A Protest of Romance

Wishlist for Neighbourhood

2012-01-31T16:26:00.001+05:30

This new year, I began my reading with Robin Sharma’s ‘Who Will Cry When You Die?’
I am not at all a fan of motivational literature, but I read a book once in a while for the ‘medicinal properties’ it has to offer - bitter, weird, bland though it may be.

In this book, I found an interesting exercise that he suggests.
List down all the people you wish would be your neighbours, people you would love to have coffee with and some laugh too – and then, note down all the traits in these people that make them appealing to you. That way you identify traits that you should cultivate in yourself.

While Robin Sharma has listed down people like Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa and Benjamin Franklin, I would be uncomfortable having these people for my neighbours!
Also, would they have time to spend with me, have coffee with me and laugh with me?

While the author’s list is based on what he wishes to learn in life or the qualities he wishes to acquire, learning is not everything in life. I may like a person simply for his/her friendship, companionship, love and not necessarily for the ‘learning’ he has to ‘offer’ to me.
Learning is also a kind of acquisition and one should not always focus on acquiring.

My list is a list of common people that I have adored or admired in my life or have found interesting or even curious. Plus there a few great names too! And I am grateful that I have been fortunate enough to have met all these people in my life.

Amit Babaji – Mysterious. Good looking, fair complexioned, with trimmed short beard, he is always neat.
He must be in his early forties. His home is under a pine tree on a mountain top in the Himalayas. He spends a few months in a year there and for the rest, he is travelling – all over the world, East Asia, China, Switzerland, England, Lakshadweep, Copper Canyon in Mexico, England and all the exotic places on earth. He stays in VVIP accommodations wherever he goes. He does not work for a living. He says he is not educated. Where he gets his resources from, he will not reveal. God takes care of everything, friends take care of needs wherever I go, he says. Who he is, who his parents are, what his religion is, what his social background is, how he came to be living under this tree, he will not reveal. He has told me though, that he is from Karnataka. And, that even before he found his tree, he knew it existed. Goodness oozes from his gentle and kind eyes.

Gautam – ‘you will like my son, he likes the English language, he likes words’ said she. A strange way of introducing one’s son, I thought.
He is only person I have met who speaks - not spoken English, but - written English. There is not an extra pause and not a crutch-word in his sentences. His speech is economical and grammatically correct. He is the only one who has given me a six on ten for my grammar and my English in general. I have met him only twice, but every time, have been inspired to strive towards one of the missions of my life – to be able to speak written English.

C J – Extempore is what separates the wheat from chaff. Whenever I have heard him speak extempore, I have wished I could speak like him. Spontaneous, ready, relevant and rich with anecdotes and quotations, he has been given the title ‘silver tongued orator’.
A corporate trainer, minus the cliché. I had the opportunity to be audience to a presentation he was taking us through – a very powerful, inspiring presentation, I thought. Though I have never attended his sessions, I am sure he works hard and does his homework unlike most of the trainers these days who have nothing of their own to say but repeat like parrots what you have already seen in email forwards, SMS forwards, material on the internet or shoddily written self help books.

Jay – The most handsome man I have seen in life. And I am 95% confident I won’t see a more handsome man than him. He has a voice that can put Amitabh Bachhan to shame. He is talented – voice over, stand-up comedy, ads for Radio, emceeing, singing… He is a perfect gentleman with impeccable social manners. He is sensitive, polite, shy and very respectful of women. Women throw themselves at him, and no one could blame him if he gave in or became weak, but no, he hasn’t once taken advantage of any of them.

Noopur – she needs someone. She is all alone. Vexed and desperate. Does not want to live. Partly, family has been unfair to her, but mostly, she has brought it upon herself. When in trouble, it is my shoulders she chooses cries on. I really want to be there for her. Show her a whole new world. Show her that life is beautiful. That it is possible to be happy because of and in spite of our circumstances. I want to hold her hand. Until she is healed. Until she becomes strong and independent.

Daisy – A girl who invokes my protective instincts. Soft, shy, demure. But at times, she surprises me with her assertiveness.
Hails from a small town. After coming to this big city she has seen its ways, even learnt from it but, (and I am glad to say this) has not lost her innocence.
Between me and her, it has always been a heart to heart bonding and it has never levitated to the intellect. Usually when we meet, we run out of conversation after a while of talking, but silences between us are comfortable. I used to oil her long and thick tresses. She cut them short soon. The big city caught up with her in a way, much to my dislike. As long as it does not take away her innocence…

Mr. Murthy – Proprietor of Select Bookshop. A legend. Not just a seller of books, but a collector of books. If you are a regular customer, his gives you a personalized service – he understands your taste, knows your kind of books, keeps them for you when he receives books in lots, informs you that your kind of books have arrived. Knowing your taste, he also recommends books to you. Whenever I visit his shop, he has anecdotes to tell. About his meeting with Sir CV Raman, about his book exhibition in Rashtrapati Bhavan in Delhi, about the Governer’s visit to his shop, about this incident in the life of an author, about the history of this place, and so on…

Kaveri – Music. Old Hindi film songs. He must know all of them. Both of us don’t know when we will meet. He is very busy. But all of a sudden he surprises me by calling up and saying ‘Hi, I am near your place. Can I drop in?’ It does not matter that it’s 11:30 in the night. Any time is good time for meeting an old friend. When we get together, we sing. One song after another. We converse. I think I like the fact that our talk is always jovial. We are the kind of people who want to be happy because of and in spite of our circumstances. Most importantly, we are comfortable with each other.

Narasimha Chikkappa – He is called the Salim Ali of Coorg, because of his interest in bird watching or ornithology. He is a shining example of how one can create opportunities for a full living even in a small town that most people haven’t even heard of. He is a doctor by profession. An avid reader, he subscribes to the monthly National Geographic magazine and is abreast of the latest in the fields of science and technology. Living in Coorg, in the midst of forests and estates, he has been exploring wild life, especially birds. He has authored a book on the ethno-botany of the Kodavas. He is frequently on the local Radio station sharing his learning with his audience. A clean smog free environment means a clear sky full of stars and galaxies and once again he has made use of this to study the night sky and learn many interesting things about the heavenly bodies. He can identify many stars, constellations and a few galaxies too. Every time I stayed with him during holidays, I returned enriched. He has had a computer at home and has been learning and writing his own programs – this, even before most of them in Bangalore had even seen a computer. His system is loaded with software that further his interests – a software to study the night-sky and such. He sends hand painted wild life cards to over 2500 addresses all over the world every year. I think what most people would like about him is his jovial nature – I have never seen him serious, everything he says makes you laugh…

Nitish – A friend. Who understands. Who cares. He has a calming effect on me. Someone who knows the softer side of me inside a tough shell. A fellow Mysorean and that is so comforting for all the connotations that come with it – innocent, sincere, simple, trusting and without guile.
We haven’t spent too much time together and sometimes, after some conversation, ‘what else?’, ‘you tell me’ begins and then, we start talking about books. And we go on…

Parag - We started our career on the same day. A super intelligent guy. Though from mechanical engineering background, he picked up JAVA like it were a glass of water. I don’t know how many out-of-term promotions he has got so far. He became the youngest technical architect in the company. While on the one side, he is brilliant in technology, on the other, he is rooted in culture. He is interested in our heritage, has read the scriptures, read the Geetha and can have engaging conversations and discussions on the difficult subjects of theology, philosophy, religion and so on. He has done a free website for the religious order in Udupi. He has learnt to play the Mridangam. He can whistle. Once on our annual day, he gave a whistling concert. He has written some 20 short stories but never seriously tried to publish them.
I like his boyish innocence. He can be playful and naughty, even play pranks, but I cannot imagine him flirting with a woman. I think that, more than any other quality sets him apart from the rest. That he is not casual about women…

Ramabhadrachar – He is no more. My father’s maternal uncle. A great Sanskrit scholar. Well versed with the shastras, scriptures, epics, treatises... Highly learned. Disciplined. A great teacher. A lifetime of learning and teaching. Has been a guru to Swami Bharati Teertha (who has Goshalas all over the state, that strive to preserve the Indian species of cattle that face the threat of extinction).
Radiant.
Has children, but no successor to his knowledge. I am privileged to be related to him. If he were my neighbour I could have received a few gems from his treasure of knowledge.
Fortunately he had devoted students to whom I hope he has bequeathed some of his treasure but no matter how much he bequeathed, now with him gone, much of it must be lost.

Sampath and Seetha – My uncle and aunt. I have never spent much time with them. But whenever I have, it has been so refreshing and comforting. They don’t judge me, advise me, or broach personal matters. Care is the only thing they offer that is parental. Everything else they offer is friendly, not parental.
Unlike most elders who think they know better than us children, that they don’t need to listen to us, my aunt converses with me like an equal, shares her ideas, thoughts and troubles with me and listens with sincere interest when I share with her my thoughts and perspectives on the matter. Unlike most women who don’t analyse the situations in which they find themselves, do not think deeply, but merely go about their routine complaining or worrying or simply reacting, she thinks. And she is willing to try new approaches to life and its demands.
My uncle on the other has conversations with me; something again which most elders don’t do. He taught English to university students. His Sanskrit studies began in his childhood and what begins from one Subhashita goes on to 20 more and then to plays and anecdotes and then other trivia…

Rohith, Nikhil – people who say ‘come home’. The first thing these people do when they offer their friendship to you is, invite you home. It’s the most natural thing to do for them, a necessary thing and for them, it’s a must that you ‘come home’. It’s certainly not just a ‘nice thing’. Rohith is from Bhadravati and Nikhil from South Bangalore – places where innocence pervades still. This innocence of yesterday is fast disappearing as we find ourselves in a metropolitan culture of meeting people in coffee shops and finishing it there. In a time, where people are very conscious of their personal space and their precious time and scarcely allow people into their lives or homes, to have such innocent people as neighbours would be a blessing.

Susheel – He puts up with me.
We like each other but at times he pisses me off. But the good thing is I don’t have to exercise any caution in responding to him. I can vent all my anger, disappointment, vexation without worrying about hurting or losing him. He knows ‘this girl’ is ‘like that’ but she has a heart of gold. We will always be there for each other. It’s not one of those delicate bonds that may one day snap after a fight. We will eventually start talking.
Coming to think of it, it’s not a relationship where we have talked about important and profound matters. There has been no serious reflection. Mostly trivia. And continuous everyday happenings. But over a period of time, these have accumulated into an understanding of each other’s nature and habits and impulses. This is exactly one of those things that make people indispensable to each other. Knowing all the small things about each other. For these small things are what manifest in our lives perennially more than the big ideals and opinions. Isn’t it?

Arjun – A special guy. I think I admire him. He is smart. Nice. Sensible. Does not read books but reads a lot on the net, is updated on current affairs and is an engaging conversationalist.
Whether it is food or clothing or travel, he has taste.
He went to Bishop Cottons and you can tell when you meet him that he has gone to good schools and colleges.
He is particular about the way things should be. Like myself. He will not hesitate to tell the waiter in a restaurant the portion is too small for the price nor hesitate to return an order because it has excess salt. Like myself.
He is not a pseudo-secularist. Like myself.
He is close to his family. Though modern stylish and smart, he has reverence for our culture, our tradition, our value system. Like myself ; )
It’s rare to find a stylish guy who will be or do all the above.
But he is scarce. I really really wish he were my neighbor.

Subhash Avadhany – the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of this guy is spontaneity. Met him in debate/elocution contests while in college. I could never believe him (I don’t, even now) when he said he never prepared for a debate but spoke impromptu, almost – that is, he never wrote his speech.
His speeches used to be so perfect – fast, fluent and forceful. He was never good at academics but the smartest guy I ever met – conversant with current affairs, confident, and can converse on any subject on earth’s crust. He did not get along with most of the people around him but never cared, never feared anything or anyone. He is good looking, charming and I am sure there is a throng of ladies dying to spend a few minutes with him.

The people below are interesting people, leading interesting lives. They have interesting things to say. They are engaging conversationalists. They offer glimpses into new worlds. The initial connection was from mind to mind but it is gravitating deeper to the level of heart.

Amisha – works for Deccan chronicler. She is searching for a story wherever she goes. Her assignments include meeting happening people like authors, attending glamorous and glittery events, parties so she can write about them.

J C – Very well read. A decent guy. Remarking about a woman he once knew, he said ‘she is the purest woman I have ever known’ and I was touched to know that there were people still that considered purity a virtue. And a desirable, laudable one. In today’s time where ‘wham-bam-thank you mam’ defines the conduct or the ‘ideology’ of half the people, who cares about purity?

B S – advertising, logo designing, branding… works in the creative field. Writes poems that do not rhyme. Some of his poems are a model of non-conformism – with respect to their style, substance, subject and length.
Our ideologies are opposites. But it doesn’t matter. He knows his days are numbered but refuses to be disheartened. He has decided to get back at life by living it with more zest. The fact that I am much younger than him leaves no room for ego. I can be my imperfect self and get away with it. That’s one benefit of having friends much older than you. I need such friends a lot.

Pratik Mukherjee – Media analyst? Is that what he told me? He is also into theatre of a different kind. The one that brings up uncomfortable questions. He is anti-state, anti-religion, anti-God, anti-Godmen, anti-establishment. A rich source of alternative views. On almost everything in life.

Harsha – filmmaker, trained in the US on film making, travels far and wide in India, shooting films, meeting people, covering interesting stories. So much I can learn…

Rabindranath Tagore – Visionary. Original. Courageous. Deep and Profound. In a lot of his works, I see my alter ego.

E F Schumacher – Author of Small Is Beautiful. One of his line that summarizes his ideology is ‘the total amount of leisure available to any society is inversely proportional to the total amount of labour saving machinery it employs’.
An economist who is himself ‘Out of the Box’. His writings verified most of my preconceptions which would otherwise have remained diffident in the face of the modern economist’s concepts of growth, development, marketing and advertising. He must be my alter ego too.

A long list. It would have been more practical to lit a few names and a few qualities against each, but when I started writing…
I am glad I have done justice to each one.
For all this effort, I hope I imbibe a few qualities from all these fine people God has sent to my life.

Lalbagh Flower Show - 24 Jan 12

2012-01-25T16:21:00.002+05:30

This is one event worth attending.
One event worth braving Bangalore traffic.
One event worth enduring a crowd.

It’s amazing how creative they can be. Of course, some elements recur every year. But there is enough innovation that makes me want to go time after time. And who would tire of flowers?

The weeklong flower show happens twice every year, ending on August 15th and 26th January. It is recommended that you go in the beginning, because that’s when the flowers are most fresh. Towards the end, they are withered, ever so slightly.

For the record, this time, the ticket cost Rs 30/-

For the first time that I have seen, they had flowers on the lake at the entrance, filled into a few coracles and looked very pretty. Usually the glass house and the area around it is where the ‘show’ is.

Inside the glass house, the centre area is made into two separate portions, the first one depicting a famous sculpture like Qutub Minar made completely out of flowers and the second portion, having several arrangements based on a common theme.

This time, it was a Buddhist Stupa. Specifically, which one this is modeled after, I could not figure out.
Right behind this was an arrangement that looked like a waterfall, made of a species of lily I think. This one, according to me, was the best of them all.
The second portion was based on the theme of dance – flowers were arranged to depict different dance forms in India, each depiction using different property – the dandiya raas using the dandiya sticks, peacock feathers etc., Kathakali used painted face masks, bhangra used head gears that Punjabis wear when dancing etc. my favourite was Manipuri.

Fortunately the music being played was instrumental. Last time, there was the loud blaring film songs that not only vexed the souls of those like me but would cause the flowers too to wilt soon.

Some areas had barricades made of thin black wires and thick yellow ropes and these yellow ones were an eyesore. They should have used green or brown thin wires wherever needed.

Carnations were much used in the arrangements, perhaps since they remain fresh for long and I realized how beautiful they looked. From a distance, you would think they were roses.

I am simply happy to be living in South Bangalore. One of those things in life you should be grateful for.

Bharatanatyam

Bhangra

Dandiya Raas

Kathakali

Freewill and Destiny

2012-01-16T16:08:00.003+05:30

I happened to hear an interesting answer to the age old question of freewill and destiny.

Imagine a horse tied to a pole with a rope.
The horse is free to move anywhere within the circle defined by the radius, that is the length of the rope. But beyond that it has no reach.

We are all like the horse tied to a pole with a piece of rope. We can exercise freewill to an extent that the rope permits. Outside that sphere is our destiny.

Agrees with practical observation. Doesn't it?

How long the rope will be, is also determined by destiny I guess.

Be Choosy!

2012-01-09T23:33:00.002+05:30

Resentment is a luxury. Or so we should treat it.
Many a time, we tend to treat it like a cheap freely available commodity. Resent this, resent that, resent him and resent her.
Almost everything in this world is imperfect – even nature.
It is possible to resent everything. In the name of principles and ideals. It provides much fodder for those who like arguing. About various things they come across.

For example, I know a woman who has never seen male dominance in her own personal life and will never see it, but strongly and vociferously resents males in general for being chauvinistic. Does it matter that some male is beating some woman in Rajasthan? I mean, when you are not even doing anything about it?

Another guy in my circle hates the guru of a pop cult for the way he looks, his effeminate voice, his body language and so many other reasons and has sworn never to learn a certain very useful breathing technique he teaches. Would you not rather learn the good and forget the rest?

Another guy who will not visit any of the parks in the residential areas of the city for he believes in natural forests and is ‘against’ artificial parks!
No one could say you are wrong in your resentment.
But one should be choosy. For one’s own sake.
One cannot resent everything. It requires you to expend energy or thought or action.
There is only so much of your mind you can spare for resentment. And moreover, you can’t change things by simply resenting them.
It’s best to let go.
When we feel the temptation to resent someone or something, perhaps it would be a good idea to make a list of the good and bad of that something or someone.
And then study the lists and think whether it really deserves our resentment. And whether the matter means anything at all to our immediate purpose in life.
If not, we should let go, and save our resentment for something more deserving.
Being selective and focused is important in such matters too.

This probably has to do with being dispassionate while being passionate.

Everest Calling - Shopping at Namche Bazaar & the Final Preparartion

2011-12-25T00:57:00.000+05:30

The Everest Bakery at Namche was one thing we all knew we did not want to miss. As soon as we reached Namche, we went to the bakery. The stuff that I and a few others were looking for - apple pie, apple crumble, we found at the bakery opposite Everest bakery. They were yummy. Mmmmm....
I would have loved to taste everything on the glass shelves but they cost money. Everything you touched cost 200 – 300 Nepali Rupees!
I decided to try some more on the return visit.

The tailor was found finally. I had been looking for one. The pair of black pyjamas I had bought from a heap on the street had not survived the 3 hour trek from Lukla to Phakding. Why, it had not survived the stroll I had taken in Lukla market, I think. When I asked a tailor (the only one in the market) to mend it, he had said, he would take any clothing that had been tried. It had to be washed and then given to him.
There had been one tailor in Phakding and it was already getting dark when we got there. I did not feel like going to him. He had probably closed shop.
So it was that the tailor in Namche did it for 100 Nepali. I haggled and he actually did it for less – 90 or so.

We all had come prepared for the trek. Our bags were full. But there’s always more. Especially when you headed for Mt. Everest.
Six of us entered a shop to buy what they call a poncho. It’s a raincoat of good quality. They came in a few colours. When I tried a bright green one, someone commented this was a Pakistani green, so I settled for a light sea green. Green is my weakness.
The guy at the shop was an the old man. We had assumed he would give us discount for 6 raincoats that we were buying in all – for he had given some discount for one poncho bought yesterday by one among us – was it Fazeel?
But he refused to give any. We were surprised and annoyed. ‘You gave him discount for buying one raincoat yesterday, and now we are buying six of them and you will give no discount!’
‘Yesterday we became friends and something happened and I got carried away...today, I can’t give you discount’ said he waving a hand in dismissal. It was amusing, his innocence, his naivette.

The way we had been spending money, we realized we were not carrying enough. It had been only three days and we had spent so much. We looked for an ATM.
ATM was closed.
The only way was to swipe a card in a shop and take cash from the owner for a fee of 12 percent on the amount of transaction.
Thanks to Amit. I had a few thousand Nepali more.
Only the 500 rupee note that Fazeel had, had the picture of Nepal king on it. I exchanged it for mine. Hoping I would not have to spend it and take it home for collection.

We returned to the dining area of Himalayan hotel.

Initially, we had decided to tell the other team that we had actually seen Everest and to describe it vividly, making them real jealous but once we had the snowfall, we no longer felt the need to resort to Everest. We told them about the snowfall and believed that we made them jealous.
Apparently, they all saw the scalp of a yeti in the monastery at Khumjung village.

The dinner consisted of Hakka noodles with 3 pieces of capsicum, 3 pieces of carrot and 1 shred of cabbage, no salt, momos with potatoes for filling, a vegetable roll and soup. The soup was good and when I asked for another bowl, Nar Bahadur told me off with a wave of hand.
He also scolded me when I asked him to get me tea in a fresh cup. He had wanted me to gulp down water in my cup so he could pour tea into it.
Narayan, another guide, compensated by offering me a spoon with a flourish like he was offering me a rose. And a tea bag too.

Hot water shower was an adventure in itself.
It cost 300 rupees, for 15 minutes. They said, after 15 minutes they turned off the tap, or there was some automatic setting which turned off the gas heater or something. This was scary. The one next to the dining area was occupied. When I requested the proprietor, he took me through a long corridor behind the dining area to what seemed to be a luxurious room with an attached bathroom. He showed me how to operate the gas heater and left.
Once I locked the door and was all by myself, how would anyone stop me after 15 minutes?
With the local folks here grudging every glass and every mug of hot water for the last 2 days, this bath was godsend. When I heard the rapping on the door, I panicked for I thought someone had noticed that I had crossed 30 mins, but when I came out, I was told my roomy was missing me badly. I had the room key with me!

I dried my hair near the Tandoor while conversing with the chief guy who was leading the ‘All Women’s Expedition’ from Indian Air Force to the summit of Mt. Everest. There were eleven women in all plus some men assisting them, seated opposite us on the other side of the Tandoor. All eyes surveyed them in awe. The chief talked about the rigorous training the team had gone through for a year at various places including Siachen, the coldest place. They had scaled lesser peaks in preparation – 17000 ft, 24000 ft, etc. Some women had postpone their marriage plans and some women, their family plans. He talked about the year 2005 or 2006 which had been a very bad one. The weather had been violent, stormy, and so many of them had died. I wondered why people took such risks. Was it worth it? Was anything under this sun worth this beautiful life?

Diamox. I am not someone who likes popping pills. But that night I found myself in a dilemma. Diamox is a blood thinner and is supposed to be consumed in the mountains. It thins your blood and helps in achieving balance with the outside low atmospheric pressure in high altitudes. It is supposed also to help you cope with low oxygen levels. If you have low BP you are not to have it.
I had been to the mountains before and never used anything. When I found myself with 3 or 4 of these guys who all advised me take one, I dilly-dallied for a while and then popped half a pill. Half a diamox.
A costly mistake. I did not know it was a diuretic. I should have had a good night’s sleep before the arduous day ahead of me. Instead I woke up 4 or 5 times in the night to use the bathroom, dark, cold and a mile away. I heard a book has been written about the simple art of saying NO. Now I know why.

Camphor.
A friend was had been sniffing at something when we had began our trek that morning. Upon asking he said it was camphor and it supplied oxygen. Oxygen or not it surely smelt great. I decided to buy a packet of those from a store the next day.

And I did. Only, upon opening the pack and inhaling the white ball with closed eyes, all ready to savour it’s flavour, I realized he had sold me naphthalene balls.

Waiting For The Barbarians - J M Coetzee

2011-12-14T19:08:00.004+05:30

“I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire. Is he blind? I could understand it if he wanted to hide blind eyes. But he isn’t blind. The discs are dark, they look opaque from the outside but he can see through them. He tells me they are a new invention. ‘They protect one’s eyes against the glare of the sun’, he says”...

These lines with which the narration begins set you thinking that the narrator is a humble, ignorant, innocent villager who has never seen nor heard of sunglasses and hence wonders at them. Soon, you learn he is the magistrate of a village. It is not any village but a frontier village with a remote quality and solitary air.

Beyond the frontier village, is the border region of the empire, the barrenness, where dwell the barbarians. Or so the Empire labels them. From time to time, members of this barbarious tribes – men, women, old men, children are caught straying into the boundary, sometimes doing things the Empire disallows. They are made captive and confined in a prison cell.
And then comes a Colonel from the capital and the torture begins within the cell. Sophisticated torture.
Occasionally, the tribe seizes a lone man from the village that has strayed into their territory and kills him. The hostility deepens. The Empire with its sophisticated strategy and weapons strikes back with venom and crushes the barbarians.

The magistrate who thinks the Colonel too high handed, sympathizes with the tribesmen suffering in the dark cell, silently though.

“When I see Colonel Joll again, I bring the conversation around to torture. I ask ‘what if your prisoner is telling the truth yet finds he is not believed? Is that not a terrible position? Imagine: to be prepared to yield, to yield, to have nothing more to yield, to be broken yet to be pressed to yield more! And what a responsibility for the interrogator! How would you ever know when a man has told you the truth?’ ”

Once, the magistrate, out of sympathy for a girl of the tribe who had suffered torture in the cell along with her father and had seen her father dying, tries to help the girl, by treating her wounds, feeding her and taking her back to her tribe on horseback.

He is found out. The Colonel, ruthlessly inflicts torture upon the magistrate and confines him to the wretchedness of the same cell where other prisoners were kept and tortured.

‘No matter if I told my interrogators the truth....they would press on with their grim business, for it is an article of faith with them that the last truth is told only in the last extremity...’

The Colonel ventures into the barrenness where the tribes dwell and brings back with him some tribesmen, stark naked and stringed together with a rope passing through one cheek of each one of them. He parades them for all the villagers to see and pelt stones at.

The story presents the blurring of humanitarian considerations in the wake of nationalistic feelings and shows how completely compassion and justice are obscured when an appeal is made to the nationalistic feelings of people.
Nationalism as an ideal has been disputed by many people – by Tagore, to name one. Some of the material that I have read on the subject discuss the necessity to broaden one’s horizon, to accept all that is good (regardless of the nation of its origin) and other such issues.
While such writing criticise nationalism for its narrowness and limitedness, this book screams about the shameful grossness and wretchedness of nationalism.
For this story is on the subject of enemy torture – it describes in intimate detail, the treatment meted out to those human beings – some of them women, old men and children – labelled as enemy by the State, in the name of nationalism.
It is a very serious subject and cannot but make an impact.

“What has made it impossible to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of empire. Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues it’s enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation...”

The story makes one think about the nations currently at war. Afghanistan, the Middle East and wherever else innocent people are being treated like worms by the enemy. It makes you think about all the medals we give out to soldiers for killing innocent people on the other side of the border. It makes you think about the true place of patriotism in our ideology.

‘Each moment, each one of us, man, woman, child, perhaps even the poor old horse turning the mill wheel, knew what was just; all creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice. But we live in a world of laws, a world of the second best. There is nothing we can do about that. We are fallen creatures. All we do is to uphold the laws, all of us, without allowing the memory of justice to fade...’

The book is an eye opener – it teaches us something new most of us would not even have thought of. It makes us re-evaluate our sense/beliefs about right, wrong, about nationalism, patriotism...

Narration comes from depth and reaches the depths of the reader.

As you read through the second chapter, you are somewhat disappointed because it digresses from the expectation set by the 1st chapter.
What in the beginning promised to be a grave subject concerning nations, people, societies and civilization in general, thinned and wavered till it became a story of an individual – the magistrate, his life, especially, his sex life.

Lines from the book I liked. Read...

‘That’s an experienced not to be missed, the fishermen carry flaming torches and beat drums over the water to drive the fish towards the nets they have laid’

‘Like a wounded snail, I begin to creep along the wall’ – the simile...

‘A fool in love is always laughed at but in the end always forgiven...’

‘...those daydreams......Without exception, they are dreams of ends; dreams not of how to live but of how to die...’

‘...I was the lie that the empire tells itself when times are easy, the truth that Empire tells itself when harsh winds blow...’

‘When some men suffer unjustly, it is the fate of those who witness their suffering to suffer the shame of it...’

‘To each, his own most fitting end...’

‘To the last we will have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable...’

‘And who am I to jeer at life-giving illusions? Is there any better way to pass these last days than in dreaming of a saviour with a sword who will scatter the enemy hosts and forgive us the errors that have been committed by others in our name and grant us a second chance to build our earthly paradise? ...’

‘I swim through the medium of time, a medium more inert than water, without ripples, pervasive, colourless, odourless, dry as paper...’

‘The crime that is latent in us, we must inflict on ourselves, not on others...’

Forgive Bipasha & Mallika, Vidya Has Arrived

2011-12-05T15:02:00.005+05:30

Watched Vidya Balan’s ‘The Dirty Picture‘ on Saturday. Why did I watch it? I like, nay, liked Vidya Balan and I thought that, though the clips were appalling, since Vidya had agreed to the role, there must be something in the movie – a powerful story, some point…

After a few minutes, I saw, that there was nothing in the movie.
It moves from one bare all costume to the next and one vulgar scene to the next.

There is much ambiguity in the portrayal of Vidya’s character. Its ridiculous in fact.
She is shown telling producers and directors she can do ‘anything’ to get a chance in the movie, she is a dance girl doing dirty moves, she sleeps first with Surya and then with his younger brother Ramakanth but when the papers and magazines write about her and call her Draupadi, she becomes all offended and emotional and burns those magazines as if she were sensitive to such matters.

The film claims it is based on Silk Smitha’s life roughly, and on dance girls in general and on how they were rendered jobless when mainstream heroines who had once been concerned about their image, became ready to do what the ill-famed dance girls had been doing.
But this point is not brought out in the movie. There is just one dialogue ‘Jo Silk karti thi, who hum heroine se karvayenge’ – the lead actor says, ‘What Silk can do, we will get done by the heroine’. Except for this one dialogue the movie does not bring out the point, when it shows her decline. Her decline seems more because of her personal rife with the men who had helped her get a break in the beginning.

Since the movie was about the life of the dance girl and therefore her side of the story, it was only expected that the movie would present the human aspect of the woman, the person behind a mere sex object, the side which the public never got to see, the feeling/thoughts that were personal to her, the internal workings of her mind, her struggle etc., getting the viewer to sympathize with her.
But the movie fails here. Like I said, it moves from one bare all costume to another, one vulgar scene to another and presents merely the ‘dance girl’ in all her nakedness, not bothering at all to show the person behind the dance girl.

But it gets confused now and then and attempts to evoke sympathy from the viewer – there is a scene where she receives an award and lashes out at the audience for eagerly watching her movies and then calling her dirty - in a speech that has all the appearance of a fierce passionate speech but turns out in the end to be without any substantial point and quite misplaced. It evokes no sympathy for her from the audience and leaves you asking why a woman who had run away from her mother and chosen the life she had led, of her own will, should make such a speech.

In the end, in her suicidal note, she asks questions such as ‘why everyman put his arm around her hip but no one on her forehead’ and such… which sound irritating again, coming as they do from a woman who chased men and seduced them recklessly.

These sudden attempts to evoke sympathy for her fail as there is no corresponding portrayal of the human aspect of her character in the movie.

There is no story. One scene after the other shows her almost naked, or seducing someone, or shooting hot scenes and nothing else…
What was there to Silk Smitha‘s life even that called for making a movie on her life? Nothing at all.

VULGAR FAT. Agree that Silk Smitha was fleshy and no way slim, but the movie overemphasizes the fatness. A few scenes showing her in costumes revealing the stomuch were enough to tell us that this was a fat actress. There was no need to rub it in. With those fat thighs and Dunlop tires around the vast expanse of her stomach, sitting sloppily on her couch, she looks disgusting and most vulgar.

Her outfit in every scene is designed to reveal whatever there is to reveal in her. It was Bipasha who had started a very wrong trend in Bollywood and Mallika Sherawat had taken it further. But this girl, Vidya, has taken Bollywood to its depths of depravity. She has beaten all heroines and cabaret dancers that have ever set foot in Hindi films. She could not have fallen below this. One can at last forgive Bipasha as well as Mallika.

What the television clips show are a lot better than some of the actual scenes in the movie.

Why did she agree to do a movie like this? The sum of money offered to her must have been HUGE and it must have been difficult for her to refuse it.

So what’s the next step in her progression towards boldness?
Will she work in blue films?
Why not? After all ‘Sex in an integral part of our lives’, ‘Times have changed’, ‘Indian cinema viewers have matured’ and all…
And when she has already come this far, just a few more inches will not hurt her. Pornography is just a few inches away.

The movie is almost a porn movie.
And Vidya is fit to be a porn star.
After the initial promise of being different from other women in the industry, she has proved that she is indeed one among them, in fact, worse than them, lacking any self respect and here for money.

Everest Calling - Namche- Acclimatization- Everest View Hotel

2011-11-30T15:58:00.004+05:30

19 April 2011

In our itinerary, this day was set aside for acclimatization. We had to allow our body to get used to the atmosphere surrounding us – altitude, oxygen level, pressure, cold, terrain and all. Towards this purpose, we would go for a short trek to some place nearby and return and resume our main program the next day.

Some of them wanted simply to rest and not go through any exertion at all. But our leader was strict and declared that it was a mandate to trek and no one was going to stay back in the hotel.

We had two options.

One, Khumjung village with a Buddhist monastery.
Two, Everest View hotel, which promised a glimpse of the Everest.

The group split into two.

I chose the Everest View Hotel.
Out of pure impulse, I asked if you could really see Everest from the hotel, not realizing that that would become gossip fodder and giggle fodder for some of the men during the rest of the tour.
Men and gossip? Oh yes, of the many things that I learnt during this trip, one was that, Men gossip. A lot.
More on that later...

Up to a certain point, where the highest airstrip of the world was situated, the two groups had a common route to follow, after which we would go separate ways.

It was a cloudy morning.

The picture to our left as we stepped out of the hotel.

Namche, as we started to climb.

After sometime, we found ourselves in a sort of landing where there was a rock at the edge of it – a sort of lesser precipice where the guys practised acrobatics – scrambling on all fours to the top of it as other down shouted asking them to be careful, sitting and standing there and posing for pictures, sliding down it and all...

This was the picture taken after – we were resting against a rock that was opposite the precipice. We are all laughing – don’t remember what the joke was.

We reached the highest airstrip in the world.

There seemed to be a small settlement of people there – as suggested by the jewellery shop on one side of the trail and some LPG cylinders on another.

Some kind of tower...on the hill facing us.

The group became two teams.

Our team proceeded on the runway. What surprised me was that the runway full of rough gravel. This runway was where Fazeel got a new name – One of us mistakenly called him Shakeel. And then on, he became Shakeel, which was soon upgraded to Chota Shakeel.

The climb to hotel Panorama was somewhat effortful. Thats Aparajita, my roomy prithu and I.

The panorama hotel.

But the walk thereon to Everest View hotel was effortless. The overhanging fog and clouds gave a grey coat to all beneath.

We reached the hotel.

On all the walls around, hung framed paintings of the mountain range, of Everest, of trekkers trudging on snow, of Ama Dablam. I wondered what 'Ama Dablam' was in the beginning, was it one mountain or two, but towards the end of our trek, it became the most familiar thing to us wherever we went.

We entered the dining area. Our long table was adjacent to the outer wall, most of which was made of glass panes which made it possible for us to get a view of the outside while being seated at our table, without having to go to the roof or terrace outside. On the terrace outside were two neat rows of spotless white tables with white chairs around them. Beyond this, we saw the valley down. So the hotel must have been standing on the edge of a cliff looking down at the valley below. A glass door led to the roof outside but it was cold and we remained inside.

Eager, eyes wide open, we looked out of the window to get the first glimpse of Everest. What greeted us was a grey blanket, thinning a little here and a little there, showing a patch of snow or a jagged rock but never giving a clue even to where Everest might be.

The declaration of the restaurant proved to be overconfident. The curtain of thick clouds and fog would not lift for us to view the Everest until the next day.

It was a star hotel but we ordered food anyway.

I and roomy Prithu order Veg Chowmien and there was a never ending speculation about what it would be like.

By now, conversion from Nepali to Indian was happening more quickly. Everything cost in 200 and 300 and we were all used to it by now.

Our guide Rabin had carried Nepali bread for all of us, each one wrapped around a lump of cheese (was it yak cheese?). Someone happened to be carrying peanut butter as well. I tried it and found it quite tasty. Tasty or not, it was surely rich.

Seated at the table, Fazeel tried to blow away the clouds with his breath. And I hoped he would succeed.
We were unable even to imagine what the picture beyond was like. We desperately asked many questions of the hotel waiters about Everest as seen from there, so we would at least have some idea. How big was it? Was it at the centre of the picture before us or at the side? What was the shape of it? How far was it from us? Was it like this, like that, asked we, pointing to the pictures hanging on the wall? And if I can recollect correctly, there was not a single picture of Everest as seen from that point. There was, in the dining area, to the left of our table, a model of the entire mountain range in paper pulp or some material like that. Smooth pyramids of various shapes and sizes and heights packed together. We looked at it for a few minutes, figuring our own position, the situation of Everest relative to us...but we didn’t get much out of it. We gave up. Though not fully.

And then it happened.
Snowfall. It was more like hailstorm. Some us could no longer hold ourselves back and we opened the door and stepped out. A chill wind blew. With great difficulty caused by numbing fingers, I clicked pictures and hurried in, only to step out after a few minutes, again. Every one of us was delighted. Some of us were seeing snowfall for the first time. My first time was in 2008 May on Darva Top beyond Doditaal in Uttaranchal, India.
We were happy we had chosen this destination and not the monastery in Khumjung village which our other friends had.
Finally I returned to my table. Every time someone opened the glass door to step out or step in, a chill wind blew in, making us wish that the guys would not keep opening and closing it, though thats what we had been doing a while ago.

After the hailstorm and the rain, the weather started clearing. The neat white tables and benches on the terrace outside and the valley beyond looked absolutely charming. The Devdar trees outside gathered some of the hail and looked like Christmas trees. It was a perfect Christmas picture. Mountains that were brown and green became covered with white flecks. And the mountains closest to us, revealed themselves. Taboche, Amadablam, Thamsherku. All but Everest.

Thats Ama Dablam, with 2 peaks...

The Sun shone bright, and as if by magic, earth and sky, hitherto united by grey, now took pride in their distinct identity and became earth and sky again, taking on separate colours of blue and green.
It was refreshing, as if eyes were seeing colours for the first time. I might as well have been a baby, excitedly looking around me, identifying blue and green and yellow and brown, having just learnt my first lessons in colours.

Somewhere in this picture, slightly to the left, was Everest.

It was time to leave. We literally tore ourselves away from the place. The sun was bright and the sky more or less clear.

Although it was the same trail on the way back, sunlight made the picture entirely different.

I saw a beautiful thing happening. A layer of vapour, one foot thick, was spread over the brown field to my right. The sunshine immediately after rainfall was causing the water soaked by earth to turn into steam and rise from the ground.

Srikant, with the guide

We could see our Namche village in and around that mound.

Sankool and fazeel on the airstrip...

We retraced our steps, walked to the other end of the runway for a short cut down to Namche.

Hotel panorama from below

Namche

Namche has a museum. We thought of visiting it but decided to do it on our return from the base camp. That however, was not meant to happen.

The walk back to the hotel seemed never ending.

In the end, my questions 'Can you really see Everest from 'Everest View Hotel' was a valid question. For the answer is 'No', 90% of the time!
So much for all that giggling...

Random Musing

2011-11-18T16:19:00.001+05:30

When the song ‘Yeh Wada Raha’ in the voice of Kishore and Asha started playing on radio last week, I increased the volume, stopped whatever I was doing and listened with a smile. It is in fact a song I have in my Sony Ericsson walkman phone to which I listen to in bed before falling asleep, almost every other day.
But when it played on the radio, I listened to it as if after a long time. I was delighted.
I have 3500 songs on my iPod – all my favourite songs at my disposal.
And yet, it’s when I listen to those songs on the radio that I enjoy them more.
There is something to unpredictability. It makes a big difference to our living. A great cause of anxiety in life though it may be, we don’t realize how precious it is. Without it, life would be so bland even with all the palaces of the world belonging to us.
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There are the absolutes and there are the ‘relatives’. Everything and everyone has so many dimensions.
Everything is simple, yet so complex. Nothing matters and yet, everything matters. The context is obvious and immediate, yet if you change your own position, and turn proximity into distance, the context could expand to include the world, and time could change from the present moment to eternity. Meaning and relevance, that depend upon time and context, are elusive, ever changing.
In the midst of all this, the one who says ‘you never know’, is the only one who really knows.
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Where there is warmth, there is life. Where there is life, there is warmth.
For days, I have had sprouts for dinner. Sprouts of green gram. You soak the gram in water for 12 hours, drain the water, and by 24 hours, the germinating begins.
This roommate of mine while I was California in 2007 taught me that they grow best when you keep them in airtight containers. It was the only good she did to me.

After draining the water, I keep them in an airtight container for a day or 2. As the hours pass by, I can see that the lid of the plastic box has gathered tiny droplets on the inside surface.
When I open the lid and gather a few sprouts in my fingers, they are warm. Though the weather is quite cold. The container perhaps works like an incubator, preserving the warmth for these small babies sprouting to life.
I don’t know why, but this evokes a tenderness in me. This thing about warmth and life. About life taking care of itself.
---------------------------------

One difference between happy and unhappy people is the difference between having a programmable hence conditioned mind, and having one’s own independent mind. When you have your own mind, you tend to think; and when you think a lot, you cannot be as happy as when you don’t think but simply live life according to a program already defined for you by people who have come here before you. Would you then, feel happy that you can think for yourself? I would.
---------------------------------

Apart from the fact that they can be pushy and annoying, there is something about people who tend to talk with too much reinforcement, when they are effectively trying to sell something – their idea, their opinion, their wish, their command.
Low self-esteem.
Something I learnt from observing two individuals at work – opposites in this aspect.
One with low self esteem does not take himself seriously and hence believes others do not take him seriously too; he does not respect himself enough, so he believes others do not respect him too; hence the necessity to reinforce a point with too many words, repetition, superlatives, non stop talking so he will be heard.
The one with high self esteem takes himself seriously, respects himself; he believes that others take him seriously as well, and hence knows it is enough for him to say it once and say it concisely; his word will be taken.
And sure, the latter is taken seriously whereas the former is ignored – “That’s the way the fellow talks about everything – it does not mean the matter is serious”, they say among themselves.

Loud, animated talking, with repetition and too many adjectives and unnecessary superlatives is a way of ineffective communication.
You use a strong dosage every time, people will become immune after a while and stop responding to you. Keep it mild and they will grasp even your hints.
--------------------------------------

To remain in orbit, you need forces pulling you in opposite directions. Otherwise, you would spiral inwards into a nucleus and become annihilated or spiral outwards, forever, away and further until you are lost beyond recovery.
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We should not orphan our opinions, no matter how unfashionable they may be. We are all they have. It requires courage and we must muster that courage.
We must read though, so our opinions are well formed and have a sound basis.
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Remembering

2011-11-14T15:39:00.002+05:30

It’s been only 4 years now. Since my visit to the US.
I remember my room in the Marriott hotel in Folsom. I remember the car park. Every morning, we would get into an SUV or some other car and drive out, take a right and head towards El Dorado Hills. It was a long straight road with a dip in the middle and as we reached our destination, we saw the words ‘EL DORADO HILLS” etched on a hillock by the side of the road.
As I think of this ride, I remember driving on the left of the road and also find myself sitting to the left of the driver, in my memory. Although this is impossible. For in the US, people drive on the right of the road and you always sit to the right of the driver.
It’s not always that my intellect corrects me whenever I visit this part of my past.
But when I am corrected, I construct the correct picture in my mind – the picture in which we were driving on the right side of the road and I was sitting to the right of the wheel.
But the correct picture, the true picture is always a ‘construction’. It is never a ‘recollection’.

It is the same when I recollect the ride back to the hotel from work with Jim, my teammate.

Once I rode back from work with Mike, the guy married to a Gujarati and always talked about Channa Masala. I was suffering from stomach ache then. I remember. As we pulled out of the car park and headed out, Mike had braked suddenly. Something had fallen out of the boot and he had jumped out, annoyed. In a minute, he had jumped back in and I had turned to my right to look at him, muttered an apology about not helping, thanks to my stomach pain.
But through all this, I can only remember sitting to his left as he was at the wheel.
Most of the time, I pass by this memory casually, on to the next picture, without realizing the technical wrong in this picture. But occasionally, when I am interrupted by this realization, I stop and construct the correct picture. Mike jumped out to the left of the vehicle and not to the right, jumped back in, and I turned to my left and not right, to look at him and apologize. His frame was not against the background of the Blue Shield office as I recollect but against the open space where the roads were.

The tricks that memory plays on us. Eerie!

Everest Calling - The Meaning of Cold

2011-11-08T16:03:00.002+05:30

A cup of honey coloured liquid. A spoonful of sugar. If you liked it to be richer, in colour and taste, you could ask for one more of the little one inch porous bags and drop it in your cup, and see smoky strands of colour making the liquid more beautiful.

Black tea.
A characteristic feature of our tour. Every time we stopped at a place for lunch, breakfast or dinner, the first thing given us was black tea.

On the second floor, on the left of the stairway that was at the centre of the building, was the dining area. Carpet and cushion clad wooden benches and tables lining the four sides, nay three sides of the hall. The fourth side was the kitchen.
At the centre of the hall was a Tandoor (fireplace). Another characteristic feature of our tour.

After some scampering, we settled comfortably in the dining area like birds in their warm nest, their cocoon, on a rainy night.

Our luggage had reached sooner than us. The porters, doubled up with 2 or 3 bags on their back had defeated us.
I and another girl had taken a room on the first floor.

I dropped my luggage and sat on my bed to rest for a while. The bed was cold. The blanket was cold. The pillow was cold. I sat on the edge taking a long time to decide whether to sit in the cold room or to go to back the dining area which was on the top floor, received sunlight and was therefore warmer and brighter. Where I could have another cup of tea.
And then having decided to remain in the room, I took a long time to decide whether to remain seated on the edge or to move completely into the bed. I finally moved into my bed, used my pillow for my back, reclining, but not fully, and covered myself with a blanket. It was so cold that my mind was numb.
Within a few minutes, it felt warm. The human body is amazing. It can produce enough heat to warm what was formidably cold just a few minutes ago.
Having remained in that position for some time, I began to think if I should join the rest in the dining area or sit there some more. Again I took a long time to decide.
The kind of decisions one has to make in these coordinates are on very basic matters – as basic as movement of limbs, yet they are very important decisions at that present.
Finally with some effort, I got out of my bed, careful to fold the edges of the blanket inwards hoping innocently to preserve the heat inside. I put on my slippers and climbed up to the dining hall.

We had our dinner – an assortment of different shapes made of the same stuff. We liked the soup though.

It was one day too early but I decided to oil my hair anyway. It was the only way I could protect it. I couldn’t have combed it without pulling it off its roots, dishevelled as the mass was, due to repeated donning and removing of scarf and hat.

I went down to my room and took out the blue shiny coconut oil bottle. It was, as I knew of course, frozen. I took it to the dining area and walked to the Tandoor, but alas the Tandoor was cooling. It was past 9 (or 10?) and they had stopped fuelling it. So I told them I needed to melt it and suggested they use the hot water in the kitchen to melt it for me. They brought it back to me in a few minutes. I went downstairs, took the bottle to my room and closed the door. I squeezed the bottle but no oil came out. It had frozen again. Within seconds.
I took the bottle and upstairs and had it heated. There was a wash basin just outside the dining area with a mirror on the wall. I asked for a mug of hot water, immersed my bottle in it and took it to the wash basin. I applied the oil to my hair, keeping the bottle immersed in the water to prevent it from becoming solidified again.
Having applied oil, I walked downstairs so I could comb it. I entered my room, put the bottle down and started to finger comb my hair. But I couldn’t. The oil on my hair had become solidified and even after rubbing my hair was not greasy.
I ran up and stood before the Tandoor for whatever heat it would give away. After a few minutes of standing before it, turning my head this way and that, I began finger combing my hair as inconspicuously as possible, standing as I was in the middle of the dining area with some of the tables still occupied by guests who were probably watching.
I rushed to the mirror outside and applied the comb. My hair was greasy enough, at last. My scalp was warm but it was beginning to become cold already. I parted my hair, wore my hair into a tight plait and heaved a sigh.

I walked down to my room, tired. Strands of hair, cold now with the cold oil, touched my ear lobes now and then.
When I laid my head on the pillow, it felt as if I had a cold towel wrapped around my head.

Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse

2011-10-14T15:00:00.002+05:30

This is a book that appears to be about Gautama Buddha or based on Buddha’s life. But it is not. The only thing in this story that bears any semblance to Buddha’s life is the way it begins. With a seeker. The paths traversed by the two and the ends reached have nothing in common.

Siddhartha, a seeker, leaves the comfort of his home to find.
He follows different paths thereon; paths that are divergent, even conflicting.
He becomes an ascetic and leads a life of self denial, he indulges in a beautiful courtesan, he becomes associated with a rich merchant and works for him, he plays dice...

In the end he realizes (and this redeems the story that is otherwise nothing remarkable, nothing novel) that seeking in itself is a folly, even if it is Nirvana that you are seeking.
Most of us agree that seeking money, seeking power, seeking pleasure lead to misery. And we believe that seeking Nirvana/Salvation/Deliverance must be the purpose of our lives.
But we are mistaken in believing so. Even when we seek Nirvana, we are still ‘seeking’ and seeking itself leads to misery and most of the time, leads to nowhere.
The answer to our quest lies in Being. Simply Being. And not seeking.
This idea of the author, appearing at the very end of the book, strikes you as novel. It is convincing and it is this in the end that redeems the book.

GOING OVERBOARD

This is the trouble with most people attempting to introduce a change and novelty to mankind, to the society.
Instead of changing or replacing the one thing that is wrong, they categorically dismiss the prevailing theory and practise in their enthusiasm to embrace the new. They rush headlong towards the new and go overboard.

Champions of women’s liberation rushed headlong in their sympathy for women and created laws that were overly in favour of women with the result that too many men have become victims of false dowry cases.
Champions of the ‘Untouchables’ rushed headlong and created the reservation policy with the result that men of merit remained unemployed while offices began to be filled with incompetent rustics.
Champions of the minorities in this country rushed headlong to protect them with the result that the Hindu is a victim of pseudo-secularism today with no one to voice his cause.

This book too, I feel goes overboard at places.

The very first one being ‘Brahmin beating’.
“...He knew that he would not become an ordinary Brahmin, a lazy sacrificial official, an avaricious dealer in magic sayings, a conceited worthless orator, a wicked sly priest, or just a good stupid sheep amongst a large herd...”
A nonsensical generalization.

“Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish. Knowledge can be communicated but not wisdom. One can find it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one can’t communicate and teach it.
I suspected this and this drove me away from teachers“
The first few lines make sense, the conclusion is where he goes overboard. There is no need to dismiss teachers and teaching. There are only a handful of people in this world who learn on their own or, learn from life. Most of them need the handholding of a teacher.

“I can love a stone, a tree or a piece of bark. These are things and one can love things. But one cannot love words. Therefore teachings are of no use to me; they have no hardness, no softness, no colours, corners, smell, taste – they have nothing but words...”
His advises you to ‘accept everything’ elsewhere and here he rejects words and teachings. Is it good, is it necessary to resent or reject something?

“I do not attach importance to thoughts either. I attach importance to things”
It would have sufficed to say that one should not be entangled in thoughts, that one should transcend thoughts; it was not necessary to say thoughts were not important.

These are a few examples. There are a few more in the book.

The popularity of the book is perhaps owing to its success with western readers. I don’t mean to be jingoistic but there isn’t anything in the book that should blow away us Indians. I felt this way when I finished reading Paulo Coelho’s Alchemist too.

Read it anyway.

LINES THAT APPEALED TO ME...

...One must find the source within one’s own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking – a detour, error...

...Om is the bow, the arrow is the soul,
Brahman is the arrow’s goal,
At which one aims unflinchingly...

...He travelled the way of self denial through meditation, through the emptying of the mind of all images...

...What is meditation? What is abandonment of the body? What is fasting? What is the holding of breath? It is a flight from the Self, it is a temporary escape from the torment of Self. It is a temporary palliative against the pain and folly of life. A driver of oxen drinking wine makes this same flight...

...One can learn nothing.
In the essence of everything, there is something that we cannot call learning. There is only a knowledge – that is everywhere, that is Atman, that is in me and you and in every creature, and this knowledge has no worse enemy than the man of knowledge, than learning...

...Let me warn you, you who are thirsty for knowledge, against the thicket of opinions and the conflict of words...

...Through thought alone, feelings become knowledge and are not lost, but become real and begin to mature...

...Meaning and reality are not hidden somewhere behind things, they are in them, in all of them...

...When anyone reads anything he wishes to study, he does not despise the letters and punctuation marks, and call them illusion, chance and worthless shells, but he reads them, he studies and loves them, letter by letter. To call the world of appearances, illusion is similar...

...To go through the world like a child, so awakened, so concerned with the immediate, without any distrust...

...He had never found his Self, because he wanted to trap it in the net of thoughts...

...The art of love in which, more than anything else, giving and taking become one...

...Most people are like a falling leaf that drifts and turns in the air, flutters, and falls to the ground. But a few others are like stars which travel one defined path: no wind reaches them; they have within themselves their guide and path...

...River’s secret - the water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new...

...He learned to listen – with a still heart, with a waiting, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinions...

...A secret from the river – there is no such thing as time – the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future...

...The river has very many voices – voice of a king, of a warrior, of a bull, of a nightbird, of a pregnant woman and sighing man, more...

...The voice of river was the voice of life, of being, of perpetual becoming...

...Gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force...

...When he answered his rudeness with a smile, every insult with friendliness, every naughtiness with kindness, that was the most hateful cunning of the old fox...

...All the simple, foolish, but tremendously strong, vital passionate urges and desires no longer seemed trivial to Siddhratha. For their sake, he saw people live and do great things, travel, conduct wars, suffer and endure immensely...

...the goal of seeking – a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life...

...Disclosing his wound to his listener was the same as bathing it in the river, until it became cool and one with the river...

...When Siddhartha listened to this song of thousand voices; when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om – perfection...

...perhaps you seek too much and as a result of your seeking you cannot find...

...When someone is seeking, he only sees the thing that he is seeking; he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means to have a goal but finding means to be free to be receptive to have no goal. In striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose...

...When Buddha taught about the world, he divided it into Sansara and nirvana, illusions and truth, suffering and salvation. The world is never one sided. Never is a man wholly Sansara or wholly Nirvana, never wholly saint or wholly sinner. This seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is real. Time is not real. If time isn’t real then the dividing line that seems to lie between this world and eternity suffering and bliss, good and evil is also an illusion.
I am a sinner and someday sinner will be Brahma again, someday attain Nirvana, someday become a Buddha. This someday is an illusion. The sinner is not on the way to a Buddha like state; he is not evolving, although our thinking cannot conceive things otherwise. No, the potential Buddha already exists in the sinner; his future is already there. The potential hidden Buddha must be recognized in him. The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. It is perfect at every moment; every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them and all dying people – eternal life...

...therefore everything that exists is good – death life, sin, holiness, wisdom and folly. Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding; then all is well with me and nothing can harm me...

‘...this is a stone, and after sometime it will become soil and from the soil it will become plant, animal or man. Previously, I would have said, ‘this is just a stone; it has no value, it belongs to the world of Maya, but perhaps because within the cycle of change it can also become man and spirit, it is also of importance.’ But now I think. ‘this stone is stone; it is also animal, god and Buddha. I do not respect and love it because it was one thing and will become something else, but because it has already long been everything and always is everything. I love it just because it is a stone. I see value and meaning in each one of its fine markings and cavities...’

...“I can love a stone, a tree or a piece of bark. These are things and one can love things. But one cannot love words. Therefore teachings are of no use to me; they have no hardness, no softness, no colours, corners, smell, taste – they have nothing but words...I do not attach importance to thoughts either. I attach importance to things”
‘What you call a thing, is it not Maya?’
‘If it is illusion, then I also am illusion, and so they are always of the same nature as myself‘...

...Love is the most important thing in the world. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But it is only important to love the world...

...I distrust words for their contradiction is also an illusion...

Not Bribing Is Not Enough

2011-10-07T11:28:00.000+05:30

The bus stopped before a closed gate guarded by an old man in Khaki. Beyond the gate, the road narrowed, retreating, as if to return the green flanking its sides, their rightful territory. We could not wait to enter. There was the pregnant silence that falls upon the proximity of any deep water body.
But the board fastened to the gate clearly said the entry was restricted, that public vehicles were not allowed. This was perhaps because the area was sensitive; there was a dam ahead built across the sea-like Bhadra river.

One of the boys got down and spoke to the guard – requesting him to open the gate and let the bus in. The guard obviously refused, pointing to the board. The alternative was for everybody in the bus to get down and walk to our destination – the dam.

After some more persuasion, the boy came back to announce emphatically that the guard had asked for 20 rupees!
‘He is asking for bribery and we shall not pay him. We have to fight corruption’.
All of them in the bus (with the exception of a few including yours truly) agreed that they had to fight corruption and would not pay him 20 rupees. No way!
This was the same crowd that had participated in some procession to demonstrate support for Anna Hazare a few days ago.

Since most of them haven’t learnt a line of Kannada though they have lived here for years, I was called to negotiate with the guard who spoke only Kannada.

I digress briefly here - on the subject of people from other states not caring to learn the local language, it may be noted that there is no uniformity in the scruples of people. They are scrupulous when it comes to fighting corruption by refusing to pay 20 rupees to an underpaid old guard, but feel no obligation (scruples) to learn the language of the soil off which they live. Another instance of how we make fragments of the ‘Whole’ for our convenience – about which I have written before.

So back to my story, I jumped down and hurried to the guard, having already worked in my mind what I was going to do. The boys around me suggested that I make a case out of the aunties in the bus who would not be able to walk all the way.
I did. Secretly willing him to shake his head.
He shook his head.
And then I asked if he wanted some money. How much did he want?
‘How can I ask?... As much as you please... something for coffee...’
The boys around stood gaping at us. I was sure they were not following a word.
‘Do one thing. Open the gate now. When the bus returns I will hand 20 rupees to the bus driver. He will extend his hand out. Collect it from him’.
He nodded.
There was a cheer from everyone as we jumped backed into the bus.
‘He has agreed. Sowmya spoke to him in Kannada. We are not paying anything.’
I, the negotiator became the saviour and everyone’s favourite that day, as the bus rolled on and the Bhadra river stretching all the way to the horizon received us in all its grey-blue calm.

So why did I do what I did?

Before that, what is corruption?
The answer to that is easy. Sure, bribery (among many other forms...) is corruption.
But what is not corruption? When are you ‘clean’? The answer to that is not so straightforward.
You may not pay the guard the bribe he asked for, but if you negotiate with him to get the bus inside, you are still corrupt. Because you are breaking the rule. A rule that was made for security reasons.
Whether you break the rule by paying a bribe or by appealing to his sympathy or a soft corner of his heart, you are still breaking the rule.
You are clean only when you learn of a rule and follow it without questioning.
The minute you attempt to negotiate around it, either by the use of polite words or the use of money or influence, you become corrupt.

That day, when people felt triumphant about ‘finding a solution without paying a bribe’, this narrow and limited view of corruption that most people seem to have, became stark.

So when the accounts closed for that day, were we deemed corrupt? If yes, then what made us corrupt?
May be yes. May be we were corrupt but not so much because we paid the guard a bribe of 20 rupees, as much because we violated a rule and compromised security.

As for the act of paying the guard the amount of 20 rupees, this calls for some analysis to put matters in perspective.
All that is legally incorrect need not be morally incorrect too.
A line comes to my mind – something about ‘the amount of crime in a sin and the amount of sin in a crime’. I will add to this by saying further that, a crime itself should not be the basis of judgment but the mount of sin a crime should be the basis of judgment.

It is said that Indira Gandhi started corruption in the country. During her regime, income tax of up to 90% was levied on people. People had no other way to make ends meet than by making black money.
Those people could be called criminals but what was the amount of sin in their crime? Not much.

Coming to my story, how much does a security guard working for the government earn in a month? 2000 Rupees?
How much did we, employees of a software company, earn a month? Anything between 30000 to 40000 Rupees? And that wasn’t enough for some of them - they had resigned for more money; there were no other compelling reasons - a few lakhs of rupees more every year.
So who was the greedier of the two? He who wanted 20 rupees for coffee/chai or he who wanted ten thousand more month on month for buying car, gold, designer clothes, movie tickets in an air conditioned multiplex?
Should we embark on the subject of most of these commodities having gone beyond the reach of that guard because of us who consumed recklessly causing prices to increase?

Being in our position, saturated as pythons, it was easy enough for us to oppose bribery and fight corruption, but to the guard, window shopping through most of his life, honesty should be humongous effort. In the larger context, the true measure of each one’s performance is how much each one has to stretch in this world relative to others.

So what should we have done that day to feel proud of ourselves?
We should have paid him not 20 but 200 rupees but stopped the bus outside the restricted area in respect for the rule and walked to our destination.

Sounds silly?

Error of Judgment

2011-09-28T11:12:00.000+05:30

People we like most in life often prove to be an error of judgment.
If this is true for me alone, then it’s my luck.

But if you agree with me, even some of you, then it’s a pattern that calls for deep reflection.

Actually, there is no error of judgment, because there is no judgment to begin with.
Many a time, we don’t love people because of who they are. We choose to love them first and then attribute qualities to them that would make them worthy of our loving.

There is very little judgment and lots of imagination. We imagine he must be this, she must be like that. After some time of believing, this imagination becomes reality. More imagination builds upon it. We snatch fragments and fractions of reality to verify our preconceptions. Once verified, more imagination grows on these preconceptions.

And then comes a jolt of reality like a quake and everything tumbles down. And we lament. In confusion - most of the time not sure whether it is the person who disappointed us that we are lamenting or our own judgment.

Whichever way, it does hurt a lot. When someone we have put on a pedestal falls down.

Ashthami 2011

2011-09-08T12:04:00.006+05:30

A new blue filigreed chubby-baby sized blue Krishna clad in yellow robes, flute in hand was the special feature of Janmashthami this year. And the tall brass Diyas; both from Guruvayur, where my parents visited as part of their yearly Tamil Nad temple tour. They had carried it on their lap all through the return journey.

The golden Krishna that we previously had, had faded, and eventually fallen into pieces from its niche when my mother’s elbow had touched it when she was passing it. I had suggested discarding it long ago. But they had clung to it, unwilling to let go.

Like all old things break, making way for the new, this one had made way for the new Krishna. The joy of the new Krishna, its colour, its flawless expression, the filigree, and its sheer size made all forget the old one and the pain of losing it.
But along with that, the importance of ‘letting go’ was forgotten too. Tenacity was here to stay. Only an old love would be replaced by a new one.

The marble Krishna, a foot tall, a most cherished legacy, which used to adorn the centre of the Mantapa, now stood by the side of the new Krishna.
But size does not matter. We all understand that it is the magnum opus of all art in our home. And will be as long as…

As I had walked through the market in 4th Block, a bunch of peacock feathers had caught my fancy and I had bought 20 of them for three hundred rupees. I had been looking for a cow and calf – plastic or fibre or whatever. It would look so lovely with the Krishna. I had found a small one but its eyes were not kind. Then, I had found a really good sculpture but it was huge – half my size and there was no way I could have carried it to Mysore.
That’s when my eyes had fallen on the peacock feathers and I had bought them. Most of my beautiful possessions were found when I had been focusedly searching for something else. I am sure that is true is the case of most people.
Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans.

Decorating the Mantapa was also peaceful and without incident. Usually there would be two opinions about what flowers to use, where and how to arrange them, where the heavy bunch of plantains would be hanged and where the coconuts, whether to use electric lights inside…
Sometime along, without realizing it, without discussing it, both I and my father had decided to let go. What mattered was our being happy and together on that day.
Living as we are in comfortable times, there is no scope for those big heroic sacrifices. But the small sacrifices make a big difference. They are the most difficult to make and their importance too, dawns upon us after so much precious time has been wasted. But better late than never.

Imprinting Krishna’s baby feet on the floor is a fascinating thing. You make a fist of one hand, dip the little finger side of the fist in a dilute paste of rice floor and press it on the floor. And then dip the tip of your forefinger in the floor and touch them five times above the feet creating the toes starting with the big toe first, so when you reach the little toe, you have used most of the floor and just a dot remains. And then after 1 hour of careful guarding, the things dry and you see Krishna’s feet entering the door and walking up to the Mantapa.

Some more alteration to the house had given us a bigger hall. I don’t see any scope for more alteration but with my father… you never know…

Making Rangoli peacocks on the floor with the stencil that also came from Guruvayur was fascinating too.

Regular as I am with my Suryanamaskaras, I ate without a care, all the sweets and snacks – Chakkuli, Thenkolal, Murukku, coconut burfee, seven cups and all…

Bro Murali was missing, saving up all his leave for his wedding. But the anticipation of the wedding and the joys it would bring, filled the lacuna caused by his absence.

Yet another Ashthami came. And went.

Forbidden Tree

2011-09-05T11:20:00.003+05:30

A few drops of rain fell and leaves sprouted from the dying, decaying, stunted trunk. Tender, shiny and green.
Like nothing had ever happened.
Like the axe had not fallen on it only months before.
It was a tree growing in a footpath. No one had planted it there. The territory was meant for people walking, running, ambling on their way to their duties.
The territory was not meant for trees to trespass. For it came in the way of people’s feet that were used to following a defined pattern of movement that was not to be obstructed or hindered by trees.

Actually the tree belonged there. Anywhere. And everywhere.
It was the tree’s territory that people had claimed forcefully.
But they had claimed it and it was now theirs.

When it had grown beautifully, boughs and leaves and blossom and all, the axe had fallen and all that remained was a short stump of the trunk, almost level with the ground. For a long time, it lay there, dying, rotting, blackening, becoming one with the dust.

But unseen, unmoving, deep beneath the black stump, there was a pulse of life. The last pulse.
A pulse that was like a seed that contained within it a big tree. That could grow again into the enormous giant that it once was.
One day, a few drops of water fell on the very edge of the trunk, barely touching it. The next day, you could see a few tiny, green leaves, all set to grow again. To live again.

Their innocence and courage were only pitiable. Their confidence almost ridiculous. Their tenacity exasperating.
For all knew they would never succeed. It was just a matter of weeks before someone noticed their audacity and brought the axe again.

It would be good for the tree to simply die. To give up.
It would be kind of someone to take care that no drop of water ever fell on the stump. It would be kinder still of someone to bring the axe and complete what those half sensitive, thoughtless people had done.
It would be kind to strike at every root, every square inch of the trunk, even set it on fire, search for that last pulse of life and kill it. Once for all.

Because tantalization is a cruel thing. To die again and again is torment.
Every life deserves one death that is final and complete. Only one.

Sometimes, love is like that tree. It grows in a forbidden territory.
Love’s territory is all the world but the guardians of society have claimed most of it, drawn neat boundaries all over it and defined well, what belongs to whom. And what territories are forbidden to whom.
And they now refuse to return it to love.
So love becomes that tree. Sometimes.
It grows in a forbidden territory.
Only to realize someday the impossibility of its aspirations and to be struck down by its own disappointment.
It drags itself to a corner to die.
Yet it holds on to a last pulse of life.
One day it finds a few drops of that wretched hope.
And grows again.
With innocence and courage. And ridiculous confidence. And exasperating tenacity.
It refuses to die.
To be struck down again. By some more disappointment.

It would be kind of someone to kill all hope so love may die.
It would be kinder still to strangle a person clinging to a love that is impossible.

For tantalization is a cruel thing. To die again and again is torment.
Every love that is not meant to be, deserves one death that is final and complete.

Ghost Stories From The Raj - edited by Ruskin Bond

2011-08-31T10:39:00.003+05:30

The subject of ghosts itself may not be of any importance as most people would perceive it, but it does attain significance when people’s belief in ghosts dictates their habits, practises, the way they handle their practical problems and certain aspects of their lifestyle.

To give you instances, in certain parts of the country, belief in spirits dictated the way legal documents were drafted. British officers had to draft them specially for these landowners in villages.
Spirits were relied upon to settle land disputes, to prevent encroachment.
Fear of spirits prevented theft of crop.
People built shrines to protect themselves from man eating tigers.
People refrained from exploiting and looting hidden treasures for they believed these were guarded by spirits.
People killed others for ‘bewitching’ their children or cattle.
People avoid going near trees that they believe are haunted. They also show preference to certain tress during planting of trees.
Mothers weep when they lose their son but weep more bitterly if he has been invested with the holy thread but not married, for they believe such boys turn into spirits and have to wait really long for reincarnation.

This book, is a collection of ghost stories, some of them based on fact, penned by British officers who lived in India during the British Raj and encountered strange experiences.

I have noted the summary of each story. This is for my own sake for I will not read the book again but would like to have some notes for easy recollection or reference.

The wondrous narration of Jon Campbell – Gunfounder to the mogul emperors (1654 - 1667) - from Indian State Railways Magazine (April 1933)
John Campbell and other officers learn of the treasure obtained by Asaf Khan, a general in the army of Jehangir, by looting and plundering Hindu places of worship that were adorned with riches such as golden cows. They dig the house for the treasure now guarded by devils and spirits. When the devils appear, they protect themselves by reading the Bible and obtain the treasure.

The Men Tigers – from Rambles and Recollections of An Indian Official by Lt. Col. WH Sleeman of the Bengal Army, Vol 1
In places central India, people faced the menace of tigers killing men and escaping all efforts to hunt them down. The common people as well as the Raja himself believed that these tigers were guided by the spirits of men who were killed by these tigers, who rode on their head and guided them away from danger and towards prey. So their reaction to the menace was offering sacrifices and building shrines to these spirits. The tigers who could not be controlled thus were of a different kind – they were men who turned to tigers by eating a certain root and turned back to men by eating one more of the root. There were others who had mastered the science and practised it, while relying upon an assistant to them the antidote to turn them back into men – by putting a necklace around the tiger’s neck etc). Sometimes these assistants, initially brave, had fled or fainted after the man had transformed into tiger and roared, leaving the tiger on the loose, creating havoc. The difference between real tigers and these men turned to tigers was that the latter had no tail!

Haunted Villages – from Rambles and Recollections of An Indian Official by Lt. Col. W H Sleeman of the Bengal Army, Vol 1
Among the agricultural and landowning classes in villages, there existed firm beliefs that lands were guarded by spirits.if these spirits were not appeased, then the landowners were liable to face trouble – their cattle or children meeting with accidents, being bitten by snakes, thrown and beaten etc. But these same spirits when appeased, also guarded lands from trespassers, theft of crop and encroachment and thus save the owners all expenses of going to court, settlement of boundary disputes etc.
In one particular instance, in a certain village, at every new settlement, the proprietor insisted upon having the name of the spirit of the old proprietor inserted in the lease instead of his own name. Mr. Fraser was requested to redraft the legal document, which after inquiry and consultation with other people, he had to do. The actual proprietor was inserted as manager or bailiff. Oncewhen Lt. Col. Sleeman of Bengal Army was in charge of Nursingpore, a cultivator ploughed beyond his boundary to add half an acre to his own land. That night, his son was bitten by a snake and his buffaloes were seized by murrain. He confessed his sin in a temple and vowed to build a shrine on the spot. Soon after, his buffaloes and his son, all recovered.
In another case, a village had been deserted though it was most fertile, for people believed it was haunted. English governors and officers undertook to disprove the belief but when they visited the place, they met with strange incidents like sightings of snakes. Once a measuring rope broke into pieces.
People used, in order to protect lands, stick up something in the field, or tie something to the tree in the name of a spirit, who from then on, took responsibility of the fields’ safekeeping. Anyone stealing crop would become ill. And only after confessing his sin to the proprietor and ask his pardon, he would be spared for the proprietor then pacified the spirit by smearing cow dung on the forehead of the sinner.

The Return of Imray – Rudyard Kipling
This is a very well told story with humour and felicity of language. The narrator visits Strickland in his bungalow which Strickland had rented after its previous occupant, Imray went missing. After sunset, there are movements in the house of someone invisible – a presence felt but not seen. Strickland’s dog too behaves strangely. It does not sleep in its own bed but in the Verandah corner. His eyes follow someone, as he stands with his body taut and all hair erect. One evening while hunting down two snakes caught in the folds of the ceiling cloth, Strickland prods at what seemed like a buffalo wrapped in cloth, resting on the beam. The bundle falls down and turns out to be Imray’s body. A tricky enquiry by Strickland of Bahadur Khan, the servant reveals that he had killed Imray because Imray had bewitched his four year old son after patting him on his head. The boy had died of fever soon. When he was about to be taken captive and handed to the police, it turned out that one of the snakes had bitten him and spared him the shame of being taken by the police. That night, the dog did not sleep in the verandah but jumped back to his bed.
An innocent act of patting on a child’s head and a coincidental fever had resulted in the killing of the English officer!

The Summoning of Arnold – Alice Perrin – from East of Suez (1926)
Arnold is burning in separation of his wife who had to return to England for a while due to poor health. She, Lilla, had said to him that if she died, she would come straight to him first aand Arnold believed it and also that she would come and fetch him. If she died. That night, Arnold screamed ‘Lilla Lilla’ and was found dead the next hour. There was strong smell of chloroform in his room. Even after thorough searching, no bootle of chloroform was found anywhere. They concluded that he had committed suicide very carefully. The next day, a telegram arrived announcing that Lilla had died under chloroform during an operation.
Had she come then, as she had promised to see Arnold and fetched him?

Chunia, Ayah – Alice Perrin – from East of Suez (1926)
An Indian Ayah insulted by her English employer kills the child who is her charge by strangling her. The English couple leave the city and the ayah finds employment elsewhere. But she hears cries of the child outside the door of the house. She stands against the doors to prevent the child from coming to her. A few days later, she becomes possessed and is confined to an asylum where she pats an imaginary baby to sleep...

Caulfield’s Crime – Alice Perrin – from East of Suez (1926)
Caulfield is known for his ill temper but he is a good shooter. One day, he takes a friend to the countryside for shooting. While they were resting in a clearing, a fakir, with sharp teeth, long matted hair, glistening eyes and ashes smeared all over his body asks for alms, he throws a stone at him and shoos him away. Then just when Caulfield is about to shoot, the Fakir disturbs the birds and they all fly away. Caulfield shoots the fakir and kills him. Since killing a local is no joke in those times, they hide the body and return to their camp to have dinner. After dinner, they return to the spot to find a jackal with a grey streaked coat and one ear missing, making a meal of the body. They shoo it away and bury the body. They return to their quarters. Caulfield begins to frequently hear the howling of a jackal around his house and when they see it, its the same jackal with one ear missing. He is convinced that the spirit of the fakir has entered the body off the jackal. Even when he spends the night in his friend’s house and not his own, the jackal follows him there too.
One fine day, he dies of hydrophobia. There are no teeth marks on his body and he has not been bitten by a dog. The servant however reports the sighting of a jackal around the house. As his friend takes his lantern to leave to his house after seeing the last of Caulfield, he sees a jackal. It has one ear. It enters Caulfield’s house but when the house is searched, there is no jackal to be found.

A Ghost in Burma (A Story Based on Fact) – Gerald T Tait - from Indian State Railways Magazine (December 1928)
a group of English officers were posted to Burma to survey the countryside. After a long and hard day of fighting the impenetrable forest they sighted a strange bungalow perched on top of a precipice overlooking the Salween river. They chose to rest there for the night after protests from the coolies who insisted they would not sleep there in the night but outside in the clearing several meters away.
A brick cube in the courtyard was the most curious feature of the place – one of the officers who knew architecture swore it was 5000 years old and belonged to the Sumerian period, indicated by the cuneiform writings on its surface and the plano convex handmade bricks. During their first night in the place, one of them, Alaistairs woke up screaming, having felt cold hands around his neck.
The next night, Peter stood at his window with his arms stretched out to get some fresh air. The window was set into a smooth bare wall that overlooked the Salween river a thousand feet below with no foothold, no support for anyone, not even a lizard to get to the window. He feels cold clammy hands pulling him out of the window. He shrieks and his two other friends pull him away and the cold hands slip. They decide to check on Alaistairs anyway. When they go out, they find him lying on the cube in the courtyard face downwards, dead, with distinct markings of two hands on his throat. Was the Sumerian cube some ancient sacrificial altar?

There are more things, A Tale of the Malabar Jungles – H W Dennys – from The Madras mail Annual (1930)
Peter visits Anderson who lives alone in seclusion in the Malabar jungles with a few tribes in villages nearby. He finds Anderson strange, in keeping with his reputation in that area – his house had domes and minarets and it was decked with Persian carpets. Nevertheless, he is a great shooter. They leave for the jungle to find some game. Just a day before their departure, strange things begin to happen. Anderson demonstrates the powers that he has acquired. He makes a stick move just by looking at it intensely. He asks peter to think of an object and then reads his mind and materializes the glass tumbler out of thin air. He says the tribes in the jungle posses these powers too but he is ahead of them. But he yet to learn how to make these objects last and not disappear after he has stopped focusing on them.
The next day, they walk back from the jungle with only their walking stick alone, having handed the rifles, guns and other heavy equipment to the coolies so they could walk fast and free. Suddenly the tall grass before them parts and a rogue elephant appears before them. Peter runs for his life but turns back when he realizes Anderson is not following him. Anderson has, by the use of his powers, turned the walking stick into a rifle and shot the elephant on its forehead. The dying elephant falls on Anderson and kills him too.
But at last, Anderson had mastered the art of making the objects of his creation last, for Peter, after narrating the story produced from his pocket the bullet that was found in the elephants forehead, though the rifle itself had turned back to a walking stick!

The Aryan Smiles – by J Warton and N Blenman - from Indian State Railways Magazine (June 1933)
Mike, an Irishman works a station master in the Punjab Delhi Railways. He is dead and in a mysterious way.
He was hot tempered and liked to use his whip. One day, he told off a mendicant in the station garden cooking food on a patch of grass. The mendicant laughed. Enraged by his insolence Mike whipped him. The mendicant put out the fire, smeared the ashes all over his smarting wounds, held up his hand heavenward and muttered curses and oaths about Almighty, Retribution, Flames and Fire...
The next day, while having his meal at his friend’s place, Mike felt very hot and removed his coat. Then he suddenly screamed that his body was on fire and immersed himself in waist high water.
The next evening during his customary walk in Roshanara Gardens, he disappeared altogether. Upon being informed by his horse cab driver who had been waiting outside the garden, his friend searched for him, lantern in hand, in all the dark patches in the garden. Reaching a dark patch under a peepal tree at the edge of a pool he asks the driver to come over but the driver refuses to go under the tree for the sake of love or money. When friend asks why, driver tells him that no Hindu in Delhi would go under that tree. The spirit of a Pir baba of the time of Aurangzeb dwells in the tree. Did the friend hear the sound of hookah? It was the Pir baba smoking. “it must be the croaking of a night bird” laughs friend of Mike. The Pir had been harassing Hindus who ccame to the sacred Peepal tree having forcefully occupied a place under that tree. The Hindus believed the tree had become cursed and kept away. When the Pir died, he was buried under that tree. But two Hindus exhumed his body and threw it into the pool. Since then, the Pir’s spirit had haunted the tree. Even as the diver narrated this story, it rained and a lightning struck the tree. Part of it fell into the tank and the remaining stood charred on the bank. Not finding Mike anywhere they began dredging operations at the tank. The clue was Mike’s whip which floated in the tank like a fishing rod. Mike’s body was found was found a vessel filled with soil and under that an old copper hookah!

Panther People – by C A Kincaid – from Indian Christmas Stories (1936)
Briggs was driving through Dharwar jungles of Kanara district when suddenly an Englishman appeared on the track. His name was Savile and Briggs offered him a lift. While having breakfast in a clearing, Savile asked Briggs if he had heard of people who had the power to turn into a panther and back to men. Savile proceeded to tell his story – he and his wife had, years ago, accepted invitation from friends to camp in the jungle. During the day they shot tigers and bears. Savile and wife had separate tents for the night as she found Savile’s snoring disturbing. In the mornings, there were excited mentions of the findings of pug marks of a panther outside the tents. One night Savile kept vigil, gun in hand. At 2 in the night he saw a panther passing by his tent and entering Travelyan’s tent. Following it, he found it standing by a horrified looking Travelyan. He shot it and upon approaching it, saw the dying creature turn into a woman that was his wife. Travelyan then spilled the story – Savile’s wife entered his tent every night in the form of a panther, then turned into the woman that she was and made love to him. Later she had turned into a panther again and returned to her tent.
By this time, the others in the camp rushed to the spot. Not believing the story they handed Savile over to the police. He spent 3 years in a prison. He had been released just then and was without money or job.
So saying he stretched himself, slowly turning into a panther. He growled at Briggs and asked him to hand over all his money. Briggs distracted him by shouting ‘Buffalo, Buffalo’, the only animal a panther is afraid of and struck Savile in his jaw and drove away. Savile recovered and followed him and tried to climb into the car but in vain. Giving up, he turned into human form, thanked Briggs for the breakfast, asked him to find him a job and disappeared into the jungle. When the records at Yeroda jail were checked the name Savile was not found. Was Savile an assumed named? Or was it really a panther that had turned into human and not a human?

The Old Graveyard at Sirur – by C A Kincaid – from Indian Christmas Stories (1936)
Not far from the officers mess at Sirur (some distance from Poona), was the old cemetery. There was a tombstone larger than the rest at the centre, and when the Indian troopers passed by it, they saluted. When Kincaid, who during one of his visits to the place saw this. When he enquired about the reason for it, Rissaldar Major Shinde told him the story of Colonel Hutchings. Several decades ago, when a 15 year old widow about to perform sati had flinched before the fires and shouted for help, colonel Hutchings passing by with his Mussalman troopers, and had saved her after a fight with the dead man’s kinsmen, killing one in the fight, and carried away the girl and married her. The Shindes whose family honour had been thus humiliated planned to kill both the Englishman and the widow, but had been unable to. After many years, they found the opportunity when Colonel Hutchings was riding in a palanquin to shoot a blackbuck or a Chinkara, men from the Shinde community attacked him and killed him. The palanquin bearers had run to the widow and informed her and she in turn informed the police. The police hanged two of the men. Before the Shinde men could kill the widow, she took opium, died and was buried beside her husband. Ever since, the colonel was found sitting on his tomb, sometimes with his wife by his side. When the troopers saw him on the tomb, they saluted him.
Kincaid having heard the story and drove to Sirur, with the Rissaldar Shinde on full moon night. There he had a Kodak camera placed on a tomb a few feet away, setting prolonged exposure. When the photographs came, surely the Colonel was there and also a hazy figure of his wife beside.

The Munjia – by C A Kincaid – from Indian Christmas Stories (1936)
Mahadev, a bright Brahmin boy from Nasik catches plague. His mother is worried, of course because he is dying, but more because he has gone through the thread ceremony but is not yet married. It is believed that if a Brahmin boy after thread ceremony dies unmarried, he will become a Munjia – a type of spirit, who is not ready for reincarnation but has to take abode in a peepal tree. Further, to be delivered from his state of suspension, he has to enter the body of a person, and when that person dies, he may be leave this world and enter the other world. Mahadev dies. Everyone in Nasik wonders where in town the Munjia will take his abode. One day when a horse cart was on its way to the railway station, soon as it passed under a peepul tree, the horses ran in a fright into the country side plunging the cart into a ravine, killing women and tree.
Mahadev had taken his abode in this peepul tree which was outside the town near the Englishmen’s quarters. Mahadev watched out for someone yawning so he could enter their body through their mouth. But people were careful and never yawned without snapping their fingers in front of their mouth, scaring munjias. But one Englishman, Colin Travers yawns without precaution and the munjia enters his body. He has the option to end his own life (Colin’s) or to kill someone and be hanged towards deliverance. Killing oneself or Atmaghat is a great sin. Mahadev had already sinned by entering the body of a beef eating Englihman and would not be born a Brahmin in his next life. So he decided to take the other option. When Colin reaches home, he takes a sword hanging on a wall in the hall and kills his wife and another woman. He goes to the police station and confesses having killed his wife out of jealousy and suspicion. The court believing no sane man would do so gave him penal servitude for life instead of death sentence. Disappointed, Mahadev, (now Colin) decide to kill in the prison to obtain a death sentence. He asks for Indian clubs for morning exercise. The authorities pleased with his good behaviour give them to him. Colin runs about killing with those clubs until a guard shoots him down. Thus Mahadev is delivered. All English officers wonder why Colin did what he did ending a promising career.

The Pool – by John Eyton
There is a dark pool in a valley formed by the foot of God. By the pool, a white temple and a holy man with three straight lines in yellow paint. One day Mohammedans plunder the temple, kill the holyman and throw him into the pool. Rushes grow on the clear pool, people fear going near it as they hear sounds of wailing and shadowy figures in the night. Years later, the area is assigned to an Englishman who turns the place into an estate and dredges the pool though it is outside his area. The villagers resent it but he heeds not. When he sees people burning their dead by the pool, he writes to authorities asking them to stop them but they interfere not as the pool is outside the boundary of the estate. One day he sees a holy man by the pool and writes to the officials warning them that a temple may be built next on the spot. He catches malaria and is bed ridden for 15 days. When he recovers he visits the poolside and finds a white temple there.

The Problem Of Good Upbringing

2011-08-25T18:49:00.000+05:30

The problem with good upbringing is that it renders you unfit for living in a society full of people who have money but no breeding. Especially these days.

You wonder why people honk senselessly like they thought it sounded like the cooing of a cuckoo to the ears of everyone around, why they close all windows during the day and switch on the tubelight, why they want fan in full speed when it’s raining outside, why they shout into their mobile phones in public places, why they send useless good morning good evening messages resulting in a national waste instead of using the service for a specific purpose, why they watch television at midnight in full volume in a quiet neighbourhood when everyone is sleeping peacefully, why they listen to loud music when their neighbour’s children are having their exams, why they let loose their dogs in public instead of holding the leash tightly, causing dog fearing people to jump and sprain their legs or come under some heavy wheels...

All you ask for is decent behaviour of them and they look at you as if you were asking for some unusual favour.

It’s that time of the year when a crib blog is due from me.
Last year it was that idiot neighbour who drove home after midnight and reversed his car for full ten minutes and parked it with the precision of a micro chip manufacturing machine until the car was exactly parallel to his compound and exactly 12 inches away from it, while the high pitch reverse music sounded like an ambulance siren for full ten minutes. And this he did on a quiet road where only rats and cockroaches scurried about among litter and not a soul else. He probably respected their lives a lot and wanted to make sure they dashed to safety before he started his operation.

This year it’s these otherwise good natured but very rough people next door on my floor who had a metal door fixed to their front door after watching one of those horror programmes on Kannada TV channels full of thefts, robbery, burglary, chain snatching, murder and other stuff narrated by over-zealous hosts, much of which I am sure is concocted to create sensation and hike TRP ratings.

It begins with two faraway explosions in the morning. About 7:30. The uncouth servant girl walks in and out of that door running errands banging the door each time.
Fortunately it’s time for me to go to office.
But after 10 hours, I am back. In the evening.
I am happy to be home. I sit in my chair before my study table, book shelf in front of me, fresh flowers in a vase behind all ready to begin my day.
I hear a slight clinking sound. I wince preparing for what is to come. And then there is a crash. And this time, it is not a distant explosion. It’s right outside my door which is four feet away. It feels like someone hit me on my head with a hammer. And it’s not the maid servant. It’s the owner. Or her husband. Or her brother.
I have told them to close the door slowly. Not once. Not twice. Some hundred times. But no. They just don’t care. They simply have no concern for neighbours.

They leave in the evening for one or two hours to take their two year old twins out. During which time it is peaceful, as in garden. But before and after that, it is a war zone. Loud banging of metal doors against the jamb, people shrieking to one another as if shrieking each other to death. Death by shriek!

In my parents’ house in Mysore, we have 5 metal doors, not one; three on the first floor and two on the ground floor. And you can’t hear people opening and closing them. We have been taught to be that careful. We don’t leave the doors open wide for they may bang shut because of the wind.
I told the lady so and asked her to close it slowly. She was offended. She shouted back. ‘If I don’t close it quickly, the children will run after me and run down to the street. I can’t help it.’ I knew the children were blameless. She was merely using them to shield herself. When the milkman came a minute later, she told him in my hearing ‘are we mad to make noise just like that? I have kids to take care of. Have I gone mad to bang the door for no reason?’

I gave up. These days I sit prepared for the ordeal. The minute I hear footsteps approaching the door, I drop my book and my pencil in my lap and plug my ears with my fingers. After I know it’s over, I remove my fingers. Sometimes owing to error of judgment, I remove the fingers a little early and start when I hear the loud sound.

I do little things for them now and then, since they can’t go out to the market with the kids and all...bring books for the children, get flowers whenever I get flowers for my vase, get their umbrella repaired, buy articles like plastic box, vase, medicines and all... and yet when I ask them in return for nothing more than my fair share of silence and peace, they deny it to me.

It’s the kids that I feel really sorry for.
I was really fond of the kids. They were cute. Unlike other children who cry all the time for God only knows what reason, these are happy children who smile and play all the while they are awake. It saddens me to see how they are slowly picking up all the wrong manners, habits from their elders and that servant girl in whose company they spend a good 10 hours of their every day.

And to think these are not people dwelling in slums but a family owning a three storey house in a premium area, two cars, two bikes and spend ten thousand rupees every month to buy toys for their kids!
Like I said, these are times when you find people having money but no breeding.

I Am Everything

2011-08-22T11:27:00.003+05:30

Otherwise, talking about corruption is just ranting and harping. Such a tried and tired subject.
But once in a blue moon when someone moves Heaven and Earth to fight corruption (nothing less than that), like Anna Hazare is doing these days, then, that is the opportunity to express one's viewpoints on the matter without sounding boring and turning off one’s audience.

If you happen to be in the software profession, which every other fellow in Bangalore is today, then you see more than your fair share of ‘activity’.
Daily emails and forwards about
‘Who Anna Hazare is’,
‘What is Lokpal Bill’,
‘How Lokpal will help curb Corruption’,
‘Why Lokpal is being opposed’,
‘Add Anna Hazare on Facebook’,
‘Follow Anna Hazare on Twitter’
‘Sign up this form’
And sooooooo much more...

Oh! Make no mistake! These are not just talkers of hollow words. There is action too.
People left office in company sponsored cabs to a popular city square – Anand Rao Circle – and shouted slogans, waved banners and sang Vande Mataram.
And the next day employees of various IT companies participated in protest march from Cubbon Park to Freedom Park.

Very impressive.
Only there should have been some sort of filtering process to decide who qualified to participate in the activities and who did not.
For some of them, nay, most of them had no business to be part of any such initiatives.
They had no moral right to raise their voice against corruption.

If I were a caricaturist, I would have drawn a picture of ‘coal calling the pot black’.

Nobody thought there was a need for a filtering process. Like many of those things in life right there before our eyes for us to see, but we are blind to, this was one.

The attrition rate in Bangalore, in 2004, was 11 months. I don’t know about today’s rate.
That is, the average tenure of an IT employee in an organization was 11 months. In other words, on an average, an employee switched jobs every eleven months.
Why? ‘Better Opportunity’.
You start your career at 22 with 3 lakhs per annum. (That was the salary with which my dad retired after 30 years of dedicated service in Canara Bank). It was a lot of money.
3 lakhs per annum is way more than a 22 yr old today needs. But its not enough for him.
Even as he is training during probation, he gets a ‘better opportunity’ and resigns this one for a new job that will pay him 4 lakhs per annum.
It does not matter that the first employer gave him a job when there was recession and it doesn’t matter that he had made vows to all Gods in all temples for campus recruitment.

He completes 10 months there and then he gets this offer from a ‘reputed multinational’.
Manager requests him to finish the project he has undertaken but no, the notice period as agreed was 1 month. Why should he stay longer?
He will now get 6 lakhs per annum.
Just when he is on his way to his new office, first day, he gets a call from another employer who had interviewed him and now announces that he has been selected! What about compensation? 6.5 lakhs. Hmmm...
He takes a right turn at the signal instead of left.

He just completed 1 year in the company and he’s throwing a party! Yes. After all, 1 year is a long time these days!

He is now an expert at the game. He attends 3 interviews – A, B, C.
A offers him 8 lakhs. He takes the offer letter to B. For bargaining.
B has to now offer a little more than A.
8. 6 lakhs.
He takes that offer letter to C.
C offers him 9.2.
He takes that offer letter back to A.
A is desperate for resources. They can’t really afford it, but they offer him 9.5. That’s it? ‘Sorry sir, we can’t offer more’.

OK. He joins A.

When he was planning to quit A after 1.5 years, someone cautioned him “if you change too many jobs, it will not ‘look good’ on your resume and companies will hesitate to take you in future”.
So he decides to stay longer so his resume will show how ‘loyal’ he is.
So he refrains from quitting so it will be possible for him to quit someday (at all).

There is no dearth of glamorous sounding reasons to hide all this shameful treachery – technology roadmap, work culture, better infrastructure facilities, cricket club, swimming pool, company shares, flexible work timings...

One who gets 12 lakhs wants 16. He who gets 16 wants 20. And he who gets 20 wants 23 lakhs.
Is there an end to greed? When you earn 23 lakhs per annum, you surely intend to consume at that rate.
When you consume goods worth 22 lakhs in a year do you really how much you are consuming?
Do you realize the amount of resources you are devouring?
Do you know many people there are in this country and the total resources available to provide for all of them?

One flat and then 2.
Two cars, one splendour and one kinetic Honda all in just one family!

When you cannot curb the greed within you, what right have you to ask someone else to curb theirs?
For is it not greed that makes one corrupt?
You may not be legally corrupt, you may not be legally a criminal, but if you are greedy, are you not morally corrupt? Don’t you and that politician share the same greed?
Then what business have you got to ask that politician not to be corrupt, not to be greedy?

What are you prepared to do for this country? Would you travel by government bus twice a week? Once a week?
Would you stop after buying one house and not go on to buy 2?
Would you resist the temptation to change your mobile phone for a sexier model every year?
Would you stop eating chips and wafers like they needed no growing but dropped from the sky?
You wouldn’t. For all those email forwards of Vande Mataram and all those slogans and protest marches, you would not let go even the smallest of conveniences.

Greed is dormant in all people of all professions – teachers, lawyers, bankers, doctors, singers, actors.
But I think greed is most active in IT professionals today.
They are the best paid professionals in this country but there is none as greedy as them. None as hungry for more as they are.
And they are the ones sending most of these patriotic emails and fighting corruption on Facebook! They are the consumerists and they ask others to curb greed! Such a joke!

At the root of all social evil is reckless consumption and wastage.
At the root of the poison tree is reckless consumption and wastage.
You may pay monthly visits to old age homes, contribute to charity, (or if you are too busy, gift virtual trees and plants to each other on Facebook! ), swoon over an oh-so-helpless puppy that has hurt its leg and carry it to a vet and all and look good in your social circle, but if you continue to consume without any check and waste without a care, then you are merely clipping the twigs and leaves of the poison tree while watering its roots.

Someone at work described with a flourish, her visit to a nearby village and the urchins she had taught and the cricket she had played with them. The next day she dropped into a bucket of water, a new forty thousand rupee mobile phone she would no doubt have to replace soon! Such reckless wastage!
Do you realize the urchin in that village is who he is because you consumed such an expensive mobile phone? And do you realize his condition is going to get worse because you dropped it in a bucket of water?

All of us have different definitions of need and greed, what we must have, what we can do without and so all. Some people look at my pile of books and ask me jokingly if I am not causing trees to be cut down? I tell them, ‘I won’t buy a house, I won’t buy a car, I travel by bus and don’t go to shopping malls, so I can buy a few books without feeling guilty’.
Specifically what we will let go, will vary from person to person, but let go, we must; one thing or the other.
If we can watch our consumption pattern and wastage and gradually bring them down - cut this today, cut that tomorrow, we would be hurting the very roots of the poison tree. For sure.

And what we need in order to achieve that is the curbing of greed.
To curb greed, one small measure after another, progressively, should be part of the agenda of each and every one of us.
For all the problems that surround us – water shortage, power outage, narrow roads, traffic jam, robbery, murder, crime, inflation, terrorism, price hike - we hope for policies, laws and bills to solve them.
No politician, no government, no policy, no law and no Lokpal bill will be able to do anything if we individuals dont assume social responsibility. No environment will become greener no system cleaner and no society healthier if we continue to devour like pythons. Remember that at the root of all social, political, cultural, economic evils is reckless consumption and wastage by the INDIVUDIAL.

The solution to every problem truly, not just theoretically, but truly lies in ‘I’, the individual. Its right there before our eyes, a glaring fact. Don’t know how we miss it.

‘I’ AM EVERYTHING. Now that’s not narcissism.

Everest Calling - Phakding To Namche

2011-08-12T17:10:00.004+05:30

18th April 2011.

Few things in life could be more painful than waking up at 6:30 AM on a cold Himalayan morning. That is also the time and place when hot water becomes worth its weight in gold. And that is the time and place when every soul thinks of the Sahara desert with a wistful yearning. That cold Himalayan morning is a very powerful context.

Breakfast in Phakding was two slices of bread with boiled potato sauté with turmeric, salt and some green leaves. Honey and mixed fruit jam were available too. Everywhere we went, throughout the tour, honey and a variety of jams and marmalades were available.

We were set to start our march to our next destination – Namche Bazaar – the distance we had to cover was one among the longest distances we would cover in a day during the trek.

I bought a contour map for Rs 200 INR from the counter, hoping to refer to it as I trekked to figure out the names of rivers and peaks that appeared by our trail. I did not make any use of it.

The first things we saw when we stepped out.

It was sunny fortunately. For photography.

Our trail was by the Dudhkoshi river.

I think this is the Taboche peak considered holy. So people don’t climb the mountain. They believe if you climb it, villages at the foothills and surroundings face trouble – natural calamities and all...

Cherry blossom, we were told...

An old porter carrying his karma…

This was the entrance to the Sagarmatha national park. Mt. Everest is called Sagarmatha in the locality.

The ornamentation at the entrance.

Every hanging bridge was a thrill.

A picture taken from the shaking trembling bridge. Even one person walking on it at the far end would set it bouncing up and down.

We stopped for lunch in a place called Jorsalle.

Swami’s pedometer recorded 13.5 kilometers from the first hanging bridge after Phakding to Jorsalle – must be inaccurate – for we covered it between 7:15 AM to 10:30 AM.
We were 29 of us and we realized soon that we were not to trek together as one group. Some walked fast, some slow, some needed rest, some didn’t, some stopped too many times for photos, some didn’t. so we walked in smaller groups and sometimes alone.

When I reached Jorsalle, some of them had already reached. They cheered and clapped for me. We all cheered and clapped for everyone who arrived and this continued throughout the expedition.
We had lunch in two batches and after a few minutes of rest started again.

At one point we came really close to the Dudhkoshi river that tempted us to jump.

Porters resting. Boys from 17 to 21.

Announcing their arrival with clinging bells, horses came in a procession. Trekkers quickly moved to the mountain side of the trail and waited patiently. I needed some practice since I have this instinct to move to the valley side of the trail.

As we climbed, the valley below became more beautiful. Distance hid from view reeds and weeds and thorny dry shrubs, jagged cliffs and precipices became smooth, green remained while the browns and grays retreated, the roar of the river turned into a distant drone and silence descended from the skies.

It was getting cloudy.

Porters and trekkers on the trail who had earphones on and were listening to music, would you not listen to the music of the mountain and to it’s silence instead of film music?

Breadth, depth and height. That picture is the most special of all.

It started raining. Then it started raining hails. My jacket was in the baggage that the porter had carried away. I put on my hat. I remembered I had forgotten to pack my umbrella.
I got a little wet but did not care.
Arnab removed two small plastic covers containing what looked like handkerchiefs of silver. We started opening it. Fold after fold, fold after fold we unfolded it until it was the size of a blanket. I believe it protected 90% of body heat. I wrapped it around myself, all excited. It crackled like thin metal every time I moved an inch but it was cool!

Arnab put on his space suit, I mean his rain suit and minutes later, it stopped raining. Just when I smiled thinking that Murphy’s laws work at high altitudes too, it started raining again and that redeemed his effort.

When it stopped raining I had to remove the silver wrap around me and fold it. With help from a French guy who was passing by me, I folded it and no matter how much I tried, I could not reduce it to the size of a handkerchief.

All of them were pine trees. How I wish they were Devdar. How much fragrance they would have effused into the air! I thought of my stay in Gangothri, in the Indian Himalayas. It was surrounded by gardens and forests of Devdar and the whole place smelled of incense. If heaven had a smell, it had to be the smell of Devdar. I and Ranjana had woken up in the morning to the smell that had become suddenly strong. We stepped out of the room to find out that they were burning twigs of Devdar wood to het water for us!

For now, I had to be content with the scent of rain-kissed earth.

Drops of water at the end of every pine needle. Little bulbs.

After it rained the fog cleared, revealing to us three snow covered peaks rising from the tops of pine trees. A closer look revealed the colour of snow to be fluorescent blue at the tip of these peaks.

Namche. We expected it to be around the next corner and it turned out to be elusive.
But when we saw terraces with dwellings in their middle, we knew it would be anytime soon.

Trust me, this is how these peaks really looked. Like jewels. I do not believe in editing my pictures.
Sunlight, clear, sharp and unobstructed by clouds in a clear afternoon sky after rain was on these peaks and the snow reflected the light.

When we finally arrived, what met our eyes seemed worth the effort. Neat dwellings on terraces that gave you a view of the whole village and hid nothing, wayside shops selling colourful jewelry, trinket, shawls, sweaters, hats, bakery, pubs, Buddhist assortments… it was really a titanic amphitheatre embellished with life itself.

We walked in narrow busy lanes, wet and dry, and finally reached Himalayan Hotel.

The Moving Finger Writes

2011-08-04T23:09:00.004+05:30

One of the admirable qualities I possessed (among others : )) in childhood, was a beautiful handwriting.

I remember once, during my visit to my mom’s sister’s place, a village in Hassan district, I had filled two foolscap sheets with the names of all my cousins, aunts, uncles on both father’s and mother’s side in Kannada. I must have been seven years old then.
I did not have anything else to write, but I knew I had to fill the sheets with closely written words for the writing to look beautiful.
If you know the Kannada language, its script - rounded, loopy, curvy, swirly - like ‘Jalebi’ as the North Indians in Bangalore describe it, you can imagine how it must have looked.
When I was in Gujarat, in Ahmedabad, my classmates had asked me to write my name in Kannada and when I had finished, they had commented ‘Oye…this looks like some Mehendi design’.

While filling in those foolscap sheets, I had taken care not to make a single mistake, not to strike out a single word, and thus avoided all ugliness and then shown it to my aunt after finishing. She had gasped, said my writing was so beautiful, that too, for someone my age, and passed it around.
Everyone took it in their hands, looked at it and nodded their head in approval.

Coming to think about it now, that must have been the first thing I wrote, if you exclude my school homework.
I must say I have come a long way :-)

My brother’s writing was always bad. It was incredibly bad – my father called it kolikal – cock’s feet. The new proper spelling would be ‘kozhikaal’.
It was so illegible. We hoped it would improve with time. But it remained the same throughout. I don’t have the right adjective.
It looked like a scattering of disfigured alphabets.
His marks in class exams remained poor – even when he had done well – because the examiners could not understand what he had written and I guess they were offended or angered that they had to go through pages of that annoying script wondering if they were holding the answer sheets upside down and if they should rotate it by 90 or 180 degrees.

My mother, after lamenting his writing, her face contorted and all, would invariably change her expression in the same breath to remark about my beautiful writing to my father.
My father would purse his lips and remark that people with beautiful handwriting did not lead very happy lives.
I don’t know where he picked that up from!
I don’t know if my father was right but today, as I look at my brother, I feel he is happier than me. People who simply live their life are usually happier than those who think about life. Isn’t it?

Though my own writing was good, I was more than once, tempted to imitate the writing of some people whose handwriting impressed me very much.
The first one, as I remember, was a girl called Kira, my classmate in 7th standard when I was in Ahmedabad, and my best friend for a while. Her letters were disjointed. Medium sized letters, neither long and narrow nor short and broad.
Neat.
It was probably closest to the Calibri font. I did adopt that writing. But I can’t remember when I discarded it and returned to my own.

The next time was quite recent. When I was studying B.Sc. in Teresian college, Mysore. I had a classmate called Alby Meera Thomas from Kerala. Her writing, I will compare not to a font, but to a beautiful aristocratic lady.
Tall, slim, continuous and flowing gracefully. The loops were the best part. Not too generous. Not really rounded. Sharp at the inner end and slightly drawn out at the outer.
Whenever the college or the class needed posters to be put on notice boards, it was her calligraphic writing that adorned those posters.

Although it was the same hand doing the writing, I now realize with wonder that the result varied from pen to pen.
Certain pens, mostly ball point, caused my writing to be less beautiful. The realization would result in effort on my part to restore beauty in the writing, but after a while, the pen asserted its right to leave its mark.
And then there were pens that seemed to possess a strange capacity to make any writing beautiful. It was like magic. You pushed it across a paper effortlessly and the result was beautiful. Always.

That’s when certain pens came to be preferred to others.
The hero pen.
Into which you had to fill ink using an ink filler. The older the pen, the smoother the writing and lesser the friction.
I had just one and how I coveted a few beautiful hero pens when I saw them in a stationery shop!

And then there was the pilot pen – with micro-tip - and another cheaper kind that looked like the pilot pen but had a fibre tip that spent itself with time, became smaller and smaller and had to be replaced. I used to covet these pens too.

What I coveted as a child but never possessed was the double-decker pencil box. I don’t know if that’s what it was called or I had given it that name.
We had moved to Gujarat from the South since my father had been transferred. And suddenly we were surrounded by these rich kids possessing all sorts of fancy accessories in school.
They had more clothes than us and also more beautiful ones.
They ate fancy looking and sounding stuff that made our Idli and Dosa and curd rice seem so plain.

This double-decker pencil box was a box that could be opened on both sides. Top as well as bottom. And on each side, there were two compartments alongside – one long for pencils, pens etc. and another small for rubber and sharpener. All the lids had magnets inside to close them. Opening the lids required a gentle push upward. The box was finished with glossy colourful designs – pink, red,…and looked beautiful.
For many days – I think as long as I was in Gujarat, I dreamed that I would possess it one day. It was expensive. So I don’t think I asked my dad to buy me one.

You know, parents have a cruel way of exacting good behavior from children.
They will attribute a quality to you they want you to possess even before you have made up your mind whether to possess it or not. And they will appreciate you for it before friends and relatives. You, the child, having no other identity nor accomplishment at that age will strive to live up to that praise which is the only thing you have.
They will say things like ‘this fellow never asks for this and that when taken to shops unlike those children of our neighbours who cry stubbornly before all public until they have it’.
And sure, once you have heard your mom say it, you will never ask for a thing when you go to a shop even if you want it with all your heart.
You will, of course, be praised again and again, from time to time and you will carry the burden of that praise.
So I did not ask for that pencil box.
Or may be I asked for it and was rebuked.

I did of course possess a pencil box that was shaped and coloured like Cadbury’s dairy milk chocolate. It caused other problems, like increasing my craving for dairy milk chocolate, but of course, I refrained from asking for chocolates too.

Once I joined the software profession, writing meant only one thing. Rough notes scribbled in a hurry on the Cognizant notepad during team meetings. Soon, hurried scribbling became a habit and my handwriting, unceremonious. And shabby.

There was this colleague from another team who had done some course in handwriting analysis and even taken exams.
When he told me about it, I asked him if he would analyse my writing. Sure, he would. I looked at my notepad and knew I could not give that to him.
I asked him to give me a minute to write ‘properly’ in my ‘original’ writing.
He shook his head and gently took the book from me. He said ‘that is your writing too’.

He turned the pages, scrutinized the words and established patterns.
Of all the things he had said, I remember one very clearly, for it had surprised me.

It was my ‘t’. He had commented that the cross on my ‘t’ was low. I had low self esteem.
I was surprised and tried to convince him that I had never had low self esteem and in fact, I actually suffered from a slight superiority complex. The analysis was not always perfect after all. There had to exceptions and cases where the analysis went wrong.

He did not assert himself but suggested that I could help the problem by consciously putting a high cross on my ‘t’. Gradually my self esteem would become higher.
This was difficult to believe. I was incredulous.

I did believe in the possibility that writing was characteristic of the mind and not of the hand. It was an attribute of the mind. If you tied someone’s right hand and forced him to write with his left, for a long time, he would in the beginning struggle to write but eventually write in the same handwriting that was his when he had used his right hand. Because writing was a quality of the mind, not of the hand or of the fingers or of the pen.

But it was the first time I was hearing that it worked backwards too. That you could change your mind, by consciously changing your handwriting.

I did not try. But I did think about what he had said afterwards as I always do when I am told something that angers or hurts or offends me - dismiss it as impossible and then think about it for long after.

Now the whole place being infested with the keyboard, there isn’t a need to write.
Now, I only write for myself when I read books and take notes and meanings of words that I don’t understand from the dictionary.
I am scribbling in a hurry most of the time, so my writing doesn’t eat into my reading time.
I start on the first page in a writing almost calligraphic and before I know… : (
I actually don’t know what my ‘proper’ handwriting is. As I write this, I realize I am in a crisis!

I do check the cross on my ‘t’ once in a way and wonder if it is too low! But I am unable to decide because it’s not my ‘original’ and ‘proper’ handwriting in the first place.

It’s perhaps time to visit the stationery shop and buy myself a hero pen and a pilot pen and a fibre tip. It’s perhaps time to start writing again.
I should check if they still have those double-decker pencil boxes or something as fancy and buy one.
And buy everything else that I had once coveted…Except those that cannot be bought. And such of those, I must have coveted many…many more than the ones money could buy.
If only I could see the moving finger that wrote my destiny, I would get my friend to analyse that finger. Why is HE such a sadist? Why did HE put beyond my reach things that I coveted? And why did HE make me covet what was beyond my reach?

Empires Of The Indus - Alice Albinia

2011-07-31T15:01:00.001+05:30

A brilliant work. A blend of history and travelogue narrated as though a thrilling novel. Very well written.

The title is very apt. ‘Empires of the Indus. The story of a river.’ For this is not the story of any one country or kingdom or race or culture or religion or any one period in history. It’s the story of all countries, kingdoms, races, cultures, religions and times that the Indus has ever seen in her life.

The author begins her story backwards – both in time and the river’s course.

She begins in Karachi where the Sindhu discharges into the Arabian Sea and travels along the river back to her source in China occupied Tibet.
It’s a sweeping narration covering a range on interesting subjects including scientific facts, myth, religion, mythology, folklore...and more.

Starting with the current and very recent political history of Karachi including partition, Jinnah and the Hindus remaining there mostly cleaning the gutters of the city, she gives an account of

1. Various people who tried to navigate the difficult Sindhu river – mostly the British
2. Sheedis – descendants of slaves taken from Africa to Sindh by Muslim traders and their unique culture
3. Various river saints, Sufi saints at various times
4. Sindhis and the cultural synthesis between the Hindus and the Muslims that they represent
5. Plight of the Sikhs who had to move from Pakistan to India but whose pilgrim centres and holy places are in Pakistan
6. Other rivers of Punjab that have been heavily dammed
7. The author's dangerous and risky journey to the Khyber pass, her meeting with political agents and officers to arrange for her travel through certain forbidden zones
8 . Her disguise in white as a Muslim woman through the countryside, stops made at small villages, the lives of people there
9. Exploits of Babar, Akbar, Aurangzeb, Mahmud of Ghazni
10. Homosexuality predominant in the Muslim community
11. Buddhism in the region
13. Coming of Alexander the Great
14. Hinduism, Rigveda, Aryans and Sanskrit around the Indus
15. Strange archaeological sights, rock carvings & engravings
16. Harappa, Mohenjo – Daro and the Indus valley civilization
17. Kargil war and Musharraf’s plan
18. The Stone Age,
19. Polyandry in the region – Ladakh, Tibet etc.
20. Her coming to Ladakh following the Indus and the culture of the place

And finally,

21. Her entering China occupied Tibet and the ensuing disappointment upon realizing that all these days she had been following a river that was not the Indus but the confluence of her tributaries - Gar, Zanskar, Shyok and Shigar – because the Indus had been dammed right at its source by China.

She weeps every time she talks to her husband over phone from Tibet. She is affected by the emptiness of the landscape like she was not affected by the many dangers she passed by during her journey.

She walks to the source of the Indus and meets a trickle of water. It is 35 to 40 million years old and the oldest river of the region. It comes not from melting snow but from the ground and flows all round the year.

Where it discharges into the sea, there’s just a trickle of water in the Delta because the river is dammed heavily in Pakistan all along its course for irrigation. And some distance after it begins, it has been dammed by China and just a trickle of water escapes the dam to follow its journey of three thousand one hundred eighty kilometres. The fanaticism of Islam has been erasing the Buddhist and the Hindu past of the river.
The folly of man is killing the river all along its course. And its water that is the cause of persecution of India by Pakistan and Tibet by China.

It’s the story of a river so well told that it touches you as if it were the story of a living human.

There is much suspense till the end. Will she reach the source of the Indus? Will she see it? What’s it going to be like?

The author deserves appreciation not just for her writing but for the effort it took her to experience all that she has written about and for the physical hazards of her undertaking.
The author, a lone woman, has been most adventurous in travelling through areas in Pakistan and Afghanistan that were haunted by the Talibans and certain feared local tribes. In following the course of the river, she faced difficulties as the river coursed through terrains not easy to follow. The river sometimes flowed in valleys, around huge boulders, steep ravines and she lost sight of it but she took detours, sometimes really long so she could rejoin the river soon, so she could 'be with the river'. She has gone out of her way in her study of the Indus.

A must read for every Indian. For our roots go back to the Indus river. As the author puts it, 'the hoeland of Hinduism is not India but Pakistan'. The book is full of innumerable interesting facts.

When I reached the end of the book I wished it would go on for a few hundred pages more.

The book ends not with hope but with despair.
Perhaps there is very little hope but I wish the author had shown some silver lining to the dark cloud.

Gliding In Rain

2011-07-26T15:53:00.003+05:30

On June 17th I resumed my Carnatic vocal music lessons. After more than 15 years. Now and then, in doing certain things, I realize that I am trying to be the daughter my father always wanted me to be. This was one of those things. Carnatic Vocal Music. He was a disappointed man when he learnt that I was more interested in Hindi Film Songs and that I dragged myself to my music classes only because of him.
When I realized years later that you could sing film songs better with some training in classical music, I decided to resume my lessons. After a long time of doing nothing about it, at last I started last month. And I was pleased with how quickly I was able to pick up, how malleable the human voice is, how it gave in to persuasion and how I was able to dwell upon a certain high note longer than I had imagined I was capable of, when at first attempt, a week ago, my voice had cracked to my embarrassment before the audience of the walls of my home.

On the 5th of July, I learnt Suryanamaskara from Nisha. I knew it exercised every muscle of your body and the best gym in the world therefore but did not expect it to leave me panting after just 2 times of doing the exercise.
Although my cautious eating does not seem like a penance to me, I become filled with a longing now and then for those days of great blessing when I was able to eat without a care. Ghee, butter, curd, cream, sweets, ice cream, Deep Fried Puri …
Those evenings of greasy vegetable puffs, apple cake, potato bun and Badam Burfee from V B Bakery.
Those days of Krishna Janmashtami filled with exotic sweets and Namkeens like Chakkuli, Thenkolal, Kodu Bale,Om Pudi, Kadle Unde, Coconut Burfee, Nippat, Murukku...
Those dinners cooked by Muthu in Akkarai guesthouse in Chennai when I started work in Cognizant - Rice, Rasam, coconut rich South Indian Poriyal or Palya, North Indian Paneer filled curries in cashew rich gravy, thick curd with a spoonful of sugar…
I will need to increment the number of Suryanamaskaras gradually. It is certainly effective and brings results within weeks. For now, my wrists are my only hope; for the Suryanamaskara puts the weight of the whole body on the wrists, which in my case, seem like they stopped growing when I was 12.

9th July. An evening drunk in music. Soaking in bliss. Original musicians who had played with RD Burman, Amit Kumar, son of Kishore Kumar and other artists played tribute to the Burmans. I was seeing Amit Kumar for the first time and was impressed by his talent. His voice sounds so much like Kishore’s. His antics on stage that I had dismissed as noisy stunts years ago when I had seen him on stage, seemed very natural. His stories of the Burmans, of their idiosyncrasies, the blinking-winking expressions of RD Burman, the amusingly deep voice of SD Burman and his short sentences, their special relationship with Kishore Kumar and the unforgettable story of the famous song ‘Roop Tera Mastana’, all narrated from childhood memories were captivating.
Although I have heard the song many times, ‘Bade Achhe Lagte Hain’ in Amit’s voice sounded so beautiful. ‘Tere Mere Milan Ki Ye Raina’ by Amit and his half sister sounded like experiencing God. And what more, I learnt that the first 2 lines were inspired by Tagore. When I came to know that Amit was 59, I could not believe it. And I returned home thinking that he should definitely have had a bigger brighter career.

13th July. Murali got engaged. My baby brother was engaged(ok, he is just 3 years younger). I am yet to get over it. He had grown up. So soon. So fast.
There were festivities in the family after 15 years. All our relatives were gathered in Hassan, my grandmother’s house - the house that has only known giving – to all who need.
Who ever had dreamed he would find such a perfect girl, and my parents, the perfect daughter in law? He never really had expectations, unlike me.
He sat gloomy faced through the ceremonies simply because he felt he was too young for it and he should have had more playtime. He is a shy boy and was perhaps conscious of being the centre of attention.
The priest presiding over the ceremonies said no exchanging rings – it wasn’t part of our custom and moreover the boy and girl weren’t supposed to touch one another before marriage! : ) so my mother slipped the ring on the girl’s finger and the girl’s mother slipped the ring on my brother’s finger. After we had partaken of the feast, when I caught my brother exchanging words with his fiancée, I felt a naughty joy.
She is sweet, innocent and simple. She knows classical music and Bharatnatyam dance. She is learning how to cook but her chapattis arent round : )
The icing on the cake, of course, is that she is very pretty!

Last week.
My faraway distant dream of writing a book suddenly seemed like a possibility.
Five hundred pages of a book, ‘Family Matters’ by Rohinton Mistry filled with excruciating descriptions of the daily troubles of a middleclass family trying to make ends meet – of course with other things thrown in – a love story, socio political background of the time and space with special focus on the ethnic group of Parsis, made interesting through skilful writing - gradually made me see that all of us are leading interesting, or even sensational lives. We look at our own lives as ordinary, banal, insipid and so on but the life we have lead and the lives our parents and grandparents lead in the special context of their time and space, in retrospect, seem so interesting.
My own grandfather was orphaned at 6, was adopted by a rich couple and struggled to prosperity. In those times, people practised black magic on enemies, rivals and the victims died a curious death. Villages were haunted by ghosts – women became possessed by them after childbirth – they would fling their babies, eat a cauldron full of rice and all. A relative had eloped with a boy of a lower caste and there had been melodrama... two subsects of the same caste had gone to court over the matter of a certain 12th century holyman (alwaar) and attempted to judge his credentials!
I have now to control my OCD –obsessive compulsive disorder of reading and start writing. There is much work to be done...

I had gotten used to the dust in my house; and also the untidiness of the two small rooms that make my home. I never bothered to deck up the place thinking my days in that house were numbered. One day I got flowers. Soon, I started getting flowers every week. I placed the ornate and ornamental vase I got from Kashmir next to the real flower vase. Then I arranged the fleet of wooden shikaras neatly – red, green, yellow and brown. And then the miniature Pashupatinath temple i got from Nepal.
I bought a wooden Ashoka pillar and Budhha statues from Sapna Book House (They usually dont have the book I’m looking for, but they do have nice showpieces!). Encouraged by the difference they made to my place, I did something more every week.
Wanting to frame a Mandala that Nandu had gifted me in Kathmandu, I found this poster & frame shop in Jayanagar.
My eyes fell on the many colourful posters around. I bought a beautiful framed picture of Saraswati. Or was it a Sharada? I soon realized that I needed more nails in my house to fasten more pictures. The carpenter came and drove 4 nails.
Now I have a Taj Mahal, a picture of the Fall, a Crimson Sunset, a Yashoda with baby Krishna in her arms hung on my walls.
It feels so good to come home to such beauty.
Life has to be lived today. Because tomorrow never comes.
The small picture of Radha and Krishna, I chose to place on the wall above my bed. I would wake up to their love every morning.
On second thought, maybe I should have chosen differently. Their’s was a love that was never consummated.

24th July. I hadn’t seen a movie in the longest while. Suddenly I became aware of this at times and then I go on a movie watching spree.
The first one I watched was Zindagi Milegi Na Dobara. Loved it. Hrithink is reluctant to go deep water diving. He does not swim. He’s afraid. His coach Katrina tells him ‘Your life will change forever after this’ and he jumps. He is shown swimming in the deep blue, through the little valleys an hills under the sea, among corals and fish of all colours, He climbs back to his boat and as they sail towards the shore, he is crying silent tears. A very powerful scene.
It reminded me of my own experience of being in the lap of the eternal Himalayan peaks and the way I was moved to tears.
I do not swim but I now want to overcome fear and see a world – blue, silent and slow - that I have never seen before. Loved Hrithik and Katrina.
Justin had said ‘Moviemaking is the greatest gift to mankind’. Very true. For three hours, it fills your life with possibilities and leaves you with the fulfilment of all that you want and all that you want to BE - in this life and another.

25th July. Watched the evening show of Delhi Belly. Brilliant movie. Everyone in the hall were laughing, sure, but I was the loudest and the happiest. Glad I watched the English version, I at least understood all the slang and abuses! So much packed into a 2 hour movie. Not a minute wasted. Fast paced. I don’t think anyone blinked. A movie packed with story, wit and humour. I was exhilarated. I was laughing to myself like a retard when I walked into the poster and frame shop on the way to collect a bigger print of the beautiful Saraswati I already had.

I quickly dropped the bundle of framed pictures at home, picked up my electronic Tamburi and started walking to my music teacher’s home. It was raining and though I had an umbrella, I got wet here and there.
You need a ‘Shruti Box’ which is actually an electronic Tamburi to set the pitch for singing. My teacher uses one during our lessons and it is important that we practise at home in the same pitch. But pitch is something you cannot memorize. More often than not, we tend to fall back to the pitch that we find comfortable rather than the pitch prescribed for lessons. And it’s important to sing in the prescribed pitch so you will stretch your voice little by little.
So I decided to buy one. I asked her for the configuration of the device and she said she would let me know during next class. In the next session, I asked her and she briefly told me what to buy. I asked if I could drop by on Saturday so she would configure the instrument for me; you know set the pitch to C, C Sharp or C Minor, D or whatever.
She was busy the whole of Saturday and Sunday. It would take half a minute to press a button but she just didn’t have the time. I would have to go without practise for 2 days but she shook her head firmly.
I called up on Monday in the noon and she said she was away and would be home after 7.
So I reached the first floor and was relieved to hear voices inside. I rang the doorbell. She opened it and when she saw me she raised her brows in shock. ‘So late? Its 9:30’. I smiled apologetically. ‘I am sorry mam. It is a working day.’ I said as I closed the umbrella slowly.
‘But so late? You did not even call me up’ she frowned. ‘Sorry I cannot do it now’
‘I thought it would take less than a minute. You just have to plug it in and press a button’
‘Sorry, I cannot’ she shook her head firmly and closed the door even as I was standing there.
Feeling stabbed, I walked back home.
I should have known it before. When she had kept me waiting with the fruit basket, vermilion, arecanut and betel leaves in my hand, the very first day instead of accepting it the first thing. When she kept saying ;tomorrow, tomorrow,...’ each time I reminded her of the printed booklet everyone else had but not me, when she took two reminders to give me the configuration of the device, when she rushed me through the lessons and moved to the next pupil... even though she knew I came from work that was 14 kilometers away and that too on Tuesdays and Fridays which meant that I had to leave office by 4 in order to reach her place by 5 30.
That night, anyone else in her place would have felt overjoyed by my enthusiasm and seen the redemption of her effort in my commitment. Most of them came to class without even practising. But she probably felt offended by my persistence in reaping the complete returns on my 500 rupee monthly investment.
It was just 9 30, not 11 30. They were not about to sleep. They were wide awake. I was the one who walked to her door in the rain. She didn’t have to. All she had to do was turn on the instrument and press a button. It would take 30 seconds. I could practise my lessons at home which I had postponed for 3 days now. The matter would have been closed and I would not have to carry the instrument to her all the way another day.
But she turned me away. A Guru. A woman. And mother of a child!
I lost respect for her. She was a miserly chicken hearted woman. I was disappointed. How would I learn from someone I did not respect?

All the happy events that had lead to my birthday one after another had ended with this last one.

Crests and troughs and moments of stillness. Calm and storm.
I could have glided onto the shores of golden sands. And I did but for one jagged rock that fate had put there for a reason I know not.

I looked at Saraswati on my wall.
I picked up the phone, called the poster-frame guy and placed an order for an even bigger print. Now with this teacher having done this to me, I felt the need for a bigger Saraswati.

Through these days of happy and sad turns it rained. The smell of wet earth found me almost every day. There were all kinds of rain. Weeping rain. Laughing rain. Angry rain. Rain below yellow sunshine. Rain under blue black clouds. Rain swayed by roaring winds. Moody, just like me.
I love every kind of rain. The rainy season is my favourite season of all. And water, my favourite element.

Whether or not friends call, whether or not I cut a cake, receive presents, the rain is the one consolation I have. My birthday present. Year after year. Because I was born in July.

Happy Birthday to me.

Everest Calling - Lukla To Phakding

2011-07-25T16:01:00.012+05:30

This was our first trek. Lukla to a village called Phakding.
No one knew the exact distance, not even our guides. Someone said 5 – 6 kilometers.
Someone in my troupe who used an instrument to measure distance said 8 kilometers. Weird. I trekked for a month in the Indian Himalayas and the length of every trail was known.

The vegetation around was colourful – flowers, foliage, barks and leaves alike.

Cloudy foggy weather though good for trekking is bad for photography. But now when i look at the pictures, i think the clouds and fog given the pictures a special, unearthly, dreamy, unreal quality.

These red flowers reminded of a flower ‘Buras’ that i had seen in my Himalaya trek in 2008 in Uttaranchal. Its juice was delicious. But this was a different flower.

The hanging bridge was an important feature of this trek.

Walking through abnadoned wildreness, suddenly after a bend, you came across a pictureque retaurant like this. And after the next bend, it was wilderness again.

Sometimes there were cultivated fields flanking the trail.

Buddhist monasteries, prayer flags, stupas and sacred writings. As you enter the mountains, you find mostly Buddhist people.

Dudhkoshi river – blue green after its confluence with Botekoshi coming from Tibet.
Dudhkoshi comes from a pond in Gokyo that is white in colour like milk and hence the name.

I trekked mostly all alone to keep my field of view clear of people during photography.
I did not rest stop even once during the trek. Except for taking pictures.

Thanks to those who were sensitive to stand aside, away from my field of view while I took pictures. There were a few who, even after I requested explicitly to stop for a minute, continued walking on the narrow trail causing me to wait until they had passed.
Well, there are two types of people in this world – those who stop for others and those who don’t!
: ) every predicament offers some opportunity for philosophy.

And finally we reached. This was our hotel.

It was cold. People were sitting huddled together, shivering, holding hands and all.

A surprise awaited me (all of us) at Phakding. If you wanted to use electricity to charge your phone, camera etc., you were charged 100 Nepalese rupees per hour.

‘It gets more expensive as you go up’, we were told.
‘I will have to be more judicious while taking pictures’, I thought.

One bucket of hot water cost 100 rupees.
One mug for washing face cost 10 rupees.

All kinds of jokes started were going around. Context is a powerful thing.
There were jokes about the idea of people bathing together, not bathing at all. A boy was rubbing another to keep him warm – and that triggered this idea of people sleeping with a bucket of cold water in between them in the night so it would become hot by morning and they could save money.
People joked about dividing the job of photography as well when they learnt electricity had to be paid for through the nose.

Everest Calling - Crash Landing Into Lukla

2011-07-20T11:02:00.000+05:30

17th April 2011
By now it seemed like I was jinxed. I and roomy were left in the hotel while the rest of them had left to the airport in the bus. We reached the airport by a Maruti 800 arranged by our tour organizer. My guilt for the delay was lessened however by the fact that we carried eleven sleeping bags with us stuffed into the little space around us in that matchbox like vehicle.

We were 29 of us in all. The first chartered flight had left with half the people in our team. The rest of us would be taking the 2nd chartered flight leaving at 8 : 40.
I was not even asked to show my passport or any other ID card /proof as I entered the airport. A word by our tour organizer was enough to get us in.

This part of the airport looks like a railway station. With the exception of yours truly, everyone checked in their luggage. I would carry both my bags with me. (Paranoid!)

Our team was gathered before Sita air.

Another airline was called Yeti airline.

After collecting our boarding pass, we moved to a lounge.

There were a few shops. I wanted a travel guide book on Everest region. It cost 2000 Nepalese Rupees and another, 3000! I put it down and decided to buy one after returning to India.

Currency Conversion: 100 INR = 159 Nepalese Rupees.
So when they gave you the price of something in Nepalese, you knew through quick mental calculation that it was less than 2/3rd the number in INR. 100 Nepalese Rupees = less than 66 INR
That was easy.

I noticed while driving to the Airport that all the shop names were of Sanskrit origin except Suzuki and the like.

The flight to Lukla was a narrow small chartered plane – Sita Air. No one at the airport seemed apologetic about the one hour delay. Apparently, this was the plane the first batch had taken to Lukla. It had to drop them and come back for us.

The interior was worn out – yellow brown leather/rexin covered seats that bent forward and backward limply as if they were broken at the hinge. There were 2 rows with a narrow passage in between.
But they were certainly more comfortable than those Kingfisher seats!
We were welcomed with Mango candy and cotton pieces (meant to be used as earplugs) by an air hostess who wore a lot of make up and cream coloured thick stockings. Her legs looked like extensions of her hands.

The scene below, as we took off contained mostly terraced mountains - after we had left Kathmandu, that is.

The terraces were beautiful. I took some pictures and soon gave in to sleep instead of trying to fight it.

After some dozing, I opened my eyes and lo! there were snow covered mountains on our left, one of which we hoped was Mt Everest, camouflaged among the other mountains. We were not sure which one but we fixed our eyes on the one that looked fancier than the rest.
Something as high sounding as ‘the tallest mountain in the world -above all the world and eternal’, had to be something very fancy looking as well.
It would be quite sometime before we realized how mistaken we were.

Then suddenly we came closer and closer to the green-brown mountains below and before I knew whether to feel thrilled or to panic, we crashed into what must have been a mountain slope. I shrieked. For all of us. We were thrown forward towards the seat in the front. Our plane continued moving and then came to a sudden stop.
Well, that was the dramatic landing.
Laughter followed.

Lukla is one of the most dangerous airports in the world. Perched on a hill top it is really small. The runway must be less than a hundred meters long. The gradient of the runway or the slope acts as the breaking mechanism for flights during landing. Because of this, the landing feels like crash landing! You crash and before you know what next, your plane takes a right turn and stops.
I was told later that our pilot had been a woman. And that too a trainee! God. We must be lucky. The guys in the seats close to the cockpit - which happened to be an open cockpit - were taking pictures of it and the hundred different controls.

Another thing we learnt about the Lukla airport was that it is one of the busiest air routes in South Asia. You miss a plane and you have to wait for a week before you can get a seat on another plane or trek to Kathmandu (or was it take the road) which takes seven days! They fly only in the morning due to weather conditions.

The picture that awaited us when we landed in Lukla, although quite ordinary in retrospect compared to the spectacular ones we would see day after day for the next 15 days to come, seemed refreshingly clear, stark, bright and breathtaking after the distant, elusive, nebulous mountains in the midst of clouds that we saw while flying.

On our way out of the airport, we watched some chartered flights taking off. After a short taxi, the planes were the air, the ground beneath them suddenly pulled away! Quite dramatic.

We were to start trekking to Phakding the same day or our stay at Likla was for a few hours to help us sort of brace ourselves for the trek – have lunch, make small purchases from the bazaar, change into warm clothes, etc.

Our station was the very first building of the long narrow strip of bazar that was made of buldings that housed restaurants, shops, rooms for stay, bakery that lined both sides of one straight road that merged in the end with the forest trail that all tourists eventually vanished into.

There were Scottish pubs and Irish pubs in almost all villages where we stopped!

We couldn’t believe there was a Starbucks shop in this remote village. Don’t think it was original.

I bought a second hand chadi for 300 Nepalese 180 – Indian Rupees.
Althought I had a cap, I bought a hat for complete protection from sun on all sides.
The next was an orange scarf. Two ends of a rectangular piece of cloth stiched together to form a silken cylinder, it was not tied but pulled down the head to neck where it remained a crumpled band. When the cold winds started hurting your lungs, you slipped the band up over your nose so only your eyes and forehead were exposed. This was really useful.

The dining area.

A bland lunch of boiled vegetables, rice (fortunately, it was soft), and Dal was served. The taste was close to Chinese.
The homemade pickle of carrot and radish did not appeal to me.

I put on my woolen inner wear which I would keep on for the next 15 days. The porters were ready to carry our burden. I saw that my baggage was the lightest of all. I was carrying very little – no energy bars, chocolates, biscuits – only 2 sets of clothes, a pack of walnuts, paper roll, and such… the rest was in my backpack which itself must have weighed 2 kilos.

I had coffee cake at a bakery for 190 Nepali Rupees. It was good looking but tasted just OK.

Ambling through the market, camera in my pocket, chadi in my right hand, I vanished into the forest trail.

Glimpses Of World History - Jawaharlal Nehru

2011-07-14T17:19:00.002+05:30

A sincere, methodical reader of books as I am, I deferred the reading of certain books, set in foreign countries like China and Russia because I did not have sufficient knowledge about the socio, political, economic, cultural background of these counties and hence would not be able to get a full appreciation of these works.

A compilation of letters written to his daughter Indira from prison, it is simple, easy to read and intermingled with personal accounts. It makes effortless reading; in fact, it required less effort of me than Discovery of India did. The providing of several maps of different time periods helped in gaining perspective.

Narration, language and style are simple but of a good standard.
But given the fact that he was writing all these letters to a 13 year old daughter, the standard seems a little too high for us to believe that those letters were meant for his daughters alone. Added to this, the fact that all letters were carefully preserved and numbered confirm that when he wrote, he did so with the intention of getting them all published and hence had in mind a larger audience.
If he thought we, his countrymen, were naïve enough not to guess it, which he probably did, habitual as he was of underestimating the masses of his country and talking down to them, he was mistaken.

The book is voluminous but not formidable. It is rushed at certain places, but it does give the reader, as it promises, glimpses of world history, allowing him to sample various pieces if it so he may pick pieces he likes more for deeper study.

A must read.

Having said that, I must warn you to be careful while reading Nehru’s works, as he is highly prejudiced.
Even as he advises his daughter to be careful while reading history, to steer clear of biases, not to judge the past and to look at it with sympathy and all that, he is presumptuous enough to judge religion, to judge an entire class of people-the Brahmins, to judge rulers and emperors categorically and more. To make his judgment worse, he is partial. To give you a drift of the direction in which his opinions and prejudices are inclined, he slights religion, he is anti Brahmin and he is pro Muslim.

Though he writes about the subject of history, his language or tone wavers from that of the unbiased historian’s and becomes sarcastic here, slighting there, humorous here and ridiculing there...it makes interesting reading though.
His choice of words which is derisive in places where he discusses religion, Brahminism, European crusaders, and even Alexander the Great, it turns grave, serious and matter-of-factly, when the narration turns to Muslim rule.

All the above notwithstanding, he is very proud of India and makes the reader very proud of being Indian. He frequently quotes visitors and foreign tourists who had great things to say about India.

The book is one thousand and one hundred plus pages long. I initially took notes, but every page had some point noteworthy and taking notes slowed my reading terribly. So here are a few points I noted now and then...

ANTI BRAHMIN, PREISTHOOD AND RELIGION

He calls people bathing in Triveni-Sangam a burden of tradition. He finds it unreasonable that religious people should think of other world and says he is bothered only about his duties in this world. Duties in this world are important, sure, but undervaluing spiritual interests is downright ignorant of Nehru.

“Whatever happens in a family - a birth, a marriage, a death - the priest steps in and payment is required…”, and much more has been said about Brahmins.
While a lot of it might be true, the other side of Brahminism - preservation of culture, tradition, heritage and legacy that give India its identity which was solely the responsibility of the Brahmins is not mentioned at all, making Brahminism a completely dark thing - which is far from truth.

He calls Jauhar a terrible rite...
This one beats me......”Chittor, the home of romance and chivalry, full of courage, but even then old fashioned and sticking to outworn methods of warfare, was overwhelmed by Allauddin's efficient army. There was a sack of Chittor in 1303, but before this could take place, men and women of fortress, obedient to old custom, performed the terrible rite of Jauhar - when defeat threatens and there is no other way, it was thought better for men to go out and die in the battle and women to burn themselves on a pyre. A terrible thing this was, especially for the women...”

Firstly, Indians practising chivalry in warfare is a matter of pride. Dharma Yuddha - fighting by rules laid down to prevent disruption of normal functioning of the State, as opposed to blind pillaging, plundering and destruction, is a matter of pride. He says Chittor was ‘sacked’ by Allauddin’s ‘efficient’ army!

And women jumped into the burning pyre to save their honour which they valued above all else in life. They preferred honourable death to coercion by lecherous men of the enemy and lifelong confinement to a harem guarded by eunuchs. Nehru calls this a terrible rite!

“China has never been the slave of religion and has not had any priestly hierarchy. India has always prided herself on her religion and her society has been priest ridden in spite of Buddha's attempts to rid her of this incubus.”
“An interesting development in China was the displacement of religious authority by secular authority. Education was secularized. The most obvious examples of this process are afforded by the use to which many old temples are now put. In Canton, a famous old temple is now used as a police training institute. In another places, temples have been converted to vegetable markets.”

PARTIAL JUDGMENT - MUSLIM VERSUS OTHER RULERS

On Alexander the Great, he says what was so great about him?
He condemns Theodosius the Great because he destroyed old temples and old statues which were the religion of people before Christianity...he was a strongly opposed to non Christians also to Christians who were not orthodox...
But elsewhere he does not condemn the destroying of Hindu temples and plundering and pillaging by Muslims.

He justifies all the savage invaders with one clever argument or another.

“The Muslims who came there - remember they were central Asians and not the Arabs - were full of zeal for their religion and wanted to destroy idols...but another reason for their destruction was perhaps the use of old temples as citadels and fighting places...that explains why Muslim invaders destroyed them...”

“Mahmud Ghazni - he was hardly a religious man. He was Muslim but only by the way. Above everything, he was a soldier and a brilliant soldier. He came to India to conquer and loot, as soldiers unfortunately do, and he would have done so whatever religion he might have belonged to...he threatened the Caliph of Baghdad, and the Muslim rulers of Sindh...we must not fall into the common error of considering Mahmud as anything more than a successful soldier.”

A lot of significant events that would have shown the Muslim kings' unworthiness of trust, cunning and deceit have been omitted.
For instance, just a line saying “Shahab Ud Din the afghan defeated Prithvi Raj.”
The story about how Prithvi Raj who forgave the captive Muslim king and spared his life was killed deceitfully by him is omitted...
The story of the Khilji king coveting the queen of Chittor and attacking Chittor only to abduct her is omitted.

“They(Muslims) were considering India their home. Allauddin married a Hindu lady and so did his son...”

Khushwant Singh, in his ‘Delhi’ says...”Allauddin Khilji was a homosexual, a fallen depraved fellow, whose pastime it was to have elephants thrown down valleys and in whose time, kingdom suffered...”

They abducted Hindu women and made them part of their harem. Even they married a Hindu woman, it was probably because she was renown for her beauty. Akbar married Jodha Bai – so people have been told from rooftops. What people don’t know is that he had a harem of 5000 – yes, five thousand women, and Jodha Bai was the only woman to enter his nuptial chamber twice – because she was his favourite beloved queen!

There is one line about Timur's intentions to massacre and destroy.

Khushwant Singh in Delhi writes, “he massacred 50000 people of Delhi with his scimitar... he found delight in raising pyramids of human skulls”

“...the tremendous energy of Mongols seemed to be lessening...the impulse to go on conquering waned...”
I am looking at his choice of words here...tremendous energy…which should have been ‘brute force’.

“…As the country went to pieces, arts fell with it. They lost vigour and life and became overburdened with detail and sometimes even grotesque. The coming of Muslims gave a shock and brought new influences with rid the degraded forms of Indian art of over-ornamentation. The old Indian ideal remained at the back, but it was dressed up simply and gracefully in the new garments of Arabia and Persia.
...the greatest triumph of the Indo Persian art is the Taj Mahal…”
His point about over-ornamentation and too much detail gives a useful insight into the approach to art, that certain Indian cultures had during certain time periods; an approach that was characterized by admiration for complexity, achieving of grandeur through complex undertakings and forgetting simplicity somewhere along the way.
But instead of being objective in his observation about this, he uses adjectives like decadent, grotesque, which is most disagreeable.

He does not forgive the cruel history of the church though. Spanish Inquisition, Crusaders, Roman Church, the struggle for power between two churches…

WORLD CONTEXT THAT PUTS INDIAN ISSUES IN CORRECT PERSPECTIVE

Though Nehru might not have written the below with the intention of putting in perspective the negligible magnitude or severity of Indian issues in the larger world context, I noted the below points for they made India’s much criticized issues seem very understandable and forgivable in the context of the terrible, monstrous things that were happening all the world over.

“Most of the glory of ancient Roman and Greek civilization was built upon mass slavery. Salves were treated with brute force and savageness. The gladiators were made to fight each other and die to provide entertainment to people. These were slaves.
Although India had it's caste system, people had freedom to live as they want within their castes and within their community - they had their gatherings, festivities. There was no brute force and no savageness. Even the small population of slaves that existed in India were mere domestic helps and were not subject to hazardous drudgery.”

Giving the example of Chaaravaaka the atheist who did not believe in God, and his works, he says, “There was freedom of thought and writing in India in the olden days. There was freedom of conscience. This was not so in Europe till very recent times.”

Crusaders - the brutal, savage history of the two religions Islam and Christianity - 'in Jerusalem, 'Under the portico of the mosque, the blood was knee deep and reached the horses' bridles'

Exaggeration of Hindu Muslim problems – “There is a tendency to give them far more importance than they deserve. Every quarrel between Hindu boy and Muslim boy is considered a communal quarrel, every petty riot is given great publicity. We must remember that India is a very big country and in tens of thousands of towns and villages, Hindus and Muslims live at peace with each other, and there is no communal trouble between them.”

“A good government is no guarantee against foreign invasion.”

“In 1840, the first world's anti slavery convention was held in London. Women came as delegates to it from America where the existence of Negro slavery was agitating many people. The convention however refused to admit these 'female delegates' on the ground that for any woman to take part in a public meeting was improper and degrading to the sex!”

NEHRU ON SOCIALISM

“...it is the twilight of capitalism which has lorded it for so long over the world. And when it goes, as go it must, it will take many an evil thing with it...”
How mistaken Nehru was...!

“Economic domination is worse than political domination”

“Capitalism produced socialism, Imperialism produced Nationalism”

“Internationalism is the foundation of all progress. Socialism works internationally but not in only one nation.”
It seems, Nehru was for free market, opposed to economic nationalism and opposed to protecting national markets by imposing tariff on imported goods.

“Growth of industries, products, aggressive search for markets and raw material for industries - rivalries of diff industrial powers – all these led to war”

“The acquisitive economy and this policy of individual grab with no planning with its waste and conflicts and periodical crises must go. In its place some form of cooperative economy must come.”

INTERESTING THOUGHTS, LINES, FACTS & INSIGHTS

...people have leisure... so what is called civilization develops…

Beauty has three levels - Indication, Expression and Exposure. Spirituality indicates, art expresses and science exposes…

The man who has got everything he wants is all in favour of peace and order...

No man can succeed in great tasks unless the time is ripe and the atmosphere is favourable. A great man often forces the pace and creates his own atmosphere. But the great man himself is a product of the times and of the prevailing atmosphere.

The idea of human progress is a modern notion. There seems to have been no such idea in the past in Europe or Asia, or any of the old civilizations. People looked upon the past as an ideal period like the old Greek and Roman classical period. Indians looked at Satya Yuga, Dwapara Yuga… and all believed in deterioration or worsening of the race.

What is Marxism? – it’s a way of interpreting history and politics and economics and human life and human desires. It’s a theory as well as a call to action. It’s a philosophy which has something to say about most of activities of man's life.

There was false propaganda by armament industry to promote war - media, rumours etc. the same with most selling and marketing industry today.

The old religions have a way of covering and regulating every aspect of our day to day lives. Hinduism and Islam quite apart from their purely religious teachings lay down social codes and rules about marriage inheritance civil and criminal laws, political organization, and everything else. They lay down a complete structure for society and try to perpetuate this by giving it religious sanction and authority.

Humour and sarcasm - British professing to be the trustees of the dumb millions...
“Incidentally this process of conferring benefits often resolved itself into shooting down large numbers of the people benefited. Perhaps in this way, they were made to escape the miseries of this world and their departure for paradise was hastened.”

Inflation in Germany went to a point (post war) -they printed more and more notes that had less n less value - a postage stamp for a letter cost a million marks (German currency)!

Women in Russia have perhaps more freedom than in any other country and at the same time. They have special protection from the State. The first woman ambassador appointed by any government was the old Bolshevik Madam Kollontai.

The great depression and world crisis- In highly industrialized advanced capitalistic America many people took to the ancient method of barter which had existed in the old days before money came into use. Hundreds of barter organizations developed in America. Exchange associations arose to help this barter by issuing certificates. An interesting instance of barter was that of a dairyman who gave milk butter and eggs to a university in exchange for the education of his children.
England bartered coal for Scandinavian Timber; Canada gave Alluminium for soviet oil; US bartered wheat for Brazilian coffee.

War is not a pleasant subject to contemplate in all its horrid reality, and because of this the reality is hidden behind fine phrases and brave music and bright uniforms.

Plato held that slavery was essential. There was much effort to retain slavery in America!
We cannot judge the past from the standards of the present. It is equally absurd to judge the present by the standards of the past.

Often past is jealous of the future and holds us in a terrible grip and we have to struggle with it to get free to face and advance towards the future.

Karl Marx says "History has no other way of answering old questions than by putting new ones.'

A MUST READ.

Not So Simple After All...

2011-07-06T14:55:00.005+05:30

It’s not almonds, its ‘aamonds’. The L is silent, said I.
'Look, I am a simple guy. I don’t understand all that', came the defense.
‘Simplicity has nothing to do with mispronouncing words’, I had to assert, almost indignantly.

‘Me and my friend went shopping.’
“Its ‘I and my friend went shopping’”.
‘Look. I am a simple man and don’t get into such minute details’.
‘Simplicity has nothing to do with deviating from correct grammar’, I was pleading this time.

The excuses people use to justify their shortcomings!
Imagine sacrificing simplicity at the altar of all your flaws - slovenliness, purposelessness, inferiority, existentialism, hypocrisy, clumsiness...and what not!

I have this bunch of relatives(15 -20 years senior) who have been used to barging in to our home whenever they feel like, becoming too comfortable, behaving like family members, giving unsolicited, unwelcome and outdated advice, throwing their weight around, complaining to our father about us and watching our humiliation with hungry eyes. Hate them.

Even when it is absolutely uncalled for, they compare themselves with us and try to prove that they are better.
This one happens to be a rough uncouth woman. Blue sari, pink petticoat, yellow blouse, lot of hair that she never tires of boasting about but combs once in a week...
We don’t ask for an explanation. No one grimaces or says anything.
But when she sees us neatly dressed, she HAS to say, 'We are simple people, not stylish like you. We don’t do fashion.’
The dumbass doesn’t even know that one does not 'do' fashion, one 'follows' fashion or one does not.

The more important point here is, simplicity does not mean shabby dressing!

Some more. She talks with her mouth full of curd rice. Or chapatti. Or whatever food.
She eats noisily.
I suggested to her that she should finish what was in her mouth and then talk, talk in between morsels never through the morsels.
Food in her mouth, she says. 'We are simple people. Not sophisticated like you. We don’t like sophistication.’
Dumbass! It’s only DECENT not to talk when you are chewing. There is no sophistication in it.

I don't have great table manners. What do I do? I simply admit it. I don’t laugh and say 'I am a simple girl'.
I just admit it and don’t justify it.

Soon as I turned 25, my parents started groom hunting for me. I met a motley mix of suitors.
‘So tell me about yourself. What do you do?’, he asked over some pizza we were having in this pizza hut next to my house.
‘Well... I read...I write... I am a member of the Toastmasters Club...I travel…I used to paint...once in a way, I write poems, when inspired you know...
He raised his brows, ‘Hmmmm....interesting…well, I am a simple guy...I don’t have hobbies...I go out with friends... watch movies...I am a very simple guy'

It’s perfectly OK not to have interesting sounding hobbies. I have met some very interesting men who do not really have hobbies to boast of. But using simplicity to justify it? Where is the need to even justify it in the first place?
And what has simplicity to do with having no hobbies?
So you mean, people who do have hobbies are complex and complicated?

Boy rejected. For having stupid notions about simplicity. (Among other reasons)

Simplicity also comes handy to those in the field of writing and speaking who aren’t willing to work hard, who have no talent, have no sincerity, but want rewards and recognition nevertheless.
I used to be a member of this forum for public speaking where people delivered speeches.
Most of these speeches were without substance.
They were neither interesting, nor well researched, nor deep, mostly cliche, not to mention bad grammar and poor vocabulary.
Some high sounding well selling subject, not necessarily close to the heart would be chosen. An acronym, a few jokes mostly irrelevant to the subject, material from the ocean that is the world wide web, would be thrown in to draft a speech in badly formed sentences.
And delivered before an audience that had braved Bangalore traffic on a weekday to get to the forum from faraway corners of the city.

And what was the justification?
'Simple message in simple words, you know. You need not be verbose, use big big words, talk about issues of national significance only, even a simple topic...’
Very convenient. Very clever.

Simple or otherwise, the speeches delivered were extremely poor and not worth anyone’s time.

I don’t have any problem with simplicity. A simple message can be significant. But a message, any message has to have certain qualities.

It has to be sincere. You have to say what you mean and the subject has to be close to your heart and not merely a subject that’s hot in the market - like Motivation. God! Everywhere you go, you find motivational speakers, courses, books, life transforming programs!

Originality. This world is such an old place that there are no new subjects. But the same old subject can be discussed with newer examples and anecdotes from the current time and context. If it is a subject close to your heart, even if it is a hoary old topic, like honesty, like love, like environment, you will sound original since you will have 'your' viewpoints, 'your' examples, 'your' anecdotes to tell that have not been told before.

Language matters. There is a difference between complexity and complication. While complication should be avoided, complexity has its own beauty. You should read the classics, the beautifully formed sentences to appreciate complexity.
Further, there is difference between brevity and economy. While brevity requires short sentences, economy does not. Economy simply means avoidance of redundancy. Somerset Maugham’s writings, characterized by long sentences, some of which make up one paragraph, even one whole page, are known to be economical. Such long sentences can be simple too.
Simplicity does not imply brevity.

Lastly, grammar is what separates wheat from the chaff.

The bottom line is that, a simple speech does not mean broken ungrammatical sentences, cliché, badly formed sentences and lines that people have heard a thousand times.

The same applies to the literary world as well. Most of these self help books are badly written - subjects that are hot in the market, a few mantras thrown in, easy to remember acronyms, no depth, content gathered after combing all the SMS’s and email forwards (about a man busy making money repenting after his mother’s death – therefore live your life! And all that…) that have done a few rounds in the 8 years or so, aggressive propaganda through facebook and twitter,…

And those who like such books defend it using simplicity, the poor thing. ‘A book need not be like those classics having a high standard. It can be a simple book…’

Like I said, there is no end to the altars at which simplicity has been sacrificed. Slovenliness, purposelessness, inferiority, existentialism, hypocrisy, clumsiness, lack of talent, ignorance...

I will share with you one last example.

'I will marry any boy you find for me ma'. That wasn’t me. Oh no! Not at all.
That was a friend from the Marwadi community - educated in a top university, good looking and placed in Infosys...
‘I am so evil’, thought I who definitely had 'expectations'.

'I am a simple girl yaar, main kisi se bhi shaadi kar loongi. I am a simple girl. It’s all about making it work. It’s not about finding the right guy. You need to be more mature and practical yaar’, she advised me 'Say yes to someone. Don’t reject all boys like that'.

A few months later, she told me she was in love with this guy, a colleague from another team. They were about to be engaged. She had begun her shopping too.
And then she called off the relationship.

‘His family is more orthodox than ours. You know how Marwadis are...’
‘But you will have a separate home in a distant city... you will not live with them’, said I, feeling sad that lovers were parting.
‘Yes. But we will have to visit our in laws and stay with them at least once in a year.’
‘That’s just for 10 days.’
‘But those 10 days will be my vacation too, not just his. He will sit before the TV, remote in his hand. I will be with his mother in the kitchen doing seva, my head covered in a pallu’.

I simply sat there listening, not sure what to say. She shouldn’t have called it off... she was in love with him...this was a small sacrifice...though easier said than done.

And then, tumbling came other reasons too...
‘His salary is another thing yaar. I am getting 6 lakhs per annum he is getting 8 lakhs; it’s just a difference of 2 lakhs.
‘How does salary matter?’ I asked.
‘It matters yaar, it matters. Guys have an ego. And then it’s also about my position in the family.
My bhaiyya is getting 18 lakhs per annum, and my bhabhi knows it and is proud of it. If my husband earns less than my brother, then what will be my position in the house, in front of my bhabhi?
‘Why do you care? You will not live with your bhabhi.’
‘But I will visit them once in a year. Tab mera position kya hoga?’

What had she said earlier? 'I am a simple girl yaar'. 'I will marry any boy my mother finds me'?
Very simple indeed! I thought!
And I was relieved to realize that I was not all that evil after all. I had not asked a single suitor how much he earned!

So that was about the use, overuse, abuse and misuse of simplicity.
What true simplicity is, is a subject for another discussion, another day.
What I know for sure today, is that, simplicity is none of what it is made out to be by people. Simplicity has become a fashion, a fad. People go for an image makeover so they will ‘look’ simple!
And then, it is a handy instrument for all those who want to justify their ineptness in one way or another.

Leave alone practicing simplicity, even understanding simplicity, is not so simple after all.
Isn’t it?

Everest Calling - The Smell Of A Home I Have Once Lived In

2011-06-30T15:47:00.007+05:30

16th April 2011. Kathmandu.

I had to make a phone call.
Because everyone else was doing so. Calling up family to let them know they were safe.
Unfortunately for me, I come across as a strong independent woman and everybody assumes I am safe and can take care of myself. No one really worries about me. But I called anyway. Mom had asked me to.

I went to the phone booth after dinner to make the call.
Different people had been charged different rates per minute of call. 20, 30, 50 Nepali rupees.
I and friend walked up and down the narrow road looking for a booth and most of them were closed.
We found one. I made my call.
The charge came to 20 Nepali rupees. I paid 20 Indian rupees. After a quick math, we agreed that the boy owed me 10 Nepali rupees.

He held the 10 Nepali rupee note in his right hand, while his left hand touched the right elbow.
I was touched. It was ‘the smell of that house I had once lived in’.
(I am borrowing words from a friend here)

I asked him if that’s how he gave, whenever he gave something to people. Yes, he said.
‘Do you know why it is done like that?’ I asked
'Aadar', he said - meaning respect.

We at home too had been trained to give like that. Always give with your right hand. And the left hand should be touching the right elbow. Or the right wrist. Or join both hands in a cup.
You should give with both hands - it symbolizes whole hearted giving.
Whether you give alms to a beggar, change to a rickshaw driver, money to a shopkeeper, water to a thirsty…

I was touched to find people here practicing and keeping alive a tradition, a nuance that we at home had discarded long ago. The youth of today would even scoff at it.
It was gone. Almost. Only during religious or cultural events, when people performed certain rituals and rites, they use both their hands. When making an offering to God, when pouring ghee and other offering into the holy fire…

Symbolism. What’s a culture with it?
When we find symbolism in literature we appreciate it. Why, when we find symbolism in other cultures we become curious and even reverent.
Our own life and our social traditions in India are full of such symbolism and nuance but we scoff at them.
Superstition, blind belief and other such names we call it.
We fail miserably to understand that it’s the spirit and nuance behind the symbolism that is the whole point.

In the days that followed, I would be touched by a few people – naïve and otherwise, in high and low places alike, extending their right hand to me with their left one gently touching the right elbow. Not really the Buddhists in the mountains where we spent most of our time, but the Hindus in Kathmandu and elsewhere.

But the very first time I observed the gesture, it lingered in my mind. It was ‘the smell of that home I have once lived in’. In a tiny shop, on a narrow street of an unknown land full of strange looking people, I had met the last shadow of a dying innocence that had been swept out of my big home.

A few weeks later, in my city, sitting in a shop selling plastics, I would think of this Nepali boy and his innocent gesture, as the busy owner of the plastic shop, whom I had asked to show me a stool I was interested in buying, would push it callously towards me with his left leg.

As I returned from the phone booth and reached the main road, a few young boys with spiky hair accosted us with the shouts of 'Nepali dance...Nepali dance dekhna hai?’
I thought they were going to perform on the street - just like our Nukkad Natak...
I turned to the boy to ask something when my friend hushed me and said, ‘they are here to take people to dance bars. Lets go quickly’. He pointed to the topmost floor of a building to our right.

I looked up and saw the flickering disco lights. The pink and yellow lights coloured the walls in turn. Apparently the music was on, liquor too, and women were dancing. I smiled.
I thought about the innocent boy in the phone booth.
And wondered if he would go to the dance bar that night after closing his shop.

Everest calling - Kathmandu

2011-06-28T12:12:00.014+05:30

Sleeplessness had fatigued me so much that it came down on me with its full weight at the airport when we were waiting for a few members of our troupe to join us from Chennai. I sat on someone's baggage first, then sat on the floor, reclining against a pillar whose protruding panels hurt my back. I cursed, shifted to the middle of the baggage of 20 plus people on the floor, reclining against the baggage first and finally lay supine on the floor with my shawl for my back and pillow.

The airport itself was not much – small, looking run-down, having brick finished appearance, brick coloured…, small filthy bathrooms. It was a view of ugliness after the gorgeous Delhi international airport whose only flaw was the gate 10B that was very far away from the security checkpoint. I told you I had almost missed my flight.
The only pretty thing about the Nepal airport was the mirrors with carved wooden frames on all pillars.

My neighbor in the plane had said 500 rupee notes would be confiscated at the airport. Not on arrival but on departure from Nepal. I had 4 or 5 500 rupee notes with me. We hoped to get it exchanged at one of the foreign exchange shops. We would learn soon that even the exchanges did not accept these denominations.
Upon entering the airport, the notice about 500 notes caused us all much anxiety.
A good way to make money I thought - confiscate 500 rupee notes from unsuspecting Indians!

After finishing all formalities, which were not much, I saw the custom guys near the exit opening peoples' wallets and checking. I quickly took the notes from my envelope and put it under my clothes in the big bag.

I learnt later from Jaggy (a friend and part of the troupe) that Pakistan prints counterfeit 500 Indian rupee notes and circulates them in Nepal and other countries to destabilize Indian economy. That’s why Nepal does not allow people to carry these currencies into or out of the country - for fear that those might be counterfeit 500 rupee notes.

So do not carry 500 or higher denominations of Indian currency to Nepal. Carry only 100's or less.

Coming out of the airport, I saw that Kathmandu was ringed by distant shadowy hills.

I mistook the airport entrance gateway arch a few hundred meters away from the airport, for the Pashupatinath temple. My neighbour on the plane had said the temple was close to the airport.

The Pashupatinath temple that the cab driver pointed to as we drove to the hotel, seemed like a collection of temples with pagoda tops. A temple complex. We would visit this temple after our Everest trek.

I dozed for most part of the drive to the hotel, not seeing much of the 'foreign' city. When I opened my eyes, I realized there was not much to miss in the first place.
The road where I got down was a narrow lane that had a profusion of overhanging electric and other cables for festoons.

After finishing some business at the counter, we entered the courtyard of hotel Thamel Eco resort.

The interiors were in complete contrast with the ugliness outside.

After resting for a few minutes, we left the hotel room for a stroll on the street just outside, lined on both sides by a motley mix of interesting colourful shops.

there were beautiful paintings in on eof the shops. They were paintings of various mountains, scenic places, people crossing bridges, yaks, rivers...
I asked him if they were created in the image of real places or mere imagination. He said 'real places'. We told him we were trekking to Everest Base Camp and asked if we would see those pictures on our way. he said 'yes' and my anticipation soared.
Photography was forbidden and I had to position myself on the opposite side of the street to take this picture. They were too expensive or I would have bought one.

This is a tea shop where you get a variety of tea.

Dinner at the hotel was buffet.
‘Pure vegetarian’, said the elderly attendant at the dining hall pointing to the buffet.
'Do people in Nepal eat veg. mostly or non veg.? I asked.
‘There are both kinds of people but mostly they are veg’.
‘Are the Hindus more in number or Buddhists?’
‘Hindus are more in number.Hindu Rashtra Hain Na', said he.

It was the only Hindu kingdom in the world. I learnt it from my father when the king of Nepal was killed in that family feud a few years ago.
All the men of Nepal had shaved their heads. In the Hindu tradition, the raja is considered the father (Pita Saman). The king is expected to look after his subjects like a father would his children. And when a father dies in the Hindu tradition, sons shave their heads.

I felt sad for the state in which the only Hindu Kingdom of the world should be. Impoverished. Naïve.
When Air India flight had been hijacked from Kathmandu, it was understood by people (whether or not it was true) that Nepal was a poor country so it was easy to bribe people even at an international airport.

We were 29 of us. Introductions were still going on. Smaller tables had been joined to make one long table around which we all sat.
Food was good. It tasted quite Indian. North Indian.
People looked good too. Excited. Fresh. Clean. Energetic.
We did not know then that it would be a long time before the food tasted that good again. And people looked that good again.
It would be just 16 days but it would seem much longer.

The trek had been organized by an adventure group in Cognizant, an IT firm whose employee I used to be, years ago. I learnt about the expedition from a friend still in cognizant and I had joined. There were a few others too who were not from Cognizant.

Cognizant T shirts were given to all of us to be worn upon reaching Everest Base Camp.
When was the last time I had received a Cognizant T shirt?
I had resigned in 2003 September.
Who knew then, when I had left, that one more T shirt from the company was due to me?

The hotel had 24 hours hot water supply. I oiled my hair, following the once-in-3-day ritual.
Not my usual hair oil but the new parachute coconut hair oil. It had the scent of jasmine. So close was it to the fragrance of the jasmine flower that I wondered how they infused it into the oil. Mankind was making a lot of needless progress in the wrong direction.

Some chemical added to the water for purification or whatever had made the water yellowish. After washing, my hair felt like coconut husk. God…

There was no electricity in the hotel. And lighting was due to generator or inverter or whatever.
Suman, the guy who agreed to charge my lithium camera battery at a special plug-point, said that for 18 hours a day, there was no electricity in Kathmandu and all over Nepal throughout the year.
‘Are there no power stations here?’
‘There are. Many. All the power is sold to India. UP, MP and other states’
I felt truly sad for the state of the only Hindu kingdom in the world.

Burial At Sea - Khushwant Singh (based on Nehru's life)

2011-06-22T15:28:00.003+05:30

If the book were just fiction, I would dismiss it as cheap dirty titillation, with some mention of Gandhi and freedom thrust in to hide the obviousness of the cheap matter and to make it seem worthwhile, but since it is based on the lives Nehru and Indira Gandhi, may be Motilal Nehru too, it attains significance as it tells you the inside stories of these people worshipped by our countrymen and the skeletons in their cupboard.

Kishan Lal Mattoo, a Kashmiri Brahmin (a character based on Motilal Nehru) wanted to bring up his only son, Jai Bhagwan (a character based on Nehru) as an English aristocrat. He employs an English Governess Valerie Bottomley to groom his son and his daughters.
In addition to her duties as a governess to the children, she comes to offer her services to Kishan Lal too, who, having become lonely in life, solicits her to ‘save’ him and seduces her savagely.

While this may not be factual representation of Motilal’s life, he was surely known for his sexual perversions.

Kishan Lal Mattoo was closely associated with Gandhi who would visit the house of Kishan Lal at times.

Victor Jai Bhagwan (the name Victor was given him by Valerie Bottomley) went to England to study. There he lost his virginity at the age of 14 to a wayside prostitute and later on had liaisons with many prostitutes. He also made friends with a Madhavan Nair, a member of labour party's left wing socialist group in London, who was to become his adversary later in life.

Upon his return to India, he married a woman of his mother’s choice. She died after giving birth to their daughter Bharati who fell into the care of his mother.

Disagreeing with Gandhi's vision of future of India (who was for people spinning their own Khadi), he opened textile mills.
…Gandhi is quoted as saying 'I became a barrister but gave up legal practice after a few years. I felt there were more important things to do than earn a living off other peoples' quarrels.'…
He then diversified into other businesses as well (the English made sugar out of beetroot, he made it out of sugar cane) and made Bombay his head quarters.

He appointed the prickly Nair GM of his shipping company and bought a yacht.

India got freedom from the British meanwhile.
He acquired a house on the banks of the Ganges near Hardwar after his father’s death.
He visited Hardwar, saw Ma Durgeshwari, bathing naked in the Ganges along with Sheroo, her pet vegetarian tiger.
Durgeshwari, a tantric woman, introduces him to the pleasures of unbridled sexuality and upon his request, moves to Delhi with Sheroo.

Along with her came the yoga teacher Swami Dhananjay Maharaj, member of Durgeshwari's ashram.
He is teaches Victor how to get rid of gas in the stomach (Khushwant Singh’s favourite subject, one he cannot omit in his writings). He was appointed to teach yoga to family and servants.

Victor’s daughter Bharati (Indira Gandhi) – headstrong, self willed and sharp tongued, studied in Switzerland, grudging her time spent in that place she did not like.
She returned to India and took over her father's business gradually and tours England with Nair.
In England she is seduced by Nair on the same sofa cum bed on which her father had lost his virginity to a prostitute 30 years ago.

In the course of her yoga lessons from Dhananjay Maharaj, she commands him to seduce her and he obeys.
“She suffered from an acute father fixation and found no man good enough to be her husband.”

You may want to note that Nehru too was known for his sexual perversions. He died of Syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease. His affair with Edwina Mountbatten (Viceroy Mountbatten’s wife!) is well known.
He also had a clandestine affair with some Sadhu woman in orange robes who gave birth to his child and disappeared.
Indira Gandhi was also known to be a notorious woman who had many men in her life. The allusion to acute father fixation seems so true in her case.

Madhavan was detested by all workers in the mill for his prickliness. Victor ignored the complaints against him.
Madhavan disapproved of the presence of the tantric woman and that yoga teacher who seemed to have taken control over Bharati who used to be in his custody before.
Swamiji treated Nair with a condescension usually reserved for a defeated rival.
During a confrontation between him and Victor, Victor suggests that Madhavan should follow his political career, indirectly telling him he was no longer needed.

Madhavan Nair for his part provokes the trade unions to revolt against Victor, gets an editor friend to write ill of Bharati and Victor. In the war between the two, Victor and his family gain an upper hand and thwart Madhavan.
Further, Madhavan champions the case of communist China and after Chinese attack, became a laughing stock.
‘…those who spit at the sky have the same spit fall on their face…’

In a gathering of factory workers following a fire incident in the mills, Victor slaps a union leader who made crude remarks about Durgeshwari and questioned Victor’s relationship with her. That incident led to Victor’s downfall. The angered union leader swears revenge.

Nair misbehaved in the parliament and was criticized in his excitement to get even with Victor when the agitation over Victor's slapping the union leader presented him an opportunity, and had the papers write about it.
But though he loses his battles, he wins the war.

Durgeshwari who had stated clearly when she moved to Delhi that there would be ‘sambandh’ between her and Victor but no ‘Bandhan’ (relationship but no bonding) wishes to return to her ashram after the slapping incident for it shows that Victor was behaving like her husband.
But before leaving, she tells him she is pregnant with Victor’s child. She reveals it to Bharati who exacts a promise from her that no one except herself (the mother) will know where the baby is when it will be born.

Victor spends a lot of his time in his yacht, away from the buzz of the city, after Durgeshwari leaves him.

...the best way of doing things for his country and its people was to maintain a respectable distance from both. Distance lent objectivity and a clearer perspective; closeness made you aware of warts and blemishes - there were far too many of those...

One day as he is walking towards his yacht he is shot dead, probably by goons hired by the insulted union leader, though the author does not say it explicitly.

The title of the book ‘Burial At Sea’ is because Victor is buried in the sea.

Real Beauty

2011-06-17T11:24:00.002+05:30

Everyone’s talking about Real Beauty – the beauty of a kind heart, of a generous nature, of grandmother’s love, of a helpful soul.
All of a sudden, there is an outburst of deep and mature people on this planet who seem to have understood that beauty is only skin deep.
When all are so enlightened, why is it that fairness cream, anti aging cream, plastic surgery and Botox injections are pouring into the markets like never before?

I am sure, even as people wrote articles about real beauty for this contest by yahoo, they had some fairness cream or some other make up on them : - )

Such is the time in which we are living; a time of strange juxtapositions.

Order burger with extra cheese. And a diet coke.
Take an escalator. To the gym.
Trek to the mountains to detoxify. And smoke marijuana there.
Wear nose stud in a swim suit contest. To represent Indian culture.
Spend millions for a beauty contest to select Miss Earth. Who will then protect the environment.

Enough of the satire.
For all my sarcasm, I am glad so many people are thinking about Real beauty. I just hope their thinking results in some meaningful action too… that the sales of cosmetics will dip and some of them will close shops.

Since too much has been said about ‘true beauty’, ‘beauty beyond the skin’, for a change I will write about beauty of the skin. Why not? That’s also beauty, though at the skin level. And skin has come to matter today like never before. Isn’t it?

No metaphor. No symbolism. I will simply share with you a few tips to remain naturally beautiful, to delay premature aging. That’s all.

First of all, do care about how you look. No one stands to gain anything if you look 45 when you are only 35.

1. Soak a few almonds (5-6) for 8 - 12 hours. Throw the water. You are not supposed to drink this water. Peal away the skin. Eat the almonds. Helps your skin, hair, memory, heart.

2. Drink lots of water.

3. Take fruit juices. Never take milk shakes. According to Ayurveda, milk and fruit make an unharmonious blend. Even if it’s a pulpy fruit you are taking like papaya or cheeku always blend it with water, never milk.

4. Remain slim. If you put on weight, you tend to look older. If you want to look young, you must be slim.

5. How to remain slim? Do Not go to a gym. Weights cause demineralization of the bones, treadmill jerks your knees and ankles. Suryanamaskara is the best you can do. It exercises every muscle of your body.

6. Do not use any kind of cream. Trust me you don’t need it.

7. Apply castor oil/olive oil to your skin and massage for 10 minutes. Leave it for an hour before you take bath. Do this once in four days. That will take care of all the moisturizing, nourishing your skin needs

8. Do not even apply soap. Plain lukewarm water is sufficient.

9. To get rid of facial hair, people go for waxing/threading. They will gradually cause wrinkles to appear. And make you look awful for the first few days of hair removal too. Instead apply turmeric - mix with water, make a dilute paste and apply it where required. Wash after 10 minutes. It leaves yellow colour on your face so do it the last thing before you go to bed. The next morning, you may wash your face with soap to remove the colour. Or better, have the oil massage ritual after this and wash with gram flour. Do this once in two-three days and in 6 months, you will see reduced hair growth. But make sure you avoid application close to eyebrows and the hair on your scalp. You don’t want to lose hair there.

10. Premature greying is on the rise. Understand that what you eat is more important than what you apply to your hair externally.

11. Do not use cosmetics - foundation cream, vanishing cream, eye liner, lipstick… except on occasions. They hurt your skin. It’s a cruelty if you are using these.

12. Eat a few pieces of Alma (you get them in the supermarket - sweet and salt). You can have amla pickle. Or amla in any form. It prevents greying, balding and promotes growth. A gentleman told me he noticed a few grey hair on his head and immediately started eating Amla. Within a few weeks, the grey streaks had turned black.

13. Do not colour/straighten/perm your hair. They cause hair falling, thinning and God knows what other problems.

14. If you are sitting in an Air Conditioned office, you already unfortunate, for it causes hair falling - it sucks moisture from your skin, eyes, scalp. Get into a secret pact with your administration department and get them to switch off the AC every few minutes and reduce the cooling to a minimum. During all seasons except summer, keep the AC switched off. Because you don’t need it!
I can’t understand jerks who want AC with high cooling and the, to protect themselves from the cold, wear a jacket in office! When you tell them its cold, they ask you to get a jacket too!

15. Do not use AC at home. Blend with the elements. When all plants, animals, creations in nature can sweat, why can’t you?

16. Do not comb your hair very often. Once a day is good.

17. Oil your hair once in three days. (I would recommend Neelibhringadi haair oil - available in Ayurvedic dispensaries) Soak for an hour at aleast. Wash. If you have any connection with the countryside and its people, get shikakai powder. They pluck it from the tree and grind it fresh. Nd then mix shikakai powder with soapnut powder (I am not sure of the English term). Its called Sujjal Pudi or Chigrey Pudi in Kannada, Arapu pudi in tamil.

18. Do not apply comb directly after hair wash. Finger comb your hair to remove the knots. And then gently, very gently comb it. This way you lose minimum hair after a wash.

19. Don’t use nail polish. The area around your nails are very sensitive. You can sooth your nerves by applying certain natural agents - like butter - around your fingernails and toenails. Imagine how sensitive they must be.

20. Have sprouts - they are rich in proteins - good for your hair.

21. Have dry fruit - almond, walnut, fig, dates, peanuts, apricot, raisins. Avoid cashew and pista.They contain fat.

22. Avoid going out in the sun as much as you can. The Sun today, I believe is harsher than it was in the past. Always carry an umbrella when you go out in the sun. since I don’t use sunscreen, I prefer avoiding the Sun. Even though you may carry an umbrella, UV rays are bouncing off other surfaces around you. even if you are using a sunscreen, you never know. Many people say they don’t make a difference. So after you come home in the evening, apply tomato, cucumber for restoration, recuperation.

23. Get at least 6 hours of sound sleep a day.

24. Meditate. It makes your skin look young, apart from the higher benefits.

25. Try to find ways and means of finding happiness in spite of your circumstances. Don’t complain, lament, worry, nag all the time. Just be happy.

Adding to the list above... (will do this from time to time)

26. Neem is a blood purifier. The minute you spot a pimple, boil on your face just beginning, pop two Neem capsules (I buy Himalaya Neem capsules - available in medical stores, Health & Glow etc) and seem them disappear the next day.

Beware of all the advertisements on television/magazines trying to promote beauty products. Know that they are all crooks who have mastered the art of conning people.
The surge of cosmetics in the market post 1991, when India opened her markets to foreign companies - the year when mysteriously, Indian women began winning international beauty pagents (so they could sell these useless creams to us) - is a drain of the nation’s wealth.
Millions of rupees are spent on these worthless creams that do more harm than good in the long run. You might as well flush that money down your toilet.

Know that anything that is not natural is a candidate for suspicion.
Anything that promises quick results is a candidate for suspicion.
Anything that defies nature - makes fair people dark or dark ones fair, stops aging, changes the shape of your nose, lips - is a candidate for suspicion.

Be Natural. Be Beautiful.

Everest Calling - Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai

2011-06-14T10:57:00.000+05:30

When we were children, we were taught that when someone asks for water, you always give it to them. You never refuse. If you refuse water to a thirsty, you will be born a lizard in your next life.
We believed it.

As we grew up, we understood that the truth of the belief about ‘turning into a lizard’ did not matter in itself, but the habit it had established in our way of living was a noble one.
No matter who it was, a visitor, a family member, a stranger, a beggar, even a salesman who was otherwise unwelcome, if he asked for water, it would be given.
Even the meanest of people would not refuse water.
If you did, people thought you wretched.

We have come a long way from those days of innocence. Indeed, we have.

I told you about this restaurant called “The Food Street” in Delhi Airport that I walked into, to get some South Indian food.
Plain Dosa cost 110 rupees. The white chutney which first tasted of ginger and resulted in a first impression being good, turned out to be stale the next second. The Sambhar was kind of bitter sour but I was not sure it was stale.

Sometime after eating, I asked for a glass of water - regular, not mineral.
You have to pay for it, she said, the waitress.
That’s ridiculous, said I. Any restaurant that supplies food also provides water.
I understand you have to pay for mineral water, but for regular water, you should not expect a customer to pay.
The waiter girl sent another girl from the counter. The same exchange was repeated. I asked for the manager. He arrived. The exchange was repeated again.
We have forwarded the complaint to our senior management, said he.
I would not relent. I said, give me water that your staff drinks.
He deferred at last. And brought me cold water in a long white paper cup.

This is why they want capitalism, I thought, as I drank the water, wanting some more but too exasperated to ask!
That too Laissez Faire – complete freedom to do business as they like.
Ease of doing business, no interference by government. No regulations.
So you can grudge a customer a cup of water he needs in between morsels to wash down your stale chutney and pungent sambhar.

Why wouldn’t a restaurant give water?
Tap water is available for free.
But oh no. it’s not really free. You still have to pay the corporation water bill bi-monthly.
It’s a bare minimum, just a few rupees for a 100 liters, but why spend even that much?
Ok. You can add that to the cost of food and charge the customer.
But then what if someone drinks 4 glasses instead of the 2 glasses that you assumed while apportioning cost?
And then there is the task of collecting tap water in a container every day.
A staff member will have to spend 30 minutes of his time.
And time is money.
Moreover there is the cost of the container and the cost of tumblers.
So you have decided to give only mineral water.
Ok, so do you charge the customer only the cost of it?
No, you might as well make some profit out of it.
Why not? So you add a 20% margin.
…
Where will the calculation stop?

Squeeze until you get the last drop and then squeeze some more.
Do these fellows have conscience?

Take 100 rupees from a customer and refuse to give even a glass of water! This, in a country that has taught the world what giving is.

Time and again, it is these businessmen that verify my preconception that freedom, for most part, is freedom without responsibility; that State regulations and interference are indispensable in trade and commerce, because calculative minds, if left to themselves will compete with each other for higher profits and the highest levels degeneration.

Wish the State would make it a mandate for restaurants to provide regular drinking water for free.

And all the business schools in the country, please do include, in your curriculum, among ‘strategy’, ‘finance’ and ‘marketing’, a subject called ‘Humanity in Business’.
Those discussing the oxymoron have used this phrase as an example for long, evoking much laughter. Let us ‘get it’ that this wretchedness is not a laughing matter but a crying shame.

Nobility will have to be enforced if it does not come voluntarily, hence the need for regulations; but let there also be continuous effort to ensconce nobility in the nature of men and women; education, textbooks, curriculum, anecdotes, example, precept, whatever it takes to turn business men into human beings.
And if a superstition about ‘rebirth as a lizard’ can achieve the purpose, it is welcome too.

EC - Flying and Scrambling, Crouching and Racing

2011-06-10T18:23:00.036+05:30

It was a bumpy plane ride; the worst of all I have experienced. I was half asleep and therefore less afraid.
My father had mentioned air bubbles once… it seems the air hostesses had abandoned the food carts/trolleys right in the middle of serving and fled…
Were we passing through one of those bubbles now? Or was it something else?
It felt like driving on roads with alternating road humps and potholes.
I could actually feel the plane diving suddenly and my heartbeat stopping every time that happened.
And I smiled away foolishly, eyes closed, rather enjoying the boisterous slapstick comedy, not caring to fear, sure of my destiny, for no reason at all.

Another feature of this ride was the impervious-impermeable Vada that was served alongside Idly. It was so impervious to the hot Sambhar in which it was immersed, that it was brown on the outside and when I bit into it, it was spotless white inside. As I chewed, there appeared Vijay Mallya on the screen before me, proclaiming he had tasted the food personally and made sure it was perfect.

We were flying cattle class in Kingfisher.
The seats were closely packed. The namesake reclining seats moved only 2-3 inches backward while I continued pressing the button and pushing the back of the seat with all my might.
The Bangalore – Delhi journey was miserable!
And the little speech by Mr. Mallya was a source of comic relief to one and all.
“The airhostesses have been personally chosen by me…! “
Yes. We believe you.
I thought of a joke by a friend during peak recession “Why King Fisher employees need not worry about being laid off?
Because they have already been … … by……
Ha ha ha…
Sorry about the crudeness.
The very plastic, artificial Yana Gupta was giving security instructions in Hindi on the small screen pausing between sentences at all the wrong times…

‘Hum aapko suraksha ke’
Pause
‘Bare mein’
Pause
‘Soochna dete hai’

The Delhi international airport!
Wow!! What a sight! How grand and what aesthetic sense! Every inch of it had received attention.

The first thing I noticed was the carpeting! The complete length of the corridors, stretching up to hundreds of meters was carpeted.
The way it stretched from this end to that, it made me think of Paris airport!

There were conveyor belts to carry people who preferred to simply stand and at the same time be transported to the opposite end of a long corridor.

Every bend and turn at the airport offered a surprise.

High ceilings created an atmosphere of majesty.

In one place, there were Mudras in metallic finish fixed to the wall, that was covered by huge copper coloured concave metallic plates - each mudra being as tall as I am.
There were 10 or more of them in all.

The wall opposite was covered with posters of cricketers.

I had to meet a friend during the three hours I had before my next flight so I moved towards arrivals.

Granite tiles polished to a sheen covered the floor that reflected the hundreds of light fixtures on the ceiling above.

I noticed, there was a long strip of murals covering the length of the building as I walked toward arrivals.

The snake charmer was there; it seems to me that no amount of development - glass finished buildings, malls, computers and all - will take away from the snake charmer, his right to represent India before all else.
Then there were the Classical dancers, Elephants, the Tabla and the Shenai, Tagore…
And this one took me by surprise - the Naama - the mark on the forehead worn by the Iyengars, and the Vaishnavas in general. I was happy to see my community represented.

I did not notice then, but the Taj Mahal was not all pervasive.
I am glad someone had discovered there was so much more to India than a grave.
(Make no mistake; I am emotional about Agra and the Taj Mahal. I spent the first two years of my life there. But definitely, there is much more to India)

I walked slowly towards the exit savouring the sights.

The Hindi translation of Exit ‘Nikas’ caught my attention as I traced its root to a word in Sanskrit that I thought I had read recently.

The arrival lounge is lined with stalls on both sides – stalls of all kind, books, food, bakery,…

The one that faced me as I entered this lounge was a very attractive ‘Kingdom of Dreams” - What was it? Some agency for booking hotels? That’s what a certain taxi driver, waiting at arrivals said.

When I googled it, I found something very interesting. “Kingdom of Dreams is a spectacular world of unparalleled imagination, which brings to you a blend of India’s culture, heritage, art, crafts, cuisine and performing arts buttressed with the mind boggling technological wizardry of today. This unique tourist destination, situated at the apex of the golden triangle of Jaipur, Agra and Delhi offers you the carnival that is India.”

I will surely visit this place on my next visit to Delhi. The website is so gorgeous.

I saw these metal book marks in a certain shop … stencils of Krishna, peepal leaf, peacock paisley, elephant, flower, lotus and autorickshaw!… 500 rupees each. I almost bought them but held myself.

As I stepped outside the arrivals exit to meet my friend, I saw some more art on the pillars.

Last and the least was this restaurant called ‘food street’ that I walked into, to get some South Indian food. Plain Dosa - 110 rupees. The white chutney which first tasted of ginger and resulted in a good first impression, turned out to be stale the next second. The Sambhar was kind of bitter sour but I was not sure if it was stale. I had to negotiate with three people before I could get a glass of regular drinking water without paying extra.
This restaurant must be a shining example of the decadence that Laissez Faire capitalism can bring about. More on this later…

I had one more hour to go before my international flight took off.
I said goodbye to my friend and moved towards the next gate. My heart sank when I saw the queue. The king fisher staff who filled the form for me at the counter by taking details from my passport…thank you so much…

Once I had my boarding pass, I felt somewhat relieved. I had to reach gate 10B. I had 10-15 more minutes but did not panic since I thought the gate must be close by.
There was no end to the enticing distracting glittery shops and I clicked some more pictures. Anti-consumption though I may be, I could not help feasting my eyes on all the dreamlike material abundance.

I pushed my trolley, walked to this bend and took that turn but gate 10B would just not show. When someone pointed to the bend at the very end of a kilometer long corridor, my pulse began racing. I had no idea Delhi airport was so huge.

I ran with the trolley as a voice announced the last and final boarding call to passengers flying by IT-65.

I must thank the driver of the electric car who went out of his way to escort me. The one meant for passengers shook his head when I signalled to him and drove in the opposite direction. The other who was loading or unloading some goods – drove me to the ever elusive 10B terminal.
I reached, just in time, still panting from the effort of my marathon.

I almost missed my flight twice on the same day. The flight from Bangalore to Delhi had also been a scramble, because we had underestimated the crowd inside. The number of people that had turned up at 5 in the morning! Where were they all going?

Had my mother been witness to all my scrambling, that too twice on the same day, she would have shook her head from side to side until…

So I was inside Kingfisher again, flying cattle class again. The refreshment for this international flight, however, included a chocolate pastry, which I must admit, tasted good.

I had gotten used to Yana Gupta by now.
What kept my childish whim occupied (and amused) this time was a Faux pas.
The recorded announcement said something about alcohol consumption being prohibited on plane and the big prohibition symbol appeared on the screen - on your face.

After water, wet tissue and head sets were offered, the lady in red appeared with “Some beer for your sir?”.
When she tried to offer me one, I asked her about the earlier instruction about prohibition of alcohol, out of idle curiosity (I am a teetotaller).
“That’s for domestic flights only, not international flights’.
Why the message then, I thought?
Cost cutting - by shooting a single video for two messages!
Somehow, cost cutting had characterized several happenings of that day.

By the way, did I tell you where I was heading to?
Oh! I forgot.
Some believe that you do not choose a mountain. The mountain chooses you. Must be true, for I swear I had no plans of going to this place this summer. But long before the onset of summer, a certain mountain, in The Great Himalayas of Nepal, over 29000 feet tall, had chosen me, to take into her proximity.
And here I was, responding to that calling.

Here I was, flying and scrambling, crouching and racing, lumbering and trudging, ambling and hopping and doing whatever else it took to reach the glorious Mt. Everest.

The Story of My life - Hellen Keller

2011-06-07T18:37:00.001+05:30

Incredible. That’s the one word summation of this book.

It’s the autobiography of a girl who became deaf and blind - and as good as dumb too - because the two important means of learning speech, hearing and sight through which we receive input from our worlds, were lost - when she was 19 months old, but who went on to learn, with the help of her teacher Anne Sullivan, conquered her disabilities and wrote this autobiography full of vivid descriptions of her rich experiences, of her absorption of every drop of life, that inspires those of us blessed with all five senses.

It could have been a book filled with the many deprivations and hardships of the girl, evoking pity and tears in the reader. But almost all the pages are characterized, not by lamentation, but by triumph - over one hurdle after another - evoking wonder, admiration and pride in the reader.

Throughout the book - from the very beginning till the end, the authors tries to assure us that she has ‘seen’ life, just like us.
“…during the first 19 months of my life, I had caught glimpses of broad, green fields, a luminous sky, trees and flowers, which the darkness that followed, could not wholly blot out. If we have once seen, ‘the day is ours, and what the day has shown.’”

Towards the end, after she has described her rich and diverse experiences, her education, her learning, her travel and her adventures, she says,

“Even as the roots, shut in the darksome earth,
Share in the tree top’s joyance, and conceive
Of sunshine and wide air and winged things
By sympathy of nature, so do I”

“…The Bible gives me a deep comforting sense that ‘things seen are temporal and things unseen are eternal’ …”

Only once, in the end, she allows herself one paragraph to share her grief, in a brief message that carries the entire weight of a lifetime
“Sometimes…….. I sit alone and wait at life’s shut gate. Beyond there is light, and music, and sweet companionship; but I may not enter. Fate, silent, pitiless, bars the way…”

One person, who deserves equal attention and appreciation, is her teacher Anne Mansfield Sullivan, who with her patience and her commitment, helped turn Helen, who would otherwise have become a vegetable, into the human that she was.

The methods of teaching she used, to educate Helen, are indeed interesting. Helen’s education, in general, serves to help us understand the challenges that the disabled have to face, even to accomplish very simple things that we pay no attention to.

She(Anne Sullivan) took Helen to the well house where someone was drawing water. Miss Sullivan placed her hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other hand, the word water, first slowly and then rapidly.

Helen – “…I was stringing beads of different sizes in symmetrical groups…I noticed a very obvious error in the sequence and for an instant I concentrated my attention on the lesson and tried to think how I should have arranged the beads. Miss Sullivan touched my forehead and spelled with decided emphasis, ‘Think’. In a flash I knew that the word was the name of the process that was going on in my head. This was my first conscious perception of an abstract idea.

“My teacher gave me slips of cardboard on which were printed words in raised letters. I had a frame in which I could arrange the words in little sentences; but before I ever put sentences in the frame I used to make them in objects. I found the slips of paper which represented, for example, ‘doll’, ’is’, ‘on’, ‘bed’ and placed each name on its object; then I put my doll on the bed with the words is, on, bed arranged beside the doll, thus making a sentence of the words, and at the same time carrying out the idea of the sentence with the things themselves.

Miss Sullivan’s descriptions of the great round world with its burning mountains, buried cities, moving rivers of ice…she made raised maps in clay so that I could feel the mountain ridges and valleys, and follow with my fingers, the devious course of rivers.

Everything Miss Sullivan taught me she illustrated by a beautiful story or a poem.
What many children think of with dread, as a painful plodding through grammar, hard sums and harder definitions, is today one of my most precious memories.

The growth of a plant, lily furnished the text for some lessons; and also eleven tadpoles in a glass globe.

Miss Sarah Fuller, principal of Horace Mann school – employed the below method to teach her speech : she passed the girl’s hand lightly over her own face, and let her feel the position of her tongue and lips when she made a sound. And the girl learnt six elements of speech - M, P, A, S, T, I.
In reading her teacher’s lips, she was wholly dependent on her fingers: “I had to the sense of touch in catching vibrations of the throat, the movements of the mouth and the expression of the face; and often this sense was at fault. In such cases, I was forced to repeat the words or sentences, sometimes for hours, until I felt the proper ring in my own voice.”

With all her disabilities, the variety of things she learnt and the richness of her experience make a reader ask who is more disabled.

She went to various fairs and exhibitions and learnt the stories of different people and places of the world. At the Cape of Good Hope exhibit, she learnt about the process of mining diamonds.
She learnt algebra, geometry, Greek, Latin, Latin prosody. She learnt Latin grammar from a Latin scholar.
A collection of fossils unlocked the treasures of the antediluvian world for her.
She used to knit and crochet; play a game of checkers or chess with a friend, or solitaire, frolic with children, find pleasure and inspiration in museum and art stores, go to theatre and have a play described to her while it is being acted on stage.
She graduated with honours from Radcliffe College in Massachusetts in 1904.
Talking about her rowing experience, ‘I use oars with leather bands, which keep them in position in the oarlocks, and I know by the resistance of the water when the oars are evenly poised. In the same manner I can also tell when I am pulling against the current. I like to contend with wind and wave…
‘I enjoy canoeing especially on moonlit nights…’ a blind girl you may think… but she knows the moon is there. Just as she could feel the city noises and knew the difference between walking through country roads and city roads. ‘Dissonant tumult frets my spirit…when I walk in the city’…
She was surprised and delighted when she uttered her first connected sentence, ‘It is warm‘. Though she possessed the ability to speak, she could not actually speak as she had no means of learning how to speak - sight and hearing.

There is vivid imagery throughout the book. Coming from a blind and deaf person, such felicity of language is surprising. Most people with all senses functioning couldn’t have done such a good job of imagery...so detailed that its almost photographic - you can conjure the picture in your mind as you read...written with such relish and with so much feeling put into it.

“…..frolicsome streams ran through it from springs in the rocks above leaping here and tumbling there in laughing cascades wherever the rocks tried to bar their way. The opening was filled with ferns which completely covered the beds of limestone and in places hid he streams. The rest of the mountain was thickly wooded. Here were great oaks and splendid evergreens with trunks like mossy pillars, from the branches of which hung garlands of ivy and mistletoe, and persimmon trees, the odour of which pervaded every nook and corner of the wood - an illusive, fragrant something that made the heart glad. In places, the wild muscadine and scuppernong vines stretched from tree to tree, making arbours which were always full of butterflies and buzzing insects. It was delightful to lose ourselves in the green hollows of that tangled wood in the late afternoon, and to smell the cool, delicious odours that came up from the earth at the close of day…”
“……. At last the men mounted and as they say in the old songs, away went the steeds with bridles ringing and whips cracking and hounds racing ahead, and went away the champion hunters ’with hark and whoop and wild halloo……..’
“…Winter was on hill and field. The earth seemed benumbed by his icy touch, and the very spirits of the trees had withdrawn to their roots, and there, curled up in the dark, lay fast asleep…”

She had enough insight and perception to be able to make observations such as below.

“…In spite of Macaulay’s brilliancy and his admirable faculty of making the commonplace seem fresh and picturesque, his positiveness wearied me at time, and his frequent sacrifices of truth to effect kept me in a questioning attitude very unlike the attitude of reverence in which I had listened to the Demosthenes of Great Britain…”
“…but in college, there is no time to commune with one’s thoughts. One goes to college to learn, it seems, not to think...”
‘…Our enjoyment of great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding…’
“Calamities…Nature wages open war against her children and under softest touch hides treacherous claws…”
“…Knowledge is power. Rather, knowledge is happiness. Because to have knowledge is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low. To know the thoughts and deeds that have marked man’s progress is to feel the great heart throbs of humanity through the centuries; and if one does not feel in these pulsations a heavenward striving, one must indeed be deaf to the harmonies of life…”
“…I sometimes wonder if the hand is not more sensitive to the beauties of sculpture than the eye….i should think the wonderful rhythmical flow of lines and curves could be more subtly felt than seen. Be this as it may, I know that I can feel the heart throbs of the ancient Greeks in their marble gods and goddesses…”
“…It seems to me that there is in each of us a capacity to comprehend the impressions and emotions which have been experienced by mankind from the beginning. Each individual has a subconscious memory of the green earth and murmuring waters, and blindness and deafness cannot rob him of this gift from past generations. This inherited capacity is a sort of sixth sense - a soul-sense which sees, hears, feels, all in one…”

She is able to analyze and compare different literatures.
“…The German puts strength before beauty, and truth before convention, both in life and in literature. There is a vehement, sledgehammer vigour about everything that he does. When he speaks, it is not to impress others but because his heart would burst if he did not find an outlet for the thoughts that burn his soul.
Then too, there is in German literature a fine reserve which I like; but its chief glory is the recognition I find in it of the redeeming potency of woman’s self-sacrificing love. This thought pervades all German literature and is mystically expressed in Goethe’s ‘Faust’…. (Chapter 21)
Then she comments on French literature ….and others…”

I have noted some of experiences that are unique to one in her situation and also make up the humour in the book.
Her joy at the Perkins Institution for the Blind - when she began making friends with those who knew the manual alphabet, like her - her joy out of talking with other children in her own language! “Until then, I had been like a foreigner speaking through an interpreter.”
When she first experienced the sea - after her experience with the waves - she demanded “Who put salt in the water?”

One unpleasant incident in her life was the trouble she got into upon publishing a story that she had written. She was accused of plagiarism, tried in a court and convicted.
The author explains, “It is certain that I cannot always distinguish my own thoughts from those I read, because what I read becomes the very substance and texture of my mind. Consequently, in nearly all that I write, I produce something which very much resembles the crazy patchwork I used to make when I first learned to sew… My compositions are made up of crude notions of my own, inlaid with the brighter thoughts and riper opinions of the authors I have read.”

This situation of the author helps us understand how our sense of perception - through which we encounter personal experiences that make us who we are, that make our thoughts, ideas and feelings – is far more important than all the knowledge we gain through reading books, our schooling and university.
Very often we do not think much of our personal experiences and our stories but place a high value on what we gain by reading, on scholarship and on learning.
The author's problem - her only means of perceiving and knowing being books, that makes her incapable of originality in expression and the ensuing result that almost everything she writes has to be plagiarism in some degree, though it is no fault of hers – makes us appreciate better than ever before, how our direct perception and experience are more valuable than all the knowledge of the world gained through great books and authors.

‘There is no way to become original, except to be born so”, says Stevenson, implying that most of us are plagiarists. But the conditions of those like the author, who have no chance at all of being original, help us appreciate how fortunate we are.

As you read about her struggle to get into college and her difficulties in mathematics, algebra, geometry and arithmetic, - interpreting signs, symbols etc., and the system's unforgiving regulations/rules that will not relent just because a student is disabled, you can’t help noticing the ludicrousness of the system. The education system’s flaws loom large before reader.

I will end this post with one line that should inspire all of us to live more of life.
Recalling her visit North, where she ambled in the woods or some refreshing surrounding as that, she says, ‘I lived myself into all things. I was never still a moment; my life was as full of motion as those little insects that crowd a whole existence into one brief day…’

Trembling At The Brim

2011-05-27T18:02:00.005+05:30

So much to ask
So much to say
And yet, nothing will be asked
Nothing will ever be said.

Two destinies
One more cruel than the other
Will be borne in silence
By two beings made of the same soul
That have just found each other.

As they stand on either side of a chasm
A foot wide,
But an abyss deep,
Words and tears,
Breath and blood
Rise to fill the brim of their beings,
Eager to spill, to flow and mix,
And become one soul again;
But hold back and tremble
Forever at the brim
For the waters of tradition
Are rising in the chasm below,
Intimidating their advancing steps.

Above the waters, a sky of silence prevails
Between two storm-filled hearts.

A sprout is stifled and smothered
Just as it takes its first breath of life.

Elsewhere the world extols and applauds
The goodness and divinity of true love.

Morbid Fascination

2011-05-25T12:18:00.001+05:30

I was reading this work published by an author, an acquaintance of mine.
Shy, polite, bashful and restrained as he is, I was disappointed and surprised at certain gross descriptions he had filled (unnecessarily) into a few pages.

There was some attempt at double entendre and below the belt kind of humour.
Though it was not in his nature, he had attempted such writing, probably because at least half the humour has its source in such matters.

And the use of the four lettered F word in dialogues was profuse. Perhaps it helps the present generation readers relate to the book better, degenerate and debauched as their own vocabulary is.

This vocabulary has made its way into theatre as well. Actors on stage send out a stream of ‘F this’ and ‘F that’ and ‘F u’ and all other kinds of unspeakable profanity, while spectators, young and old, men and women, married and single, even children watch them without batting an eyelid. If the same profanities were translated into regional languages, say Kannada or Tamil or Hindi and thrown at people, they would grimace. You would hear them whispering ’third class’. Don’t know why people’s reaction to the same becomes one of eager welcome when the language is changed to English!, I mean, American!

There is the argument of ‘we give people what they want’ coming from writers, poets, movie makers, editors of newspapers and magazines and playwrights. Whether it is ‘we give people what they want’ or ‘people take what you give them’ is the eternal, irresolvable question of “who came first - hen or egg?” and the moral police can go on beating their foreheads.
Meanwhile, in the name of presenting ‘contemporary art’ or presenting ‘reality’, isn’t it a smart thing to do to make some money, even though at the expense of legitimizing the dissolute and giving sanction to the decadent?
Yes, you effectively give your sanction. If one artist has done it, many will join soon and then it will become the norm.

While the above(dilution of standards in art) is still understandable (though not pardonable), what I don’t understand(and this was what I was referring to in the opening sentences of this article ) is the morbid fascination that writers, artists all over the place seem to have developed for another four lettered F word; the one people use to refer to intestinal wind.

The very first time I came across the use of this word in literary field was, I think, when I read a work of Khushwant Singh. He had dedicated one whole chapter to intestinal wind and like a true subject matter expert, he had expounded on various aspects such as, the attitude of different cultures towards wind, and then… oh, forget it.
I had, diligently written in my review of the work that, ‘this author has an incredible capacity for distasteful writing’.
While I wondered what sort of a person writes such things and how he faces friends, family and the world, having written such things (I said he, not she; women will take some time before they equal men), while I grimaced at the tip, the rest of the iceberg started looming before me even as I winced.

People were using the word shamelessly.
This guy, who was introduced to me by a friend who was trying to solve my single status, greeted me with flowers (hmmm… gentleman) and within a few minutes of settling down in a restaurant where a play was just about to begin, having heard some sound in that pin drop silence, whispered in my ear that someone behind him had ‘F @#$%^’ aloud!
(disguised as a gentleman….). Sorry friend. You will have to find me a better one.

Before I knew, fellow bloggers had started using the word in their articles.

And then authors. They have been using it generously too.

I fail to understand why this morbid fascination for the distasteful.
The popularity of the rest of those profanities can be explained.
The F word that I first mentioned makes you look ‘cool’, modern and all…(or so the perception is). All the other below the belt talk and double meaning jokes give you some titillation.
But this F word? Just how does it appeal to people? It does not titillate, and it’s just not cool. It’s plain disgusting and loathsome.

If you observe the pattern, right from naming of certain rock bands, like ‘Witches Sabbath‘, ‘Bhayanak Mauth’, to writing lyrics of rock music, to turning our film heroes to negative characters - in one of the movies, both heroes are shown debauching with a dozen women, now smoking, now drinking, now playing Tabla on the posteriors of those dozen women, to using coarse slang in our speech, to projecting ourselves as ‘I am not a Gandhi’ type of a person, to making a mockery of the sober, innocent, honest, decent ones by calling them ‘Gandhi-like”, we display such fascination for the morbid, for the evil and a repulsion towards the good!

One of my friends had left her laptop on the table for sometime and the screensaver appeared - a phrase floating against a black background, moving all over and seesawing. You remember those screensavers?
I looked at it. It read ‘Sexy Naughty Bitchy’.
That was her office laptop. When I asked her if she would change the screen saver when in office, she replied in the negative, to my shock.

Wasn’t it embarrassing, I thought.
Oh! I got it later. It was meant for all to see. And take notice of.
That was the image she wanted to project of herself. Sexy naughty bitchy!
‘I am not a boring conservative good girl. Make no mistake’!, the three words were supposed to convey. And sure, they did.

Coming back to my author friend, I was disappointed when I saw that he had made a mention of that other loathesome F word, quite needlessly in his book and without relevance (he was predicting how a certain character in his story would react if he broke wind in public. My advice to the author - try astrology, but people would want to know about more important events in life.)

When I saw that this morbidity had gripped even my gentlemanly, soft spoken, well mannered, strong willed friend, who is not easily influenced by ‘social trends‘, I knew, we had made the U turn in civilization.

What You Speak Is Who You Are

2011-05-18T17:11:00.001+05:30

13th and 14th May 2011
Venue: Infosys Campus, Mysore

Two things that made my journey from Bangalore to Mysore as well as my absconding from work, worthwhile were the simply GREAT Infosys campus and the world champion of public speaking (1999), Craig Valentine’s speeches, nay, his performance on stage.

The below is the best I could record between attentively listening, watching, laughing and (of course) applauding through the sessions. As I wrote this article, I realized what a big chasm there was between witnessing the speaker himself and writing about the experience.

Don’t miss the learning below, if you like public speaking. Or writing. Or theatre. Or even simply conversing with people. Or Living!
It was specifically addressed to aspiring speakers but I believe there’s a lot that all of us can take away from his words.

“What’s the number 1 thing that stands between people living their dreams?” he began the session with this question.
“Fear’, ‘lack of confidence’, ‘destiny’… came the answers from us all.
No it’s not a negative thing. It’s a good things that come in between you and your dreams.
This he illustrated with his own story.
He walked to his employer and said he wanted to quit, because he wanted to be the world champion of public speaking. The employer immediately offered him a hike in salary. He shook his head and said he wanted to pursue a career in public speaking. The employer hiked his salary again. And again. And again. When the employer said “I will give you one hundred thousand dollars, he said, “I will ask my wife”.
He went home, told her about it and asked what he should do.
“Take the money fool” said she at first.
And then she said, “wait a minute… this is what you have wanted to do all your life.” Hmm…. Craig, YOUR DREAMS ARE NOT FOR SALE”.
He went to his employer, and without making eye contact, said “My wife said, my dreams are not for sale” : - )

If he had chosen the employer’s offer was definitely a good thing, he would not be living his dreams.
It’s the good that comes in the way of the great.
More often than not, following our dreams means letting go of our chosen safe path and taking risks – risking the good things we have. One who has nothing to lose can do absolutely anything. Isn’t it?
Don’t let the good get in the way of the best.

He told us of the first time he went to a bookstore. And how important it is to read.
“The people you meet and the books you read make you”
He recommended the book “Live Your Dreams” by Les Brown.

The full act on day 2 which followed the trailer on day 1 also began with humour.

“Sales blames marketing. Marketing blames production. Production blames engineers
When the engineers learn to talk, they will blame someone!”

Average leaders blame. Exceptional leaders accept it.

With a few demonstrations involving audience participation, he drove home important lessons.

We were asked to stand up face our immediate neighbour and turn the other way.
Then we were asked to change 12 things about our appearance…
After a few seconds, he said ‘OK, change two things…turn to your partner and find the change”
We did. The glasses were taken off, or the cot was removed, dupattas worn differently, hair let down…
And then again we were asked to turn the other way and change one thing and repeat the process.
We did.
Moral: Change small. Change often.
True. When we were asked to change 12 things, we simply stood thinking. Changing 1 or 2 things at a time was so much more easier.

How to craft/deliver a good speech:
1. Breathe life into a speech
2. Bring the audience to you
3. Build a message – tell a story, make a point

A foundational phrase is important. It is the ‘Take away’ phrase for your audience. It should be fewer than 10 words.
“No phrase. No stage. Don’t talk if you don’t have a take home value.”

He illustrated it with much humour.
Story: A man bought a bug bear (for those to whom this is not clear may think of a ladder instead of a bug bear). His little boy started climbing it. He went to the boy and warned him – you are too young for this. You will hurt yourself. Get down…”
The next day he went to the thing and the little boy was still on the top of it.
He said, “I told you not to climb, what are you doing up there?
To which the boy said “I am still getting down”
What’s the foundational phrase of the story?
“Sometimes you have to ignore your parents to get to the top.”

He gave us a story about a plane journey when this guy was sitting next to him for 4 hours without saying a word to him. When the journey was almost over, he said ‘hello, how do you do?”
Our man asked him, “I have been here for the last four hours next to you and you did not even as much as greet me and now you talk to me!”
To which the man said “I was afraid you would bore me. So what do you do?”
“I aspire to be a professional speaker”
‘And what do you do?”
“I am a professional speaker. I am the number 1 gospel comedian in the world”
“I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a gospel comedian”
“That’s why I am number 1”!

We were asked to come up with a foundation phrases for this one. Some of the responses were:
To be number 1, you have to be the only one.
Understand my silence to understand my words.
Your niche can make you rich.
What’s the prize. It’s a surprise.

Moving on…
It’s important to combine verbal with visual.
“What you say is not always what they hear.
People won’t remember what you say as much as what they’ll see when you say it.
The book is always better than the movie because people create the picture when you don’t give them the complete picture. People buy into what they help create.”

Speak to one. But look to all. Everyone in the audience should feel the speaker is speaking only to him. Never address them in plural. All of you, many of you, some of you.. STOP. SIMPLY YOU.
Public speaking is one on one enlarged.
Use the Hallway test – if you would walk to someone in the hallway and say it to him, you could say it on stage?
Would you walk to someone in a hallway and say “Have you all been to San Francisco?” NO. You say, “Have you been to San Francisco?”
And what happens if you say the former? You don’t get a response!

BODY LANGUAGE: This was a learning for me. I had witnessed too much irrelevant movement, noise and histrionics on stage by these speakers who had completely misunderstood the use and necessity of body language. Some of them jumped around like monkeys on stage and other almost danced during every speech they delivered. It was such a fall from dignity and grace that I had denounced the movement on stage entirely.

I learnt in these two days that movement could be relevant and enhance the impact of a speech manifold.

“Move on stage to make a transition.
Move when you change location in your story (action drives the movement in your story)
Timeline – create a time line – past – present – future – move to three spots on stage – 2 spots 2 feet apart. Avoid running too far between characters.
This creates a reference point to a particular time
But remember where you placed everybody and everything on stage.
A certain speaker created a reference point on stage to a part of his speech where the uncle died and he was cremated. Later, having moved here and there, he returned to stand at the same spot and had lunch.
Don’t have lunch on your uncle! ”

Always occupy center stage in the beginning

Be an excellent tease to be an excellent speaker. Make them wait to hear, say, the most important line in a dialogue or the last line of a conversation.

Check the VAKS
Visual
Audible
Kinesthetics
Smell
“I and my wife, were sitting on this leather sofa listening to Beethoven and the smell of cookies baking wafted through the open window.”
But don’t narrate a novel (while setting the scene). Just Speak (hurry up)!

Don’t tell. Ask. No person, no audience wants to be told about themselves.
How many of you sleep till late in the morning? Instead of Most of wake up late in the morning.

When you narrate a story, structure it in the form of “Conflict, Cure and Change in character”
That’s how story must develop. And, never be the hero of your own story.

Non verbal body language of listener/speaker is important. Focus on your own when speaking/listening. Public speaking is one on one enlarged.
Remember the acronym – SOFTEN.

S – Smile when appropriate
O – Open posture, not a closed one - Having anything between you and your audience is a closed posture (podium or lectern too) or hands folded instead of being open.
F – Forwardly – don’t recline in your chair- sit straight or lean forward
T – Touch/territory - What you do to one side of the audience, you do to the other
E – Eye contact - Scan and stop
N – Nodding - nod and acknowledge

Humour:
“How many of you would like to add humour to your speech?”
All hands shoot up.
“Never ADD humour to your speech. Uncover the humour already present. Never add humour.”
In his earlier story he had done that
“Take the money fool” (his wife reacting ) was uncovering humour in the story, not adding.
He went to his employer, and without making eye contact, said “My wife said, my dreams are not for sale” – that was uncovering humour, not adding it.
Someone asked Craig, “When are you free?”. He said, “I am never free. I am available” : - )

The heart of any speech is in its dialogue. (stories, characters, dialogue). include dialogue in your speech.

Specifics stick. Be specific in your message. Don’t meander.

Never end your speech with a Q & A. people always remember what they heard first and what they heard last. (primacy and recency)
Have a scale. You master what you measure.

Help them grow and let them go. I don’t remember the context in which he said this but it applies so much to parenting!

“Tap and transport” – again, forgot what exactly he was referring to. I think it was about bringing the audience to you having won their attention (and respect) and then taking them to your message.

Do visit 52speakingtips.com. I just checked. Some stuff there is for free!

Lastly, when you open your mouth, you tell the world who you are. I couldn’t agree more. I sincerely hope and wish people paid more attention to what they said and how they said it.