SPECTRUM VOICE

The voice of Charles Dickens

2012-01-10T01:16:00.000-08:00

On the subject of Charles Dickens, I can unequivocally state that we, meaning the general reading public, seldom devote our leisure in making a study of his work. We have writers more jaunty than Dickens, pastimes that glitter with dashing prosperity and make the writer look old and emaciated in comparison. Yet, on such celebratory eves as the Christmas or when encountering travails in the face of our great expectations, we recall his baritone, a voice that booms with surprising warmth from the crevasses of his yellowing masterpieces.

Recently, I have taken it upon myself to compose an article of Charles Dickens for a journal celebrating the bicentenary of his birth. This activity requiring a thorough study of Dickensian texts enabled me to walk back into the jorum of the past when the novel in the hands on such masters like Dickens, Trollope was growing up. I re-read the Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol in that order and appreciated them now more than ever. The voice of the author was what struck me more than his stories; the warm tone that modifies itself to suit the perspective of the speaker, to suit the movement of the text and the narrated incidents is as natural as it comes.

While reading Kingsley Amis my appreciation of Lucky Jim was somewhat detracted by Amis’s circumlocutory descriptions, over-vivid, over-English; in Dickens, however, we see a transmogrification of such genteel Englishness; here we have the boisterous, garrulous friend of a writer who puts his warm hand on your shoulder and makes you see the England he himself saw and through it the world at large. And you can never miss the vision, which at the end of the story is sure to give you some new perspective on life, an end which all books hope to achieve and few do. And I am glad that in an age of stark reality when the society was undergoing a shift from the idyllic to the modern Industrial era once and for all, the irrealist Dickens painted life in such a way that despite the bleakness of society wherein they had been begotten, their outlook is surprisingly refreshing and creative.

Despite the structural incoherence, directional fallacies and miscellany of characters, it is Dickens’ voice, unique, immanent that comes out disconcertingly amplified and acts as a appeasement for all the drawbacks one must encounter in quintessential Dickensian creations. Vladimir Nobakov, to whom Dickens meant a study of his voice and its inflections, suggested: ‘We just surrender ourselves to Dickens’s voice—that is all [. . .] the enchanter interests me more than the yarn spinner or the teacher [. . .] this attitude seems to me to be the only way of keeping Dickens alive, above the reformer, above the penny novelette, above the sentimental trash, above the theatrical nonsense.’

It could be the serialization of the novels that led to this reality-imagination-correlation that is evident in almost all of Dickens’ novels. The serialization allowed readers to enjoy a stave or two of his stories and then return to their normal livelihood and then comeback in a week or two to the next imaginary installment. The feeling that the writer was a friend who came on a visit once in a fortnight or so to update them on the goings-on in the lives of some protagonist and his friends and foes gripped the public. And even now as you read Dickens you cannot escape the writer’s presence “at your elbow” directing and guiding the proceedings.

We may remember that most of Dickens’ novels are oriented in such a fashion that their succulence can be best tasted when heard rather than read. The audible capacity of Dickens’ work is, at least to me, best pronounced in A Christmas Carol wherein every episode be it the visits of the ghosts or the end when a modified Scrooge opens the window on Christmas Day with a heart brimming with celebratory excitement. Such moving scenes vibrant as if painted by hand are best appreciated when some voice adding its emotional inflections utters them to a group. Dickens himself well appreciated this audial quality of his works and may have intentionally oriented them in this special way. Dickens’s readers were, from the start, his ‘auditors’, who virtually heard the stories as reiterated to them by the author who later took it upon himself to make his real presence fundamental in the lives of his readers by embarking on his professional Reading tours in 1858. His devotion to his readers found reciprocation such that in all provincial cities and towns wherever his Readings were held people came in millions to catch a glimpse of the supreme actor who devoted his life like a suited thespian to the entertainment of the masses. The fact that all tickets were sold for the first New York Reading, amassing over $16,000 in receipts substantiates his popularity even in the USA.

Like Shakespeare Dickens’ appeal encompassing the learned few reached the masses, who embraced him not as a guest in their house but as their inmate. The view is supported by Charles Eliot Norton, the Harvard Professor of Fine Arts, who wrote in 1868: ‘No one thinks first of Mr. Dickens as a writer. He is at once, through his books, a friend. He belongs among the inmates of every pleasant-tempered and large-hearted person. He is not so much the guest as the inmate of our homes.’

Finally, we can conclude our discussion on the myriad minded Charles Dickens with the observation that even though the author-reader relation has overtime become abstract and formal such that many of us regard our readers as either an hostile, unappreciative group or people who are totally unreachable because of virtual noise and several other factors that render reader-writer communication implausible if not impossible. We do, however, have the option of walking back into the jorum of the past and let ourselves by inspired by the voice of Dickens who regarded any labor of communication with his readers as a labor of love and spared no efforts, however daunting they may be, to woo and win his public. May be the fullest and complete communication between an interlocutor (writer) and a receiver (reader) can only be possible when both parties work together towards that goal. In Dickens’ case both parties did work and that nexus lead to the creation of prose pieces that still shine with exquisite glitter among literary tchotchkes and masterpieces in the bijou shoebox of English literature.

Romancing with History: Part1--Visit to the Red Fort

2011-12-27T04:15:00.000-08:00

North-India is in winter a beauty to behold, we have mornings thickly laden with nebulous layers of fog and mid-afternoons and afternoons when the fulgent sun targets its mollified rays at the heart of the city thus radiating warmth and wintry torpor. It is also a time to travel. The citizens enjoy this period of appricity by discovering the great city and its environs.

A Foggy Morning

This Christmas my husband and I had originally planned to celebrate the day by going to the St. James Church, one of the oldest churches in Delhi. However when we arrived at its premises, we found the church closed for the day and decided to visit the Red Fort, a monument I had long wanted to see.

Red Fort

Built in the jorum of the Mughal Empire by the emperor Shah Jahan, this seventeenth century fort stands majestically is the pedestrian neighborhood of Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi. Against the backdrop of the watchet sky this Brobdinagian monument stands stolidly as a witness of the changing currents of time. It was from this virtuous place that the first Prime Minister of India, Pandit Jawharlal Nehru, delivered the famous speech "Tryst with destiny" at the stroke of midnight hour when India achieved its freedom on 15 Aug 1947. Every year on the day of independence the National Flag of India is hoisted at the Red Fort by the Prime Minister. As you reach the premises you would observe the red façade of the building with the tri-colored banner waving atop.

Made out or red sandstone this fortress is known for its grand architecture. The main entrance opens on to the Chatta Chowk, a covered street flanked with arched cells that used to house Delhi's most talented jewelers, carpet makers, weavers and goldsmiths. It now houses shops where you can find assorted collections of Indian handicrafts made of wood and brass and other materials(I go myself a couple of Rajasthani puppet dolls from here). As you walk down this dark, strepitous alley you will feel transported to another era, a bygone era whose relics lie before you. The curious eyes of travelers hovering over the two tiers (the second floor is officially closed) of this market suggest awe and inquisitiveness as to what lies beyond this narrow settlement.

The bazaar

The Chhattar bazaar leads to a large open space where it crosses the large north-south street that was originally the division between the fort's military functions, to its west, and the palaces, to its east. Representatives of the Indian army stand guard at various points at this juncture. My grandfather who was a colonel in the Indian army narrated stories of the Red Fort and as I saw the tenement I recalled some of them.Beyond the Chatta Chowk is the heart of the fort called Naubat Khana or the Drum House. The musicians used to play for the emperor from the Naubat Khana and the arrival of princes and royalty was heralded from here.

The Diwan-i-Aam

The Diwan-i-Aam, which is the large pavilion for public imperial audiences, has an ornate throne-balcony (jharokha) for the emperor. The columns were painted in gold and there was a gold and silver railing separating the throne from the public. The cool white marble get-up that now stand frozen in time exude rich regal airs. A net is now drawn across the marble balcony separating the curious onlookers from the royal seat. Old glyptic ceilings hang surreptitiously from above; their intricate designs once studded with precious stones now lay bare like toothless old men showing their gums. The once stelliferous halls are now illuminated by humble halogens and natural light.

The Diwan-i-Khas

After you cross the hall of public audience you take a ramp down to an open courtyard richly platted with trees and other important buildings. The Diwan-i-Khas or “hall of private audience” is the first important building you will observe. In Urdu “khas” means special, and this hall was a special chamber used by the king when talking to his special guests. The room with openings of engrailed arches on its sides consists of a rectangular central chamber surrounded by aisles of arches rising from piers. The lower parts of the piers are inlaid with floral designs, while the upper portions are gilded and painted. Over the marble pedestal in its center stood the famous almost-mythical Peacock Throne which was removed in 1739 by Nadir Shah of Persia. It is said that the pavonine throne was an exquisite piece of Persian artifact curved in gold and studded with priceless gems and stones.

As you walk around the Diwan-i-Khas you can let your imagination conjure up from the tessellating pieces of history the golden Peacock Throne housed in the middle of the Diwan-i-Khas. The pillars impleached with majestic Mughal designs done in perfect symmetry will surely add their wonder touches to your imagination. One motif that particularly caught my attention was that of the scales of justice done in marble suspended over a crescent amidst stars and clouds in the northern screen of the Tasbih-Khana ('chamber for counting beads for private prayers').

Scales of Justice

Through the center of the Diwan-i-Khas flowed the Nahr-i-Bihisht or the stream of ‘pairidaeza’. The whole get up is paradisal indeed and my view was reiterated by Amir Khusrow the famous 13th century Sufi poet whose verse “if there be a paradise on the earth, it is this, it is this, it is this” is inscribed in one of the walls of the tenement

The two southernmost pavilions of the fortress are zenanas, or women's quarters: the Mumtaz Mahal, and the larger, lavish Rang Mahal, which has been famous for its gilded, decorated ceiling and marble pool, fed by the “stream of paradise.” Of the two the Mumtaz Mahal has indeed experienced a transmogrification. Once a seraglio it acted as a prison in 1857 and now it is a museum housing treasures from the Mughal era: daggers and swords and armors, paintings and priceless texts handwritten in exquisite calligraphy, dresses (which will make you smile upon judging the average size of a Mughal emperor), potteries, carpets, traditional rugs and many more. My favorite among the displayed was an embroidered palanquin cover, now almost frayed and dirty yet still retaining some of the old design that some unknown hand or hands stitched on its surface.

Mumtaz Mahal Museum (this picture is from the web)

As you walk around the open courtyard imbibing the priceless regal beauties stationed at arms-length you might, if you were a person with a strong linking for the artistic, take issues with the British administrative buildings built behind the garden which are now used by the military. These box-like buildings with their European modernistic façade seem anachronistic in the setting. Perhaps the builders were daunted by the finery of the Mughal art that they build themselves box-palaces just beyond its premises or they were so fond of the royal surroundings that they built their own tenements close to the artistic hearth so as to enjoy the beauty of the Royal fort all day long. Whatever the reason, the sanitarium like buildings will make you twitch your nose.

British Administrative Building

Our tour around this ancient monument was over by 5:30 pm. Upon its completion we took a rickshaw (the hand-pulled ones are a relic :-)) and headed to the Chandni Chowk metro station, which is only a few kilometers from the Red Fort. The ride down the Chandni Chowk market bustling with activity, the smell of street foods, and the sight of sweets dipped in sugary syrup condensed the touristy feeling I had been experiencing throughout the day.

At home that night I cooked my Christmas meal: Roasted chicken with vegetables, mashed potatoes and gravy, homemade bread and fruitcake. As I did the dishes I couldn’t help but smile at the wonderful medley of experiences— Christmas meal, Mughal architecture, smell of Indian street food and Metrorail ride—which lay imbricated in my system. A Christmas well spent, is how I concluded my observations for the nox.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Fort

http://delhi.clickindia.com/tourism/redfort.html

I Wish You a Merry Christmas

2011-12-23T00:40:00.000-08:00

It sure is that time of the year when Dean Martin reminds you that you are just one snow-step away from Christmas. The weather outside turns chilly and the warmth of home embraces you with its wooly blanket and a cup of hot soup. Wherever in the world you are you can never get away from this quintessential feeling of a merry Christmas time. It is the Christmas that you carry in your heart that makes this seasonally joyous time more endearing. All those memories of Christmases past color your present days of merriment such that at the end of the festivities you agree with Andy Williams when he calls the Christmas time as the “most wonderful time of the year.”

This year my plans for Christmas are well underway. Contrary to my belief that Christmas celebrations in North India may not be as glorious as those in USA, I discovered the whole of Gurgaon steeped in Christmas revels. There are trees and ornaments in all the shops, the bakers are busy making the best fruitcakes and cookies, the restaurants are taking orders for Christmas parties. And on top of that the cold fogy mornings seem so much similar to the pre-snowy days in Nashville. All in all, I couldn’t be happier about this season of merriment.

We got our tree early this year. It is a small tree, three feet in height which I decorated with assorted Christmas ornaments. When I came back from USA I brought along with me a few of my Christmas decors which I thought I would cherish down the years to come. The idea of lonely Christmases with no tree in my house had almost welled up my eyes at that time since I never thought I would be able to use my Christmas goodies in India.

I couldn’t tell you how pleasantly surprised I was when contrary to my bleak expectations I noticed the first lot of Christmas trees coming to the shops. I bought the second tree I saw— the first one was only a feet in height—and came home feeling like a million dollars. Following which I scoured the whole city for ornaments to bejewel my little tree. I got ribbons and stars and little Santa ornaments and even made a couple of paper stars myself. For the next few days after I got my tree all my activities at home revolved around my tree. After my university I would come home, play Christmas classics and sit by the tree decorating it, enjoying it. And as I did that I couldn’t help but wonder how harboring two cultures in your heart, however different they might be, gives you the opportunity to enjoy their celebrations with élan. I consider my five-years in USA as a formative experience as a whole wherein the practices I gathered from the culture so ripened my taste buds and became a source of such fun and sport that I have decided to cling to them and cherish them through celebrations and merriment for as long as I shall live.

It feels great to enjoy the goodies of myriad cultures. And I feel that the distinctions that are drawn between two nations are more topographical than human. People acclimate to various cultures and make them their own. This truth may seem erroneous in a world where Facebook doesn’t exist; however, in our internet-centric set-up we are attuned to being cosmopolitan.

Harking back to the Christmas celebrations at home let me share with you the menu I have planned for the special day: homemade fruitcake with dried fruits soaked in rum, roasted chicken with mashed potatoes and homemade gravy and garlic bread. My good crockeries are out and so is my silverware. I feel in my heart as merry as Bob Cratchit’s family on Christmas Eve willing to forget all the ugliness that exists in life and indulge in the fleeting season of merriment. So here I am wishing you all a merry Christmas and hope that all your dear desires would come true in this season of joy and festivities.

2011-11-26T11:28:00.000-08:00

To Retail or Not to Retail That is the Question

Remember that scene from Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan starrer 1998 romantic comedy film You've Got Mail where Kathleen Kelly’s (Meg Ryan’s) bookstore The Shop Around the Corner falls prey to the corporate fangs of the Fox Books. Those of you who have watched the film may agree with me that while we observed the dance of events on screen, we all had hoped that virtue will be ultimately rewarded and Meg Ryan will win the battle with Joe Fox (Tom Hanks)—one of the corporate heads of his family owned “mega” bookstore, Fox Books—and by some means save her charming little bookstore.

Imagine this fictional figment unraveling in real-life, the thespians replaced by pedestrians and you will get the feel of the present retailing imbroglio in India unleashed by the government’s easing of the Foreign Direct Investment rules. The myriad-minded Indians are speculating whether to assign the protagonist’s hat to chain superstores like Wal-Mart, Ikea, or deign them as vicious antagonists. The current situation is dubious.

The cabinet of the Congress party-led coalition in the country’s capital, New Delhi, agreed on Thursday to allow foreign multi-brand retailers to own up to 51% of joint ventures in India and single-brand retailers like Nike, Apple, etc., to own up to 100% of their Indian businesses. This move on the part of the government being long overdue, I feel that embracing free-market policies will ultimately beget good results for the country.

Nevertheless the contingencies of allowing foreign retail stores unlimited access cannot be overlooked. Several mom-and-pop establishments, corner stores, and local businesses may face their demise on account of being unable to compete with giant chain-stores. I still remember how during my stay in USA I observed a local Target store usurping the business of a strip-mall next to my apartment complex in Nashville, TN. The American economy was at the time on the brink adding more pressure to the already ailing local stores ultimately resulting in several of them renting their shops to other stores or closing their doors. The electronic retail giant Circuit City went down during and time and moved their business online.

The Indian economy is struggling right now. Recently the Indian currency plunged to an all-time low dropping 52.70 against the US dollar. High inflation and lower growth rate have added to the rupee’s decline. And the Indian government feels, rightly in my opinion, that the easing of foreign investment rules will somehow ameliorate the situation and propel the moribund economy. The ever-increasing Indian retail market that currently does a business of $470 billion a year is expected to show a hike thus helping the rickety economic infrastructure of the country.

The local businesses that make up the majority of the above mentioned percentage do surely take liberties. In many cases goods purchased lack in quality and are more expensive that average Indians could afford. Food pricing being arbitrary India even minor disruptions in harvest results in shortage of certain crops or vegetables. A lot of produces are wasted every day because of the lack of proper storage areas and transportation issues. It is expected that foreign retailing superstores will work from the ground-up setting up warehouses, getting transportation means ready for swift movement of goods and establish rapport with farmers and local business owners.

The whole new future scheme may sound optimistic for India, but inside this well-laden growth plan there lie this question: who will actually visit these newbie chain-stores? Several Indian citizens who have been brought up on local-market produce and local made goods will look askance at these stores. Even now, people hailing from rural parts of India and people who are partially exposed to the fruits of globalization, people who have limited access to education and basic amenities will definitely feel intimidated by these superstores. The retailing market is targeted at the new-generation, the well-educated, financially remunerated class and the upper-middle class who generally consider brand-shopping as a prerequisite of class and sophistication.

In my case I remember growing up on few branded clothes, but now the situation has taken a tectonic shift as youngsters and almost all modern Indian folks I see around me wear nothing but super-brands like Levis and Burberry. It is a part of the New-Indian culture that women and men who earn well are supposed to maintain an ostentatious standard of living; and such lifestyles have already resulted in mega-brands from Levis to Louis Vuitton, from Dior to Hulsta flooding the Indian market. Gurgaon, the city where I now live boasts of housings 43 malls including the biggest, Mall of India, giving Gurgaon the 3rd highest number of malls in an Indian city.

I believe that superstores like Metro and Wal-Mart will do well in these cosmopolitan urban locations, and surely enough the government has laid down specifications forbidding foreign retailers from setting-up their stores in locations falling short of ten lakh (one million) in population. Another imperative laid down by the Indian government necessitates retail stores to shop 30% of their goods from local farmers and small business owners. This move, in my opinion, will definitely cut the middle-man conducting business deals out and lead cash flow directly into the hands of the retailers.

.In the political fairground of India the government’s decision of giving the “aye” to this major open-market movement has already started creating political controversies with politicians hailing from the opposition sector retorting to acerbic vocabulary in demeaning the government’s move. Uma Bharti, a major political-thespian in India belonging to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) condemning the government’s act of easing FDI rules said she would "set fire to the first Wal-Mart store whenever it opens here, regardless of the consequences”. Another politician, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati, was vociferous on the issue too slamming the government for its irrational move.

In conclusion, it remains to be seen whether the Indian consumers are ready to change the way they have been shopping. It sure behooves them to use their discretion in choosing the method of shopping that suits them. And even though political parties with differing opinions may prescribe affirmative or negative results of the governmental move, the whole effect of this open-door-welcome scheme will beget its results only when both the Indian consumer and the big-box retailers join hands in agreement. And sure many Indians preferring in-home delivery of groceries from their local shops will need more than just average discounts to be lured to the doors of Wal-Mart and others of its like.

References:

1. 1. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204630904577058131832465876.html

2. 2. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/business/global/india-to-allow-foreign-retailers-to-own-stores.html

3. 3. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/lucknow/Will-burn-down-first-Wal-Mart-store-Uma-Bharti/articleshow/10876510.cms

4. 4. http://www.newsbullet.in/crime/34-more/21963-fdi-decision-to-help-rahuls-friends-alleges-maya

5. 5. http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/11/24/fdi-in-retail-if-wal-mart-builds-it-will-indians-come/?mod=google_news_blog

6. 6. http://www.anandabazar.com/26bus3.html

2011-11-06T02:23:00.000-08:00

Perfect One, Where Art Thou?

Picture from: http://www.wolfescape.com/Humour/MenWomen.htm

What’s with women and perfectness. I can’t help but notice all the talks about women and perfect men. Step into a clique of unmarried young women and all you hear will be the bla..bla..blas about that perfect partner. Women just can’t stop talking or fantasizing about the perfect man, who will jump right out of a storybook, come riding on his steed to woo and win them and take them away from the divinity forsaken festering Gehenna the world is becoming to a paradise called perfection. And there they will live happily ever after.

Everywhere I go, be it out in the world, or on the social networking websites, I am haunted by talks about this mythical creature: the perfect man. Apparently, every girl is looking for him, and those who have found him, or think they did, are trying to further perfecticize him. Blame those pieces of trashy vampire lit, or whatever is de rigueur in chick lit, but there is no getting away from the perfect-man-syndrome that all your friends are experiencing which ultimately lead to the disease called unhappy-for-life-because-of-irrational-expectations.

I may sound like an irrational prick, but open your Face book and read the wall-posts of happy and unhappy women on your friend-lists. Chances are that you will find at least five to ten posts, depending on how large your friend-list is, every day on topics like men, men’s love for women, their perfectness, and eternal faith that an unmarried women with no boyfriend must have on her stars that one day Prince Charming will come right outta his storybook world and straight up to her, and then they will go together on a junket. All the woman needs to do is to bite on wisdom cookies worth ten-pence and wait. What a load of bollocks!

Even celebrities with dolled-up figures and nose-jobs are looking for the perfect one, waiting, as I like to put it, for him to perform the above mentioned feats. And they seem to be having no luck either. Evidence: all celebrities are either divorced, or unmarried, or (un) happily married. Look at Kim Kardashian. Who thought the K-factor wouldn’t work? The point is, when celebrities with perfect fixings cannot have that perfect man, how can we, normal women with mediocre skin and ample cellulite hope to have him?

But does that mean that we should settle for less? Certainly not. I think we should have the perfect one, only we should specify in solid terms how perfect a person has to be to be called perfect. Or more exactly, what are the qualities that qualify a man as perfect: does he have to have a pair of wings or a long nose to prove he is unique? Ask a women and she would look askance, become positively irked and say all of the following: a perfect man has to be handsome, tall, well-qualified, rich, have to have a nice family, no criminal records, no past girlfriends, he has to love me more than anything in this world, and oh yes, he has to be perfect. I wonder if the speaker listens to how she sounds as she utters any or all of the above mentioned. I am sure she too will feel that such a male partner is found in fiction only, and not in real world. Then why waste your time looking for him? Why not aim a bit low and find slightly imperfect elements available readily in the market.

And, while we are on the subj, don’t you think that men are also looking for perfection in women the same way as women. The question that rises now is whether women with sky-high expectations of perfectness willing to be all that she expects in the male half of the sketch, save for that past “girlfriend” part of course; however, I am sure a perfect guy won’t mind that eitherJ. The answer to the above question would definitely be a firm negative. We can at first be deluded and emotional and end up loving somebody beyond belief, but then we get our senses back and we distribute our love: part of it goes to regular retain therapy, part to family and friends, part to pets, a only a pizza-part to that man How can we shower all our love on one man, that’s insane, besides we have only so much love to deal with. We can’t afford to put it all in one place. As for past affairs and other important records are concerned, let’s not open that archive, okay?

As we approach the tail-end of this discussion, I suddenly feel the urge of advising all those women who are deluding themselves with visions of false perfectness. I am no expert in this matter, but I always have an opinion, and these days it’s all that matters. So babes, I think perfectness is boring. Think about it: a gal marrying a man and living happily ever after in a perfect citadel of romance. Is there anything more boring than that? With nothing to fight about, no domestic altercations, no differences of opinions you would feel you are living a subnormal existence. Imagine how boring life must have been for Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty!

When writing fiction we are told to keep in mind the fact that hell is interesting; I say when talking about relationships a bit of hell taken in moderation add wonders to the relation. Moreover, there is more fun in perfecting, or rather customizing an imperfect specimen over a life time rather than having an already perfect one delivered on our platter. We will have no use for him.

Finally, when you are hoping to select one gander from a basket full of juicy ones, aim low. Don’t expect your gander will be the best one, or in other words the perfect one. Do that and we will all shall live happily ever after.

Picture from: http://elfofart.deviantart.com/art/The-Perfect-Man-197040944

The festival of lights

2011-10-23T00:27:00.000-07:00

Some pictures of our home getting ready for Diwali:

The Kitchen Gets a Makeover

Floating Beauties

Sweet Offering

Light

Divine

Glittery

Raja-Rani Dolls

Flavors of Bengal: A trip to the land of culture during its biggest festival, Durga Puja

2011-10-12T03:32:00.000-07:00

The season of celebration is here with its luxuriant hues. A sudden conspiracy of lush green, slow currents of air moving; wafting with them is a smell of coolness, of shadowed tree trunks, of shady leaves, ferns. White headed Kashful nod their feather-light forms to announce that the goddess is here. The leaves of autumn, the orange-stemmed siuli flowers all herald the coming. On the early autumnal morning of Mahalaya, an auspicious occasion observed seven days before the Durga Puja, the whole of Bengal rises up in the chilly pre-dawn hours, to tune in to the “Mahisasura Mardini” broadcast on All India Radio (AIR).This two hour radio program is an exquisite audio montage of recitation from scriptural verses, devotional songs, and classical music and has overtime become an intrinsic part of the celebratory season. The legendary narrator Birendra Krishna Bhadra in soaring Sanskrit narrates the story of the annihilation of the demon Mahisasura, “Mahisasura Mardini”. His voice, immanent, inescapable, like thump of heart, invokes the demon-diminishing ‘Durgatinashini, Devi Durga’. The goddess acquiesces. With her four children by her side, Laxmi, Saraswati, Ganesha and Kartikeya, the divine consort of Lord Shiva, our beloved Maa Durga, descends on earth to celebrate the season of happiness with her devotees.

Although Durga puja is widely celebrated around India and abroad, it is regarded as the most significant socio-cultural event in the Bengali society. In West Bengal and Tripura, which have the majority of Bengali people, it is the biggest festival of the year. During Durga puja the face of Kolkata, the capital city of West Bengal, changes overnight. There is festive fever and frenzy. The goddess becomes the muse bringing out the best in her devotees; the city becomes a jorum of art as the goddess descends in every street pandal (the temporary structures that house the goddess and her family) and in every home that celebrate her auspicious advent.

Kolkata, being my maternal home, has always been favorite city. Having a close connection with this city, I always grab a chance of visiting the myriad hued conurbation during the season of celebration. Amidst hectic academic schedule, when the chance of attending Durga puja in West Bengal came across, I embraced the prospect with open arms.

Kolkata

Late in the afternoon of Saptami, loaded with baggage as I disembarked at the Sealdah Railway Station in Kolkata and smelled the whiff of fresh autumnal air redolent of celebratory enthusiasm, excitement reigned. When I observed the Kolkata after two and a half years of absence, it struck me as quintessential as always. The yellow taxis were there, the rush, the traffic were there, and the people, wide-eyed and excited were there too. Entering the city, I heard the unmistakable sound of dhaak (Indian drum) accompanied by the obvious smell of burning incense and caught sight of one or two of the numerous pandals, temporary structures impleached with creativity housing the goddess and her family. There in the taxi on my way home, I got reacquainted with sights and sounds of the City of Joy seeped in its celebratory joyfulness.

The elegance of Kolkata during Durga puja lies undoubtedly in the city’s artistic depictions of the goddess in her hundred different avatars. Every local club celebrating Durga puja becomes abuzz with activity months before the celebratory season incepts planning on their showcasing of the goddess, their choice of pandal decoration. Although such artistic hype have undermined the religious significance of the celebration, the true spirit of the season remains unfrayed as more and more people take to the streets during the four days of puja inspecting the various scaffolds and the gods within them and passing their artistic judgment.

This year I had the chance of reviewing some of the famous creative seats of the goddess. From the artistically alive, snazzy theme pujas of South Kolkata to the convention oriented somber pujas of suburban West Bengal; I observed the seasonal favorites and their myriad hues.

Saptami Crowd

In the evening of Saptami, I embarked on my noctivagant journey of imbibing the festive favorites. I found the streets full of people, lovers, revelers, men, women and children walking in narrow alleys and streets thick with perfume and smell of fried foods, their new clothes sweat-pasted on their forms. As I walked my way through the crowd, I couldn’t help but wonder about the numinous energy that draws people out of their homes in the wee hours of the night and makes them traverse over-populated backstreets and passageways in the hope of catching one glimpse of the goddess and her family. What is it, I wondered, that attracts modest human beings out of their beds and into the streets to celebrate seasonal happiness? Is it the goddess, or simply the spirit of the season she unleashes in human minds that transforms all grimaces into grins and renders all routines null-and-void? It is both I concluded, having woken up from my reverie by the blare of bhepu, a portmanteau of the Vuvuzela and a blow horn, this soft cardboard made (un) musical instrument is highly popular in the festive season among young adults.

Singhi Park

The South Kolkata puja scene being incomplete without visits to the famous duo: Singhi Park and Egdalia Evergreen Club, I began my travelling spree with the former. Singhi Park, one of the oldest and most renowned haunts of south Kolkata, dates back to 1941. The puja has always preferred to be the antithesis of theme pujas in continuing the traditional way of worshipping the goddess, and this year is no exception. Their 62-ft pandal adorned with items used during any Hindu festival like conch shells, drums, bells, etc., was a replica of the Dakhineswar Temple. It had a creamy-white facade with red borders. The goddess and her family within were as traditional as the pandal. The tall and imposing goddess, embellished in her finery observed the proceedings with her fiery eyes. Although traditional in their choice of pandal décor and idol depiction, Singhi Park experimented amply with their lighting. Massive ceremonial gates adorned with scintillating light bulbs depicting traditional and modern motifs and contemporary incidents in their dazzling canvasses were placed in the entrance and egress area.

Lights

Egdalia Evergreen Club, the cultural brethren of the aforementioned Singhi Park, took the experimental route. Established in 1943 this popular puja is known for its innovations in designs and lighting. This year they came up with an Indo-German fusion creation that touched the heights of artistic creativity in depicting the traditional concepts in the fabric of modern art. The Mandap was the replica of an urban city road with footpaths and traffic signals. World renowned artist Gregor Schneider lent his ideas and concepts to this puja.

FD Block, Salt Lake, Kolkata

As South Kolkata shuffled between traditional and modern themes, the Durga Puja at FD Block Salt Lake, Kolkata, preferred to present thing big. At the venue a 40-ft Durga idol in golden created out of fiberglass emanated her aureate aura as onlookers stood spellbound at her feet gazing at her Brobdingnagian structure. Surrounding the idols were 12 temples, symbolizing 12 jyotirlingas. On the right side of the colossal fiberglass idol was another pandal with a huge Shiva in the Nataraj form.

The Suruchi Sangha puja at New Alipore, which is among the biggest crowd-pullers for its innovative themes, incorporated the majestic state of Kashmir facing an environmentally uncertain future in their theme. Its original conceptualization of bringing to life the ecological issues and thereby inculcating the audience to be more concerned about the environment won them many accolades.

The Goddess being decorated

The cultural extravaganza of Durga puja took a tectonic shift for me when after inspecting the famous pujas of south Kolkata I headed for the home of my in-laws in Kalyani, a suburb of Kolkata. The majestic idols gave way to modest pujas, the colossal pandals to homely scaffolds, the trendy clothes to traditional attire; in short the whole festive circuit suddenly began to course on a different track.

On the morning of Ashtami dressed in my best sari as I walked into the homes of one of the acquaintances, a family that has been celebrating Durga puja in the traditional style, I realized the change for the first time. The Ashtami anjali (offering, prayer) was about to begin and the goddess was being decorated. In a small four-walled minimalistic room the brass-bodied deity was adorned with a number of garlands made of: hibiscus, orange and yellow marigold, Bel leaves, tuberose and many more. The daughter of the priest put on the adornments with conscious attention as the onlookers watched the proceedings with clasped hands and welled-up eyes. If devotion were tangible, I am sure I could locate it in that little overpopulated room. The supreme omnipotent majesty stripped off her thematic fineries struck me for the first time as Uma, the daughter of the house; her nectariously sweet face devoid of made-up art was as natural as it could be.

The Ashtami puja terminated with the distribution of fol (fruit) Prasad and the quintessential khichri bhog. Khichri, the trademark celebratory dish of Durga puja is a blend of rice and lentils and is served in hot dollops on banana-leaf plates along with fried accompaniments like eggplant fry, thin slices of eggplant dipped in gram flour and deep fried, and cabbage curry. But festival foods for Bengalis are never complete without sweets of various kinds. Milky treats like payasam, and traditional Bengali sweets like rosogollas, sondesh and mishti doi are also served as part of the Mahastami bhog.

Sweet Offerings

Taking about foods popular in the festive season one must never ignore the endless flavors available in the street shops. During the puja time the market for street food is certainly, unequivocally as high as home-made and restaurant made delicacies. The options are endless too: chow mein, egg-rolls, panipuri, popcorn, ice-cream, idli, dosa, biryani and many more. Pandal hopping Bengalis often slow down for a bite of fast-food and the disposable plates and ice-cream sticks that line the side-streets outside any puja pandal are a testament to the fact that people love to indulge in the scrumptious delicacies available on the go.

I too indulged in some of the festive flavors as I made my way to the popular pandals of the Kalyani. The Central Park Durga puja is the biggest in the area and attracted a large crowd. When I walked into the pandal on the eve of Navami, Dhunuchi Nach was being performed. 'Dhunuchi nritya' or ‘the dance with effervescent smoke' is a traditional dance form Bengal, which is performed in front of the idol of the Goddess Durga to the sound of dhak, the traditional drums.

Dhunuchi Ntritya, Central Park, Kalyani

A dhunuchi is an earthen pot with a funnel base and an open top. Burning coconut shells is put inside and then powdered incense, known as Dhuno (powdered smoke producing incense), is poured over it to create the atmosphere. A sweet smelling thick white smoke spreads and engulfs your senses. Then with the Dhakis and their drum beats, the Dhunuchi dancers balance the earthen pots, with the base delicately placed on their palms, between their teeth or on foreheads. They then dance to the drum beats with the burning Dhunuchis. The deep percussion of the dhaak, embellished sometimes with long white or multi-colored feathers, and rhythmic movement of the dhaakis, is inseparable part of the Durga Puja celebrations.

As the dancer performed his steps I stared at the goddess’s face for a good five minutes. The face visible through a miasma of smoke seemed to be bursting with life. The iridal dark-brown of the goddesses eyes seem to shine with majestic brilliance, the margaric smile that lined her lips, frozen, seemed to dilate with vitality. For a moment I felt transported, elevated into a different hemisphere, into a spiritual limbo where I heard nothing but the drum beats and saw nothing but the three glittering eyes of the earthen goddess.

After taking a full dose of cultural ecstasy, indulging in finger-licking good food, and spending time with loved ones, I witnessed the finale of the festive season. Vijaya Dasmi, the last day of the Durga Puja sung the farewell paean. On the eve of her sendoff, the goddess was smeared with vermillion, fed sweets and entreated to come back once again the following year.

Bidding the goddess adieu

At the epilogue of the saga, the four days of fun and frolic, of pandal-hopping and puja greetings struck me as some photic illusion. Married women with faces and partings rubescent with vermillion, children still under the hypnotic state of joy, young men who had to return to work, and geriatrics who couldn’t wait to get their children and grandchildren back the coming year all bade the beloved Devi Durga goodbye with tears in their eyes. I too joined the crowd and prayed for divine mercy and hoped to re-indulge in the season of celebration the upcoming year.

“Asche bochor abar hobe” (It'll happen again next year)!!

Non-English Words Used in the Blog-post:

1. Dhaak— drum

2. Saptami, astami, navami, vijaya dasami— four days of Durga Puja

3. Durga puja — The worship of Goddess Durga, a Hindu festival. To know more about it you may read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durga_Puja

References:
1. http://isharethese.blogspot.com/2010/10/dhunuchi-naach.html
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahisasuramardini_(radio_programme)

The Sunday at the End of Summer

2011-09-18T08:49:00.000-07:00

Don’t you just love this time ofthe year when the newly laundered earth with its starchy-white clouds come andwake you up in the morning with a warm hug? This morning I woke up and smelledthe freshest air in a long time. It seemed that suddenly all the inquinated particlesin the atmosphere have undergone an over-season metamorphosis and been transformedinto full-bloomed red roses. The sun and its aureate rays cooked medium-rareseemed so good on the skin that I waived the idea of applying sunscreen as Iwent out for a morning stroll to enjoy this beautiful morning.

October is my favorite month, notbecause I celebrate my birthday in this month, but because it invokes theseason of celebration. And for me the thought of impending joys always rubs-offthe delinquent layers of sordid life-dust which gather on me layer after layerafter each bad day that I face. This year I experience the pain of getting adjusted toacademia, the pain of keeping up with youngsters, and the pain of walking awayfrom writing.

In the last week I was under somuch academic stress that the finale of our first minors made me go berserk. Thecelebration mood, nonetheless, was momentary because once I was done with thetension over the test, there came swooping in the abject tension of my performancein the skill-testing papers. I tell you, I am not good in devouring (academic)stuff created by other people; I prefer to make my own dish. However, devouringand processing stranger crafted academic abracadabra was a thing I had to do inthe past week. In the former week I feltcaught up in a hysteresis loop wherein everyday exit lead to a return to thesame place, the only place the following day . There were no centers, noreal-exits; and I was caught in this snare like a bug unable to escape fromunder the heavy foot of a giant.

In the hypnopiasis of fatigue, Imarched listlessly and continued marching losing all the leftover vibrancy Ihad in the process. And then came along this beautiful morning where directly Iopened my eyes, I felt rejuvenated and refreshed. It was like magic, a soft feather of miracle, andit made me feel like a phoenix gathering strength from her dead ashes broughtto life by the alchemical touch of a bright autumn morning. What is there in Sarat, in this fallean charm of theseason that it gets you relinquish all your tribulations? Is it the season ofcelebration it holds in its gowpen, or plainly that we have always associatedthis season as dearest one, the king’s favorite daughter?

Whatever it was the Sunday at theend of summer brought me so much calm that I almost rose to idylatry. In orderto celebrate the spirituality I played (MahisasurMardini). The voice of Birendra Krishna Bhadra communicated with my innatespirituality such that I almost experienced a momentary heirophany, the manifestationof the sacred before my eyes. The universe of reverberating sound waves, the solemnbaritone, the chanting elevated me into a reality far above the miseries ofmortal life.

Having finished my daily writing exercise,I went out to click some pictures of the beautiful day. Everything looked brighter,happier, and sunnier to my eyes. The hibiscus that blossomed in my gardenseemed like a sudden flare of red, dipped in some divine blood-pot it flourished with so much glow that it made me stare at it for a moment in utterappreciation. I later analyzed that the change in perception was the result ofthe change of my point of view. Under the influence of the bright sunny morningthat eradicated the remnant clouds of miserable downpours which harassed us in the past week, I felt new and ready for life once again.

Here are the pictures I took:

Sun and Shade

The flocculent clouds tangled up in the blue

Celebration

Life

Remembering Fiaz Ahmed Fiaz: Thoughts on attending a seminar dedicated to the poet

2011-09-16T10:46:00.000-07:00

What is Poetry? An arrangement of scenes, trivial or tragic, romantic or practical, viatic or static, homely or fantastic featuring more or less the plausible events (of life and dream) patched up with deliberate details. That is how poetry struck me when I sat a few days ago in the populated seminar hall of our institution while listening to eminent educationists and irrealists referring to the poetic work of the famous Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

The seminar, a gathering of intellectuals from the poetic cream of India, took place in the jorum of our contemporary designed school building. The building, however, acted as anachronism. Its brick-red facade, the glasses that some unknown mason glued to its body for modernist effect, the royal blue banner displayed next to the entrance declaring in bold yellow letters the university’s dictum that ragging in any form will be dealt as criminal offence by the institution, and the guards with thick bushy mustaches hardly exhaled poetry from me when I walked into the building around twelve in the afternoon. But all preconceived notions relating to un-poetic surroundings were dashed from my mind when the sweetly melodious voice of a singer reached me. On a stark Monday morning of abject life dear B, my friend, stood at the podium reliving the tunes of a dead poet: “Hum dekhenge, lazam hai ke hum bhi dekhenge ge.” I don’t know what she intended to see, but in her voice it was evident that she was frisking the depths of her own soul as she performed the act trying to search something, some aspect of her own self lost to her and the world about whose presence she had been enlightened by the poet’s lines.

The proceedings were already underway by the time I reached the destination. Hirsute intellectuals and young students from the school of humanities and social sciences which had organized the two-day seminar on Faiz Ahmed Faiz filled the room. I seated myself in one of the comfortable blue chairs and observed the chamber. It was a fairly sized seminar hall, well lit, the wooden desks showed no sign of wear or tear, the temperature in the room was comfortable too. As I placed myself on the settee I wondered would this room comfortable as it was evoke poetry in me. Apparently, it did not; however, as I listened to the canorous Urdu of Sheikh kaaf nizam, one of the dignitaries invited to the literary show, I realized that poetry doesn’t need a place, it needs time, time to burgeon in the mind, time to grow up from roots to shoots and saplings and then spread its massive green leaves outside the confines of all deep dark places of life that imprison us.

Poetry is all about freedom, mental freedom. I quite agree that most of the Urdu spoken by the dignitaries throughout the course of the day was lost on me mostly because of the lack of knowledge on that front, yet I somehow manage to derive subtle pleasure from the musicality of the language, the softness of the words. Urdu is indeed a gentleman’s zabaan, and Faiz had given it ample time to inflate and gradually fill-up him mind with words and expressions fit for his cause because his poetry is outstandingly musical and elite, if I may be pardoned for using the expression.

One of the things reiterated throughout the day was the constant urge to customize Faiz’s poetry to one’s own needs. Faiz has to be your own Faiz if you want to do justice to his poetry said the honorable Dean of our department. I took to his words immediately; the morsel of truth the expression held was that you can never learn to produce or appreciate good literature until you can customize it to your needs. Can poetry, or for that matter, any piece of literature be written if there is no independent mind behind the cause? Indeed this idea that one must think well and read well to write well has become universally apodictic.

The seminar continued for two days and as the first day gave way to the second the waves of poetry took shapes from winding currents of empty expressions issued in stylized Urdu to things that almost made some sense and then lost into nothingness. Like flavored smells of lavender incense sticks once burning and once exhausted they smoldered for some time and then leaving behind only a dust of ashes and a libanophorous room, they departed leaving me searching for clues to decipher their unheard codes.

There is a fine line between understanding and appreciating something, and I realized that even though I understood only a few sections of the two day discussion, I appreciated the tremendous efforts the poet paid to his art. I pictured him sitting at his desk, a wooden desk, a ledger with a coarse vermillion cover, a pen, an over-used fat bellied fountain pen with a dripping nib, and his figure, hunched up, his face with lumps of flesh pillowed under his chin grimly concentrating on poetic impulse. I see only one legible word on his papyrus: Faiz, his own name written and underlined several times. His euphuistic mind deliberating on silent musings that flutter about like lovely colored butterflies, just within reach but hard to lay hands on, while he sits there patient, stoic waiting for them to sit on his ink-dotted kurta. A massive green platter of green accessorized by the dry remains of a once-exotic temple stand like placid observers outside his open window silently reminding him of possibilities and despair, the dyadic principles of human life.

It was this transitory image of the poet encased in my mind that made me go back and think about the seminar in a new light. Of course, I give you only a piecemeal of the two-day session, mostly a discussion of the first day mainly because it appealed to me more than the second day of the session in which the linguistically skilled instructors decided to relegate at lengths from Urdu to Hindi and English. Even though the Hindi that was spoken was as pure as the purest Hindi could be and the English as classic as it came, yet somehow I retain nothing of the discussions heard. It is only the first day impleached with reminiscent ramblings collected throughout that day that exist in the core.

As the clock strikes its way to the deep hours of night, let me leave you all with a poem of Faiz Ahmed Faiz that I translated. Although it lacks much of Fiaz’s musicality, it does bring to mind the flavor of his poetry-- a portmanteau of the altiloquent expressions mixed and dusty colloquialism--which I tried to retain.

Soch

Faiz Ahmad Faiz

Translated by Barnali Saha

Why blissful my heart is not

Why I keep remaining numb

O, leave the saga of my life

I am good the way I am

So what my heart is unhappy

The whole world is woebegone

This sadness is neither thine nor mine

It is our beloved barony

Even if you become mine

The agonies of the world will remain the same

The knots of sin, the manacles of malice

Our words can never by riven

In any form pain is lethal

Be it somebody else’s or ours

Boohooing, enflaming the soul

That is also ours; that is also ours

Why not embrace the pains of the world

And later consider the debates

Later dream the happy reveries

And contrive on the dreamy arrangements.

Unperturbed rich and wealthy

Why on earth are they happy?

Let us apportion their happiness among us

They are after all akin to pain

May be we have declared conflict

Heads will be smashed, blood will flow

The pain too will afloat with the blood

I won’t be there, pain won’t be there

P.S. : Do not use translation without permission

On Reading Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own

2011-08-20T12:38:00.000-07:00

Look inside and write; trust the little voice inside you. Be honest, be true, to yourself. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own was a revelation. Entranced by the magical prose accentuated by poetic touches and straight-faced logic, I read with appreciation the lines Lady V composed. Cleansing, rigorous prose composed with so much sanity and devotion that a reader is rejuvenated directly she opens the first chapter.

Feminism, or for that matter equity feminism, is a troubled ground that requires great tact and not verbal vituperations to challenge the gender discrimination issue; and many writers who begin well end up losing all rationality when they confront some of the negative dialogues the patriarchal class happen to shower or have showered upon the “delicate class”. In such turmoil Woolf is composed, she is the phlegmatic saint believing in logic and finely pointing out the same for the blindfolded population.

The arguments Woolf points out in her essay are wholeheartedly applicable in modern days as they were the time Woolf wrote her text. That every woman in order to be a fiction writer, or be successful in the creative field must have some congenial creative space, and that when denied lead to a break in the thread leading to a loss of several natural talents. A creative space and financial independence are two factors that directly affect the quality of prose a writer produces. And Woolf ventures to clarify her points by examples from literatures written by women from the jorum of antiquity, which, by the way, was not before the erstwhile Eighteenth Century when creative situation ameliorated for women, thanks to Aphra Behn who dared to walk outside the satin-folded life (pun intended) and carve a creative niche of her own partly due to unfavorable circumstances and partly because she was a brave female. Imagine how different situation would be if we were stuck in the mud of patriarchal superiority. Democracy is all for the good, but what about in-home autocracy? How many women dare to come out of the dictatorial home rule? You can defy the government, but can you defy the geriatric rule? Your traditions, at least in India, forbid you, your upbringing stitches your tongue and you end up taking the path suggested and often jettison self-interest in the interest of the family and society. And yet we forever retain a certain grudge, a spoonful of malignancy against the egoistic male sex that made us choose a path we did not want to take.

But there have been women like George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Emily Bronte who made most of their impediments and have written in a voice devoid of malignancy against the then superior sex. The negative capabilities of their fictions give them the universal air that makes their prose glow with the vibrancy of creative celebration. Woolf suggests towards the end of the essay that when one writes one should forget about one’s sex. To affirm male superiority and feminine subservience is to affirm the antinomy of the cosmos, the pity and terror of the confirmation unchain in the human soul, especially in the case of women, an ennobling catharsis and a rush of deep-seated negative assertions. And negativity seldom breeds good prose, or poetry for that matter. But isn’t it difficult to empty the impressions of life, well or bad, and create fictions for the sake of creation or for pleasure? May be this is the most challenging sport in a writer’s life, to write out of oneself, to shut the distractions, to cover the windows, drown out the noise, physically and mentally, and write as clearly, as evenhandedly as possible.

It is evident that Woolf herself could do that in most cases, for most of her creative ventures have been highly successful and you could hardly deny, judging by her refreshing prose in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, etc., that she had all the qualities of a literary genius. But harking back to the Room of One’s Own, the essay with its various pleonastics, its redundancies and to-the-point avowals suggest, ingeniously, the practical nuisance which happens when a chain of thought is broken; it takes time to mend the bond and re-think, and in the meantime, you talk superfluously. That is the reason why our worthy antecedents chose prose instead of poetry to deliver their thoughts. Poetry is a concatenation of thoughts, imageries, and emotions and can seldom beget awesome results unless written uninterruptedly. And since these women seldom had a room of their own and often used a common living room for creative work such interruptions were more than probable, hence the deluge of prose and paucity of poetry.

One of the most striking ideas presented in the book was the communion of the masculine and the feminine in the human brain for successful creative results. Woolf is of the opinion that a human brain has two sections, masculine and feminine, and writers like Coleridge, Sterne, Keats and Shakespeare managed had androgynous brains which made their works equally attractive to both the sexes. It is when one of the sides dominate the other that the breach of communication occurs that ultimately leads to one sex possessing or declaring antagonistic opinion about the other group. "A collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished."

What I liked most about the book is the honesty with which Woolf presents her arguments. She takes you on a ride and gives you refreshments by means of images and descriptions of pedestrian scenery, of London, of her room, of her bookshelf. You feel her presence in your own room, her thin, cold breath on your shoulder, a brushing of her loose hair on your arm, a whiff of feminine scent. In her ways she makes you emulate her methods, she urges you to read, to observe and draw your own conclusions.

“The looking-glass vision is of supreme importance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous system. Take it away and man may die, like the drug fiend deprived of his cocaine,” says Virginia Woolf in the second chapter of the book. Okay, I agree that as civilization has advanced poetry has declined and the “looking-glass” vision does not interpret in the drug-demonic context anymore; however, inobservance sure reduces vitality, but where’s time to perceive and consider? For those of us who can somehow afford this pastime may continue with this habit. It surely is an amazing pastime judging the world and like a sapient scientist order observations in a well-made rational modus.

To this effect I stepped out of my house to observe the Indian culture with a scrutinizer’s eye and jot down my findings accordingly. The road outside my house guarded by wooly-headed green trees like sentinels droopy under the effect of some anodyne posed solid questions. How is the Room of One’s Own relevant in Indian culture? And how does bookish feminism interpret in real life? Do people care at all about what literature has to saw, or for that matter what Virginia Woolf has to say on the subject of a writer training her eyes? Apparently, nobody cared; however, I was willing to experiment to satisfy myself that I do retain the eye-sight that’s imperative for a writer.

My walk took me to a busy thoroughfare with honking vehicles approaching from all sides and huddling of confusion before a left turn. The corridor had sidetracks which holds a furniture shop, a flower shop where long sticks of sick looking carnation and roses marinated in a small plastic bucket, its proprietor sitting idly and eyeing the traffic and rubbing his eyes. The cycle-rickshaws nosed-in; smells of Chinese food and Indian tandoor, South Indian coffee and other food stuffs amalgamating into a puzzling alchemy; and people, returning from their daily engagements, heading for pleasure spots. What a busy scene it was, active, demanding, rigorous, and un-poetic. Obviously, a room of one’s own was indicated if one was to write poetry under the circumstances.

I concentrated on the feminine population which surrounded me: women dressed in crisp corporate clothes, in cool short dresses, in descent salwar kameezes, and in well-worn sarees travelling alone mostly. Most of them had groceries hanging from their wrists in cloth-bags; some were driving; one or two of them texting and all were busy in their ways. It is this business, this air of untold confidence they exuded in their movement that made them stand out in their own ways. Of course, it would be erroneous to say that I observed all the women in the vicinity. I earmarked a few of them and followed their movements and came to the conclusion that Indian women prefer multi-tasking and that the percentage of working women has indeed advanced such that in a given public gathering you tend to observe more members of the hitherto considered delicate sex than their male counterparts. I wondered if the women I saw had rooms of their own, I wondered about their roles in public affairs and domestic lives. It was evident that they had equal rights and opportunities; I wondered what they thought about this “equality”, did they really appreciate it; consider it at a boon or a commonplace happenstance of advancing civilization?

It was difficult, if not impossible to accumulate their views, but judging from their appearances it seemed that they do cherish their independence. As I walked back home I began to consider the ideas Woolf so rightly puts on the table and apply it in my own life. I questioned myself what does a room mean to me and discovered that a room has a two-fold connotation for me: first, a creative space, and second, mental independence. A room to me is a space where I live and write the way I deem desirable. It was when I applied the idea personally that I realized that in the absence of my comfortable, creative niche I cannot function; I realized how important it is for a writer to own her own space and unequivocal independence.

“If a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it,” Virginia Woolf says in The Common Reader. What she means in the passage is that women must write as honestly as possible and express what they feel rather than what they were taught to think. A room is a four-walled barrier that shuts-out outside influences, that hides the adamantine claws of male supremacy, the perforce opinions. Indeed, women must strive and create this niche for her not by force but by intellect. Woolf suggests that deprecating the opposite sex and considering our own sex as the subservient clan is a mistake and women has to actively compete with other forces for a place of prominence in the market place. The new possibilities for individual self-fulfillment are ample, and it is to us to carve out our own place, the rooms we would call our own by our own ability and not by stressing gender differences.

(Pictures from the web)

2011-08-15T12:24:00.000-07:00

Double Income No Kids (DINK): A modern necessity or a choice?

The skyscraperized modern tenements we observe in the ever-expanding metropolitan cities in India are testament to the fact that India is moving and growing fast. As the facades of ancient architectures are fast being replaced by modern sleek designs, young India too is heading towards a contemporary westernized lifestyle. Joint families are being replaced by compartmentalized nuclear households carrying two or three members. The powers of opinion, freedom, and of course the independence that comes from monetary stability, especially in the case of women who heretofore have been puppets in the pantry, seem highly attractive to the present generation. The wish for this freedom-oriented existence is propelling the ambitions of the young people such that they now prefer to walk away from traditional roots and opt for self-sufficient, pleasure driven lives.

The apparently humorous moniker given to self-sufficient couples with no kids— DINK, has deep inner meanings. Notwithstanding the momentary advantage, the contingencies that are tailed to this acronym are too grave to ignore and must be appraised thoroughly. It is surprising that the traditional Indian family with impleached customary ancestral rituals is lying in a moribund state, its survival being threatened by the questioning mind of young adults who (un)wittingly have come to hold everything ancestral as unnecessary. A modern Indian youngster generally considers her career high and places the need to establish a family and have kids lower down her list of priorities. And even if she chooses to marry, the prospect of a childless household—an anachronism in the quintessential Indian mindset— is usually more attractive to her.

Even though Indian society seldom acknowledges such livelihood, the increasing percentage of couples with no kids in metropolitan cities proves that such an existence is very much in vogue. The ample joys of singledom, the pleasures of financial independence as portrayed in films and in commercials add on to the overall sheen of this kind of modus vivendi by making its prospect seem not only acceptable but highly desirable. Also the lack of time needed to nurture children, concerns regarding over-population, memories of abusive childhood, the perpetually unprepared feeling are among several other factors impelling young couples to choose a twosome households.

The sofalizing Generation Y has been accused of being the laziest generation preferring Facebook to face-to-face interaction and virtual world to the physical one. The prevailing millennial attitude is that taking breaks for fun at work makes people more, not less, productive. Likewise, they accept that their work will bleed into evenings and weekends. And having no kids to take care of more or less, in their opinion, adds to the productivity at work. “Today’s young people are much focused on trying to work hard and to get ahead,” said Carl Van Horn, a labor economist at Rutgers, USA.

An interesting survey by the Associated Chamber of Commerce & Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) on “Changing Consumption Patterns of Delhi” shows that DINKs are high spenders. Living solidly on the present, DINKs generally follow the Horacian Carpe diem and usually prefer to nurture self and spouse to kids. An average of thirty-five percent of couples (in metropolitan cities like Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore) spend more than half a lakh on travel and travel-related expenses every year. Forty five percent of them spend about Rs. 5,000-10,000 on non-essential items while sixty-five percent are fully aware that it is being without a child which is giving them the financial freedom. Their stats compared to the stats of households with kids show a marked difference.

It is dubious, however, if a twosome, self-sufficient household has any long-term benefits. It cannot be said with surety if people opting for twosome households will be equivalent in their happiness level with people with children, or whether in future they would crave for children and perhaps have them anyway. In many cases young couples not so much disown the wish of having kids as postpone it on account of practical necessity. Yet we can hardly disagree that priorities of the Millennials are different that the primacies of their antecedents such that there is often a culture clash when the old and the new put forward their arguments for or against twosome livelihood on the table.

Nevertheless it is an accepted fact that social life bred in the jorum of generations has certain positive elements that refresh and rejuvenate office-oriented corporate livelihood. Man is a social animal, he is the begetter, the nurturer and such tendencies come naturally and nonchalantly, and it is hardly feasible to repress the natural urge of a complete family life based on in-fashion societal preferences. Couples opting for a twosome childless lifestyle must undergo a thorough self-appraisal and judge preferences before taking any decision. They may keep in mind the fact that several couples with kids have successful careers and that leading a childless existence has generally lead to lonely adulthood. Rebellious iconoclastic notions generally cease to sway the mind when it had matured, hence any hasty decision taken during early life based on societal judgment should better be avoided.

Acknowledgements:

1. http://nitawriter.wordpress.com/2008/04/14/dinks-are-high-spenders/

2. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/weekinreview/29graduates.html?_r=1

Happy Independence Day

2011-08-14T23:51:00.000-07:00

Directly I opened my eyes this morning I knew it was Independence Day. The first intimation I had that things were about take a patriotic turn was the sight of a bevy of security personnel lingering in the neighborhood of the front lawn under the newly painted flagstaff with nonchalance written all over them, and the panjandrum of the safety staff with a vindictive whistle dangling from his mouth into which he blew intermittently. It was in fact the whistle that plucked me out of my dreamless and made me rush to the casement with morning eyes to inspect the proceedings downstairs. The proceedings had not begun at that hour and the final drill practice was in the process of initiating; but judging from the stray-lambish style of the would-be marchers I divined that an hour or two of wait was indicated before the celebrations.

My time sense was absolutely accurate, about two hours into the morning /I observed the group, now dressed in their neatest possible way and tucked in gloves and knee high white socks standing in proper line and a handful of citizens and two of the gardeners setting up the table and directing the event. The weather in Gurgaon being inclement most of us preferred to observe the actions from the cushiony warmth of our dwellings. I found myself hanging at my kitchen window with ample alacrity as the group started singing in a business-like way the Indian national anthem. Their collective voice rattled on. Inescapable, immanent; their auditory spectrum saturated with the clicks and pigeon sounds and patter of raindrops of cement. The song continued for a moment and then ended rather hastily on account of the raining gaining force and soaking the protagonists.

No sooner was the anthem finished, the flag was hoisted, and a series of hurried claps sounded and the security personnel did an attention pose, which I daresay disappointed me for I had the idea that they would do a formal march like the military men and school children. I remember my school days when perspiring in the humid landscape of Kolkata we practiced marching in the school ground one week before the Independence Day celebrations. Naturally, I had expected some such outcome in this case having seen this clique doing their alerts and marches in the morning on not less than three occasions in the past week. But all ideas of forward-marching was jettisoned when I observed the personnel disperse and then come back carrying food packets in plastic bags and start distributing them.

I walked back from the casement and drank a thoughtful cup of tea thinking about independence and our celebrations. The Prime Ministers enervated speech was being featured in the television channels; I wish the guy had more fervor in his speech, a dash of passion and vigor might do him some good in making people actually listen to what he was saying rather than yawn and change channels. May be I am sounding a dash unpatriotic in expecting an obamaesque makeover for our erstwhile PM; but let’s face it Indian political scenario, at least to me, is unattractive on account of its major players being either corrupt to the bone or lacking the heat of life. A herd of vintage colored snapshots with outrageously weird conceptions and believes have been loose on the premises for a time out of mind. I think it’s time we get some action and do a purgation of some sort to rid us of some these oldies and inject some loyal patriotic blood into India’s system

But where is loyal blood to be found? I wonder. Is there am ambrosial fountain filled with the minerals, or is there another treasure trove which guards the secret recipe? In any case, the India I see on this holy day is not the India I have in my mind. I agree that we have walked a long way, for years we have endured outside rule and accepted a subservient status, our treasures have been looted, out libraries burnt; but we have also waked away from such bludgeoning history and created a new and shinning India for us. There must have been hoards of loyal blood involved in this building process. And thus it sounds almost ominous when on this Independence Day the nation’s leader presents in his dreary old tone a list of should and woulds rather than solid steps against the cantankerous corruption issue eating away the marvelous country.

It is, however, always easy to blame and advise others. What have I done for my country? I question myself; I have been good, straight and caring. I have admired the heroes of the past and emulated them in my own way; but if solid renderings are taken into account, my score is nil. May be we all need to zap up our systems and be a little more active in guarding the respect of our country and remember not only on independence days but on all days our subservient history, our dramatic independence, and our corrupt, marvelous and dreamy present.

Happy Independence Day

JAI HIND!!

I See: Ramblings before heading for the dreamless

2011-08-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

As I lose myself in the rigorous, demanding prose of routine livelihood, the pure joy of writing, the dessert of the day that unwinds and purges the dirt and grime of quotidianism, is missed like rain in the arid pastures of North India. Yet, I am forever cognizant of a stifle in the cardiac region; something ceaselessly repeats inside me words and sentences. Every day as I leave my house and as the vehicle strides in its jolted journey toward the destination on the other side of the town, I see and hear noises of the morning-eyed India, and all along the way the meta-voice chirps happily freshly-baked expressions. It almost nudges me to reach for my notebook and start scribbling, as I had been normally doing for a time out of mind upon waking up and only recently stopped owing to the Nuevo academic schedule. And it pains me, even disturbs me, the thought of turning down something that comes naturally to me. It is almost impossible to write something on the way since the road conditions are seldom conducive to creative squiggling.

The not-writing-down-my thoughts, however, does not hold me back from observing and delighting myself at the various random images I come across; the leitmotif of humanity is presented with such variety that every day I am awed like a child at the miscellany I observe on the roads. Somehow writing sensitizes you and you feel like a youth at heart observing and regaling at the physical and internal beauty of the world. Although appreciation is temporal since an ordinary day’s experience eventually hardens you such that at the end of the day you find that the voice inside you is enervated, if not absent altogether. We must accept the drudgery of existence nonetheless and customize our creativity around it. So I have allowed myself one hour every two days and fifteen minutes every day to write down my impressions.

Right now, I sit at my desk possessed by the knowledge of a typical day, inflamed with the wondrous and sensational fantasies dreamed up during an automobile ride. The first sight that entranced me was that of a stretched out sheet of cloud and a lump of the same on the opposite side. I seldom check out clouds, but this morning I did; there was something awkward in the flocculent blanket that drew my attention. I have of late been making a study of John Milton’s Paradise Lost and have been intrigued time and again by the vastness of imagination of the blind man. I could not say if it was the result of my lucubrations, or something else entirely that made me think that the nebulous patch on the face of heaven was that of a stretched out god, sleeping, peaceful. I could make out his nose, slightly snub; his toes, two of them missing; his puffed-up coiffure, and two tiny cloud-bodied cherubim just abaft his knee area. A car, a cloud-made ambassador, to be precise, was heading towards this sleeping divinity. I wondered if the archangel had restrained its majestic pennons and was driving the four-wheeler in question. How he would look behind the windshield: goatish, profligate, meretricious, or insane? A concatenation of honks from different motors forced me to give up my thoughts half-way and concentrate on the earthy attraction. By this time I had spent almost ten minutes inspecting the dome above. What was funny was that the driver having divined that I had been inspecting the airplanes sundering the sky at regular intervals (we were close to the airport at the time) asked me whether I liked flying. Imagine my consternation when my solemn thoughts of a straightened-out god on the bed of clouds were taken as review of aeronautical parts by this pilot in the front seat!

Anyway, after this aforementioned incident, I looked up only once or twice to check out any new cloudy figure that might catch my attraction; but there weren’t any. In the meantime, I observed the earthy world on the streets, a universe unto itself, a microcosm of the young India vividly platted before me. And all I had to do was look. I observed shinning cars, reds mostly followed by whites, and a handful of blacks; women sitting in the front seats of their cars wearing earphones; people on the streets walking toward bus stops, their lunch boxes oscillating as they paced up the pavement; a golgappa seller pushing his cart, his wide-brimmed brass water pot covered with a pink and powder blue Rajasthani dupatta, his oiled, mehendi-colored hair shinning.

We stopped at several traffic signals, and these intersections were great places for me to inspect humanity. As we stood lame at one such stop-signal I looked to the left and noticed a small expanse of trash-littered landscape tailed to the front wing of a high building. There was a low barrier, a cement wall of some sort, barricading this area from the blue-glass-fronted-building. A couple of women with their heads draped by the pallus of their disheveled sarees picked up empty soda bottles and milk packets from this trash-scape and gathered them in wicker baskets. They had very small backs and one of them wore paste nathni and metallic hoop earrings.

Another sight that caught my attention was on my way back in the subway. There was a woman standing before me on the train back clasping two blackberries in her left hand. She was around thirty, neatly clothed in red and green salwar kameez, her hair tied up, a spectacle hanging down on her nose. She looked modest in every way. It was, however, the quirky nail-paint she sported—red paint dotted with bright green polish—that made me examine her closely. Her nails were very long, clean, but the paint somehow gave her an untidy air. Occasionally she talked on the phone in a corporate tone advising the receiver on the other side on business policies and ways to behave in an interview. She seemed knowledgeable and bright, but all my attention was drawn by her nail paint. I wished I could ask her the reason behind the choice. She did not look like one wanting to hide her age, the wrinkles around her mouth region were prominent; I could see some of her grey hairs too, then why? Alas there weren’t any answers from her side.

The final image that drapes my eyes right now and that which I think is the best image of all is of the spouse reading the newspaper with a genial resolution. The comfort in this motif is beyond belief. The peace that the drooling air condition machine generates at the epilogue of one long day erases old imageries and rejuvenates the vision. And thus, having finished my daily writing exercise, the contended me is ready to bid the liana of her daily sightings adieu in the hope of another fresh start tomorrow.

Good nightJ

2011-08-03T01:39:00.000-07:00

Back-to-School: Part 1

The journey begins

Experiences are probably the most precious fragments you assemble in life. Though I won’t go to the absurd length of calling them jewels or rubies you find by the Indian Ganges’ side, I would definitely call them intellectually fortifying and remarkably unique. It amazes me the amount of experiences we gather in one lifetime: good, bad, actual, intangible; it takes only a few years to fill the jorum, and then layer upon layer of add-on experiences sediment such that in one given time you feel almost stacked to the brim if you open the archives. Anyway, the point is that your perspective of a certain situation, a certain experience, is liable to change after you walk away from the scene and observe it objectively under the solid canopy of logic. The stripping off of emotions, intimidations and other attachments that may have blindfolded you when you experienced something greatly helps in analyzing the deposited data acritically.

For years my dream of being re-initiated after an educational hiatus to the vaulted tenements of some scholastic establishment has propelled my actions in life in no uncertain manner. This drive became an idee fixe with me such that for years I labored under the impression that life would cease to exist for me if I did not get back to school. And now that I am back to academia, officially, the feeling of accomplishment and mental peace that I thought I would be experiencing are conspicuous by their absence. The initial ecstasy of winning a battle where I was both the protagonist and the adversary, where one side of me reflected truth and optimism while the other mocked and derided my ambition, is gone for good. May be the mind is maturing after all, taking in the banal and rather than idolizing it and poring over its hidden intricacies is accepting school-life the way it is: a routine. At least that was what I thought after my first two days in class. Today I will write about my impressions on the first day of class.

The first day of school began like the initial chapter of a novel: full of promises. The day preceding this inauguration started and ended in a flash; I could never recall another day which traveled so fast. It seemed as if I was caught up in some strange fast-paced reverie which none of my deliberate actions could slow down. Hence I allowed myself to be wafted and rested mechanically and finally found myself the following morning around nine am before a classroom with likeminded young scholars waiting with bated breath for the classes to commence. We stood outside a moderately sized climate controlled schoolroom to which we were directed by the security personnel. We exchanged pleasantries and wished each other good morning while the janitorial staff prepared the room for us. We waited in the corridor and watched the podium being cleaned and dusted with a grass-headed broom and then a trash of Parle-G biscuit packets and empty coffee cups swept with the same besom. We were dubious at the time, all six of the waiting souls who were admitted in the first counseling to this prided course of Masters in English and Communication. We felt uncertain as to how many students would be there in the class after all, how long the first day orientation would last and many more. We shared our speculations and doubts and felt more uncertain.

The room finally cleaned, we were allowed to walk inside the compartment and park ourselves on the wooden benches. I cannot tell about the other girls, but the moment my derriere touched the wooden b, I felt my heart expanding with satisfaction. I realized at that specific moment that I was back-to-school, finally.The initial satisfaction was brief though since in a few moments our seniors, second and third semestrial students of the same course, walked in with ample gravitas and ishytle. They perched atop their desks in turns and laughed and talked while a handful of freshers’ observed them and chucoted among themselves. They knew we were inspecting them and directed their actions accordingly. All of them tried to look smart and confident. Finally, the teachers and the other first year students arrived, and the orientation officially began.

In the first stages of this orientation we were given an overview of the course by the professors. The professor who began the rigmarole was a mild, happy looking academic. Following her the other professors went to the podium and presented their statements. We were given the regular details and were strictly warned about the importance of daily attendance on final results. Such talks penetrated from me a genial smile since the presentiments sounded much like the ones I heard on the first day of my high school. I kept my merriment to myself though and decided to listen on.

Among this group of pedagogues one academic took it upon himself to warn us about the “torturous” ride that waited for us in near future. He made it clear in no uncertain terms that it ain’t a jolly ride. But by the time he had ventured to issue the caveat, we had somehow understood the truth by heart.

Following this professorial counseling session we were asked to come to the platform one by one and introduce ourselves. The freshers’ walked in silent trails to the dais and presented themselves. Some talked about their hobbies, some about their future plans, all talked about their academic backgrounds. The general lack or oratorical skill was evident. I wasn’t much impressive either in my speech, still, thanks to the BCL creative writing class, which required me to open my mouth in public; I managed to get on well.

The preliminary exercise continued for an hour or two before it ended with a couple of seniors embellishing our expectations of the course with adulating phrases. We were encouraged and motivated with talks of festivals and cultural programs and seminars and other academic packages that would be part of our two year service at the school. When the professors ultimately got up and informed us that the official orientation was over it was nearly one-thirty.

The finale of the grand opening was announced with the recitation of a lovely poem called The Soldier rendered by one of the kind-hearted instructors. It is a poem about a cavalry-person returning from some battle.

It took me a solid one-hour thirty five minutes metro ride and a subsequent fifteen minutes rickshaw ride to reach home. As the rickshaw stopped at a traffic-light glowing red, I looked around and observed a man crouching in a fetal position and sleeping, his face was covered with a cloth that had once been white or some such monotone and now looked like a sticky blackened piece of fabric. His slightly heaving body and total unconcern to the bustle of the busy city somehow made me think of this soldier in the poem our professor read. I wondered would the soldier himself be aware of his destination; do we ever know where we are heading in life? We may lie unconcerned ignoring the reality by covering our faces, we may fool ourselves with wise presentiments, with pretenses of perfection and satisfaction, but the truth is we never know where we will be tomorrow; and no poet's warnings could prepare us for this voyage. Hence, to think that life’s endless episodic puzzles could have some decipherable equation that just needs a certain amount of skill to solve is tomfoolery in itself.

P.S. : Picture from internet.

Rain in Gurgaon

2011-07-27T06:25:00.000-07:00

Musings on a Monday Afternoon

2011-07-25T05:27:00.000-07:00

Trip to Chittaranjan Park, New Delhi, and other things:

Living in North India is like reading an incomprehensible poem where the first few stanzas are so painfully abstruse that you feel you are tackling an obliquely trailing ship with no nautical chart to assert its voyage. In many ways you are the frigate itself, straining at its moorings as you try to comprehend the current of social life that sets you in motion. For the last few months I have incessantly felt the pull of contrary currents; on one side I see plain simplicity, nothing idyllic though -- you can hardly expect that in this part of the country-- yet pedestrian to the tongue, a touch of earth, a feeling of life as it is. While on the other hand, I have experienced artificiality as we know it. Ostentation, a facade of rich and gaudy texture and sequined strokes intermingled to awful debris where in you could seldom locate the sapling of reality even if you have stuck your hands to the ovum of the earth. Such is life in Gurgaon; such is life in my New India.

Delhi and Gurgaon—one the Prima Donna, while the other the Nuevo capital of glamour and style; one carrying in its jorum the culture of centuries, the other a youngster denouncing with iconoclastic ferocity that substantial ethos. Gurgaon is undoubtedly the land of the New. It is perhaps the modern Byzantine stripped off its ancient elegance. Here you will find tall structures, buildings with distinctly regal names and manicured lawns, vehicles that only a few years ago had been objects of dream, shiny floored shopping malls filled with rich stock and many such luxuries. But if you are in search of some old-homey culture, you will have to cross the state border and enter the environs of New Delhi.

Last weekend we had a dinner invitation at some friends’ place in Chittaranjan Park, New Delhi. Chittaranjan Park, or CR Park, its popular sobriquet, is an urban region containing a large population of Bengali people. For years it has been a seat of popular Bengali culture in New Delhi. And once you enter this locality, you will feel that same ancient culture buzzing around you. On my way to this destination I had perused the roads and the scenery, and had observed how the pot-holed stretches with stray trees, dumping grounds, and skyscrapers on either side lead ultimately to constricted alleys with two and three storeys bordering the side roads. Modest shops and open-air flower sprees took over glass-fronted malls and labyrinthine arcades. The whole area seemed to be an anachronism, it was as if somebody had scooped out a chunk of Bengal and planted it out of sheer whim in the heart of North India.

Our friends live in a beautiful house in the epicenter of this awesome locality. Upon arrival we were immediately introduced to evening snacks of great succulence: bread-crumb coated deep fried chop, chicken patties, fried mishti (Bengali sweet) and a glass of cold drink. Our host and hostess added to this initial feast the spice of great conversation. The session of adda (kibitz) touched on all topics under the spectrum—politics, travel, personal updates, and many more. The cozy pink-walled living room with its ethnic Indian décor condensed our sense of serenity. Our days in Gurgaon have left us culture shocked, here we never speak our beautiful native tongue outside our house; in fact, even Hindi is rarely spoken in this area -- English is the (un)official language of Gurgaon. Hence, it was a pleasure dropping our guards and participating in the feast of reason and the flow of the soul and mouthing lovely Bengali.

We had decided to do the week’s grocery from Chittaranjan Park, and our host and hostess gladly acquiesced to the invitation of accompanying us to the shopperies. There was a well-spread fish market only a few steps from our friends’ house, which displayed in temporary scaffolds the catches of the day. The fish lay in arrays; their piscine skins shimmering under warm bulb light. My hostess and I refrained from entering the fishy establishment and stood outside as our better halves marched in with alacrity. The market in many ways resembled a famous souk in Kolkata called Gariahat Market. As I observed the surrounding and took in the human-fritinancy that whizzed through the bustling streets, I felt like home. My hostess drew my attention to a jhalmuriwala preparing in his steel jar a concoction of puffed rice, spices, raw onion, lemon, peanuts, mustard oil and thinly sliced coconut-crescents. This mixture is a Kolkata-special-dish, but we abstained from tasting it just before dinner.

After the fish market we headed for the mishtir dokan (sweet shop), the best in the area which had that quintessential sweet shop name on its signboard: Annapurna Sweets. We procured a dozen of their sugary Bengoli desserts coated with layers of khoya and dipped in running syrup.From the flower shop I got a bunch of their freshly-cut, which now marinate in a tall glass vase. My hostess being a gardening-aficionado herself gave me some awesome gardening tips I intend to follow, in good time, though.

The finale of our visit was announced after a sumptuous dinner of lovely Indian food and another round of adda in which the whole Ghosh family participated with élan. We left CR Park around eleven in the night with just as much space in our stomach as to allow our physical system to merely insufflate without any bodily strain. We reached home in twenty minutes owning to the otherwise busy streets being vacant for the nighttime. As I curled up with the reading material on my bed fifteen minutes before heading for the dreamless that night, I felt I heard time and again in the buzz of the air-conditioning machine the vignettes of open-hearted, pure laughter which had surrounded me that evening.

Pictures from the Web.

Reading "Phone Therapy" -- A Poem by Ellen Bass

2011-07-25T02:18:00.001-07:00

2011-07-23T01:30:00.000-07:00

To Our Teacher, with Love

This afternoon as I sit for my daily writing exercise of inscribing at least a thousand words, the meaningless free-writing exercise start to take a tangible shape, the nebulous impressions solidify under the postmeridian lull, and I see before me the vignettes of the day past. Yesterday our creative writing teacher finished her allotted classes and bade us goodbye; her place would be taken by a new teacher who would finish the course.

It was an exceedingly emotional day for us and everybody was touched by our teacher’s presence. In her final speech our teacher stated that just as her students have been touched by her presence, she had also been touched by her students, and that she would always remember the faces. ‘Always,’ I cannot believe I am using it; she said we should jettison this word from our dictionary and leave a life without generalizations, since they do nothing to improve our writing.

After the conclusion of the class we took pictures and when our teacher finally left, I sensed a deep sadness in her pupils, a look of a fond-somebody leaving behind a thing she adores. And it was those slightly red eyes together with the collective algo we felt in our minds as we wished her well that made me think about the vastness of the human heart— an universe unto itself able to gather under its wooly blanket all the allotropies and homologies of mortal existence. There is so much goodness and brotherhood in the world and it takes a singular incident, one divine alchemic touch hailing from the deep recesses to transform the quisquiliae to solid gold.

I don’t mean to say that the world is a better place now than ever, but yesterday, I felt, albeit momentarily, that differences are creations of the human critical self, that underneath the death and pain and ugliness, we are all good. In many cases, however, the layers of sediments are too deep to be disentombed, and we end up never discovering the good in us partly due to apathy, and partly due to a closed-up emotional life. But to me emotions are the S and P of existence, the building bricks of my creative life. And I am always fascinated by the depth of human emotion.

It’s amazing that the people I have met only four weeks ago are now an intrinsic part of my social life. We have had confrontations in class, have criticized one another, displayed vivid evidences of the algedonic polarity of existence; and yet, at the end of the day, under the brooding light of a pedagogue, we unite, huddle and smile at a camera. I thought that yesterday I had seen the basic constituents of the human mind, the organic anti-normal part we hate to show. After the flash we all went back to our customary self, but the capture stored in its vial the truest and the unstained of human sentiments.

I will remember the goodness of these faces oft seen in the last few weeks, faces that will soon be lost in the trifle of time and the bustle of life. I agree that my differences with many of them have precipitated unkind sentiments in me; I had often opted for the negative prescription that I ought not to have been part of the class after all. I was dubious as to what I learned from my class, I was undecided on the average pedagogical exercises and their improving my writing skills. But now, I feel the brain cells are inflated to the point of bursting with wisdom gained from bi-weekly classes at a British establishment in an Indian town.

The bonds we strike over coffee or over a casual conversation have the sinews of ivy, they tie you; and even though several social bonds never bear sweet fruit and we are often forced to give-up friends or acquaintances for differences of opinion, we do remember the good ones. And on certain solid afternoons when the sky is covered with a cumulous sheet and the room smells of perfumed candles, the crop up, and you feel happy that you had the pleasure of their company.

2011-07-14T23:57:00.001-07:00

Terror Strikes in Mumbai Raise Security Questions in India

Barnali Saha

Every time it is the same—a newspaper cover graced with howling faces, intimate albeit hazy pictures of mangled corpses or half-dead men, women and children being hauled to some medical establishment, and a series of listlessly aggressive reports posted under red-banner like headings dictating the failure of the governmental institution in preventing another terrorist mayhem in India.

Following 26/11, after only a short period of metabolic depression, terror raises its head in Mumbai, India’s financial capital, once again. A series of blasts in principal locations in the city, including the crowded Dadar neighborhood; Zaveri Bazaar, a popular jewelry market; and near the Opera House, ripped through the city at the height of rush hour traffic on Wednesday, killing at least 17 people, injuring 141.

The sophisticated IED explosives with a timer mechanism and the discovery of an unidentified body with an embedded electric circuit, at Zaveri Bazar have triggered speculations of foreign hand behind the attack. A day after the serial blasts the conspiracy theories are being unleashed in no uncertain manner and the finger is pointed once again at the intelligence agencies, and their failure to protect the people.

"Whoever perpetrated these attacks has worked in a very, very clandestine manner," Indian Home Minister P. Chidambaram said. "It's not a failure of intelligence." Yet the growing resentment of the public against the government and the politicians is well evident. And even though Chidambaram added, “we will find out who is behind these attacks," the citizens of the terror-struck city seems to know better.

“This raises a series of serious questions about the effectiveness of our intelligence and the level of coordination between the central and state agencies. I bitter and helpless,” said Panchali Sengupta, a homemaker.

“It is the same Home minister, who was responsible for 26/11 and he is there still now; coalition Ministry in Maharashtra killing my dear state. It is now most corrupt lethargic state, said Chanchal Chakrabarty, a long time Mumbaikar.

After 26/11 the government had announced well-platted plans about rebooting the country’s security-system. But the 13/7 attacks have evidently laid open the fact that the governmental agencies have been unsuccessful in recalling the lessons learned during the past season of bloody carnage.

As investigators struggle to find clues to the identity of the terror-group that perpetrated Wednesday’s serial blasts and the government plays the blame-game, the people in India who need to commute everyday feel threatened and insecure. As recently as in May 25, 2011, a series of low intensity blasts outside the Delhi High court have raised the possibility of further outrage in Delhi too. "Living in the most troubled neighborhood, every part of India is vulnerable,” Chidambaram said. And the people of India know what he means.

Is the constant breach in security ultimately the result of deep-rooted corruption in the Indian political system, or is it simply that India has ultimately accepted the role of itself as a subservient high-school kid used to being bullied by powerful anti-parties? Or that the measures the Indian government plans are balked from application by such in vivo political issues like the Lok Pal bill and the recent 2G scam?

Whatever the case may be, life in India moves on nonetheless, and people get used to sudden periods of spasmodic high-security followed by a lull, and then another terror-attack just boosts up the campaign only to fall back once again. As the list of unresolved terror cases in India gather fresh records, we, the people of India, are at a loss as to our future in the trouble-torn ground of the Indian Republic.

Acknowledgements:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/world/asia/15mumbai.html

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Day-after-serial-blasts-cops-clueless-as-Mumbai-seethes/articleshow/9229588.cms

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/07/14/india.blasts/index.html

Yes I Can!!

2011-07-11T23:54:00.000-07:00

It took me fifty-three short stories, over one hundred blog posts and countless journal entries to realize that I can write. The realization was sudden, and I embraced it. For too long I have run away from myself, and have denied the person inside me the respect and love for which it yearned.

Yesterday had been a very lonely day and I had been brooding over some personal relations. The sky was dripping, the air-condition buzzing and Mozart playing his Piano Concerto 21. In all, it was a perfect day to be a secluded bee. I was writing my daily journal when a vision suddenly came up. A flash. A momentary illumination. And then I decided to sit at the computer and see what happens. And, to my surprise, after an hour of ceaseless typing, I realized that I had successfully delivered the imago in print. The starting was vague, but then it began to clear-up and make sense.

I agree that I am an ambivert; and writing calls for the introvert. The outside world palliates loneliness but deforms the thought process exceedingly such that after a loud weekend you need at least ten days of mental recuperation. And that patch of ten days usually assume a dry and arid character where how much you may try to add a dollop of fertilizer, you fail to nourish the ground. But thankfully, I wasn’t under the weather or depressed yesterday, and consequently did not let the mind give up all its hope of developing a writing career eventually. Instead, I challenged it. I threw all the covers away and let it dwell on its seed. To the result that finally the thought germinated, one root gave birth to another extension, and when I ended the day’s work, I discovered that unbeknownst to me I had written exactly what I had in my mind.

I thanked myself, my mind, and the spirit that granted me the vision, the image. And I promised myself that even though I always will lack the confidence to look into a person’s eye and declare in unequivocal terms that I want to be a writer one day, I shall never deny myself the respect and love it deserves. It is true that unless you acknowledge your gifts, however minuscule the scale of talent might be, you never improve, or find the confidence to carry on. Growing up in a very conservative family I was denied the joys of independence and that resulted in me being unassertive and pale in comparison with the highly confident Homo sapiens I meet every day. Had it not been for the angel of a husband I have, I would never have known my abilities, let alone honing or nurturing them. My family does not read my work, some of friends even decline to comment on my publications, but this angel is always there to encourage me and read all my creative quisquilie. I guess we all need one such spirit to prosper in life and know ourselves and our capabilities.

Anyway, after a happy day of work I am off to my creative writing class and shall be back with a new post on Friday.

CheerioJ

Reading T.S. Eliot's The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

2011-07-11T05:39:00.000-07:00

Tunes I listen to when I am writing

2011-07-07T05:49:00.000-07:00

2011-07-06T02:57:00.000-07:00

Writing about Writing

I was listening to Hemingway’s speech this morning where the famous irrealist talks about writing being essentially a lonely vocation. You compose when you are alone. And I couldn’t agree more with the grainy, masculine tenor my computer played for me. There is something soothing in lonely mornings that opens up the creative cap and allows you to see it all clearly. Under such formidable circumstances, the words and images hailing from the recesses of your mind face no constraint, no judgment, and no criticism. You find yourself in a labile path with no fixed points to remember while you compose. Nothing, not even the terrible fear of derision, bothers you; and for some hours you find yourself drifting in a frigate of imagination. In your journey you encounter your characters, they come alive in front of you, they take on human forms and peel away layers of stereotypical ordinariness you attributed them in your first and second drafts. It takes several days, even months of undisturbed solitude to personify self-created puppets.

A community of writing individuals may or may not improve your writing ability, but a few hours every day in front of a laptop surely makes you perseverant. Also, you feel more alive. Even the flower-pot-colored imbricated rooftop tiles of an adjoining house start to look brighter. Writing without restrictions has an amnesiac effect on you. You forget, albeit momentarily, the hard truth of life, and lose yourself in a world and sentences and images. And this orgasmic relief, this sojourn in the ivory tower of imagination can seldom be experienced in a group.

In our writing class we often talk about the process of writing. Some of my classmates, especially the newly initiated ones, are still confused about the creative process, and ask for concrete steps. I wonder if there are any physical steps to writing. I think the writing domain is an untamed lea. We can learn the techniques of the craft, but writing is a personal process. And when people spend days under the delusion that whatever one writes is dedicated to his readers, he or she inevitably stonewalls the conscious with expectations, and that ultimately leads to a season of a harrowing drought, what we call writer’s block.

Several writers suggest expecting the least from oneself. I find the word of wisdom invaluable. I have lowered my expectations to a negligible level. And whenever I write I know I am writing for myself. I know my meaningless syncopations would make no sense to the world, and I never try to transmute my illogical word-rhythms for the sake of elevating the world’s view about me. The truth is we all write for ourselves; it’s sad that some people take ages to realize that.

I wish writing something meaningful were easy when all you needed to do would be to sit at a desk and type away. Alas, those who write from heart know that it is anything but easy. Writing requires patience, humility and long years of meaningless improvisation. And however much the society and kin assure you that you are almost there, you know better than that. Awful first drafts lead to moderate second draft and then ultimately to the terrific third and fourth drafts; we are all caught in this vicious cycle.

It was a revelation to me yesterday when a writer friend said he accepts his first drafts as perfect and just edits away the mistakes and thinks it’s ready for submission; I wish I could do that! But then, on second thought, I am glad I couldn’t pass away my inferior first efforts as finished product. The whole idea of writing is to think out of the box and say something in a way different from others. This challenge hits you like shrapnel when you are attempting to improve your creation. There lies the fun of writing. And truly speaking a single effort is seldom a complete effort.

I am attaching Hemingway’s inspiring speech for you:

SPECTRUM VOICE MAKES IT TO THE EDITOR'S PICK LIST ON OPEN SALON FOR THE THIRD TIME

2011-06-29T05:57:00.000-07:00

The Third Time

The Second Time

The First Time

Memories of Four Fourth of Julys

2011-06-29T02:13:00.000-07:00

Picture from web

The blue soon-to-rain morning rang a bell in my mind thereby initiating a vastastion of brooding on the sweep of life under my wings. And as I walked back a few hundred yards, stopped and dwelled on my kithless sojourn in a far-off country, I realized that Fourth of July is on the upcoming Monday. And with that thought, came a train of random images and a bouquet of exotic odors rushing into the sensory jorum: smells of dirt and grass and human sweat, a rainbow of jolly faces, hotdogs and umbrellas, music illegible accompanied by the nectariously soothing paean by the present Homo sapiens directed to the Stars and Stripes—

“Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,

What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?

Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thru the perilous fight,

O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?”

And then, just like magic, the cinnamon-colored sky is hit by a thousand enchanting arrows of light that would burst on the blank chalk-board above, fountains, spark-foaming rockets. Magical starbursts blushing red and yellow like the cynical play of Northern Lights. And for half an hour the season of dream continues, and all of us on the ground—native, immigrant, F1, H1B, alien worker—feel in our hearts a deep love for a country that adopted us and took us under its aegis, fed us, loved us, and looked after us. During this mystic season of hypnotic light-play, the differences in color or nationality or even social status seldom matters; and every year under the star spangled banner millions of America’s children stand united praising this great country and its big ole heart.

USS Constitution (Picture from the web)

I have under my belt memories of four lovely Fourth of Julys; the first one in Cambridge, MA in 2007. It was raining cats and dogs and my husband and I along with our Korean housemate had walked down to the Cambridge side of Charles River. In the morning we had seen the USS Constitution, the majestic three-masted frigate of the US Navy that is the oldest commissioned warship afloat in the world. On the ramparts of Fort Independence, Castle Island, South Boston, Massachusetts the ship had unleashed its 19-gun salute; and all that while I, still a novice in the country, had been busy inspecting its gunports, its three masts, its quarter-gallery, and its overall grandiose.

The evening fireworks were the icing on my cake; I couldn’t recall another day, except for the first time I observed a snowfall, when I had been so excited about an enigma. It seemed impossible to me that people could have fireworks when it was raining so hard. The Boston Pops performed their rendition Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture," and I remember how I had jumped from under the pink umbrella my Korean friend held when I saw the sky ignited by the first arrows of light. To define the next half an hour would be like catching the fragments of cloud, impossible, that is. Yet the major emotional outcome that was the result of the lighted-evening was spellbinding. I remember calling my parents and wishing I could draw before them the lights and shades that mesmerized me.

The rest of my Fourth of Julys have their roots in the Music City of US, Nashville, TN. Our whirlwind of shifting residences from state to state achieved its finale in the buckle of the Bible belt. Nashville has been home to me for three and a half years, and I loved it dearly. I loved its country music; I loved Cracker Barrel, I loved the city’s old homey touch, its retrograded signboards in Broadway, its pubs; I loved the library where I studied, the institution where my husband worked as a post-doctoral research fellow, but most of all I love the Fourth of July celebrations at the Riverfront Park.

Every year on the designated day, my husband I would head for the venue well ahead of time to find a nice place close to the riverfront to stand and wait for the fireworks. There would be country music bands, I remember Julianne Hough was there last year, and she was just terribleL Anyway, aside from listening to music, which is usually very good, we would have gyros and sodas and would take a walk down the smelly avenue at the hind side of the location stuffed with people, buyers and sellers, children with balloons and toys. Although we had to elbow our way in and out of the human labyrinth, the crowd never bothered us, the place felt like home. Dressed in my Fourth of July special T-shirt, I would feel I was one of the gang. I knew that in every way I was different from the majority of others, but it never mattered to me.

The firework show generally begins around nine in the evening; and last year after the havoc caused by the historic deluge in our dear old city, we thought that the Fourth of July celebrations would be attenuated. But Nashville proved all speculations wrong when she painted her sky with a stelliferous display of a lifetime. I knew that last year was my final Fourth of July since by that time my husband and I had taken the decision of coming back to India. Academia didn’t seem a sparkling proposition to us anymore; the hurdles were becoming more and more un-climbable. The job cuts, the heated political atmosphere, the sudden slash of opportunities to thrive in an otherwise welcoming nation forced us to search for options outside its borders.

Sitting in India and going back to this oneiric season of celebration, I feel that my vision of America has always been positive and loving. Despite pestilential outbursts from certain prejudiced parties against the embracement of people who are different, I always thought America is an exceedingly tolerant state. My five year stay has made me love this country like a second mother, and even though it’s impossible to convince people who hate differences how much I love the United States of America, I know in my heart that I will always be patriotic to this nation. Far away from my second mother’s bosom, I will celebrate her independence with élan.

Kitchen Disasters and Me: Complaints of an Unskilled Chef

2011-06-22T01:18:00.000-07:00

Image Courtesy: 123rf.com

Call me a nupson if you will, but I deserve to speak my mind when wielding the skillet is considered. In fact, fidimplicitary no more on the cooking issue, I hereby declare my opinion: cooking is paucipilicate vanity! People who do that are conjurers of a different kind, they are alchemists; and I am sorry to say that I have finally come to terms with that fact that I share not a shred of DNA with that magical clan. Of course, I am not saying that I can’t cook, that would be erroneous since overtime I have cooked some amazing meals albeit with the help of online cooking blogs and cookery books. But when working in the kitchen on my own without the feathery touch of a helping hand on my shoulder, I tend to unleash one blunder after another. The common blunder of late has been me burning myself. I have deep-rooted evidence to prove that cooking has always been a disastrous exercise for me, especially when I am zealous about some dish.

I feel ashamed, even peeved to inscribe this ghastly words. But I guess we are all different in our own way, and the universe and our families must excuse us for our short comings, be the cause of such shortcomings inherent or rooted in one’s own self-induced habit of indolence or impatience. Anyhow, when only last week I was in the cooking lab cupping pieces of marinated fish in my gowpen and getting the oil ready to fry the damn things, my intentions were anything but noble. It was an exceedingly hot day and I was sweating like a member of the suilline family; yet beaming within me was the good intention of cooking a good homely meal for the male half of the sketch.

And then disaster struck. I don’t know what went wrong with the fish, a total mood alteration, I guess, for when I dropped a couple of my meaty friends in the hot oil there was an intense spattering and I, being me, instead of walking away from the danger zone decided to inspect the container. The result: Three new burn-spots added my gallery of blemishes. If here had been a museum of kitchen accidents, I am sure I would have had a chance to shine, for not only do I own a gallery of burn-spots, I also have under my belt knife-cuts, scrapes, home-remedies-gone awfully-wild and many more. I doubt if there is another Vicenarian in the whole of Delhi NCR area who could boast of such achievements.

As my husband lathered my forearm with analgesic that afternoon, I experienced a moment of epiphany. Well, it was not exactly an epiphany-inducing moment, still, after crying a bit over the burns and complaining about how much it hurt, composure dawned on me, and in a silent soliloquy I told myself, “Honey, if you want to survive, stay away from the kitchen.” I declared my intentions to my husband whining all the time how I will be going back to school very soon and would have no time to cook or clean. He, obviously, had no problems. But I wanted to complain some more feeling, as you could guess, pretty—what’s the word— ah, yes—quisquilious, meaning worthless or trashy, thanks to the recent disaster in the kitchen.

I was totally under the weather at the time blaming myself for not being outstanding in the kitchen, in a good way, I mean, and not bothering to remedy the defect. I guess I really don’t care anymore. In some way it is good for me to shed off the pretensions of the multitude and know what exactly I am good at and what not; makes life uncomplicated, if you know what I mean. After careful consideration I took the most important decision of my life: cook as less as you can, and cook only when you have tooJ

My mother, however, took it really hard, as I had guessed. She thought my decision to cook once in a while and eat for the whole week “things” cooked hastily on one Sunday afternoon is totally irrational. She still loves to dwell in the old patriarchal era where Indian women cooked for the whole family wholesome meals consisting of not less than thirty dishes and refuses to acknowledge my Nuevo rebellious anti-patriarchal, boo-manhood mental get-up. It’s always difficult to convince mothers, but I don’t mind. I know someday she will understand that her vision of India is blindfolded.

Anyway, here I am on a sticky Wednesday afternoon typing my blog on my heated computer and wondering what on earth I can have for lunch. The options: bread and bread. I haven’t cooked anything substantial since last weekend and have been blissfully eating out. But now as I remember the warm afternoon meals people serve at home I could sense a Niagra in my mouth. Wonder why life gives us so many options and then leaves us dumbfounded. I should call some eatery and order in, or….I could just step into the kitchen and fix a warm meal….!! Sounds delicious, but never mind. Let’s order in.

And while I chew the fat with myself and whine some more you could listen to this new piece of recording I did this morning. Wondering if I am sounding hungry!!

P.S.: I am a wordsmith, I love collecting strange words. For those of you interested in knowing the meanings of the strange new words I have used in my blog, here they are: nupson— an idiot; paucipilicate— totally, utterly; gowpen—hands held to form a bowl, cupping.

A Day from My Diary — Account of my first day at the BCL Creative Writing Class and My Delhi Trip

2011-06-15T02:09:00.000-07:00

Profound was my relief yesterday when I found that the prospect of being initiated to the penetralia and the mysteries of the craft of writing wasn’t actually as intimidating as I thought it would be. Indeed, I couldn’t point out a happier day in my recent academic history when I had enjoyed my time in the confinement of a classroom as I did yesterday. The lively conversations that precipitated from my hung-up abditories surprised me exceedingly. I never knew that I could be so assertive, that I, one whose perdurable companion is her daily journal, could actually be a part of an intellectually stimulating debate. I was stunned by the revelation and I couldn’t say if my assertiveness added a hint of positivity to my vacillating level of literary confidence. Anyway, I suppose I should give you a better and more substantial account of my first creative writing class at the British Council.

The whole day yesterday the mad quopping of the clock at my desk suggested the beginning of a new decade in the annals of my life. For long I have yearned to be a part of a stimulating writing group to experience the enjoyment of collaborative literary creation and learn the intricacies of the writing art. Yet when the time came to get ready and pack my bags, I was dubious and hesitant. A rain of arrows targeted at me by the meta-voice suggested negative possibilities. The thoughts enervated me, and I was amazed at how our inner spirit seldom agrees when we are out on a revolutionary road trying to re-write our personal archives. I decided to turn a deaf ear to my own inner self. Although when I was getting ready to leave the house I failed to observe the beckoning hand of grand success floating before by eyes like some photic illusion, I was conscious of an all-embracing sense of peace gradually enveloping me. For the past few months I have been relying on the calming effects of meditation and deep breathing. The practice has been helping me relax and focus on my work.

For yesterday's outfit I chose a pair of well worn jeans, a simple royal blue T, which happens to be my favorite shirt despite its mundane getup, and my black walking shoes. It was a warm day yesterday, warm and humid. The weather around these parts often remains dry and arid, but it was strangely clammy yesterday. I felt as if the atmosphere was sweating profusely as it waited with breathless enthusiasm for my outcome in the new sport. Yesterday’s traffic wasn’t bad; “the busy old fool” was playing hide and seek in the clouds and so its piercing rays didn’t scorch my skin. I sat on the back seat of the car humming along with the tunes on the radio. The driver talked a lot, he is an agreeable gentleman who loves Delhi and couldn’t stop talking about its innumerable offerings. He proposed to give me an impromptu car trip to the major attractions around the Chanakyapuri area.

The diversion proved efficacious in relieving some of the strain. By the time I was observing the President’s Mansion (Rashtrapati Bhavan) and the beckoning of the India Gate on the other side of the road, I felt patriotic and inspired. The treasures of our country are endless, and I was overwhelmed by their iridescence.”You cannot possibly finish touring our whole country in one lifetime,” observed my mustachioed companion with glee when he saw me half hanging out of the car window trying to capture the fleeting scenery on my cellular phone.When we crossed the India Gate I dedicated a patriotic salute to the monument and remembered the time my best friend and I went to a cool nationalistic Bollywood movie called Rang De Basanti and devoted a long salute to the movie screen soon after the show was over thereby adding considerably to the entertainment of the moviegoers present in the theater on that day.

Having jettisoned all my dubiousness by this time, I found myself inspecting the environs with alacrity. The penannular roads gave way ultimately to the hub of Delhi—Cannaught Place. This place is Delhi’s Times Square, a place seething with people, quadrirotal vehicles, omnibuses, shops and many more. My driver gave me a quick tour around the inner and outer circle of this place; and I could feel the pulsating vein of the city throbbing under the weight of its inhabitants, the life of city bubbling and bursting with unbounded enthusiasm and vigor. It was hard to not acknowledge the Joie de vivre in that area. I was stunned by the amount of activity in the region: shops all settled waiting for customers, street-vendors ready with their offerings, flower shops with blooming blessings waiting for the hand of the gift-donor, and people coming and going in all directions. The setting was a mighty old chain that attached all of them in its links, all breathing, seething, and living in the narrow expanse of a constricted city hub enjoying the contributions of life.

For a moment I tried to imagine the collective stream of consciousness of the people around me, but then I couldn’t hold on to the thought. Eventually, my driver stopped the car before the establishment that was to house me and all my thoughts for the next two hours. Inside the citadel, the sentinels directed me to a chamber marked Room 1. I was accompanied by a girl who was also doing the course. I later learned her name and that she is an avid traveler. She was a very young lady, a first year student of English Honours at Delhi University. She wore a white T-shirt, a pair of watchet denim capris and small-lensed eyeglasses encased in a bright pink and black frame. Her front set of teeth slightly protruded and her hair had blond highlights which did not suit her.

As I sat introducing self to this youngster in bits, I observed the rest of the clan. The room where we sat on a circle with our chairs along the wall in one neat curve smelled of tension, apprehension, and excitement. The girl sitting next to A was another very young person, in fact, we found out later on that she was the youngest of the lot. She wore a blue top, blue denim capris and sported a simple back-brushed and clipped hairdo that suited her. She displayed considerable English skill. A couple of people in the group stood out and one of them was V, who reads one book every month and writes factual stuff; S, a dear girl, is writing her novel and could speak to her characters. She is a rather pretty lady all in pink and blue and displayed ample enthusiasm about the course. G is a lawyer and has been staying in Delhi for over ten years. Though from Nigeria, she is well versed with the nooks and corners of the capital. P and I gelled as soon as we spoke to each other during the interaction session where we were required to talk among ourselves and break the ice. Our teacher, to whom I am going to dedicate one paragraph, handed us printed out pages which had a list of common and infrequent qualities and interests and we were asked to match our new friends with the allotted interests.

The exercise turned out to be a real fun sport, slow in the beginning but gaining spirit and reaching the crescendo of conversation around the closing time. My impassioned feverishness bid an ignorant goodbye while I shed my normal diffidence and went about talking and discovering the interests of my classmates. AN was a wonderful guy, a lawyer by profession, who has the unusual dream of living in Beirut. AP speaks with a lovely accent and shares my interest in Khaled Hosseni. R is a MBA and complained about not being a voracious reader, although I though she is rather well-read and doesn’t really need to sweat over the reading issue. We all hang out talking about ourselves and our love for literature.

Our teacher was a lovely lady dressed in pristine white. She was a vision of intellectualism, sophisticated and uberous in knowledge. She is a writer and has written academic and non-academic books. An avid reader, she enjoys both the Elizabethan offerings of Shakespeare and modern Indian write-ups by authors like Khuswant Singh, Amitav Ghose among others. Although not an aficionado of Arundhati Roy’s renderings, she reads her for Roy's style of writing. During our interacting session she went about talking to the students and when the session was over she made us all partake of another fun sport. One person from the group was asked to introduce another person in the group and point out that person’s interests and qualities as discovered during the recent interactive session. AP introduced me with some lovely lines, and I introduced P, rather clumsily, I thought, and pointed out our common interest in cooking as an anecdotal reference.

Anyhow, the introduction was over soon and we then began talking about literature and narrative procedure and were asked to give our opinions to a number of selective arguments presented to us in a printed form. The list included such questions as to whether fiction needs a plot for development; whether the reader is more important than the writer and so on. We were divided into groups of four where we discussed and consolidated our points of view based on the arguments provided and tried reaching a unanimous consensus. One spokesperson from each group delivered the groups ideas and then the other groups were given opportunity to expatiate on the issue and provide their view points if they deemed desirable. We did not go into a heated argument, but the discussion was lively, and I was more vociferous than I thought I could be.

At the end of the class my new friends and I exchanged our contact details and I felt for the first time full of beans at having gone ahead and taken the decision to be a part of this extensive, not to say nerve-wrecking course. The intimidations that had been a part of my morning saga having bidden adieu by then, I felt more at ease. As I reclined in the back seat of my car on the way back, the daunting façade of the BCL establishment seemed benign, and I felt happy.

Now here are some pictures I took yesterday on my cellular phone:

Rashtrapati Bhavan

Gyarah Murti

Taking the pen

2011-05-08T22:53:00.000-07:00

Somebody had once said that the pen is mightier than the sword. It is well considered, even now, that if war is a mark of decisive human failure then the pen is the sign of magnificent achievement. Man, Homo Pollex, the modern Prometheus, curved the narrative of boundless human civilization using this instrument. The fowl’s pride on papyrus was perhaps the precursor to the ever expanding creative genius of human beings. The great works of literature, starting from epic to our modern day fiction, were written using the pen; and yet, now, in the face of such impressive adversaries as the i-pad and the netbook, the quintessential pen has fallen in desuetude. The instrument that once shaped what we hold precious—the jewels of English literature—is dying, with little or no hope of recuperating and starting afresh. As contemporary décor discards all the old-fashioned touches in a living space, modern civilization with its ever-increasing scientific fruits finds it impossible to assign a room to an ailing ancient gadget, however vital its contribution might have once been.

As I was reading Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary when troubling thought came to me that possibly we are in the madness of the new mindlessly doing away with the old; that to us the word Retro connotes weightless nostalgia and nothing else. Being an unequivocal preteriest, I couldn’t say if I wasn’t peeved by the idea. The thought remained throughout the day and deep into the night. And then logic dawned on me. It occurred to me that neglect of this once mighty instrument is due in part to the difficulty once faces in attempting to establish a communication through pen and paper in the old-fashioned way. Say a person writes a well meaning letter with the instrument in question, what will happen next? The receiver of such a communication may look askance at the correspondent and would either laugh at her effort, or simply take her as a puritan holding on to an obsolete tradition. Also, let’s face it, fountain pens are messy, and quills and inkpots rarely available commercially. Still, like one attempting to run on a slushy cobblestone street, my mind toyed with the idea of writing with a fountain pen despite the terrible contingencies that lay in front.

The following morning I went to a local stationary shop and questioned the shopkeeper about the status of fountain pens in India. He agreed that the tradition is dying, but added that several schools in Gurgaon are trying to revive the convention by making it customary for children at school to write with fountain pens. “It builds penmanship, you know,” he said as he brought out one of these instruments. Strangely the pen I got is a nice fusion of old and new, it has a refillable barrel where once the ink is finished you can just inject the needful using an ingenious plastic injector from the tiny ink barrels which came with it. The shopkeeper provided me with full and detailed information about fountain pens and even said that he would specially order a couple of Sheffields for me. I thanked him and came back home all the while wondering when I could sit at my desk and start writing.

Have you seen the movie Julie and Julia? Do you remember how Julie felt about cooking? Well, I almost felt like her, overwhelmed by my art, that is. Although it is not at all advisable to day-dream while crossing streets in India, on my way home I was deep in contemplation, and even remember vowing that I would never quit the writing habit.

I generally write my journal in the morning, one hour every day, but that day I decided to sit in the afternoon. The first few pages were written with curious long hand; several blue blotches made themselves visible on the exercise book, and I had to flick the instrument at least five times when after two absurdly written lines the ink dried. The thought engine that had been sprouting thousand ideas all day long suddenly came to a standstill; the brain seemed halted in the presence of the alien instrument and it took me sometime to overcome the idea of jettisoning the disastrous object and getting back to gel pens and felt-tipped smoothies. I realized that indeed it is pretty difficult in a modern age to be a troglodyte. People who say that they are old-fashioned seldom realize that their lived are constantly being instinctively modified by technology and principles of contemporary living. There is nothing as a modern old-fashioned man. We are all children of technology; and even though I thought of revolting against the ceaseless expansion of modernity, in the face of old-fashion, I too fumbled for a while.

It took me two solid days and two hours of constant journal writing each day to break the fear of writing with a fountain pen. During this phase the ink barrel exhausted twice and I had to refill, pardon my expression, the damned object and flick it over a thousand times to get the ink rolling. After the expiration of this period, I realized that the human spirit of adaptability has worked wonders and unknowingly I have developed the habit of writing with a fountain pen.

Now almost two weeks have elapsed since I started the experiment, and even though my writing hasn’t undergone a metamorphosis, — thanks to constant emailing and incessant Facebook-ing— I face no difficulty in writing with a fountain pen any longer. The experiment that was fueled by a sentimental wish of holding in my palms the sand grains of an aged civilization has taught me a few truths of life: that indeed, if we wish, we can introduce well-meaning combination of old and new elements in our lives; that endearing the basic equipments used in the developmental process of any art from (vintage utensils in case of cooking, old pens in case of writing, antique laboratory apparatuses in case of science, etc.) would ultimately endear you to your art, I now feel more attached to my writing than ever; and finally, habit like evolution is a solid truth, you get used to a thing if you use it over and over again, and it doesn’t matter if it’s exolete or presently in vogue.

The Sounds of India

2011-05-05T06:12:00.000-07:00


Picture from the web

Imagine a day when you wake up and find yourself in the lap of silence with nothing except the terrible quopping of your heart reminding you that you are in some extraordinary domain, that something around you is seriously amiss. For people living in India silence is probably as intimidating as a bad dream. To them silence is supererogatory, an artificial bubble in the presence of which people’s lives cease to function; the vehicle of their constantly moving lives halts, and the driver looks around and begins to check if there is a problem with the machinery, the physical process of movement in this case, that is. So extreme is the idea of silence in India is that not a second passes without you being reminded that in this world the mortal millions do not live alone, thus proving that the erudite irrealist Matthew Arnold was totally wrong in supposing the contrary being the truth of human existence.

Shortly after I relocated to India, it occurred to me that probably I would be able to scoop out a spoonful or two of silence for me. But no sooner had I had that thought in my nut than India laughed a mocking laugh. For only after a fortnight of my stay in the country, I realized that silence is the last thing you could expect in a nation so thickly peopled with the creatures of God. And having jettisoned the hope of silence, I am now finally at bliss with the sounds of the country — the thousand vibrations, the innumerable resonations, the honks and the shouts, the hammerings in the morning, the loud television noises in the evening, the noisy ringtones on the streets, and the list goes on. The incessant prattling of life in India that hugged me soon after my return to the country — a compliment I could have well have excused — has of late become such an intrinsic part of my life that now I have started to feel anxious in the wee hours when for a brief period the constant drumming stops and all seems to be at peace. For it is strange, rather unbearably strange, to devour great chunks of noise throughout the day and denied even a morsel around midnight!

For a person who stayed for half a decade in a foreign land whose salad green leas are but the opposites to the land in which she currently dwells, I have well acclimated myself to the changed circs. I remember before my return to India how nervous I had been about giving up my long relished quiet. But now even the idea of that long relished quiet gives the impression of a thing of the past; something that happened a long time ago and is no more available, except in museums, a relic, if you will. But I am not saddened by the sudden lack of noiselessness; I am, on the other hand, quite enjoying this overactive livelihood. I get up every morning and I am greeted by the guttural noises of a hundred pigeon that hang around the building, and then the day unfolds itself one noise following another, reaching its crescendo just before twelve and then continuing on the bemolle till four-thirty, in the meanwhile loudening once or twice for a brief period of time only to drop with a discordant bang at the close of the day. If you listen carefully you can actually quantify the sounds — collect, organize and interpret the various noises that reach you throughout the day.

These discordant jingles and crashes are the life giving sparks that fuel our huge nation and to turn a deliberate deaf ear to them — not that it is possible to take that action; still, by some ingenuity say you could do it — is correspondent to turning away from life itself. India and its colors and sounds are the atoms that bind the system. Several nations may pride themselves on their glum quietness. They may take it as a mark of sobriety to inhabit with their classical monotones; but then where is variety in their method? Where is life? Life is where the clatter is, and India is filled to the brim with life; rather it’s over-brimming with its myriad sounds, it is bursting with life.

Reading Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary

2011-04-29T07:03:00.000-07:00

I feel I am bursting with words right now. They are everywhere; I can sense them flooding the landscape; they are monsters, little devils all seeking to come out of the system the same time. The deluge is the result of reading Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary. This morning I started reading this extraordinary assortment of entries from Virginia Woolf’s journals collected and published by her husband, Leonard Woolf, after her death. The preface itself is wonderful. I found Leonard Woolf’s professional, forcefully editorial tone slightly bedewed with stray drops of love that occasionally stains the white page of his mind. I feel the formality is somewhat lovingly broken when he talks about the patterned Italian paper covered copies his wife used as her journals and other details about her writing life.

I have never considered myself a Woolfian by any means; I have often found her work rather un-entertaining, albeit beautifully written. Her stream-of-consciousness method, her experimentations with style and technique have undoubtedly amazed me, but I have never been a moth attracted to her “luminous halo”. She has always struck me as an extraordinary writer, but not a lovable creature. I never adored her, until now.

Entranced, I read page after page of her daily thoughts — mundane details, her dread of criticism; her occasional hatred for the works of certain writers, notably one story of Katherine Mansfield, which she thought was a poor effort totally undeserved of praise or the patience of a reader; her comparing her success to that of other authors; her belaboring on the literary triumph issue; her vacillations; her depressive ramblings — and I feel that this Virginia Woolf is more human than the person next door. She is flesh and blood, warm and human.

I must say this book is gradually eating away the effects of the books that I finished reading in the recent past; my careful thoughts preserved after reading these quondam tomes have all but gone. I am like a bowl of water bubbling with love for this somewhat obsessive compulsive, lovely-profiled lady. I wish I could time travel and meet this woman for tea sometime and watch her moves, notice her noticing objects, sounds, motions.

I wish I could read the whole book today; it is nearly four hundred pages and I am dwelling on the seventy-fifth—having taken more time than needed for lunch and other daily chores. Anyway, the book is working as an anodyne, my otherwise wavering mind is calm and interested. I haven’t stirred much since five in the evening and hope to finish at least a hundred pages today.

Blue

2011-04-18T04:44:00.000-07:00

Blue

Blue, blue, corybrantic blue

Majestic, boundless faded watchet hue,

Unleash the spring, unchain the devil,

Raise me up, feed me to the evil.

Blue, blue, deep sea-blue

Sighing, breathing labile vertu,

Speak to me in whispers, speak to me in shouts,

Bring to me the fire, bring to me your bouts,

Blue, blue, cruel, sunny-blue,

Reckless, temerous, in sapphire pareu,

Spell me life, speak of doom,

Break the nox, set life abloom,

Blue, blue, omniscient, nihiliscent blue,

My paramour, my love, my death-bearing beau,

Bring to me the end, let me your blue defy,

Show me the world and in your blue let me die.

The Diseased

2011-03-22T07:27:00.000-07:00

Nothing aggravates me in a fine March morning, when the sky is blue, the Bohea steaming, and my general mood in the pink, like seeing a buffoon venditating its momentary physical discomfort on a popular virtual forum. Directly I catch sight of such lame “status messages” as down with flu or suffering from a stomach pain, and my morning bonhomie transmogrifies to a bitter sneer, and I catch the distinct aroma of a singeing disposition. On not less than six or seven occasions in the past couple of week have I been, unwillingly, the reader of the trivial physical discomforts of my virtual acquaintances. And on every occasion I have wondered how we are supposed to reciprocate to such consequential physical discomforts of our beloved web-pals? Are we supposed to cry, or better still, howl? Are we supposed to give them a hug, a kiss? And how such actions could prove to be efficacious in alleviating the pains of the subject is lost on me. I agree that the unwritten laws of the society entail us to show concern for the health and wellbeing of our brethren, but does that involve showing unneeded love on undeserved recipients. Why is it that a certain section of our educated, seemingly wise and extrovert population take it for granted that they are the cynosure of our eyes, our own Adam and Eve, our paradisiac fruit that need contact watching and attention? Why is it that within the confines of the bijou virtual compartments we maintain we cannot spend one happy day without being pestered by needless information? When a world is being wrecked by a war on despotism carried out in a community that lives with us in the same world that we inhabit, when people are still recovering from the throes of a devastating earthquake in a land that is linked to us by means of humanity, do the scattered cases of a homely viral fever, or a menstrual cramp, or, for that matter, a sudden change of mood, matter? What amazes me, even peeves me, is the way a section of our younger and even matured unit are blithely discarding the serious aspects of a worldly life for a homely self-centric one. If one keeps her eyes open one can catch the discrepancy in the points of view I am talking about: on one hand one will witness great democratic feelings unleashed in the social area that can crumble the ivory tower of a tyrant while on the other a carefree unconcern for anything except self. The attitude struck me square in the face when I disembarked at the Delhi airport and caught sight of the glammed up metropolitan city that I now call my home. The city of Gurgaon is one of the lushest cosmopolitan conurbations in India. It cups in its palm the most expensive restaurants, bar, fashion stores and its hip population. In many ways it is as snazzy as New York or Los Angeles, and the average cost of living, as you can guess, touches the zenith in the economic scale; yet, in this seemingly, well-maintained, well platted out, organized metropolitan hub, you will easily catch such diseases as child labor, abject poverty, chill penury. As soon as you cross the polished, glassy façade of the skyscaperized city you will, if you have the eye, that is, catch the glimpses of pain and distress: children with perpetually hungry eyes specter thin in form looking for food; women, emaciated, bare-boned extending their hands in the hope of small charity; men, hollow, shadowy forms working under the beating sun to build brick by brick glass palaces to be inhabited by the fortunate ones. Who will listen to their disease; how shall you reciprocate to their pains? The whole city riding expensive cars and spending needless money on “imported” goods turns a blind eye to these agonies. They behave as if the less fortunate ones do not exist, they turn their gaze, and they close their hearts, deliberately. Let me share a small incident with you: a day or two after I relocated to India, my husband and I went for a snack. We had in our mind delicious Indian snacks available in a food stall near the guest house we had been staying at the time. As we enjoyed the hot treat a small girl dressed in an almost threadbare outfit and displaying an unbearable hungry countenance approached us. I asked her what she wanted to eat and she said she wanted a “samosa,” a deep fried Indian treat I am sure many of you are aware of. My husband took the girl to the shop and bought her a couple of samosas. She left the shop in quick steps carrying the bag of food. I stood in my place watching her moves: she reached a side street where her mother sat, placed the bag on her mother’s lap. She washed her hands at a washbasin adjacent to a temple that stood in the area, wiped them in the loose end of her mother’s saree, sat by her and began eating. I cannot tell you why, but the happiness I felt that day watching the child enjoy the little treat is greater than some recent great joys. I thanked God for bringing me to the spot that A.M., for allowing me to help the girl in our little way. At the same time, I couldn’t turn away from the fact that a portion of my fellow human beings, rich, well-fed, topped to the north in silk attire, is sick. Apathy is a disease that has marked them as her own, and they are unaware of it, or they simply do not care. Compared with the inconsequential, barely there diseases that wreck my virtual pals this disease of apathy is a grim discomfort that eats away the heart and kills the human spirit. This is a disease we need to be concerned about; this is an ailment that needs prompt attention, potent medicine and regular treatment.

Raise a voice and help stop child labor in India.

On Valentine's Day

2011-02-14T09:57:00.000-08:00

Contrary to the expectations of the young lovers, the sun on Valentine's Day did not resemble a giant heart dancing high up in the sky, and neither did the nightingale sing Justin Bieber's Baby. Valentine's Day has so far proved to be just like another day, at least for me. My interest in Valentine's Day took a nasty turn when a few months back I was studying a book on the history of English literature that in its account of Geoffrey Chaucer's work had a gist of his famous dream-poem Parliament of Fowls. In it Chaucer is transported in his dream to a Garden of Love that contained a dark Temple of Venus. In the garden the goddess Nature presided over the Parliament of Birds: it is on Valentine's Day when fowls and birds chose their mates. Now, a romantic as I am under normal conditions, even I failed to derive even as much as an iota of romanticism from this lovey-dovey account of birds calling for their mates without the thought ringing inside my head to check to if I have a rainbow tail to go with my romantic nature, or wonder how well I can sing a cuckoo song of love. Such ghastly notions spoiled my love side, and for several days I felt misembodied. I blamed the blasted Chaucer, Father of Poetry though he undoubtedly is, for killing my poetic side. Two eagles vying for the hand of a formel, let's face it, is not romantic.

Every year around this time as the smell of spring cloaks the air, people start talking about Valentine's Day. They take sides shouting for or against the customization of love around this very day. Some feel that this day is a hoax created by rich companies with the express intention of ripping us, while others feel that it is good to have a day dedicated to love. And in the middle of it all rests another largely forgotten group, the clan of latitudinarians who is a passive audience to the spectacular display of emotions presented by the V-day lovers and the non V-day lovers. The procession of arguments for or against the love issue doesn’t bother them very much; some things are not worth caring about. I think that I belong to this third group of people who love to see the butchering of lovers initiated by supermarkets, but would keep their hands clean by not being a sacrificial goat themselves and spend their cash on tchotchkes like a dollar box of China made chocolates or a forty dollar bouquet of flowers. But even if you want to stay away from the Valentine's Day brouhaha, you just cannot ignore it: this morning I was reminded by Godiva that today is Valentine's Day, and I ought to celebrate it with a box of their premium chocolates; by Pantene that wished me a happy V-day and added, like a good salesperson, that the new Pantene 2-in-1 products make falling in love twice as simple, how you ask, well, I don’t know, I did not finish reading the email; and Pillsbury that asked me if I would be interested in sharing the Valentine doughboy with by friends on Facebook, the idea behind such an action is totally unintelligible to me.

Once you are married and you get it into your nut that Valentine's Day is a day when you shall kick your spouse if he doesn’t show up with gifts, you have reached the second stage of the profoundly tender passion--true love, and cannot but be relieved that you shall not have to dance with a banjo to impress a prospective lover anymore. To celebrate this respite I am willing to part with fifty Jacksons! But Valentine's Day is all about the pursuit of love, you say, and may be I give the aye to you for the idea; still how you can express true love in a stifling restaurant smelling of food and bustling with a thousand equally deep lovers like you all vying to express courtly love under candle light, beats me. May be we are stretching the thing to an extreme bit; may be Valentine's Day is more personal than we want it to be; may be true love really doesn’t need cards and chocolates to commemorate its presence. But today we shall leave the argument at this point and wish the lovers all the very best in their love pursuit.

I would, however, end my blog post with an unromantic personal revelation. Last evening as I was cleaning up my apartment, I discovered the burlap full of love notes and cards that I had sent my husband via the Great Indian Post before we got married. The box had been marinating in our closet since a time out of mind. I had first discovered the box two days after I came to stay with him, and that was four years ago, that time I had tenderly gone through the mushy revelations and prided myself for composing such priceless tokens of love. The total weight of my love notes was an astounding ten pounds; and since the airline would not allow me an extra-suitcase for my love letters, I had to discard them before we pack our suitcases for our journey back to India. I felt sad for a while thinking that I was jettisoning romantic love for the purpose of practicality, but these days the world demands you be practical and mature. Moreover, back in the apartment, when I discovered my husband deliberating which restaurant to take me to this evening, I realized that in the confusion, I may have struck the right note somewhere, albeit without knowing. I bade my love cards a final adieu and proffered to enjoy Valentine's Day in a more practical way.

On Books

2011-02-11T11:05:00.000-08:00

Modern technophiles have been predicting the doom of books as we know them: the death of folios and quartos, hardback and shinning paperbacks. They envisage that in a few decades books are going to be a thing of the past and e-readers like Kindle, etc., would become the primary source of bookish delight. The steady rise in the market of wireless reading devices are pointing to the fact that people of our century prefer to travel light; the weight of heavy tomes is too much to carry about, instead they prefer to have them all compiled in a sleek, shiny pamphlet like device which they could conveniently use. I agree that I am myself thinking of buying such a device, still I cannot get over the old bookish feeling; can a wireless device, I wonder, replace the tactile feeling of paper on hand, the smell of antiquity laden in pages stored for a long time in a shelf, the yellowish corners, the bold letters? Is the intense wish for convenience robbing us of all that we held true for centuries? Is the biblioclasm brought on by the tech-revolution, the sudden infernal cataclysm, finally killing the tradition of reading books the way they are naturally meant to be read. Are we, maddened by a sudden concentration of technological power, forgetting the great history that spreads behind us of inscription and what it had meant for us?

William Caxton in 1476 printed the first book, and since then the lamp of literacy began to spread its light throughout. Before the advent of the printing press manuscripts were written by hand and preserving books had been a laborious task. But as soon as people learned the art of printing, they took advantage of technology to preserve wisdom. Judging from this angle, the rise of wireless devices sound sane, even justified; it becomes a case of passing the baton. Technology today, however, is highly vacillating, a new gadget becomes defunct in only a few months, in such a circumstance can we trust the irresolute hands of technology to guard the nobility of the thing that mattered to us most -- our books. What will happen in a few years, I ask. Possibly newer technology will arise. We will discover new ways to read, new gadgets will overtake old devices, and the weight of manuscripts will be reduced to a zero. If such a thing happens we shall have to accept the shift with open arms, nevertheless, we will regret the absence of certain things that reading in the traditional sense entailed.

Books mold us. They create our character and externalize our brains. Take a look at the books you have acquired over the years; don’t you think that those tomes have a story to tell? The shift from fairy tales to comics, from science fiction to Shakespeare, from love lyrics to essays; in other words from childhood preferences to titles chosen in maturity testify to a growing mind. The presence of old books is reassuring; their smell almost motherly. Without your direct acknowledgement, your old books have become one with you, and they have stayed with you through thick and thin guarding you with the warmth of the knowledge they have poured on you. In a room surrounded by books -- torn, smelly, and old -- you tend to feel more at home than in an empty house with only a shelf displaying a wireless device. The pride in flaunting the collection you have laboriously gathered over the years is nothing short of sensational. I wonder how modern gadgetry can replace this satisfaction.

Physical presence of books in our lives goes deeper than we think. When I first came to USA from India several years ago, I felt lonely and friendless; and in my lonesome read a book called Namesake written by Jhumpa Lahiri. It is a novel about an immigrant Bengali woman and how she coped with the transition from a traditional family life in India to a nuclear existence in USA. Her story read like my story; I felt that the author has emphatically written my history and my future. And I remember holding the book close to my heart drawing strength from it to survive in an alien landscape. I still have the book, and the even though I haven’t studied it in a while, I feel a strange, almost familial attachment to it. How an electronic book can replace this feeling, I wonder.

As I was browsing through my collection of books yesterday, sorting them, choosing the ones to keep and discarding the titles I thought I wouldn’t need anymore, I couldn’t help but feel a little perturbed. The logical part of me dictated that I must discard certain titles since I couldn’t carry it all back to India, assuring me that these days bookeries in India carry all kinds of books; still I felt sad thinking what hands would sift through the pages of my discarded books, what hands would imprint their marks on them. I hoped they went to worthy hands that would love and treasure them. Still all is a surmise now. Shakespeare was true when he said in sonnet 73 the following:

This thou perceivs’t, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well, which thou must leave ‘ere long.

To me the thought of leaving behind the books that have comforted me in lonely hours, matured me when I ran to them frustrated by the unceasing hum of the laptop, embraced me and taught me, is similar to leaving behind a part of me. Still it is satisfying in a way to think that the fragments of the moments of triumphant absorbing of written wisdom will remain with me, half forgotten, half remembered, forever.

The wireless devices available in the market may include the substance of the books, but the emotional weight of my once owned library, their physical evidence would nowhere be found. The fickle newbie technology will yield brilliant magic tricks, one outwitting the other, and, in the middle of it all, will try to try to eat away our love for books, but without books we are a set of wayward travelers with nothing to glue us to our foundation; without books we "might melt into the airwaves, and be just another set of blips."

Reference: Due Considerations by John Updike

Deal or no Deal -- An account of my Craigslist transactions

2011-02-09T13:09:00.000-08:00

What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! -- Hamlet quote (Act II, Sc. II).

Human beings are such fascinating beings, and the more you know them the more you realize they are perhaps the most intriguing creature in the universe, apart from invisible aliens, of course. My recent knowledge about humanity is totally based on earthy experience though and has nothing to do with aliens, spaceships, or robotic creatures. Recently, I have had the fortunate chance to meet a sea of myriad humanity--some strange, some nupson like, some smart, some more balatronic than can be described, and a handful of standardized normal specimens.

My fortunate encounters with this sea of eclectic Homo sapiens hitherto unknown to me were the result of the ads I posted on Craigslist. My husband and I are on the brink of a big move and needed to sell the furniture and other items of our household; hence we created an account and listed the items that were for sale. Think of a time before a big storm when nature usually sits breathless resting itself for the big strike. The initial moments after we posted the ads seemed similarly benign and calm to me. And then the storm came striking the shore first in the distance and then started spreading, its boom and uproar broke reboant on our lives. We received calls in great profusion; the phones never stopped ringing. I felt as if I was running a call center in India, a task, you are fain to think, coming naturally to Indians. Unfortunately, I don’t belong to the revered clan, and after a brief period of forced enjoyment, began hating the task only to forcibly starting to like it when the thought of Jacksons and Lincolns crossed my mind. To cut the long story short and head to the crux, much to my dismay, I attended the calls. Some of our stuff sold pretty easily and we thought that the rest would go effortlessly as well. Only it didn’t.

After the first week of grand success, I began to think of myself as a Craigslist diva with tips and tricks under her belt ready to unleash at a moments notice. I assured my husband who had started to think of Goodwill and Salvation Army already, to cool down and let the cash flow. Tell me- after turning off the hypocritical signal, of course-- is there a better charity than self-charity? Besides most of my household stuff cost a good deal of money, and I didn’t want to let them go without some compensation. Call me human or sub-human; I am practical when practicality calls. So, there I was ready to pocket a truckload of cash, but my (ig) noble intention took a ghastly turn in a few days. My cecity to the inefficiencies and fallacies of humanity, that hadn’t bothered me much before now, took an illuminated turn. I saw the light, if you know what I mean. In case you don’t, take a look at the two priceless responses to my postings that I received in my inbox: the first is a reply to our posting of a chest of drawers, and the second a response to our posting of our dining table that included an area rug for free. Here, I must tell you, that the first one was harder to digest than its successorJ. And these two were just prologues, previews, if you will, the real show was yet to come.

When I look back at my Craigslist encounters with the express intention of creating a list of characters that deserve some kind of award or special recognition for the marvelous character traits they effortlessly displayed, I find myself grappling in a sea of candies unable to decide which one to eat and which one to not. But in a story there can be no more than one protagonist, one antagonist and a couple of very important characters. Hence I have condensed my list and have drawn out the finest few who deserve due mention in my humble blog post for their extraordinary character and nature. I wish I had peacocks and monkeys, or at least Dundies to present these glorious few with because, to me, they are the epitome of small town virtues, the real mirror, and the microcosm of the world they came from; and they are chosen here based on the degree of weirdness they displayed.

The first position has to go to a woman who came to visit our abode to check out the stuff we had for sale. But she put a lid on the proceedings as soon as she had walked into our apartment. She was a middle aged white lady with distinctly southern looks, disheveled straw colored hair, and wore a pair of baggy trousers and a plaid shirt. She came with a child, a thin, pale looking individual that had an undeniably hungry look in its eyes. The lady appraised my husband and me for a second or two, judging us from head to toe like a medical practitioner would inspect an immigrant that had disembarked at Ellis Island than anything human. With every passing second she grew paler, until a time when she looked positively vampiric; doubtless convinced that I was a wicked witch of some kind, she held the child tightly by its hand. She fumbled, and in a word of two said that she would talk to her "sister" who wanted to buy the "things" from us, and would come back later. The poor lady had forgotten, probably under the grip of fear, to even see what we had for sale; but we thought it would be better to let her go. Her sister never called and neither did she.

The second position goes to another lady who called us one Sunday forenoon and inquired about the couch we had for sale. That morning I had shoved the telephonic duty to my husband and waited to judge his professional skill at dealing with weirdoes, or should I say, masterpieces of humanity. He started off naively, innocent as he was -- an academic in every sense of the word, he is an angel in human form-- but even angels have breaking points; innocence is short lived. The lady that called us asked my husband a series of questions about the couch to which he replied correctly; to my amazement, he gave her a long of positive points about the couch, which I believed he was too inattentive to notice. But while I was correcting my viewpoint, the woman on the other side continued her conversation with my spouse. I heard him tell her that the couch was in perfect condition and that we still use it. To this the woman gave a sharp yowl, which despite being only faintly audible, struck us like a steam hammer. "What do you mean you use it? How do you use it?" she questioned with marked displeasure. Both my husband and I were at the time under the impression that a couch is a necessity, not an accessory in a home. My husband told her in a few words about our daily couch using technique on which she brooded for a trice. Conversation continued with more questions thrown at us regarding the material of the couch, its warranty, the years it had spent in our home, etc. Finally, the tête-à-tête ended with her telling us that she was looking for something different and my husband apprising her the sacred words that you get what you pay for.

Ultimate consternation, however, came in the form of an Indian lady, a fine female who snatched the third position in this list from other worthy contenders. She called me no less than six times about my fancy professional series microwave oven, and every time she wanted me to lower the price. I illuminated her with the fact that the ad contained the words "price non negotiable"--which, I thought, she had inadvertently missed-- but she wouldn’t have it. I guess she felt that being an Indian undoubtedly qualified her to a deserving special discount; she went on with her appeal. Somehow overcoming the strong desire of shouting at her, I calmly informed her that I had no intention of giving her any special discount on the already heavily discounted price. Later that week, she called again having seen the ad reposted on Craigslist, and this time my husband picked up her call. She asked for the same discount to which my husband, despite my vehement disapproval, agreed, and gave her our address and arranged a time she would come to pick the item up. Only that she never came. When the appointed time had passed we took it for granted that her watch followed the Indian Standard Time and decided to wait. After an hour of two if breathless suspense, my husband called her and she said that she had found another "good" microwave oven and wouldn’t come. That evening, after a trying few weeks, I realized that enough was enough, and ended up giving away our stuff to a friend. All that remains are going to Goodwill and Salvation Army in a few days.

P.S. My sincerest apologies go to the following gracious and worthy contenders who didn't make it to the weird list: the African American family that came to buy my bamboo rug and ended up mentioning that the bamboo "thing" wasn’t a rug at all, and wished I had been more specific in my ad (which said "Bamboo Area Rug for Sale" and included the quality of the material in the specification list too) about the material; to the Chinese gentleman who wanted to buy "everything" I had provided I gave him all for the grand price of fifty dollars; to the young lady that emailed me about my area rug to whom the sentence "all items must be picked up" made no sense, and who wanted to give me ten dollars less than the price asked for provided I meet her at a designated place with the item.

Embracing Imperfection

2011-02-07T10:00:00.000-08:00

This morning after what seems to me a millennial hiatus, I stepped into my patio to inhale the fresh air and enjoy the wintry landscape for a while. In the summer I had made it a quotidian habit to sit outside every morning and write for an hour. The habit had proved extremely beneficial in that not only I observed the diurnal march of nature, but also imbibed its daily sights and sounds steeped in the hustle of work-life that surrounded it to the fullest. With the advent of winter, however, the habit had to break, and, like all broken habits, it soon ceased to bother me any longer. I added one more leaf to my archive of forgotten habits and lived happily until today when a terrible discomfort in the being caused by the stifling conditioned airwaves inside the apartment, and the absence of my lovingly paternal spouse forever worried about by health and well-being, I decided to step out for a breather. Upholstered from head to toe in winter garments and carrying a cup of caffeinated beverage and my writing book I walked out. I cleaned my red chair littered with dead leaves and dust and sat on it and almost bewilderingly observed the changed landscape surrounding me. The green trees of summer have given way to slightly shivering nude branches with flakes of dead brown leaves clinging to them like barely-there lingerie. The uncovered few bird nests looked like once comfortable homes destroyed by some mighty storm. Still, despite it all, the whole area seemed dear and calm. Having just returned from a skyscraperized city where people diverted by industrial glitter rarely notice the constellations in the sky, this imperfect landscape of broken branches, dilapidated bird nests and cloudy skies beckoned me warmly. The warmth of the chilly winter wind soothed the sinews and the whole atmosphere felt romantically somniferous. I closed my eyes and breathed while the voice in my head composed lines that waited to be written.

Poetry is what I wrote today, rhymed lines dedicated to an imperfect beauty. The lines came naturally, not one artificial pressure stroke was imposed on the process of creation today--the work was natural, organic. As I wrote, I wondered about the landscape more and more: I wondered how it had looked a century back, tried to imagine its uninhabited past and pondered the essence of the industrial revolution and modern virtual insurgency that has robbed a sizable portion of contemporary human beings of the finer sense of appreciating something as organic and simple as Nature. We drive to distant lands to catch its glimpse, yet we turn a deaf ear to its knock on our own door. As I observed the gray, wintry sky with sheets of clouds blanketing it, I couldn’t help but feel contented at having retained a bit of that old romantic sense in me. I don't know how many of you can afford the simplest joys of daily life any more being so much blinded and sidetracked by your enormous web-presence where joy starts with seeing yourself under the virtual limelight, calumniating a less intelligent individual, mocking him for an advertent or an inadvertent mistake, or taking part in ceaseless discussions that never reach a saturation point. Under this wintry firmament I felt all the stress of expectation, the fear of denunciation, the need to prove my might fade into annihilation. A sense of peace overcame me richer than all the riches of the world combined, truer than even the force of true ambition. In a moment everything worldly seemed so futile; the need to present myself under narcissistic limelight, to constantly provoke arguments by words or actions, all seemed fruitless. The thought made me happy instantly; my limited resources seemed sufficient, my own imperfect, blemished face seemed beautiful to the greatest degree. Yes, in the presence of imperfection, under the hood of chill and rain, I felt beautiful and happy and found myself reciting, once again, those oft quoted lines from Wordsworth's, I wandered lonely as a cloud:

"For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils."

This morning I welcomed my philosophical didactic self to play on its pedantic music and allowed it to compose a verse that has no purpose but to please myself. And pleased I was, to the fullest, to the degree humanly possible. Today I was happy to feel that in my life I am done pleasing others, done forgetting myself in the virtual deluge of opinions and constant meaningless exchanges with strangers. Today I felt complete and happy for what I am and not what I shall be.

The Presence of Faith

2011-02-04T13:44:00.000-08:00

I had originally planned to give you a hypotyposis of my journey to the New York City in this heart-melting winter and my experience at watching the taping of The Daily Show on February 2^nd, 2011 in the form of an epical travelogue, yet here I begin with a subject that has little or nothing to do with my actual Big Apple tour. I cannot fancy my reason behind composing this philosophical account, but starting from the time I disembarked at the Nashville airport my mind has been caught up in an eagre of faith related queries. A moment of epiphany illuminated me yesterday leading to the poor, agnostic self finding its answers in a way it had least anticipated. And I wished to write to write about it.

Hovering over the snow-layered landscape underneath my feet, I was at one point mulling over human omnipresence priding myself at the idea that the world cannot hide its secrets from me anymore and the other feeling vulnerable and insecure at the thought that judging from the ground level this Wright-marvel is just a speck of blue and red, when the flight hit an air-pocket and started to shake. From where I sat I had a good view of the large right-wing, and seeing it shiver as if stricken by some demonic fear, I was a bit scared. I turned my face away and began confabulating with my spouse. A second later the seatbelt sign was on and we were instructed by the pilot to buckle up and grab our seats as we would hit some more air-pocket areas. No sooner had he issued the ominous warnings than we hit another jerky spot, the whole flight shook like a plaything in the hands of a child; I closed my eyes. A terrible weight followed by a sudden emptiness hit my heart as the flight shook and free-fell a bit and then regained balance only to lose it a trice later. I grabbed my husband's hand and waited for the worst. The flight became steady and stopped oscillating; I disentangled myself and brushed my off my fears. A moment later the fluctuations began once again, and this time the back of the flight where we were sitting shook real hard; a child began crying, and I caught sight of a middle-aged woman on the left side of the aisle wearing bright red polished nails sitting with clasped hands placed upon her lap looking out the window. Somehow her posture made me think she was praying. As I appraised her, it struck me that I had not once thought of praying in this scary moment. The flight continued to shake and each jerk made me think of terrible things: a flight accident, death, a fire, a heap of rubble, news headlines, and then, amnesia. I wondered how it would feel to die in a man made aerodynamic zeppelin, a brightly painted metal box with wings! Will it hurt, the burning? Will I feel the pain? I saw my husband laugh at my fear-stricken face and that made me even sadder. "It's nothing," he said adding that he had experienced more jerky air travels in his life and that I was lucky not to be been caught up in an air-pocket situation before. But at this point even his words could not alleviate my fears; some time back I had been to Disney World, Florida, and, against my better judgment, rode the The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror thrill ride. The bumpy airplane brought back brutal memories of that awful thrill ride, and I grew even paler. Having no option at hand to calm myself I began to pray. I couldn’t tell you if everything turned out miraculously for the better or not, but I did buck up eventually. I started feeling warm, my cold, sweaty palms normalized, and before I knew it the bouncy drive gave way to a smooth landing at the Baltimore airport. The relief on disembarking the flight was stupendous. I called my mother in

India

and told her how much I had missed her; she was pretty startled and I was a bit embarrassed, still I did it. I wanted to call my sister-- my best friend with whom I have no physical resemblance, yet who is closer to me than a Siamese twin--but it being very late I decided to chuck it.

All the way home yesterday I thought about faith and the overwhelming presence of it in human lives. I have been a newly-formed agnostic who has very recently started to doubt the presence of God and the importance of religion in human lives. With Scientific theories presenting explanations for natural and unnatural phenomena, pointing out the attendance of the known unknowns more deftly, and getting ready to study the unknown unknowns, the future of solemn faith in divinity has began to look bleak and uncreative. A commonplace atheism has forked the once religious or agnostic minds of the people of our generation. The left liberal principle silently entails devotion to Darwin and the Goddess of knowledge and undermines, inaudibly, a loyalty to a divine spirit. A.N. Wilson in his God's Funeral says, "The closing decades of the nineteenth century were the true ere of the 'death of God.'" And I cannot agree with him more. The rise of Science and Technology has undermined the rise of Christianity in the Anglo-Saxon era. The barbarians of the past are dead; future is glittering in the glassy-palms of Science--the new God with explanations and answers brimming inside its cranium.

Logically speaking, faith has suffered terrible setbacks over the past couple of decades and with the virtual world usurping its altar; it has now been reduced to a trite impulse. The bloody wars and terror attacks have presented to us the dark side of faith and pointed to devotion as the reason propelling unhealthy causes and has further alienated Homo sapiens from the pulpit-world. Belief in afterlife and Judgment Day though still linger in the minds of the quadragenarians, but we duogenarians seldom give the tip of the hat to God. Even people with deep religious backgrounds have rebelled against the presence of an invisible God calling him listless, uncaring and tyrannical. The crumbling images of mythology could no longer bolster its tenement; religion is similar to a dying gadget like cassette players of tape recorders. A sociologist called Mark Chaves in a 1999 study pointed out that only a mere twenty-eight percent of Roman Catholics attend Mass on a given weekend. People prefer to be pontificated over the television and the internet. And whatever religion prevails, at least in the

USA

, it is a friendlier, less dignified service. My life in the buckle of the Bible belt, however, has proved otherwise. I see groups of deeply religious folks attending services every Sunday. These groups upholstered in dainty Sunday clothing will reinstate in your mind the presence of faith, but after a while you cannot help testifying to the fact that modern religion is highly democratic; we are free to belief and free to relinquish faith.

I have been born in a conservative Hindu family and in our plethora of deities have tried to find out a unifying force. My mother, a devoutly religious person, instructed me the ways of a religious life very early in my life. And every time I had found myself in the yellow walled prayer room in our Kolkata house with pictures of deities pegged to the walls, I have assented to the old Hindu mythological tales of gods and goddesses with four arms and three-eyes without the slightest sense of doubt. I have found belief in religion psychologically fitting and had not the wish to ever discard it. But reading scientific texts and taking part in discussions that point out the fallacies in a given religion, the invisibility of God, His or Her indifference to the fast-moving stream of pain we find ourselves drowning in, had sowed doubts in my mind.

But if religion has taught us anything is that it is more a quantum state than anything solidly made. It tends to become invisible when examined; it is our biggest known unknown. In my case my faith has suffered big set back in my immature past when I had falsely questioned the divine spirit to provide me answers as to why my in-laws always considered me a tchotchke; an unimportant part of their family life, unfit, unsuitable in many ways to their vainglorious lifestyle? Why after terrible efforts and an admission in a prestigious educational institution, my academic dreams were thwarted because of a dependent visa and lack of student assistantships in the English department? I questioned my faith during those bleak hours and ended up turning away from it only to turn back when prospects seemed brighter, and new avenues made their presence known. I have tried to make amends for the past follies by following my mother's example and setting up a prayer room in my Nashville apartment and forcing myself to bow to the ancient Hindu religious practices ratified by academic and philosophical luminaries of the past.

Yesterday when I was caught up in the aeronautical adventure, I had turned to faith. Even though my husband pointed out all the scientific explanations to the oscillations that scared me stiff, he couldn’t reassure me. I had ultimately turned to the warm embracement of faith and found relief. I couldn’t locate a miracle in my disembarking safely at the airport; yet I found a miraculous silver lining in the idea that despite a fair chance of mishap threatening our lives everyday in so many ways, I am still alive and breathing. You could attribute it to Omega Point, but I decided to thank God for it all. In a moment of mild despair, I was happy to locate faith in me, and now I intend to stay on track and present myself as a moderately religious, left liberal.

Reference: The Future of Faith, Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism, By John Updike