandinsky. He’ll never stop making you wonder. He will make your mind form a lot of questions then wash away those questions in a sudden torrent of nameless psychedelic beauty.

The baby on the plane

This happened in the AA Flight 2455, from Chicago to Phoenix. The young couple at the row behind me had a baby boy, who kept on shrieking and crying alternately at the top of his voice. The father kept patting him, carrying him up and down the aisle. The mum tried to put him to sleep by softly singing lullabies. Nothing worked.

I was intent on getting some sleep in the plane after having to wake up at 4AM to catch the flight. Even before take-off I was drifting away to sleep. When I woke up, all I could perceive were layers and layers of clouds outside the window and a very angry little fellow at the back, kicking and punching my seat as the young parents (must be in their mid-twenties) looked on helplessly. He obviously hated flying, the little gentleman.

And how he cried!! For three long hours!! Shrill and angry, he woke up everyone that slept all over the economy cabin. Never have I heard a baby cry so loud and SO MUCH. However, he calmed down a bit once the tired mum allowed him to stand all by himself on the aisle, holding on to the seat arm-rest -an activity the baby seemed to have just recently learnt. What more, he seemed to find me and my terracotta necklace intriguing, so within five minutes he was perched on my lap, laughing loudly (he IS a boisterous little fellow, I tell you) and tugging at the necklace. His face was red from crying and his downy head of sparse hair wet with tears. He reminded me of a big blond doll I had when I was about his age.

The parents walked around, apologizing to everyone, and especially to me and two other girls seated in my row who were closest to the source of …well…noise. I was indeed getting very irritated right after waking up, but playing with that little chap, just into his second year of existence made me forgive him readily.

Passengers around jolted out of various stages of sleep seemed to be in a forgiving mood too. Not one of them though –and that is when trouble brewed.

Well, the man in a beige leather jacket in the seat in front of mine was glaring at the baby for quite some time. Surprising he could hear the screams at all considering how huge his Bose headphones were. But anyway, after the plane landed and people were busy retrieving stowed carry-ons, he looked back and said to the parents: “wouldn’t carry him if I were you. Doesn’t work! All that noise man!” The mother said, “Sorry, he is just 15 months old…and…” at which the guy snapped, “You couldn’t have quieted him down? The little bastard disturbed everyone” “May we could, but we really enjoyed hearing him cry.” This was the mother, and the father was offended just as anyone would. “You have a better idea smartass?”

“Yes.” Said the big guy, and for a minute he seemed to be towering over the young father. “May be you should have put her (this, pointing at the wife) fucking tits in his fucking mouth!”

The passengers were shocked and just as the two men were coming to blows, the wife got hold of the husband. “Please George, it’s not worth it!” The badmouthing fatso wasn’t about to give up. “That’s what I say…..her fucking tits…….”and this time while some people held the husband back, he gasped “I’ll see you outside douchebag. You won’t get away with what you just said!” At this the guy said, “tell me where and when!”

Me and some other passengers tried to calm the couple down. The baby had started crying again. The young mother was in tears. The father was red from humiliation. And surely enough, at the baggage claim area he spotted the offender and they fought loudly and would have come to blows if some people had not interposed, yours truly included.

This incident and related reflections taught me three lessons:
1. Just because seemingly the entire population of a nation emphasizes on politeness and wraps you in the cotton wool of courtesy, doesn’t mean you cannot expect the precipitous, shocking outburst once in a while.
2. Always have a baby with a man who is genuinely willing to have one with you and who will guard your and the baby’s honor with his life. (this is a pointed comment specifically directed at a certain man I know

3.Pups are easier to carry on flights than babies, you just need to mildly sedate them and put them in the living cargo section.

Dear Sweet Nan

Nan Carmichael’s day begins with tending her flowering plants. Then she goes to the gym for her daily workout. Her work as a docent in Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Arts keeps her busy till the evening, after which she catches a movie with friends, or goes out for dinner. She also stays back and relaxes sometimes by watching television or reading.

She loves driving fast. She loves playing practical jokes on friends. Once she and I went out on a rainy morning when Tempe streets were waterlogged (the drainage system here sucks). I was telling her how in India the sidewalks would be full of pedestrians and how they’d all swear at the passing vehicles when splashed with muddy water. At which she points out to the two lone pedestrians and grins, “there! Shall we ’splash’ them and see what happens?”…..

She loves traveling to exotic countries. Her eyes twinkle as she says, a cigarette dangling from her crimson nails, “I will marry when I find the right man!”

Nan Carmichael is 75 years old. She’s my friend. She’s always there for me, offering support, love, encouragement. She’s got the perfect peach-n-cream complexion and her eye make-up is always perfect. She makes the best pumpkin pies in the world. Looking at Nan, I always think that my soon to be expiring twenty-something status isn’t such a bad thing after all.