L'esprit d'escalier

The Age of Innocence

2011-12-31T02:23:00.009+05:30

Ten years ago when I was roughly thirteen years of age, the object of my affection was, supposedly, a white panche-clad balding seventy year old man from the neighborhood. In those days, everybody carefully cultivated their own running jokes. This was mine. He was a short, wiry man who unsmilingly considered the world that passed outside the walls of his large compound with a cool and easy countenance. He would silently observe the goings on and occasionally summon one of us to deliver dreaded sermons of scrambled wisdom from over the years.

He was that species of old men which anybody with the baroque childhood that being young in Jayanagar in the late '90s entailed, will easily identify. Ostensibly retired from a job in the government, fairly well travelled, well read and speaking crisp, perfect English. My first encounter with him was when he called to me, as he did with a wave of his hand to show me his vast collection of postage stamps a few days after he had moved in to two houses away from mine. I was suitably awe-struck.

Perhaps what made him so adorable in such a curiously quirky manner was his taste in tobacciana. This erudite, impressive gentleman had a special preference for beedis. In the middle-class, reasonably conservative social and cultural background that all of us shared, beedis were glorious non-sequiturs. I can't possibly know what his own family made of it but to the rest of us, devoted teenaged observers of the neighborhood, it was hilarious. Not only was it shocking that anybody on 10th Main should smoke in public, that an otherwise respectable old man should resort to the delights of street urchins was a scream. I never found out what he was called. To us, he was and will be beedi thaatha: The first man I ever loved (some might say he is also the last).

In one of the recent noisy Twitter shenanigans(you will agree there are many) that I partook in, I declared after an exhausting session of competing with several boys at posting pictures of strikingly beautiful women, that it was impossible to mark, enjoy or appreciate men in the same way. Sometimes, to evaluate a woman by the colour of her eyes, the joy in her lips, the gentleness of her curves may simply be enough. These things are so easy and apparent. Men are different animals. How do you explain to everybody the allure of solemnity, of a nervous reticence, of the way a certain man holds a cigarette (or a beedi for that matter) and the silent intensity that the best of men exude? Do you really fully understand the pleasures of pages dedicated to photos of men reading, or the meme-fication of brooding, thinking lookers and laconic t.v serial killers or of the eternal attractiveness of the Darcys and the De-Winters?

In a way, the only things that make men attractive is their ability to think and, when appropriate, shut up. And this they only acquire with age. This universe, however, is cruelly consistent in how unfair it is to us, helpless captives of the fairer sex. The reminders of countless unsubtle aunts notwithstanding, where the clock ticks, there's a bomb waiting to go off. I remember the day I turned eighteen. I had broken down and cried. For what irrepressible joy, I fail to remember. Perhaps it was like I was crossing some important milestone but had missed the point entirely. Or I was worried about stepping into official adult-dom (dum dum da dum) and felt horribly unprepared. I didn't know back then, of course, that nobody is an adult until s/he has to undergo the bathos of staying up on cold nights and mulling serial cold-blooded murders of people with management degrees.

What was your favorite year? Mine was age sixteen. It was the year of living. It was hard to believe that anything was impossible. Quite another thing that life afterwards has with great kindness worked overtime to prove me wrong.

In the last few years, all my heroes have fallen or bid farewell or simply disappeared. When you are a child, you think that everything will remain just as it is. Growing up is standing around and watching as those eternal presences fade away. They will shove you out of your house, raze it to the ground, build a glossy electronics store on the very earth you called home. They will will you to stop them. You will stand there and think only about your tax returns.

I've been thinking about this for nearly a week now and what I feel about it wasn't clear until I went back to the neighborhood I grew up in. I dragged a patient friend to the leafy, beautiful lanes of my childhood a few hours ago. I showed him my school, the places we took walks in and the places we borrowed books from and the temple which Anna religiously drove past before he went anywhere else.

Don't you sometimes surprise yourself by how much you miss what the city felt like in those years? The same boring Bangalore that had limited means of entertainment and a visit to Lakeview for ice cream was the foremost indulgence?

On one side of the rain-soaked deep-blue tar road lies the house of my childhood, homes of my first friends and the house in which beedi-thaatha lived. Many houses have added a floor or two, gotten flashier facades and a few have been torn down completely. Those years evoke a sense of wideness and space. Shivering as we were on this surprisingly cold December evening, I understood what I miss most about the Bangalore of then-- the humility and simplicity that silently vanished in the roar and blinding lights of a big city; I miss how this place was witness to the romance between its people and its open spaces.

How do you have the heart to clear your vegetable garden to build a garage, or an extra room? How can you sell the walls on which are pasted your memories to the highest bidder, real estate be damned? Where there were vast front yards, now stand multiple cars and staircases and ugly appendages to once-beautiful houses; those ridiculous bright colors of paint. How could you?

As my friend and I walked in (still) beautiful, beautiful First Block and I jabbered on non-stop about how this grocery store and this chaat-gaadi were important monuments to my childhood, I realised that I was attempting to drag him by the collar through the forbidden woods of my nostalgia. I was desperately trying to recreate my times of then for somebody else's appreciation-- In the manner that numerous insufferable old people had done to me in vain. It has arrived. This is the end of the beginning.

In contrast to what were –in retrospect--exciting, eventful decades of growing up, this time of ageing and decay is undramatic. Nobody tells you of the ordinariness that clubs you in the face with clumps of identical days and of how you can never really wake up to your insignificance in the grand scheme of things. Or of the times when you stay up at night and between wholly entertaining, gleeful indications on Facebook of unlikely people getting laid (to answer the question on the back cover of that potentially life changing American Gods, No, nothing is sacred any more.) you read tiring updates of acquaintances going to university somewhere, working towards causes they (still, miraculously) believe in, travelling to new places, having ridiculous looking babies and to all of this you frustrated-ly batter the steering wheel of your motorcar-present for its stubborn refusal to, just, move.

I spent an important chunk of my birthday dinner doubled up on the floor in the booth of a fancy restaurant's restroom clutching my stomach, with only cold fear in response to strange new pains. It was a malignant mound of flesh. Certainly. What else can it be at this ripe age, after all these years, nay, months of shameless profligacy? I have since discovered that the tumor that will eventually kill me is a relatively common condition called stupidity and that I have with erring judgment befriended a consciousness of my mortality. My oldest friend A will remind me that I've always known that beast. In our countless walks around Second Block, I would worriedly list ominous symptoms I was experiencing; preludes to what I was sure were deadly diseases and A, sipping from her plastic cup of steaming filter coffee would unsympathetically tell me that there was no way I could have Alzheimer’s at age fourteen and that I really, really had to stop reading Reader’s Digest.

It is a common accompaniment to the miasma of ageing, this fear of dying. It isn’t like the grim reaper could arrive and disrupt any grand plan, for there isn’t any. But this deal isn’t the kind of dance you’d want to be whisked away from, unnoticed. I will never know if writing such things in a place like this dilutes how I feel about it but I have on more occasions than one, in the cruel December of this year marvelled at how some people can go away, never fully comprehended and their specialness so simply misunderstood. It doesn’t feel very good.

For reasons not completely known to any of the parties involved, when I was age six, I walked right into a wall. Or so the story goes. This resulted in a permanent scar (dent, most people call it; ‘lobotomy scar’ on one occasion) on my forehead. “This hospital here,” I proudly pointed to my now slightly impatient friend “is where I got my head stitched up.”

I remember how Amma would take me to the doctor every week to have the dressing replaced. We had reached a quid pro quo understanding that I would avoid bawling in exchange for a bunch of chocolates. It has occurred to me only recently that I, like the young of most species, was an obnoxious brat during my growing up years: Demanding attention all the time and fully aware of the potential of a tantrum effectively thrown. I’m slightly ashamed that after marathon introspection sessions and endless soul-searching, it took the odd instance of all the good that was done being summarily ignored and more demanded consistently, the way it is done when you’re not twenty any more, that I discovered how thankless it must be to be a parent. Let’s put it this way. Why do people have children? Why would you want to change nappies in the middle of many nights during the best years of your life, put your life on hold indefinitely, be embarrassed repeatedly at PTA meetings, make great personal sacrifices, spend your life’s savings on the brat’s education only to have him drop out of college and lay his head on the bosoms of a marching band of girlfriends and cry over the shitty childhood he had?

For various reasons, this has seemed like the first real year of being all grown-up. And as it goes with these matters, the more one knows, the less one understands.

In the course of a walk, I may have accidentally uncovered the dangerous evolutionary function of nostalgia. I think Mother Nature programmed it as a course-correction device. An instrument that will cut this overreaching species to size occasionally with dutiful sang froid. It works tirelessly to make the past seem perfect and the future, uncertain; to foolishly convince humankind that everything that has already happened actually happened for a reason. Because it is indescribably humbling to realize that all you want at the moment is to be returned to the life you never really liked much in the first place.

Perfect Balance or the lack thereof

2011-09-26T23:22:00.002+05:30

A version of this appeared in The Deccan Herald's weekend supplement - The Sunday Herald on 25th September '11. The best thing to come out of this is various sections of my family, who have surprisingly taken the jibe directed at them in their stride, calling to tell me that I could have done a better job of being angry. This must be what it feels like to have an eccentric child. Sigh.

-----

One of the clearest memories of childhood rituals I have from the ‘90s, when I was growing up , is what I now refer to as the ajji checklist: a litany of conditions one satisfied to keep a formidable line-up of grand-aunts happy. This included wearing a bright pair of bangles, earrings, and a large red dot on one’s forehead. It was of prime importance that these custodians of our way of life be reassured from time to time. Any transgression on one’s part in these matters was dismissed off as giving in to the vile winds of change that had—without warning – begun to blow from The West. Understandably, you’d not want to be accused of hastening the death of a much eulogized culture. It was quite a serious lapse. Even for a 9 year old.

The real trouble started in the later years. When alongside allaying the fears of elders and assuring them that your homegrown sensibilities were intact, was the pressure to break free and mark your own territory, discover your own cultural and political interests; and more importantly, to know all the songs that played on MTV. It was in this time that my generation began an exercise in hypocrisy that we’re now all too familiar with – Self conscious lessons in Carnatic Classical Music and earnest imitations of lingo from American t.v. shows swirled and mingled in the cool Bangalorean evenings of then. The same evenings lent an ear to lamentations about disappearing identities and the general sense of loss that a previous generation felt in its twilight.

Perhaps more than any other time, it became important to pay homage to your cultural heritage with every action. It was like we were walking with the burden of 5000 years of civilization and doing a shoddy job of transporting it to the waiting hands of posterity. This mixture of fear and insecurity is perhaps what gave birth to the swarms of bigoted, self-anointed protectors of all things Indian. It took terrorism from a foreign land for Americans to wake up to their identities. For us, it was the pleasanter affront that commerce brought with it in the new millennium.

This rabid fear of losing cultural heritage isn’t really confounding. Every society in every age has felt anxiety at losing its identity in a shrinking world. But the premise itself is quite dubious. Here is a citizenry that wordlessly accepted the political leftovers of damaging imperialism, prides itself in the mastery of modern technology, and happily embraced capital from the prosperous West, but fumes and wails at the suggestion of cultural exchange.

Even in this we exhibit delightful double standards. A friend recently pointed at a widely watched YouTube video of students at an American university sitting cross legged on stage at an arts convention, singing the compositions of Thyagaraja –none of them Indian. This found mass approval. Never mind the fact that the performance was wholly mediocre and would have been panned for its lack of quality had it been rendered by Indian artistes. There is something deviously pleasing in knowing that men and women from the immoral West would want access to our arts. This kind of pleasure is a one-way street. For the same people who delighted in firangs singing Carnatic ragas would not have approved of an Indian band covering Def Leppard. However well.

The only legal thing to do with our arts and history seems to be to preserve it. As if culture could be pickled and carried around in glass jars. Then again, we’ve all found our own middle grounds. Sometimes comical – a friend who works for a European corporation is equal in his love for Irish pubs and the compositions of Purandara Dasa. Sometimes ugly – your writer was unwilling witness to a particularly scarring Bharatnatyam piece choreographed to the music of a Colombian pop singer. Two separate art forms desecrated by one horrendous idea.

This ambiguous middle ground is heartening as it is terrifying. To have access to one’s cultural roots and to also be allowed to experience the ideas and arts from other corners of the world is empowering. What have our traditions lost by the presence of foreign cinema, music or language?

It is only a natural response to want to preserve that which is beautiful. Cultural Protectionism, with its illiterate goon armies and nationalist cause is hilarious not least because of its wrong estimations of predatorial cultures but because they naively believe that they can enforce their mores on a country so as to ‘preserve’ the animal.

The genius in all of this lies in how something as vague and diffuse as Culture has been nailed to the sturdy axis of Morality. To wrong culture, is to betray your moral values. This is clear in depictions of Good and Bad in Indian cinema of a few years ago. Much in the spirit of Orwell’s ‘Four legs good. Two legs bad’ all Heroism was Indian – Evil however came dressed in a three piece suit.

In all this, I’ve learned that Guilt is a handy instrument with which to deal with future generations. I have felt its force while revelling in the music of another land while barely comprehending the arts of my own. As if I was wrong to want to write in a foreign language; easily forgetting all the while that the good news is the opportunity to experience the outside world – a privilege that didn’t come easily to people before. In my grandmother’s time, crossing oceans stripped one of religious privileges.

Future generations will nevertheless be pushed into leading double lives without agreeing that Culture really is the collective result of many personal choices. Renaissance is a noble cause only when it isn’t stepping on the toes of personal liberty. Change has always been a bitter-sweet story. With the worrying news of disappearing languages and art forms is the happy curiosity in new ones. Civilization will continue to discard and create as she pleases.

Exhaustion

2011-09-23T02:05:00.002+05:30

There are these evenings when you are sitting with an assortment of people-- friends, strangers, foes, in-betweeners who, while they're talking and sharing stories, are fading into and out of focus. It's like those popular cinematic shots where you see everything around you but comprehend nothing clearly. It is a surreal feeling. Of being there and not. The firm weight on your shoulders, the pressure on your temples, the heaviness in the air you breathe three dozen times every minute in the hours you sit there attempting to settle into the ambiguous ritual of a social exercise.

Maybe such a thing is hard to experience if you aren't sitting under a velvet cloud of sadness. Not your usual deal, mind. As a qualified expert in the subject, I can tell you that miseries you can't verbalise are the hardest. Not flimsy little pains that translate briskly into tears. These are the ones that are stomping the ground of your lungs. It's the pain in your face when you wake up every morning after nights of dreamless sleep. Then again, it isn't always solemn. It is the strange numbness you feel when all your sincere hope of being wiser at a later time gets crushed by the pathetic spectacle of seeing somebody twice your age a few drinks down and gingerly breaching the subject of someone they once loved.

Everything has been a blur these past few weeks. If there's any time for anything, it's only to stop and review the list of failures -- past and waiting to happen. At work, people religiously believe that nothing is worth doing more than twice. I'd like to apply that attitude to mistakes. Ha Ha.

Very learned people have reasoned that it is a phase. I have now gracefully accepted the fact that I will always be surrounded by people who have known me forever, know nothing about who I am, with very imaginative ideas of what I should do to be happy. Happier. It feels like I am a wrinkled, broken old hag conversing with children who haven't yet learnt that it is easier to take misery when the source of it is somebody else.

I have realistic demands. What I'd really like to do less than twice is explain myself. Actually, I don't want to do anything at all. I wish to dedicate no effort. Haven't you had mornings when you'd do anything to be left alone to fall back in bed into a deep, limitless slumber?

Like other vain people, I like mirrors. I must've been around eight when I was standing on tiptoe in the room I shared with my sister and was stuck to the mirror, examining a scar on my forehead. My sister walked in and gravely admonished me for the incongruous vanity I had at such a young age -- rattling off judgement she'd heard from some idiotic adult, needless to say. I scurried out of the room, embarrassed and all the while wondering what the word vanity meant.

I have a four foot long mirror in my room. It's where I've looked at least once everyday for the last five years. Perfunctorily before heading off to college; doubtfully when wearing something that's supposed to be pretty and more than anything else, despondently while examining the always worsening state of my hair. When you are newly young, these things are of much interest, they tell me. When I was newly young, I was never very seriously dissatisfied with what I saw in the mirror. This was until I walked in to a brightly lit room in another part of the house one day and caught an unexpected reflection. I looked nothing like me.

Nobody deserves to be disappointed more than twice. The trouble, I have concluded after much, much thought in numerous long-distance bus-rides is that this bumpy ride to adulthood was doomed from the very beginning. You go from getting attention, toys and expensive vacations in exchange for good behaviour, fantastic grades and obedience and somewhere along the way segue into attempting to please every person you shake hands with and coaxing life to take the second right at the roundabout and throwing tantrums when things don't work out. This trip is also called maturity, by the way.

I'm looking at the years it took to finally arrive at some kind of stability and comfort and easily throwing it away at the hands of people who've found themselves in shit, for a change. I can't kick myself enough. The inevitable truth is, it happened. And will happen again. Again and again and again and...yawn.

I'm looking at not looking into a mirror again. I'm looking at a million tired utterances of What's the point. I'm looking at the powerlessness of a child. I'm looking at other people's lonelinesses, fears and regrets enveloping me. And frankly, I don't want any of this shit. All I want is to go back to sleep and not wake up until they've all gone away.

Disinfectant

2011-07-10T04:03:00.007+05:30

Every day, on my way to Work and back, I walk past the side entrance of a somewhat busy hospital. An ambulance is always standing by. I walk on each morning as people with arms in slings and feet in casts make their way out of the hospital, dazed, scared, tired into waiting cars and auto rickshaws.

On some nights, ambulances are offloading frail, aged patients with mysterious illnesses. I catch glimpses of nurses wheeling their newest guests through a brightly lit corridor via the side-entrance and watch them disappear into unknown rooms.

Every day, the hospital’s fluorescent lights reassuringly look out for those of us unfortunate enough to be away from the comforts of our own beds at those hours. Once every while, thanks to the curious behaviour of lurkers on the streets or inexplicable anxieties, fear catches up with me and my heart pounds until I’m in the safe refuge of the bright, alert lights of the hospital compound. As the rest of the city sleeps, the hospital’s bleary eyed attendants wait on those who Providence chose to visit on the day.

On days(nights) when I drag my feet back home a little before midnight, ambulance drivers on night duty are welcome company where your only other options are stumbling drunkards who in between wails are emptying their stomachs onto the pavement.

I walked the stretch from the main road past the hospital again today. It was around 11 P.M and the street was quiet and cold. The ambulance was missing from its usual parking spot. Off, perhaps, to fetch some poor soul somewhere battling grim ailments; held hostage by pain and fear. The corridor leading from the entrance that opened to the road was deserted save for a couple of people who were carrying out a muffled conversation. The smell of disinfectant spilled out to the street; strong enough for the scent to dry the throats of passersby. Further ahead, a man stood by the parking lot, coughing, steadying himself by leaning on a wall and clutching a phone; making as if to throw up. It was repulsive and strangely mortifying.

I got home, craving warmth and somewhat angry at having to hear the terrifying wails of a man who had just lost someone he loved.

***

I spent the summer of 2004 studying Trigonometry in a tiny little hospital in Jayanagar. My father was to undergo a minor surgical procedure. The thoughtful presence of his old friend, Diabetes, required him to stay in bed for two weeks to recuperate. Anna was intensely depressed. He would take any number of surgeries of whatever scary consequence with typical bravado and a few witty rejoinders, if need be. But the poor thing was horrified by the demand that he stay put and rest for two weeks. Two weeks after all was the average time it took to clock about 700 kms on the automobile he had deigned to drive that season. The thought only furthered the agony of the man known to possess wheels for limbs.

But Anna being Anna put on a brave front and took on the challenge head on.

He lasted all of two days.

By day three, he was up, pacing the room and restless. He pretended to humor my regular commands to go back to sleep the first couple of days. Later, he’d growl and show me who was boss. I retaliated by complaining to the on-duty nurses about my father’s careless ways and hinted to them that they should ask him to act his age. What an exercise in futility that was. Anna had effortlessly charmed every one of the eight or so attendants at the hospital and had all of them eating out of his hands. I would meaningfully point at his prancing around the hospital ward and how it was completely unnatural for a patient to be doing so only for the junior doctors and nurses to smile indulgingly and walk off.

This was a tiny little place in the very beautiful and somewhat high-end locality of fifth block Jayanagar opposite the beautiful parks on 4^th Main road . A small, private 'nursing home' where people came for uncomplicated procedures and vaccinations, and was owned by a bald sixty-something plastic surgeon, Dr.M.

Dr. M was a smooth talking, always smiling grandfather figure. A textbook old-school type who walked in on time for his rounds, always impeccably dressed. The hospital was a longitudinal building with rooms on either side of a long corridor and a tiny, functional Operation Theater at the end of it. Dr. M’s consulting room was at the beginning of the corridor, just past a small waiting area. Certificates of the various degrees he completed in England lined the walls of Dr. M’s officious room.

I stayed with Anna those days and kept him company with one large Math textbook while he grudgingly slept. I would take fifteen minute walks along the ghost town of Jayanagar fifth block only a few yards away from where Anna had taught at least a dozen people to drive their first cars. It was a locality of considerable privilege; filled with the beautiful inherited homes of long-term NRIs. All the houses faced a narrow park along the length of the road that was inhabited by canoodling couples and passed out drunkards in equal strength.

One afternoon that week, I finished my walk and returned to Anna’s ward only to find that he had assembled a couple of friends and brothers and the grey haired congregation was engrossed in a hotly contested series of card games.

I blew my fuse.

In spite of my protests, threats and pleas, Anna continued this rogue practice of carrying out card games in a solemn hospital ward. He played an angelic, enduring sick child while the doctors were on rounds and later began his sly games of Rummy or whatever else with whoever was around. I would peer from the top of my Readers Digests from time to time and look at my father laughing and chatting away and felt a little irrelevant. The man refused to accept care and attention even when it was prescribed on paper with an Rx on top. I would later learn that this was a chronic problem.

But how long would it go on? (He may not have known it, but Anna was living proof that fortune doesn’t favor the brave). Anna was toying with his fancy box of plastic cards one evening(He’s the only person I know who played Solitaire with real cards. He was overjoyed when he finally learned to use a computer and found that his favorite game was a permanent fixture on Windows.) when Dr. M brightly barged into his room and saw the offending pack of cards in Anna’s hands.

I grinned victoriously and prepared for sweet vindication.

Dr. M simply shrugged and asked Anna how he got hold of that brand of cards and asked he if he could please pick up a deck for him the next time and walked out, humming a tune. Leaving me defeated and with the only record of an instance in which fortune had indeed chosen to favor Anna.

***

It’s been five years and I don’t remember her name. She was from a security agency that deployed personnel to stores, offices and hospitals. She worked a day shift outside the Intensive Care Unit of a Cardiac care hospital on RV Road. Her job was to ensure the ICUs were accessed only by the doctors, nurses and authorised supporting attendants. She was plump, dark0skinned, and wore spectacles. Her hair was oiled and braided and she had an unrelenting frown on her face. The ICU had a small waiting room with sofas that was, by strict orders, to seat only one anguished relative for every patient the ICU housed. The first evening, all of us had crowded in the ICU waiting area anxiously. Little did we know we had broken Her rules. The next day, we ran into the towering, screaming virago who put in all us pesky, waiting relatives the fear of God.

“Why are you crowding here? Are you doctors? Will you treat these people?” she would ask in her raw Kannada not expecting an answer. She sat on a tiny low chair and terrorized any group of people who dared crowd the ICU and directed all non-entities to the larger waiting area downstairs. We all eventually learned to accept that the fates of those past the insulated, frosted glass doors of the ICU would change little with our proximate presence.

On Tuesday, she softened a little and asked us who we were there to see. We told her. She grimaced and got back to work, frown firmly in place. We were by then regulars and took turns to stay by the ICU to deliver food and medicines. We became familiar with the other people who like us sat all day near the ICU waiting area and chased down duty doctors in the hope of favorable updates. On Wednesday, She was in a cheerful mood. That girl whose mother was in there was smiling too. The Mother was recovering.

She lowered her guard and chatted us up. “Ayyo, aa nurse galige yenu ansode illa” she said, resting the palm of her hand on her temple. Those nurses don’t feel a thing. They can coolly sit down and complete a

meal even if a corpse was lying beside them, she said with shock in her eyes, sounding like a little child.

Thursday was terrible. Two people in the ICU had passed on. Everybody was grim. The girl we saw the other day was weeping. Her mother’s condition had worsened and she had finally succumbed. I had gone in to the ICU the first time that week for a quick visit only to see him throwing up violently into a bag a stone-faced nurse was holding. People all around were on giant beds with beeping monitors surrounding them. Plastic tubes were insensitively stuck into nostrils and half open mouths. Some people made loud noises, their breathing was labored. I’d stumbled back out of that chamber of horrors and walked all around the hospital crying for an hour.

She looked at us sympathetically and said she regretted having to shout at people who were so obviously worried for loved ones. What to do. This was her job. She was going to tell her supervisors at the Security firm. She can’t do this anymore. How can anybody take it?

I sat with her all day, sleepily looking at all the duty doctors who walked through the glass doors. One particularly good looking, smart young female doctor had me totally awed. I wondered if they’d let me switch from Electronics to Biology after having completed my first year. Never after sixth grade had I wanted to be a doctor so badly until that day.

We left later that week hoping and praying fervently that we’d never have to return. She too wanted to leave and never go back.

She got her wish.

Digging up Pasts

2011-06-23T12:01:00.004+05:30

Posting here the piece I'd done for Citizen Matters a few weeks ago. What was supposed to be a report on a treasure hunt ended up being a lot more personal than I intended. An edited report appeared here.

(God, I love italics)
*******

There's something about living in this city for a considerable amount of time that makes it impossible to not be -to a reasonable extent-a loud and brash bigot. There is a wordless demand that you don't simply love this city but be a little proud, a little overbearing, and become an insufferable little mobile advertisement for your part of town.

It is with prompt from the same sentiment that we took part in Hunt For The Past-- INTACH's Heritage Hunt held in the Basavangudi area last week. The event was a sms-powered treasure hunt that took one to different parts of the old South Bangalore area, looking for clues. I was tagging along with Supreeth, another proud South Bangalore child - a Basavangudi huduga who happily waited at the Gavipuram starting point at 8 a.m on a Saturday morning like it does not require superhuman effort; as if he did it all the time. I contributed in my own small way: ambling in to 'Ashrama at around 9 am, having given up on the ancient, sacred privilege Bangalorean techies were granted by traveling gypsies - weekend sleep. Anything for South Bangalore.

A treasure hunt may seem to you like a fun thing to do; a happy walk across the breadth of Basavangudi. But for us, not winning meant ignominy, grumpy silences from our families, possibly no-dinner for a few week, and worst of all, no more license to launch internet forum wars on residents of other localities. The pressure, you will agree, was enormous. And so, we began our sms powered Pilgrim's Progress. We walked all over Basavangudi, looking for clues, quotes, name boards and on occasion gaped at the towering Vivekananda statue opposite Ramakrishna Ashram.

It took only asking an arbitrary (but friendly, mind) passerby where Masti (Venkatesh Iyengar, Jnanpeetha award winning Kannada literary giant)'s house was to find it--proof that Basavangudi will remain old-worldly and charming; in spite of the best efforts of multiple international fast-food chains.

The sms clues, which had by now taken on a surreal, secret scroll like air to them nudged us to walk all the way near Krishna Rao Park to the Basavangudi Boys School. We sat down in silence for a few minutes, mulling and mourning the atrocity that is the Tagore Circle Underpass. We exchanged a few theories on how Bangalore's urban planning initiatives of the last five years seemed like their only motivation was to find and mutilate the most beautiful areas of Bangalore. No really, take a map and trace the Metro route if you don't believe me. There is a conspiracy of pulp-y paperback thriller proportions waiting to be written there. It can be called The BBMP Code.

Basavangudi was home to some of Karnataka's greatest poets, thinkers and intellectuals. And this little park opposite the Basavangudi High School, Supreeth informs me, was where stalwarts like TP Kailasam, DV Gundappa met to discuss their revolutionary ideas with contemporaries and exchange banter. These places, ladies and gentlemen, were in fact witnesses to literary history.

Tagore Circle was in many ways the heart of this part of the city. The Taxi Stand Bus stop was the hot transit stop for people returning from schools and workplaces. The police station with its Infosys- aided makeover looked the equivalent of a 'foreign-returned' young man who had traded desi clothes for swanky designer threads; the overall effect was that of a man wearing Gucci to a 7.00 am laughter club. And BP Wadia Road. Ah, BP Wadia Road! The libraries, the tree canopy, the muffled buzz in contrast to the crazy, random chaos of its cousin, the Gandhi Bazaar main road.

Now all there is to it, is a wide gaping hole where there was a road, making me resent that heart-of-the-area metaphor a little bit; dust and an assortment of cranes, bulldozers and cement mixers all of who have about as much clue to their purpose as the confused looking BBMP engineers on the site.

The sms clues in the meanwhile were not in a very ruminative mood.They sent us off running towards Bugle Rock where the stone busts of the aforementioned literary giants looked at us with kind eyes. Resisting the lure of Vidyarthi Bhavan dosas, we trudged nobly towards the Basavangudi Co-operative complex for our last clue at the foot of what was supposedly "The only Gandhi statue in Gandhi Bazaar". From there we hurried back to the starting point to be told, to our feigned surprise, that we had won.

Ah the sweet taste of victory.

Naresh Bharadwaj, one of the people behind the startup Meeva Technologies which designed the treasure hunt is a long time Basavangudi resident himself. We marveled at how walking around these roads on a sunny Saturday morning can be a serendipitous re-introduction to places we've already known. Naresh and Srilatha of Meeva are looking to implement the same model to tourist sites, museums and palaces. Their service lets users design and implement their own sms based activities.

Reassuring as it is to know that Basavangudi continues to be home as we know it, Hunt For The Past seemed to be a slightly ominous name for a treasure hunt here. For running around these roads as we did will tell you (BBMP's machinations aside) the places remain the same. Its people, however, do little to resist change.

Keep The Change by Nirupama Subramanian. Some fawning and an Interview

2011-04-18T11:09:00.006+05:30

I keep lamenting to anybody who bothers to listen that Indian chicklit is murdered at the hands of hollow-headed twenty-somethings who seem to have absolutely no understanding of the genre, let alone sensibilities that could translate well into a work of literature. It was a pleasant surprise then to find Keep The Change by Nirupama Subramanian-- a light, funny, incredibly well-written book about the life of Damayanti B, who lives in 32 Amman Kovil Street, Chennai, enduring the aggressive attempts of her parents to get her married off. A few pages in, Damayanti finds herself in 124 Pine Crest ('...there is no sign of any pine or any crest in the neighborhood') in Mumbai after landing a cushy job at a bank where she battles the conundrum that is having a career and finding true love while heeding her amma's advice of 'not doing anything silly.'

I'd seen Keep The Change at bookstores dozens of times and never really picked it up. A note to jacket designers here, please do your authors a favor and make covers that won't make people run away to the outstretched arms of the Literary Fiction section without even reading blurbs. Don't go all Don't judge a book by its cover on me. I will have to point you to Pradeep Sebastian's The Groaning Shelf-- an anthology that validates everybody's secret urge to perceive books as objects of physical beauty meant to be caressed and coveted, to defend myself. Also, if the good people at Harper Collins are listening, WHAT IS IT WITH YOUR HARPER PERENNIAL LINE? Ahmed bhai on the Fourth Block pavement seems to be selling better quality paperbacks. <Splutter. Fume>

It was one of those evenings when Puja and I were sitting in office and berating the likes of Advaita Kala (Puja says she's pretentious), Ira Trivedi (The lady I am running a hate campaign against, ever since she had that grand book launch with Junot Diaz) and Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan(who, for someone who seems to have some sense of literature wrote a disappointingly sad book) when Puja said that Keep The Change was a pleasant vacation from the absolute trash being churned out in the Indian chicklit market.

The plot is fairly straight forward. The humor is simply fabulous. Written entirely as a series of letters to a girlfriend, Keep The Change features, also, a Little Voice in Damayanti's head offering silent rejoinders and caustic rebuttals. The cast of characters includes a social butterfly Sonya Sood ("Madras minimalism has given way to Punjabi baroque"), colleague and warm friend Jimmy, the gorgeous Rahul and an intimidating CG, besides Amma and Appa and the handful of eligible suitors.

The boy was a specimen who deserved to spend the rest of his life in a jar of formaldehyde on a laboratory shelf. They were really scraping the bottom of the barrel since this one was only a lowly finance manager at a Coimbatore company called Gajalakshmi Spinning Mills.

He looked like a fat beetle, ogling my chest from under thick, black glasses. He quickly shifted his eyes when I stared back at him. He was almost two inches shorter than me and had slicked down his hair with perfumed coconut oil. Yuck! He had a little pink plastic comb in the back pocket of his blue polyester trousers. Double yuck! In this unfair world, a boy looking like a constipated blob of ectoplasm can aspire to get a fair, beautiful, well-educated girl who can do the Bharatnatyam while singing Meera bhajans and make ten kinds of rasam, but if a girl, however accomplished or intelligent, has even a tinge of brown in her complexion or slightly crooked teeth, she is immediately rejected. I hated the way he appraised me quickly while pretending to stare at the calendar on the wall behind me.

'I want my wife to be adjusting well with my parents,' the boy declared when we were sent to a corner 'to get to know each other'. He had this irritating habit of popping out his tongue and licking his lips after every sentence.

Little Voice: 'Adjust? Like I adjust my sari pleats with three sharp safety pins?'
'Oh! I said, a sort of questioning, sarcastic 'oh' which he seemed to take as assent to his statement.
'I hope you are not planning to be employed after marriage?' he continued.
LV:'If I do give up my dead-end boring job, it is not going to be for another dead-end boring job as your chief housekeeper.'
I said, 'Yes. I am.'
'Then how will you manage the children?'
LV:'Duh!'
'What children?' I asked. Was I going to become stepmother to his illegitimate brats?
'Oh, we must have one child within a year of marriage.' His tongue flickered out for a second like that of a lecherous toad about to gobble up a fly.
'At least, two totally. My amma says we should not be putting off for too long. Amma says that she would like one boy and one girl. We must start trying right away, no planning. She is really waiting for grandchildren.'
LV:'And you are really waiting for unlimited free sex.'
Me: 'Ah-ha?'
'So I think, with two children, my parents and the house to look after, you will be quite busy at home itself,' he continued, blithely ignoring by disgusted expression.
LV:'I would rather be kissed by a Dementor that come within a mile of your body!'
'My horoscope is not very positive about children, so I don't think there is any use even trying,' I said to him feigning an air of deep despondence.
Boy returns to bosom of his dear amma. Girl sulks in corner.

As is evident, Nirupama Subramanian, unlike the aforementioned writers of books on young, single, Indian women knows full well that one of the central ingredients to a good piece of chicklit is wit and humor. Puja can't get over the insult 'You Idly face' (we plan to use it very strategically in office some day) and I have large amounts of admiration for someone who can manage to slip in Milan Kundera quotes between hilarious narrations of office goof-ups.

Nirupama Subramanian is a graduate of XLRI and works as a corporate trainer. She lives in Gurgaon with her husband and daughter. I went ahead and mailed Nirupama and pestered her to answer some questions which she so graciously did:

How long have you been writing? When did you start writing Keep The Change?

I have been writing articles,poems and short stories for a long time.I used to publish sporadically in newspapers and magazines. I started writing Keep The Change in July 2008 and finished the first draft by November 2008.

How did you make the transition from writing short pieces of fiction to a full fledged novel?

I think I always wanted to write a novel and had some idea of the subject. A novel requires more discipline and dedication. But it wasn't very difficult to transition since I knew what I wanted to write. It just takes an idea and the will to commit time to it.

What was the process of writing Keep The Change like?

Writing Keep The Change was enjoyable. For me, it is important to have fun while doing what I do. Keep The Change flowed quite easily. I loved doing the Little Voice pieces and even laughed while I read my own stuff. I wrote the first 12 chapters at a stretch and then had a bit of a break while I wondered if it was any good. I didn't show it to anyone till then. Then I structured the story, wrote chapter outlines and completed it. I write whenever I get time. During the days I am not at work ,after my daughter goes to school, sometimes at night when I manage to stay awake. I also work as a freelance consultant- that is my day job so on some days there is no time to write.

There wasn't too much editing work . My editors gave some useful suggestions that I incorporated but the story line was pretty much the same.I did very little rewrite work and most of my first draft has been retained in the book.

How difficult was it to get your first book published?

I was quite lucky. I had the right kind of book at the right time. I had offers from Penguin and Harper Collins, the only publishers I approached. They both reverted pretty quickly, within two months, I think and were interested in the book. So it wasn't too difficult. I think publishers are quite open to all kinds of books these days.

What do you think of similar writers in the genre in India? Have there been books you really liked? Even better, books you didn't like?

There is a lot of interesting new writing in India across genres. I enjoyed Swati Kaushal's 'Piece of cake' and Anuja Chauhan's use of contemporary Indian life and mores in The Zoya Factor and Battle for Bittora. I do read Indian fiction, Literary and other categories. I liked Serious Men and Saraswati Park. Now that I am a writer, I am more sympathetic to the efforts of other writers. Yes, there are probably some books that shouldn't be out there but haven't read anything terrible of late.

Do you feel that Chicklit is sometimes dismissed as 'light reading' when in fact good writing is essential for great chicklit

I think Chicklit is light reading in the sense that you don't have to strain to enjoy the book or understand it I don't like the term too much, especially the chick part but that is the label that seems to apply to this genre. I think any book,despite the genre should be well written. A good story, well told makes for good reading. You can't compare Chicklit, though with angst ridden feminist literature though both might talk about women in search of their own identities. The style and treatment are different and both can be effective. I personally don't look down on any genre except ' badly written pretentious books' which should have been mercy killed by the publishers before letting them out to the world.

Was there a bit of you in Damayanti? What were the inspirations behind the character?

I think there is a bit of Damayanti in me and every other girl. I wanted my character to be more like the girls I see around me, not a party hopping page 3 type who could be in any part of the world. I see the struggle between the being 'traditional' and 'modern' that many girls go through and many have come to an arrangement that blends both in a way that makes sense for them.

Really! What does CG stand for?

No idea! Didn't think of a full name. I thought he could be a little mysterious.

What feedback have you gotten from your readers/critics?

Mostly very good feedback. Some critics did feel that the story was fairly usual, similar to a typical coming of age novel and nothing very novel about it. I believe that one of the merits of the story is that most people can resonate with it. I value the feedback from many readers who said they could really relate to the story of Damayanti and have found themselves in similar situations. The readers are not just young girls, but older men and women as well. The book has done really well and has stayed on the best seller list for a year. So I am very pleased with the way it has shaped up.

What are you working on now?

My next book. Not a chicklit novel but a contemporary urban story set in Gurgaon where I live now.

Have you at any point felt that you had to work on your writing? What did you do then? Have you ever experienced such a thing as writer's block? How did you deal with it?

I do want to write more, write better. Sometimes, especially with what I am writing now, I do feel the need to stop and recalibrate. I give it a rest for a while until a new compelling idea comes to me about how to move the story forward. I keep reading other books. My inspiration is what I see around me, life as it unfolds. Usually something comes along which helps me overcome the blocks.

Who are your favorite writers? What books did you read, growing up?What are you reading right now?

I followed the typical reading trajectory of anyone growing up in the 70s and 80's. Enid Blytons , Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, P.G Wodehouse,Agatha Christie, then moving on to the Ludlums, Irving Wallace and Arthur Haileys. Later, it was mostly classical fiction- Hemingway, Maugham,Graham Greene and then Rushdie,Vikram Seth et al. I enjoy the writing of Marquez, John Updike, Alice Munro,Ian McEwan. Though I mostly read fiction, my latest read is a non fiction one called ' The Difficulty of Being Good' by Gurcharan Das, based on the Mahabharata, which I found very interesting. I also finished Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence before that.

Keep The Change is published by Harper Collins in India.

You Shouldn't Have Left Me

2011-03-29T01:23:00.005+05:30

Try. On a day like this to escape the feeling. The thought that your life's eventualities are the careless manoeuvres of a hand that holds its strings. Why, you've tried every day for the last five years. How far have you gotten? Only as far as Anger. So sexy. You got angry sometimes just to feel sexy. You waited for anger's palm to run down your face. The delicate, cruel pressure of it's fingertips. On your eyebrows. On your lips.

Hello, Your Surprise, meet my Bitter Laugh. You think I don't know? The way you threw things hard enough to make a point, never hard enough to shatter?

You shouldn't have left me.

I stand up, roar a little and then collapse into a sorry heap. My own anger dies quick, fitful deaths. Anger, my dear, was my prerogative. Nature pumped it through my veins. Let me be the man here. The way you do when I pick up the tab.

I hear laughter. You say I'm imagining it. Those evenings. Those dingy bars. You walked away. I was left with nothing to work on. Except the laughter I heard. Ricocheting off the empty room and bouncing off my resentful face. That's all you knew how to do. Make a clown out of this man, a handful of years older than you. You walked away. Gathered the applause. Weren't you a hero? Your walk. Out of the bar. Out of the misunderstanding. Out of the argument. By bowing out, you drew first blood.

How much courage does it take to walk away? None. You didn't win. You resigned.

You shouldn't have left me.

I taught you pleasure. I taught you the exhilaration of a live voice. Did you know before how the roar of a crowd could push the air out of your chest and fill it with an ecstacy that was so strong it had to be endured?

You knew nothing before me.

You shouldn't have left me.

A little push. And you would arch and fall like a paper tower. Could you imagine crying as release? Without me? Remember what you said? Rainwater caressing your back on a summer night. That was all me. You owe me a lot more tears -- those drops of gasoline-- than you've let yourself cry.

I am man, you are woman. Who told you that tears were your privilege alone? Your eyes could have served you in other ways. Even if they were always darting about for exit routes. Tears must have served as great route-maps in our wasteland of passion.

What a coward you were. Mascara stained tears as ransom. I shake my head in disbelief. In disgust.

You shouldn't have left me.

Bitch.

Your vamp's fingernails stroked my temples. Assured. Like you knew what you were doing. Your arms wound around my tense stomach. Head buried in my arms. All along you were looking for tenderness. An Achilles heel. How foolish was I? To think that the bristles on the back of my neck were important topics to be run through in our pursuit of love. Never realising for a moment that while I ran my fingers through your hair, all I had in my hand was a horrendous cliche.

You shouldn't have.

Restraint was my duty alone. Not yours. You wrote the rules well didn't you? While I thought, all along that you were only writing down verses of your misery.

A lesser man would have taught you to count your blessings with a quick lesson in pain. It isn't anything a man, even one as ordinary as I, doesn't know. The wisdom that passes from a strong hand to under one's eye.

There is time to learn. As you will. I trust him to teach you -- my replacement. The shiny new chalice for your bright anger. For your lusty inspections of weakness. For free lessons in Euphoria. That guy. The one who is better than me.

You shouldn't have left me, my love.

I should've left you.

A Suitable Ploy

2011-03-26T22:28:00.004+05:30

There are many undue privileges our snobbish generation has and ignores. We know nothing of the tribulations generations past have endured. We appreciate too little the liberties we’ve been handed. With our exuberance and disrespectful excesses, we have all but forgotten the lives of our grandfathers. Times when the man of the house had an average of ten mouths to feed. When there were children to be clothed and sent to school. There were houses to be taken care of. Aging parents to be nursed. Daughters to be married off.

There was this trope my adorable granddad used to remind us of from an Annavru film: The septuagenarian patriarch, father of half a dozen nubile daughters, sitting on the front porch of his house and questioning the postman delivering letters of his gotra-nakshatra. The poor man was so drained of energy, having arranged for the first of his daughters, husbands and appropriate ceremonies that he attempted to quickly get his last daughter hitched to the postman(there was no Shaadi.com then).We would all laugh. Half a laugh for the tragicomic modalities having daughters entailed. The remaining guffaw was spat just because anything our remarkably funny granddad said warranted laughter. The postman of course was asked to scoot after he recited not just his nakshatra but that of his wife and little children. “What do you little ones know about our times. Of the difficulty of marrying off daughters.” He would say to us during his post-nap story sessions.

His daughter, my mother, however shares none of his good humor. Amma is stuck in a time-warp. In her head, PV Narasimha Rao(who she shares her birthday with) is still prime minister. Liberalisation is not a word. And daughters are still difficult to marry off. And so she has dived head-first into an all-cylinders campaign to marry me off to some suitable boy.

Me. Twenty mood swings a minute me. Twenty Two years old. Eats like a ruffian. Bawls like a baby. Agile as a polar bear in hibernation. Has the memory of a goldfish and social preferences matching that of Jane Goodall. Me, settled. Into domesticity. A pretty picture no?

You see, it isn’t me my mother is worried about. My impeccable record for staying out of any trouble of glamorous/amorous kinds silently vouches for me better than I can, verbally. She is worried about herself. She is constantly paging into and out of that room in her mind where anonymous judges rate her on how good a mother she is. Then again, you have to understand that my mother is a little rusty. She has fallen out of habit of being a mother. It’s been a while. It’s like she launched into a stellar parenting career with my sister with so much zeal and enthusiasm when my sister was born and did such a good job of it until she had her married off, that it was simply not interesting enough anymore with the other offspring. I won’t fault her for it. It is like Poker. You get a good hand, you go break the bank. You get a sloppy hand, you fold and do something else. In that sense, I am the equivalent of being dealt Eureka Forbes business cards in a game of high-stakes poker. That is no secret.

But then marriage is a completely different ballgame. It is like a bonus round in Mario. Like the Super Over in IPL. It demands frenzy and drama and in some cases acrobatics. How can my mother resist a piece of this? What Will They Say, besides?

My mother who until now has been like a pained babysitter, who I had to grudgingly endure and ignore when she taunted me about the state of my room is now treating me like a grown, mature adult who is to be talked to in reasonable terms/tones. She doesn’t even say anything when I stay out late. Why, she even discussed manicures the other day. Brrr.

I often quote the movie Good Advice. In which Charlie Sheen says something to the effect of ‘You are young, emotionally unavailable, beautiful (and stupid); any man will love you’ to Denise Richards. My mother is easy to love. If only it weren’t for the pesky intelligence. She has shut me up with strokes of genius I have only begun to understand. Our conversations go this way:

Amma: So Auntie/Ajji/Thaata/Next-Door-Neighbor X was telling me about this boy. Working in <NYSE listed company>.

Me: Ok, you have my approval. <Chuckle. What comic timing! Pat pat!>

Amma: <Variant of I will drive a sledgehammer through your skull>

*Hits refresh button and regains composure*

Amma: So, should we go ahead? <In her most grown up voice>

Me: Amma, I told you. No. Non. Nei. Illa.

Amma: <Switches to ‘80s Kannada Film Amma disposition> Don’t spite me. You don’t know how they(who this refers to, I will never find out) speak. You aren’t all that young you know?

Me: <unintelligible>

Amma: ok. How many years? Two?

Me: TEN

Amma: Four

Me: Six

Amma: Ok then. I won’t bother you until then.

Me: <Victory sign>

Amma: Which means you won’t find some huduga in the interim and come bounding up to me.

Me: Wait, wha?

Amma: <Is doing victory dance in the kitchen. She won’t have a Pashtun speaking son-in-law. Family honor locked up in a chastity belt.>

I underestimate my mother. How my father made space for her cunning intelligence in their long, eventful marriage, I comprehend not. I console myself, thinking it is not without reason her own father cracked jokes about daughters being difficult to marry off. I realize now he was only half joking. I have had at least three variants of that conversation in front of different audiences so far. That doesn’t mean Amma shies away from more drama.

It is genuinely difficult to come up with original reactions when your mother finds you hanging up the phone and asks you immediately how much older the person on the other end is. It is slightly creeping out when she smiles and nods satisfied when you distractedly say ‘a year’. She waits a while before she asks ‘Iyer or Iyengar?’ and I go and dunk my head in a bucket of water.

Author’s note: I did not make that shit up.

“There are only two conditions I have to the man you will choose” Amma says while I ransack my room for earplugs. “He must be at least two years older.” Repeating the family tenets for finding good husbands. Apparently women age faster. And so they must choose older husbands to keep looking like they are not Mother and offspring. Assorted aunts’ words. Not mine. Amma, speaking in the voice of all the family’s women continues: “Second, he should be an eligible bachel-“ Your writer is by now running down a flight of stairs with a solitary sock jutting from her ear.

You may accuse me of lying. You may declare that my reluctance is insincere. What is wrong with getting married? Surely you are legally eligible for the stamp of matrimony. It isn’t like there is a long line of suitors lined up outside your balcony reading out poetry to you. Oh wait, there aren’t even enough men who read to make a decent line anyway. Unless you were at Tishani Doshi’s book signing.

Yes, intelligent reader, my reluctance is wholly insincere. It isn’t like I haven’t considered the idea myself. Why not. Marriage is the one destination to which all the thought-trains my mind conducts with a ridiculously skewed sense of time.

1) 1)Complete boredom and need for some cathartic plot change in life.

2) 2)Point blank bafflement with the diktat of this century that demands that a woman spend 45 hours a week at a desk to buy the odd designer handbag, when clearly being a woman is a difficult enough job; And considering the appraising looks all of us suffer in roads men built it isn’t wrong to agree that womankind is eternally at the unpaid employ of man(Ok. Bad one. I concede).

3) 3)A career that is going absolutely nowhere.

4) 4)Bangalore traffic.

Notice how marrying a rich NRI type would solve all these troubles?

But whattodo, whattodo. Hot, eligible, single, straight, rich NRIs are hard to come by. I even approached experts to do some head-hunting. One of my great-aunts, a pro in these matters promised to “start scouting for eligible, young NRIs” with a wink. I responded with a very honest “Have fun, ajji” and a reciprocal wink.

She hasn’t spoken to me since.

Thus ended my attempts at ensnaring a pardesi. I was not to be deterred. Home-grown maal ain’t so bad you know. I once spotted a twenty something type in traditional gear, with a badass tattoo running down his arm. At a temple mind you. I gave him a triumphant smile and a discreet thumbs-up as he walked past me discussing thrash metal with his narcotics and schizophrenia-aided imaginary friend.

I have had some other assistance in these matters. Other relatives have trapped me in conversations in which they make me fill verbal questionnaires as if they could manufacture a man of my liking.

“Tell me Siri, what kind of boy, you want.” Said a retired grand-uncle who convinced me that the only way they would be rewarded with the privilege of a visit by my happily-married (see!) resident sister and husband from overseas was if I did something major. Like get engaged.

“Good looking. Rich. Sid Mallya type”

“But for that you have to be Deepika Padukone-type, no? Ho ho ho”

I know, right? Ouch.

My relatives have made a sport out of locating and stepping on raw nerves. Sigh. Right, right. I digress. At this point, if you’re still with me, you are understandably wondering how I went from hunting down eligible bachelors with sizeable bank balances to running away from any mention of the M word.

Frankly, I don’t know either. The answer lies, I am guessing, in the clinical time-capsule I spend the majority of my life in these days. In that sterile, soul-less space called The Real World in popular parlance. Where a room one takes breaks in has no windows. In their stead, there are pictures of happy people, as if they were natural substitutes. People jumping in the air, arms and legs spread out, like they were hugging the universe and shouting out their victories. It is in their extreme joy that you call their bluff. We may be young. But we know that joy has no place without its little pains. The agony of uncertainty. And the gentle mirth of secrecy. Those song-writers knew what they were talking about.

I was sipping on a glass of water at Work, staring at these images. You would think that the woman in the picture on the wall is happy, with her obviously beautiful smile and her perfect, mid-air split. Even in spite of the teeth marks someone thoughtfully left on her pants.

I have encountered a respectable number of sleazeballs. None beats a certain acquaintance, verily married and aging who eyes young females of the species he resembles with a candour you would want to award him a medal for. Then there is his wife, past her prime, having lost the plot and begging the validation she misses from known sources, with everyone she stumbles upon. And to think that you knew them when they were madly in love. Passive heartbreak of this sort is enough to prepare you to willfully buy real-estate in Cougar-Town. We like happy-endings too much to see things fall apart this way. Besides what a failure and waste of life it would be to let a measly man be the source of all your misery. At least go terrorize a country and get shot. Much more glorious, no?

Quite another matter that my mum thinks I’m fully capable of meeting such an end rather than finding a good husband. It is for this reason that she is so anxious to find me my soul mate with the help of nakshatras and family friends who know ‘good families’. It is for this reason she is pulling all stops. It is for this reason she has taken to repeating her father’s treasured postman-nakshatra-joke, a tad too seriously. It is for this reason I am glad she has learned to use e-mail.

Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew

2011-02-13T17:51:00.007+05:30

This will be in points. I don’t have the emotional stamina to write in any other way. Moreover, I am terribly lazy.

1)Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew is a book you will be told you must love. As I was. I picked it up because I had heard wonderful reviews by the handful of people who’ve read it; not discounting his publisher referring to him as –something to the effect of—her superstar this year. Choosing to invest in a 400 page hardcover about Sri Lankan Cricket seems like a good decision when you discover on the last day of the Jaipur Literature Festival that its author Shehan Karunatilaka is a refreshingly witty and insightful speaker.

2)Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew is a book you will love. Because echoes of glowing reccos don’t last until page 40; when you are left wondering Mohinder Binny is which of the two; when you can nearly smell the alcohol that aided W.G Karunasena, the eccentric, Ceylon Sportswriter of Year winning journalist narrator’s writing.

3)I know very little about the technicalities of Cricket. I have on numerous occasions confused leg-spin and off-spin bowling. I don’t know if Murali chucks(W.G says he doesn’t. I like him enough to take his word for it). Chinaman is the story of W.G Karunasena’s search for Pradeep Sivanathan Mathew, an ambidextrous spinner whose varied arsenal of deliveries includes the double-bounce ball, seen until now in slapstick ads that rode on ridiculously funny tropes that were recycled each World Cup. Pradeep Mathew whose existence few acknowledge and fewer still have anything good to say about is the enduring mystery of this epic novel. Surrounding Wije/Gamini/Karunasena are best friend Ari Byrd(a Bogart impersonating, bumbling character I absolutely loved), wife Sheila, errant son Garfield, revered ex-Cricketer Graham Snow, an assortment of Sri Lankan bombshells, thinly disguised superstar cricketers and shady Lankan Cricket Board officials. Then there are the allusions to the war. To the Sinhalese vis-à-vis the Tamils; the expatriate friend Jonny from the British High Commission with a foggy past and Premier league disappointments. To call it a Cricket novel, thus, is a little like calling the IPL a cricketing tournament.

4)Pompous cricketers, women with suspended morals and an intriguing mystery. I could only think of Fake IPL Player, having run away from any books that chronicled sport; or anybody’s love for it. Forgive me. Chinaman is far more sophisticated in its writing and layered in its telling. Not to mention literary. Not comparable to the rambling fascinations of an eventual sell out. What shines through in this complex first person narrative of stubbing out the story of possibly the greatest bowler of all time is the maniacal fixation that a sport can bind any willing patron in. I have known sport-fanatics. I secretly envy them.

The excerpt below testifies to the mania and loving that resulted in this novel. It is a moving description of the protagonist’s relationship to sport. It is slightly unfair to post this bit as representative of the book because it misses out on the strong, original humor and suspense that really are the central features of Chinaman. But then this chapter felt so right and does appropriate justice to the depth of Karunatilaka’s writing.

My wife asks me why I love sport more than her. More than I do my son and our life together. I tell her then that she is talking nonsense. But perhaps she isn’t.

Some people gaze at setting suns, sitting mountains, teenage virgins and their wiggling thighs. I see beauty in free kicks, late cuts, slam dunks, tries from halfway and balls that turn from off to leg.

When the English toured in 1993, their supporters arrived in droves and formed a jolly beer-swilling troupe called the Barmy Army. A T-shirt of theirs read as follows: ‘One day you will meet a goal that you’ll want to marry and have kids with.

Anyone who saw Diego Maradona in 1986 will agree that the T-shirt speaks the truth. To be in the right place at the right time and to watch a gifted athlete in full cry is one of life’s true pleasures.

In sport, has-beens can step onto a plate and smash a last ball into oblivion. A village can travel to Manchester for a cup tie and topple a giant. Villains, can heroes become.

In 1996, sub-continental flair overcame western precision and the world’s nobodies thrashed the world’s bullies. Sixty years earlier a black man ridiculed the Nazi race theory with five gold medals in Berlin before Mein Fuhrer’s furious eyes.

In real life, justice is rarely poetic and too often invisible. Good sits in a corner, collects a cheque and pays a mortgage. Evil builds empires.

Sport gives us organisms that attack in formation. Like India’s spin quartet and the three Ws from the Caribbean. Teams that become superhuman before your very eyes. Like Dalglish’s Liverpool, Fitzpatrick’s All Blacks and Ranatunga’s Lankans.

In real life, if you find yourself chasing 30 runs off 20 balls, you will fall short, even with all your wickets in hand. Real life is lived at 2 runs an over, with a dodgy LBW every decade.

In real life, as Sri Lankan cricket grows sweeter, your wife will grow sourer. The All Blacks may underachieve for two more decades but your son will disappoint you more. I hope you read this Garfield, I hope you forgive.

The answer to my wife’s question is of course a no. I would go down in a hail of bullets for her and for Garfield many times over. And while Aravinda de Silva has delighted me on many an occasion, I wouldn’t even take a blister for him.

But the truth, Sheila, is bigger than both of us, whether it be written on the subway walls or on the belly of a lager lout’s T-shirt. In thirty years, the world will not care about how I lived. But in hundred years, Bulgarians will still talk of Letchkov and how he expelled the mighty Germans from the 1994 World Cup with a simple header.

Sport can unite worlds, tear down walls, and transcend race, the past, and all probability. Unlike life, sport matters.

5) Yesterday I retweeted a quote by Tom Wolfe. He says ‘The problem with fiction is, it has to be plausible. That’s not true with non-fiction.’ Which Karunatilaka makes sound like rubbish. Because with W.G, he has crafted such a genuinely acerbic, profound voice and with such ease that it is hard to believe this book rests in shelves marked Fiction and not memoir.

I can’t resist quoting Woody Allen here:

"I jokingly suggest thou sacrifice Isaac and thou immediately runs out to do it."
And Abraham fell to his knees, "See, I never know when you're kidding."
And the Lord thundered, "No sense of humor. I can't believe it."
"But doth this not prove I love thee, that I was willing to donate mine only son on thy whim?"
And the Lord said, "It proves that some men will follow any order no matter how asinine as long as it comes from a resonant, well-modulated voice."

Chuckle. But no really. Oh the voice. The voice of W.G! Everybody who has been young and fancies him/herself as a bit of a cynic will have dreamed of writing some major work in a tone such as W.Gs. Karunatilaka has fulfilled his.

On an aside, talking about non-plausible non-fiction, I must also mention Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing. By putting her book in the same sentence as the phrase, I don’t mean to say her work on bargirls in Mumbai is implausible. It was just so poetic and surreal at times that it didn’t seem at all like her protagonist Leela was one woman. Or that all those horrifying realities of her life were true. Not to mean her book was not entertaining or moving.

6)Like any balanced reviewer (hahah) I must stop gushing. It isn’t like there weren’t times when I felt that the book was longer than necessary. Too much of a good thing. I can’t lecture on form and structure, but this book is entirely in the format of short entries in a slightly disorganized manuscript. The underlying scheme of the book is to sometimes deliver unforeseen bouncers ( while writing about a book about a spinner. I really need to brush up on my Cricket) and then calmly go off on an aside while you’re left wondering what just happened, mouth agape. This is perhaps the coolest thing about the book. Once you get used to it, that is.

---------------
Sidin Vadukut review that sort of started it all, here: http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/481225.html

Random House excerpt from the novel here: http://randomhouseindia.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/shehan-karunatilaka-chinaman/

The awesomeawesome Jai Arjun Singh's review here: http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2011/02/absent-spinner-cricket-and-life-in.html

Shehan Karunatilaka speaks to Rajdeep Sardesai. Nick Hornby mention #win: http://www.hindustantimes.com/Spin-on-a-yarn/Article1-661320.aspx

He talks to Supriya Nair here: http://www.livemint.com/2011/02/04185432/A-rare-type-bowling.html?h=B

-----

EDIT: The passage I painstakingly typed there from the book is what Shehan Karunatilaka's website has in the excerpt section, I discover now (albeit an extended version which seems to have been edited in the latest version). Hours after. Haha. I feel vindicated. </endof goofy remarks>

Remember?

2011-01-20T11:47:00.000+05:30

Soda says this post goes 'all over the place'. Which is kinda true. You've been warned.

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

I have had an epiphany. No wait, epiphanies move like lightning. They strike you and everything looks different. This isn't that. More, a realisation. What started as a hazy suspicion has cleared and confronted me in the full truth. And the truth is, I don't remember a thing.

You heard right.There are no files in this disc. No songs on this tape. I don't have memories. Perhaps I had them before, but now, nada. A revelation such as this isn't the easiest of truths to handle. I gave the thing some thought and decided at the very beginning that this kind of memory loss will not result in a three book, three movie franchise. And Matt Damon will not play me.

At this point, you will be forgiven for dismissing this as a crazed young girl's tirade about forgiving and forgetting (to arrive at the most obvious cliche) and so on. But after much trying, there is no other way of looking at it. It has happened. It is true. I don't have memories. (Anymore. I think). And I will keep from repeating that joke about me not being young anymore, because both of us (you, dear reader, sparse and unconvinced, me your post guide for the next six minutes) must agree that that joke is past its prime.

How is it possible that in the face of such amnesia(if you will), I am calmly proceeding to write a multiple thousand word blogpost and not running around, arms flailing, seeking questions from anybody who may care to answer, important details of my life such as who I am, where I am from, and what my favorite pokemon is, etcetera. Of course I haven't entirely forgotten. No. That would be taking things a bit literally.

It must have been a little before midnight, when I was hovering near the mirror, looking for something and chuckling to myself at a joke someone had cracked earlier that evening. Fairly normal, so far. I looked and looked; crouching under the bed, shifting stacks of books, scanning shelves. And then I stopped looking. I was still chuckling. At that joke. And what the joke was, I couldn't for the life of me, remember.

When I was a child, I was often caught of bursting into a room, desperate to say something and promptly forgetting what I was going to say. An aunt taught me to retrace my steps so I would remember how the thought first came. This used to help, for the most part. So I walked around the entire house, trying to remember why I started chuckling. To no avail. I had no memories of the evening that I was sure had been good.

I then realised, that this wasn't even new. Over the last few years, I have progressively forgotten more. It wasn't like everything I knew vanished(That would have been some serious shit. Ronald Reagan, I've wanted to be like you. Not that way though). It was all there. But I forgot it was.

It is as if all that I knew was stored in a huge, large room (as large as your opinion of me will allow) but where I stand is in the anteroom. With a thin curtain drawn over the doorway to the large repository that is my memory. So if you were to quickly ask me if I remembered the time I drove around Double Road drenched to the bone, when the water on the roads was knee high, I'd have to reach into that repository, look around a little, find the memory and then nod vigorously. But it would take time and effort.

It is a little troublesome, this scheme. Especially if your perception of the world you live in and the people who inhabit it are all a cumulative result of your past with respect to them. This loss of quick and easy access to your own memories will mean that your perceptions too will freeze. And when I look around me to see people whose perceptions of the world around them has been immobile for a while, I feel very strongly about not turning out like them.

Amma often says that if she had the choice to erase memories, she'd do so gladly. But then a lot of things are worth remembering. And so her petitions to God are put on hold. Until the next time she considers the thought, that is.

Amma might offer clues on my current state. You see, my mother has a fixed set of stories to narrate. I have heard all of her stories, to the point where I often complete these stories for her. Just so she won't complete them herself. It's amazing how each narration starts with the sort of enthusiasm one would reserve for what happened that afternoon and not in the sumer of '85. This can only mean two things 1)She miraculously remembers her stories from thousands of years ago, vividly. 2)She has a fixed set of memories about each phase of her life to mark like milestones and she has, like I am coming to, shunned/forgotten(I don't know which) all else.

I was talking to a friend years ago (In what now seems to me was a ritual of matching sob stories and trying to one up each other on list of tragedies suffered) and on memories, he said that he doesn't remember certain bits of his earlier days because his childhood was so tough.

I can hardly claim such things. I have had a nice kind of childhood. And my memories from then are the clearest. Little things. Like sitting in a car one evening in the 90s maybe when a relative was in hospital. It was dark and there was breeze. No vehicles and the trees were in charge. Black, blue and green. And ghostly appearances which turned out to be groups of walking nurses on break walking around on Mallya hospital road. I remember wondering why anybody would want to be a nurse. Why anybody would want to witness pain and suffering and death on a daily basis. Thinking their stockings looked uncomfortable. How did they manage to keep them so white and spotless?

I remember clearly, yes.

Why then can I not remember what I did three days ago? One possible explanation is that things have become less remarkable. And like suicide, homicide, genocide is explained these days, maybe it's just boredom.

I have thought about this for long periods of time (restricted of course by my attention span) and concluded that boredom isn't it. I can't have been bored for the last three years. I don't remember being bored so long. Why then have my memories been sneaking away to hide behind the curtain? Do I not love them enough?

Talking of memories, I have been finding a number of precious pictures this last week. We unearthed my parents' wedding album recently. Everybody looks young. And hopeful. My mother was extremely beautiful. And as gullible looking as she is today. I found a picture of my sister with her best friend from school on a class trip to somewhere in Chennai. And the best. A ceramic plate photo-souvenir of my father in Hong Kong. He is wearing a stiff suit. Smiling. He is posing with Chinese idols of good fortune. He looks healthy and strong. I will however always remember the softer, older him, recovering and, in my eyes, in need of care and attention.

What effects do photographs have on memories? Most of the people I know seldom look at them. They don't seem to acknowledge what they were like, back then. Or maybe it isn't important. Some of the older ladies I know treat these albums like trophies of their youth. In thick musty albums of black cardboard, protected by thin crisp paper that crackles as you flip it; they are thin young women, their hair neatly combed back, flowers in their braids; wearing light colored sarees, sitting with their sisters and looking serenely at the camera. These are the pictures they will show to their grandchildren. Look how pretty your grandmother was. We were young, too once. (Carrying a feeble mark of protest.) What do you know of our days in the sun. Now, it is all gone. The last bit said with as little resentment as possible. These photographs are solid manifestations of their memories.These two entities shake hands and agree to provide them with favorable snapshots of their past. 'I agree, if you agree' say the photographs to the memories officiously before handing them the dull packages in which their images of their pasts rest. While this may be a somewhat cruel way of looking at it. Nothing is as sweet as seeing the thin smiles old photographs bring on the smiles of people.

Then there is the watching of video tapes of weddings and nameless ceremonies of which there are crates in my family. Every year these tapes are retrieved, dusted and played dutifully. Someone is always getting excited about how someone trips now, or laughs now, or breaks into a jig now and explains what it is that X is whispering in Y's ear. And each time, everybody sits down to note with amusement how half the people in the tape are now dead. We even kept count once.

I am still unclear on why memories are keeping distance from me. Remembering shouldn't take so much effort. Memories, like refrigerators when a good game is on, should be at arm's length.

I realise some times, that I need memories. Specific ones. I need them to be close to me. Especially when people who these memories involve all live far away. Without these memories, the relationships I share with these people loses something very vital and important.

My mother sits next to me now, playing with a musical jewelry box-- something my father got for her from one of his tours when they were newly married, thirty years ago. It is one of those mechanical pieces which take manual winding; that play a slow tune when opened. The raaga amma informs me is Kirwani. It is superficially pleasant. But I've always felt troubled by it. It is undeniably sad. And very ruminative. "The first thing he ever got for me" she says, using her favorite phrase for such things. Million memories. Which is ironic because we can't remember so much.

Jaipur

2011-01-13T17:44:00.000+05:30

I know! I know! Nothing is decided yet. I only have plane tickets booked. But this is what I plan to gatecrash. Multiple entries at the same time means I haven't made my mind up yet. Please help!

Full schedule at: http://jaipurliteraturefestival.org/program-2011/

	Durbar Hall	Mughal Tent	Baithak	Front Lawns
Day 1
11-12am				Pamuk & the Art of the Novel Orhan Pamuk in conversation with Chandrahas Choudhury Presented by DNA
12-1pm		Woodfinger: A Modern Folktale Rana Dasgupta in conversation with Tishani Doshi
2.30pm – 3.30pm		Two Nations, Two Narratives Muneeza Shamsie in conversation with Urvashi Butalia		The Bankers Who Broke the World Liaquat Ahamed in conversation with Gurcharan Das
3.30-4.30			Books that Made Me Ahdaf Soueif, Githa Hariharan, James Kelman & Pauline Melville in conversation with Susheila Nasta
5.00-6.00	A Eunuch’s Life A.Revathi in conversation with Urvashi Butalia	Storyteller-in-Chief Junot Diaz in conversation with Sonia Faleiro
Day 2
10.00-11.00		Why Books Matter John Makinson, Kiran Desai, Patrick French & Sunil Sethi in conversation with Sonia Singh Presented by British Council
12.00-1.00	The Forum: A Global Exchange of Ideas Gurcharan Das, Kavery Nambisan & Manjushree Thapa	One Amazing Thing Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni in conversation with Mita Kapur
2.30-3.30			Imaginary Homelands Ian Jack, Junot Diaz, Kamila Shamsie, Manjushree Thapa & Marina Lewycka in conversation with Chandrahas Choudhury
3.30-4.30			The Inheritance of Books Kiran Desai in conversation with Jai Arjun Singh
5.00-6.00			Out of West Kiran Desai & Orhan Pamuk in conversation with Rana Dasgupta	From Courtesans East & West Katie Hickman & Muzaffar Ali in conversation with William Dalrymple
6.00-7.00	Dhin Tara Junoon Readings, Recital & Music Salman Ahmad & Shomshuklla
Day 3
10.00-11.00				Boys will be Boys Ruskin Bond in conversation with Ravi Singh
11.00-12.00				AfPAK Ahmed Rashid, Atiq Rahimi, Jayanta Prasad, Jon Lee Anderson & Rory Stewart in conversation with William Dalrymple
12.00-1.00		India: A Potrait Patrick French in conversation with Amitava Kumar Presented by British Council	Happenings in a Novel Roma Tearne & Vaiju Naravane	The Crisis of the American Fiction Jay McInerney, Junot Diaz & Richard Ford in conversation with Martin Amis Presented by DNA
2.30-3.30	Possibility of Laughter Marina Lewycka & Zac O’Yeah			Readings from Coetzee J.M.Coetzee Introduced by Patrick French Presented by Times of India
3.30-4.30
5.00-6.00				Kashmir Kashmir Basharat Peer, M.J.Akbar, Mirza Waheed, Nitasha Kaul, Rahul Pandita & Swapan Dasgupta Presented by Goldman Sachs Public Affairs Series
Day 4
10.00-11.00		Popcorn Essayists Anjum Hasan, Jaishree Mishra, Kamila Shamsie & Namita Gokhale in conversation with Jai Arjun Singh	Mumbai Narrative Gyan Prakash & Sonia Faleiro in conversation with Marie Brenner	Half a Yellow Sun Chimamanda Adichie Introduced by Jasbir Jain Presented by Counselage
11.00-12.00		Indian Summer Alex von Tunzelmann in conversation with Karan Thapar Presented by British Council		The Alchemy of Writing: Truth, Fiction & the Challenge of India Tarun Tejpal in conversation with Manu Joseph
12.00-1.00		The Forum: A Global Exchange of Ideas Abha Dawesar, Dayanita Singh & Jaishree Mishra Presented by BB	Pulp Faiza S.Khan & Pritham Chakravarthy in conversation with Namita Gokhale
2.30-3.30		A Winter on the Nile Anthony Sattin in conversation with William Dalrymple
3.30-4.30			Word, Image, Text Dayanita Singh & Sarnath Banerjee in conversation with Rupika Chawla
5.00-6.00				Sex & the City Candace Bushnell Introduced by Ira Trivedi
6.00-7.00	Open to All: Take part in Jaipur’s first open-mic session! (Say/Do/Perform/Recite in 2 minutes)
Day 5
10.00-11.00	Stranger than Fiction Arthur Miller in conversation with Abha Dawesar Presented by ICCR			The Reluctant Fundamentalist Mohsin Hamid in conversation with Shoma Chaudhury
11.00-12.00				Writings the 1980s Martin Amis & Jay McInerney in conversation with Nilanjana Roy Presented by DNA
12.00-1.00				Descent into Chaos Ahmed Rashid in conversation with William Dalrymple
2.30-3.30	The Companies Christopher Bayly, Gyan Prakash & James Mather in conversation with William Dalrymple Sudhir Mulji Memorial Lecture
3.30-4.30			Trainspotting Irvine Welsh Introduced by Jeet Thayil Presented by British Council	A Suitable Book Vikram Seth in conversation with Somnath Batabyal Presented by Counselage
5.00-6.00	Society Has the Total Right To Know (Debate) Freedom of Expression is a dangerous illusion, not an accessible reality Chaired by John Gordon Presented by Intelligence Squared Asia

5

2011-01-04T19:28:00.002+05:30

Governments came. Governments fell. Some black magic and shirt tearing also.
Our good friend is alive and well. And pontificating as well as ever.
I got a nosepin.
The High Command is crazy as she ever was. Maybe crazier.
Wrong is in college. (How time flies.)
I still haven't learned to drive. How can I? (Shame I know. Fine. Sissy)
Shivanna has done nothing of note since.
I got a tattoo. (mwahahahahah)
The smarter one has been growing up. (Chuckle!)
I traveled. Alone. Be proud.
I got into college.
I wrote. For ACTUAL newspapers. (Cool, no?)
I heard someone liked to write stories.
I got out of college.
I learned much about all the people we know.
I got a job. And no, it isn't as a domestic help. (Hilarious, no?)
I pack suitcases like a pro. I can cook too.
I made friends. You'd love them. More importantly, they'd LOVE you.
GM crossed oceans. (Imagine!)

Whatever the reason we didn't laugh our heads off, it'd better be good.

Encounters with enemies. Faceless and otherwise

2010-12-18T12:09:00.004+05:30

Later today, I will be part of a discussion on whether Bangalore is safe for women. I must admit my opinions are playing a game of ice hockey in the grey area. Nevertheless, this is something I'd written long long ago about sexual harassment(we will agree to not dignify any such term as 'eve teasing') on the streets and suchlike.

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

This is being written with a considerable amount of anger. You can say that some latent fury just stood up and decided to make itself known. I am not a misandrist, before you’ve delivered your judgment. I’m afraid I’ve never had it in me to reserve hatred for any group of people. But when offended directly, one cannot soothe the resultant repulsion with balmy kindness or icy indifference.

If you are a woman, you will well know what it is like to be touched, frisked, stared at, groped by strangers. Especially walking the streets of India, one has to be on one’s guard all the time. One has to take necessary precautions such as not ‘inviting attention’ where it isn’t warranted. Here, debates rage about whether a woman who was raped deserved it. I don’t have the wisdom to think any one thing about each of these arguments. What I do know, is that it is painful to suffer in silence the disregard for one’s modesty.

How many times I have been felt up or stared at on crowded streets, I have like most women lost count. And through time even come to somewhat dismiss. But there are some incidents I can’t quite forget. I still remember the day when some urchin, on a moving bike brushed my back with a quick, slimy hand when I was walking down a deserted street. I was fourteen. I remember very clearly how shocked I was at the offensive touch. I didn’t cry. I had gone home and locked myself up in my room. The reason I recall this is because on that day, I was filled with repulsion for myself. I felt like I had done something wrong and unexplainably asked for it. It took many, many years and some more maturity to realize that this is just how a lot of women feel when they have similar experiences. Why does a victim of abuse (“mild” or otherwise) hate herself when she is not at fault?

Worse still is when the perpetrators of these offences are people you know. How does one react when a good ‘friend’ casually places his hand on your shoulder, or your back or touches you in a manner that can be best described as objectionable in your mind and as “accidental” to a wordless, mutual understanding? When simple handshakes at parties turn into surprise hugs, from people you barely know. We are liberal people, living in intelligent times when, often, a woman protesting something she perceives as being ‘done to her’ can easily become “feminist rant” or even “femishit fury” (as is termed in online forums, springs of creativity that they are). Why is a woman’s demand for her modesty to be respected, reflective of the feminist cause? Do people even know the difference?

I would be lying if I said that I am scared to walk the streets and live in fear of the predatorial street males I am spewing venom at. I often take late night walks alone and have had many uneventful, wonderful walks. Some weeks ago, I was walking in a somewhat empty street and saw a man walking a few paces behind me. He was short, and dark and wore a bright yellow shirt. My eyes were fixed on the ground as they normally are while walking but did not fail to notice that he looked like a construction worker from around there. I did not realize he was following me until a few minutes later. Due to a comical turn of events on the day, I was not wearing glasses and could not see very far. I was listening to music as I walked down the street, my diminished eyesight until that point only an unpleasant glitch. Growing uneasiness prompted me to turn and see to my horror that he was fiddling with his crotch. I was aghast and realized I was alone in an empty street. The road was dark and the few streetlights didn’t help the girl who had just broken her spectacles. This man had been following me for the last ten minutes. Fear was heaving down any intelligible things my mind said to me. He stopped too. For about a second, he stared at me as I stupidly stared back. Both of us looked terrified. I then turned and walked as quickly as possible, hoping to find the safety that crowds in most cases provide.

I may forget that such a thing happened to me a few years later. I do want to remember for long that although I was afraid, I did not, like the fourteen year old me, question what I had done wrong to deserve it. I can now see, if insensitively, that he was the sexually frustrated Indian wretch thrust from some conservatively mute village somewhere into this crazed city of free floating temptations. I was the liberated woman, not regarding the famously unknown dangers of a dark, lonely street. And there we were facing each other, both of us afraid of being found out. But I was/am free of hating myself for somebody else’s grimy mind, and that to me is good news.

One of the first lessons current society teaches a young woman is to fear the ugly things men of wrong moral leanings can do, and we are indirectly taught not to ask for it. This same caution, after an unruly male is done meddling with you, immediately festers into the doubt and insecurity that repeatedly claws at you and asks you what you did wrong. Of what use is caution if it results in hurt and more fear?

I am glad I have grown out of thinking that some twisted man eyed me because I did wrong. I am glad that the anger fizzled out to my benefit. I cannot walk with placards screaming comebacks with other women who chose to channel their anger that way. I can only hope that people who have seen worse get out of thinking they were party to the crime committed against them or on the other hand, remain victims long after.

For the good of the educated, decent until proven otherwise, urban male, I really do hope education will come to giving people not just respect for feats of courage and bravery and intelligence but also, the undeniable importance of decency. Men of today, more importantly tomorrow, urgently need to learn to respect decency. Be it the man on the street, looking to brush past a woman on the streets or boys, learned and accomplished, placing friendly hands on a girl friend’s knees just because they can.

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

Edit: I was just going through my awesome cousin Deepika Nagabhushan's piece in Citizen Matters on a relevant topic and thought it was a brilliant article. Read http://bangalore.citizenmatters.in/articles/view/1022-karaga-festival-bangalore

Men etc.

2010-08-15T17:59:00.001+05:30

Roy sighed and stretched. "Basically it comes down to what my father used to say: ' Men think women are crazy and women think men are children'"

"Yeah," said Dinah, "there are a bunch of sayings like that. What about, 'Men hate women for what they do and women hate men for what they are.'"

Lindsay leaned in to Dinah. "Or, 'Women don't feel what they know and men don't know what they feel--'"

Roy leaned in to Lindsay, interrupting. "Can I go back to something you said earlier?"
"Sure," she said doubtfully.
"I was just wondering what kind of machines give multiple orgasms. Vibrators, right?"

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

'I wouldn't let you fall,' he says simply.

I look up, startled by the pure romance in his words. Then I realise he just means he won't be encouraging me to do any high-risk stuntwork today. Relief all round. I turn away and squint into the sun. 'I wouldn't let you fall.' Hmm, I guess there are just some things you wait your whole life to hear and that's one of them. It promises both gentleness and protection.

Often found on deodorant bottles, rarely in men.

The Songs and Melancholies of The Stay-at-home Mum

2010-05-22T19:53:00.003+05:30

There is a certain advantage to writing very long pieces that most people who add apologetic "long post" disclaimers ignore. When one has to ask other people what they thought of such a bit of writing, you realise a long post can always be conveniently described as "Long." with a "...and nice" added in afterthought.

********

So, much has happened over the last two months. Many things have changed. Literary critics (the few hundred who religiously scan my writing anyway) will note that I haven't rid myself of the terrible, terrible habit of starting new pieces and new paragraphs with a 'So'. But come on, I am no Kafka, and my metamorphosis does not involve turning into an insect, and/or a literary genius overnight.

About two months ago, my mum left for pardes to shower some TLC, good food, attention, good food, support, good food etc on The Sister In Another Continent. This whole trip was a coup pulled off deftly by my sister, her husband P, little old me, a dear friend S, extended family, my friend Kayone's (:P- Lit critics you may consider the smiley usage "the groundbreaking experiment of a stunning new voice in literary non-fiction") dad and his entire office. It took this small army of lobbyists to convince amma that her patriotism and loyalty to bharatmaata would not be diluted by staying over in a country where mums wore skirts (she would find that description very amusing; in a manner that substantiates her distaste for the non-swadesi).

After much emotional blackmail done by both parties involved in several international calls, Maa reluctantly relented, and packed her bags (Factually, I packed her bags. I'm a natural they say. George Clooney from Up In The Air like.) and went off to The Continent.

~~So far, so good.~~ (One more 'So' at the beginning of a paragraph, and I'll delete this bloody blog). That is the background to this heart-rending story of the last two months of my life, spent overcoming the very trying processes of managing a life(used liberally), a house, two thousand four ninety three bills and one depressed domestic-help. I will not even go into the emotional crises and throwing up thrice in an hour bits (I will, actually. But that later).

To understand the full depth of my reserves of strength and flawless character, one must understand why living alone is significant in this context. If you were born in the late eighties, you will remember the summer of 1999, when Summer in Bangalore meant horrific maximum temperatures of 28 degrees("The world will end in 2000, hundred percent! Even Readers' Digest says so!" echoed all over Lalbagh at 7.30 a.m everyday), cricket on the streets, finding abandoned pups, playing Mario three hundred times a day et cetera.

My memories of '99, unlike yours, reader, are stamped with vivid and detailed memories of V auntie's wedding.

That is not forgetting the six other weddings in the season all of which were effectively spitting copies of each other. The SAME things happened. I always suspected that the reason Hum Apke Hai Kaun was never remade in a South Indian language because it's IMPOSSIBLE to make any South Indian wedding interesting, let alone make a three hour film out of (Never mind a perfectly legitimate reason for Prem to walk around shirtless for the most part of the film).

I had the absolute pleasure of witnessing all these weddings and numerous other pujas that and many of the following summers because my parents didn't think it right to leave an 11/12/13/..18 year old alone at home. Apparently I would burn the house down, or not eat(right!), or have fun(That is a definite no-no).

It isn't without reason that none of my mother's adorable aunts tries to relate anecdotes from the '70s to me. They consider me quite a prodigy in these matters. I have heard it all. You would too, if you were attending weddings and pujas while your friends were beating your high score on Sonic the Hedgehog. It seemed like even the impossible-to-marry-off-thank-god-he-has-money type people were getting hitched those dreadful summers. My mother was ecstatic at seeing all her late-twenties nieces getting married. I was cursing my luck. Painful memories.

The point--some 1000 words later- being, I have never been allowed to stay on my own even for the briefest time by parent-folk. I was shipped off forcibly to live with aunts and grandparents when emergency, life-saving trips to far-off weddings/pujas had to be arranged. It was almost cruel how I was never thought capable of doing my own thing or managing myself.

Until...now.

Now, when I am grown, and boring enough for even my mother's aunts to avoid, and have zilch social life; when I am too old for faint rebellious streaks from the teens to remain, and when I'm decidedly too uncool to go do crazy things, my folks decided, was a safe time to teach the tenets of self-dependence at.

"What is the worst that can possibly happen? She will come home at 9.45 p.m. And that too because badly designed signals on the Ring road means forty five minutes extra on the road...ha ha" the adults would have reasoned.

Masterstroke, Ma, masterstroke!

But I am better than that, I will have them know. I did come later than 9.45 p.m. On TWO DIFFERENT DAYS. TAKE THAT! Who's all that?

These significant personal victories aside, there is much I have learned in the last two months:

1) You know your visions of having the entire house to yourself includes numerous pizza parties, playing loud music all night, coming back late? Mine did too, until the morning after amma left. I woke up to repeated door-bell-ringing of the annoying sort to find the domestic help storm in and shoo me off to the supermarket to buy detergent, brushes, new brooms, withdraw cash for her salary, and to please get rid of all the clothes on the floor. I was dumbstruck. This woman had asked me to do things my mother has always been afraid to demand.

2)Apparently yogurt/curd is milk fermented with spoonfuls of yogurt. Which means you do not dump two litres of milk into half a litre of curd unless you want to return home to be greeted by a ghastly white mass that you can swear will move any moment and attack you. Ugh

2.a) You do not lift a pressure cooker's lid until the weight is removed. WHO KNOWS THESE THINGS! Someone should write these down, somewhere no?

2.c)Why the fuck do all the dals look like each other? Even in spite of Google image search.

3)"I will do the dishes tomorrow". Two very positive words: Yeah, right.

4)It doesn't help my age-related insecurities to realise that I take my Mother role very seriously. Be it when my friends Kayone and Kaytwo(:P :P) were home and denied food until they showered and changed or when one felt weepy and unable to muster strength to cook only for the self after they left. Ma, I know just how you feel when you say you can't cook when I'm not around.

That apart, cooking for people you love is so awesome a feeling that I don't mind admitting it and risking sounding like a housewife from a sunflower oil t.v ad(Those women look younger than me anyway).

5)In life, one does not have to spend precious time and energy cleaning up the mess if one doesn't create any. The exact same wisdom applies to kitchens.

6) Thank you South-Indian, rigorous, Brahmin, Brahminical (Everywhere I write, those words go together. Always.) upbringing. The most intense moral dilemma about black-white, right-wrong, am I evil guilt-tripping came when I was...wait for it...chopping onions. (Aside, that book No Onions Nor Garlic by Srividya Natarajan sounds very unconventional and interesting. Anybody read?)

7)Living with friends is AWESOME. Kayone, Kaytwo and Kay especially. They are much fun after food and drink. Take videos. ALWAYS. Hyuk Hyuk.

I will not forget the time we walked a few kilometers at 10 in the night. With Kayone cheerfully riding my bike around and Kaytwo and I dragging our feet and doing girl-talk. It was the night we made Maggi at 2 a.m on. Kayone must be the best Maggi-maker I know. She can wail about gooey Maggi all night however. After years and years of failing at pulling off all-nighters with Physics books for company, I realise it is much easier to stay up until 6 a.m with your best friends.

Kaytwo gives fantastic perspective. Kayone is a terrific listener. Both of these discoveries were made at around 3 a.m in the night. I could marry these women. Unfortunately, they have other plans.

8) Do not consume agents of inebriation. If you must, do so not until the point of someone having to sing to you to stop your wailing. Or to the point of throwing up thrice. Because, remember, amma is not around to lovingly make mensin-saaru and tell you all will be well the next morning. Also, switch the phone off and flush it down the loo. You will not remember a thing you said. Worse, you may end up calling wise aunts who may not be very drunk when you call them.

8.b)How the fuck do you get rid of bottles? I nearly got booked as a murder suspect in the process.

(Aside: A special mention must be made to our man Shark. He can handle anything (except girls who cry). Respect!)

9)If you manage to do all of the above, be a little understated and sound disinterested about it. What if you gingerly relate all this to your Sister In Another Continent and she excitedly suggests you have a House Party soon? Have some self respect. Scare your family while you can. Who knows when they will turn cool and shatter your dreams of being a "disgrace to the family".My sister has set up a countdown of the number of days of possible debauchery I have left. Poor thing. She doesn't know I slept at 11 last night.House Party it seems. Someone tell her it isn't our culture. Pah. Thoo. Chee.

10)There are many things in the course of life that you will not begin to appreciate until the time is right. When the heavens decide you are ready to move to the next level, emotionally. It seems that this was my time. I was finally ready for...

Maggi. The one thing you cannot appreciate until you stagger, nay, crawl into the kitchen, looking everywhere for a scrap to eat. I still struggle to finish all of it, it still makes me gag. But let it be known that I gag with new found respect.

11) Instant coffee. One word. Sucks. I also discovered why there is such a large contingent of tea-lovers. I am a recent convert. Laziness to head out and buy milk each day forced me to turn to amma's tin of amazing lemon tea. No really. It's awesome.

12) So(uh oh)metimes (phew!), it scares me how much I love cooking. Agreed I can only cook two things, one of those being rice, but that takes nothing from the thought away.

Most of my exploits in the kitchen start when tiredness and hunger have reached a killer crescendo. Read that as post 11.30 p.m. But I cannot stop being awed by the aroma of cumin frying in oil. Or the magic that mint leaves can do. All these smells through the processes of cooking are delightful hints of what is to come. Gives me kicks.

I can say with a lot of experience behind me to all the ladies who swoon over Curtis Stone, and worship the likes of Kylie Kwong, Nigella Lawson etc., that with some time spent cooking simple home-food for yourself, you will learn to appreciate the genius of Tarla Dalal. Because when one has limited grocery and can kill for food at 12 a.m, looking delish does nothing for hunger pangs. (There Curtis, that's your entire career razed to dust) Ma Tarla, I salute you.

The Stay-At-Home-Mum in the title refers not to my mother (who has, according to last update, been hitting the town merrily), but to me. The Me that comes home late in the evening and realises that there is laundry to be done, bills to be paid, grocery to be bought...It never fails to amaze Me how food doesn't cook itself either. Me has had evenings when she realised to her horror that there was no power because she had forgotten that there was such a thing as Bescom to who bills had to be paid. Me has spent whole days just lying in her bed, ill and without the strength to move only to wake late in the evening to decide what to cook. Me has toiled a few times to keep things in order and learned how easily nobody noticed (To be fair, she hasn't bothered much about 'order' for the most part). After having worked for hours on engineering-type stuff that made you (Me) feel stupid and small, there were vegetable vendors who ripped ~~you~~ Me off just because she wasn't thirty years old. Me gaped and tried to think of a smart answer when they asked Me what 'variety' of 'badnekai' she needed. knowing full well she was clueless. She could swear they all grinned while pulling this malicious in-joke of the consortium of vegetable vendors.

Being alone isn't easy. Neither is taking care of a house and a spoilt ingrate. Come back Ma! I promise I'll help with the dishes.

Saris, Woes, Beauty, Self-Pity and related Ruminations

2010-05-02T21:49:00.005+05:30

Hello there beautiful woman. How is it there in your world? All good? What's the view like, five feet and seven inches above the ground, looking down at all of us with those light eyes? Pretty peachy I'd think.

I normally don't reserve much spite for your type. I can understand our worlds are different. You've grown up imagining yourself as a Rapunzel trapped in a stone tower. I grew up hoping The Ugly Duckling was based on a true story. You grew up having brave knights climb into your high tower each evening, sing praises of your light blue eyes, do your homework and leave dutifully. I grew up never doing homework. I assure you I understand we're from different worlds. It doesn't bother me much. Most of the time, at least.

I've known many people like you. I've had nothing to do with it, I can say with conviction; but all the closest friends I've had have been stunners. My first best friend is/was the most popular girl everybody knew. We were both generally obnoxious and easily got away with it. The trouble began when we stepped into adolescence. She got lovelier each day and that people were all reacting differently baffled me. I spent a considerable number of years dealing with all the male attention she was getting. I was like the loyal secretary listening to boys' tales of woe. Our woman, who got more attention than she could handle, was always too busy to notice the trail of broken hearts she left behind. Try not to laugh, but one of the many boys floored by her charms would write me letters describing his feelings for her. We became good friends over these letters we wrote to each other. I still have some of those around here. I wonder what he is up to these days. Funny chap, that one.

I haven't spoken to the lady in years now, except for a few hurried phone calls on of our respective birthdays.I look at her albums on Facebook sometimes. She has seven hundred odd friends and her biggest grouse is staying home on a Saturday night. Sorry guys leave desperate sounding comments on her photos, which I sleepily scan while sidestepping the drool, all of which she dismisses with the practiced disdain of a looker.

I really had only two good friends in school. Both of them were very pretty ladies. One, a graceful dancer, and another a petite, gentle girl with beautiful eyes. Those three years, we were the closest of friends. The last time I met them, however, I struggled to hold conversations on for longer than five minutes. I, and I suspect they were too, was embarrassed at something one of us was saying most of the time. One of them wants to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a model now. She had her set of admirers who, quite logically, became pally with me in pursuit of an 'intro'. What do I say? These guys went on to be my DC team in school.

So you see, I have been friends with pretty girls. Too many of them in fact. It didn't help a long-standing childhood complex about one's looks. Damned cheekbones. And dimples. The absence of dimples which both my sister and my mother have. And I've worn spectacles all my life. And I do nothing with my hair except for tie it up. If my life was one of those parodied American teen movies, I'd be next in line for a makeover that would make me a ravishing beauty with great sadness in her eyes. But life isn't anything like the movies and the only trauma my eyes have experienced is due to that damning allergy one suffered last month.

Enough of all that. The reason I write this had nothing to do with my life lived playing bridesmaid (It wasn't until now. Stupid digressions). Neither is it begging for your sympathy (Actually, it is).

Today I had the unenviable responsibility of choosing a saree to wear to Grad day. My mother being overseas with her favorite offspring, I had to turn to my wiser, radical, rockstar of a grandmum and my very reasonable auntie C. 'Ah. That color. It will make you look dark. Off with it' Ajji says while in the same breath expounding on what sets men's hearts aflutter. Slightly unorthodox, yes. She didn't say that in so many words of course, but you get the idea. This line of thinking is slightly unsettling to me. It is bad enough I have to look at my feet and pretend all is well when girls my age discuss each other's backsides. Listening to my seventy year old Ajji launching into the dynamics of attracting men is about the last straw.

'ji and auntie C tut tut at all the sarees I choose. They laugh cruelly at the black saree I'm holding. They exchange looks when I meekly choose another--in their words-- boring saree. I try on this blingy orange and gold saree which they grudgingly approve of, hastily draping it over my jeans and doing a 360 in front of the mirror. I promptly look like a rotund, ripe pumpkin. My messy hair does nothing to help. They nod disinterestedly. At least it's blingy, I can see them thinking.

I know I tread on dangerous territory here. This can turn out to be a big mistake. Now 'ji, Amma and I represent the family's maddest, eccentric-est geniuses amongst its truly peculiar womenfolk. You know well, that in order to compensate for the vacuum in the sense of humor section, I reach for the kindness that the genre offers by stepping into self-deprecatory talk. At least that way people will laugh at me, even if out of sympathy. So don't be misled. The 'genius' refers not to me but my Rockstar Gandmum. That woman has, for nearly eighty years now, held all the men and women around her in cold terror. She says it like it is, topped her school, had two grown children by the time she was my age, can take on anybody and his second cousin. Most people, in whispered tones, call her crazy. But I, our 110 decibel shouting matches notwithstanding, have always considered her an insane, radical genius much ahead of her time. Understanding, thus, the kind of prescience I deal with, I must be careful.

The last time I consulted 'Ji on these matters, it took her two seconds to fling my mother's beautiful red Benaras saree aside and make me wear something with the luminous capacity of the headlights of a BMTC bus on high-beam to a cousin's wedding. All while I was wailing my disapproval. Who listens to a hormonal twenty one year old these days anyway. And I suspect I resembled a BMTC bus rather closely that day. Which is more or less a decisive indicator that one is ready for matrimonial bliss, going by the philosophical mores of the family. The priest duly had a premonition that I'd be married off by <random masa> next year. It didn't bother me much for his forecasts have proved to have a tolerance limit of around six years. I had more pressing matters to worry about. And that scalding memory of the security guard at an atm asking me if my --thirteen year old, five feet eleven inches tall-- little brother was my 'only son' only worsened matters.

As the two ladies badger me about my obviously pathetic tastes, I take what questionable route womankind has taken for millenia, looking for solutions to their duress-- I turn to a man to make me feel better about this mess. The uncle, enjoying the technicolor drama unfurling between three shouting women, sucks as much as any guy when it comes to saying the right things to a woman. "Waah. Why am I so ugly" I wail, tugging at the saree futilely to help make me look leaner. "You are a bright girl" he says alluding to the beauty x brains = constant equation. I roll my eyes and make a mental note to take him on a tour of RV's Archi department (Where rules of Physics and Fairness don't apply).

Nobody is kind to us Plain Janes. Long lost, disssstant relatives and friends of my mother's routinely run into her at concerts and marvel at those days when my mother resembled Sharmila Tagore or some such (I know! These aunties!). They never fail to throw a glance my way, grimace and go "Youuuur daughter?" without even bothering to notice that my jaw has dropped to the ground and I'm red as a turnip. My mother quickly mumbles something about me taking after paternal aunts and moves on to discussing details of known and unknown relatives whose children got married, had grandchildren or died.

What do these women in Kanjivarams whose yardsticks for beauty are invariably fair skin, baby fat and round South Indian faces know about the mechanism of good-looks anyway? They have never cried in horror at how fat they look in photos, which our generation you will agree is all about. Agreed, these aunties are all invading Facebook in droves, but I'm thinking that if you're forty and fat, nobody cares.What do they know how it feels to bravely strut around in stilettos and get told that you look 'uncomfortable'? What do these shrieking women know how it feels to spend thirty minutes in the morning staring at a wardrobe that seems to be put together to make you look like a hag. What do they know how the heart sinks to see pretty little things walk around in college, hair perfectly in place even at 4 p.m, dressed like fashion models, and with gait that belongs somewhere on a catwalk in NYC? What do they know of the pressure there is to look 'presentable' on special occasions and still fall hopelessly short? Or of the envy one feels at how some people do it so 'effortlessly'. How those dratted, bulimics-sans-barfing Barbie dolls can wear anything and look good while at it. Have they discovered to their horror seven years after the thought first came to them that those damned cheekbones are just where they are? Whatever happened to getting better with time, do they, goddesses of Mysore Silk, know?

All that wringing hands done, I still don't have a saree to wear for Grad Day. One of the best things college gave me and I, having endured four years of college, its amusements, its mysteries and its callousness together are dying over dressing up for it the last day. We're taking turns crying to each other about how ugly we are and how awesome everyone else will look. I'm telling her she is really beautiful, there is no cause for alarm and she is returning the faith. There is nothing like reassurance. (Men, learn!)

I fully know that it is us Plain Janes who give the Andie McDowells, Giselle Bundchens and Catherine Zeta Joneses of the world their worth. I don't take my responsibility lightly. I know I'm not hopeless. I'm not 14 anymore. I can't be bothered to feel ugly. Except the one time I was moping somewhere in Europe and the color of my skin made me feel a little bit crappy. Then there was the time when I was terribly, terribly infatuated and went around hating how I looked and felt horribly inadequate. The things we do. Letting arbitrary specimen of the male kind make us feel like shit about ourselves. Years of modesty, self esteem, self worth all pulverised, by one hormone-fueled idea. All because of some bastard's charms.

And I've felt beautiful. Sitting on my bed in faded shorts, puffing away, my brain's constant buzz briefly muffled. My messy, problematic hair being its difficult self, its beauty is cryptic to everyone else but its only admirer. I've felt beautiful riding on breezy evenings, with music that seems to be made just for me, and in simple uncomplicated moments that may have nothing to do with what I'm wearing. All notions of beauty encompassed in moments of simple glee.

This, really, is how it should be.

That said, I still don't have a saree for Grad Day. And the thought of frizz makes me weep. Are you there God? It's me, Plain Jane.

Bienvenue a Bruxelles

2010-04-15T01:32:00.001+05:30

To the untrained, pedestrian (literally) traveler, Brussels, Belgium
(Bruxelles, is the local, more romantic spelling) is one very large
chunk of chocolate. Buildings of pale browns and beige, and architecture so fine, it could only have been carved out of chocolate.But please ignore my Pavlovian associations.

My first bonafide trip to a European country was to Belgium over the
weekend. Do not scratch your fine head dear reader for England is part
of Europe (geographically) just as it is a memmber of the amazingly
comical and amazingly amazing European Union(EU) but with a rider--
like only the English can describe so finely, in principle only. In
my, expert needless to say, opinion, Britannia is too snobbish to be
part of any club. I don't quite remember who I quote here when he says
"Put three Englishmen in a room and they will have invented a law
barring a fourth one from entering it". Which I estimate is how EU
works.

But really, most of my visit(s) have been centred around London and
this city is too cosmopolitan to be slotted as a European destination,
never mind its location. Besides, London is up there on its high
horse, commanding so much attention and intimidating you with its big
city-ness, that it fails miserably at fitting any Pentax- wielding
tourist's idea of a misty, cheery and quaint, cobblestoned haven of
warm people and warmer capuccinos.

So what was to be began with a train journey on Friday evening. We
took the Eurostar fast train from the international terminal at St
Pancras station at London to Brussels. Now you all know what a pretty
little fiasco the Schengen visa was to get and what monsters we had to
slay and what impediments we had to get out of the way. To all this,
the immigration counter at St. Pancras was the perfect anti-climax. I
expected to emerge from there, clutching my passport victoriously,
smile on face, UK border force demons under my feet and posing for
metaphorical shutterbugs but the officer stamped my visa without as
much as a glimpse. I could have stuck the Scooby Doo collectibles
stickers from some brand of pains on my passport instead of a visa for
all he cared. To add insult to injury, he even stamped the wrong visa
on P's passport. So much for all that talk about fighting terror and
hawk-eyed vigilance and our security being top priority. Wuteverr. (Or
maybe, they don't really care as long as you're getting out of the UK.
Or this could be their standard treatment of issues concerning the EU.
What? To Brussels, capital of EU? Hahah. Take that! From Britannia
with love. On to the trains now, vermin.)

I was super excited to take a train across international borders. The
trains pass through under-water tunnels. Did I expect to see sea-life?
I did. Oh what the hell. Yea, I'm who they call a dullard. There I was
thinking this will be an extended under-water sea-world type
expedition only to peer out the window to look at boring cement
tunnels. Bleh. Haven't they heard of fiberglass? (I must sound like a
literary critic at this point. Demanding a Marquez when given a Perry
Mason, and not seeing the point. What do you mean the train/prose is
just a means to an end? Form over function love!)

The train is, well, a train. Nothing beats the Indian Railways
experience, of course (this is my pacify-the-nationalists- trick) but
the muffled, constant buzz of the super-fast train (as against the
rhythmic lilt of our lovely carriages) has a strangely soothing effect
on its passengers and every one of them drifted off to sleep.
Including the cheerful businessman type fellow sitting with us. As did
Kaa and a very tired P. It seemed like the only ones on that empty
train who weren't sleeping were I, and one very smug French looking
person sitting across the aisle who, between reading about arthouse
cinema and the Haiti earthquake, paused from time to time to give me
patronising smiles. As if the book I were reading ( A Year In The Merde, an
unapologetically derogatory novel on Parisians and their way of life,
review coming soon to a blog near you) reminded him of his own days
spent as a foolish, uncouth youth.

We reached Bruxelles Midi station at about 22.30(Oh, I must sound so
kosher). We took the Simonis metro line to a place called
Louize/Louisa to get to our hotel. It being rather late and Brussels
being a city that sleeps surprisingly early, we were forced to eat at
a burger-joint called Quick. The burger tasted very exotic and my
heart went out to these people.

The next day, I woke very late, on account of my legs' point blank
refusal to move. We lazily dragged our feet over for breakfast ( I was
by now a little more enthusiastic, for obvious reasons) just as the
staff were looking to clear tables. I will not say much about the
spread. As little as European food has done for me thus far, I refuse
to antagonise the divine continental breakfast routine. These people
aren't stupid. What better way to start a day than with a
brain-pickling sugar high? Croissants, pains, buttered toasts, french
fries, tomatoes, mushrooms, fruit, yoghurt, syrupy juices, strong
coffees and WAFFLES! (I ate everything. Yes! I know!)

We started out to visit the European Union Parliament which is at the
corner of a sprawling park. The building itself is rather
disappointing. A tasteless glass building (I naively expected a 17th
century castle) which only looked like a prototype of any arbitrary
construction in Namma Bengaluru's Electronic City. All we could do was
stop and wonder at each point what any part of the structure housed
and what purpose it served, while speculating how Silvio Berlusconi
might use it. You get the idea.

By now, the terrible weather forecast was beginning to show itself in
true form like only grim forecasts seem to do. To beat the chill (It
was between 2 and 5 degrees with a chance of rain in the city), we
hopped on to one of its clean and comfortable buses and Brussels
showed itself to us.

Sitting here and writing this hours after returning home, Brussels, it
seems, was the pleasantest surprise one could have asked for. I didn't
expect a lot from this trip. It had been, in fact, reduced to a
formality because this was the port of entry of choice. I couldn't
really name any places of interest in Brussels before this and all I
knew about Belgium was that the chocolates were great stunning
devices.

It turns out Brussels is also famous for beers. And Belgian waffles,
which come topped with chocolate, whipped cream, strawberries, and
other fruity miscellany, hawked at street corners and every
boulangerie worth its baking soda. Brussels also has lovely towering
buildings and overwhelmingly beautiful cathedrals. I will always
remember the city by the sight of the Grote Markt-- The central square
flanked by the Town Hall and The City Museum. Around it are many, many
bars and brasseries where you can do anything from play card games to
savour crepes and the ubiquitous Belgian Waffles.

All the signs/ announcements in Brussels were in French and Dutch. The
Metro stations had all been beautified in different ways. One station
we saw had gothic sculptures. Another had very intelligent wall
graphics combining art, statistics and information about global
warming. London and its Tube being my only standard for comparison, it
seemed that the underground system in Brussels was (naturally) a lot
less frenzied. The people didn't seem to mind tourists too much and
are generally less stone-faced than your average Londoner on the Tube.
You can see punks walking around in mohawks spitting around with
reharsed disregard for public property and practising what seem to be
secret-handshakes. Ok, not so secret. And almost no busy area seemed
to be spared from graffiti and spray paint vandalism. My heart, it
sinks.

The Galeries St Hubert near the Grote Markt warrants jaw-dropping in
quite another way. Supposedly Europe's first shopping mall, this large
building houses posh designers, antique stores and busy coffee shops.
It has glazed roofs that filter sunlight onto entrants as slender shop
windows call for your attention to their classy wares. We got out from
one of its side exits to a street, hold your breath, full of roadside
cafes.

The marketing strategy of these cafes is quite simple. A waiter stands
outside the cafe and shouts, hollers and or flirts with prospective
customers noisily to coerce them into choosing his cafe. With us brown
people, they took to shouting out "Shah Rukh Khan", "Kuch Kuch Hota
Hai" and "Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham" to get our attention. I was all
doubled up with laughter. I even got one of the waiters to sing on
video for the camera.

That done, we visited a few beer shops. It seems that Belgium has more
chocolate and beer fountains than plain water fountains, and it's just
as well. This is what makes them special right? This store we went to
had over 250 kinds of beer!

Next we went to the St Micheal's Cathedral. A huge stone building
which I cannot begin to describe. The cathedral bears a marvelous
dichotomy. It has a very formidable high ceiling, but its stone
carvings and sculptures are decidedly petite, finer and very richly
detailed. The sculptures I saw in Belgium are very different from the
ones I saw in Britain. This is much finer work. Where architecture in
Britain (Roman) uses up spaces, the grandeur in these buildings lies
in its innate richness. St. Micheal's Cathedral was spellbinding with
its high ceiling, chiming bells and exquisite stained glasses. Like it
often happens, the becoming enormity of the architecture and
commanding waltz of light shushes one into a respectful silence. I was
only too happy to comply. To me, these buildings, each sheltering so
much history, witnessed piecewise, year by year, and in all its
physical being, the accomplishment of thousands of people is what art
really is. To go any further in trying to describe what I felt will
ruin the thought completely. We'll let pictures do the talking.

Lunch was at a brasserie called Magic Rubens, some place where
magicians performed in the evenings, going by the general scheme of
things. I loved the restaurant. Lively yet subdued and rather happy.
Time, it was, for more cheese and fries. They served a tray loaded
with five different kinds of beer, all local specialties. Erm, learned
as I am on the nuances of liquer, the most I can do to describe the
taste is that they all ranged from slightly bitter to very bitter.
Special mention-- the white beer(never seen it before) and my
favorite--fruity beer(Passionfruit we guessed).

We took time to visit Manneken Pis(Literally, boy urinating/pissing),
the famous statue of the cherub-like boy pissing with gay abandon(read
that like you used to when you were ten). This is a tiny statue which
everyone has seen some or the other variant of. Legend has it that the statue is of a little boy who went missing and to look for who, an elaborate search party was arranged. After an entire day of frenzied searching, they boy was found behind a bush, peeing to heart's content.
Another legend goes that Manneken Pis is the statue dedicated to the courageous boy who doused a fire threatening to raze down Brussels with his pee. Perhaps the Kannada proverb "Murthy chikkadadaru keerti doddadu" was coined with this bit of stone in mind. I hear there is a
Manneken Pis museum where the boy is dressed up as Elvis Presley,
Micheal Jackson, Santa Claus amongst others. All this for one tiny
statue from the millions in Europe. Brother!

The rest of the evening was spent in general touristing and in
welcoming the cruelly sombre weather. Dinner was at a Thai restaurant
with an overtly cheery waiter who patiently listened to our requests
and said "I understand" like we were sub-human retards. It was a good
day living up to someone's formula with all the ingredients for a
memorable day-- a sliver of surprise, a sprinkling of fate and a whiff
of new things.

The next day's visit was to the Atomium-- a 160 m tall metal structure
of large globes interconnected like the representation of atoms in
an organic compound. Each of these "atoms" houses exhibitions from
time to time. The topmost atom has a restaurant and offers a panoramic
view of the city. The gods of touristing decided to go off and have
tea and we were left with a long queue for the elevators, boring
exhibitions (one was on Belgian popular art or something, which
although interesting, was a little irrelevant to us tourists) and the
city blanketed in thick fog thereby panning what was to be a panorama. The Atomium
was pretty disappointing, but anybody could see that this place would
be far prettier in Summer (more crowded too). Opposite the Atomium,
some European Auto Expo was on at the convention center, and this
seemed to have attracted a zillion other cars to its parking lot. All
this was quite a view from the highest levels.

After circuitous wandering, we had lunch at a falafel place which had
(Hurrah!) Internet. It was by now evening and we shopped for souvenirs
and chocolates and ate some more waffles (such joy, this tasting of
local delicacies). Then it was back to Bruxelles Midi for our evening
train back to Londres. This time, traveling with hundreds of other
passengers, including at least forty six men in oversized spectacle
frames, an entire rugby team, and an assortment of Belgian gentlemen
each of who I seem to have roguishly jostled to get to my seat, all of
who,hence, gave me derisive looks through the rest of the journey. I
also read of Brangelina's impending split. Oh dear lord. That's too
much for a weekend.

2010-04-04T01:21:00.000+05:30

I found this on the internet somewhere. I liked it enough to think that it needed a more permanent space (in the context of me and my thoughts) and so I post it here. Taken from this link.

ELMORE LEONARD'S 10 TIPS FOR NOVEL WRITERS

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
Which can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. A prologue in a novel is back-story, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.
3. Never use a verb other than ''said'' to carry dialogue.
Said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb ''said'' . . .
5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
6. Never use the words ''suddenly'' or ''all hell broke loose.''
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
For example, thick paragraphs of prose.
11. If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Bath, Bridges and a Fancy Dinner

2010-03-27T00:39:00.002+05:30

My sister busied herself with finding a good Chinese restaurant for lunch. The iPhone suggested what was supposedly Bath’s oldest Chinese restaurant, The Peking. This place however turned out to be rather average, with pink tablecloth and greasy food. We had fried asparagus starters and curry smelling of medicinal herbs(bleh in short).

From there, we went to the Roman Bath Spa which is the main tourist attraction of Bath. This is a site of great archeological import. The Roman Bath Spa dates to 1st century A.D when the Romans first invaded Britain. The Spa in question is a temple to goddess Sulius Minerva, a town centre the cynosure of which is a large public bath. Entering the Roman Bath, we were all given handheld audio guides(Made in Israel. I checked) which explain every exhibit on demand. I’m a big fan of this country’s museum culture, seeing as how every tiny town and hamlet has a neat little museum of its own. It is given that they have the resources to indulge in such luxuries, but that belongs to another conversation.

One thing that made the Bath spa special is that some of the audio exhibits have commentaries by the travel writer Bill Bryson (Whose The Short History of Nearly Everything I’ve wanted to read forever). This was a neat way of making the exhibits insightful. Bryson in his commentaries quotes Charles Dickens, comments on how the bronze-gilt bust of Sulius Minerva evokes fear and how she isn’t the prettiest woman you’ve seen, and generally makes interesting observations that add some perspective to vanilla descriptions. The audio guides by themselves were very nicely executed. They were informative without boring you to death, like these things can so easily slip in to being. And there were separate audio commentaries for children where fictitious inhabitants of Roman Britannia explained exactly what each structure of the Baths were used for, etc.
I listened to the commentary meant for children. When nobody was looking, of course (Oh shut up. They were so much fun!).

One very old, wise sounding priest spoke of the animal sacrifices at the altar, while Bryson spoke of how the Romans were on one hand sophisticated and learned with their cleanliness, education and knowledge and yet primitive regarding animal sacrifices and goat-slaying astrologers.

The Roman Bath is essentially a ruin that was excavated and restored by archaeologists and scholars. They explain how the entrance to the temple has Luna, the moon god and the Roman sun god representing the union/balance of the opposites. The union of Male and Female. The site of the large Roman bath itself is a sight (Site is a sight. Today’s literary-gem forecast looks bleak). It is an open air area with grey stone pillars and a pool in the centre. The pool is a beautiful bluish green. Torches are lit all around to complete the historic setting. Most exotic.

Steaming hot water is pumped into the pool from one room and then drained off in another room. There are adjoining sauna rooms and a cold pond—now a wishing well. We got some nice pictures of the place, especially with the Bath abbey in the background.

The tour guide was a cheerful middle aged man who had a jolly witticism for every fact he presented. “The Romans consulted their astrologers just as I don’t leave home without consulting my wife each day.” he says to us tourists. The last time they cleared the wishing well, they found three credit cards he declared, to our amusement. I wonder what those people wished for. Hmm.

While we were advised to not drink from the baths as the water was not treated, we were lead to this very fancy café called The Pump Room where we were all given glasses of treated water from the Baths. Don’t ask me to describe the taste now. It was, well, water. The Bath Room, however, was one classy place. A place of chandeliers, pianos, scones, tea and polite conversation. Unfortunately, they’d taken their last orders by the time we reached.

From Bath we headed to Bristol which is only 10 miles away. Kaa maniacally insisted we go visit the Cliffton bridge, which threw up a good photo-op session-- One of the (many, many, many) sights I'll take back home. The magnificent bridge against dazzling lights of the city. We settled for an early dinner at an awesome Turkish restaurant called Bosphorous where the sweetest waitress brought us good Argentinian Shiraz wine. For starters we ate rolls of deep-fried cheese and spinach which tasted heavenly with Hummus and fried mushrooms. I had some vegetable dish with cheese for the main course which dealt the lethal blow to my until then tolerant Indian palate. Such a tragedy!

We joked that we should all stop at the starters and move straight to dessert in restaurants as we’d found it impossible to finish food. Let me reach into my big bag of generalizations and declare that, somehow, being Indian gives us the most intense of experiences and tastes which in some strange way renders all other flavors too weak. Having a taste for strong Indian flavors has left me with nearly no taste for food from elsewhere. Unless we’re talking sweets. Oh, and Doritos. Which I stuffed my face with today.

We boarded at a hotel called Mercure. A nice, smart hotel that played amazing music in the lobby and had interiors in copper, maroon and gold. Our room, on the eighth floor, opened out to large windows across two of the walls looking out on exactly one half the city. I dozed off out of exhaustion and woke up at 3 a.m, feeling like an ass. Only to be treated to a magnificent view I will remember forever.

The Drive to Bath- Day Five

2010-03-02T21:02:00.001+05:30

I’m writing this sitting in P’s car. We’re driving from home to Bath, home of the famous Roman Baths. I had to immediately whip out the laptop and start describing what I see. You can groan at my clichés but what I see from outside the window is indeed wandering paths, spreading meadows and sunshine playing peekaboo with the clouds. No really, the road we’re driving down is elevated and from here we can see vast fields of green streaked with lines of white – the remnants of last week’s snow. On the snaking road, at one elevated curve, there was a large happy spot of sunshine illuminating the car like it were a large spotlight from the sky. It shone on us for the briefest moment. I don’t want to spoil that thought by forcing more artless analogies. But at this moment, there are happy songs playing on the radio, I just finished stuffing my face with food, read a nice book and spoke with amma on the phone. Heaven’s spotlight is directed here this moment. Everything is perfect. However brief or impermanent they may be, I want these good times to last—in whatever form. That is mostly why all this is being written down.

We’re almost at Bath right now. On either side of the road, I see a hilly town on the entire surface of which are nestled pretty little buildings with sloping tiled roofs and chimneys. The sun is bursting out. There is green everywhere. For someone who has always been terrible at descriptions, the clouds are clearing on how this place was home to so many English language writers who made careers and literary history solely by the joy they derived from the nature surrounding them.

The buildings around us are a shade of brown—with dull pinks, reds and yellows-- that evinces feelings of warmth and cosiness. The gates and grills are all austere black. And the green is wet and dewy. The roads climb and dive without warning—I’m being treated to a constant joyride. From on top you see the town built at various levels. And from below, you drive past humble shops and cafes. Every level is a terrace of many little buildings. To my right a diverging street called Thomas Street is stubbornly lodged at a strange angle. It leads to a cul-de-sac which stands at 45 degrees to the road we drive on. Cars are perched sleepily on either side. They may be holding on for dear life, but make the job look incredibly easy. A long stretch of buildings, accessed only by stairs, by the side of the road we’re driving on stares down at us proudly. The streets are below most of these buildings. The houses are all built in distinctively Roman styles with pillars and geometrical, sloping roofs.

The road is rearing out into a formidable climb. A double-decker bus comes hurtling down cheerfully from the other direction. The town is a picture of large tiled buildings and peeling walls with splashes of white—the doors and windows are all white. We just drove down a sloping road down which I can see pyramidal church tops reach for the skies.

We passed half a dozen pubs. One is called The Trinity. Another one is called The Hobgoblin. A pub called The Bath Tap has a cartoon of a man in a bath tub reaching for the faucet. The GPS is taking us around in circles as we look to find a Chinese restaurant called The Peking.“Blue skies” my sister is chanting repeatedly, with a hint of incredulity in her voice. “…hold me like you’ll never let me go…Baby I’d hate to go”. They’re playing Leaving On A Jet Plane on the radio, idiots.

Man I suck at descriptions.

Day Four- Museums and Monkey Business

2010-02-23T00:55:00.002+05:30

The South Kensington station in London, like I tell everybody, is one wonderful place. Not by itself, of course. It is just another station with little stores selling papers, crisps and umbrellas; looks worn and weathered; and has, at this time of the year, people walking gloomily about. However, it is the places which it leads to that make it so charming. From the South Kensington station, one can choose to walk to The National History Museum, The Science Museum, The Royal Albert Hall, and of course, my personal favorite (favooooorite, actually) The Victoria & Albert Museum all by taking the subway that leads "to the museums".

When I visited London for the first time(that feels so cool, saying it), I totally tripped over the museums. And Victoria and Albert, with its "2,000 years of culture" was easily the best. It has beautiful Greek and Roman sculptures; dedicated sections containing artifacts and finery from every major civilization from the last two millenia; sections dedicated to photography, architecture, glass(!), fashion amongst many, many other things. Add to this its heart-stopping Cast Courts, the V&A is an excellent place to potter about on a hot (or cold, in this case) afternoon. Then, you can step outside to the large courtyard and ponder thoughts while wordlessly conversing with the quiet fountain in the center.

The first time I went there, I had with me my sister's brand new DSLR camera which I had only barely learned to operate. I spent an entire morning learning to take better pictures at V&A. Hercules, Venus etc were forced to pose for portraits they didn't ask to be made.

This time around, I went to the V&A as much to pay a perfunctory visit and renew ties, as to catch the popular Maharajas exhibition which was running into its last few days. The India section (desultorily bundled off under "South Asia" whereas China got its own section. The blood, it boils.) had quite a few Mughal treasures the last time around, so I knew what to expect.

The ticket queue on a Friday afternoon was frustratingly long and I decided, eventually that I didn't want to look at any more romanticized Mughal artifacts. Especially when I had to choose between this and another very interesting exhibition on electronic/digital art called Decode. I bought tickets for Decode and spent a jolly half hour going through very cool exhibits. Fractal art, Visual Effects using sensors, smoky picture walls, Video montages etc etc. Fun stuff.

From here, I went off to Leicester Square to buy tickets for a musical for the weekend only to queue at too many places without getting either the right seats or the right price or the right dates. That done, I spent about thirty minutes trying to decide where I wanted to eat lunch at. It was bad enough that I had to do the lunch ritual alone, and to make matters worse, I was stuck with the task of choosing where. I cannot begin to relate the emotional pressure that was upon me. Pasta? No No. Traditional food? Too complicated. Chinese? Bleh. Indian? Definitely not. In the end, I did what every idiotic-tourist-who-can't-make-decisions does. I went to Burger King.

From there I hopped over to Covent Garden for a round of coffee and watched some nice street performances. There was the stout man with a beard singing in his deep, baritone voice and being merry and cheerfully flirting with passing girls. There was the girl juggling knives, balancing from on top of poles hoisted by four men("three of who were drunk and one of who needed to pee") who made fun of some poor volunteer ("Give it up foooooor, Steeeeeve!"). There were the hip-hop dancers cheered on by loud Spanish girls. There was also, the customary singer of songs of broken hearts and unrequited loves calling as if to those sitting and sipping solitary coffees in the cold, by themselves. From my few times there, I can declare this a standard Covent Garden evening.

Special mention must go to our man who took off a piece of clothing for each time he goofed his act up. He went from being fully clothed to boxers to black-chuddies to pink chuddies on an icy evening while happily noting how this was "his first show in weeks, thanks to it being a lot warmer". We all laughed good naturedly and thanked god for making 2 degrees a lot warmer than -3.

Later that evening, we went to a nice English pub called Barney's in St. Albans. It was Friday night and everybody was sloshed. Girls walked around in clothes that I worried would give them hypothermia. People were darting in and out of the smoking area outside. A few stumbled over to the wine cellar downstairs and I very prudishly looked away. One smiling woman was blowing candles off her birthday cake.

We spoke for a while but I cannot, for the life of me, remember what about. It might have been about how people manage to endure the cold while dressed in scraps. It could have been about traditional ales. It could have been cellphones. Whatever it was, it must have been funny. For I remember laughing a bit. Or perhaps I was drunk.

Day Three

2010-01-20T03:37:00.007+05:30

The weather began to improve and the snow was thawing. There were patches of grass now jutting out and the gray driveway was covered in translucent, thin sheets of ice. I lazily set out on day three, with grand plans in hand, for the very famous Tate Modern Gallery on Southbank. Now The Tate Modern, opened in 2000, is supposedly one of Britain’s most popular tourist attractions. The Tate gallery originally referred to the collection of art from around the world stored at the pretty and proper gallery in Pimlico. Now there are two Tates. Tate Britain is the gallery of art as it evolved through the ages in Britain and elsewhere. Tate Modern is dedicated solely to art of the contemporary form. Where the former is an old lady in a blue cardigan sipping tea and discussing “…that outrageous story in the paper today”, the latter is a tattooed skin-head, with earphones stuck to ears, and hair dyed purple (and possibly gay).

Like great travelers (that I am one of the foremost, there is no doubt) will tell you, the art of traveling well lies in blending in, of taking in elements of local life and going with the flow. This I did to the full, by carrying a copy of Time Out London guide in hand and by idiotically wandering all around Southark tube station looking for Tate.

As if starting out late wasn’t bad enough, my complete inability to read maps didn't help. Walking from Southark station to Southbank, I finally found Tate Modern morosely looking down at me from behind many other art galleries. On my last trip to London, intended as I had to visit both the Tates, Tate Britain bored me so much that I happily gave 'Modern a miss. Tate Britain isn't so bad, actually. But how many paintings can you look at anyway. I can look at a few dozen, and occasionally go ahh and smile; then I head for the cafe. I found out only much later that Tate Modern is more popular and cooler than Tate Britain and all that (Time Out knows so much, it isn't funny). The Tate Modern building used to be a power station until it was converted into an art gallery in 2000. It is a less than ordinary square building, stout and dark from the outside. A large grey ramp takes you through to the reception and shop. The left side of the building is called the Turbine Room for that was where the turbines were housed in the days of the building's dark and murky past.

There were many exhibitions on on that day. Each of these was sponsored by corporate majors like UPS, and Ernst and Young. I expected to have epiphanies dawning to clear my pedestrian incomprehension of modern art upon entering Britain's most acclaimed collection of the stuff. But the gray area lies intact. This was not conventional art, and in that some were striking. A good few paintings/displays, to me, achieved a good balance between being both artistic and managing to convey something powerful and profound. My lungs were taxed sufficiently in suppressing laughing-fits at my own rude jokes about most other paintings.

I could however appreciate only the more famous artists- Picasso, Matisse, Bacon, Warhol et al. The emphasis on educating the interested and curious on important milestones and artists is simply remarkable. An information room lets visitors browse all details of the collection, request info and sign up for art clubs. They have free-art appreciation camps for young people. My favorite bit was the many video stations playing films on art and the evolution of the gallery. There were some counters where you could watch mini biopics on artists you were interested in. The visitors at the gallery were much younger than at any other place i've seen in London.

One display, called Thirty Pieces of Silver by a recent artist had thirty sets of silver cutlery steamrolled and suspended from the roof a few inches above the ground using gossamer threads. "It took us three weeks to set this up" a man whose name tag read Matthew said. Matthew works for Tate Modern and explained that this is from the Tate's permanent collection and tried to explain to a confused looking me that it was quite a task to choose the sets from the larger collection that will go on display.

I liked this exhibit partly for its name. The display speaks of how people are presented silver at weddings and happy occasions which are later discarded without a second thought. Thirty pieces of silver were given to Judas as a bribe to betray Jesus and the artist thinks that discarding gifts listlessly amounts to betrayal of symbols of warmth and love.

"That is why Tate Modern is so popular, we get all kinds of people. Ones interested in art and the people who normally don't visit art galleries." Matthew said, while asking me in the same breath if I liked art. I sheepishly admitted that I belonged to the second category.

He lived in Calcutta for six months doing charity work many years ago and wanted to visit Darjeling and Agra but didn't leave Calcutta simply because he loved its people. "People there can smile in the face of any conditions" he reminisced. "Very political people there" I said, talking of West Bengal's communism irrelevantly, responding to his stereotypical notions with some of my own. "Which is the city known for its technological expertise?" he asked of Bangalore before advising me on what places to visit in Europe, stifling a chuckle when this non-lover-of-art screamed "Rome."

Finishing with Tate, I crossed the Millenium Bridge over the river to St. Paul's Cathedral. It was beginning to get dark and it was too late to take the St. Paul's tour. I took a few pictures, took a look inside and left.

God, the sky is beautiful before sunset. And the trains? They're insane.

Day Two

2010-01-18T05:01:00.001+05:30

The sun rises at 8 a.m here. I don't normally get to witness twilit mornings at home for...umm..obvious reasons. And so, waking up at 7.50 leaves me feeling like a hero. What's more, it had just started to snow. The last time I saw snow was nearly ten years ago in Manali.

Snow is awesome when it's fresh and white. Duty bound as a tourist to make a racket and behave atrociously, I went and frolicked around in the snow until the time my brain couldn't detect body parts. We had a raucous snow-fight in which my sister, dressed very primly for office, got badgered from all sides with snowballs. The husband and wife settled all domestic scores with this battle and I ran around yelping mindlessly. Perfect family moment. The only thing missing was a dim-headed dog. I covered that base.

Day two was meant for time spent at home. I discovered many wonderful things. Deal or No Deal is a wonderful show. I want to go play too! So much money. All for nothing. And the t.v programming that I loved so much- Home Redecoration shows, petty auction shows etc, last time round are actually the favorites for over-70s. I really am a lot mature for my age. And Hip-Hop is so in around here. Don't get me wrong but all the top ten songs from here feature black men and women wearing too much bling making ass if to sing. Oops. Extra s there.

The evening was reserved for watching Avatar 3D. At IMAX. Burning yet? Oh wait, wait, hold the fire. The fellow who 'welcomed the audience' to the 'IMAX experience'(First time I got welcomed into a cinema by a 'host') proudly repeated the cinema's punchline: "This is Britain's largest screen". Yes, please call for the fire engines now. The screen at IMAX was HUGE. I'd watched the movie already, and was a wee bit tired. But well, it was a great experience.

We walked from the IMAX at Waterloo, crossing (what my sister says is called) the Waterloo Bridge over to Strand for dinner at a restaurant called Thai Square. The walk itself was pretty spectacular. The views of the National Theater and the river were splendid.

Thai Square at strand is a pretty little restaurant serving (duh!) Thai cuisine, with sculptures of elephants and general Thai miscellany. I had some kind of soup with mushrooms and lemongrass- It was sour and the temperature was rather perfect for the weather. Fried tofu was served with (what I thought was) really good sauce- chilly flakes and spices based in honey. For the main course, I had noodles that I feared would set my tongue on fire; which were really quite good nevertheless.

We took the tube from Charing Cross station to Euston and from there to home. The Charing Cross station platform walls have very pretty black and white drawings of horses and carriages. Somewhat unusual considering most other places have advertisements. I have a picture here somewhere.

The more I take them everyday, the more I fall in love with the train-service. Maybe I'll write a song that goes "This is a London Midlands train service...to your heart". Time to stop. Toodles.

Day One

2010-01-13T07:53:00.004+05:30

Can you do the Big City Smile? I'm hopeless. I don't understand the dynamics of the Smile. People's eyes meet entirely impersonally and ta-da they flash the Smile. I used to find it extremely nice, this whole grinning at strangers and going-Hello-because-you-have-to-thing. But I've grown out of it now. I can live with it, definitely, but I so suck at it. I always get the timing wrong. I either smile too unconvincedly or time it too late. Practice, practice!

But give me some credit. All that co-ordinated smiling is difficult to manage while navigating oneself around in zero-degree temperature and managing to move around whilst decked in six layers of clothing, with gloves, a scarf, a cap and an enormous handbag. Grace wasn't one of my redeeming qualities anyway.

So I woke with first-day-tourist-gusto of the finest quality and took off to London; which is currently in its Mr.Hyde phase. Most places are unrecognisable, cold(what an adjective. I outdo myself all the time) and hostile. This charming park in Russell Square, I have nice pictures of from 2007, now looks grave and dead. The cafe in it looks haunted. People are walking around like (fashionable) zombies. In a place where everybody wears black, grey or beige, I looked like a repulsive, walking, talking, stumbling wedding cake at the proverbial Undertakers' Convention. I had no plans at all for the day and arbitrarily chose to pay the British Museum a visit. I can see half a dozen people laugh at that. Please, I could think of nowhere else to go. An exhibition called "RevolutiON Paper" about Mexican revolutionaries and prints/drawings currently on at the British Museum. Another one on Aztecs (sponsored by ArcelorMittal, Indian name. w00t.) which I will go to one of these days)Interesting stuff. I spent very little time at TBM. More time was spent in transit(on that lovely,lovely piece of underground railway network they call the Tube) staring at a map than at any one place. It seems I am completely out of ideas. The weather doesn't help at all. The temperature isn't intolerable per se. But so only until the wind blows. At that point, it feels like I could break into the first building I can find and seek warmth and comfort while politely holding its inmates hostage(so what if I don't have a gun? I have charm).

After limitless wandering, I went to the London Bridge and walked along the insanely cold pier. The Thames isn't the winsome-st of water bodies even in summer. Imagine then, the terrible sight, more distressingly, the thought it is in this weather. Brrr.

All that walking lead me to Monument. The Monument, located, at, wow, Monument, is a stone column built as a memorial to the Great Fire of London of the 17th century. The fire lasted for three days and wiped out a large chunk of London. The monument itself is a large Roman column standing in the midst of very sophisticated, modern buildings. To say it is symbolic would be swimming in cliche. It is nevertheless, history amidst London's perennially-new face. Monument recently underwent restoration and was opened to the public. It is a single spiral stairway spanning 307 steps that lead all the way to the top of the column from where you get panoramic sights of London.

I thought my lungs would spring out in protest, but the climb was worth it. London looked white and misty from the top. With a good camera and conducive weather, this is a nice place to visit. The American women there wouldn't agree. "6 pounds for that?" one girl shrieked as all of us carefully climbed down the stairway. The entire monument has an internal radius of three metres or so. And the climb is physically demanding (They know that. Everyone gets a 'Certificate' on getting the top and back. I wonder if I can add this one to my resume. Hmmm?)

"You know, I've lived in this city since birth. But I've never come here." a nice English man who offered to take pictures as I posed like an idiot said. "This and St. Pauls' Cathedral over there" he pointed at the famous dome. "They say there are whispering galleries there. Where you can speak in a low voice..." his voice now dropping to a whisper "...and someone at the other end could hear you." I got a little freaked out after that and left soon afterwards.

The sun proceeded to sink at around four and I decided to call it a day. My trip back home was punctuated with colorful headlines of an evening paper writing about Blair, the cheat and Cheryl Cole's virginity amongst other things. And yes, I can happily claim I'm jetlagged now. Sounds so cool. "Oh man. Jetlagggg". Let me say that again. "God, so tired. Must be jet-lag". I wonder if I can get jet-lag t-shirts and wear it around in Bangalore.

My other achievement for the day was figuring out how this dratted DTH contraption and the sister's gorgeous LCD t.v works. I can now change channels without the t.v going kaput. I'm so proud of me.

Day Zero

2010-01-13T07:02:00.001+05:30

After weeks of tackling travel-people with twisted sense(s) of humor and (mis)managing two thousand three forty things, we finally hopped on a flight and traveled to here.
The signs have been good thus far. The immigration fellow at BIAL (BIAL! First time. Whee!) looked at my passport and went "So, yen Siri, yell hogtidira?" The heart, it swells with pride. The sort of thing that will make amma cry and feel vindicated for naming me so.

My expert opinion on BIAL is that it is a decent airport. Certainly not bad. We may not have seen too many airports but we have seen good old HAL airport through its many avtars, through the days when J.H Patel rubbed shoulders with anopheles mosquitoes(arre, metaphor saar), and when the fellow at HAL airport explained that the Bangalore airport was justifiably sloppy because it was 'not Singapore' to amma.So, my opinions can be considered credible. I spent most of the time waiting for the flight speaking loudly over the phone and being generally obnoxious. The Turkish(I think) men in front of me at security check kept glancing back and saying strange things. They could have been talking about flowers, but the tongue made them sound extremely sidey.

I caught Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on the flight(This is important, because I say so)-- the earliest form of chicklit, discounting Austen maybe. Was breezy and funny. And god, I luuurve Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend. Not the sentiment, no (Liquid cash is better than jewelry no? Hell, plastic money became all the rage only after Pretty Woman) but the humor in the song is oh so...(He's your guy when stocks are high, but beware when they start to descend, it's then that those louses go back to their spouses, Diamonds are a girl's best friend).

My flight was via Dubai. ("Thank you for flying Emiraat"). The airport is all that Dubai is to the world-- a grand picture of limitless luxury and dazzling, mythical opulence. I spent hours walking around the place. The duty free shopping area is, like my sister correctly warned me, 'More mall than airport'. Trust me to go looking for a place to surf the net and nearly miss a flight. I Had to run quite a long distance to make it through the 'Last Call' (what an unnecessarily ominous thing to say about a plane. Pah) This is the story of my life--a constant battle with time.

I struck conversation with a Law student from Bangladesh as he wondered if I was having a heart attack from doing a P.T. Usha. "You're an engineer! Ah, you must've watched Three Idiots then." he laughed.cheerily and I shook my head in dismay. Even as I sprinted like a mad woman towards the gate I saw several isolated instances of people reading Two States by Chetan Bhagat. That man is taking over the world.

More politically incorrect observations, did you say? Yes, Yes, this is just the place. My flight was full of Arab rich-kids. There you go. And Emirates' emergency-escape-procedure videos had one guy in a muslim skull cap who, any self-respecting immigration officer would slot as a 'potential threat to national security' aided solely by his sharp intuition. Enough? Most of the women in Emirates' advertisements are European; and rarely Arab. I should stop, no?

The flight to Heathrow was turbulent in patches. So much, at one point, that the hibernating bear of an Arab rich-kid sitting next to me and I had to hold the contents of my food tray lest it prance around on unsuspecting fellow passengers. And food I had enough of. I didn't want to be rude to those nice flight attendants and refrained from refusing any food they offered me. After a while, they didn't bother asking if I wanted something to drink/eat and simply plonked everything on my tray and marched off (gracefully, needless to say).

The forward/downward cameras on the plane were really interesting. This is the first time I've seen them. They project views from the front of the plane and of below throughout the flight. Some of the bits were brilliant. The view outside the window while taking off Dubai must be the prettiest there is. And no, I couldn't spot the Burj. The view of London during the daytime before landing is charming as I remember it. This time however, the fog made it impossible to make anything out. We were offered sporadic glimpses of city-lights but those were too brief. The 'view from the forward camera' is supposedly the view that the pilots have. I said a silent prayer as it flashed images of white nothingness and tried to concentrate on Transformers 2 instead.(What a terrible movie to watch when your legs feel like cement and you haven't slept). I also watched 500 Days of Summer. Very cute. Joseph Gordon Levitt is my latest crush. After that cute Arab flight attendant. And that omg-level Brit guy on the flight who I was loudly telling K about. I am writing about random people I was leching at. Can I stoop any lower?

Annnnyway. We finally landed and reached. And my sister toh-tally fawned over me and emptied half the stores into dinner which I obediently ate (Refusing food is considered rude in some cultures). Ah, so everything was going well. I mean, how much better can this get? Like amma rightly estimated, what can make me happier than being in a place where the sun lazily rises at 9 and hurriedly sets at 4? Nothing, did you say? Full points.

But, erm, things turned out a little differently. The sister trudged in importantly and has given me a six columned Excel sheet to fill in details of where I will go, what time I will get there and what my (hourly)agenda for each of the thirty days is. "You're on HOLIDAY. I want you to spend each of these days well" she says with so much intensity, she looks a wee bit like Urmila Matondkar from those hopeless films on maniacs RGV made (Kaun. whattafilm). Thus begins the holiday.

Beauty * Writing Talent = Constant?

2010-01-07T01:17:00.002+05:30

I'm starting off a post on a book of 'confessions' with a confession of my own: I love beauty pageants-- the beautiful clothes, the glitz, the celebrity, the pretense of being part of a bigger, nobler purpose and ostentatious shows. What is not to like? But this isn't a particularly easy topic of discussion. Such admissions are usually met with a self-righteous remark or two about how shallow beauty contests are, how big a farce it all is and so on.

This automatic distaste for beauty pageants brings to mind the Comedian from Alan Moore's Watchmen (notice how I redeem myself by making a reference to a contemporary masterpiece), which I am currently reading. The Comedian sees with clarity the farce that the world is. It is is his acceptance of the world's iniquities and ironies that gives him the ability to fight crime, albeit without much of a conscience(I haven't finished the book yet, so don't tell me if he turns out to be a saint). The Comedian, for instance, would have no issues with the 'intelligence' of beauty contests. He'd happily embrace(considering his lascivious ways, that makes an accidental pun) the inanity and laugh at it all. Getting over their silliness is a good way of enjoying the funner sides of 'inner beauty', 'women of substance' and 'beauty with a purpose'. Besides, the only way one will end up getting disappointed with beauty pageants is if one really expected them to be about women of "charm, grace and wisdom".

After that elaborate argument in defence of beauty contests, and having earned your intelligent self's disapproval, we move on to the more intriguing confessions of a could-have-been beauty queen. Readers of Sunday papers' literary sections will have heard of Ira Trivedi for her second book The Great Indian Love Story. I just finished reading her first book What Would You Do To Save The World? - Confessions of a Could-Have-Been Beauty Queen (2006)

What Would You....is a novel about a twenty-year old Economics student, Riya who follows her childhood dream of participating in "The Miss Indian Beauty Contest". She takes a semester off her course at Wellesley college to take part in the event. Her portfolio, taken at Indore by the family photographer with her posing in gaudy make-up courtesy a local beautician Juhi("who likes to be called Jewels"), is accepted by the organisers of Miss Indian Beauty, not before asking her what her height is. The question is so ridiculously important that it is checked and cross checked several times, the author claims. What's more, it is the title of one of the chapters in which the author explains why there is a strict minimum height cut-off for all contestants. Riya's experiences during the one month training period leading up to the contest is the premise of the book.

"I beg to differ. I don't think that Miss Indian Beauty is a contest held just to enter the movies. The pageant aims to find a girl who epitomises India in every way, from her beauty, to her morals to her intelligence. She is the paragon of Indian womanhood, and has the responsibility of representing the Indian woman at a global level." God, I sounded like I had stepped straight out of the beauty bible. I must have sounded staggeringly corny.

'OK, well then...Miss...'

'Riya.'

'Nice name, unique. Ok then Riya, why don't you name for me a single Miss Indian Beauty who has done anything other than join the movies to rise to stardom. Can you name a Miss Indian Beauty who has gone on to become an acclaimed academic or activist?"

"Well, I am not saying that, but entering the movies is not the point of the pageant, that's all I want to say."

He laughed loudly, raising his head up high. A bit of his moustache went into his mouth. "Listen babe."

"Please don't call me babe Mr. Kakre." I was getting angry now.

"Wah, Wah, we have quite a chingari here! Listen Riya, if you weren't pretty, and you are quite pretty, you wouldn't be here: the Miss Indian Beauty contest is only a certification of your beauty.It is a stamp of approval that you're beautiful enough to be in the movies, and once you are branded, the signal turns green and you are allowed to go."

I had no reply to give him. I thought I might as well shut up. I was obviously pathetically failing to support my argument.

That was the end of the session. It had lasted only twenty minutes, but it made me think afterwards. My arguments with Mr. Kakre had unleashed the thoughts that I had pushed away into the coner of my mind. They had emerged again with a vengeance. I wasn't here to make it in the movies, so why was I here? What did I want out of this? Like everyone else, I wanted fame and glory, but was being Miss Indian Beauty going to get me that?

Ira Trivedi was herself a Miss India contestant in 2005, and she makes no bones about the fact that this is her story. WWYDTSTW isn't really a novel in the strictest sense. It is one person's account of her experiences, her opinions of people and, possibly, her bitterness. An account with real names swapped with fake ones, which people clued in on the Miss India contest can easily figure out(I can proudly say that excepting the skin specialist, I knew the original names of each of the prominent references. Even the contestant who came second. Yay me!). There is Donald Singh, the holistic guru and nutritionist, Emma Contractor, the diction expert, Yasmeen Wadia, the choreographer. Textbook Roman A Clef.

Now I am sure a lot of people--me included-- immediately write Trivedi off just because she is a beauty pageant contestant. I was careful to avoid slotting her as an airhead just because she had perfect BMI. I tried to be optimistic about the book before I started reading it. Especially considering Ira Trivedi has previously lived all over the world and studied Economics at Boston University and all that. Sadly, it's just as well to judge the book without reading it. For the writing is most terrible. Grammatical errors, wrong usage apart, the book has no depth, no soul, and fails miserably at drawing you in. The no-dialogue(a personal peeve) adds to the meh-ness of it. Clearly the lady isn't much of a writer. It's as if she happily forgot all about writing a book and sat for hours and wrote one loooong email about her experience to her editors who then chopped the text into a few chapters and quickly had Sushmita Sen release it.

I will cruelly say that author has made no effort towards making this an interesting story. This, however, turned out to be a good thing. Superficial and shallow as the perspectives are, the plot(or whatever little there is of it) remains largely free from embellishment by stereotypes. By writing exactly what she saw, without dwelling too much on the meaning of things, Trivedi manages to write of the other side of beauty pageants-- Beauty Pageant Q&A books, the mismanagement and erratic schedules, the contestants being 'used' by sponsors, t.v channels and the organisers to market products, the useless nutrition regime, and about how contestants are confined to the hotel for nearly a month etc.

In all, What Would You... is an absorbing email to read, an intriguing blog to scan and a terrible book to be stuck reading. To be fair, I found that the writing becomes bearable after a few pages. One never knows. It might have been my stubborn resolve to finish the book.

I am aware I've written a thousand or so words on a book no one has heard of or cares much about.But, true Miss India fans (erm, I am one. Almost. So?) and chicklit enthusiasts will understand my distress. What I'm ruing is the loss of an opportunity. 'An insider's view of the goings on at the Miss India Contest' is screaming out 'possibilities' to me. This could have been a very entertaining book, if not top literary lists. Instead, What Would You... is just one person, who admittedly threw away her chance at the crown, writing down her opinions without the slightest artistry. She took a premise brimming with potential and flattened it into pulp resembling the jowar rotis they were forced to eat(that comparison brings it to two people lacking artistry).

Oh, what could have been...

PS- This review in Mint of Ira Trivedi's The Great Indian Love Story has nearly the same things to say about her second book as I do of the first.

PPS- They should have been really desperate to use a stiletto on the cover. Really now.

Also, Miss Trivedi got an MBA from Columbia after writing her first novel. Hmmph.

That snarky conversation in the excerpt above alludes to Prahlad Kakkar's session. Kakre, as he is known in the book, is described as having 'a fetish for women' by the author. Funnily enough, it was he who was asked to launch the book along with Sushmita Sen.

A Beautiful Mess

2010-01-04T15:47:00.002+05:30

The Maa and The Kaa were inspecting a dull mound on the bed; tut-tutting, pointing and grimacing at its composition and size.
"How long has this been here?" the sister enquired, pointing at the scene of the crime.
"Weeks, months perhaps?" said Maa, the righteous sentinel.
"Pathetic" Kaa said, contorting her face in the manner that she does so well.
Maa, waste words as she doesn't, pointed heaven-ward doing that very contortion of pretty facial features which her elder daughter's genes so deftly copied.

And what did I do? I counted on what younger, average-looking, dim children suffer at the hands of not-so-proud parents all through their lives-- the undivided attention of no one-- to rescue me. I hoped nobody noticed as I tried to sneak-- from underneath the pile of clothes, books and stale-food-- out to a safer haven. Alas, it was not to be. The Duo(this is me living out my childhood fantasies of contributing to Gokulam some day) noticed a small lump, decidedly duller than the rest of the mound breaking away and moving in the general direction of the television.

"Oh good you're here. You can clean up this mess now" the Kaa smiled.
"Huh? I can't. Exams, woman!" I countered unconvincingly, a little like John LeCarre's Englishmen ("Hope in their faces and none in their hearts").
But the Younger-Child Effect kicked in crucial seconds too late, like these things tend to, and complex physical forces rendered my voice unheard and out-of-range; perhaps it made me invisible as well, but then given the hundred something post-its on the mirror in the room, it was difficult to check. The duo then moved on to more important subjects of discussion such as which aunt was at loggerheads with who else, and what pujas were to be undertaken to ensure The Kaa encountered no visa troubles and suchlike-- all as I silently considered my options.

They would have done well to know that I was made of sterner stuff. having practised the art for twenty or so years, I did what I do to survive. Stretching that streak of defiance I was born with (like the Maa describes it to puzzled relatives in lousy attempts to explain my 'eccentricities') into a full-blown landscape of rage, a glowering mark of protest, a tapestry of anger, I stormed off to the living room, eying the remote with all the mortal angst I could muster. This walk from my domain(Maa would have said 'cave') to the holy shrine of the television, savior of exam-ravaged warriors, was a show of strength, a giant leap.

Aaaand, I got as far as the remote.

As one heard the horrific, chillingly blase sound of the Mains going off. Click.

It was the Kaa. Leaning against the wall, listening, with rapt attention, to Ma recounting her second cousin's wedding in 1983 from her excellent, photographic memory, not to mention the three thousand weekly revisions(done in my reluctant presence) Kaa had preempted my claim to the basic human right of entertainment. In one graceful motion, she flicked the ominous looking switch that dictated power to the entire house, not taking her eyes off Ma the whole time.

For a moment, I contemplated rejoicing this acknowledgment of my presence and kissing the ground she walked on and singing eulogies. But then, that unused part of my brain dedicated to Self-Respect took over. Streak-of-defiance in place, walked up, shot a menacing sideways glance and boldly flicked the switch back on, like a triumphant gladiator.

I nearly died.

You, gentle reader, are probably questioning my fears. As you read this, you are descending to doubt my judgment. What after all can a pint sized (a large pint, if you ask me) woman do to me-- the general terror of professors,auto-drivers,unruly motorists, and sundry. At this point, I must point to you the complexity of the thing. You see, I am tormented by two terrible recurring nightmares. One involves poisonous snakes chasing me down as I run around, arms flailing. The other, admittedly scarier, involves my working for the sister in some organised setup, like-horror of horrors- her being my boss at office.

"You didn't do what I asked you to do three days ago, when I'd told you to do it in one hours time, and when I'd told you it was very-urgent when you were still working on the excel sheet I asked you to make to last week?" she will ask her victims, politely, with synchronised eyelash batting. And Christ! For the sake of those poor dah'links condemned to work for her, I hope her company's medical benefits covers psychotherapy. (I've stopped taking on the men in the family who complain about how women love to nag, of late. Poor things. Enough on their plates already.)

You see, the Kaa has an impeccable way of working her charms. Of keyholing her Fascist schemes through dastardly Gandhian methods.

As I checked my email for only the third time that morning, the Kaa gingerly walked in to my domain (To refer to it by 'room' is so bourgeoisie, besides it doesn't resemble any such mundane dwelling. Any more.) and began to relocate all the important thingummies that populated it. Piece by dust-smothered-piece. With poetic flair. And drama so thick, it was floating around in blobs. When I objected, she tried to reason- with raised-eyebrow and those big brown eyes stretched into ominous question marks.

"I positively NEED my textbooks from two years ago AND that soiled sock AND that empty pack of chips to rest on my bed because..."

"Hmmm?" pout, raised eyebrow, straight face.

"...I'm an ENGINEER" I shouted, withdrawing even as I uttered the words. After four years of explaining every silly quibble with this stream of logic, one gets a little, comfortable, you know?

Kaa threw at me one more disgusted look and shook her head to continue with the cleaning, well on course to her moral victory. Maa, who had since- without stopping to observe the goings-on at chez yours truly's- gotten on to the details of the birth of said second-cousin's grandchildren, entered the fray and began to tend to the other objects of my affection- placed for convenience sake, as the intelligent reader will understand, on my bed.

"DON'T THROW THOSE EMPTY SHOE BOXES. I'VE BEEN COLLECTING THEM FROM 2004!" I screeched furiously.

Ma, gently(This family belongs on Broadway, I tell you!) placed the cardboard boxes on my bed and proceeded to help my sister who was by now making a big show of carrying large textbooks across the room-- Imagine the magnitude of the story. NRI daughter arrives for well-deserved holiday only to tend to problematic (possible deranged) younger sibling, who she has taken care of like she were her own child ever since age seven. A Scream. No. Make that a full throated HOWL. That's what this is. A howl.

The little details of my ineptitude and cruel indifference will be lustily exchanged at family gatherings. It will pass from mouth to ear, over and over again. Each time, convoluted into a new truth. Someone, somewhere will add a cigarette between my fingers and silk stockings to my wardrobe. And in one of the later versions, I will resemble an evil, scheming vamp with too much lip-gloss who tortured her family and robbed it of its meager fortunes. My great-grandchildren will talk about this, standing on the outer fringes of the assortment of family that will surround me when I'm lying on my death-bed, and all they'll have to say is how the wretched hag deserves to die for smoking filtered slims while her poor little rich sister toiled like the heroine of a Brothers Grimm fairytale.

But no. I couldn't let this happen. Like any political strategist, or Chess genius--I strike a fine balance between the two, I assure you-- will tell you: A truce is better than a tiff. A Draw is better than a rout.

And so I sat the two ladies down (I urge you to think metaphorically, the bed was simply inundated with priceless objects) and had a gentle heart-to-heart. Don't you cynically underestimate girl-talk. it is an evolved art: It took five generations of women in the family to perfect it, and we're already half way on the path to communication.

"I really want to...erm...clean the mess in the room, I really do. But I don't know how. I need these things, you know? See this large, tattered Yuvraj Singh poster? Don't you remember how attached I was to it, back in school? And this solitary shoe? This rubber snake? It was a birthday present! As for these Readers Digests from 1992, they're frigging relics. Considering the ruin RD went to in the late '90s. And about the pale,brown broken coffee brewer" I said, reaching from further under the pile to pull out a round coffee-maker. "erm...never mind." I said quietly, knowing full well that it is the thought that counts.

Two sets of large brown eyes stared at me.

"I've been wondering about that coffee machine for years." Maa noted, incredulously.
"It was white when it went missing" Kaa offered, looking a tad bit scared "and you weren't even born then" she said, eyes so wide, I could have paddled around in it.

Both ladies hurriedly scurried out of the room.

And that was the last I saw of them.

I have to only look left to see the sweater I wore two weeks back lazily stare back at me, sprawled as if it once had a life of its own which it has just lost. Another pair of jeans lies in an advanced stage of rigor mortis. A stack of textbooks is resting languidly in a corner of the room in a state of bliss I'd rather not interfere with.

As for Kaa, she has packed her bags and left for home, since. Not before testing herself for contamination by industrial effluents. Maa walks around with a gas mask around here. And my collection of Lays packets has seen sizable additions.

And I am at the centre of all this-- in the midst of my world. The proper order of things has been restored. Zeitgeist, unscathed.

2009

2009-12-27T02:24:00.015+05:30

I don't believe in year-end summaries/'best-of' lists. Most of them are never objective, rarely fair and mostly boring. Unless it's the Bangalore Times' round-up of earth-shattering celebrity break-ups and make-ups and such. Those are always fun to read.

But this year has been interesting (Yea, yea, like any other year will be)and this blog post is an attempt to introspect, look back, look within; a deeply personal analysis of what made this year in my life remarkable. Hardly as exciting as anything Bangalore Times has to say but that's life. This is an analysis of an ordinary girl's 2009 -- all for the reading pleasure(I'm being presumptuous, of course) of random people on the internet-- that's how deeply personal this is.

Getting down to business, indulge me as I tell you of lessons learnt from the year past:

February 2009
Sometimes, life takes its course. Karma tags along.
"No man is rich enough to buy back his past, sir Robert, not even you" says a conniving Mrs. Chevely to a man she is threatening in the movie An Ideal Husband. I haven't had to buy back pasts, nothing so sinister. Or glamorous. But there's no leaving anything behind. What goes around comes back around. Even if what I'm referring to may not even be a case of that Justin Timberlake song I used to like(don't tell anyone), karmas do run over dogmas.

April 2009
Don't listen to advice you didn't ask for.
J is a lady I would have never liked if I had had a choice. She is loud, thinks she is funny, and believes exactly what she wants. And those are not even the reasons I wouldn't be best-friends with her. She eyed me rather suspiciously initially (contemptuously, if my paranoid mind is taken seriously) but seemed to warm up to me later (Joy!).

The woman did, however, think that her infinite wisdom and expert advice was due and direly necessary in the case of this young girl-at-sea. J isn't exactly the set-hearts-aflutter type. Or your stoic and graceful girl-next-door. And the day I got advice on my social life from her, I had to put my foot down, make mental notes and perhaps etch them on some nerve tissue lest they get lost.

"So are you people seeing other people?" she enquired.
Everybody at the table hemmed and hawed and made reluctant conversation on ambiguities and ambivalence(s).
"Happens. Happens" she nodded like she had personally co-authored two books on the subject herself. "When I met Y, I knew he was the one." she assured us in response to doubts we hadn't raised, calmly telling us about wisdom that comes with time and how she expertly handled social pursuits and why I(the others had politely moved on to a private conversation) should learn from her. And then she descended into a detailed explanation of her fears over dating an engineer. (Y, that adorable goochi-woochi Y, was a 'software engineer')

"You know, ever since I've been a little girl, I've hated the Science-studying, equation-drawing, geeky types!(sic)My family is full of artists. Imagine how shocked they must have been." she said shrilly, as I went ' Awww' with all the sincerity I could muster in response to details of a relationship between two people one of who I had never met and the other, I'd known for three days.

The next half hour went relatively well: I intently listened to J's worries about the possible culture clashes between Punjabis and Malyalis. "How can they eat anything with grated coconut." she exclaimed worriedly while explaining the intricacies of this coupling fixed by the heavens themselves and how marriage-oh that scary proposition- was going to be a melange of clashes as much as cultures.She was all the more worried about that strange piece of garment the Malyalis wore. "Punjabis at home will go on about the munda in a mundu" she said in a tone that I judged (with only partial conviction) as humorous.
"So how did you meet Y" I said, recalling the standard-issue question one must ask fawningly in such type of matters and she waited for me to complete my question.
"You have met, haven't you?" I demanded in mock horror as the two of us laughed good-naturedly at my clever joke, tapping table tops and covering mouthfuls of spontaneous laughter.
"I can't wait to." she said, not noticing that I'd suddenly stopped laughing. "He's coming back from Dubai next year" she said with undisguised excitement, matching glee with a twinkle in her eye for the special Orkut-friend she'd finally see in flesh and blood.

March 2009
Generalisations Suck
Must've been 2. AM when I was reading about Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence or the art of teaching computers to think like humans. "Humans have the ability to estimate values in case of lack of information." the textbook declares, going on to discussing the challenge in getting computers to do the same. And I'm all Oh-my-god-are-you-kidding-me? Until now, I thought that was what we called the delicate act of conjecture. Of assuming what you thought was right when you didn't know better.

The last thing I want is for my dear old PC to start judging me without knowing details. Everybody else I know, has done that already.

August 2009
Karma and the strangeness of it.
You know the problem with believing that everything we do is the fruit of past actions? It is an idea that is impossible to subscribe to when you're knee deep in shit and something you will readily agree to when good things happen. Karma hangs confusedly in balance. Because great things happened, as did nasty shit.

September 2009
Bangalore Times rocks.
This year, something important changed in my life. After seven years of undulating support and loyalty to the Benett and Coleman group's flagship daily rag, I went back to my roots and to Deccan Herald. The mornings have changed forever. No Bangalore Times. No BT interviews of Kannada stars. No BT articles on what Manoviraj Khosla thinks of the financial repercussions of the Indo-Moldovan Nuclear deal. Except for that Panorama section (Which isn't so cool anymore, in the age of bookmarking sites) and the Sports section (At least they don't have Sourav Ganguly jokes), most other pages are sleep-inducing, to say nothing of their focus-dissolving splitting of articles and unceremoniously shoving details to page-59. Please Metrolife, get yourselves a booze-loving slut or two. Then the language of the articles might improve. (Degree in journalism strictly optional.)

November 2009
Pigs rule and donkeys work. Remember Animal Farm.

Mad month. Make or break. Priority mismatch. It broke.

December 2009
Age is not just a number
I turned 21 a month ago. Scary 21. Thats two years gone out of what I've reasoned will be the best eleven years of my life. Shrieeeek! I haven't even done anything. Looking back on four years of college, it seems like how-ever-much one tries to experience new stuff, avoid moping and learn to walk, there will always be tonnes left to do. So much to read, so much to know and so much to see.

This shall end with a sentiment that summarises much that can't be said (owing to lack of clarity besides lack of articulation-skills) perfectly and circumspect-ly: Ayyo!

Edit: I'm making this a tag. All of you do round-up posts too!
I shall tag Padma, Soda, Merin, Nakul, Chaitanya

Camden Town

2009-12-16T23:33:00.001+05:30

This is an account of my visit to zany Camden town, in August 2007, that was published in The New Indian Express's supplement Expresso sometime in June 2008. Good days those. Please excuse the goody-goody tone. Earnestness has bad side effects. Although I must say I quite like this piece.

Entry into Camden Town, London is a bit of a personality test. If you are the kind that is game for experimentation, enjoys alternative genres and has a taste for the bizarre, smile, as Camden Town welcomes you with its tattooed arms wide open. Alternately, if you are squeamish about boldly dressed people, punk and Goth cultures and can’t appreciate anything out of the ordinary, run! Camden Town is definitely not for the faint hearted.

After a visit to the very prim, proper, posh and upmarket locality of Wimbledon, we traveled to Camden Town, located at the other end of London—literally and figuratively. This is your Alternative paradise. Streets here are populated by tattoo parlours; it has people dressed in bizarre clothes, sells food and tribal art from across the world and throws you firmly out of your comfort zone

We saw a performer dressed as a native American beating tribal drums outside the tube station to catch the attention of passersby. It was a sight that requited photographic importance. We took out our cameras to click a quick picture and got a loud “Oye” of protest—a term, the semblance of which, you hardly hear in overtly civilized England. “You’ve got to pay me one pound for every picture you take.” He explained “I’m working here!” This is roughly the customer-satisfaction diktat that dominates Camden Town. If there were such a rule, it would be “We can’t care less”.

I have to admit, I was bewildered and took the advice of a Hindi speaking Pakistani gentleman, who manned a nearby shack selling junk jewelry, to not bother paying up. A little shop further ahead sold some more junk jewelry and traditional London souvenirs which included little Big Bens and coffee mugs sporting the names of famous areas in London. The next shock-and-recover maneuver occurred on seeing a box of candies labeled ‘Cannabis Lollies’ on the shelf in a store. I was relieved to know that these were harmless sugar confectionary which had nevertheless raised quite a storm among concerned parents in the UK. Like the pattern goes, everything at Camden Town is meant to amuse, if not always scandalize.

People that pompously wear their profaneness on their sleeves may find some assistance in the cause with T-shirt stores at Camden. The most popular T-shirts in London are ones with the ‘Mind The Gap’ motifs, derived from the London Underground safety announcement.

Meant to caution people about the gap between train and platform, the phrase has gained attention otherwise in pop culture puns. Among the many zany and quirky Tees, we found one with a picture of Pope Joseph Ratzinger and ‘Papa-Ratzi’ written under it. Wicked or witty? Categorise as you will.

The world famous Camden Market is a busy complex filled with stores that showcase and sell cultural artistry from around the world. Shops here sell clothes as diverse as Oriental and African to all that can be described as Bohemian. Food counters offer Thai and Chinese food at very reasonable prices, and if your food options are narrowed down to vegan, you could still get lucky in this haven for all things unusual. A little bit of exploration will lead you to ingenious miniature tribal musical instruments, masks, art, books and what have you. And if you spot a couple entangled in a passionate embrace right in the middle of the market, remember, it is rude to stare.

A houseboat ride through Regent’s Canal is another option you could take into the colourful high street. If you were on the lookout for more interesting encounters, walk right up to the self-anointed evangelists lodged at street corners and talk to them about why the world is headed to damnation. Be assured, Camden Town will never be short of interesting sights or people.

The Hopes and Tragedies of Oddadammed

2009-12-06T21:53:00.000+05:30

Odadammed is a busy place. Perhaps, the busiest in the city. The nice kind of busy, you know, with people streaming in and out of it. There is chatter of which ice cream flavors to buy, of what restaurant to choose, and if she will not look plump in that daring red dress she bought in haste. Odadammed gives you a remarkable license to scream out doubts about anything: muffin-tops or your promiscuous roommate or your sleazy boss because it wraps everything you say in a crisp layer of anonymity. Even the most gifted eavesdroppers have had to return empty-handed for all Odadammed has to offer is waves of white noise sparkled with an arbitrary frosting of unrelated words. Oddadamed is hardly a gossip's heaven. What self-respecting voyeur would be proud of intricate details concerning a sleazy, promiscuous muffin anyway.

I've snuggled under the protective comfort of Odadammed's blanket of sound too. Everybody in the city has. The square has shared many of my intimate secrets. Mostly the ones I would coo to Jane through our many walks, jostling with other passersby, and sometimes each other. I would point to her rude observations about a tourist at the streetlight, one-liner fantasies about us, jokes about somebody's hair and she would chuckle and nod. I remember winters when I've made uncomfortable admissions or felt the cold despite the jacket. I've mouthed guilty secrets on these paths. Sometimes she would be all ears. Other times, I'd have to content with the attention and kindness of Odadammed alone. Never a solitary secret here.

Today, I only wait as the white noise bounces of me. No Jane to point at the tourists and guffaw. I could describe their clothes later and share a laugh perhaps. Would she find it funny? With Jane, there's no saying. She can't usually help laughing at my 'Idiotic tourist' stand-up gig. I could greet her with one, perhaps. Will she come? With Jane, there's no saying.

I sit at Rio, the small cornerside cafe at the square.Instantly recognisable from from the thousands of tourist pictures one finds on the internet and in television travel shows. The square at Odadammed is the flame to touristic moths. And come they do, in droves. Just like the River and the Bridge. It is where everything is priced a just beyond reason. It is where artists will draw caricatures of yours for a few precious bucks. The portraits cost a little more. Ones with colour, more than that. The tourist couple posing for the colour portrait are paying good money for what their Canon and photoshop can do these days for free. They are perhaps in their early thirties? The woman looks eager. Ostensibly, this one is for the albums back home. The bloke does well to hide his impatience. Too well in fact. He looks a complete prick, Jane would have said. That is quite the same thing I would have told her. You can see he gives jack to the picture. A little less to the woman, maybe. You can see him eying young girls walking past. He may have been addicted to porn in college. And is probably flirting with a chick called Natasha in office. All, as his lady decides where in their pretty little pad this portrait will hang. For posterity, she will say with a smile to the bored artist after he is done. Jane says she hates stupid women a lot more than the philandering men they tag after.

But that is Jane. She has a thought for all the men she has met, and some of the men she hasn't. She has hated every man she has loved, she'd say.They were either too strong, too weak or too messed up. In retrospect only, I would silently hope.God knows her love isn't easy. So does the benevolent Odadammed, he after all has been in on our petty fights, our 'sweet nothings'(like the tabloids call it. We hate that term anyway) and our separate lonelinesses-- being thanked for which would have made the real Odadammed choke, roll over and die.

Odadammed, you see, was the name of a medieval warrior known and feared for the brutal ends his enemies met. Alas, he wasn't cruel, or valiant or barbaric enough to breach celluloid and have Gerard Butler play him. How was he to know the dynamics of Hollywood, poor man. He, however, caught the imagination of a pub owner, in the '70s who named a seedy little bar Odadammed's Head. A further development he wouldn't have thought much of was that the pub became a place for petty goons, hardened laborers-- hardly the sort of men he'd have befriended. Oddadamed's was a classic case of death liberating one from truths one needn't have known. For, another thing the place was infamous for was illegal trafficking of the contraband-- crack, weapons, women. The latter making the name of the pub an entirely unintentional, unenviable sexual innuendo. This, I take, would have been pretty hard hitting stuff, even for a steely, ruthless soldier who chopped off men's arms with their own swords.

The streetside artist is now finished with his portrait. The woman gushes and the man pays, not without bargaining on the price. Cheap bastard! I wonder if Jane would have liked a portrait of the two of us. Only if we were painted in neon, I suppose. I can tell she'd prefer caricatures to portraits. In art as in real life, my woman.

The closest thing we have to a portrait is a picture we took together in front of the Odadammed statue and fountains at the square. It is dark, neither of us sober, and lights of many colors illuminate our inebriated smiles as we make to take a dip in the fountains. This was years ago. It was more of a joke to us than symbolic or commemorative. We hated the statue of Odadammed. A ridiculous, ostentatious installation with too many lights and silly fountains. One would think the warrior's poor ghost had enough to resent but no! In the summer of 1987, a protesting crowd of homosexuals and transvestites had set fire to the Odadammed's head pub, prompting that iconic headline in The Daily Gazette: Gays Ravage Odadammed. It was a revolt against the oppression, harassment and bias by the local police. The incident caused much noise in the state, and before more chaos ensued, the then mayor quickly commissioned a monument in memorial to appease the gays. This gave way to the statue of a warrior atop a horse, in Roman sandals and a skirt (The sculptor erroneously thought he was Greek, when Oddadammed was actually Syrian) which now stands at the square christened Odadammed's Square (lending to the widely used, derisive schoolboy phrase 'as square as Odadammed'). Water from four different fountains coalesced at his feet. Each fountain representing, supposedly, different kinds of people. To people of different kinds, Odadammed is a relic to this day. You can see them devoutly walking around in T-shirts printed with the screaming headline from the '80s incident, in groups of twos, holding hands and taking pictures. The Odadammed Ravaged t-shirts, bearing the picture of some artist's representation of what he thought Odadammed looked like, holding another man's hands with a cheeky grin, some say, is more popular than t-shirts bearing the city's name, making Odadammed a veritable gay icon, and a universal pop-culture phenomenon.

We never bought those t-shirts. As a rule, every tourist city has a separate set of things to do and buy for the tourists, none of which is in any way connected to what the locals do. The locals, for instance, would never eat at the flashy food-joints near the bridge. it was simply something we never did. Just like Jane and I always hit the town on weekends(staying home is for the sober:Jane). Just how Jane and I never watched romantic comedies (I don't get them) or visited her parents(She can't stand their company) or wore red colored clothes (Red is too loud:J) or planned to holiday in the mountains(Bad memories of mine). As locals, we never went to the Museum of Love or visited cafe Rio. Which is what makes me uncomfortable today. Jane once spoke of how being a tourist- in spite of its obvious moronic trappings- was fulfilling. She thought tourists have no synthetic notions of what a city feels like, tastes like, where the best food is, or where the best bands play which gives them license to try new things without unimaginatively settling for what we always did. To try things without bias or prejudice. 'Being a tourist frees you from saying it's just something we don't do', she had argued, enthusiastically.

But we nevertheless considered Odadammed a place to only walk past. A means to an end. A colorful, sometimes eventful, flight to chosen destination. One never sat down at the Odaddamed square. That was what the tourists did. They ate and talked and took pictures. We always walked. It was one such walk that the fight broke. I said something about unfair judgment. She thought it was ironic. I asked why. For a man who judged indiscriminately, to ask for fair judgment was a little rich, she snapped. She was being unfair, I said. Why, she questioned brazenly. I never judge, I countered. She scoffed. I had walked off in rage. I heard a little bit about how I was the kind of man who never cared to listen to what a woman was saying because in my head, because I had already decided she wasn't smart enough. I had called her a vacuous bitch. Or something. That was the episode Jane and I had had. And the last one at that.

Now, as redemption, I do what every man hates to do. I wait. And I confront uncertainty. Possibly, rejection and heartbreak. In front of me, Oddadammed smiles a strange kind of smile. We share kinship over being misunderstood. At least you can change who they think you are, pal, he is saying to me, the skirt notwithstanding. Where I sit now, is at a table on a cobblestoned side-walk at the crossroads that lead to the monument at the square. I sit down where people always walked. Like one of the people Jane and I mockingly sympathised with. Poor geezers, we thought. He who sits at Oddadammed square having been our standard for extreme oddities. This brings me to another sorry snippet from Oddadammed's quiver. Say it fast, Jane had said excitedly, when we were walking from the bus station to the movies past Oddadammed once.

Oddadamed Square. Odd adammed square. Odd a dammed. Square. O da dammed square. I laugh as I repeat the name aloud to the bewilderment of a passing waitress. I sit at the square of the damned. Waiting with hope, where others always walked.

Epilogue:
I met Jane ten minutes later. I had hopelessly walked out of the cafe to be stopped by a bunch of tourists in Oddadammed ravaged t-shirts asking me to click a picture in front of the fountains. Just as I clicked, she tapped me on the shoulder and smiled sweetly. She was in a pretty red dress.

Interview: David A Bell

2009-12-05T11:41:00.002+05:30

David A Bell is a Canadian professor of Electronics. He has written various textbooks which are widely prescribed to students of engineering. We interviewed him over email for the Dept of Instrumentation Technology's fest TransIT 2009. This was featured in the fest newsletter. The entire interview is presented here with minimal editing. His website is at www.Davidabell.com

1)Could you describe your engineering career from the start? How was the transition from being a student to teaching to writing texts that now serve as reference?

My first employment as an engineer was with the Shortt & Harlands in Belfast Northern

Ireland

where I was born and grew up. My transition from student to engineer was not difficult, in fact in some ways it was almost like a continuation of college. I shared an office with several other young recently-hired engineers, and nearby offices were occupied by older, experienced, engineers who were our supervisors. Our offices were also on the periphery of workshops staffed by technicians who constructed prototypes of our designs. The work atmosphere was relaxed and friendly.

After some years with Short and Harland I moved to Canada and worked for companies in Halifax and Ottawa. In my first engineering job we were still designing vacuum tube circuitry, because the available transistors were very unreliable. Thermal runaway was a major concern. However, reliable transistors soon became available, and then everything switched over to transistor circuits. Bipolar junction transistors (BJTs) had been introduced only in the last year of my studies, so I had to do a lot of reading to teach myself transistor circuit design. When field effect transistors (FETs) became available, more study was necessary to learn FET circuit design. Then, of course, integrated circuits became an ongoing area of study. I also attended many design courses sponsored by my employers. Obviously, continuous learning is part of every engineers experience.

As well as circuit and system design, much of my work as an engineer involved technical writing; specifications, design reports, test procedures etc. I also did some travelling to companies who were contracted to my employer, and in this case I reported on the quality and progress of a particular project.

During the first year of my teaching carreer I found myself working harder than at any time previous! This was because (in company with other new college professors) I was reviewing the subjects I had to teach, preparing lectures and tests, and writing laboratory investigation procedures. Ontario had just started twenty new Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology, and the resources we needed were not available.

2)How is teaching Electronics and Instrumentation now different from how you were taught the same subjects?

As mentioned above, the material studied has changed considerably. However, the learning process is still fairly similar; student attend lectures, study text books, perform laboratory investigations, solve problems, write tests. Practical hands-on experience testing circuits in a laboratory is very important. I have heard of colleges where students are only allowed to witness laboratory demonstrations, and I see this as quite unsatisfactory. The availablity of calculators and computer circuit simulation is a major improvement on my own student experience.

3)What is the usual process of writing a textbook?

With few exceptions, I was unsatisified with the available text books when I commenced teaching electronics. So, I always prepared student hand-out sheets explaining theory and showing problem solutions. The handouts became a major resource for my text book writing. I cannot say how long my first book took to write, because of the process of interesting a publisher in the project. The procedure was: submit an outline and six chapters to a publisher, rewrite the six chapters to incorporate an editor's suggestions, receive a rejection, and then start over again with another publisher. When I did get my first book published, and then signed a contract for a second book, the second book was written, edited, and published within a year. That was because I had all of the material for the second book in the form of student hand-outs.

I try to write exactly the way I would lecture. The material has to be clearly understandable to students. The content has to cover the items listed in most course outlines, and in each new edition I have added new material and deleted material that has become outdated or less important. Updating a book usually takes me a year of something less than full-time work in my present semi-retired situation.

4) Do you agree with the methods generally adapted to teach engineering? (in the context of Instrumentation and Electronics). If not, what are the methods you would recommend?

I tend to agree with the typical engineering teaching methods.

5) Are there any experiences that you've had as a part of your engineering career/teaching that have influenced your ideas on the field?

The following is a quote from the preface to one of my books:

I am convinced that an understanding of device and circuit operation is most easily achieved by learning how to design circuit. Circuit design is usually quite simple; much simpler than some methods of circuit analysis.

6)Everybody would love to know what you do in your free time. What are your interests apart from technology and teaching?

When my children were young we used to camp and go on canoe trips during summer, and ski in winter. I am long past skiing right now, and as I get older the Canadian winter seem longer. I have a sail boat that I sail on Lake Huron during summer. My wife is a retired elementary school teacher, and our children have all grown up and left home. We are recreational ballroom dancers, take dance lessons once a week, help out with beginner dance classes, and attend dances at least three times each month. We also like to travel. In May of this year we visited Peru, and next January we plan a trip to Egypt.

Men and Baays

2009-09-28T16:12:00.000+05:30

A while back, when Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire: for prospective partners, a two- or three-page multiple-choice document that covered all the music/film/TV/book bases. It was intended a) to dispense with awkward conversation, and b) to prevent a chap from leaping into bed with someone who might, at a later date, turn out to have every Julio Iglesias record ever made. It amused us at the time, although Barry, being Barry, went one stage further: he compiled the questionnaire and presented it to some poor woman he was interested in, and she hit him with it. But there was an important and essential truth contained in the idea, and the truth was that these things matter, and it's no good pretending any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.

----------------------------
This is High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. The man we got to know of through "About A Boy". I hadn't watched the film, like half the world and its cousin had. I will, nevertheless. It has Hugh Grant. I'd be mad to miss it.

About A Boy is hilarious. That Nick Hornby can write! And Hugh Grant, given the characters he generally plays, seems tailor made for the role of Will Freeman- the man who lives off a song his dad wrote, slacking off responsibilities and experimenting with his various fascinations. Hardly the sort to go off and help change lives. But he does. And that is about the plot.

I can't quite get over the picture on the cover. Much like the title of the book explains (or doesn't), this is not just about 36 year old Will or 14 year old Marcus. It is about the two of them, together.

But wait, this post was about High Fidelity. This time, made into a movie with John Cusack I hear. Having read the book, I can only expect it to be a riot. It tells the story of 30 something Rob Fleming's life lived as a grieving record store owner, struck by his girlfriend Laura leaving him for Mr. Sixty Minutes. High Fidelity, if the reviewers are to be believed, documents the 'way men are'. Oddly enough, most of it made decent sense to my perfectly female mind. Maybe all those neo-something-ists shouting about everything and everybody being androgynous at a deep subconscious level really is true. Never mind that. High Fidelity is brilliant entertainment.

-----------------
About A Boy:

A nervous-looking young woman in her late twenties was shown into the room. She was wearing a Kurt Cobain sweatshirt and lots of black eye make-up and if she wasn’t Ellie’s older sister, genetic scientists would want to know why not.
‘This is Ruth, who owns the shop. This is the young lady who broke your window,’ said the
policewoman. Ellie looked at the shop owner, bewildered.
‘Did they tell you to do that?’
‘What?’
‘Look like me.’
‘Do I look like you?’
Everyone in the room, including the police officers, laughed.
‘You put that picture in the window to exploit people,’ said Ellie, with noticeably less confidence than she had been exhibiting previously.
‘Which picture? The picture of Kurt? That’s always been there. I’m his biggest fan. His biggest fan in Hertfordshire, anyway.’
‘You didn’t just stick it in today to make some money?’
‘Make some money out of all the grieving Nirvana fans in Royston, you mean? That would only work if it was a picture of Julio Iglesias.’
Ellie looked embarrassed.
‘Is that why you broke the window?’ Ruth asked. ‘Because you thought I was exploiting people?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Today has been the saddest day of my life. And then some little idiot comes up and breaks my
window because she thinks I’m trying to rip people off. Just… grow up.’
Will doubted very much whether Ellie was lost for words too often, but it was clear that if you wished to reduce her to a gaping, red-faced mess, all you had to do was find a twenty-something doppelgänger whose commitment to Kurt Cobain was even more devout than her own.
-----------------
(Co-incidentally, the bits from both the books I remembered while writing this, read days apart, have some bitter joke about Julio Iglesias. Ouch!)

I am now reading Nick Hornby's biographical account of a life of football madness-- Fever Pitch (with Colin Firth). For someone that could never make much of football, it goes to say much about how in love I am with this man Hornby.

In love, so much, that even on a rainy day punctuated by waltzing tempers and petty fights, having to hear "You're being such a girl" (which I normally take offense to) didn't do much to distract me from the final pages of High Fidelity. Which it is.

A Tale of Two Pities

2009-09-18T02:00:00.000+05:30

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wis-dom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the ep-och of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the win-ter of despair, we had everything be-fore us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being re-ceived, for good or for evil, in the su-perlative degree of comparison only.

This, I think, sums up a lot that has happened to me in the last three years. How I wish I could write descriptions that were half as beautiful as this. We shall, however, sate ourselves with the best utilities that text editors can offer; for now.

A Guide to Recognising your Saints

2009-08-21T00:00:00.000+05:30

When good things happen is when you realise how nothing would be yours if it weren't for the many wonderful things that you were blessed to have as a part of your life. I'm thankful for every one of those people who walked in to mine and whose lives I walked into.

and, ahem... YAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!

Life and Love according to Miss Holly Golightly

2009-08-19T22:28:00.000+05:30

Between trying to comprehend vicious quant problems and wringing hands and chanting "there's too little time", one got the chance to read Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. It ran the usual course of seeming cryptic at first, meandered a bit later, and then ended quite quite nicely. It is a relief to like something after not having read for some time now.

"Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell," Holly advised him. "That was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky."

Ladybugs, Katherine. Lots and lots of ladybugs

2009-08-05T20:17:00.000+05:30

Frances, this is Zeus.He's an art student from Macedonia.He's staying with me while he's studying the Tuscan light. More vino, darling.

Hmm.He's not bad.

He's not good, either.

Look, I'm going to go, but I'll come back another time.

Oh, you're so boring !

What?

I said you're boring. Look at you!You're sad.

Again !

You're like a big black hole.

Excuse me, but I...

Fefe always said, "Regrets are a waste of time. They're the past crippling you in the present."

I just walked in the door.

How are you ever going to be happy if you keep wallowing?Listen, when I was a little girl, I used to spend hours looking for ladybugs. Finally, I'd just give up and fall asleep in the grass. When I woke up, they were crawling all over me.

So?

So go work on your house and forget about it. I said go!

I'm going !
Work on the house and forget about it. Gee, why hadn't I thought of that?

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

Love the film. Want to read the book. Script here-Under The Tuscan Sun(2003)

Love Actually

2009-07-12T14:40:00.000+05:30

What is it about young women and falling in love? Why are they so bloody irrational. What makes them smile all the time? What makes these strong women begin to long for warmth and security which they had never had much use for?

Love really does strange things to people. Women in particular. I've seen too many instances of this to not wonder.

Bulletproof Monk

2009-06-20T21:07:00.000+05:30

1)The term "N Other Requests" has always struck as sidey to me. Doesn't it to you?

2)What respected connoisseurs categorise as 'trashy films' make for absolutely delightful watching. Little Black Book, Serendipity, The Holiday, Love Rules, Transformers(\m/), Armageddon, Erin Brockovich, Match Point, She's The Man, Jurassic Park, Oceans' Eleven (AND Twelve AND Thirteen), Princess Diaries, Pretty Woman, PJT, Shanghai Noon, Chicago and on and on and on. I watched a movie a day on an average these holidays. This is such bliss! (Zee Studio, I LOVE YOU).

3)The peace and calm enjoyed at home watching pointless films and indulging in indecent amounts of good food makes one think about how screwed up the concept of community is. The Society must be some surreal, divine prototype of particle colliders. Making random people/particles bump into and rub against each other when they are better off without much contact. Must start a fund for those poor subatomic particles on the Swiss border. Whoever thought subatomic particles' rights didn't count has another think coming. Just cos' they're tiny doesn't mean they don't have feelings, right?

Life at home, spent in solitude(with the universally unobjectionable assistance of food, chick-lit and chickflicks) is perfect, for lack of a better word. It makes me question humanity's obvious prediliction to life spent otherwise. What thoughtless idiots!

4)Writing in numbered/bulleted points is such a guilty pleasure.

5)If it weren't for these exams, things would be perfecter. The demand, however, stands for more nice long walks on rainy evenings with pleasant company and scouring bookshelves of dusty bookstores.

6)The bookshelf at home, in the meanwhile, is clawing, screeching and pleading for my attention. Why don't their textbook cousins take a leaf off 'em? (Does that amount to a pun or a queer case of biblio-homicide?)

7)What the fuck is a root locus and who gives a shit? Now really.

8)The I is all Zen. It needs a surprisingly small number of people and things for me to stay so. I smile beatifically, foolishly unaware of those cruel spate of exams that are going to strike anytime now. This is the proverbial Calm before the real-time storm. Om!

2009-05-20T22:02:00.000+05:30

I spent some time today doing things, I now realise, I must do more often. A little while passed, in being curled up, and feeling sorry for myself. Some time more, was spent talking to an old friend, in whose life, a number of happy changes have just happened. I am happy for A. A stands as a reminder that I am blessed to be around people who understand my quirks and who wait patiently through what is apparent indifference and what really is withdrawal. I noticed today that A puts bad-things-from-the-past ever so politely and in the most comfortable ways, and so subtly at that, you hardly ever notice. Not once does A err at that. She deserves so much more good than this.

I also spent the teeniest while doing little things for M. Reversed direction, for once.

Diatribe

2009-05-04T23:31:00.000+05:30

1)If people can't understand, does that make them less guilty? Then stupidity has its rewards you say? So my crime is that I'm not as stupid as you?

2)Yeah, I can't change these circumstances. Why create another roadblock then?

3)Lie to me. Not to yourself.

4)How could you?

5)Try.

6)What shall I build with these tools? All I have is the fear of turning into you.

7)Net-workers have hairy limbs(or equivalent) and get violently brushed off when discovered. I have no doubt you will consistently receive the very treatment.

8)Why are you not here?

9)And why are you not here?

10)You may have heard me out, passed tissues love, but I walked the mile alone.

Edited: 11) Happiness tastes better with humble truths than with frothy lies. Just like a certain TopChef told me ten minutes ago, Ice cream is just milk and air. Desserts on the other hand...

Caveat: For every banshee in the head, there is an angel sitting besides. As one ricochets about the insides of your skull, the warm, reassuring, quiet presence of the other is enough, quite.

Different 'you's for different people.

If you don't know, you never will.