stingle

2011-05-09T13:33:00.006+05:30

Loneliness is a grey word. Filled with sadness.

It is not a sad word simply because of its dictionary meaning. Its sad because it carries on its stooped shoulders a series of failures. In friendships, relationships, communication. In intent, involvement, committment, effort.

The word loneliness speaks of failed endeavours. It speaks of aborted attempts because those who are by themselves by choice, don't use the word 'lonely'. They say they are solitary.

Hence, lonely instantly becomes a loaded word. Crippled with multiple fractures.

It is a cliche to say one can feel the loneliest in a crowd. That of course is true. And to be expected, considering a crowd cannot relate to you intimately, personally.

What is said seldom is that the more one's heart is filled with love, the lonelier one can get. The sheer contrast between the outflow of emotion and the paucity of receptacles in which to pour it in, renders one frighteningly alone at times.

A forgotten smile, a missed call, an unanswered letter, a break in eye contact, a lack of warmth in a return hug, loneliness is heralded by a menagerie of foot soldiers.

Expectations are of course a precursor to loneliness. And yet how possible is it to lead an entire life without expectations? To feel warm gushes of affection and caring without being burdened by some sort of behavorial context, some sort of ease at being able to predict other people's responses and reactions?

We all can't be Sufi in the interactions we engage in, in the relationships we forge, in the love we feel. And anyhow, the Sufis were probably the loneliest of them all...

The Casteism of Revolution

2011-04-11T16:51:00.004+05:30

Ever since Anna Hazare started fasting, and the Indian media started feasting, I have been trying to identify what exactly I feel about this entire phenomenon.

I have finally realised that I don't feel any one specific emotion. What I do have are a series of observations, culled out from my reading of the papers, what social network sites have thrown at me, and what I have gathered from conversations around:

1. The first is a sad one. It is a realisation that casteism is completely, deeply embedded in our psyche. We have a Brahminisation of everything, even mass protests. There are those who have been leading crusades for worthy causes for decades (and it is a sad truth that their voice has often gone unheard), but it is bizarre that those people now are churlish about the success of any movement that they are personally not responsible for. They have become the 'Brahmins' of protest work. They cannot let the 'lower castes' i.e. urban middle class, the media, corporates, apolitical citizens, take over this mantle. They feel affronted. Yes, it is true that for decades on end, it was only those with leftist leanings and deep roots in activism, who actually took up causes and fought for rights. They gathered in bunches of a few dozen, were often scattered with rubber bullets and police lathi charge, they came from humble backgrounds, they dressed humbly, they worked with the underprivileged and they tried to get their voices heard, often resulting in frustrating failure. Post partition right up to the early 2000s, mass India slept. We were uncaring. The middle class was scared, the influential class was apathetic, the media was state owned and the judiciary not yet this proactive. Yes, it is true that in those dark decades, when India completely lacked any community conscience, any citizen vigilance, there were only these 'left oriented groups' who tried, and tried hard.

It is odd however that today when the supposedly 'crass right wingers' at developing a conscience, instead of applauding them, this same bunch of leftist protest workers are dismissing them. It is almost like a pre determined judgement: if you are are well off, you cannot be committed. If you believe in private enterprise, you cannot contribute to nation building, If you are the media, your intent cannot be right. If you are part of the establishment in even the smallest way, then you cannot work at improving the establishment in any way.

This "I'll be judge and I'll be jury" mentality baffles me. It seems petty and unmerited. If the establishment perpetuates a wrong these people scream 'self serving'. If the establishment works at improving itself, they shout 'sham'.

It genuinely reminds me of the old Brahmins who would not let you in their fold, no matter how hard you tried.

If this is not the Brhaminisation of Protest work, what is? It is true that a lot of people threw in their lot with Anna Hazare with scant understanding of the Lok Pal bill, its nuances or the road ahead. It was amusing to read the status updates of 20 year old kids who thought Jantar Mantar was a picnic spot with a cause. But it was all amusing in an endearing way. It was nice to see people moved, even if they weren't going in depth into the problem. At least its a start.

The sheer petty cynical dismissal of this movement by the 'hardened ground workers' so to speak was deeply disappointing. It appears almost that they are shocked and upset that a movement NOT started by them should have acquired momentum and visibility. They cannot accept that free market India could possibly have developed a sense of social duty or citizen rights. Unless your politics is left wing, your cause cannot be real, they seem to be saying.

2. My second observation is a happier one. It is that Rakesh Om Prakash Mehra should be an extremely proud man today. More than half a decade after Rang De Basanti, it is clear that his movie actually made an impact that goes beyond a fad. When the candle light vigil at India Gate for Jessica Lal took its cues from this film, then too there were cynics who said this is 'pure tamasha'. The fact is that Manu Sharma did get prosecuted. And today, it is still true that people in this country have realised that they can make a difference. They can make the government accountable. They can make the establishment answerable. Movies have a power. And if they use that power to influence more than clothing and bedroom habits, its is commendable.

3. Having seen the media stoop to its lowest, crassest depths, having felt embarassed at being a part of this shrill hysterical and often vapid outlay of content, I have also realised that the media has it really bad both ways in this country. If they don't cover your protest then they just don't care. If they do cover your protest they are just looking for sensational bytes and a free tamasha. Somebody please explain how the media in this country is supposed to be doing good if everything they do is seen as self serving?

4. My fourth observation is closely connected to the first one: why is it that in our country we cannot accept that the prosperous can well be responsible for socially relevant / developmental work? Does this country have no scope for something like the Bill Gates' foundation? That man is a rich man and he is genuinely committed to the causes he supports. Why this complete cynical dismissal of corporate India by those involved in grassroot work? Why can't the two co exist? Why does one have to live in an LIG flat, take the bus, wear only cotton and chappals, to prove one's committment? Why can't making money for oneself coexist with wanting the country to be clean and well governed? If somebody joined the Jantar Mantar protest by driving down in his BMW from his posh gurgaon flat then he needs must be a 'fake'? Why?

5. This next observation is the mirror image of the previous. While there is no reason to automatically suspect the intent of the well heeled, the hysterical support that Anna Hazare got from a lot of screechy social networkers had me quite perplexed. Especially some of the people whom I know quite well. These are people who evade their taxes, abuse their position, use their influence, with absolutely not a hint of guilt. If they work for the media they demand press passes with impunity, even when they have no desire to cover the event, if they work in finance they learn new tricks to make a bigger blacker buck, if they work in education they allow kids papers to be marked by their spouses or siblings, if they work abroad they launder money. And all such and sundry were making loud, almost innocently oblivious, comments about 'weeding out corruption'. It's almost as though it doesn't strike them that they too perpetuate the same malaise. Every single day. With every single decision that they make. To them, clearly, what they do is convenience. What Kalmadi and Raja do is corruption. Hello, India?

6. My last observation: let us assume for a second that the cynics are right and Anna Hazare wants the publicity. Where is the dichotomy between wanting to do good solid work and wanting to be lauded for it? Why does every committed social worker HAVE to be self effacing? What if Anna Hazare has ALSO pandered to the media, both now, and before? Why is it necessary to therefore instantly doubt his intent? Why can't seeking personal glory co exist with wanting to bring about real change? Why does Anna have to be some sort of saint? What if he wants to be remembered for this work? How is that even a point worth raising during the debate?

All in all, much has happened and I think two clear things emerge: firstly that citizen vigilance (even if it lacks throughput, even if it lacks total comprehension) is definitely here to stay. If people can do a bit but not a lot, that is still a beginning. Everybody cannot dedicate their lives to causes. That doesn't make the little that they do, suspect. Secondly, a free market economy can and must co exist with clean transparent welfare governance. India needs to come out from the strangehold of both the corrupt politicians and businessmen, as well as the holier than thou jhollawallahs.

So bring on the next picnic at Jantar Mantar. We will transform India, one picnic at a time.

Stuck at 20

2010-12-09T15:28:00.002+05:30

It was exactly a day like this. The sun hadn't come out fully, and the grey, melted butterscotch ice cream feel to the sky was warm and chilly at the same time.

Actually, why say it was exactly a day like this. It was this very day in fact.

December 9th. Fifteen years ago.

I was exactly a month away from my 21st birthday.

And pretty much around this time, mid afternoon, I finally stepped out of the National Heart Institute for a cup of tea, after a harrowing morning. I relaxed for the first time and thought of taking a small break before going back in.

But I didn't get the chance to finish that cup of tea. Because somebody from the staff of the hospital came out to call us.

It was exactly around this time, on exactly this date, on a day exactly like this one, fifteen years ago, that my father died.

And while I have done a fair amount of growing up in the past fifteen years; while in many ways I can feel each day of each week and month of each year etched upon my heart, my mind, my soul and my face, I also realise that some little tiny bit of me just got stuck there. At twenty.

In the chilling afternoon stillness of a cold December day.

In the coversations we were yet to have, in the poetry we were still to read, in the jokes we were still to crack, in the books we were yet to exchange, in the plays we were still to watch, in the music we were yet to share. In the lessons that I learnt so much more slowly, more painfully, and more harshly from life. Because I didn't get a chance to learn them from him.

Miss you baba. Incredibly acutely, considering its been fifteen years.

Mary Mary Quite Contrary How Does Your Marriage Grow?

2010-11-04T21:07:00.008+05:30

Ranjit and I are closer than two peas in a pod. We can literally finish each other's thoughts at times, leave alone sentences. I don't use the word 'soulmate' very easily in my life, but it just seems to be the right word to apply to the two of us.

The journey he and I have been through, to be where we are today, has been an incredible one. A terrible one. An exhilerating one. An exhausting one, an invigorating one. It has broken us and made us, many times over. It has defied us, and defined us, hollowed us and deepened us, in ways that even the furrows upon our hearts can't fully express.

We have a healthy respect, and an equally healthy sense of humour, about each other's pasts. We have to, since both our pasts are a living, breathing entity in our present. And both of us have the sort of colourful, controversial history that only a spouse with a funny bone can even hope to live with. Add to that our volatile temperaments, our sensual explorations, and our sensitivities, and you get a heady cocktail that only another braveheart can dare to attempt to negotiate.

To put it simply, Ranjit and I are deeply in love. Each passing day. Present continuous, not a memory of an emotion experienced once, and eventually enshrined and honoured in an institution called marriage: like a glorious tomb raised to a long gone sentiment.

And yet, there are some funny things about our marriage. There are certain things that Ranjit and I don't do. For example, the most glaring one - we don't share a bedroom (and therefore, neither bathroom nor cupboard - he is messy and I am tidy and the shared thing drove us both nuts). We don't have joint bank accounts. We don't answer each other's phones. We don't look at each other's text messages. We don't have each other's passwords.... (well, actually I do have his, because I have had to bail him out of several disorganised moments.) We don't accept invitations on each other's behalf. We don't automatically assume friendship with each other's friends, unless we take to them personally, that is. We don't always socialise as a couple, again, unless we both like the people we are to meet. We don't send out birthday or anniversary or festival messages jointly. We don't always eat together, only when we are both hungry at the same time...

That sounds like a lot of "we don'ts" doesn't it? I know that those of my friends and colleagues who believe in a more conventional variant of marriage often want to ask me why I bothered to get married at all...

I would like to answer that question. Sincerely.

I wanted to marry so that I could live a life with the man I love. I wanted to marry so that I could have our child and focus on raising it, and not defending it. I wanted to marry because I wanted to build a home to our shared journey. And a home isn't always the same thing as a common bedroom.

There are things about a marriage, or rather, about living together, that you cannot experience living apart. A crumpled and sleep warmed cup of tea and coffee together, first thing in the morning. A late night chat drifting into sleep. A midnight snack. A raiding of each other's music and book collections. A fight over which CD is mine and which yours. A sneaked in love making as you are rushing to get ready for work. A sunday brunch in your pyjamas. A baby. A chat that carries on for so long that it gets you late for everything. A no reason sudden cuddle. A make up free sunday. A sudden rush for chocolate excess at 11 p.m. A nursing each other through sickness. An urging each other towards healthy living.

Putting together a meal (ok, I'll confess, only Ranjit does that, I am allergic to the kitchen), taking a drive because the sudden urge to scan an album siezes you, taking the other one's ass because they've done something utterly stupid, which you wouldn't have witnessed if you were living apart... there's a lot going for a marriage beyond sharing bedrooms and bank accounts...

I know this is not what a marriage is supposed to be. I am defying the conventions of an institution that I have endorsed... I have no right... Perhaps we should have called it cosy cohabitation instead... I don't know. I wanted to have that baby. And I live in a country where the negotiations around single parenthood are surprisingly time consuming; it just didn't seem worth it...

Having said that, I feel odd at times when I realise that the 'format' of my marriage may give the outsider the impression that the dynamics of the relationship are of a brittle, laquered, hard nature. That Ranjit and I are wary, ultra modern and cynical; that he and I skirt around each other's edges, diamond hard and brilliant with wit and intellect, yet incapable of a warm fuzzy place...

In reality, nothing could be farther from the truth. Our friends know that. We are silly in the way we love each other. We are exasperating to single women above thirty and we make those under thirty sigh and get misty eyed. I have had a twenty four year old office colleague come and hold my hand on a hooghly barge (it was on office get together in Calcutta) and tell me how her dream is to find a relationship like the one Ranjit and I have. It was so embarassing that I sort of coughed out a silly comment about how Ranjit and I fight too. Lame. I know.

I have however neither changed my name, nor my habits, nor my toothpaste. I don't know what that says about my priorities or my marriage. I just feel sad that such irrelevances say anything at all...

At condescending moments, looking down from my rainbow prism of fulfillment, I tend to wonder, are these things prioritised by those who have nothing more fundamental to share?...

But those are just mean moments, I don't really think like that. I believe that this age old, hackneyed, crumbling around the edges institution is still distinctly individual for each person... everyone finds their own unique rhythm with it. We just happen to have found an unusual beat... but it makes us dance, so what the heck!

Fragile

2010-10-13T14:25:00.001+05:30

Its in the texture of the air. In the colour of the flowers. In the way something green gold saffron shimmers as you turn your head.

Its in the memories. The taste of the food. In the echoes of the dhaak, the kaanshor, the bells...

Its in the faces that don't change. And yet age every year. Its in the dreams that gradually shed leaves.

Its in the hopes that were immersed in the river last year. And in the emotions that resurface alll over again.

Its in the nostalgia that we weave even as we speak, aware even in the present that we are making memories.

Its in the dust on the face, the ache in the ankles, the discomfort of the steel chairs, the iron buckets and baskets of fries. Its in the voice that rings out loud in a dining hall full of people, its in the smoke and the incense and the embers that burn in places other than earthenware lamp holders.

It makes me fragile. This place, this space, this ritual that lives itself out not in geography, not in history, but in a place suspended somewhere in between the two.

Durga Pujo. Yet again.

Golden goddess, rest my heart.

The Discontent of Content

2010-09-24T12:43:00.001+05:30

The trend is alarming and the repucussions worrisome. There is a sudden new found enthusiasm in our world for ADHD.

Yes, you did read it right. What causes concern when found in children, seems to not only be perfectly fine, but even laudable, when it comes to us adults: complete Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

We actually seem pleased that a person can hear a piece of music, google the artist name, track its singer on twitter, put up a status update about it on facebook, write a blogpost about how moving the piece was, gmail the mp3 to five friends and claim to have actually heard the piece at the same time.

Stop fidgeting and pay attention children. The age of the total discontent of content is here. We have time for everything and as a result, attention for nothing.

Our Paul the Octopus impersonations - not as soothsayers but as multi limbed jello beings - have been perfected. We have many arms but no central spine to hold it all together. We have span but no attention. We have spread but no centre. We have response but no stock.

It is not just radio. The 40 sec link into the next song has become endemic to our very being. We want our news in bullet points, our songs in hooks, our films in trailers, our books in quotable quotes.

We want to be seen to know it all, spreading it wide, spreading it thin, and we have lost our divers' costumes that allow us to go down deep with an oxygen tank called patience and a breathing tube called focus.

This is a great thing for mass media. It allows us 'medians' to cover everything, and uncover nothing at the same time.

Today's journalists need not be experts on the subject their beat covers. Today's writers need no education in literature. Today's musicians need no classical training. Today's painters need never have seen the inside of an art school.

Everything goes in the name of spontaneous, unstructured personal articulation. Expression rules and absorption is dead. We can opine without knowledge, create without learning, and extol without imbibing.

We don't have time to read this blogpost to the end because our phone just beeped, our computer just pinged and our connect just disconnected.

THE SMUG SECULARISTS SONG

2010-08-23T16:09:00.001+05:30

Flood ‘em terrorists
The end is nigh
Now you know
When the waters run high

Where will you hide
As the floodgates rise
Where is your Allah
Your bearded, your wise

Here I am
Feeling smug in my land
I killed no infidel
No blood on my hand

Now you know
When the end is near
Hope gives way
To a drowning fear

The world looks away
And why should it not
Were you merciful
When it was your lot?

You bombed our trains
You bombed our brains
You bombed our buildings
You rammed in planes

Don’t teach me my geography
My Afghan from my Pathan
My Iraqi, My Paki
My Koran from my Kirpan

You turbaned lot
You troubled lot
You dirty lot
You flooded lot

God is drowning you
Drowning your sins
When you swim you sink
When you sink then you swim

And I won’t write that cheque
And I won’t fill that truck
You can keep treading water
I won’t throw you a rubber duck

I am smug in my parsimony
You can scream you can yelp
I am not Vodafone
I am happy not to help

Let the U.N raise the money
Let Zardari find you hope
I am not here to forgive
I am not the pope

All of you are fanatics
You laugh when we cry
I am not a terrorist
I’ll just watch your children die.

Lost and Found

2010-07-19T22:51:00.001+05:30

I lost you for a while today
And while looking through the bric-a-brac,
The lost and found cardboard box of my life,
I found such little worth finding
My losses amongst trinkets and baubles and faux memories of pain,
A few jewels lost forever and out of reach, its true,
But much else of no value.

And in the yawning, gaping, empty vacuum of a lost and found box
I saw you recede from me
Smiling your gentle smile,
Love crinkling the sides of your eyes

And in repeated loops of twenty minutes,
3 times an hour times 6 hours,
My heart broke so many times.

the 100th post

2010-06-03T17:11:00.004+05:30

Advised a friend to either dump a girlfriend who was boring him to tears, or else to marry her.

I must be the first Female Mysogynist ever.

But seriously. What's up with women and their obsession with men and the mythical sun shining out of their ass? Why can't we think beyond, live beyond, be beyond?

Even the crudest, most low brow, most crass men, when they meet, will discuss beer & cricket / football (apart from female anatomy). They will comment about the state of politics and the carrborator of their car. They will talk about their next pay hike. They will talk about SOMETHING apart from the relationship that they are in / wish to be in.

But nine times out of ten, even the most intelligent, most talented, most well read, most independent, most successful, most attractive women, when they get together, will talk about men. And marriage. And the ones who stayed. And the ones who left. And matters of the heart. And the hearth.

Good grief. WHEN are we gonna get over it?

Footnote: I would not have noticed this about our gender, had it not been pointed out to me by a man. My husband. A few years ago. Shamefaced confession.

But since then, I have kept relentless pursuit of this observation. And noticed phone coversations, sms chats, facebook updates, blog entries and tweets from some of the women I like / admire most.

And I am saddened to see the truth behind the observation.

This is my 100th post on a blog called stingle. Which fiercely protects a space called 'still single'. And my insight on this pathetic state of us women is not a judgemental one from the outside, but an empathetic one from the inside. I've been there too. I've obsessed like that too. I too have focused all my energies on acquiring the right labels in my life. And perhaps I come from the vantage point of having acquired those labels, but nonetheless, whatever be the reason, wisdom is not to be scoffed at.

In my 100th post, for the 100th time, I wish to know: when we women talk about settling down, why don't we ever talk about 'settling down, single'....? Come to be at peace with the status of singlehood?

Don't get me wrong. Love is beautiful. A relationship is cosy. I don't advocate singlehood for the heck of it. I am married. I am happy. [Of course the joke between the two of us often is that we are happy inspite of being married, and not because of it] but what I do have an issue with is how we women don't ever get comfortable with the status - whatever the status - and look beyond. We are unhappy single. We are anxious married. When we don't have a man we are worrying about where to find him. When we do have a man we are biting our nails off worrying how to hold on to him. When we part with a man we fall apart. When we find him we cling.

Kya problem kya hai??

Mirror Image

2010-04-27T15:12:00.001+05:30

I have aged, beyond repair.
My body at war with my best intentions.
Taut and tired is what the gym makes me.
While plump, juicy youth
Firmly cocks a snook at me.

My heart has aged, beyond justice.
My life in battle with my oldest dreams.
Etched and exhausted is what my fantasies make me.
While transient visions, missions, transgressions of the merely young
Pass me by in piteous disdain.

Music Credits!

2010-03-29T18:55:00.004+05:30

While driving to work today, I was listening to a song that always reminds of someone I know... I simply have to hear the first few strains, and an image, a memory, a face, some moments, flash through my head...

And I realised that this happens to me with many, many songs. Songs that sometimes may not even be so closely held by the very people I associate them with. They may be surprised in fact, to learn how closely that song reminds me of them; how close it brings them to me.

But there is some arresting memory; a vibrant moment lived, a cherished conversation held close to the heart, and then, the song is their's. For good.

So I thought, why not do a roll call of honour. A different sort of a credit roll. And for the fun of it, see if the people involved actually remember the association at all or not... Or feel as strongly about the song....

[I would like to digress here for a moment and say that I am leaving Ranjit out of this list. The universe of music I share with Ranjit is too vast, too personal, and too, too vibrant to be captured in one post. Ranjit is my music partner in more ways than one... so Ranj, sorry, no specific credit roll for you here. You get credit for the 'music in my life!']

I am obviously also not including songs that my highly talented friends have had something to do with directly. I mean, its stupid to say Baawra Mann reminds me of Swanand, or Socha Na Tha of Imti. Duh. But naturally.

The first, but obvious, and Gorky, stop grinning:

RAAH PE REHTE HAIN (Kishore Kumar, Namkeen): Gorky, Gorky, Gorky. His black boot upon his Yezdi pedal. A late night drive back from his film maker job in NOIDA. A rain slick tar road... and this song playing into his ear from his walkman. I will stop here. There are other details too personal to share. But this song stopped being RD and Gulzar's long ago. Its yours, Gorks. Needless to say, there are many others. But this is sort of the signature one; the album cover.

MERI JAAN MUJHE JAAN NA KAO & KOI CHUPKE SE AAKE (Geeta Dutt, Anubhav): Geeta Dutt's tortured, fading, dying voice in a last burst of glory. Kanu Roy's simple melody brought to life so completely in her rendition that made it so believeable that a housewife with a tuneful voice is singing in her throaty, less than perfect style. But so much trivia aside, for me these two songs belong only to Pavi. For years now, from high school to hot dates, from winter bonfires to summer picnics, Pavi has always insisted that these are two songs she can sing well. And the funniest part? She never remembers which these songs are, precisely when she needs to croon. So I must have answered innumerable hushed, whispered, conspiratorial calls, replied to pager messages (gosh remember those??) and lately, replied via the more convenient sms option. She will always say 'hey babes, what are those songs from anubhav that I can sing?'. And I will reply: Koi Chupke Se Aake. Meri Jaan. So Pavi, meri jaan, ye do to tumhaare huye.

PUKARO MUJHE NAAM LEKAR PUKARO (Mukesh, Bhool Na Jaana): For us, the hardcore Kishore - RD fan gang, this is one of those rare Mukesh tracks that we love. (Coupled with a few others that will get mentioned farther on in this post). And for me, this song is Biju's. I don't remember how, I don't remember when, but I do remember him telling me that the line Badi sar chadhi hain ye zulfein tumhaari, ye zulfein meri baazuyon mein utaaro... is one of his favourites. Pataa nahin kyun, ye baat mere saath reh gayi. Biju - does the line still move you?

BAAT NIKLEGI TO PHIR DOOR TALAK (Jagjit Singh, The Unforgettables): I can already see Pavi smiling. But of course. Oroon. Who else. One of the many many songs that Oroon renders beautifully, but the ONLY song that he remembers the entire lyrics of. Oroon, you have made me cry so often with your rendition of Baat Niklegi, that I should apply for insurance now. I finally got a grip on the tears, but even now, the eyes get moist. I remember your school farewell (you being a year ahead of me) and you sang it on stage. As a special precaution I went out of the assembly hall and heard you from the door. And cried buckets, as usual.

TUM PUKAR LO (Hemant Kumar, Khamoshi): Shujoy - I don't know if its Hemant Kumar's singing, or his composition, or Gulzar's sheer brilliance... or some other personal association that you may have... but you've always had a soft spot for this song. I've seen you attempt to sing it at several antaksharis over several Durga Pujas... and hum it under your breath even otherwise. That rickety wooden table in front of the goddess; us sitting, irreverentially swinging our feet off it, the line of us in dhotis, saris, respectively, and you attempting this tune, until Oroon rescues you and takes it on... This song belongs to you, my friend.

ROMEO & JULIET (Dire Straits, Making Movies): 'A lovestruck Romeo, Sings a streetsus seranade, Laying everybody low with a love song that he made...' I've always described Knopfler's voice as Rum Chocolate. If you could make love to voices, I'd want to do him! Rishi, you may not even remember this, it was soo soooo long ago. But it was in Mumbai. We were at the Ghetto (I always forget the name of the pub and ask Ranjit - hey which one is that dark pub with the neon lights where your teeth shine white and he tells me!!)... So Rishi - it was probably 98 or 99. I was in Bombay on Encompass work. And we'd hooked up and gone for a drink. This track started playing over the sound system. And you mentioned how it was one of your favourites. I remember not being familiar with the track then and asking you what it was about. And you, magically, without allowing the rhythm of the song to get spoilt, repeated every line back to me, into my ear, even as the track played out. What a gorgeously written piece of urban poetry. And what a stunning memory. Dunno about Knopfler and his Intellectual Property rights, but Romeo and Juliet belongs to you, Rishi K!

TIME (Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon): Singhaaaaa!! We were in your not-so-fancy car. I don't know where we were going but it was early evening, the sun was setting and we were driving towards AIIMS. Floyd's brilliance over your sound system and you asked me if I'd ever focused on the words of Time. And then as the sun actually set in front of our faces, you repeated the lines to me: 'you run and you run to catch up with the sun but its sinking... racing around to come up behind you again... the sun is the same in a relative way but you're older... shorter of breath and one day closer to death....' No wait, you didn't repeat them speaking, you sang them, along. Your face was lit up by the setting sun then, and all your love and reverence for and resonance with Pink Floyd shone through in that moment... This song belongs to so many, across two and a half generations, across so many nations... and Singha, as far as I am concerned, it belongs to you!

KOI DEKH RAHA (Udit Narayan & Kavita Krishnamurthy) & TERE PYAR MEIN (Hema Sardesai, Shankar Mahadevan - Zor): Gorky, Pavi, Ranjit, Tapas recognise this name. The others on this list may not. Pramit Ghosh. My crazy ex boyfriend and an extremely interesting chap regardless of what we went through. Pramit, who introduced me to George Orwell's Down and Out in London & Paris, who introduced me to the ancient ruins in and around Ahmedabad, who introduced me to yumm food at Vishaala, who introduced me to the concept of living by myself, and who also introduced me to contemporary hindi music, which I had great disdain for, before I joined Mirchi. These two songs were the soundtrack of the few months I spent with him. They captured the madness, the uncertainity, yet the fun, the vibrancy, the unpredictable spontaneity of that time of my life. Both songs have a sweetness and yet a racy pace - something that reminds me of that crazy and pyschaedelic time in my life...

MAINE TERE LIYE SAAT RANG KE SAPNE CHUNE (Mukesh, Anand): A simple song with Gulzar's masterful words. A gentle moment in a superlative film. But is that how I remember the song? Not quite. I see Imtiaz sitting at the kerb of the Hindu college bus stop. I see the afternoon sun slanting through the leaves. I see him humming the track as I cross the narrow road and plonk down next to him. I see the twinkle in his eyes as he confides that this is one of his favourite love songs. Because of its simplicity. At that time I thought he said it for effect, he came across as such a complex fellow. And then years later he made Socha Na Tha. And then Jab We Met. And then Love Aaj Kal. And I realised over a decade later, that he had meant what he'd said.

SAVERE KA SURAJ TUMHAARE LIYE HAI (Kishore Kumar, Ek Baar Muskura Do): Tapas. You and I have shared many many songs through our long friendship and our radio partnership. There should be many other tracks I associate with you. But this particular one - I just always imagine you singing it. I think perhaps because you introduced me to the track. But it always has been, and always will be, yours.

and the best, for the last!

CHANE KE KHET MEIN (Poornima, Anjaam): Baba! Ha ha ha ha. The man who has introduced me to Rabindra Sangeet, Adhunik Bangla Gaan, Polli geeti, Toppa, Bhatiali, Suman Chatterjee, Nachiketa and who not... and THIS is what I associate with him? Of course I have an entire childhood of beautiful music that I attribute to that man. The reason I include Chane Ke Khet Mein in this list is because its unusual, its mad, and it showcases in my memory, the vibrant, youthful, unprejudiced person he always was. Baba loved this crazy, almost Bhojpuri, what many would term 'cheapo' song. He loved its energy, its rhythm and he was completely crazy about Madhuri's dancing in this. He really admired her skill. And I read somewhere that they had a multiple camera set up for this song and Madhuri rendered the entire dance of this 4 - 5 minute number, in ONE take. She is that fabulous. And Baba recognised that extraordinary talent. So yes, my dad, of many intellectual pursuits and deeply artistic interests, belongs to Chane Ke Khet Mein! :o)

What if...

2010-03-02T09:55:00.002+05:30

Sometimes I have this really wicked thought of telling all on all my ex-men. (Nice phrase, ex men. sounds like a sci-fi film.)

I guess it must be about getting to office on a tuesday morning after a lazy, gorgeous, sun kissed, holi drunk, gujia satiated weekend, but it makes me want to do mean things.

I have the added advantage of the fact that my husband knows about each one of the ex-men, in all their varied shades of glory. So does my family.

Which kind of leaves me free to wreak havoc on the entire sanctimonious holier than thou lot.

Hey, don't get me wrong. I don't think they are all pigs because we all chose to move on with our lives. I thinnk they are pigs because they are!

Hee hee.

Anyhow, got to know about this maudlin tweet that one of the ex-men had posted about his blissful marital life, and I had this wicked wicked desire to get on to twitter and leave one saucy, marriage wrecking comment on it...

I have similarly juicy, creative thoughts on several other ocassions. Thoughts that could render marriages, homes, careers and sanity ruined.

I am disgustingly wicked.

So whats the moral of the story?

Be careful of an ex boyfriend for about three months. That's pretty much the time in which he can murder you, malign you, post your dirty pictures on the internet, deface you, haunt you, stalk you, attack you....

After that, with their short attention spans, and shorter memories, they will forget you.

But be careful of an ex girlfriend for life. She may just decide to ruin your life on whim.

Just because a long weekend got over.

Exhate

2010-02-21T20:18:00.006+05:30

I recently got to know that some woman who I knew in my first job, around 15 years ago, feels 'sad' that she and I did not explore our friendship back then because we were prevented by early 20s insecurity, rivalry and suspicion.

Needless to say, this caught me totally off guard, in my solar plexus, because I had only viewed her as a colleague and someone who was more than an acquaintance, less than a friend, all those years ago. I was mildly happy to get in touch with her again. She had never occupied more mindspace for me than that. I however seem to have filled up her thoughts with far more complex hues.

Today apparantly being in our mid 30s and more mature, we have the power to put all that behind us and become friends. And that she no longer is in awe of my looks or my success or the colour of my frigging hair, or something to that effect. I don't remember the exact words because this was all in her facebook invite message to me, and after I confirmed her (which I'm not sure why I did) I can't seem to retrieve that invitation message.

I got on to facebook about a week ago, caving in to general pressure, and am already regretting it.

The whole business seems entirely directionless and pointless - and that when its not revealing nasty truths from people who were barely on the edges of your consciousness.

I seem to inspire a lot of this perplexing hatred. What flabbergasts me the most is very often this hatred comes from people who I barely think about, have never wished them any harm, never had any ill will towards and never even thought about much.

Thankfully the people who love me also do so quite intensely, so it adequately compensates, else I'd have a serious self worth issue.

But I don't get it. Once I had gotten to know through a friend that a guy he knew bad mouthed me intensely and regularly, for over 2 years. The guy kept urging my friend to lose contact with me, as 'prolonged exposure' to me would be bad for him.

Believe it or not, I had never even met the guy in question. We had only heard of each other on and off through common acquaintances. Such third hand knowledge of a person can generate gossip, sure, but hatred? Venomous, black viscous hatred?

How?

Then there was this girl in my team where I currently work. For a long time I kept working on her career because I truly saw a lot of potential in her. I would even go the extent of saying she and I became sort of friends. Laughter is one thing we shared a lot, and that is a great bonding agent.

Then one day I gave her career a direction she didn't quite resonate with. She made it amply evident to me that even though it was growth, I had not given her growth in quite the way she wanted.

By this time she was anyway no longer my direct reportee. I had just continued to remain involved with her career because I truly felt she'd go places.

Needless to say after she made her displeasure at my intervention evident, I totally stepped out of her professional life. I anyway had other responsibilities and it was a relief to take my eyes off something that was proving to be quite thankless.

For the next 8 months I had absolutely nothing to do with her. I'd hear how she was coping, when she was doing well and when otherwise, but it was all very distant information percolated through layers of office talk. I didn't spend much time thinking about her. She vaguely shimmered on the horizon of my awareness.

One day I heard she was quitting. I remember thinking: 'well, thank god, at least she won't be able to blame me for this. I've had absolutely nothing to do with her for nearly a year'.

Well imagine my surprise when she went out all guns blazing, blaming me for having conspired to kill her career in this company.

Err. Nasty accusation aside, I never quite got the logic of it. Why would I want to kill the career of a person when I'd spent 5 years building it? It defied common sense.

Anyhow, today she is doing precisely what I had envisaged her to be doing in our company, in a rival company. Talent and potential rolled towards its natural destination. Even though she resisted my every urge to push her in a particular direction, it was just something so made for her that it found her anyway.

And she went out bitterly hating me, my intent and every last curly hair on my head. I think she went so far as to hope I miscarried or something. Which I thankfully didn't.

There have been others. Comparatively minor in intensity and involvement, but still there. A girl who worked for me in my previous company, thought at that time that I wasn't worthy of being her boss, later on went on to practically hero worship me, and therefore felt compelled to tell me all about her past feelings of hatred and malice.

A girl in my current company, a sort of a friend I'd say, told me a similar story some months ago. About how she used to hate my guts and thought I was nuts and anal for being so detail oriented but today, as she finds herself in positions of responsibility, realises my committment and dedication to the job and deeply appreciates me for the training I invested in her etc etc... Even though she bitched and cribbed about me endlessly then, apparantly. But hey, she loves me now.

Most of these confessions come from women. Even the woman I started this post with - she's been following up her facebook invitation with a series of intense lover-like smses after I clearly indicated my discomfort to her. It is essential to her that I understand her true feelings, her admiration inspite of her insecurities, her appreciation inspite of her envy, her desire to strike up a deep meaningful relationship with me inspite of her highly inappropriate, more-information-than-I-needed invitation message. She needs me to look at her guts, love her inspite of their putrification and then embrace her in a lifelong bond of friendship.

Yawn. I don't think its worth the time and mind space. I don't get the sanctimonious nature of it all. As Gorky puts it so fantastically - "Why do people insist on using someone's head as a stepping stone to attain nirvana?"

I think when you've disliked a person for a while, and then changed your mind about them, you feel so saintly, so haloed, so good about yourself, that you naturally assume the other person will fall over with gratitude once you confess your true feelings to them. I guess the only reason a person would have the socially awkward, highly inappropriate "I Used to Hate You But Now I Think You Rock" conversation with anyone is because they are feeling so smug, so full of the clean, pious, moral light, that it doesn't strike them for a second that the other person may just be plain flabbergasted, never having thought of themselves as hated or disliked in the first place. The sanctimonious nature of having let go of a negative obsession, is so high, that these slightly ill people just don't realise how their couch confidences will sound to the unsuspecting third party.

The most bizarre of these stories is the one about the girl who joined a company after I'd quit it. She replaced me. Six years later she came to meet me in my new organisation only to tell me that she'd been obsessing about me so much that it was threatening to be an illness.

She had heard about the quality of my work in my previous organisation and somehow had gotten into a state of total inadequacy. Nothing she did ever really matched up to the standards I'd set.

What rot.

We've all replaced older employees in jobs. Sure it takes some time to step into their shoes. Sure it takes a while to replace the team's and / or the boss's dependancy on their way of working, but its doable. No employee is ever indispensable.

Its never worth a six year obsession about a person you've never met.

Or is it?

And what's with all this confession. Waiting to exhale. Or should I say ex-hate. "Oh I used to hate you. But I also admire you. I was insecure about it. But now I'm over it. Its all water under the bridge. Or over it. Or whatever. We are all more mature now. So I must spill my guts into your ears whether you want to hear it or not. You must smell the rotten turd of my brain. Please. We can start on a fresh page. Please, lets start afresh. I used to be insecure about you. I used to be jealous of you. I used to believe all the gossip about you. I used to be envious of you. I stuck pins into your dolls. I sat bitching about you to others. But now I see you for the great person you are. I'd like to do you the favour of befriending you. Now you must fall all over yourself in gratitude. I used to think you were weird. Now I don't...."

Err... I have news for you, you exhater. You are giving me more information than I need. You are telling me things that don't make me feel grateful, they make me feel disgusted. Also, you are freaking me out.

I'm not interested in helping you bury your ghosts. Even if I am the ghost.

ALCO-HAULE HAULE!!

2010-01-20T16:48:00.000+05:30

I think its officially time to replace the word 'socialize' with 'alcoholize'.

Lets face it, for most of us, for most of the time, with most types of company (with the exception of aged relatives on some select worship days), there is no socializing without alcoholizing.

Don't agree? Read my list of Top 10 things people find increasingly difficult to do without booze. (if you do agree, feel free to add to the list!!)

1. Sit with random colleagues beyond work hours, for more than half an hour.

2. Flirt.

3. Sit with 'friends' for more than one hour.

4. Share personal life details (especially details that nobody is interested in)

5. Initiate sex

6. Be truthful

7. Be nostalgic / sentimental

8. Appreciate poetry. (Or nature. Or childhood).

9. Prepare for Monday morning. (or begin Friday night)

10. Appreciate one's spouse.

Please eat a Kegg!

2010-01-17T20:33:00.010+05:30

It must have been about a year or so back, that having run out of eggs in the house, and constantly forgetting to get more from the local grocer, I stopped at the 24x7 store below my gym and picked up these fancy looking eggs called KEGGS.

I'd seen them earlier a few times - at home before I got married, and I remembered them being quite nice. Not the sort of person to pay much attention to individual items on a grocery bill, I didn't know how these jumbo sized, tan coloured, packed in corrugated brown sheeting eggs compared price-wise to regular dimunitive white eggs.

They turned out to be yummylicious. One stunning sunrise type golden yolk that was so strong on flavour that the pale lemon variant that one had normally gotten used to seemed like nutrinugget in comparison. And a white that would cook to scintillating silky textured crispiness. For major fried egg fiends like us, the Kegg was one heck of discovery.

R began to insist that we ditch the grocer's pathetic egglets and switch totally to Keggs. Which is what we did soon. Like all such products, the packaging hardly merited any more attention from us, once we were sold on the quality of the product itself.

Over months and months of eating Keggs I obviously started noticing little details on those green boxes. What struck me first was the currogated cardboard base the eggs had, each in an individual dip - so if your refrigerator ran out of eggshelf space, hey, presto! these came with their own.

The next thing I noticed was that each egg had an individual hologram stuck on it. Not bad - so these were actually individually quality checked and okayed. Kya baat hai.

Since we are talking about eggs here, after all, it was almost another 6 months or so before another detail caught my eye: the phrase 'Tan shells' on the box. Aha. So the lovely colouring to the shells was deliberate, and something the company / cooperative / farm - or whatever it was that made these damn things - were proud of.

Ok so what came next in this bizarre egg discovery journey? This one truly warmed the cockles of my heart. Right next to Tan Shell - yeah, so why it took me so long to read it, mystifies - was another phrase. Cage Free.

That one genuinely made me do a double take. Hey not bad. So I read other stuff on the packaging. These chickens were raised on an extremely healthy, non synthetic diet, and kept entirely cage free in a near total organic farm. They got plenty of air and sun, and water and food and running around space. Thats pretty much all the stuff I try and ensure for my child.

I came home, happy with our greed that day. And told R that we were doing a nice thing by eating Keggs and not eggs. After all, we've all seen those miserable dingy cages with about two dozen birds cramped into that dirty little space, being transported to the fish and poultry market. Its not made any of us non-vegetarians proud.

So this cage free business was nice. A happy chick clearly gave a happy egg. So nice.

You see everytime I see a suffering animal I don't have an automatic desire to turn vegetarian. I don't think there's anything wrong with the natural order of animals eating other animals. I just wish the animals would live a happy life and die a painless death. The way it happens in a lot of farms in the West.

If you've read the James Herriot series of All Things Bright and Beautiful...... Wise and Wonderful... et al, you'll know what I mean. The guy is a British vet. And he loves animals. And has extreme compassion for all suffering birds and beasts. All his books are about his experiences while healing, treating and curing animals.

Yet the same vet is more than happy to sit at a farmer's kitchen table and share a rash of bacon. There is no contradiction there. The desire that animals lead happy healthy lives, feel cared for and loved, and then end up on your dinner table eventually, may seem irreconcilable, even reprehensible, to vegans and vegetarians, but I don't see the contradiction in the wish. If raised right and killed compassionately, a lot of animals bred for food end up actually having a better quality of life than their stray or domestic counterparts.

Whats my point therefore? That the Cage Free claim on the Keggs box made me quite happy. Rabid non-vegetarian though I am.

Today when I opened a fresh box of Keggs, out popped a little leaflet. 'Keggfarms - the larger story' it said. And a truly impressive story it was. Set up in 1967 as a poultry development company, Keggfarms did a drastic reorientation of its goals in the early 90s, when it realised that 70% of this country's population - the poor rural sector - was not benifitting from the success of the farm.

As the leaflet says, 'there are an estimated 30 million, mainly below poverty line, rural households in India, where women raise poultry as a traditional activity.... these birds are raised on no cost household village and agricultural waste'.

Keggfarms took it upon itself to provide these rural households with superior quality poultry birds, that would thrive in the village environment at no additional cost, and would gain far more weight than their indigeneous cousins and deliver far larger quantities and superior quality of eggs. 'Effectively converting a traditional household activity into significant supplementary income in the hands of impoverished rural women'

Obviously, the yummy Keggs we eat are not from these specially bred poultry. They are from 'upper caste' chickens in a fancy farm. But everytime we eat those Keggs, we contribute to the Keggfarms coffers, which often finds itself quite cash strapped in its corporate rural venture.

So go ahead. Eat a Kegg. If it's not available in your locality, put in that teeny weeny bit of extra effort of asking your local grocer to stock Keggs. Trust me, if you demand it a few times, he WILL source it. Customer is king. And these are hard times. Hey they get our favourite shampoo and soap brands don't they, if we promise to always purchase a regular supply? So why not our brand of eggs?

Pamper your pallette. Savour your sunny side up.

And do your bit for this country. Cmon, be a good egg.

Sundar Nagri

2009-12-30T15:47:00.012+05:30

The winding path to my sunset days...

Came from a place my childhood knew...

and from being young to growing old...

I simply walked a block or two..........

A follow up on our balloons fund story.

Today we went to give the money to Dr. Amod. Ironically to a place called Sunder Nagri... Beautiful City.

Dr. Amod is the Head of the Dept of Community Health at St. Stephen's Hospital. And we met him at a dispensary that the hospital has set up in this slum cluster area. To focus on community health.

Community health is a complex and vast area of work. It goes way beyond treating diseases or providing medical care. It encompasses the economy, the psychology, the social fabric of the community that it works in. Child care, education, senior citizen care, vocational training, women empowerment, livelihood opportunities, health, hygiene, sanitation, even finances and fund management comes within its ambit.

After we handed over the balloon money, one of the volunteers at the centre took us around. Within that tiny two and a half floor narrow decrepit building we found dignity and hope, fun and childhood, confidence and self assurance.

From the masala factory on the terrace where women grind and sell pure, unadulterated low cost spices, to the senior citizen's resting centre outside the clinic, to the creche where children from ages two to five spend the day while their parents eke out a living, to a fund management division where the community is learning the art of saving lending and borrowing transparently, to - believe it or not - a multi media centre and a fashion designing centre - where kids and young adults are being equipped with the latest technological tools - the whole journey was not less amazing than Alice's through Wonderland.

This was a slum? I thought to myself. Dingy, cramped but spotless. I was amazed at the cleanliness, everywhere. Not just within the dispesary but outside as well. No garbage, no filth, no muck. Just smiling faces and confident open expressions.

The creche was the most overwhelming I think. Look at the kids swarming around Ranjit's knees, hugging him, touching him, holding him... this is the most unselfish spontaneous and generous show of love we'd ever experienced. We had not even carried any sweets or toys for these children so what you see in the images are not in response to any act of kindness.

We simply stepped into that courtyard. They simply came and hugged us. Just like that. On their own. Totally spontaneously. Totally joyously. It was completely incredible.

It was similar though obviously much more muted at the old age home. I particularly remember this frail old lady with a bright red wollen cap who literally leaned across and dragged herself over to us across the dari they were all squatting on. Just to stroke my face and Ranjit's hair. That's all.

Wizened hands, gnarled fingers, the gentlest touch.

There's a lot that is being done here, at Sunder Nagri, near Dilshad Gardens, close to Shahadra. There is a lot more that needs to be done, and a lot more that could be done.

Watch this space. And if you like, come join us at Wonderland.

Balloons for Christmas

2009-12-28T16:13:00.003+05:30

On Christmas morning, we all woke up to a truly 'cheerful' story hogging the headlines - about how the MCD has demolished a night shelter on Pusa Road for 'beautification' prior to the Common Wealth games. And how over 250 people have been rendered homeless, including women and infants: the youngest of them being 3 days old.

All this at a time when the mercury was merrily swinging in the 6 degrees range. Wind chill factor not counted.

As I sipped my warm cup of coffee and attempted to read the story out to Ranjit, while our daughter romped around in 3 layers of warm clothing, Ranjit said 'whats the point of reading this? What are we going to do about it?'

That started a conversation and a chain of events that has led to Balloons for Christmas...

The writer of the article was Ambika Pandit from the Times News Network who Ranjit managed to reach thanks to the Central Address book of timesmail! Ambika was genuinely happy that her article had made an impact, and was extremely helpful, passing us on to the right person....

The right person was Dr. Amodh Kumar, who is with St Stephen's Hospital and works for and with these homeless people. When Ranjit spoke to Dr. Amodh and asked if we could bring across blankets etc he assured us that all that had been taken care of for the time being. But he would definitely solicit our help for other requirements.

That very evening we had the most amazing conversation on Dr. Amodh's speaker phone - with some of these street kids and adults... He put them on line, and Ranjit put his own phone loudspeaker on... and here's how the conversation went...

R: Hello!

Kids: Namastey!

R: Aap log theek hain?

Kids: Haanji

R: Aapko kambal wambal kuchh chahiye?

Kids: Aap hamein balloon laa deejiye bhaiyya!

R: Balloons? Itni thand mein aapko kambal rajai nahin, balloons chahiye??............

Kids: Hum balloon bechenge bhaiyaa... abhi to season hai...

Ranjit and I had been laughing up to that point thinking these are carefree kids who want balloons rather than blankets. (gosh, what a bubble we live in). Which is when they made us realise it was not for fun but for income that they needed these balloons...........

Since then Dr. Amodh has done some groundwork for us and informed us that:

a. The entire lot of balloons to keep these people going during the festive season, costs Rs. 23,000. They have already picked up the balloons in order to maximise the season's sales.

b. They have promised not to use children to peddle these balloons and Dr. Amodh hopes they will at least try and stick to their word.

Oh, and you know what? These street people want to take this money purely as a loan!! They are very clear that once they tide over the winter months and make their living, they want to return every penny. Obviously, while none of us expect anything back, I think this attitude is great. Great for their sense of self, their personal dignity and their pyschological freedom.

Dr. Amodh obviously wants to encourage that, for these very reasons. These people are very clear they want to pay us back whenever they can. Isn't that amazing?

Ranjit and I have promised to get the money across to Dr. Amodh by this evening. The entire amount. I wrote a mail to a selected few, those who would trust Ranjit and my word, because needless to say we would not be able to give any paper, any NGO receipt, any sort of documentation whatsoever for any contribution. We are simply collecting cash and going there this evening.

Barely a couple of hours into sending the mail and I've already received more than half the amount, either as cash or as a pledge.

Its amazing how much goodwill and generosity there is out there. And shocking how so much suffering carries on, none the less.

I am moved by my friends' and colleagues' trust, generosity and sensitivity. I am happy I know such wonderful people.

May 2010 be a genuinely happy new year.

Quote Hanger

2009-12-14T16:40:00.003+05:30

"I close my eyes.
And this image floats beside me.
A sweaty-toothed madman with a stare that pounds my brain.
His hands reach out and choke me.
And all the time he's mumbling.
Mumbling truth.
Truth like-like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold.
You push it, stretch it, it'll never be enough. You kick at it, beat it, it'll never cover any of us. From the moment we enter crying to the moment we leave dying, it'll just cover your face as you wail and cry and scream."

- Todd Anderson, Dead Poet’s Society

The Bad Believer

2009-12-08T14:40:00.006+05:30

Sheepishly I am forced to admit, I am a bad believer.

All through my life I was given an involiable, unquestionable orientation towards the existence of god. There was a lot of deep spirituality that surrounded my childhood. My mother and my grandparents were initiates of the Ramkrishna Mission, a truly philosophic, thinking branch of hinduism. My father, though shunning all options of formal initiation, was a devout follower of Sri Ramkrishna and his teachings; his soul stirred and responded with great emotion for that simple saint.

Since a lot of Sri Ramkrishna's teachings revolved around the sameness of spiritual message among all religions, we as children got adequately exposed to the basic principles of all faiths.

Add to this, my schooling at The Mother's International School, affiliated to the Aurobindo Ashram, and what you get is a heady mix of extremely tolerant, very high thinking, complex philosophical new age spirituality.

I grew up assuming that was 'religion'. It was only later that I understood that my perspective of god was not from a religious point of view at all. I had no resonance with meaningless rituals, the gestures of worship shorn of the meaning behind. At school we were taught the meaning of every bhajan, chant and shloka, and as a result, I could never fully understand the deep stirring of emotion people felt even when they did not understand the gibberish a priest uttered in a temple.

My father's side of the family was that of priests. Because of the brahminical lineage, what I did understand early on from conversations, was that if you wanted to do ritualistic hindu worship, it was serious business. You spent time understanding the shlokas, reciting them with the correct intonation, and you followed the complex step-by-step processes of worship which included intricate details of how to hold the prayer tray, when to ring the bell, what significance its resonance had at different points in the worship, why a certain fruit or flower or herb was to be placed at a certain angle near the idol and what that placing signified...

The old ritualistic priesthood that was my paternal heritage, coupled with the new age spirituality that my parents adopted, made worship a thinking practice for me.

Ritualistic worship had stopped at my home with my grandmother since my mother believed more in simple prayer and devotion. I did not grow up with a 'temple' in the house where I was expected to put flowers or light incense everyday. Nor did I think that ringing a bell and singing a bhajan was worship. Nor did I think that the family gathered around idols with folded hands and some hand me down songs was 'proper' religion.

When my friends would tell me in later years that they had done 'pooja' at home, I would be awestruck. Thats because I always assumed they knew their rituals the way my grandfather or father did, and they were so much more knowledgeable than me in hindu traditions and practice. I always assumed that what had been allowed to atrophy in our house had been kept alive in theirs. I was quite impressed, and often felt a tad inadequate.

Imagine my surprise then, when a friend said she'd done pooja at home on diwali - and she didn't even live with her parents. My jaw dropped - I asked her, 'you know how to do lakshmi puja???' She looked non plussed. Of course she did. I was amazed... she actually knew the lakshmi panchali and the specifics of this goddess' worship then?

My friend burst out laughing. Hey, she brought in some fresh flowers, cleaned the 'temple' at home, spread a fresh cloth, lit some dhoop and sang bhajans... and then distributed the sweets she'd placed in front of the idol, as prasad. There, you had your lakshmi puja.

I was shocked. From where I came from, this was like 'playing at worship'. The way kids would play at 'home making' or 'doctor doctor'. This was drivel... what did this have to do with actual serious ritualistic hindu worship? How was this any different from a children's game of imitating what the grown ups actually do?

Over the years of course my shock has abated. I have realised that this is what 'pooja' in almost every hindu home is. It is the 'playing at worship' accompanied with a sense of faith and belief in god, and a sheer reassuring quality of this 'game' that makes it sacred for those who play it. Lakshmi panchali be damned. God, being our best creation, is flexible to our changing ways. Yes, there is 'god' in that room where this game is played out. The sheer human faith behind the 'game' brings god alive in those moments.

I understand that now. I believe that those prayers, childlike though they may be, (and perhaps because of it) are heard. Somewhere. Somehow.

However, a maturer age intellectual understanding of a phenomenon is never quite as powerful as the instinctive adolescent rejection of it. My sheer disappointment and disdain at my discovery sort of stayed on with me... and perhaps this came from the arrogance of being from a very spirtually awake family, but I found the version of religion that existed around me, to be a childish needy dependance on a 'big daddy' figure to fulfil all wishes and fantasies. There was no god there, just Santa Claus.

Hence I found myself rejecting religion very early in life. A few encounters with chauvanistic narrow minded ways at temples, further eroded my respect for it. The religio-political situation in our country in the past 2 decades put the final seal for me. Religion was a sad, bad thing.

I don't feel good near temples or mosques or any other place of worship. I find no peace, no god, no beauty in any of them, except the architectural aesthetic of it, that too, rarely.

The sight of someone bowing in front of a roadside temple doesn't make me feel good. It fills me with fear and loathing. I imagine swords and knives in that person's hand. I imagine violence and hatred. Religion for me has come to represent the most bigoted, biased, intollerant, violent, conservative side of human beings.

I truly wish every temple, mosque and church in this country could be razed to the ground to make way for schools and hospitals. I wish there would be a blanket ban on all public display of religion - and I smile because I would have to sacrifice my biggest annual cultural experience for it - Durga Puja - but I think the sacrifice is worth it. Durga Puja for me is part cultural, part social, part deeply personally emotional and spiritual an experience. But it is actually a religious display and as far as that goes, it hides within its rich vibrant belly, the seeds of aggression and violence. So in my ideal world, it would have to go. Along with Ganesh Chaturthi, Navratri, Eid, Christmas and the rest of the brouhaha.

All this is still in the realm of 'religion'. Yes, I have in the past few years completely rejected religion. I believe it is the root of much evil across the world and we'd do well without it.

This however did not mean that I had rejected god. I was brought up not to question the validity of god, but to remain a thinking individual in the space of god. It was never a question of whether to worship this entity or not, but how to do so. The 'way' was the liberal, tolerant, secular way. The thinking, spiritually advanced way. But the fact that God 'was'... that was a given.

So why did I start this post saying I am a bad believer? Because over the past few years I have realised how fickle my faith is.

I had never before been confronted with a situation where I had to defend my faith to an atheist or an agnostic. Everybody I'd known before I met R was a believer. With the exception of my dear friend Gorky who's always been a nonbeliever, but a peaceful, non debating non believer. The only conversation I'd ever had about god with Gorky was one where he put our difference down in his amiable succint way - 'you believe because you feel a presence, I don't believe because I don't feel a presence' is all he had to say. And all that needed to be said. It was simple. And needed no further discussion.

Then along came R. A rabid atheist and a staunch rationalist. R cannot understand the need for adults to have this super santa claus. He finds it against reason, adulthood, the scientific temper and basic common sense. His arguments are from a scientific point of view and he asks for scientific elements vis-a-vis god: proof, evidence, emperical experience and material.

All perspectives, which the true believers say don't even apply to faith. Those who are good believers are unfazed by this onslaught of the scientific approach, saying we don't need to provide this proof because this proof exists outside of the space of faith. It is akin to trying to measure pressure with a thermometer or temperature with a telescope. The tool is wrong so the fact that god can't be measured by those standards is not a surprise. Faith cannot be defended with scientific tools any more than weight can be measured with a candybar. It is irrelevant and absurd.

And so the believers believe. And tell you not to apply apples to oranges. And the non believers continue to disbelieve, saying scientific tools are not specific to subjects but a macro approach to matter.

God is not 'matter' counter the faithful.

Show me the evidence of 'god' somehow, says the atheist. Any tool will do, but show me one proof that is not circumstantial or anecdotal.

The faithful don't participate in this line of argument.

And the eternal debate rages on.

Over the years, R has softened (if that is the right word) from being an atheist to an agnostic. He says he's willing to wait for proof but until he gets some he will reserve judgement. He has also discovered his spiritual side and with extensive study of various religious texts, he has started to absorb the message deeply, if not yet convinced about the source being anything other than human. So Mohammad for him is the bedouin in the desert with a vision, Jesus a true humanist ahead of his times, and Krishna a maverick king of ancient India. Were they more than human? He doesn't think so. Did they have deeply profound beliefs and ideas, some dubious, some brilliant? Yes, he does think so.

Sharing in R's journey, I too have changed. Except my journey has been in the reverse direction. I too have become an agnostic. I am not sure now what I believe. Who is this big daddy who we all turn to in our hour of need? Early on in my childhood, I had through some personal realisations, started to restrict my nightly prayers to 'thank yous' instead of 'wishes'. I'd figured we take too little time to acknowledge our blessings and too much wanting for more. Every night for those 3 minutes that I prayed, even on my worst days, I tried to thank this lonely hard working fellow up in the sky for all the good that life had given me. Coming from a reasonably privileged background, I found it shameful to ask for more, and not acknowledge what I already had.

So the wish fulfilling Santa Claus God was not my god in any case. However, this 'god' of mine continued to answer my unspoken prayers, grant my inarticulated wishes and stand by me, the way only god can.

I have had a colourful, chequered life. It has had its moments, both grand and miserable, it has seen death and illness, pain and beauty, and I have always felt that at the end of the day, if I have ever deeply truly wanted something, eventually it has happened.

I attributed it to the grace of this ubiquitous 'god', until R insisted that I question my belief. And I found myself to be a bad believer. His rationalistic approach appealed to me. When I found I could not answer his questions in his language, I did not fault his language, I began to question my faith. I like proof. I like logic. I like emperical evidence.

I shun all superstition and I have great disregard for the 'cover your ass, just in case' mentality, that I see a lot of educated, reasonable people give in to. I find that 'just in case' mentality very pathetic when you know that medicines will cure your illness but you will still wear that locket 'just in case'. When you know dates and positions of the sun and star doesn't really impact your life but you still conduct your ceremonies on those auspicious dates 'just in case'. When you know that a piece of wood or stone is just dross material, but you will keep an idol in one corner of your house 'just in case'.

I find the 'just in case' mentality worse than that of the truly faithful. The truly faithful don't do things in half measure. They believe, and they believe totally and the fact that reason has nothing to do with their convictions, doesn't dull their convictions in the least.

Its the 'just in case' people who make me sick. They are disparaging of the very things they follow, they attempt to defend their actions as 'pleasing parents' or 'following tradition' or 'keeping society happy' and yet somewhere deep down they seem to have a genuine fear that if they flouted these rituals, something bad might just happen to them. So while they know their science, they stick with superstition 'just in case'. This mentality prevents us from going either forward or backward with any strong definite steps. Its a limbo space that is vague and confused and highly irrational.

Hats off to the good believers, those who have no doubt, no complexes, no issues with their ancient beliefs. They bow to every idol, follow every ritual, truly believe that this santa claus, and not their own hardwork or drive, is the cause of every success. They are not aboard two different boats. They are true to themselves and their faith.

I am not one of them. And I am loathe to become a 'just in case' person. When R and I got married we picked a saturday so our friends could attend and we did the rituals that made my mother - and me, to be honest - happy. But at no point did I think that not chosing an auspicious date would in any way marr my marital happiness. I loved the sacred fire and the vibrant rich rituals around it, but I don't think not wearing my sindoor is in any way going to harm R. I wear the sindoor because I love it as a cultural cue.

God for me, I have realised in these past 3 years, is a cultural context, and not one of faith. Rituals are the same. I love them for their aesthetics and for their nostalgic value. I don't think not doing any of them will cause me any harm whatsoever.

R has understood that about me now. I don't try and defend some half baked faith that wilts under the white hot fire of his flawless reason. I simply concede these are habits, and cultural cues, which have strong emotional and aesthetic appeal, and nothing more than that.

I still find myself calling out to my 'god' on days when I am low, or when I wish to be heard by that omnipresent voice. But more and more I begin to realise its a need, not a belief. A dependency and not a conviction, a moment of weakness and not one of strength.

All religious ceremonies make me angry. And feel alienated. Vague references to god make me impatient. Why did god cure your child's sickness and not a pediatrician? If your faith is so strong, why didn't you just pray and not go to a doctor? How is god responsible for the success you saw in your career, and not your own hard work? 'Oh' the faithful counter 'god says you must act'.

Good lord. This god seems to have left a lot of the onus on us, and taken a lot of the credit.

And yet, can I truly say, I no longer believe in God? No, not yet. Its over 30 years of unquestioning faith, which is now beginning to crumble, and making me realise, I don't buy the whole 'faith' deal. It makes no sense to my educated, rational, thinking, sensible self. But still I can't wholly reject god. I need the god I grew up with, even though he's not making sense to me anymore.

That is why I say, I am a bad believer. Which is a far worse thing to be than a non believer, or a devout one.

I am rejecting a god that I cannot kill. 'Just in case'.

In Step Sisters!

2009-11-23T14:24:00.004+05:30

My husband's older daughter, Esha... an absolutely delightful child, with our one-year-old, spoon-weilding, bhangra artist: Shaayari... this was pretty much their first meeting....

Step sisters? More like 'in step' sisters.

2009-11-23T14:21:00.002+05:30

Falling off the edge of the earth
I discovered something sweet

They use gravity to pull you back
And put up signs on every street.

2009-08-27T18:16:00.004+05:30

The heart hums like a refrigerator on contented days,

And tension screech beeps like an inverter on low power.

Happiness comes rushing like the wrap of cool airconditioning on a hot summer day

Joy bubbles over like an electric kettle.

Hope bursts upon like a thousand watt bulb,

And dull drudgery flickers like a tubelight with a faulty choke.

Ideas rush through like a high powered bike.

And they say technology has killed poetry?

Random

2009-08-24T16:48:00.004+05:30

Warning.

This is a HIGHLY amateur video of an EXTREMELY random series of images in which my daughter is doing PRECIOUS little.

Just like her, this video goes absolutely nowhere.
hee.

Golly! My First Lolly!

2009-08-24T16:46:00.002+05:30

Not the Brownings

2009-08-20T12:48:00.003+05:30

Why won't I write you a love song?
Because it's silly to,
To your husband.

To shared meals
And preferred sides of the bed
And favourite sit coms
And what lies ahead....

After those silly Brownings,
Who writes love songs
After the vows?

Who remembers what's at the root
Of the sleepy morning smiles,

Who writes to weekends of lazy loafing
And quickly brushing before a kiss
And sucking in your stomach
Though you have nothing left to hide.

Nobody writes love songs
About the potted plant
That has bloomed after the rains
And a daughter running around,
Nutty and derailed.

A love song in the kitchen
A love song for the laundry basket
A love song to the reading lamp
A love song to a favourite newspaper columnist.

These are not things you write love songs to.
These are merely the places where love lives.
Its home address, so to speak,
Where it hangs up its fineries,
Stretches back and closes its eyes,
And sometimes, goes to sleep.

I Know I'm Cute

2009-06-30T13:30:00.002+05:30

My day out at Ma and Baba's office. They all stare too much. And talk rubbish. But they are sweet. Some of them played with me. Others did funny dances around me. Kinda childish some of them. And all of them seem to have a lisp. Strange. You'd think a radio station would have people with clear diction.

Ho hum. But it became a bit of a bore after a while. So I packed myself off to granny's place. Much more fun there.

Anyhoo. Good experience. Wonder what mom and dad do there day after day hour after hour though. Its quite dull after the first bit of dancing gets over.

Question: do they all greet each other like that every day? Seems quite elaborate, gathering around every person and making funny faces and dancing and talking nonsense. They obviously have a lot of time.

Etymo-illogical

2009-05-20T19:27:00.003+05:30

Why is it called "Baby Sitting" when the baby never sits?

2009-05-07T18:38:00.001+05:30

It doesn’t matter who I’m with
It doesn’t matter where I am
The sun was sinking when you went
The sun will shine wherever you go

This heart is a jingle jangle thing
As Dylan amply demonstrates
And in the wind there’s always a song
A song for those who stray from ways

And thoughts of you in half dreamings
In sweat lined, late noon snoozes
Brings to mind those hybrid things
That the back of the heart stealthily oozes

And I wonder at the mysteries
That cling to the side of the dullest things
And the wonders that they evoke
And the quietness that their passing brings

Cat Scan

2009-04-28T17:31:00.002+05:30

2009-04-21T14:25:00.003+05:30

Actually,
All ink is indellible.

Its the typeface
And computer print out
In their harsh permanent etching on the paper

That are temporal.

The project plan
And the concept note
Armed to the teeth
Sending them out for votes.

Client and departmental head
Anxiety as we go to bed

Will it work?
Does it fit the bill?
Who is the TG?
Do I have the skill?

And all the brouhaha
Around the block
Dancing to the puppeteer
The mice upon the clock

And then you google search a poet
Who wrote with ink on page
With no sense of permanance
With callous disdain for age

And the words remain
Rippling water paint

Impressionist art.
Indellible ink upon the heart.

The Post and the Host

2009-04-18T10:14:00.002+05:30

I realise, blogging, and doing a radio show, have one thing in common.

You ALWAYS do it for one particular set of eyes. And ears.

No, no, no, no, noooo. Please don't tell me it isn't like that. I refuse to believe it. If you weren't doing it for one specific set of eyes, you'd not do it at all. Just like if you're not on the radio for one specific set of ears, you won't be much good at it.

That pair could belong to anyone. A friend, a parent, a teacher, a mentor, a competitor, an enemy, a lover. But subconsciously there is that one person we ALWAYS keep in mind.

So who's yours? Identifying who one is posting, or hosting, for, can be quite an insight into one's own personality. Sometimes a nasty shock. Sometimes a hilarious realisation. Often a smiling dawning.

So then? Who's yours?

Therapy

2009-04-18T09:36:00.005+05:30

No approval required
No validation sought
No truck with sentiments
Sold or bought

No 'you love me more'
Or, 'I couldn't care less'
No 'I did this for you'
Or, 'Is it over yet?'

No singing for your supper
No heartbreaks before lunch
No dinner-time passion
No morning-after hunch

This is the space
So white, so right
This is a smile
That hides no fears

This is the place
They call unconditional
This is joy in itself
And simplicity in tears

For all of us neurotic, chaotic, psychotic, frenzied
Half formed, half validated, incomplete, expressionless, valueless, schizophrenic
Underconfident, incontinent, half hurt, half mad, half crazed,
delusional, illusional, self obsessed, self glorifying, self worth hunting,
seeking, peeking, meek and beseeching, wondering, fearing,
hyper-sensitive, hyper-ventilating,
book-keeping, score tallying, sentiment spinning, value seeking hordes

I recommend the simple therapy
Of the love that is parenting.

It Became Me

2009-04-14T12:13:00.004+05:30

I don't quite know when
It became me.

The choices, the voices
The silent regrets

The spoken, and unspoken
The miasma set

I am uncertain yet, but the writing was loud
In bold purple, behind a scarlet cloud

It became me
When I claimed a hiding place
It became me
When I made my out-there face
It became me
When I stopped running and got out of breath
It became me
When I began worrying about death

It became me
When I began to ignore that it was a misfit.
It became me
When I stopped looking for it.

It became me.
A semi-person that I did not wish to be.

To R, Trying to be FathR.

2009-01-13T13:34:00.003+05:30

Welcome to my world, my love, (albeit 6 months late!)

Now that you have finally decided to change diapers and clean poop, and we can hope for some entertaining moments in the days to come... here are a few handy tips, beyond the cotton wool and bum cream...

Parenting is an inner revolution before an outer one... its a change in perspective before a change in diaper...

The poop that needs most cleaning is the mess in our own heads:
- I need my sleep
- I need my ease
- I need my comforts
- I need my food
- I need my leisure
- I need my love
- I need my laughter
- I need my health
- I need my joy
- I need my time
- I need my way
- I need, I need, I need...............................

And then a child comes into our lives to take us out of our vortex of need and greed, and tranfer us to another space called 'give'. (just replace the word 'need' with 'give' in the above sentences....)

By nature, by need, by necessity then, this is about a journey into selflessness. Its no longer about my sleep, my popularity, my social life, my sense of disgust or horror or shock, my eating time, my bathing time, my quilt, my bed, my time.... its about sticking on, regardless.

Its about knowing that my arms are THE space. Not the 'alternate' space, not the 'sometimes' space, not the 'for a few moments' space, not the 'till somebody comes along' space, not the 'I'm in the mood to play' space.... but THE ALWAYS AND FOREVER SPACE. A space the child will flow into and tuck into and snuggle into and sleep into.... Because the child will know it is not a temporary space.

Which brings me to the other discovery of mine:

Parenting is about going from Solid to Fluid....

You become fluid about your time.
You become fluid about your habits.
You become fluid about your sleep.
You become fluid about your meals.
You become fluid about your comforts....

And most importantly...

You become fluid in your body.................. remember how we were taught in school that liquids have no shape of their own and that they take the shape of the container they are in?

In this case, it is the container that takes the shape of the contained. You have to flow yourself around the baby... your arms, your neck, your shoulder, the crooks and crevices of you need to be constantly flowing, undulating, adjusting into and around the shape of the baby.... the baby will give you cues and clues... you simply need to respond with the fluidity of your body...

The baby will not adjust into your arms... your arms will need to adjust around the baby...

Think of yourself as liquid, eternally shaping to this soft form.............................

So then, my dear R, starting today you become an exercise in fluidity...

Fluidity of mind and fluidity of body.................

And then of course, there is the poop..................

Good luck!

Purani Jeans

2008-12-23T21:07:00.003+05:30

I fit into my old pair of jeans today.

My size 26, low waist jeans.

The jeans I used to wear before I got pregnant last November.

The jeans my brother had predicted I'd be able to squeeze into by my birthday next year in January. I beat his prediction by 17 days.

The jeans which I have been waiting to wear, ever since my daughter was born 4 months and 26 days ago.

The jeans which for me is my identity, my self, my individuality, my confidence, my 'me'.

Sayema did a connect with me on Purani Jeans today on Radio Mirchi. I had no idea that the show I had conceptualised and named five and a half years ago, would become such a personal reality and delight for me one day.

I love my old jeans. My Purani Jeans.

2008-12-05T14:57:00.008+05:30

I have not been able to get this one thought out of my head.

What if, on that fateful night in Mumbai, some of the guests at the hotel - maybe those who were in point blank range of the terrorists' rifles and had sub zero chances of survival - had decided on the spur of the moment to hurl themselves at the gunmen, instead of towards the floor? What if four or five of them, emulating th jihadis, had decided to say bugger all to personal safety and in a moment of insane passion, had decided to take the gunmen down, with them?

Nearly 200 people dead. More than 300 injured. Over 500 people against a mere 5.

Just imagine if, the next time something like this happens, a few regular, common, normal Indians just decide to become as suicidal as these fanatical men, and make up their mind to take the bullet head on, but not lying down?

What if some of those guests at the Taj had gotten disgusted enough with all these terror attacks to forget for a moment about instinctive survival? What if eight or ten or fifteen people had jumped each rifle wielding maniac?

Sure. The first few would have definitely died. But even with rifles and grenades, its impossible to stand up to over a dozen people charging at you, people disgusted enough, frustrated enough and pissed off enough to risk certain death.

Can you imagine if that happens the next time? Can you imagine what'll happen if these jehadis actually pass on their frenzied way of being to us? Where we are matched as equals with them - because just like them, we no longer care if we die. For the larger cause.

Except, in our case, the larger cause is Peace & Security.

Just imagine.

GORKY

2008-12-02T21:41:00.014+05:30

This good looking man is GORKY. RD Burman fan, film maker and best friend. GORKY insists that a passing mention of him in my previous post is mighty inadequate and he must be given an exclusive, in bold, all caps. So here it is. A post specifically about this phenomenon in my life called GORKY. And yes, every mention, I promise, will be in all caps and in bold. Just for the pleasure of embarassing the daylights out of him. I hope many of our common friends see this post. Just so they can ensure he never lives this one down.

So then. First things first. Why does he have such an unusual name? Well, a bit like the Namesake. His dad was reading a book by Maxim Gorky when he was born. As GORKY says, thank god he wasn't reading Munshi Premchand. Ha.

GORKY came into my life when I was in college. For the first 2 years, as we got to know each other, spent hours drinking tea and sharing cigarettes at Jai Singh Lawns at Hindu College, I mistakenly believed that GORKY studied somewhere else and only came to Hindu to hang out with pals. It was only in the third year that I realised that not only was he a Hinduiite, he was apparantly in my class. I hadn't realised it over 2 years because he never attended any classes. How he managed to pass is a bit of a mystery. I suspect it had something to do with a lot of luck and some of my notes.

After college, GORKY moved to Mumbai and after months of scrounging around in that grand phenomenon called the 'mumbai struggle', he finally joined Kundan Shah (of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron Fame) by telling him an appallingly bad joke about a man in a desert with a camel. GORKY had been shadowing and stalking Shah for days before this joke-telling meeting, and when finally Shah asked him if he had a sense of humour, he discovered quickly that what GORKY had was more akin to a nonsense of humour, and hastily hired him. I've always had this suspicion that he basically wanted to get the meeting over with as quickly as possible, after that disgusting joke. A few really bad movies later - Shah was obviously half the man and less than half the director, without his charismatic and quirky writer by his side, Ranjit Kapoor - GORKY was back to struggling and to one meal a day. So he did something extremely strange. He went to Indonesia to make TV serials in Bhaasa. Ya, I know, kinda weird. Whoever thought Indonesians needed us to make their serials for them. But apparantly they did. When GORKY went there, they were still, in terms of production quality, inhabiting the DD days. Apparantly introducing things like slow motion and montage made GORKY a veritable legend in that land. Wheee.

Djakarta is also where GORKY met his future wife, Gul. They made these phenomenally slick, but story wise largely Ekta Kapoor inspired, serials together - what a blissful way to fall in love.

Today GORKY lives in Mumbai and makes TV serials. He and his wife are the producers of Chaand Ke Paar Chalo on NDTV Imagine. One day GORKY will make a film. A great film. An award winning film. And he has promised to invite me on stage when he receives his award. If he has not managed to meet my daughter by then - she's four months old and he still hasn't seen her, which is unforgivable - I too will refuse to attend the awards ceremony.

Now, why is this post about GORKY? Well, largely because he said he wanted a solo. But partially also because, like most other people, my mind too has been caught up with myriad thoughts on what FAITH actually means in today's world. Ever since the Mumbai terror strike, many of us have been debating issues of violence and hatred, liberalism versus intolerance, hatred vis-a-vis love, inclusion in the face of exclusion, world peace as opposed to an Us vs Them mentality. These issues are hugely complex, riddled with potholes and prone to many layers of interpretations.

What has all that got to do with my best friend? Well, in a way, nothing. But then, there is this one thing. Once in a while, very rarely, one is fortunate enough to have a person in one's life who becomes the measure of one's value system, of good and of bad, of what relationships are about, what constitutes the emotion of trust. On countless ocassions, I have found myself referring to my friendship with GORKY to understand wildly disparate things in my life: my relationships, my interactions, my choices, my priorities. My husband knows that GORKY is a reference point in my life that helps me unravel many complicated knots, solve many thorny issues. Everytime I have a problem with somebody - anybody - I ask myself the simple question: "if this was a situation between me and GORKY instead of me and this other person, would I still react the same way?" I have been amazed at the number of times my anger, mistrust or hatred for that other person has vanished immediately. Whenever I doubt a person's integrity, loyalty or committment, I put GORKY in that person's place and realize how easy it is to empathise, trust and forgive. Because I choose to trust, all my reactions flow from that trust. Anger dissipates, suspicion dissolves, hurt vanishes. Because I choose to understand, my responses are born out of that understanding. And I find myself a better, warmer, less angry, more generous person.

GORKY doesn't even know that I do this. But I have figured on countless occassions how simple and easy human interaction can be, because of this blessed friendship in my life.

These aggressors, who are waging war on the world, obviously believe everybody is against them. That their very identity is threatened, that sanctioned by a holy book, it is their beholden duty to wage battle against those they consider pagan. These young men have been brainwashed into believing that injustice has been done to their ilk, and it is time to seek vengance. These young men are misguided, confused and very very violent. They are extremely intelligent, very focused, very committed individuals. As a pal of mine said a few days back - with a different orientation, these same men would be an asset to any country and institution. But these young men have been taught to disbelieve, disassociate and distrust. And their distrust begets greater distrust, casts larger shadows of suspicion over the whole world, makes countries retaliate in anger and horror towards their communities, thereby fulfilling the wishful prophecy that they are discriminated against. The inexorable wheel of mistrust turns and becomes a vicious cycle.

In this atmosphere of hatred, suspicion and mistrust, I often juxtapose such complexities with a simplicity in my life called GORKY. A friend, a trusted person, somebody who I will always believe is right, before I believe that he is wrong. When GORKY can't keep his word, I don't doubt his intention, I understand his situation. When GORKY is incommunicado, I don't think he has forgotten me, I realise how screwed his schedule must be. When GORKY says something hurtful, I don't examine his words, I examine what in me caused him to say what he did.

I do not extend this spirit, this expansive way of being to too many other people in my life. I am a lesser, meaner, more angry, less loving person towards many other people some of the time, some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time.

That says something. It says Trust is not born out of people's actions always. Sometimes it's the other way round. Actions and words are born out of a space called Trust. Something as tiny and microcosmic as a personal friendship gives me cues on how human behavior may be genuinely impacted.

What we need desparately in this world today is that ability: to see the right before the wrong. To give the benefit of the doubt before the rejection of judgement. To make bridges and not trenches, to first believe that nobody is against me, there is no agenda, there is no conspiracy theory, that life is fairly simple and the whole world is not out to insult me, my faith and my identity. To chill. To relax in the knowledge that the other guy does not weild a sword. Before we question the validity of the agenda that these violent young men have, we need to question why they have an agenda at all. Why any of us need to have an agenda at all. Even before the whole thing is dangerous and tragic, it's all so melodramatic, so immature and foolish. It's like kids playing at chor sipahi or GI Joes. Simulating Star Wars or Spiderman. It's a fantasy led make belief world with the maturity of a 5 year old. Who on earth has time for agendas between EMIs and paycuts? Who the hell needs to lead a diatribe against a community when we hardly notice the individual? In a world where there is barely enough time to love, where do we find all this time to hate?

My friendship with GORKY simplifies many things in my head for me. It tells me how easy human interaction can be. It shows me how agenda-less all communication can be. It proves to me how simple Trust can be.

The GORKY factor in my life is one that whispers gently: There is another way. There is ALWAYS another way.

Ramu ki Aag

2008-12-02T14:39:00.008+05:30

Poor RGV. He could well take a note out of Billy Joel's song book and lament "We Didn't Start the Fire". The fuss around his Taj visit, the full blooded condemnation of his trip to the site and the public outrage around his red circled face on news channels has left even the phlegmatic film maker on the back foot.

I don't get what the brouhaha is all about. Isn't there far more worth concerning ourselves with, than who was part of the hapless VRD's entourage to the site? What does it matter to the issues of national security whether a film maker or a CM's actor son went along or not? After all, barely 96 hours before their visit, the Taj had been visited by those whose entry should have been checked and stopped with far greater alacrity. They went in with guns blazing, destroying our very sense of personal security and well being, and now we were going nuts about RGV visiting the charred and crumbling remains?

Hey, some of my friends in Mumbai went to the site too. Maybe it was morbid curiosity, who knows. But that's only human. We saw the drama unfold on TV for days. Why blame somebody for actually wanting to go and see the place where it all took place?

Here's my guess on what happened. Ritesh boy told daddy dear that he wanted to come along whenever daddy visited. Makes sense - daddy has security. Ritesh wouldn't need to take along his own (if he still harbours illusions of being mobbed that is, after his flop career).

When daddy dear called son to join him, son was with RGV. So Ramu decided to tag along.

Isn't that fairly harmless? Deshmukh surely wasn't going there to give his son and the film maker a 'tour' as the news channels alleged. Even if he fails in the sensitivity department, he can't be that stupid. Not after what happened to RR Patil and Shivraj Patil.

But more importantly, here's what I am genuinely nonplussed about. Why on earth is everybody up in arms if Ram Gopal Verma wants to make a movie around the South Mumbai terror attack? Why is it the sign of ultimate crassness and of a profiteering mentality? Why is the very thought repugnant and horrible?

Film making is a creative art. It is a form of personal expression and a vibrant way to make a statement, show one's point of view and speak one's mind. Yes, sure it's also a profitable business, but it can as much easily run into huge losses. And the reason the commercial stakes are so high is because making a movie also costs much more, takes much more time, physical labour and coordination effort than say, putting pen to paper. You can't just wait for inspiration to strike, you have to do a lot of spadework before a movie idea get translated onto celluloid.

After the terror attack, poets have written poems, journalists have written essays. If a musician performs a piece, a composer composes a special tribute or a painter puts on canvas his personal horror and grief we will stand up and laud their efforts. We will read articles, share poetry, forward blog posts and treat them all as one consolidated creative expression of solidarity.

But if somebody wants to make a movie on the same subject, we will call him crass.

My heart goes out to all my very dear film makers friends in Mumbai - Imtiaz, Gorky, Bijesh, Chandu. I can't help but wonder what they are to do, if they wish to express their anger, hurt, horror, grief and frustration. Must they curb and bottle their feelings simply because their medium of expression is celluloid?

I am a writer. Two night after the attack a poem came to me and it is up on my blog since then. I've got emails, comments, smses and telephone calls about its relevance and validity. What if a film maker wants express how he is feeling about the same issue? He is not allowed to work in the only medium he finds himself able to? That is crass and profiteering simply because a film has to be relased at the box office and be put through the vagaries of hit and flop, while a poem need not be sent to a publisher, a painting may not see a galary?

Let's get real. It doesn't cost that much to write a poem or paint a picture. They can be personal forms of expression while a movie necessarily has to be a public form, depending on an audience for its very survival. That does not mean that people working with the medium have simply become desensitized businessmen. It's also their chosen field of creativity. Cut them some slack.

Cut poor RGV some slack. The hilarious sms floating around about him is a telling comment on how things can get blown out of proportion, with neither logic, nor perspective:
Ram Gopal Verma Ki Kamaai, Do Sarkaar Banai, Ek Giraai!!

Ha ha. Yeh aag bichaarey Ramu ne nahin lagaai!

That Thing Called Home

2008-12-01T22:22:00.012+05:30

I am overwhelmed.
By the simplicity of our lives,
Holding the largeness of our love.

Like a seashell holding the ocean.
Like a humble meal hiding exotic spices.
Like a skylark unmindful of the mysteries of its song.
Like a night breeze on a balcony fragrant with drunken blooms.

I am amazed.
At the ordinariness of living.
That fills out with the breath of life.

Quote Hanger

2008-12-01T14:41:00.000+05:30

If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside. - Robert X. Cringely

2008-11-28T13:11:00.012+05:30

यह शहर मेरा डरा सा है

इस शहर को फिर आबाद करो

किसी भी खुदा तक जो पहुंचे

ऐसी कोई फरियाद करो

वो शहर जो लाखों की पनाह थी

आज वो ख़ुद बेपनाह सा है

वो जहाँ भीड़ छटती न थी

आज वही शहर तन्हा सा है

Hey, Its Love!

2008-11-18T23:25:00.005+05:30

This falling in love business is an extremely tricky one.

For starters, it has no sense of time or timing. It comes upon you when you are most unprepared, and it stays away when every fibre in your being is prepared and anticipating.

Secondly, it comes with its ancilliary complicated emotions. Emotions that are bloody tough to handle and which come as these unwanted latch ons with the primary feeling. You'd like to shake these unwelcome additions off, but you never seem able to. Feelings like anxiety, worry, tension, insecurity, fear.

Yes. I am in love. All over again. After 5 years of an intense relationship and 2 years of marriage, I need to tell R. That its official. That I am in love.

And boy. Am I glad I wrote my post Nappy Rash when I did. Because if I hadn't, I'd have clean forgotten exactly how tough this road to amore had been. How fraught with misgiving and fear, how seeped in inadequacy and self doubt...

Yes, its official. I am in love with our daughter. I can't imagine when I said 'I can't cope, its too crazy, I am overwhelmed...."

Because now, no mile is too long, no night too exhausting, no effort too much.

I am in love. I adore her. I dote on her. I could do 48 hour days for her. And still smile.

Pyaar hai hi aisi kutti cheez, kya karein.

So R.... eat your heart out. You have competition. Serious competition! :-)

(except, he seems to be falling in love with the same person, with the same intensity... so.... um.... boy... competition was never this tough....)

Over Exposed

2008-10-26T22:17:00.005+05:30

What was the dream again?

Somebody tell me.

What was that thing, so far?

Behind the shadow lines?

Where did it go?

That train that left from nowhere?

How was it sung?

That song with no one tune?

I laughed, I remember.

It was crystal lilac blue.

And it took on hues

From the seas and sand.

But then again, I could be wrong.

Perhaps the prisms in my mind,

Left me blind.

Genetic Coding

2008-10-11T15:16:00.014+05:30

She’s made of passion,
She’s made of fear
She’s made of broken things held dear

She’s a song left half sung,
Beside blue seas
She’s the many half faces
Of the many ‘you’s, ‘me’s
She’s the telephone chat
We never quite finished
She’s the empty glass
And the refill in it
She’s the books of poetry
Inscribed, exchanged
She’s the music copied
The moods arranged

She’s the misunderstanding that got resolved
She’s that puzzle called us. The one we solved.

7th October 2008

The Trade of Tradition

2008-10-11T13:23:00.005+05:30

I bring my clutter, you bring your mess,
Some floral patterns; sticks of incense
A book leafed through, some prayers read,
Patterned afternoons, what to have with bread
When to bring out the wine, how the tea is had
What god to cherish, which demon was bad
New clothes, old habits, which magazines to scan
What teams to support, in whose life span
The cricket chased
Through lazy days
The music we bought
The poets we sought….

It’s an exchange of ritual.
That cluttered thing,
This trade of tradition
That lovers bring.

6th Oct 2008: Durga Pujo, Mahasaptami

Half a Spoon of Sugar in my Tea

2008-10-03T13:20:00.003+05:30

Lets love... but not passionately
Lets protest... but not vehemently
Lets talk in half whispers...
Lets weigh life out in half measures...
Lets just have half a spoon of sugar in my tea

Lets sulk... but still talk of the necessary stuff
Lets quit... but still take the ocassional puff
Lets form only half pictures,
Lets sense life out in half pleasures
Lets just have half a spoon of sugar in my tea

Lose weight but don't be skinny
Make friends but not soul mates
Taste everything but don't pig
Eat all your meals in quarter plates

Don't go overboard
Don't overdo it
Hold back a bit
Don't screw it

Give up sweets but don't make your coffee bitter
Don't laugh out loud, can't you just titter?
Exercise, but exercise caution too
Have a view but pander to other notions too

Why are you so trigger happy?
Why are you so sugar rushed?
Why can't you just have half a spoon of sugar in your tea?

To a Higher God

2008-10-02T17:18:00.001+05:30

There is a disturbing, scary wave in the air in our country today. It is wave that follows every bomb blast and precedes every festival.

It's more sinister than a wave of communal violence or aggression or hatred. It is a wave called communal identity. Suddenly each one of us are retreating back into our rigid religious identities and instead of opening ourselves up to a wider sense of self, we are shrinking into narrower definitions of who we are.

If things continue in this light, soon India will once again fall prey to the worst communal violence ever, maybe not seen since the days of partition. From isolated bomb blasts and area specific rioting, we will rapidly flame into the worst nationwide conflagrations ever. With global intolerance peaking against every community possible except one's own, this Us vs Them fight is poised at a nasty, sinister place.

It's simple. If we don't stop being "Us", the rest of the world will not stop being "Them". So lets take a first step.

If you click on the url provided below, you will find some of the most evocative prayers from every religion. I request you to please put your name against a prayer that is NOT from a religion you were born into. And if you like, then a pledge below that.

It does not matter if you are an atheist or an agnostic. The very idea is to reject a preconceived identity and be willing to put one's name next to an alien one. If every Indian can do that and truly believe that no, they will NOT rot in hell for doing this, then maybe this country will stop exploding every day.

After you've done your bit, and if you feel strongly about this issue, please do mail this link out to as many people as you can. What is important is that this philosophy be passed on: that there is a higher God than the petty gods who create hatred between us all. And yes, it is possible to pray together, crossing all barriers, for peace and prosperity in this world.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=9Gk7DKo4tfW2EXmtdC5zfw_3d_3d

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

2008-09-12T19:18:00.007+05:30

That's the plight of this poor sad crippled corrupt country. And who can blame anyone? In a nation where so much goes wrong, who is going to notice the few times when they don't? Or rather, who is going to notice that sometimes when something goes wrong, it may not be because of the flawed character of our confusing country?

The way we, the westernised, urbanised, public school educated, english speaking cosmopolitan lot, jump to blame the entire system and machinery here whenever we have an unpleasant experience, reminds me of these lines from Tagore's wonderful poem Puraaton Bhritto (the old faithful servant):
Bhooter Moton Chehaara Jaimon
Nirbodh Oti Ghor
Jaa Kichhu Harai Ginni Baulen
Keshta Baitai Chor!

Translated, it means: [The old servant Keshta] has a face like a ghost, and brains softer than pulp; and whenever anything gets misplaced around the house, the mistress automatically assumes that Keshta is the thief!

Tagore's poem of course goes on to paint a tragi-comic, pathos filled picture of this old faithful - a fixture in homes of yore. And similarly misunderstood and short changed, yet loved and cherished, in a curiously confused way by the employers.

Today our country's lot is a bit like Keshta's. Whatever goes wrong, we are quick to jump to the conclusion that it is because of the inherent "there is something rotten in the state of Denmark" situation here.

I had an interesting experience today. A friend of mine had to attend a special function at 8:45am. where his autistic daughter had to perform Gulzar's evocative bhajan "Humko Mann Ki Shakti Dena". Needless to say, he was excited, and made sure he reached the venue well within the time that his ex wife had specified.

When I spoke to him around noon to find out how the performance went, he had reached his office. And was mighty pissed off. In response to my query he rued, "I didn't get to see her sing. I was late for work and the performance got held up because the minister who's the chief guest, was late."

"Late? By how many hours?" I asked flabbergasted, "Its noon now, and the performance was scheduled for 8:45 I thought?!?"

"Are you new to this country?" he asked gruffly. India bashing, by the way, is my friend's favourite passtime. His tirade against all that is woefully wrong here, never seems to end. And his hatred for this country is only matched by his passionate admiration of the west and the values they espouse. Values, that I must confess, I hold very dear too, and often uphold in the face of classic Indian sentimentality and lack of clarity. Though I can't say I share my friend's total rejection of this country. Simply can't relate to that.

On further enquiry I was even more disgusted by the morning's episode. Apparantly the function was to recognise and reward institutions engaged in special education; the minister was to give away the awards and the kids were to perform. Hence my friend's daughter was there representing her institute - Action for Autism.

"Hang on a minute," I said, incensed. "So that means ALL the kids there were special children, right? Either autistic or spastic or retarded....?"

"Yup" my friend fumed. "And they were made to wait for over 2 hours for the minister for social justice and empowerment, Meira Kumar."

Needless to say, the story made me furious. True to my trigger happy style, I instantly started working the phones. Being with the TOI group has its advantages. Within the hour I had passed on the story to the programming head of Radio Mirchi Delhi as well as 2 different editors from the TOI, as well as the brand head of Indian Express.

Which is when my friend got a bit miffed with me - after all, not everybody wants to spend a regular work day rubbing ministers the wrong way. An argument on integrity versus hypocrisy followed. He agreed to do the story. And that is when he decided to cross check the facts with his ex wife. Ex wife confirmed the facts but couldn't be sure.

At some point my friend realised that with such a vague and unclear picture, it wasn't right to give a story out to media. So when one of the journos finally called him, rather than giving some half clear account, he passed on the phone number of A.F.A so that the journo could get her story directly from the institute.

The journo called back in five minutes. Apparantly the minister was only 15 minutes late. The kids had all been called early for rehersals. The performance had happened as scheduled.

My friend had missed it because he had been told by his ex wife to be there at 8:45, and he had planned his day accordingly. And the reason he'd been given that time is because she had been asked to reach by then, and she had obviously not bothered herself with further details on what was rehearsal time and what time the performance was. After all, she had to be there early anyway. Perfectly reasonable, perfectly understandable.

Obviously I sent one round of apologies out to the various people I'd contacted. They all generously said it was ok - guess they are used to false leads.

A slight bit of confusion handled without too much fuss. But what I was really taken up by was that mid day conversation about "the sad state of India".

India. Guilty until proven Innocent.

No matter who actually gets what facts wrong, at the end of the day, it's a classic case of 'Keshta Baitai Chor'.

The Lady and The Throne

2008-09-08T19:54:00.001+05:30

One is my mother and the other my daughter. Can't tell which one is more pleased!!!

Neck to Neck

2008-09-07T20:03:00.006+05:30

I was telling Ranjit the other night that while many of the things that have been said about motherhood have seemed like hyperboles and cliches to me, and, as I'd mentioned in my post titled Nappy Rash, a lot of it appear to be hand downs from male fantasies, there is one strange thing that does happen.

The committment to the child's well being, the sense that nothing, absolutely nothing in the world should make her uncomfortable, is an almost matter of fact setting I find in myself.

It's weird - it doesn't feel like a new emotion, or a wonderous new sentiment. There, in fact, is nothing sentimental about it. It's so part of me, it's almost as though the feeling always existed, and has simply been switched on.

And the sheer unacceptability of her discomfort is, as I said, almost cut and dried; matter of fact. Her pain is inconceivable, like walking naked down the road is inconceivable, like peeing in your drawing room in inconceivable, like not eating for a week is inconceivable - ya sure all these things can happen, but one doesn't think of them in the normal course of things.

They are simply not done.

My baby in pain? Yeah, happens probably. But it's just not done.

Getting Cheeky

2008-09-07T19:47:00.004+05:30

Can't even begin to tell you how it feels, my friends!!

Bottle The Bitch

2008-09-01T20:41:00.008+05:30

No, I'm not talking about pickling and bottling any villanous bitch in my life.

I am talking about bottles. And what big bitches they are in a new mother's life. I have envisaged many scenarios in life, I am fully aware of the 'aggressive person' tag that I carry and therefore have often thought there could various types of rivals in my life... funnily enough, there never were any. Maybe its arrogance; maybe I never considered anybody good enough to be a rival in the school, college or the work space.... call it absent mindedness; maybe I never noticed when one popped up... whatever the case may be, the fact remains that I don't remember ever having a rival....

Until now.

When I was planning and shopping for my new baby, right up to the 7th month of my pregnancy, I bought many things. My mother in law, sisters in law and my mother too put together a lot of stuff they thought I'd need.

Therefore, one of the very first things I acquired were bottles, bottle nipples and bottle sterilisers. Simple enough, you'd think, right?

Wrong.

As soon as the baby's been born, and your stitches hurt, you look like a bloated balloon and all you want to do is sleep, one ham handed nurse appears out of nowhere and starts squeezing your breasts pretty much with the same delicate touch and sensitivity as one juices a lemon. With pretty much the same results. A reluctant sticky trickle.

Then she makes a disgusted face, picks up your precious wrinkled bundle and stomps off. You look on bewildered.

Thats when the head shaking and tongue clicking begins. Congratulations. A nemesis called Breast Feeding has just entered your life.

Little did I know when the bottles, nipples and sterilisers were acquired, that the very use of them will be considered akin to black magic. All real mothers, all good mothers ONLY BREASTFEED.

Get used to these two words. In large font, bold, all capitals. They will come back to haunt you, new mom, every day, every moment, every miserable inadequate trickle by trickle in those first few nightmarish weeks. Doctor's prescriptions to friends' advice, notes comparing colleagues to internet information, slightly older new moms to slightly interfering old maids - everyone and everything will extol the virtues of great milk engorged breasts and of mothers who have gushed out rivers of the white nectar for their babies to draw sustenance from.

Every single paediatrician's prescription I have so far - whether I went for my baby's vaccination or a common cold - had those formidable words printed at the bottom: BREAST FEED ONLY. NO BOTTLE FEED. The icing on the cake was what I noticed on my second visit to the doctor's clinic, on the soft board in the reception area - believe it or not, a roll call of honour, of all those babies who'd never been given the bottle! With a little 'take a bow, mothers' congratulatory line at the bottom. The sheet of paper had row upon neat row of babies' names, mothers' names and mothers' mobile numbers - apparantly these milk flowing demi goddesses had happily consented to having their phone numbers plastered all over a doctor's reception because they didn't mind their privacy being invaded if they could be of some help to us hapless lot.

Ok, so you're still not getting the drift? Whats the big deal you ask?

The big deal my dear is the simple truth that some women simply don't have enough milk. They need to either add on formula feed to breast feed, or at times, totally substitute with formula. HOWEVER, when you are a new mom, you NEVER seem to come across such women. All the moms you meet were milk river gangotris. They had so much milk their breasts hurt. They had so much milk they had to let it all out during their baths. They had so much fucking milk that their babies gagged on the mighty streams.

Bah.

Except for one very dear very honest friend who called me from the U.S. and told me not to feel guilty about formula at all, none of my contemporaries said anything about inadequacy. They were all splendidly adequate. If anything, they didn't know what to do with all this milk of human kindness. They spurted, they soaked, they overflowed. Paucity? They had never even heard of such a problem apparantly. I was a freak.

Well, my baby is nearly four months old now and I know I am not a freak. Many women face exactly the same problem. Some don't realise or recognise it. Some are in denial. Some hide it. And yes, of course some also genuinely don't have it. But guess what? The genuine ones don't send you on guilt trips. They tell you to chill, relax and enjoy your baby, and let good old lactogen step in to save the day if need be.

God bless my mother, my mother in law, my gynaecologist and my husband who relentlessly encouraged me to give my baby girl the bottle whenever I felt inadequate, restless or tired. God bless them for being practical, sane and yes, very importantly, funny. Thank god for my nut of a husband who kept saying - "look at me, bottle fed and VP at a radio network. Look at you - bottle fed and another VP at the same network." Idiot.

Their support helped me cope with the fact that I had had a baby in my mid 30s, and after my history of huge gynae issues it was a miracle in itself that I'd conceived naturally and delivered a healthy child. Their lack of judgement of me or my milk supply allowed me to rediscover my real self sooner, because I could step out for a meal or a coffee and not worry about my baby's next feed. Their refusal to see the output of my breasts as a sign of my competence as a mother helped me get back to a dieting and exercising regimen sooner than I could have otherwise.

Now that I have gotten over the guilt and the angst and the sheer sense of failure, I hear of new mothers who can't go anywhere or do anything with themselves because their babies are stuck to their breasts like leeches. Hey, thats exactly what I went through. 5 hours non stop and the baby still cried and still wanted more. First of all, I didn't want to be cruel to the poor kid: she obviously wasn't getting enough. Secondly, hey, is it a crime, I DIDN'T LIKE BEING THAT WAY. Stuck, rooted, bored, fat, useless, brain dead, baby breasted and glassy eyed. I am sorry for not being sorry. I am sorry for opting out of that way of being. I don't think that that kind of exhausting, demotivating and completely energy sapping way of life was the only way to prove to the world that I was a caring mom and my baby was my biggest priority.

Heck. Why should their be any way to prove anything to the world? What my baby means to me is something for me to know and her to feel. A few bottles of formula will not determine how much I love my child.

Trust me, I am not making a big deal of a small issue. If you are planning to biologically produce a a baby, or if you partner is, believe me, this will become a bigger deal than you can even begin to imagine.

So whether you are male or female, in case you are planning a family, here's my little bit of advice: do certainly breast feed / encourage your partner to breast feed because it is genuinely beneficial, genuinely healthy for the baby. Nothing compares to breast milk in terms of nutrition, immunity and basic bone building. But, please please please don't kill yourself over it if you find that you can't do it, or can only do it partially. It is ok. Genuinely ok.

Because, like my mom said: if you go insane, its unlikely to help your baby.

A Month of Motherhood

2008-08-26T22:30:00.005+05:30

1. A "wailing baby" graduates from being an irritating experience to a heart breaking one.

2. Within a span of 30 days, your middle of the night thoughts gradually shift from "god wish I could go back to sleep" to "god wish she could be comfortable again"

3. Smells stop bothering you. Any kind of smells.

4. You change 5 times a day, for the first time in your life, not for vanity.

5. Checking email becomes the biggest adventure of your life.

6. Taking a bath becomes a luxury and a high point.

7. You develop a whole new sense of respect for a phenomenon called 'silence'.

8. All sense of personal privacy goes for a merry toss. You can expose your breasts in front of nearly anyone.

9. You can't remember what lipstick looks like.

10. You make the world's most boring conversation.

11. You look like shit. A lot of shit - since you're grossly overweight.

12. Your concept of time gets redfined into 2 hour slots.

13. You define 4 hours of undisturbed sleep as a "relaxed easy night".

A Short Bark of a Poem

2008-08-20T22:08:00.004+05:30

If I wasn't so tired, I'd be in rage.

Only neanderthal men refuse to change nappies in this day and age.

Nappy Rash

2008-08-20T20:19:00.005+05:30

Now, I must word this post most carefully, because I do hope that when my daughter grows up she will be sufficiently interested in me to want to visit my blogs - current or old - and read up on old posts.

So nowhere must I express a sentiment in a manner that is either inaccurate, or exaggerated, or unfair.

However, I also hope that my daughter's mind, moulded as it will be in her formative years by the way her parents think, will be lateral enough, if nothing else, to understand and empathise with the sentiments expressed ahead. And she will not take personal slight.

The bald fact remains: adorable though new born babies are, the first few weeks after their arrival is not fun. No, its neither an enriching, nor a fulfilling, nor a heart stopping, nor an "I was born for this" nor a "this is the true meaning of life" type of experience.

It's plain exhuasting. And bloody dull.

And whoever first introduced the myth that its the most fulfilling moment in a woman's life, was definitely a man.

Nappies and bottles, feeding schedules and milk adequacy, farts and burps, baths and belches, diapers and sleep deprivation, is not the stuff that "life's purposes" are made of. Plus, if the baby cries in that especially heart wrenching baby way, there is distress to top it all. You hate to see her in pain. And you want to do everything in your power to ease it. And sometimes you can't.

No, its not fun.

What sees me through however, is the constant image of a toothless toddler chattering to me. Or a voluble five year old asking me ceaseless questions. Or a confident ten year old telling me exactly how things are. Or a confused teenager not quite being able to articulate her shadow world of pain and perplexity. Or an opinionated young woman taking me on with her radical political views.

Every time I wake up in the middle of a tired night, and try and prise open sleep stuck eyes, what gives me the ability to smile at that tiny, helpless, vulnerable infant cradled in my arms, is not that present moment but the dream of so many future moments when I will tell her about these back breakingly exhausting nights; her giggles and my belated indulgent admonitions.

Basically, a strict eye for hygiene may well prevent my tiny one from getting nappy rash. But women like me tend to get a metaphoric layer of it over the surface of our minds, during these first few crazy weeks.

The fact remains, my darling Shaayari, my beautiful little piece of alive poetry, that I already love you more than I am capable, and to the infinite limit of my heart's capacity. However, that doesn't prevent me from wishing that your neck was firm, that you were potty trained and you could talk to me and tell me about your troubles, rather than leaving me guessing and fretting at your every wail.

As for all my single women friends who are still contemplating the idea of having a child: remember that most of what is said about new mothers and their experience of motherhood is a product of male fantasy - a fantasy that many women have adopted and started believing to be true through years of socialisation and psychological percolation.

I personally have come to believe that there is nothing especially different between a man and a woman when it comes to parenting. It's an acquired skill and a slowly developed taste towards worlds of delight. The first few weeks are formidable, and while a man can chose to participate at will in those few weeks, a woman has been declared by nature and by history as the primary care giver. She, her mind and her body have no choice in the matter. She cannot frown, display irritation and walk into another room. She cannot pull a pillow over her ears in the middle of the night and she cannot shake off the sheer guilt and in-built separation pangs and anxiety, should she even attempt to take off for a couple of hours - hey, I've tried this one, so I know. It doesn't help.

The woman is bound. By hormones and sociologically adapted and mutated genes, and by nature's inherent building blocks and by social expectations.

The fact that her mind may have become more androgynous in the intervening centuries does not help. Because nothing else in evolution has kept up with that one rapid change. Neither the rest of her, nor the process of pregnancy nor the needs of an infant.

So ladies, be forewarned. It is the dream of a future delight that should tip the decision in favour of procreating. Not the anticipation of any sense of immediate fulfillment. Because as far as my limited experience goes, the latter is a bit of a handed down myth; the former a genuinely beautiful vision.

My Daughter and I

2008-08-16T09:42:00.003+05:30

Not uploading any images of Shaayari just yet, since she still mostly looks like an old man. And since all new born babies look the same, will spare all visitors to the blog the insincerity of having to exclaim "oh how cute" and "looks just like so-and-so".... the moment she stops looking like a fried egg, I promise to load many pictures.

She has grey eyes, by the way. All smokey, yet sharp. Quite lovely.

In the meanwhile, will give in to a moment of vanity and upload this picture that Ranjit took of the two of us in hospital, barely a day or so after Shaayari was born. I think Ranj captured quite a quiet little moment. I like the mood of the picture. And the glow.

All Out of Scheduled Status

2008-06-16T17:29:00.012+05:30

Apparantly my husband can give the gujjars Scheduled Tribe status. Especially if his train reaches Mumbai 8 hours late and arrives at 6 in the evening instead of 10 in the morning. Or at least, the gujjars and meenas seem to think so.

What else would explain their ripping off a part of the tracks that the Delhi-Mumbai Rajdhani runs on and therefore forcing this super fast express to divert via Bhopal and then reach Mumbai Central? The people whom we consider to be decision makers and powers-that-be, in our dubious democratic structure, will never travel that route, never face that inconvenience and never get impacted by this novel form of protest.

Oh. Their conscience is meant to get pricked because my husband's day has just gotten wasted. Yup. Righto. I can see that happening.

My husband, on the other hand, DOES get hugely impacted by this loss of a precious Monday. He's traveling to Mumbai to pick up a duplicate of his high school certificate from his alma mater, since he's misplaced the original. And the reason he decided to go by train is, firstly, to control expenses and secondly, to avoid rain related interminable flight delays and diversions. Ever since we heard about that infamous Jet Airways flight that took off from Delhi at 8:30 in the evening and arrived in Mumbai 5:30 the next morning, none of us really want to see the inside of an aircraft.

However, all this clever budget management and pre planning didn't really help. Because the gujjars believe that if my husband gets disgustingly delayed in picking up his high school certificate, somehow they will get their scheduled tribe status.

An obscure bit of logic that escapes me. But then, I must be dense.

Singled Out

2008-05-21T19:12:00.003+05:30

Rainy days and leafless trees
Silhouetted birds in grey frame freeze
A random city crossing from a car window
At a red light pause in life.

Today I am a wife.

Yesterday I was single
And pain had this grey blue touch.
Today, it gets too much.

Sad songs and rain songs and staring out of windows
Needs a solitude of sorts.

The hurt and pain
And the entire bargain
Within the dark framework of twosomeness
No longer retains the rainy day quality

Of a sad day of those single years.

Misery Mapping

2008-05-19T23:21:00.004+05:30

"Why do you girls keep talking about us men?" Asked my husband once. There was exasperation there, and let's face it, some degree of condescension, maybe a dash of arrogance.

"I mean, you are perfectly emancipated, perfectly self aware, perfectly liberated, thinking, randomly talented, myriadly gifted, world-view oriented, financially independent career women. So why do even women like you talk, if not only, then largely, about us men?"

I stayed with that question a long time, and it actually brought about behavioral changes. Best friend and I actually did stop discussing men and discovered we had many other things to talk about. That was good.

BUT. The fact remains, we do talk about men. And apart from it being weak and demeaning and needy and dependent and a pile of horseshit, it's also great therapy. I tried to figure for months why perfectly intelligent, perfectly world-aware blah blah women keep swapping notes on men and their behaviour and their actions. And it's not because we are deeply caring in our sisterhood bond and it's neither because we are heartless bitches dying for a slice of gossip.

The truth lies somewhere midway. I call it Misery Mapping.

It may be an ego trip, it may be an empathy moment. It may be an epiphany or it may be a superiority complex. Where our minds and our psyche fits into the mapping varies from woman to woman and conversation to conversation. Sometimes, your man is so crap you make me feel good about mine. Sometimes your man is so similar to mine that I realise my situation is not so unique. Sometimes your man is so much better than mine that you help me make up my mind.

Misery Mapping is like a home grown remedy to a common cold. Its not always accurate, its not entirely scientific, it often takes much longer than medication would, but guess what. Its often effective.

Yes, I agree. Women should not spend all their time talking about men. But Misery Mapping achieves a few things men don't benefit from, because they don't do it.

Because its cathartic, becuase it behaves like the safety valve of a pressure cooker, it prevents us from drinking and beating you up. It prevents us from chasing hot things in tight clothes the moment our belly expands and our jaw line sags. It prevents us from leaving your committment and loyalty of several decades to go chasing after a younger, flimsier dream. It prevents us from giving in to the infantile need of turning every emotional moment into a joke. And it prevents us from bursting out one fine day into cholestrol and heart attack and high blood pressure and hyper tension and dying in your arms leaving you to pick up your pieces.

Simply because we rely on this supremely non-intellectual, home grown remedy called Misery Mapping.

We talk about you. We discuss you. We dissect you. We analyse you. So that you don't kill us. Our insides, our values, our emotional integrity, our fidelity.

Of course we also do all those other things that are considered typically 'male'. We cheat, we lie, we sleep around, we abandon, we are cruel, we leave, we forget, we ditch, we inflict hurt, we humiliate, we forget. This is not a piece about making women out to be angels and men to be devils.

It's simply a relatively straightforward point. Misery Mapping - whoever should chose to do it -gives the participants a context and a rooting into their own lives. And allows conversation to achieve what would otherwise only get achieved with a lot of dangerous action.

Its Lipstick Therapy. Part II

Midday Lipstick

2008-05-19T18:35:00.002+05:30

What do men do for Midday Lipstick, I wondered to myself, as I applied those reassuring strokes of confidence and self worth, bang in the middle of the day, just as your overall sense of self seems to be wilting, with pending mail, unattended tasks, unanswered phone calls and undone to-do lists.

Midday Lipstick is a good thing. In fact, it's a great thing. It's sort of this moisturising, plumping, rejuvinating, glossing, shining, re-attractivising feature of a working woman's day. And its highly therapeutic. Especially when you've bought in a new shade, or a new variant of gloss.

It sort of builds you back up from the ashes of a dull day.

Mid day deo is in the same genre, but unless you're really stinky, it doesn't quite have as dramatic an impact.

What do guys do? Honestly. I'd love to know. Felt damn bad for them today, because they don't have midday lipstick in their lives.

Jaipur Blasts, 7:30p.m. IST

2008-05-13T23:06:00.001+05:30

Isko koi chalna sikhao bhai, ye kaisi ajeeb si chaal hai

Ye do kadam aagey leta hai, to paanch kadam peechhe!
Ye aasmaan ko chhookaar bhi girta hai neeche.

Kahin karodon mein khelne waale vyaapaari
To kahin bhook ki mahaamaari

Sau karod ki abaadi mein
Kitne karod ki barbaadi

Yahan ummeed pe bhor hoti hai, to aatank mein sooraj dhalta hai
Aakhir ye desh chalega kaise, yahan to sab kuchh chalta hai

LOU WHO?

2008-05-13T17:30:00.006+05:30

Soulmate was formed about five years ago. The band consists of blues-guitar player, songwriter and singer, Rudy Wallang and Vocalist Tipriti ‘TIPS’ Kharbangar who also plays rhythm guitar,Ferdy Dkhar on Bass Guitar and Sam Shullai on Drums. They all come from Shillong, Meghalaya which is one of the North-Eastern hill states of India.

Lou Majaw (b. 1947) is a Khasi guitarist popularly known as the "One of the Biggest Fans of Bob Dylan in the North-East [India]". Born to a poor family, the Majaws could not afford a guitar or a radio. In a friend's house he was introduced to the music of Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, and taught himself the guitar in school. Majaw then moved on to Kolkata where he played in bars and pubs for various groups such as the Dynamite Boys, Vanguards, Supersound Factory, and Blood and Thunder. In 1966, Lou was introduced to Bob Dylan's work. Inspired by his music, he later organized a "Dylan's birthday concert" in Shillong May 24, 1972. Since then he has organized the concert each year on 24th May to pay obeissance to Dylan, with the shows eventually gaining national and international fame.

Do you care? No?

I thought as much.

I would never have heard of either Soulmate or of Lou Majaw had it not been for an over enthusiastic, irritatingly in-your-face restro-bar in Vasant Vihar called The Haze. The owner, called Kiron Somebody-or-the-other, is obviously from Shillong himself, and has taken it upon himself to promote all the artists of his idyllic home town, single handedly.

And if that means spamming the brains out of poor unsuspecting folk like me, so be it.

Worse still, if after getting the 89623rd sms that you're not interested in, you call him up very politely and ask him to remove your number from his mass sms list, he says he will take care of it, but does nothing.

Eventually, you get fed up and ask your lawyer friend to give him a stern call and warn him about being a public nuisance.

He roundly abuses your friend, and then calls you up and abuses you. For sending you smses that you never wanted in the first place. Wow. Now that REALLY makes sense.

I guess Soulmate makes decent music. I'm sure Lou Majaw is a great man. But forgive me, I am a philistine. I like Dil Haara from Tashan and Pretty Woman on my DVD. And if I wanted a crash course in Blues music, there is noone better to teach me than my husband.

Sigh. Why do establishments, organisations, institutions and such like, send these irritating, pissing off, get on your nerves spam smses? And then act tough about them? I don't want to know about your festivals, your artists, your menus, your special discounts, your performances, your product enhancements and your new improved anythings. I don't care. And your smses are the one sure shot guarantee of you not getting any business from me. Not now. Not ever.

This is a larger deeper malaise. As the world gets more isolated, more cocooned, more wrapped up in its own selfish spaces, paradoxically the sense of privacy seems to be vanishing. This malaise spreads its tentacles through social networking sites, carries on through spam mails and smses, rears its ugly pathetic head through features like AdSense which everyone applauds.

Uff. I'm fed up. If, everytime I searched Poetry on an interesting literary site, I actually wanted to know about Poetry in Pottery, Poetry Foundation of India and Poetry Encyclopaedia at discounted rates, I'd HAVE ASKED FOR THAT. Your ads may make sense to you Mr. Google, they DO NOT to me. When I am searching for poetry, I only want to read beautiful resonanting poetry to get away from this very clever world you've woven. Not because I want Poetry in Pottery.

Somebody tell google that inspite of their great work, it doesn't all make sense. Somebody tell Shopper's Stop that if I want to shop on Mother's Day I'll go there and shop. I don't need an email telling me that I must. Somebody tell these 5000 teleshopping networks that when I want to make strong abs, I work out. I don't buy shitty belts with vibrating batteries. Somebody tell the entire advertising and marketing community, that advertisements on TV, radio and print are clean, ads are straight, ads are good, and when required, I respond to them. This new virus called 'personal touch' is neither personal, nor touching, its in fact bloody irritating.

Somebody tell Kiron something-or-the-other that he's an irritating oaf.

Or hang on a second. Maybe I can just send him an sms.

A Love Poem???????

2008-04-27T19:50:00.002+05:30

Love sings
Love glows
Love yells
Love bellows

Love is like vine
It creeps up your mind
Love is disaster
An unbroken landmine

Love deepens
Love flattens
Like middle aged ladies
Love broadens

Love pinches
And snorts
Love makes all sorts
Out of all sorts

Love slides
And love sidles
Love grunts
And love bridles

Love makes love poems
Some average, some bad
But the loveless poet
Is most definitely sad

Green Card Safron Sun White Thoughts

2008-04-15T17:02:00.005+05:30

I smelt the dusty Indian summer sun while driving to work this morning. This despite the fact that the windows were rolled up and the AC was on.

I saw a wicker basket left askew on the corner of the road, in a way that can only happen in really poor countries, where the street is an extension of home for so many. And household goods can just be found lying around on main crossings and kerbs, much like a dishevelled kitchen or bathroom.

I saw the three irritating temples that fall on my route to office and that exasperatingly slow me down with their sequined thread, red cloth, meandering crowds and crushed flowers pace.

I saw a stray dog. Or two.

Abida sang Ghalib on the very western CD player, in my cocooned and conditioned world: my protection against the onslaught of an India that can drown me in an overdrive of sensuality. A battering that the eyes, the ears, the nose, the skin and the tongue cannot take, without taking violently ill.

I must temper the India that I live in; dilute it to make it digestible. My system is fragile.

I saw dark green leaves, still, and then mildly ruffled by a summer breeze that carries no shade or solace.

I saw a 'tempo traveller'.

And Abida with her 'patthar-phek' style of singing, as I call it, bellowed out, Bekhudi Besabab Nahin Ghalib, Kuchh to Hai Jiski Parda Daari Hai.

Don't get me wrong. I like the way she sings. It's part of that overwhelming in-your-face, like-it-or-not Indian experience (ok, don't force me to say subcontinent; in the context of what I'm talking about, its the same dusty terrain, LOC be damned).

I saw, in my ten-minute drive to an extremely international style office, Lata Mangeshkar and Gol guppas; cows and colony parks; cotton kurtas and crows; dusty feet and sweaty ideas; bus rides and whirling fans; struggling grammar and corrupt politicians; visionary men and characterless charlatans; inept tellers and unreliable plumbers; fantastic domestic help and useless colleagues; dirty maroon rajdhanis and cholera infested waters; steel plates with pockets for daal and subzi, kele-ka-pattas and roadside pottery; paanwaalas with tinny radios and hot rotis with daal.

I saw Kishore Kumar and sequined chappals, I saw sufi concerts and kulfi falooda. I saw so much though my eyes were blurred with tears.

I saw so much. Because today my husband said, "Lets Move to the States. This country is shit".

Horse Trading

2008-02-11T22:10:00.000+05:30

It's one of my most favourite sights, all year round, but especially so on crisp winter nights in Delhi. As a mist rises from the roads and meanders into the neon lights, and car headlights pinpoint prisms into your eyes.... the sight of a young horseman galloping a white steed back to the stables. Back from a wedding that must have just about begun with the jai maala, after the baraat has been recieved with due ceremony...

For years I've watched this streak of a visual on random Delhi roads. There is a wedding hall of sorts very close to my mother's house; my brother's reception happened there. We of course, the boring bengali sorts, did not have horses decked in red and gold, but a sedate white ambassador to do the honours.

But from the gates of that wedding hall I have often seen this exhilarating sight. I don't know why the rider is invariably a very young fellow, a lad almost. And the horse, a white mare, never seems so unfettered than in those perfectly free moments.

At times I have been lucky enough to see both pre and post. While driving out to the market or to a friend's, I have seen the baraat arrive. At its simplest, the horse is draped in thick velvet cloth of red and maroon, brocaded in gold, and the groom, his face hidden under the canopy of flowers from the sehra streaming from the pagri, rides gingerly, clutching both reins - I mean, what are the odds of the average Delhi groom having equestrian skills? - a petrified little boy, the 'sarwahla' sits in front of him, looking dangerously close to slipping off. A motley crew of absurdly overdressed people follow, stomping their feet and flailing their arms to the tired tunes from the brass band. Wizened and rickety thin men carry gas lamps on their head. More lights on an open bed truck, drawing their power from a noxious and noisy generator, blaze into the night air, and between lamp hiss and generator drone, the sound of the band fades. Never did understand why they play 'ye desh hai veer jawano ka' in any case. A tongue-in-cheek dig at the brave man going to war?

There is always a white maruti van at the back. Filled with the naughty young men of the family, and their 'car-o-bar'. Indulgent looks from elders. Flirtatious ones from the women, especially from the bride's side. Laughter. Bling. Tinkle. Guffaws. Pagris. Aiye, aiye...

Now that's the simple version. As it gets elaborate it stops short of nothing. Only the traffic stops. For hours. The circus can go up to an unbelievably elaborate horse drawn carriage. And miles of bad dancers behind. Expensive cars. Sweating armpits. And red gold signages held by more impoverished looking men.

And the over bedecked horse sniffs and snorts and stamps in impatience, as it is reduced to an uncomfortable .05 kmph with its unwieldly burden. The lad leading it looks dazed, gripping the reins to ensure the horse doesn't buck and heave, the lights in his eyes blinding him - he should wear blinders too, like his charge.

And a voice in your head tells you - in all probability, the bride and the groom have met barely once, or twice. Maybe done a coffee if the family is progressive enough. Perhaps indulgent bhabhi jee sat discretely at the other table. And from then till now, that resplendent bride inside has focused all her energies on the wedding. And nobody is prepared for the marriage. And nobody will know when the flowers dry.

Thinking such half thoughts, I have then returned an hour or so later, and the gates of the wedding hall have been more or less deserted. The ceremonies have begun in earnest inside and apart from some stragglers, some really late, hasty smile expression arrivals, and some of those guilty tipsy boys rushing out for another plastic cupful, there is hardly anybody around.

And then out of those gates bursts forth a vision. A horse. And his rider. Unfettered. Unblinkered. Unswathed in velvet and gold. Unchained. A trot, a canter, and then a full gallop as the night air swallows them in its cold crisp neon-laced mist.

A laboured, laden, slow mare, traded in a few hours for a gloriously free beast. And its master. Enjoying the night air whipping through hair and mane. Leaving behind all that they have been asked to deliver for a paltry sum of money - duty, responsibility, role playing, expectations, exasperations, alterations, adjustments - all of it shed with the weight of the gas lamps.

A few more minutes, and other burdens may grip. Poverty perhaps. And loneliness. And villages connected by distant trains. Money orders and bad hay. Cold quarters and a rough brush on diseasing skin. Worries, both human and animal, as exhaustion makes both sleep on their feet.

But for the moment, the gallop of the truly free. For this incadescent instance, without a care. Wind in the hair.

Quote Hanger

2008-02-07T17:11:00.001+05:30

When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion. - CP Snow

Mother's Blossoms 2008

2008-01-30T15:21:00.001+05:30

26th January dawns sunny crisp and cold over Delhi. The slighly droopy somewhat fading Mother's Blossoms wake up groggily to a vague sense of something pending - almost impending - although it should ideally be a lazy jobless saturday which is ALSO a national holiday....

No... I definitely did NOT have to watch the parade on TV, the blossoms are thinking in their respective flower pots. No, I did not plan to start my gymming this weekend, and even if I did, well... those are hazardous decisions best left unrealised....

Ah, 4 cups of tea / coffee later, the slow realisation sinks in.... I am a Mother's Blossom and today is the day I foolishly committed to a bunch of pals on the email that I will wend my way schoolwards and be a part of the MIS annual reunion.

By this time its past 11a.m. Riya calls Pavita. Pavita sounds somewhat muffled, through layers of think quilt and thicker sleep. Pavita would like Riya to figure it all out and inform her sleepiness. In the meanwhile, 2 old seniors Oroon and Shounak surface. Hey they are headed to the reunion too. Super charged by caffeine and phone calls Riya says this is seeming worth it. Lets head towards Sarvodaya, ahoy!

Riya calls Pavita. Fails to inject similar enthusiasm. Pavita hos and hums and yawns and mumbles something that sounds like 'mebbe lezzee'.

Miffled (thats a combo of miffed and stifled) Riya smses Sudi. To a much better response. Sudi is waiting for Soggy who's waiting for Debu who's waiting for a car and then they are all headed to the blossoming moment. Things appear to be perking up.

Pavita is still not sure.

Double salvos of Oroon and Shounak are liberally launched in her direction. She capitulates. Riya calls Shounak back. Hey how are we going to find each other in that 'area-wise the largest school in Delhi'? Shon replies "Don't worry, we are Mother's Blossoms. We'll smell each other out".

Yuck. Gross.

Ok its 12 noon now. Everybody is attempting to get dressed and rush for this largely unnecessary rendezvous. Riya calls Sudi. Yes, that ship has sailed. Let us now meet at the haloed portals. We all arrive crisp and fresh, in varying degrees of unpunctuality to the 'sarvodaya' side gate. (Oroon and Shon enter from the main road gate and therefore reach the football field before us).

As we are about to run in slow-mo towards above mentioned field and fall into each other's arms at the 'Sunlit Path', an imposing shadow falls upon us. "Have you registered yet?". Boy. This alumnus must've been trained by Shekhar sir himself. The Legendary Bull Dog. "Gulp. No. I just wanted to meet my pals first."

Unknown voice + face thunders "NO!! Please register first!!" The years melt away as one sheepishly heads toward the wobby wooden desks with askew white table cloths (bedsheets, one suspects). One is handed a form longer than the US VISA form. I lost track after year of joining MIS, year of leaving MIS, number of years spent in the school (duh, can't you add, you sadistic form-fillerer???), current job, marital status, designation, number of children.... I have a vague feeling I must've also filled in blood group, number of siblings, terrorist affiliations etc, but I can't be sure since my mind was that familiar numb din by then. Ah. How nostalgic.

You pay Rs. 50/- afer filling that form - by this time you're thinking somebody should've been paying you instead. Or, you are told smugly, you can pay Rs. 2500 for a lifetime membership. Sorry you murmur stupidly. I don't have that kind of money. Do you have a credit card set up? The much more involved mother's blossoms frown from the other side of the rumpled white sheets. Credit cards? Certainly not.

Your eyes then fall upon this splendour that each one of them is sporting. Its a sleeveless grey sweatshirt with a Mother's Blossom emblem on the chest, top left corner. Soggy and Debu promptly rechristen it Mother's Bosom. Its so corny you want one for yourself. Well, if you take the lifetime membership you get it for free. Whoopie. Or else you pay Rs. 600. And NO no credit cards sorry.

I want one. I only have a hundred buck note. I forgot the purity of the MIS environs where plastic was ALWAYS frowned upon. Sigh. I beg and plead many to buy me one but nobody does. This is especially after I spy the back of the sweatshirt on someone. Ok, this is the prize winner. This grey unassuming Mother's Blossom sweatshirt says in about 300 font size in the center of the back I AM BLESSED.

Yes. Its true. Today I could've been the proud owner of a sweatshirt that proclaimed my blessed status to the entire world staring enviously at my back if ONLY Shon, or Oroon or Sudi or Soggy or Debu or Tej had coughed up a measly Rs. 600.

Cheep Cheap.

But all was not lost boys and girls. In return for the Rs. 50 we all got a bright purple-pink square of a sticker that we were supposed to slap on our sleeves / pockets / jackets / foreheads or any other prominent body part and in return we could eat for free from all those stalls lined up at the side of the football field.... Golguppas, Aloo Tikki smashed in front of your eyes on a paper plate and bathed in chutney, pao bhajji with an overdose of lemon, poori alu daal and paneer, gaajar ka halwa and something called Daulat ki Chaat which was sensed more than tasted because it looked and felt like shaving foam on paper plates.

Old teachers looked older. Bhalla, who's now vice principal, was asked by Oroon 'hey heard you are now the vice president?' Ass. Mrs. Pillay looked positively alzheimered. But she was sweet, pretending to remember everybody. All of them said the same predictable things. Spouse, children updates clearly won the day over career updates. What you had achieved clearly played second fiddle to what you had married and what you had produced.

And as you walked away, towards the 'Sunlit Path' and beyond, gaping at Sri Aurobindo in grey, still peeing benevolently over all things big and small, you heard a voice in your head ruefully saying 'nostalgia isn't what it used to be....'

Two Purple Bands

2007-12-18T15:28:00.000+05:30

It takes five minutes and two purple bands on flat white oval disc to change your life.

The home test kit sounds complicated but is surprisingly simple. It involves putting 2 drops of body fluid on that white disc and waiting for five minutes.

Those five minutes seem the longest and the shortest spin in your life. The do-it-yourself kit instruction pamphlet tells you that if you get only 1 purple band, in the region marked T, then it means your test is successful. And you're negative. If you get 2 purple bands however, one in the region marked T and the other in the area C, then your test result is positive.

Of course, if you get no bands, then you've messed the test up and need to do it again.

The kit also warns that you must check in exactly five minutes. Any delay and the bands may fade or drift or god knows do what. Implode perhaps.

Of course you don't take your eyes off the disc for those five minutes. So the 'check in exactly 5 minutes' instruction seems a bit redundant.

The funny thing is that the kit doesn't tell you that the purple band in the C area appears BEFORE the purple band in the T area. Which means, technically, you know your results even before you know if the test has been successful!

It's strange, that colour spreading gradually on the white paper inside the disc. You remember ink on blotting paper, weaving its way through the warp and weft of the material? Its exactly like that. A pale purple spread, over which the darker bands appear. Quite magical actually, and quite beautiful.

And you keep staring at it. At the two purple bands. At the first completely real, lifetime committment you're making, at the ripe old age of 32 going on 33. At the first sign of 'the rest of your life', especially if yours has been the moment-to-moment and whimsical and uplanned sort. 2 purple bands, like grips around your heart.

2 purple bands like wedding rings.

2 purple bands that feel like wizened fingers gripping your own.

2 purple bands that bring to life cliches you never thought would be real for you. Cliches like tears. And a smile. And a bursting heart. At the thought, so funny, so strange, so scary, so overwhelming, so insecure, so giggly, so frightening, so soft, so curly, so cuddly, so freaked out, so unknown, so worrisome, so careful, so boring, so mundane, so clinging, so freedom, so independent, so binding, so restrictive, so liberating, so fattening, so figure-loss, so stressful, so stress free, so calorie-count, so eat-what-you-like, so personal, so universal, so restrictive, so addictive, so old, so new, so confusing, so contradictory, so mismatched, so timely, so accidental, so sudden, so awaited, so unborn...

2 purple bands.

Drive carefully. Baby on Board.

Quote Hanger

2007-12-09T13:01:00.001+05:30

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. - Soren Kierkegaard

Who's In Your Mirror?

2007-12-06T09:18:00.001+05:30

Its incredible. How does the whole world gang up against a person who's already down and out? How do people reconcile to kicking somebody who's already down?

What brand of aggression is this? What kind of petty minded insecurities prompt this sort of behaviour?

For those of you reading this post in Delhi, you might just have heard of a radio presenter called Pallavi. She used to be one of the most popular, well loved radio personalities, years ago. Then something bizzarre happened. She lost her voice. Unbelievable though it sounds, like a badly scripted TV soap, it actually happened. It was the rarest of rare symptoms of a very rare disease called Myasthenia Gravis. The same one that Amitabh Bachchan had years ago - remember the droopy eyelids and the raspy voice of Agneepath? It wasn't just performance and make up.

Pallavi obviously could no longer continue as a radio presenter. However, she did not end her relationship with the one medium that she's always loved, and which she's spent almost a decade and a half in. She became a show producer and went on to deliver one of the most successful breakfast programmes in the country.

Again, if you are a radio listener in Delhi, you may on and off have had the duo Ananta and Saurabh crack you up in the mornings, in their laugh riot of a show. Pallavi was the silent and highly competent producer behind them.

The treatment for Myasthenia Gravis itself takes a toll. It's severe and complex, like cancer treatment, involving surgery, radio therapy, chemotherapy. The process of flushing out those toxins from the system itself is a long drawn one. On top of that, the desire to go back on air has always burnt strong in Pallavi. And therefore she continued with a variety of muscle regeneration treatment, speech therapy, yoga and meditation. The opportunity to realise her dreams came up suddenly, when Ananta and Saurabh decided to move on from Radio Mirchi.

As a friend I was delighted to facilitate her return on air. But the focus was obviously the radio station and not her. I've always had tremendous faith in her radio presentation style - its muted, its subtle, its endearing and it grows on you gradually. Pallavi is not the sort of presenter who has you rolling in the aisles or who makes you jump up and applaud. But her influence is insiduous. Suddenly one morning you realise that switching on to her show has become a habit, a habit you'd rather not let go off. And that is the real power of radio.

The only place where Pallavi did not get a strong score as replacement breakfast jock, obviously, was in the voice parameter. But we gambled. We decided to take her story to the public and let them give her a chance. We had great faith in her ability to endear listeners to her, and with such a strong survivor story and inspirational message, well, we had an idea we might just make it.

So far it has worked. Our ratings are good, the story has captured people's imagination and even if there are flaws, glaring flaws in the programme, I hear her making progress every single day. Till then, we have something called marketing muscle to see us through! I believe we'll make it. I am genuinely convinced that - unlike what a lot of snide water-cooler commentators are saying - I have NOT made a mistake this time. I know that many colleagues, junior and senior, who've mentally abandoned this journey mid way, rather than sticking with it, are waiting gleefully for me to be proved wrong.

I have no desire to prove myself right. Unlike what has been grandly predicted about me by armchair psychoanalysts, I am not 'preparing the grounds to withdraw gracefully' everytime I address the team, because 'its difficult for me to accept immediately that I was wrong'.

Obviously, there are enough people in the company who've written Pallavi's second innings off. They are convinced that it is a matter of time before she's pulled off air, we go into damage control overdrive, and one of the grand talents that are supposedly tucked inside the system is asked to come forth and rescue the day. Needless to say, every single presenter in the system today believes that he / she would've done a better job. I am not so sure. I think everyone would've come with a similar balance of strengths and weaknesses and the effort to establish them would've been as much.

It's evident that my central team members don't agree. And like I said, they're only waiting for the time when we will say 'so sorry, I give up, can you rescue us please with your phenomenal talent and incredible vision. Really sorry, we mucked up inspite of having run the most successful radio station network in the country, please please fix this for us'.

Hey, you know what? That may well be the case. We may have mucked up - though I don't believe that - and we may well need younger fresher perspectives to pull us out of our crisis. Pallavi I know is trying her damndest best, but yes, it may well not be enough. I'm not in the business of making Pallavi's radio career, I am in the business of keeping Mirchi the number one radio station in the country.

And that is what brings me back to where I started. Supppose for a second that Pallavi is genuinely failing. Suppose she's struggling and giving it all she has, and yet not being able to make it. Even if that was the scenario, how can a whole team of able-bodied, perfectly healthy individuals gang up against such a person? Start the day by dissecting her show, pulling out her recordings only to laugh at it, and end the day with another doomsday prophecy?

Forget about human values, even if you are political by nature, wouldn't it strike you that being forthcoming and helpful and concerned, or atleast appearing to be, would be your best bet today? At least be devious with some intelligence!

Now for a second let's leave corporate machinations aside.

How does an entire team just start ostracising a person for no fault of hers? How do they start treating her like a pariah, and refuse to bond with her at any level whatsoever? How is any of this Pallavi's fault? Even if things weren't working out for her, wouldn't it strike anybody that she may be lonely, frightened, afraid of becoming the laughing stock, thirsting for some affection, some understanding, some momentary suspension of judgement....

Hey, these are other performers. Don't they at least fear for themselves? Life is such an even playing field... this could happen to anyone. How can we become so desensitized as to actually start treating a living breathing human being like a dart board for all our insecurities, jealousies, envies, mediocrities?

How can you stop talking to a person who's only trying her best not to let the company down?

How can you make fun of somebody who's only trying to make her own job fun?

How can you sleep with yourself after making comments like "kehne ko to cancer tha, morning show milte hi sab theek ho gaya?" How? How do you even look yourself in the mirror?

I shudder to think of a day when I'm even capable of thinking like this. I dread the time when I too will settle into my comfort zones, and be happy to pull other achievers down, rather than having any ambition or vision for myself or for the world...

Seriously man. This show may or may not work. This jock may or may not stay. God damn it, this radio network may or may not survive; who cares? It's not the end of the world. The media is a fickle entitiy. Today's rulers are tomorrow's beggars. No statistic, no TRP, no GRP ever stays.

But what always does stay are our words and our actions through trying times. And there are always those who stand up to be counted, and those who just wait for others to fall.

And at the end of it all, there is the person in the mirror. We can justify, preen, bluff and fluff in front of the entire world, explain away every heartless comment, brush off every insensitive remark and action. But when the mirror reflects a monster, we're alone with that dreaded image.

Who do we wake up with, when we go to sleep alone? That is the only reality that bites.

Random

2007-10-31T10:51:00.000+05:30

Today
I am sad.

Purposelessly.
Without misery.
Without even the excuse of a treachery.

Today
I am sad.

Because sadness has come visiting.
And I must serve tea and biscuits.

Tears and misfits.
Awkwardly shaped thoughts.
Not quite fitting around the ankles.

So Chaplin-esque.
This whole deal.

Quote Hanger

2007-10-28T16:31:00.000+05:30

Where the Mind is Without Fear - Rabindranath Tagore

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow
domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought
and action--
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my 'country' awake.

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

I highlight the word 'country' in the last line, because it is so easily replaceable with 'mind', 'heart', 'soul', 'being'. Tagore is brilliant in his insights, that transcend time, space, context. This poem is an elixer of immortal strength for every human being in search of a universal truth; every person looking for an answer within the situations of their life.

Unfinished Business

2007-10-25T17:17:00.000+05:30

There is unfinished business
That must be attended to.

There is a song to be written
A line to be remembered.
A scene from a movie
Sweet slowly replayed.

A love to be made.

Its all been left half done.
Unfinished.
Incomplete.

There is this urgent business
We must attend to.

Quickly.

Before the flowers dry.

So Full of You

2007-10-23T00:01:00.001+05:30

I am so full of you today!

So full
With sepia tones
That colour bounces back from my skin

And to the onlooker
I am a rainbow.

Simply because I am so full with you today.

The grey black blue whiteness of us.
Left unrisked.

Don't Look Here

2007-10-22T02:51:00.000+05:30

Search in your spirits.

In your temple bells
And your gated hells
And in the ghosts that you dare not know.

Search where there is no light
In the spaces where
You have been warned
Of maya, her maids
And of the shadows of past regressions

Search
Where there is no seeking
No fetching and no bringing

Of things into the light

But simply a touching
Of truths already known

And a beauty sown
Upon the graveyard of reasoning.

I Wish You Had Come Tonight

2007-10-22T02:44:00.000+05:30

I wish you had come tonight.

There was a sadness sitting to be shared. Like an unfinished bottle of wine.

A sort of endlessness that made no demand, and had no expiry date, and yet wished to be drunk. And done with.

I so wish you had made it, without the cactus in your hair, the bludgeons upon your face. Waiting with impregnable arguments, daring to be felled.

I so wish you had let them fall. And allowed a surprise to sneak upon us like a black cat silhouetted against a moonlit night upon a terrace ledge.

Suddenly.

I don't believe you

2007-10-22T02:34:00.000+05:30

I don't believe you.

I don't believe your reasons
And your analysis of the seasons.

And I don't believe that you know.

Perhaps
In inner courtyards
When the skies purple with ink

You show

But I don't believe you know.

The spirit touches upon infinite things
And baubles that a christmas brings

Drift to snow.

And yet, infinitessimally

I don't believe you know.

Why I'm not on Facebook!

2007-10-07T17:04:00.000+05:30

Ok, ok. I can already see half my pals grinning. Why half. More like 2/3rds.

Like Sonia Gandhi, if re-election (for the post of 'with it') is inevitable, then we shall face it. But what to do. My 1-2-3 deal with Being Firmly Off the E-network is non negotiable.

1. I'm not interested.

2. It intimidates me.

3. Gosh. It has people. Eeeps.

I must therefore, (again, firmly) insist that I am not e-tarded. I do many activities on the world wide whatugot. From searching for information to googling any damn thing to booking movie tickets to ordering books to reading poetry to ho hum checking mail to downloading music to yesss..... blogging.... see? I am, net net, quite netted. And nettled therefore, by being looked upon as a retro-come-lately-there's-an-ol-kid-in-town.

Nobody asks these days IF you are on Orkut. They ask what was your worst scrap. And that does not point to bloodied nose and knees in an honest to goodness delhi road rage brawl. Nobody wants to know IF you're on facebook. They wonder who you threw a pie at last.

Uff. I din. I don. I won.

Why? Coz I am petrified of people I do not know. Most people don't believe that since I am so all over the people I do know. But truth remains. Show me a stranger and see me pale Ambika style. Or was it Amba? Or Ambalika? Whatever. I do the about-to-beget-pandu number faster than you can say Bhishm. Not Bhisham please.

And you see, this Orkut and this Facebook have people. Mummy! Not only that, they are allowed to get into your space whenever however. Dementors!! Worse still, the whole world can see the rest of the world trying to get into your world. Horror!!!!

Like a friend said about a friend who she was teasing about her latest male preoccupation - 'she told me not to reveal such sordid details on her wall since her dad was on face book too'.

Oh. My. Gosh.

That just about did it for me. Any remote plans I may have had to succumb went firmly out of the e bay. Sailing south.

Not that my dad is likely to be on facebook. Since he's dead. He's probably privy to all my male and other preoccupations in any case, wherever he is. Vantage point.

But since its highly unlikely that he will express his opinion - by throwing pies or scowling on my wall- at whatever it is that I am preoccupying, or occupying, or being occupied by - his Omni séance doesn't hassle me that much. If he were to pop up in my inbox through some mystic cross connection I'll be worrying about a lot more than privacy.

But that aside, this general bonhomie and cheerful camaraderie as we stealthily creeep into each other's most personal parts - pun intended - gives me the creeps. I realise that most people, when they are on Orkut or Facebook, are sitting alone. And its often pretty late at night. And they may well be a few drinks down. And in the relative safety of an empty room with zonal lighting and the alcohol coursing, many things are said, revealed, confessed....... into this mid day sun blaring fish market called social networking on the net.

Insane.

Hasn't anybody noticed the words? InterNET. NETworking. world wide WEB. Its a tangle. Its a trap and I am not stepping into it. Heebie geebies.

Parting thought? I have never ever understood the point of networking for the sake of itself. There are some words and phrases I just don't get: People-watching. Hanging-around. Doing-the-scene. And yes, Social networking.

I have never been a member of any social club. I don't much care for group or community activities unless there is an agenda. The only kind of group I've ever belonged to is a theatre group. Because one person cannot stage a play. Well, atleast, not all kinds of plays.

But why does one need literature clubs to appreciate literature? Or music clubs to hear music? These are solitary pursuits, best savoured alone. A cricket club makes sense. But who's ever heard of a Patience Group?

A friend, who's a rock music encyclopaedia, joined one of those rock appreciation groups once. And came away severely bruised. A Jerry Garcia guitar solo played plaintively in the background that nobody paid any attention to, and the conversation swelled around trivia one-up-manship and the competition for memorablia hunters. X was a dude because when he'd been to the U.S. last he had managed to wrangle a personally autographed LP left by the legend in some dusty store but than Y was cooler because he knew what the legend ate for breakfast every wednesday morning.... and Garcia played on, unheard, unheeded.

Sigh. Groups.

Give me a joy and I'll give you a group that can destroy it.

Hate them Cats

2007-08-31T23:24:00.000+05:30

There was a cat.

Since I hate cats, I was pretty sure. Its funny how quickly, and with how much alertness, we tune into the presence of that which we hate. While those we love waste away, wating for our attention.

It's possible to ignore what you love so completely. Maybe I should just learn to love cats.

Trust my luck, it had to be an ugly, mangy, dog-eared Tom. They won't even throw me the cute ones. Spring them on me, like. And watch the hate dissolve. No chance.

As much chance of that as of a terrorist meeting a back thumping violence worshipper, who'd reinstate his basic faith in human wickedness, and therefore maybe return him to his family. No sir. A terrorist will only meet people who abhor violence.

I will only meet ugly cats.

Malevolent. Staring beady yellow eyes. Growls and arched backs. And sudden streakings which unnerve. No cute ball rolling at your feet, no dignified saunter across the lawn that may teach me to respect, if not like them.

No. The ones I encounter jump from the garden wall on to tables laden with food. Streak across window grills and brush horribly against legs as you sleep. They are big and dirty. And totally fierce looking.

So when I shifted my plastic chair next to the swimming pool and reached for my kebabs, I knew by the rustle from the bushes, that there was a cat.

And of all the evening drinkers and diners by the pool side, it would chose us. To prowl around.

One of us - certainly not me - chased it around the tiles of the pool. Unfortunately it didn't fall in. Beastly. Though, then again, a bedraggled wet yowling cat? Maybe not.

Naturally it returned. Nobody at our table noticed it, except me. I suspect it noticed nobody at our table, except me.

It was mutual then.

This hateful fascination. This fascinating hatred. How often, it turns out to be mutual. You'd almost think it was such amazing luck. Invariably who you hate, will hate you back.

Stunning.

Considering the abysmmal accuracy rate Love has in the same regard.

Unrequited hate. Now, wouldn't that be something?

Have a Bath

2007-08-31T23:13:00.000+05:30

If you could bathe in songs,
What texture would Peter Gabriel be?

Something thick.
And smooth.

Sometimes slippery.

How would Ghalib feel against the skin?
A bit grainy perhaps?

If you could bathe in a song
Would Asha come with her own bubbles?

And how much lather
Would Bhupinder be?

If you could bathe, bathe, soak, sink, shower, mist, scald, singe, tingle, chill, sputter, drink, drown in a song

Who would your bathing partner be?

For My Father

2007-06-24T13:08:00.000+05:30

Sometimes,
When I hear a song
That you would’ve loved

Something tears up inside;
At your listening, silenced

And if the release date precedes your death
I wonder if you had heard
In a casual
Or a secret
Or a forgotten hearing

Which you misplaced from getting home
Like your other gift songs

But when I see a copyright and published date
That is after December 1995
It is a funny feeling indeed

A song unborn at the time of your going
And yet a song that simply demands,
In fact is, your listening

And I wonder how this song can be
Without the hearing that brought
Bengali songs to life for us

Be that as it may,
The moot point remains:

That more than in the celebrations
More than in the festivities and
The birthdays and
The weddings and the
Structured memories

It's in these songs
Unheard by you
That you come alive

In all my rooms

My Husband Writes to Me

2007-06-21T19:15:00.000+05:30

YOU HAVE, MY DEAR, AN ETERNITY OF UNREST.....

You have, my dear, an eternity of unrest.....

were the phrases that tumbled for joan of arc

in her “knightsuit” and florence with the

“nightlamp”.

You have, you have, you have, my dear.....an eternity of unrest,

the victories of margaret thatcher and

the books of germaine greer, the ultra cool

barbs of shobha de and the thatched cliches

of femina columns.

You have an eternity of unrest an eternity my dear an eternity...of unrest,

to support so many

tendencies and fierce

longings and motivations.

How does the yearning for
home,

my man and

my home and

my man and

my child and

my man and

our home and

our child and

my life and his

life and my

life and our

child’s life

and my

home….
merge with my cool-ness, hip-ness, today-ness, why

does it interfere?

You have my dear, an eternity of unrest,

as alanis screams and tracy groans and baez

cries and sheryl chills while sinead smiles.

You have, my dear, (need I repeat, or say more) an eternity, (should I continue?) of unrest!

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

My husband wrote this, and gifted it to me a few weeks ago. Perhaps that restless space where one feels an unrest and the other expresses it, is the closest one can ever get to restful spaces.

And as Hamlet said as he fell, "the rest is silence".

Faithful

2007-03-06T19:49:00.000+05:30

Ram Jivan was not feeling good at all. In fact, if he knew the phrase, we would’ve said he was feeling ‘goddamned awful’. His head was throbbing, his heart palpitating and his thoughts atrophying. He didn’t want to think and he couldn’t stop thinking. Alone in his one room living quarters, he felt downright miserable. There was no one to discuss his confusions with; his wife was at the village and his uncle’s son was an idiot. Not that his wife being here would’ve been much good. The two of them didn’t quite talk the way his mistress and master did. Ouch. That reference didn’t help. He didn’t want to think about his employers. He couldn’t stop thinking about his employers.

It had been three years since Ram Jivan had been employed by the mistress to drive her tiny tall-boy. From then till now, Ram Jivan had been a part of all of mistress’ experiences and episodes, accidents and achievements. When she graduated from the tall boy to a bigger sedan, provided by the organization she worked in, for Ram Jivan it had been ‘their’ acquisition. Proudly polishing the bright red vehicle in the office parking lot, Ram Jivan had good naturedly taken the teasing heaped upon by the other drivers and office boys. He’d been a tad embarrassed by mistress’ choice of colour – bright red was so extravagant – but quickly even that became a matter of pride. Nobody could miss the arrival of the vehicle, and Ram Jivan in his simple way always felt that it was the impressive presence of the car that had given them the prized slot in the parking lot, right in front, where only the top three or four cars were allowed. It had never occurred to him that the grade and quality of the car did not do the trick; it was the grade and quality of the person who owned it.

From hospital duty when mistress’s mother fell dangerously ill, to wild late night parties where Ram Jivan insisted on staying on, in the heat or the cold, just to ensure that mistress got home safe and sound, this faithful servant had been there like a watch dog through it all. He had, over the years, acquired a silent, self proclaimed stake in the family’s highs and lows. It did not matter what they said or thought, for him, their happiness was of supreme importance. When mistress finally decided to tie the knot with that wonderful gentleman who’d visit ever so often, Ram Jivan was sure nobody was happier than him. The fact that mistress was getting on in her years, and was refusing to ‘settle down’ had been bothering him no small amount. He’d silently shared in her mother’s anxieties, aggressively defended her when she came up in local domestic help gossip, and tried in his timid way to nudge her thoughts in the direction of matrimony. Ram Jivan today was convinced, even if nobody else was, that his little machinations had served a great deal in helping mistress make up her mind.

Damn. It was exactly this sense of ownership and emotional possession that made Ram Jivan so bitter today. His sense of outrage was heightened by the fact that his feelings just didn’t seem to matter. Because, although he didn’t know it, for Ram Jivan, his mistress’ world had become a microcosm of the world at large. If everything was all right in that one, everything was all right everywhere. When mistress did something to shake that balance, Ram Jivan went into a tizzy. He simply could not deal with it. He got headaches, belly aches, heart aches. A few times, when he’d attempted to bare his heart to the mistress, he had not been exactly rebuffed; she was gentle but firm. He had not exactly been encouraged. He knew his place. He was the driver, taken very good care of, paid handsomely and treated wonderfully. But he was not an equal. ‘I disagree’, ‘I disapprove’ and ‘I dislike’ were not part of his vocabulary with his employer.

As his mobile rang shrill in the tiny room, Ram Jivan snapped out of his reverie with a start. Ouch. It was already 10a.m. and he had not even started the fifteen minute walk to mistress' house. He had to report at ten past ten, and this was mistress' reminder call. He wouldn't take it. He couldn't start his day with her razor sharp voice and her ghost like ability to percieve where he was, even through the phone. His gasped 'nearly there madam, just around the corner' would be greeted with her whiplash 'you haven't even left home yet, Ram Jivan,' and he'd wilt. He'd have to start jogging right away, and pretend that he'd not heard the phone. She wouldn't fall for it though. And it was so unfair, considering that the entire delay was caused in the first place by these blasted thoughts of her.

Ram Jivan was all of twenty three. Not more than a lad when he started work, his initial three months with mistress had been extremely embarrassing. He’d drive, but she’d park for him. He’d drive, but she’d reverse for him. Still raw and untrained at the wheel, he had been the butt of jokes from parking attendants, mechanics and drivers. But mistress patiently saw him through those green years – well, not patiently perhaps. His ears would singe with the burning criticism and mistress’ brand of caustic sarcasm. But something about her made him stick on. He noticed that she spoke like that to everyone, and he never got a sense of class difference. It appeared to him that the entire world seemed stupid to his mistress, and he just happened to be one such person in the line of her vision. She could reduce grown men to tears and not even realize that she had. He not only learnt to deftly dodge her temper, he began to hotly defend it when others complained. Even Ram Jivan could not say what gave him this sense of fierce and possessive loyalty – perhaps it was generations of feudal culture, socio genetically sowed into him, or maybe it was the security of the job, in spite of the ghastly hours and unpredictable schedule. Whatever it was, Ram Jivan was here to stay.

Here to stay, and mind his own business. Well, at least that was the way Medha viewed it. She found her driver adorable and exasperating at the same time. While his body language betrayed volumes, his lips would gurgle inarticulate monosyllables. It was impossible to make him say a word when he chose to be silent, and that would infuriate Medha. What's with this guy, she'd exclaim to herself. One tadpole of a driver whom she'd groomed and trained, literally brought up and civilized, and here he was, giving her attitude.

Medha shook off her exasperation, and her eyes off the rear view mirror, through which she could see Ram Jivan's glum countenance. Psshaaah. She had enough to brood about, without allowing menials, even well meaning ones, to get under her skin.

Medha's normally excel sheet like brain was going into a tailspin these days. Little did driver and mistress know how similar their mindsets were, that hers was in as much of a turmoil as his. She glanced up furtively again into the rear view. Was this a good time to change course? She smiled grimly at the unintended pun in her head. Change the course of what? Her car? Her life?

Forget it. Get on with work first. This was no time to get distracted. Medha got off at the office entrance and sent the car back for her husband, who was going in late today. She flipped open her mobile to re-read a message from last night, for the nth time. The palpitation started, as did the slight tremble in her limbs. She snapped her cellphone shut and attempted to do the same with her wandering mind.

Some time in the afternoon Medha's phone beeped again. The message was simple, and devastating. "One shouldn't have to beg for coffee". Medha felt as though she'd choke. This was far out. This was movie dialogue and B grade scripts. This couldn't be her life. A thirty something working executive, ambitious, married, 'settled' was the word. This was insane.

The next fifteen minutes passed in a blur. 3 people came to discuss work with her and she could pay no attention. Her husband called and she wouldn't answer. Nothing worked. The visual focus of things around her changed. Some things stood out in sharp relief, while others receded into a blur. Medha shouldered her bag and stepped out of the office. Her reply sms was terse and equally simple. "Coming".

'Ram Jivan, South Park shopping mall please.' Did she imagine it, or did Ram Jivan's fingers clench over the steering wheel? What nonsense. This was just pure guilt. But why should she be guilty? She wasn't doing anything wrong. And Ram Jivan was hardly somebody she owed explanations to, about why she was setting off to a mall in the middle of a working day.

By the time she was at the familiar table at the cafe, Medha's celebrated composure was nowhere in sight. She couldn't figure if the tremor, the giddiness, the breathlessness was pleasurable or painful. She knew she wouldn't be able to stand. Her knees, as she'd identified the feeling in those countless trashy novels of adolescence, were wobbly! Yikes. She hated this reaction. She hated the fact that there was no source. Every impact should have a source. How can you deal with a reaction if there is no action to correct; change an effect when you can't identify the cause? This was the closest to 'being' as she had ever come. A pure state of being, with no state of doing, or undoing.... She didn't have a problem. She didn't know what to solve.

'Hi'.

Damn. Funny feelings. Coordinates: middle of tummy, top left. Shifting in whorls. The knees weren't exactly cooperating. The breathing had decided to join in the fun and games and take a merry go round ride up and down her wind pipe. She wanted to slap every separate part of her anatomy and force them to behave.

Medha couldn't look. She forced herself to. A cascade of emotions poured through her like paint, and she felt the fumes rise to her eyes. This was incredible. This was idiotic. 'Hi'.

Nikhil smiled. She decided it was him she really wanted to slap. That same smug smile, like he knew exactly what was going on, and blast it, that same darting vulnerable look around the eyes. How did they do it? How did they hold up these cliches like neon signs around their faces and prove everytime that the cliches were for real, and were fleeting?

Medha couldn't believe she was actually here. Why was she sharing a table and an hour with a man who had pretty much brought every stereotype of men to life? Why was she here to hear the same pleasant sounding rubbish every self help book warned against? Why did she fall for drivel like 'one shouldn't have to beg for coffee?' Why, when her own husband was not a chip of that old block, was not like anyone she'd ever met before, was not likely to make stereotypes come to life, was not about to behave like an overgrown jerk in search of mommy and mallika sherawat rolled into one.

Medha stayed on.

Several floors down in the basement parking lot, Ram Jivan was fuming.

He had spotted Nikhil's self driven 4 wheel drive swing into the complex. His baleful gaze had followed Nikhil's form as it pushed through the glass doors, went to the bank of elevators and got swallowed into a crowd entering the one going up to the 3rd floor. When Nikhil had hesitated for a fraction of a second next to a florist near the elevators, Ram Jivan had wanted to throw something big and heavy at him. But whether it was those waves of antipathy, or something else, Nikhil change his mind and went on up empty handed.

Ram Jivan decided that he did not like Nikhil. That he did not like any of this.

He had not realised he was actually gnashing his teeth, jaws clenched, when his cellphone rang. He sprang up in alarm. Was mistress already done? Should he get the car out? Would he have to grin at that dolt when he picked madam up, if he escorted her? Why couldn't he just stare out of the window deadpan like most other drivers did? But no, madam would give him tension on that too later. Might as well be polite and ....

Ram Jivan started; the phone was still ringing. When he looked at the screen his heart sank. Damn. It was sir. Obviously he must be looking for madam.... shit shit shit.

Ram Jivan answered with a pant as though he'd come running to his phone. "Haanji, namaste!"

"Ram Jivan, where's Medha? Why is her phone switched off? Its never switched off. Is she ok?"

A wave of relief and joy flooded over Ram Jivan. Here it was. His solution handed to him on a platter. "She's at the South Park mall sir. I'm here with her."

"At the mall??? At 3 in the afternoon on a working day? And has her battery gone, do you know? Do you have a spare charger for her?"

Ram Jivan's heart was melting for this good, kind, caring man; his righteous indignation progressively taking wing at the same time.... "I don't know sir, we should be back in the office soon. Maybe she has come to shop for something...."

"Ok tell her to call me the moment she gets into the car. If her phone isn't working, give me a missed call from yours, I'll call back..."

The conversation was ending. Ram Jivan could rapidly see the window of opportunity close. He broke into a sweat. How to say it, what to do... a random comment would be taken amiss. He could not just arbitrarily offer information that was not solicited; both sir and madam hated that... but in another few seconds sir would hang up....

Ram Jivan's normally dull wit suddenly sprang to life with the sparkle of moral light. He had it. Just in the nick of time, he had it.

"O that won't be necessary sir. After all, even if madam's phone is off, she can call you from Nikhil sir's phone I'm sure".

There was a pause.

"Nikhil? He's there too?"

Ram Jivan could hear the bugles of triumph, the drums of victory beating in the background. He was being crowned the king of goodness in heaven, and all was well with the world. His duty as the ever faithful had been done.

"Yes sir, I saw him enter the mall 5 minutes after madam. Oh, but then maybe he has come alone and maybe they won't even meet, and then maybe I will have to give you a missed call after all whenever...."

"Ya ok ok." click.

Ram Jivan stopped blabbering midway through his ramble. He smiled.

Oblivious to his machinations, far above, 2 people were huddled in an intense and charged conversation. They weren't touching, but somehow they had a sheen around them that seemed almost electric in its crackle. No waiter came near them, no wandering sales girl stopped to make her pitch. They had a big Do Not Disturb aura all over.

"I don't know what I want Medha. Except that I want you. I know this is crazy and I have nothing to offer. But I can't help it"

"I can't help it??? Who do you think you are, Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind?? Its 'beyond my control' and all that jazz? You remember I hope, that it's you who walked..."

"I know... I just want you. I need to hold you. I could go for you right here..."

Medha gulped and allowed the sudden flip flop plunge in her stomach to complete its routine. Quelling the urge to grab Nikhil by his hand and drag him straight back to his studio apartment, she breathed deep. They were silent while she allowed the lust fumes in her head to die down. Looking at Nikhil didn't help. It genuinely was Clarke Gable from Gone with the Wind. It was beyond their control. This unshakeable, unbreakable chemistry that wove its rope around them, and had for the 8 years they'd known each other. 2 to recognise it, 3 to fight it, 1 to give in to it, and 2 to recover from its tortured, terrible impact. Like being in a car crash and enjoying it. Like standing in the middle of a storm and relishing it. What made people enjoy destruction? What made people give in to the dark?

Medha shook her head. This scan of the last 8 years helped her focus. It had been a long journey from those horribly lonely, tear streaked, self worth devastated, body hungry, mind wandering years, towards finding good health again. She couldn't let herself get there again... or could she? She looked up. Nikhil was devouring her face with what she called his 'hungry eyes'. You always touch me with your eyes, she'd tell him. You don't look, you make physical contact.

"I know, I know, I don't want to mess anything up in your life.... its not like I could ever give you half the happiness you have today... I don't want to disturb anything... but damn it, I can't handle this no entry sign. Sorry, pun unitended" Nikhil grinned wrily.

"Wow. So this is not even about 'leave everything and come with me Medha', is it? It doesn't even have the honor of an abduction, the respectability of flight with another man? This is not a french novel. This is just plain and simple seedy infidelity you are looking for. Without having to take responsibility for another person's life, society, or even feelings."

"Why the sarcasm? Why do you always cut me down like this? What have I done? Don't you want me too?"

"Of course I do. I never could stop. But this shit has to, somewhere. I'm getting late. Unlike you, fancy book critic, I have a job to do..."

"Right."

By the time Medha stormed out of the mall, she was furious. And unfortunately, very turned on. Sex with Nikhil was like a drug. You wanted it so badly that the anticipation was almost crippling. But she was determined to kick the habit. Go cold turkey if need be. Home is where she needed to be right now. For grounding. For morality. For goodness.

For good.

"I'll wait for you at the apartment tonight." A voice warm-breath whispered into her loose hair, "With wine and pasta. And some music I picked up recently". Medha jumped out of her skin. But before she could retort, Nikhil had walked away towards his cherry coloured 4 wheel. Even the sight of that damn car could turn Medha into jelly. They had barely ever managed to get into the car and roll up the window before reaching, fevered, for each other... how mad, how dangerous, how insane those days were....

Medha called Ram Jivan and went back to work. Her resolution lasted with the sun. Her phone remained silent, except for one quick call to her husband and some garbled excuse about needing a midday break. She never really could lie to him point blank. Honesty was his corner stone, his identity. A half truth was what she managed at best.

When the sun set and the office boy came to draw the curtains in her cabin, she waved him away. Pushing back her chair, she stretched and purred, the afternoon's sensuality still lending a wine like langour to her limbs. She stood at the window and watched the city lights come on, and smiled. Just the thought of being with him made her so heavy-limbed and fluid... what would happen if she actually went...

His room came into her mind in sharp relief. Zonal, mood lighting, plush rugs, the smell of incense that Nikhil so loved, and books and manuscripts everywhere. Hard bound, paper back, recent works, classics, thumbed through, brand new... intoxicating, that smell....

And along with it came crashing other images. Medha alone in that room and no Nikhil in sight. Medha crying outside that door, drunk at 2a.m. and neighbours popping out, but no Nikhil. Medha calling the house when Nikhil switched off his phone, and hearing that phone echo unanswered in that empty hall.... Medha buying a new rug for the house only to hear a caustic 'trying to be my wife?'. Medha waiting and Medha hoping. Medha hopeless and still waiting. And finally, Medha not waiting anymore...

Shaking her head, confused, sad, hurt, Medha left office. Her past was tumbling into her present, and her heart was feeling fragile. Compared to the robust tremulousness of the afternoon, this stillness was fragile. She felt the tears prick at the back of her eyes. The whole thing was sad. The investment of emotions were sad, the letting go of dreams were sad, the waylaying of life on the pathway of ideas was sad. It was a futile world, this one of the heart, and whether you destroyed it or nurtured it, at the end of the day, something was left sad somewhere.

"Lets go home Ram Jivan" Medha uttered those words like a talisman. What would she go home and tell her husband? Should she go home at all? Or should she give in to the tempest that had never even yielded driftwood?

Ram Jivan observed his mistress through the rear view. She looked so sad. He felt awful. He wished he dared entertain her with some story, bring up some funny anecdote, like he did at times when she was grim and frowning after work. But this was different. He couldn't break that silence, it was too full...

Suddenly Medha felt the entire world tailspin and her heart get completely entangled with her thoughts.... nothing was working. Nothing was making sense. She needed a compass and north was missing.

"Ram Jivan...." she hesitated...

"Jee?"

"Uh... not home.... Apsara Apartments first.... just for a little bit" she almost whimpered out that last sentence like a pleading child...

Ram Jivan shut his eyes in despair for one furtive second. Apsara Apartments. Cherry coloured 4 wheel drive in the basement. Ever since Ram Jivan had joined mistress' service she had gone there only a few times, but he knew who stayed there, alright.

He decided it was time to get brazen. "Apsara Apartments? So late madam? This is the same place we used to go to, a few years back, no? And last 2 weeks you've asked me to drive by the same place about 3 times? Same place you want to go?"

Medha sighed. This was no good. She would go home and send him off first, and maybe drive out later herself. After dinner. After a chat with her husband.... a chat? About what? How could she hold up her tattered flag of petty conversation in front of his brilliant white mast of honesty? Discuss work? Her break at the mall?

"Never mind, lets go home" she instructed her driver, and settled back into her seat, a wave of terrible exhaustion passing over her.

Ram Jivan relaxed. One day at a time, he thought.

When Medha walked in home, her husband was surfing the net. He looked up briefly and smiled. Coffee? He asked, as usual.

Guilt. She felt. Not so usual. Not for anything tangible. Not for any wrong done. Simply for an adultery considered. Were trecherous thoughts more harmful, or deeds? Did a thought through in detail indiscretion, that had never happened, matter more in the final book of Right and Wrong, or a senseless, thoughtless, real trespass? Which one notched higher on the moral crime graph? If she got terribly drunk one night and kissed a stranger at a party, would that be worse? Or were these betraying, adulterous thoughts worse?

"Thanks baby" she sighed, settling down into the couch. "I'm not hungry tonight, so go ahead have your high calorie food".

Her husband grinned. And with a flourish pulled out a bowl of rich gooey cheese sauce pasta from behind him. "Already doing that".

Pasta? Sure, now there would be wine too. And maybe hubby darling too had bought new music. How charming. What a plethora of choice. Utterly delightful.

The entire macabre humour of the scene helped her make up her mind. The world was amoral. Life was amoral. Feelings too, were beyond ethics. What the heck. She'd go. She'd take advantage of this amazing man, who'd never ask. She'd totally trample his trust and then decide what to do with the debris later. She'd never tell him. She'd live this double life, as many husbands had done, over years, and not feel guilty about it. Loving him, desiring Nikhil, committing to both in her strange twisted sense of loyalty...

"I'm going out" she was about to say, but she was interrupted. "What were you doing at South Park mall today in the afternoon exactly? What was all that about a midday break? You have a recreation centre in office too."

"Uh... so? I felt like going there. I'm the boss. I can go anywhere. Who's gonna ask me at office? Look, I need to step out for a ...."

"Did you meet Nikhil?"

Medha's lungs collapsed. She was grateful that her husband normally didn't pay much attention to nuances of the face, because hers must've looked like a panchnaama.

"Nikhil?" she managed.

"Yeah, Ram Jivan said he saw Nikhil entering the mall after you. Was wondering if you ran into him while you were there?"

"Uh... no. I didn't. I window shopped, had a coffee, came back. Wish I'd known, would've invited him for a coffee too..."

"Why?"

"What do you mean, why?"

"I thought that man hurt you terribly. Made you lose your entire sense of self? Why would you invite him to join you for coffee on a nice afternoon sneak away from work?"

Medha looked up. Her husband was looking at her intently. His tone was casual but his body was arrested. His eyes sparking.

"Cmon Medha, you deserve a break when you want it, you know."

Was he talking about the afternoon? Or was he talking about something else? What an incredible man, Medha thought. She put down her bag, nodding slowly. "Yeah, I guess you're right. We are all entitled to enjoy our breaks to the fullest".

The next morning, when the doorbell rang, Medha felt too lazy to go downstairs. Her night had been fuzzy and warm, and loving. She decided to check from the balcony first.

"Car keys madam" Ram Jivan beamed up, a sword of sunlight splitting his face into two halves.

Half innocent, half wicked, thought Medha, staring down at him in exasperation, in affection, in wonder. She flung down the keys and went back to the bedroom.

"You know sweetie", she murmured, nuzzling into her husband's neck, "in a progressively individualistic world, where family, society and community have ceased to matter, its funny where the face of ethic can pop up. Odd, where we can suddenly get our moral bearing, our faith from."

"I know." Her husband said. "Now stop being profound while behaving like a dachshund".

You've Got New Post

2007-02-11T01:33:00.000+05:30

'Why is there no new post on your blog?' Best friend asked.

'Because I'm happy. I can't write when I'm happy.'

Best friend wore a curiously best friend expression, managing to blend relief with curiosity with perplexity with amusement.

'I honestly can't. Today I felt like writing after a long time because I just saw Parzania and I was disturbed. But the feeling passed because I'm largely happy.'

Best friend wanted to know more. So I supplied. About husband and life and togetherness and balance and things falling harmoniously into place.

Best friend smiled and said, 'for those reasons, I'm more than willing to accept absence on the blog'.

An ex boyfriend and almost ex friend had once told me: for the sake of poetry, you always need to be heartbroken. Your being happy would be a great disservice to the world.

Very flattering it was. Made me feel quite like the raven haired, wild eyed beauty I always fancied being. Ah. The me I've wished to be.

Happiness is largely a deadening emotion. It makes much of habit, a big deal of consistency, a huge fuss over stability, and can well lose imagination en route. The tremulous beauty of sadness is fertile ground. It breeds thoughts that seek wings of expression. Happiness has no such desire. It sings itself to sleep with a smile on the lips and is more than content with conversation, beer and a pay cheque. Good sex helps. Good conversation helps even more.

Sadness can make much of a muchness and therefore help you 'live life larger than life' as a film maker friend says to me about his own. Not about sadness that is, just about his own life. But it applies equally to the emotion so I borrow, conscientiously. Conscience can screw the rhythm of writing.

My husband can't watch Parzania at 2:55p.m. tomorrow because he has to visit his daughter. His daughter who isn't mine. His weekend sojourns to his ex wife's house makes us miss many saturday and sunday things. The fact that EPL is on, on Saturday nights, puts paid to evening plans as well. So I catch up with friends. And get my weekly alcohol fix in the process, since I try and avoid drinking too often when with hubby. He kicked booze almost 2 years ago after his liver threatened to pack up, so I try and avoid putting temptation his way.

But such weekends notwithstanding, I must shamefacedly confess, I am happy. My husband loves me and displays his caring in a zillion different ways. He cooks for me and kids with me. He makes plans with me and messes up plans with me. He musses up my schedule, my hair, my thinking, and grins delightfully at the end of each mussing up. I love it. I love him. And ignore the muse. I am happy in a dumb cow like way. I fight the weight that happiness insists on heaping on me. I gym. I hum. I humdrum.

I don't write enough. I don't care.

Happiness is a bloody bad thing. I wish it upon everyone who's had the curse of imagination preying upon their expression. When you let go of the word, the paint, the musical note, the dance step, the charcoal, the pencil, the stage, the spotlight, what you're left with is that which you were searching for through all these idioms and mediums. That fat, boring, complacent thing called Happiness.

The Flowers

2006-12-20T14:22:00.000+05:30

It always seemed so inadequate, this giving of a coin or two, as a bribe to the conscience, at the crossing. And so, in desperate hate at one’s impotence, Shyama would increase the amount every once in a while. She was one of the first to switch to five rupee coins while most people just handed out 50p or Re. 1. She was also the first to convert to ten rupee notes while the rest of the city was still catching up with her fiver generosity. To some extent, Shyama pretty much was a large contributor to the phenomenon of the Rising Market Rate of the Delhi Crossing Beggar.

Then Shyama read a very thought provoking article in a leading daily. And she was amazed at how the secret guilt of being financially secure, was not a secret at all. The writer had been through the same pangs, and had attempted to assuage the same guilt with the same rising currency denomination. It was not a unique trait at all; on the contrary, it was an urban malaise.

Shyama had been both fascinated and upset by the article. There was something respectable about a secretly harboured emotion, however crippling it was. The ‘deferred’ quality of newsprint, as Vikram Seth would’ve put it, suddenly took away her sense of identity. She didn’t want to share in a malaise. She had to reinvent this act of ‘giving at the crossings’ till she could rightfully reclaim it as uniquely her own.

The idea actually came to her by accident. One of the beggar kids once spied Shyama’s lunch box, lovingly packed by her mother, on the seat next to her. Still prattling his whining litany as if by rote, and shaking his palm desultorily at the window, the kid had given himself away by his eyes. Riveted, gleaming, hungry, hopeful, hopeless, charmed, imagining, fascinated, hypnotized eyes; glued to the lunch box. Shyama knew then that not one morsel from that would go down her throat too well. So she opened the lunch box and emptied out its contents into the suddenly alive palms. And another set that materialized next to it, as they are often wont to do at India’s big and small crossings.

This episode, blossoming into a regular occurrence at random crossings across the city, and kept fiercely secret from mom who continued to pack the food lovingly, not knowing that it never reached the tummy it was meant for, gradually burgeoned into a solution in Shyama’s head. The head, that was still searching for some unique identity in that 30 second act at the crossing, to brand it with some personal stamp, slowly woke to a theme. The theme was: kids and candy.

Another small incident helped cement the idea. This happened at a busy Mumbai crossing, somewhere in Andheri west. Because Shyama was in an auto rickshaw, and there were several cars around her, the beggars were giving her less than optimum attention. A few half hearted arms and palms, whines and whispers had materialized by the rickshaw grills, and had disappeared as rapidly. Those who traveled in auto rickshaws did not pay. They were chasing the racing meter in their minds, and the small change had already been swallowed up in their imagination. The beggars knew that.

Left in relative peace, Shyama had been able to observe the phenomenon she normally went through herself, from a slight distance, (if, what exists between any two vehicles on any Mumbai road can be termed ‘distance’). Apart from the regular array of women with babies, men with no arms, and kids in rags, there was this little girl trying to sell off a bunch of red balloons. While Shyama watched, the little girl went from window to car window, knocking, scraping, begging, pointing at her balloons, and Shyama suddenly realized with a little jolt, that the girl did not really want to achieve a sale. As the lights changed, the little kid seemed visibly relieved and skipped off to the sidewalk, to make way for the surge of traffic. As her auto zipped ahead, Shyama craned her neck for a last glimpse. The little beggar girl was looking like a real little girl now, scampering with her balloons, her eyes softly alight as they followed the bobbing of her temporary friends, a small smile playing at the corners of her lips. All little girl, till the light changed again.

How many needs were there, to cater to? Shyama wondered. And were we doomed to always take something away, while giving another?

One can never serve all the beggars in India. Nor can one fulfill all the needs of one beggar. You try and save them from cold and they die in the summer heat. You try and send them to school and they die of starvation for lack of income. You try and find them employment and they die of overwork and underpay. You find them a home and they die of misplaced gratitude that makes them steal your stuff and run away. You clothe them, they die hungry. You feed them, they die of exposure. You love them, and they die of embarrassment.

Shyama had already realized that this act of giving at the crossings had far less to do with the beggars, and far more, with herself. The arc that her hand made from her lap to the bag, from the bag to the window, drew a pattern between some undefined points in her life, and at the same time, erased something else – something that ought to be erased but never could be – as transiently and as ephemerally as a wave on sand.

Having come to terms with the superfluity of the entire purpose, Shyama was now quite comfortable introducing frivolity to the act itself. If it served no higher purpose than to make invisible arcs through the empty slates of her mind, than how seriously could she take the entire thing? Might as well have some fun and colour, circus and mirth, while she was at it.

And so Shyama stocked her car with bagfuls of candies. Candies and glucose biscuits all tumble-piled onto each other; glittering through the transparent plastic bag with unpredictable promise. The kids, beggar though they were, had an aesthetic instinct. They knew that tears and frowns and whines did not quite go with this booty. Sad stories and orange lozenges at the end of them? You didn’t need a public school education to figure out that that didn’t work.

And so it came about, that Shyama discovered a whole new side benefit to the Kids and Candy theme. Apart from making her crossings experience delightfully uniquely her own, she now had the added bonus of being greeted by a riotous, grinning, laughing bunch of kids, who behaved like kids. Since there was no money to be made here, the watchful grown ups and beggar pimps at the traffic light indulgently let the kids be during these one minute romps. No harm done, even to business – the same kids could return to other car windows and reapply the miserable teary expressions, and the car owners wouldn’t even notice the change. India’s sensitivities and sensibilities both, could be quite awe inspiring at times.

Over a period of time, the kids came to recognize her, and her weaknesses. They expanded their business with ‘didi’. Although she had totally stopped giving money, newspapers, they realized, she’d buy at times, in spite of lecturing them on how one paper was not very good and she much preferred another. The other thing Shyama found difficult to refuse, were flowers. The kids would sometimes crowd around her window, clutching drooping bunches of yesterday’s roses, bought, stolen or begged off the corner florist, maybe while he was shutting shop late at night. The florist perhaps gave the flowers away for free, knowing they were of scant use to him now. The roses would be well past their prime, sad in their marginalized beauty, not very unlike the kids who clutched them hopefully. Although their petals were already falling off with every slight movement of the hand, the roses would be packed quite cleverly, with bright cellophane, and sometimes with extra twigs to hold the stems up, hidden well behind and under extra green foliage.

Shyama noticed all this. And she could not resist buying them. When she put the flowers in a glass on her office table, they’d be nothing more than stems in just a few hours, the petals adorning the polished surface like a bridal bed. She often bought the flowers as much for their own sake, as the children’s. To give them a warm home in their last few hours, and a decent burial in the office dustbin. Ten rupees for a bunch of five seemed quite worth it. Sometimes on impulse, or for lack of change, she’d buy five or ten such bunches, and pass them around in office in an impromptu carnival. It was fun, and the roses smiled wanly, she felt.

The kids developed their own group dynamics with her over the years. The ones that grew up slowly drifted to the fringes, while the younger, cuter ones took centre stage. The more confident ones talked more, asking her to get clothes, get blankets, even get jewellery. Sometimes Shyama would remember these requests, and while emptying out her cupboard, pack some of her old wardrobe into the car. At others, she’d buy sweaters and t shirts from the handcart man, thereby perpetuating and supporting this fringe economy. It fascinated her in its secret working; second hand clothes bought by the cart man by weight, from the Lal Qila area, carted back to south Delhi and sold per piece, and then bought by the affluent to distribute amongst servants and beggars, who’d sell them off again in Old Delhi and the cycle would resume. Shyama liked the self sustaining economy of this cyclical process, and liked contributing to the futile churning of it.

At times, wistfully, after a manic day of debating irrelevances at work, Shyama would wonder why she did not make this fringe life of hers her entire life. There were people like that out there: working with street children, spending time teaching, releasing reports, visit-lecturing at international forums, chronicling pain, demanding release.

But Shyama never could take that significant leap. She liked her comfort zones too much. She enjoyed her extravagances; she was addicted to her superfluities. She had another secret reason, but she never articulated that, because it smacked too much of smug self-justification. But one reason also why she never managed to change her calling, was because she seemed to hardly ever met any of the NGO types who looked happy and fulfilled. Maybe it came from being face to face with suffering all the time, maybe it was the side effect of having to fight and yell for every last bit of grant, every tiny bit of concession, every blackboard, every chalk, every wooly blanket, but the fact remained, whenever Shyama met anybody who’d made the leap, they failed to inspire her. When she read about them in magazines in newspapers, her heart stirred, something swelled in her soul and she’d almost make up her mind. But then she’d meet the person in flesh and blood. Or, someone like the person written about. And her resolve would melt. A friend would call her for a night out at the pub and she’d quickly agree to meet, for a lager and a laugh, relieved that she didn’t have to save the world quite yet.

And so the fringe life continued. As the country progressed and Shyama read about 8% GDP growth, she’d be wryly amused to see that the beggars were better dressed in Delhi now. They genuinely were, compared to a few years back. Almost none of them were in tatters, there was nobody half naked, at least not in South Delhi, and even the whining expressions were gradually getting replaced by more self confident, poised aspects. The faces at the window had changed their story. They seemed no longer to say “I am pathetic, therefore pay”. Rather, the submission was more direct, more forthright, more honest, “you can afford it. Therefore, pay”. They put the onus back on you and that made it more difficult to refuse. And they wished you well, at the end of it, with a nod and a smile, and somehow, the transaction was an equal one.

“Didi”, an impish and utterly cute girl with wild mop of hair, had grinned at her through the window, on Rakhi day some years back, “2 rupaya de de, rakhi lena hai chote bhaiyya ke liye”. The ‘chotta bhaiyya’ in question was playing in the dirt near the pavement. The request was so endearing, Shyama had felt a bit guilty about putting it to the test. But she did, anyway. Smiling back at the girl, she’d said “I have an extra Rakhi in my bag, will you take that?” The girl’s grin had widened. Sure, she’d replied. But could she get some money too? For sweets? Shyama had promptly produced the sweets as well. And the girl, grinning wider still at being caught out, had happily accepted both the sequined thread, and the sweets, and scampered off to another window for the money she still sought. Shyama had never been able to figure out if the girl had been honest with her or dishonest.

Beyond the fringes of life at the crossings, the rest of Shyama’s life played out pretty much like life does for most young, 21st century women in Delhi. Work, and friends, and independence and longing; relationships and break ups and the perennial whirligig of time space and substance. When love arrived it came in a guise she had not imagined. When Shyama married it was in a way she had never anticipated. But it was a happy fulfilled place nonetheless, breaking through imagination and fantasies, and arrived at, in spite of them.

The night of her wedding reception, Shyama’s car stopped at the same dear familiar crossing, on the way to the reception venue. Her husband and some of her friends were already waiting for her there. Shyama had no wallet and no money on her, the sweets too had run out in the car. Dressed in bridal finery, Shyama felt the shock of the unfamiliar most acutely when one of the older beggar girls came to her window. This juxtaposition of the totally familiar with the new sense of unfamiliar she was waking to, made Shyama’s heart skid a bit. Who she was, and where she was, became a momentary blur in her head. The beggar girl was looking at her in wonder; she’d never seen Shyama like this before. About to proffer her bunch of wilted roses, the girl’s eyes widened and her smile deepened. Shyama smiled at her a bit sheepishly. “I can’t take anything from you today, I have nothing on me.” “Going somewhere special?” the girl asked. “I got married yesterday”, Shyama confessed, feeling embarrassed and awkward, as though meeting an acquaintance she had forgotten to invite. It struck her then that she did not know any of these children’s names. The girl lit up, “take some flowers then, you’ll look good carrying them.” Helpless Shyama shrugged “But I have no money today, I’ll get all of you sweets tomorrow…”

Shyama’s driver turned around. Unsure whether he should reach for his wallet and help his mistress out, or shoo the girl away so that Shyama was not hassled unduly, the driver waited for his cue.

It was at this point that the beggar girl took charge of the moment that had slipped out of Shyama’s control and comprehension. She thrust a bunch of roses in at the window. “Take them” she commanded. “You can pay me tomorrow. Or not. It doesn’t matter. ‘Koi baat nahin’.”

When Shyama walked into the resplendent reception lawns, the lights twinkling in the trees and Chopin playing softly over the sound system – her husband and her father in law’s choice - she clutched a bunch of red roses close to her. The old sad flowers seemed to seep a confidence into her, a rock solid identity while she dealt with new fragile ones. Every time the evening threatened to overwhelm her, Shyama referred herself to the flowers for a sense of rooting. She carried them around the entire evening and then late at night, when she came home tired and flushed, content and flustered, the roses found place in a glass on the table in the bridal room: the best gift she’d received that evening.

Reflection

2006-11-30T17:43:00.000+05:30

A stillness of time
Is required to reflect
the swaying branches of our mind

And quiet is a place
Uninhabited

The blind leading the blind

The blind leading the blind
Can make a lot of noise you know
Clawing and cawing directions
In a desperation of aborted sense organs

And stillness left aflutter.

Quiet is a place I bought a ticket away from.

Hello everybody. I am back. At work.

Rustle [from the diaries]

2006-10-13T18:58:00.000+05:30

The sunflowers open their face to the sun
And I think of you drifting somewhere in the city
A March breeze tosses my heart
I think of you again.

They have raked the autumn leaves
And heaped them at the side of the street
I brush my rustling thoughts of you
And gather them in a gentle corner of my mind.

19/03/97

Summer [from the diaries]

2006-10-13T18:51:00.000+05:30

A koel has gone insane
This summer.
She sings saucily
Through hot afternoons
Urging mango ripes to overflow
She sings into the sunset
As if
She decides when dusk should fall.

Hers is a wanton call
Coaxing the sap out of drying barks
Seducing the juice
From summer blooms

A koel has gone mad
This terrible summer

It’s pecking at my heart
To pour its liquid song
Into my veins

17/6/98

Preparing [from the diaries]

2006-10-13T18:48:00.000+05:30

By the time you dropped off the flowers
At my door,
By the time the trousseau arrived,
By the time the jewellery that grandmother had saved
Arrived by parcel from another city,
By the time you went and changed
Into your brand new suit

Did you notice how a few stars dropped by
To timidly witness our grand moment?
A gruff sun having left
For not being looked after well.

15/11/97

Sunset [from the diaries]

2006-10-13T18:01:00.000+05:30

In each of our cities
The sun sets in different ways
It hides behind scaffoldings sometimes
It sulks behind soot stained buildings.

How does the sun set in your city?

Does it pale into the neon lights?
Choked by a passing bus
Does it hitch a ride sometimes?

White, dusty skies
Red lettering running to sell engine oil
Against a bizarre tree

My city hums with me.

Choking me with its venom
Spewing me onto its roads
Driving me from sun to sun
Lamplights on the run.

28/5/99

Take My Trip

2006-10-10T20:30:00.000+05:30

This is the Maldives. The turquoise blue is for real. It's not a trick of light. The beach is genuinely pearl grey.

And there is nothing to do. Except snorkel, fish, sun and beer.

If there is any song tucked away in any part of your heart, you deserve to treat yourself to the Laguna Beach Resort, Maldives.

Just don't go alone. Alone can be very lonely here.

Grey Blue

2006-10-10T19:26:00.000+05:30

It isn't as though I am not familiar with grey-blue. It is a feeling I've met many times, around the gentle bend of a song, in a chilly office when you suddenly look up and realise that the sky has darkened and most of the cubicles are empty, and the electrician is switching off the tubes, one by one, by one...

The quiet hum of machinery, the drone of a distant TV with a couple of office boys and a security guard hunched up around it, half guilty for being there while I still work, so snapped up into irritating attention whenever I pass by to visit the ladies or walk into the studio.

A radio station is a funny place to work in. A monstrous machinery of people, strategy, technology, database and planning - to talk to one person. Its astounding. While an ESPN gears up to cater to a billion people during the EPL, a Star Plus grooms itself to please millions of viewers per saas serial, what is our job? To make ONE person smile.

The rest follows. But the day you loose sight of that one person, you're sunk. You cannot address yourself to a mass on radio. The only way to procure the masses, is to forget them and focus on the individual.

That, I think, is what Amitabh Bachchan used to do. Talk to an audience of one. And get the nation by the balls of its imagination. O yeah, its his birthday tomorrow. Happy birthday big b.

Grey-blue often keeps me company while I work here. Today I was chatting with the jocks team in Jaipur about who they are really talking to, and why... and I started to do this typical character sketch of an average middle class listener. What does he think about, what are his insecurities, how does he feel, what does he wish for? 6 matches of the ICC Champions Trophy are happening in Jaipur, but does this guy have a ticket? Can he buy one if he wishes to?

And I suddenly felt that unbidden lump in my throat and that slight pin prick behind the eye lid. A tad embarassing when you're addressing a gaggle of giggly barely-out-of-teens.

I don't know when grey-blue will show up in this line of work. That's probably why I love this job so much. Sometimes, when I'd work really late, and the office would be deserted, I'd step into the on air studio, before leaving for home, on a chilly winter morning. I'd know that the roads outside would be fogged over at 1 or 2 a.m. and just before braving that cold lonely drive, I'd push open the solid thick wooden doors that lead into the On Air.

Normally the engineers would've darkened the room before leaving. And the entire studio would be in dim, weak starlight streaming in from the massive glass paned windows on a clear night. Else the sound of the radio would be filtering in through the dark, and just the red and yellow lights on the consol would be glowing, and twinkling, and blinking... like friendly magic.

I've stood there, in the shadow, on many a night, and felt grey-blue curl up like a muffler around my neck, a rug at my feet. I've heard the strains of a soft song filter out of that twinkling blinking friendly magic, and reach its gentle fingers out into the night.

And as I stood there, I have imagined that same song soaking into a romantic drive a young couple is taking on the gurgaon road; sinking under a blanket where a teenager has hidden a radio; caressing an old man as he nods off to sleep on his rocking chair; keeping a night watchman company in his wooden shack, accompanying a call center executive as she works late into the night with a steaming cup of coffee by her side.

Our entire working, planning, thinking, strategizing, meeting - for that one moment.

Do you know that what you hear on your radio set is actually playing 8 seconds after it plays out from the On Air studio? Jokingly once, a jock of mine had said about the On Air - if the rest of Delhi is in the present, then this studio is the future.

As I have stood there late into the night, watching the blinking lights, and feeling the emotions that seep out of that room to touch lives, hearts, moments, situations, fights, cuddles, huddles, arguments and pain; interest and boredom, aloofness and involvement - I have felt for a split second that I genuinely did stand in the future and beheld magic near enough to touch.

And I have quietly left the room, wrapped in grey-blue, wondering if any of us understood the power we held in our hands. And if we'd ever put it to the right use.

Lost and Found

2006-10-04T19:30:00.000+05:30

We used to play
Hide and seek

And school had a wooden box
Called Lost and Found

Whenever I had to hide
I'd want to jump into that thing

But it scared me
Because there was always the fear
Of not being found

If you hide
You can be sought
And its altogether friendlier
In the parking lot

But the lost and found box
Had an attitude

It smelled of hope.

A desperate tiffin box
A forlorn pencil holder
An altogether abandoned umbrella

Each looking up ingratiatingly
At every half interested head
That peeks into the lost and found box

And what if your status changed
From lost to 'stolen'
Instead of 'found'?

Then where would you belong?

Hunting

2006-10-04T19:21:00.000+05:30

There was a larger purpose here.

I'm sure of it;
I had kept it most carefully.

You know how it is
With these carefully kept things.

Stashed in trunks
Stored in strange places
Remembered so hard
That it guarantees forgetting.

However,
I know I'd parked it here somewhere.

A larger purpose
With a lilac view
Those rose tinted things
Fighting mildew

I even remember the paper I wrapped it in;
An old newspaper with an inspiring editorial
And the mothballs just in case...

Do purposes evaporate?

World Heart Day

2006-09-24T13:16:00.000+05:30

Funny that September 24th should be World Heart Day. Its also Baba's birthday - a man with a very big heart, who died of a heart attack.

This is not going to be a maudlin piece about how much I miss my father and how I suffer from clockwork sentiment like so many others. Clockwork sentiment? You know, the sorts that spring up obediently and punctually on specific days. Oh, its a birthday. Sniff sob nostalgia. Yikes, its a death anniversary. Snivel, whimper, memories.

Not that those emotions are untrue. Memories do come unbidden, images appear in sharper focus. You remember excruciating details that you manage to keep at bay the rest of the year. My sympathies to clockwork sentiment, including my own.

However, like I said. This is not a piece cleverly weaving the pathos of world heart day with the death of a large hearted man who died of a heart attack. [dang, I do like that connect, don't I? Mentioned it a second time in the span of 4 paragraphs!]

This one's about developing a personality. I was 20 when my dad died. I was a confident, successful, accolade winning, teacher petted, academic achiever kind of youngster. Everything I touched seemed to turn to gold. I was the role model and the model child. Yeah yeah.

Then one day I was standing in front of my bookshelf at home, wondering which book to pluck out of the rack. As my eyes scanned the titles, they stumbled on one I'd read recently, just before baba's fatal attack. Did I like it? Was it a good book?

I remember the slow sense of realization coupled with mild horror that assailed my brain, as I processed my own thinking. I had absolutely no idea whether it was a good book or a bad one. I had no clue whether I should recommend it or trash it. Sure I'd read it. Sure I'd absorbed it too. But had I formed an opinion about it? No I hadn't. And why?

Because I had not gotten the chance to discuss it with my dad.

Once this sinking awareness set in, I got into a morbid fascination of testing it out on other things in my life which I thought I had an opinion on... books, movies, people, food, clothes. Gosh. It was a horrible excercise. Because at the ripe old age of 20, I discovered that I did not have a single opinion of my own in this world.

All my views were directly bounced off my father's opinions. Either he liked something so I liked it too. Or, he hated something, and as the rebel teenager, I began to like it. Or he loved something and in order to be different I chose to dislike it. You get the drift right? I'm not saying all my opinions were the same as my father's. What I'm talking about is even more sinister. All my opinions were a product of my father's views on the subject, coupled with my equation with him at that point of time.

Trust me, it sounds trivial now, but it was a very painful realization then. That I had absolutely no personality to call my own. No thoughts, opinions, ideas, views, concepts that were truly original. Sure, all our notions are influenced somewhere or the other by history, culture, context, peer group, family, friends and tradition, but within that we amalgate what we call a singularly personal world view. This direct richocheting off a strong personality's mind and believing it to be yours can be quite misleading and disconcerting.

I am 31 today, going on 32, and I still find myself stopping to think 'what would baba have felt about that?'. At times the exercise is an amusing one, at times frustrating. But I do hope that somewhere along the way I may have learnt to distill, process and gleam a position that is genuinely mine. A stance that may well be reflected in like-minded people, but which is not arrived at because of them.

Because I went through this quiet realization many years ago, I also test it on people I am close to. Colleagues, friends, family. I try and see, especially if I am close enough to that person, whether they are still in the 'richocheting stage' or the 'assimilative stage'.

So where are you?

The reason I ask you to think about it, is because I hope and pray that a tragedy, like the loss of a loved one, not be the spring board for examining the development of your personality. Death is a great teacher but hey, not a very pleasant one. But since that day I've often wondered - had baba not died, would I still be richocheting, and not ever grasping that I am?

Many, sadly too many people I know, are richocheting. I know this sounds hopelessly pompous and priggish, but its true. Very often, people who come across as strong willed and opinionated, actually aren't. You just have to meet their closest people - a parent, a best friend, a partner, a boss - and you realise where their world view stems from.

On the other hand, funnily enough, a lot of seemingly tentative people are assimilative. They appear unsure, hesitant, questioning. You'd think it would be the easiest thing in the world to influence their minds. But no, they are not that easily swayed because they are good listeners. They will hear you out, absorb what you say, process it and then assimilate it into their world view. Open to being agreeable, but not open to being overtly influenced.

These sort of minds are not aggressive or confrontative. Because they have no turf to defend. They are not embedded in a subconscious emotional connect that they dare not defile. For example its so much more uncomplicated to take it easy when my opinion's are attacked rather than when My=Baba's views are under threat. After all, I loved that man, I must defend him, right?

Hey its his birthday today. Birthday, not birth anniversary. Because he continues to live and glow in the recesses of my mind. And perhaps the girth of his personality does not admit defeat, but I continue to love and battle him in a way that one can only do with someone who was more than close; who was a part of oneself.

Happy birthday baba! Keep up the fight.

CALCUTTA [from the diaries]

2006-09-23T13:29:00.000+05:30

ONE:

What she remembered of Calcutta were hot summers and pinafores. The kind of pinafores that one had to cross the mighty seas for, catch a flight from another country, catch a train from another city and finally arrive at cool houses with cement floors and loud indulgent voices.

From there the pinafores weren’t far away. A tram or a taxicab, sometimes even a rickshaw would take you to them. For her, Gariahat was not a market. It was the triumphant sound of what to Ma was a secret treasury. The coffers of all that could not be found anywhere else, even if one were to scour the entire universe. Gariahat. Home to the magical pinafores, which could not be found anywhere else in the world.

She preferred it when the pinafores got a bit old and wash worn. True they did not quite remain as crisp and as white as they first were, billowing off hangers strung high on the shopkeeper’s shack. As Ma and the shopkeeper haggled good-naturedly, the pinafores would proudly fill themselves up with the Calcutta air and swing and sway and swing and sway…

But Ma never got those pinafores down from the hangers. What a waste it seemed to her, that after pointing to them and haggling over them and making them altogether the focus of the entire transaction, Ma would make the shopkeeper pull out fresh flouncy pieces from a large cardboard box.

That’s the only time she would be consulted. Which ones did she want? The ones with the leaves and flowers? Or the ones with the carrots and apples? The ones with the orange and red threads; or the ones with the blue and green patterns? She never knew, she could never say. Choosing pinafores seemed a matter of grave and serious deliberation. After all, one had travelled the seven seas in search of these exotic things. How could she possibly decide?

Finally the purchase was made. She was the proud owner of four new ‘pennys’ as grandma would curiously call them. And Calcutta was the only place where she was allowed to play with only the pinafores on. In Delhi one had to wear a frock over them. In the other country, which you had to catch a flight to after the summer vacations were over, somehow the pinafores lost their seat of pride and glory. That’s where you needed gum boots and fur coats. That’s where it snowed. Pinafores got snowed under other clothes.

But here? Here it was different. Prickly heat powder and cousins who were always in the twilight zone of friend and stranger. Load shedding and hand fans. And the chatter over her head that never seemed to end. Pishis floated effortlessly into Mashis who got enmeshed with Nau Daa-s and Mejo daa-s and then found themselves entangled in Didis and Mamas and Kakamonis. An assortment of nicknames followed and a string of addresses chased them. She never knew very clearly who was who at the end of it all when she met them. For her, they were conversation: carried from one land to another, from telephones and dining tables to four poster beds and string chairs, and it seemed a bit strange to her that they should become real people one had to say ‘hello’ to.

Calcutta. What else did she remember of it? Bathrooms she did not like and too many sweets she had to eat. High ceilings and creaky fans and oh yes! Bars at the window. Curtains at the window. She somehow loved both the bars and the curtains. They seemed to make the windows come to life. Give them the respect that sleek sheets of glass and Venetian blinds did not offer them. The windows in Calcutta, she was sure, were happier off, with their creaky wooden doors – imagine windows with their own little doors! Blue or green painted doors, two per window, opening out onto the street, with little wooden blocks at the corners that prevented them from banging shut if the wind got into them. And to cap it all, every window had a sill low enough and wide enough for her to sit on. Yes, she liked the Calcutta windows.

From there the world seemed altogether a friendly place. Everyone spoke the language that was greeted as a strange tongue anywhere else. What was a secret cipher in the rest of the world was the common code here. And so, subliminally, without knowing when or why, the brief and sporadic trips to Calcutta notwithstanding, inside her head, Calcutta was home.

TWO:

The Mumbai sky is clouding over again. Perhaps it will rain. I hope it does. A short piece of blue sky framed by some fluttering clothes on a clothesline suddenly reminds me of Calcutta. Perhaps it’s the time of the evening. I’ve never been very fond of the dusk. Ever since I was a child, the dusk has made my heart heavy. She always seems astray, like she’s lost her way between the day and the night. And her forlorn silence makes me sad.

Or maybe it’s just the grills at the window that remind me of Calcutta. Or, the sound of children shouting, as the play in the compound 4 floors below. Some sound, sight, texture of childhood returns. I am almost scared. And it still hasn’t begun to rain.

As a child I used to be mostly silent. Mostly bewildered. Mostly absorbing. Sometimes, I think, one never outgrows one’s childhood. I am still mostly all that inside.

Yesterday Mumbai came to a grinding halt. A bus explosion at Ghatkopar, two killed, 28 injured, 4 critically. Frantic calls from home. Yes Ma I’m ok, no Ma I was nowhere near Ghatkopar, yes yes, I never travel by bus anyway.

And then Balasaheb swung into action. And Mumbai stopped. Stopped without question, to question. Stopped without protest, to protest. The pictures in today’s papers are ludicrous. Grinning women in Shiv Sena uniform, stopping trains like it’s a festival. Rail Roko at Thane Station could well vie with Ganesh chaturthi in terms of exultation. Not to be outdone, the Muslim community quickly takes out a protest march condemning the blast. Or maybe they’re just plain simple scared. Nobody wants to give Mani Ratnam a chance to make a sequel.

It’s a scarred world that we live in. But the square blue patch of sky I can see from the bed reveals none of that. Where would you be right now? Now that you have told her about me, our 3-day fantasy has begun to grow roots inside my head. Too much beer, too much Maugham and three heady, sense-sloshed nights. Nights that were meant to fly away in the wind like a careless ribbon. Nights that are now growing tentacles and acquiring a geography.

Somehow your being in Calcutta has sent me into a time spin. That city is not meant to be the present. It’s supposed to be the past. Soft, shadowy patterns under ceiling fans. Calcutta is a fathered world, and the first few days of my first adult romance. Now that neither Baba is alive nor that romance, your bringing Calcutta to life seems silly.

The sun sets completely. I heave a sigh of relief. This is good old uncomplicated night. Always in black, always the same, no matter which window you look at it from. This is not the bewildered, identity-crisis-ridden half pink, sometimes mauve, suddenly purple occasionally orange, streaked with red flushed with vermilion splashed with amber stroked with azure, sheeted with grey riot that the dusk can be. Now I feel safe.

The Kumbh Mela at Nashik started yesterday. Like most everything reported in the papers, controversy surrounded it. Much was made of Akharas and boycotts, central legislations and temple trusts. But today, the Times of India reported “Splendour, shlokas and sniffer dogs kicked off the Kumbh Mela here on Wednesday with prayers for world peace.” And in the meanwhile, J M Lyngdoh won the Magsaysay for his “convincing validation of free and fair elections as the foundation and best hope of secular democracy in India”.

Ours is a robust country for sure. Validated by the square piece of blue sky that has turned an obedient black now. I wonder if you will call tonight. There’s the bud of terror growing right there… yes, I can feel it, in the centre of my chest. I know it so well. I know I will water and nurture it till that all-too-familiar fear grips me again… how many times, just how many times have I grown this plant. A fear that blinds and binds me, makes me alternately cling and run… you’ll hear too much of me, you won’t hear from me at all, there will be deluge and drought, agony and ecstasy, pain and exuberance… you don’t know the pattern perhaps, but I do. The next few months will be an emotional roller coaster for us, before this ubiquitous ‘us’ rises and rises high, high in the air in a stream of glorious flame, spins and turns and showers multi coloured stars and finally explodes in a rain of glowing streaks. Oh I know this one so well. And finally when we drop to the ground, spent and burnt, our fireworks but a shimmer of a memory, that square patch of blue sky will still be square, and still be blue.

THREE:

She never knew quite when she fell in love with Durga Puja. Everything was wrong with it. It was noise and it was crowds and it was sweat and it was new clothes that were always uncomfortable because they were always the wrong fabric for the wrong season because they were always made keeping the winters in mind.

But when it came to Durga Puja, there simply was no choice. One simply had to be excited. One simply had to look forward to it. At the end of four days skin rash, shoe bite and upset stomach, you just nursed yourself back to the rest of the year and regretted that Pujo was over.

Amidst the sodden banana leaves and swollen conch shells, the golden goddess shone down. It was her favourite pastime to establish a secret-connect with the idol, even as the multitudes prayed and the cymbals crashed and the drums beat. She was sure that when she looked into those deep black lustrous eyes, they shone and sparkled just for her.

The smell of Sheuli flowers always told her that Pujo is near. It was heady, the anticipation. A four-day sabbatical from life as she knew it. A heightening of senses, a loosening, dislodging of pain.

Crisp cotton saris and blouses with plunging backs. Dark kohl to line the eyes. The excitement was akin to a wedding and yet different. And even now, after all these years, the first glimpse of the goddess was still heart stilling. Overwhelming. Pain rattling. Something about unfinished chapters and completion of circles. That idol was the centre and the reference point and a quick scan of the year gone by. When She arrived, she felt old.

FOUR:

I light a cigarette. The entire flame of the matchstick gets absorbed by the nicotine tip. I love it when that happens. Flame absorption. How did Ayn Rand describe a cigarette? ‘Controlled fire at the fingertips’. I loved that.

I must return to Delhi soon. It’s most truant; this weeklong leave, soaking in the music and the poetry, humming to the guitar and watching patches of square blue skies. Very wasted.

There was another blast after the Ghatkopar one. This time at a pyrotechnic technician’s residence in a slum cluster in Jogeshwari. Alternately dubbed as an accident and as sabotage by the media and the politicians. Apparently Mumbai is on the edge; not that I can tell.

I am on the edge for sure. I stare at my phone and allow the smoke to curl in vague patterns around my fingers. The centre of my heart is lead. Dark grey and heavy. I’m sure if I fell into the sea right now I’d drown quicker. The waves we saw breaking at the Gateway of India – I could have honestly drowned in them. It would have been very Daphne Du Maurier-esque.

You’re not with me today. Across the miles I feel you peeling off like Velcro. Something is tearing at the fragile fabric of an ephemeral world. Something is reclaiming you like sea land.

The terror is growing. Its gnawing at my insides and the sky is a sheet of grey metal. A crow is beating its wings against it. I’m sure it’ll break something. The sky is unyielding today.

The Maharaja of Marine Plaza

2006-09-20T23:03:00.000+05:30

5 year old Veer was not enjoying the game anymore. He was finding it difficult to keep his lips from pouting, and in spite of the rain, it was becoming increasingly impossible to fake the tears as rain drops. Any minute that impish brat Rani would squeal out - "Veeru is crying!" and they'd start their blasted little dance around him, "Veeru kitna chhota hai, veeru kitna rota, veeru vada pao khane ka, nadaa kholke dikhaane ka".

Hate that Rani. She really thought she was the queen of the chawl or something. Beastly. It was all her fault. And there she was, at it again...

"What what whaaaaat? Your baba is what???"

Veer braced himself, stood straight to his full height - all 3.5 feet of him, and said with as much conviction as the last 5 times, albeit a bit droopy with tears. "My Baba is a King".

The kids exploded. Some rolled in the mud with laughter, others hugged each other and guffawed till the tears ran from their eyes. The women of the chawl looked up from their fish baskets and smiled. The grime grinned from the dark cement. The stench smirked.

Veer ran home. Hating everybody.

Aai was sitting on her haunches in her faded green work sari, sunning shrimps. She looked up warily from her basket as Veeru burst into the sun streaked enclosure outside their kholi. "Go slow you crazy fool. If you slide on the fish don't come crying to me, crybaby".

It was too much for Veer. Aai too? He started scouring the chawl for Baba. There he was, smoking his last beedi before getting on for work. They looked funny together, Aai and her Pathan husband. When Shera had come to Mumbai to escape the war in Afghanistan, nobody had expected sweet little Jyoti bai to fall head over heels in love with him. Or for that matter, the exotic Pathan to give her a second glance. But obviously something happened, and before 6 months were up, Jyoti bai's tummy started swelling.

Of course Shera married her. And of course everything was normal at the chawl after that. But somehow, Veer had become the product of some unspoken contempt in the neighbourhood. Veer was too young to understand why Aai kept her distance from the other fisher folk, and why baba looked so different from the others. Nor could he understand the mild ridicule he always felt sting at the back of his neck. And now that he had that one chance to be first among equals, Baba was not willing to come out into the open and tell everyone the truth.

The problem was this silly promise Baba had taken from him. Why couldn't he just tell everyone else that he was a maharaja, and stayed in the chawl only as a disguise? But Veer figured, he couldn't. The disguise wouldn't work would it, if everyone knew? And enemies were everywhere. Baba would've kept it a secret even from Veer except for that resplendent gown and turban Veer spotted one day in the trunk. So soft, so silky, so unbelievably rich. Veer had just put the turban on his own head, which had of course promptly swallowed half his face, when Baba walked in and grinned at his predicament.

Picking him up in his arms Baba had told him the most incredible story. About palaces and queens, chandeliers and palanquins; about intrigue and war, and secret tunnels and escape hatches. Breathless, Veer had heard him out - how his own Baba was actually the emperor of a vast kingdom, and was in hiding right now. And how Veer must swear to secrecy, otherwise the entire chawl's life would be compromised. Veer was allowed to occassionally peep into the trunk and stroke the turban, but not much else. In excitement and thrill, little Veeru had made his breathless promise to Baba. Never ever to speak a word....

But to see Aai sitting in that dirty green sari, when SHE was the real rani, not that snot nosed brat outside. And baba, in his torn bandi, smoking a beedi when hukkas could be laid out for him on satin cushions. Veer couldn't keep his word. He simply couldn't.

Not that he minded life in the chawl; it was the only one he'd ever know. But surely Aai and Baba missed their days in the palace? Could he do nothing about it? He was small, but he was smart. The other day when Pappan's kite got stuck on the tree it was Veer who'd retrieved it without damaging. And even Rani, who was 2 years older, and a smartass, came to him with her problems in english. Veer had the best grasp on english in the entire chawl. Grown ups included.

Veer decided something had to be done. Kallu was the only solution. But Kallu was mean. He was a bully and always laughed at everything the kids said, just because he was 13. Kallu behaved like he knew everything better, although Veer had seen the tea stall owner - who employed Kallu - hurl abuses and humiliate him in public. But Kallu continued to behave like the dada. And the kids had no choice because there was no one else old enough to give adult advice and young enough to be one of the group in the entire chawl.

The rest of the teenagers had either run away, or were in some strange homes, or had died. So Kallu it had to be.

Veer went looking. Kallu was not at the tea stall, but his wire tea tray was missing too. Which meant he'd gone on an office delivery. Which meant he'd not return without a smoke. Which meant Veer could very easily find him behind the Colaba fish market with those awful boys.

By the time Veer managed to slip and slide over the slime of decaying fish and reach the empty shack at the back, Kallu was pleasantly stoned. Being the youngest of the dubious clan of ‘beedis’ as they called themselves, Kallu was the least bothered about cops, raids and beatings. As a result, he enjoyed his smoke most leisurely. When Veer huffed his way to him he found Kallu alone, grinning like an idiot.

“Vee vee!” Kallu belched. “Kya re?”

Veer started without preamble. “Kallu, I need help”. Kallu looked quizzical. Veer almost never approached him and if he did, it was with much feet shuffling reluctance. This forthright open faced request was new.

“Kya be” said Kallu again, narrowing his eyes.

“My Baba is a king. And nobody believes me.”

Kallu sprayed out ganja smoked spit contemptuously on the dirt floor, "call the king to come and clean this!" he smirked. Veer waited patiently. He was getting used to this.

When Kallu's remark did not evince the sort of distressed tear burst reaction he was hoping for, in order to get the pest of his back, he shuffled reluctantly out of the shack.

"Allright. I'll help you. But you've got to convince ME first. I don't think your baba is a king. I think he's a terrorist. A runaway. A refugee. A bomber. If you can prove to me that that red bearded weirdo is a king, I'll take care of the kids in the chawl. They'll all be bowing and courtesying to him from tomorrow. Deal?"

Typical hateful Kallu swagger. Even when he was interested in doing something, he managed to make the other person feel like he was doing him a favour. And this one was an out an out favour, so it was pretty certain that by the time the entire deal was over, Veer was meant to be feeling dizzy with gratitude.

Veer wished he could've smacked Kallu across the head like he'd seen the tea stall owner do. He swallowed his pint sized pride and agreed. "Deal".

"Ok so how do you know your baba is a king? Where is his palace? Who are his subjects? Why does he live in the chawl? Where does he hide his crown? Why are his kinsmen not looking for him? India doesn't have kings and queens and neither does Afghanistan. So where did he rule?"

The line of questionning was getting a bit too complicated even for clever little Veer. He looked up, a puzzled frown creasing his forehead. "But his palace is right here," he clarified. "That's where he goes every evening. Why do you think he stays at the chawl by day and goes out by night? So that nobody spots him. And I've seen his crown - well, its not really a crown because it doesn't have those jagged edges. But its silky and red. And he has a gown that goes with it. Haven't you seen him leave the chawl with that packet? That's what it contains. He goes to his palace quietly and talks to his courtiers and tells them how to run the kingdom. Then he comes and hides in the morning so that the enemies don't spot him. His kingdom is this entire area. All of Colaba and Cuffe Parade and Marine Drive..." Veer prattled on, but Kallu was beyond listening.

Kallu's expression was reflecting more and more incredulity. He was beyond laughing as well; he was genuinely non plussed now. Veer sounded so convinced. And it WAS true that Shera only left at night. With a packet under his arms. And returned in the morning with the same packet.

Kallu was beginning to feel uneasy. Obviously Veer had no clue what he was talking about. All this king nonsense was total rubbish. But these were unsure times. An Afghan in the chawl, leaving each night... where did he go? What did he do? How did he make a living? How come none of them had ever asked? That silly Pandu did come for rounds every week, but the lesser said of these Mumbai cops, the better. For god's sake, they had not even managed to nab the 'beedi' gang with ganja yet. And they'd catch a terrorist. Right.

"Come lets go". Kallu had taken a decision. On the pretext of Veer, he'd follow Shera tonight. If Shera spotted them, he had Veer as a shield. Surely even a terrorist would not hurt his own child. And then Kallu would be a hero. The papers would talk of his bravery. Vilasrao would throw a party in his honour. There he'd meet Ritesh and the other stars. Shah Rukh Khan would come and shake his hand. Maybe Priyanka would give him a kiss on the cheek like she'd given that loser Hrithik in that junk film....

They waited way past sundown. The tea stall owner hired another boy and swore under his breath that he'd give Kallu the beating of a lifetime when he came to collect his pay. Aai stopped wondering where Veer was and decided it was futile to worry, the boy would be fine. Rani trooped around the chawl wanting to tease Veeru a bit more and finally fell asleep sulkily in her mother's lap.

Veer and Kallu hid, although there was absolutely no need to hide. But they had already gotten under the skin of their sleuthing roles, and hiding and skulking around was integral to that.

Finally around 8p.m., after a frugal dinner, Shera left the chawl with his customary packet. The Afghan had long legs and walked briskly and the two kids were trying not to get noticed. So they kept losing him, and by the time they reached the long Marine Drive stretch there was so much traffic and so many headlights that Veer totally lost his bearing. Afraid that the pest would get hit by an oncoming car and spoil the entire plan, Kallu finally hoisted him up on to his shoulders and gave chase. The gentle jog and the split point lights splintering into his eyes slowly hypnotised Veeru into semi slumber. And he missed keeping his eyes on his father's rapidly receding figure.

Suddenly Shera dashed into a maze of dark alleys curving like arteries behind the main stretch of the sea-facing boulevard. Kallu couldn't keep track of where the Afghan went. He wasn't about to give up now so he hailed a taxi. He had mastered the art of dodging taxi fares when he'd reached his destination. The driver looked at him disgustedly. He could spot a runner from a mile and had little hope of a decent fare, but he took the risk anyway. There had been no business since morning and this might just buy dinner.

"Chalo" Kallu commanded imperiously. "Kidhar" came back the bored but valid drawl. Veer giggled. He loved it when someone, anyone, took Kallu's trip. Taken aback and suddenly feeling just 13, Kallu stammered "Marine Drive". The driver raised his eyebrows and shrugged, as if to say "and where do you think we already are?", but then he shifted gear and the taxi was off on the long sea winding stretch of a road.

"What are we doing?" Veer quizzed. "Where's baba? Aren't we going to look for his palace? I thought you said we were following him? Where did he go?" Awake now as much as he had been asleep a minute ago, the way only 5 year olds can be, Veer kept tugging at Kallu's arm and asking questions.

Kallu stopped paying attention. He was scanning the roads wondering what he would do now. The life and pulse of Marine Drive were also sucking him into their glamour and he was finding it difficult to stay focused on his current task. What swank cars, what amazing buildings, what stylishly turned out people. They all looked like film stars. The warm yellow lights glowed inside the new cafes that dotted the promenade and smiling faces suffused in aromatic fumes twinkled at their wide windows. Advertisement panels brought the underside of the over bridges to life, selling everything from insurance to toothpaste, with wide mouthed models flashing sparkling smiles in neon. Hotel after hotel with liveried guards and elegant doormen seemed to welcome, yet with a hint of a dare...

Exotic names. Intercontinental... The Sea Princess... Marine Plaza.... Kallu jerked up from his half recline and craned his neck out of the taxi window. At the door of Hotel Marine Plaza stood a tall liveried guard with a trim red beard. His gown was elegantly long and creamy and on his head was a red silk turban. As the taxi slowed in the snaking traffic, the Afghan's eyes locked with Kallu's, even as he bent to retrieve a middle aged lady's leather suitcase. A stricken expression hit Shera's face as he looked beyond Kallu into the taxi and noticed Veer, looking in the opposite direction at the sea....

Kallu felt the world slow down. A turban, a gown, a night shift, a proud Afghan opening a glass door to a boy in rich threads who didn't look a day over 17. Followed by a middle aged paunchy man, who tossed his car keys into Shera's hands... And Veer's head was turning. Slowly as the taxi revved up again, Kallu realised Veer's head was turning because of the expression of panic on Shera's face... The light at the crossing twinkled to a tantalising yellow before the liberating green... Shera lifted his hand to half cover his face but a guest at the Marine Plaza was talking to him, asking for a car announcement and Shera had to nod and smile...

"Veer look there" Kallu yelled, almost yanking Veer's head back to face towards the sea. See how... how lovely the sea looks at night... I'm sure your baba's palace must be beyond those twinkling lights there... its called the queen's necklace... I've heard that there is a lovely palace beyond the sea there... Now I get it, your father rules from there... why could you not be clear earlier... that's why we lost him, he travels by sea, maybe even underwater, to his castle..." Kallu was blabbering, but his fingers had an almost vice like grip on Veer's neck, willing it not to turn, willing the taxi to move, willing, willing the darkness to swallow one proud Afghan who was not a king...

The next day Veer walked triumphantly into the playing area, his hands confidently tucked into Kallu's grasp. "Kallu has something to tell you all" he began....

Angry at Anger

2006-09-20T15:06:00.000+05:30

What is the chemical composition of anger? Where is its black bleak fountainhead? Is loneliness its younger cousin? Is sadness its secret partner? Is pain its alter ego?

Delhi has come to a grinding halt today. There are protests. And burning. And stoning. There is anger. Palpable in the giant traffic crawl like an endless centipede oozing itself out onto this city's streets. Those of us cocooned in our eyries, those of us who managed to avoid the jam - literally or symbolically, don't quite know whether to feel thankful, or guilty.

Like a cremation, we watch human goodness burn. Human faith smolder. Human contact give way to the trajectory of a stone. And there is no knowing where the stone will land.

Children are stuck in school buses on clogged roads today. Parents can't get to them. Stripped homes waiting for whitewash to kiss their walls stand barren and exposed. There is no whitewash to be bought and the painters have gone home - or atleast tried to go home.

Our walls are bare and the 'marammat' shows through. Our children are stuck and we are waiting to be reborn to them. Our roads are choked and our destination is getting lonely.

Our people are angry. And they are not our anymore.

Somebody tried to seal somebody's shop. Somebody broke the law and as a result, somebody else is keen to take his livlihood away from him.

You know what amazes me, between the hand and the stone, the head and the throw?

The fact that if Mr. Gupta has thrown the stone because his shop is being sealed, and it is Mr. Aggarwal from MCD who signed on that sealing document - then it is but a matter of a series of coincidences and accidents that led to this moment.

If Mr. Gupta's father had encouraged him to take up a government job, if Mr. Aggarwal had had more enterprise and opportunities, it could've been Mr. Aggarwal's shop and Mr. Gupta's signature.

Both in Delhi. Both probably living in similar localities. One slightly better off than the other.

Maybe they went to the same school.

At a time when they did not get caught in snarling centipedes of tar with empty tiffin boxes.

Who's gonna bring the children home?

Full Toss

2006-09-20T04:50:00.000+05:30

Coffee stains
On unwashed cups
Love hangover
In soft soap suds

Wash off the grime
Rinse out the rain

Water slides in melamine bites

Ring out a home again.

The party ends
The cups remain

The carom board
In boric stains.

Powdered dreams
And laboured loss
Walk towards or away
Hey. Lets toss.

Talent

2006-09-20T03:18:00.000+05:30

As the years have unfolded, I've realised what a fundamental fallacy we are all victims of. History and literature have taught us to believe that love is an emotion. Whereas in reality, it is a talent, not an emotion. The moment you view love as a talent, your perspective changes hugely. And different people's relationship with love can be viewed in a far more empathetic, generous light.

Compare it to singing. Some are natural singers, some labour at it and excel, some take their talent for granted and let it atrophy. Some try their damndest best and achieve but a modicum of success. And some are just tone deaf. They simply cannot sing, try as they might. Most importantly, they may not even wish to try.

Do we resent these people for their varying singing abilities? Or do we take it as a given? Some can sing, some can try, and some simply can't.

Some can love, some can not, and some do not.

Its as basic as that. Loving does not come easy to everyone. It is a skill not a feeling; a talent not an emotion.

Attraction, affection, desire are emotions. The art of loving is the expression of those emotions. Everyone can feel their heart swell at the sight of a gorgeous sunset over the sea - thats feeling. Not everyone can pick up a paint brush and re create it on canvas - thats talent.