What dreams may come

Quietly Fades the Dada

2008-11-09T03:04:00.000-08:00

When Krejza tumbled to the turf a few overs before tea, and the myopic, contacts-wearing Ganguly made his slow way back to the pavilion, a fan held out a placard that said "Even the Don scored a duck in his last innings."

The comparison might sound preposterous but Ganguly was as important to his generation in Indian cricket as Don was to his (and to all others succeeding).

Nobody who has seen him dance down the pitch to a spinner will grudge him his awkward and tentative pulls. Nobody who has seen the placement and timing on his sublime off-drives will grudge him his inability to follow the short ball all the way through with his eyes. And nobody who saw him ruffle the feathers on the green baggy cap in its own territory will grudge him his banian-clad antics blue jersey in hand.

Now that he will no more take the field as a batsman in Test cricket, post-mortem analyses will prove this and that, but even if he did not manage to end as he began, as his form in the series and the match promised, the moment surely is his. Even the Don faded quietly, and Dada, after all the kicking and the screaming before the series and all through his life, had to go for a first-ball duck, quietly, to heart-felt applause.

Berlin

2008-09-02T08:37:00.000-07:00

Just back from Berlin, visiting a consumer electronics exhibition. A wonderful time it has been. The exhibition itself was great - all the major players with quite some eye-candy, and then the city.

We stayed near the Brandenburger Tor - the Brandenburg Gate - at the Kempinski Adlon, just on the eastern side of where the Berlin Wall stood. And the exhibition was on the western side. Managed to go round a bit, especially into the Eastern side - the Cathedral, the Historical Museum, the Jewish Quarter.

Went on a boat-ride the day before we had to leave. Started in the Eastern side, past the old lock and some of the old buildings. Past the Reichstag and the Chancellery and some of the modern buildings. Past bridges and picnic spots, parks and waterfront hotels.

On the way back, dropped in at an art and architecture bookshop. Spent some time walking down the Unter den Linden, the street that Frederick the Great built.

Went to Potsdam the next day. The Sans Soucci is grand and the Neues Palais grander. Huge grounds, delicate villas, and pure history. Managed to get into the Cecilienhof where the Potsdam Treaty was signed by the Big Three, just as they shut the door - no audioguide, but we managed to see the rooms at least, and the photographs.

Brilliant place - Berlin. Would love to return and take it slower that time.

Reality bites... and then chews you up

2008-06-28T21:27:00.000-07:00

Reality never had it so good for itself before. But, before we start on our rant, a moment's silence for Shinjini, a schoolgirl paralysed by maybe too much of it.

Every other TV channel has decided that an infusion of life is what every middle-class living room needs. And religiously, reality in its different avatars, in the form of diamond-decked starlets and pan-chewing babus, has invaded our entertainment needs.

Gone are the days when entertainment was escape from reality. That is too shallow for us now. Now it is escape to reality, it seems. Even if reality means a production assistant waves away "intruders on the action." Even if reality means prying into the innards of a simple, functional being. The camera, it seems, is everywhere. And, reality is what is captured on it.

The trouble is that this is not just the latest fad that TV audiences are taking to. The game shows of a decade or two ago and the Saas-bahu soaps that are still popular, were clearly about something "outside," about people resembling us but somehow different. People wanted to be in on all that, but you were not in unless you were in the show itself.

Now we all are the show. Life is no longer sanitised by people wielding the megaphone. There is just the word 'Start' or whatever is the word that is in the beginning, and life just unfolds. We are brought ourselves and our neighbours, and our friends and our enemies all on a few square inches of the latest technology. Welcome to the Truman Show. Welcome to yourself.

The camera, in its long history has finally performed the impossible. Earlier there were allegations that it was opaque on the shooter's side - that things were left out. Now it has been silvered on the lens side, and it reflects what lies behind. Allegations that too much has been left on the scene.. well we were never asked to speak or forever be silent.

For all that TRPs and other intricate number-mongering yields, it is a simple fact, universally acknowledged, that a single reality TV show with simplistic idea or none, is simply in search of a prime spot top be vacated by other silly items like news and stuff.

We have our 24-hour news channels now - who watches them anyway but dull, old people. We have our multiplexes and for those who have no time to go there, we have our local pirate of the DVD ocean. We have our parks and beaches and centres of culture which we can get away to when we can arrange for the six-pack. What we need from TV right now is reality; we need life. And if it is live so much the better.

Unvarnished, unedited, untouched by the editorial scissors that snips out what the human condition expresses from its inmost being. Tears, smiles, shouts of joy and anger, emotions that each of us have felt, and will feel all the more now that we have seen them on TV, shown by people like us.

In the age of reason that we were supposed to be living in, less was supposed to be more. In the age of reality TV that we are living in more is less.

Forgotten springs

2008-03-16T06:16:00.000-07:00

Where does a straight road lead to?
The end is in its beginning,
Only unseen, it forgets itself
On its way there, through ways and means
That twist and turn past good and bad,
Through means and ends that weave
Meanings and endings
Out of everyday tears and smiles.

A black dog barks in the empty night
Lined with trees that have already shed their leaves.
A stilling wind blows, then is forgotten
As the chill creeps in unbidden from out of sight.
Unnoticed rhymes in the wheeze of a motorcycle and
The tar almost melts, darker than the darkness of the night.

There is music in the breeze
That whispers of new beginnings
Past where the street of leafless trees
Ends.
And when night darks its way to the soul
Of man looking towards the setting life;
When man feels drawn from the world whole
That teems in its many-tongued strife;
Then the music of the breeze
Will bring back memories of forgotten things;
With its discordant harmonies
It will speak of a million Springs.

--Shyam.

We The People

2007-12-26T05:04:00.000-08:00

Narendra Modi's victory in the recent Gujarat elections shows all is not well with the polity in our country. Not because Modi was denied a visa to go to the States; nor because he perpetrated a massacre that shamed a people busy getting visas to the States; not even because his party has a program that is explicitly divisive. All is not well because we as a people have inured ourselves so much to rhetoric that we can listen without flinching to all of it as long as it is the right flavour. All is not well because we do not mind it any more - cynicism covers up as skepticism, and indifference as moderation. And, finally, all is not well because we have depoliticized ourselves to the extent that we spout rhetoric often enough without regard to the reality on the ground. 'We The People' - that powerful idea - has come home to roost but the chickens of thought are fled and what is inside seems empty.

How did this come to pass? We were political enough during the long freedom struggle. We braved the oppressor's wrong and the proud man's contumely. We wrested from an empire our political sovereignty. And, when the time came to protect it with our lives, we braved that darkest of hours in our life as a modern democracy - the Emergency. Hundreds and thousands of our youth stood up against tyranny and forsook their 'natural' occupations - as students and industrial workers, as scientists and intellectuals, to take up arms against the sea of troubles that flooded the land with its froth and slime.

They still are around - the survivors from that last great fight for democracy. And India has not stopped producing its young ones. There still is fire when the young talk - but politics has become too base to be touched by it. There still is the capacity to face problems - but political problems are too knotty to waste time on. We have other things to worry about. What were once means have now become ends. A strong economy does not feed a vibrant polity - the strong economy is an end-in-itself. It is now easy to see that growth will remove all our problems. No point asking growth towards what. No point asking growth for whom. And, if there is an attempt at all to look at what the nation is up to, it is taken in the sense of a crusade. Whither India then? Whither its people? Do we, the people, know what we, the people, should? Does it matter?

There will be time

2007-08-15T20:41:00.000-07:00

There will be time, there will be time:
A time to seek the time we lost
Searching for time and for our false sweethearts.
Over the ruins of yesterday we fought;
We fought over our forgotten pasts;
Over the midnight hours we lost
Searching for ghosts and for imagined wars;
But there will be time, there will be time.

There will be time, there will be time:
A time to find the time we lost
Searching for reasons to forget our pasts.
Over tomorrow's promises we'll laugh;
We'll make fun of our ancient wars;
Over our tombs we'll grow our lawns
And search for our ghosts in the hearts of our flowers;
For there will be time, there will be time.

--Shyam.

The Argutentative Indian

2007-05-09T00:36:00.000-07:00

There is something disturbingly simplistic and naive about academicians even when they speak the gospel truth that simple men do not understand. Take the case of Amartya Sen's "The Argumentative Indian and Other Essays," which I read recently from off a friend's bookshelf. A well-written book for the most part and considerably enlightening, but also employing a certain tenacious tentativeness and an assertive defensiveness with heavily apologetic rhetoric in some places.

One of the key complaints one can raise about Dr. Sen's book is his ready knowledge of certain obscure texts and customs and his introduction of such into the argument to make what would otherwise have been an indefensible point. Take, for example, his patent knowledge of the Vedic and post-Vedic schools of philosophy, and his repeated insistence on the allowance made for skepticism in the Vedic religion. Granted Carvaka is a name not to be dismissed lightly in the history of Indian philosophic thought, but no sensible observer of the practical Hindu religion would deem him a figure of considerable significance in the mainstream consciousness. Even all the mantras from the scriptures that he quotes to substantiate his claim of a substantial respect for skepticism in Hinduism are merely taken out of context without reference to the apparent resolution of all doubts that follows in the text. To claim for the average Christian the doubts of Sabellius and Tertullian would be as pertinent as the claims Sen makes for the average Hindu as the inheritor of the heritage of doubt explored in the Upanishads and other scriptures. In sum, the mainstream Hindu consciousness is more a hereditary and cultural construct than a logical religious one and Dr Sen brings a few bookmen to the busy street to prove the existence of certain obscure and mostly irrelevant-to-the-average-Hindu ideas.

Another important 'fact' for Sen is the prevalence of the argumentative tradition in the Indian ethos. While it would be mere snobbishness to deny the possibility and the primitive presence of the dialogue mechanism in the Indian plurality, Sen falls into the opposite error of wishful thinking of the kind of people with the 'bright pebbly eyes of the Theosophists,' to quote Sen quoting Chesterton. Here, he reminds one of Marx, who believed the modern, enlightened workman would spend his toiling hours busy in the factory and come back home to entertain himself with Shakespeare or the philosophers. The sad fact is that the rural Indian, and even the urban Indian in most parts of India, has little time and inclination to involve themselves in public debate of any form. There are pockets where activism has rendered the democratic process of inclusive debate effective but this is not as widespread as one would gather from the text. Agian, it is not the possibility of debate that is in question but the inclination towards, and the readiness for it, in a useful sense, in current-day India. Extrapolating from this state of affairs to the past, it is inconceivable to think that the rural Indian of the past had much say in matters of governance either, the panchayat being an elitist and, often, a hereditary or class-oriented group of people with some voice lent to select elite groups within each village. And the repeated emphatic mention of Asoka's and then Akbar's measures to conduct public debates and communal interactions tends to make one forget the tradition of the agoras and the Forum and other institutions that the West remembers well. In the final analysis, whereas democratic elements were present in Indian governance, the idea is inherently Western, if it should be assigned a pedigree.

Other ideas presented in the analysis of calendars, the India-China interaction etc., seem plausible but far-fetched and his veneration for Tagore, while well-founded, clouds his judgement. It is a fact that non-mainstream writers are ignored in the long run and Tagore chose to remain in the shadows. His contributions to literature might parallel those of Bharati, the Tamil poet, but one does not see in Sen even a recognition of the many other stalwart writers from obscure corners of the country who have been ignored as much as Tagore has been, in spite of the Nobel he managed to win.

There is also a curious reluctance to go beyond the obvious condemnation of the fundamentalists in his political rhetoric. While the RSS umbrella organizations come in for stick, there is a want of the equanimity required to see in the political machinery flaws in all its components. The Congress and other parties escape any admonition by the mere fact of being secular and yet, as Sen himself acknowledges, it is not merely communal rhetoric that is damaging the fabric of our society. Cultural divides run deep and even if healing elements too run into those fissures, all political parties share the blame for exacerbating the situation.

The merits of the book are patent and what one may learn from it too and hence I will refrain from the obvious paeans to the patient collection and analysis of pertinent data, the penetrating critiques on certain issues and the overall usefulness of the book; but the flaws run a concurrent course too and, while this is expected in any work of such magnitude and scope, a suspicion of schoolman rhetoric is not easy to avoid.

Learnings

2007-05-04T09:16:00.000-07:00

big learning:
More often than not, of all the things I do, those that I would not give my life for, are not worth doing.

Chennai:
The distance from Nungambakkam Station to West Park Street, Shenoy Nagar is about 3km and almost nobody along the entire way will know how to get to the place.

Traffic Police Constables and small vendors are ideal to get to know routes.

It is a long way from Shenoy Nagar to the Connemara Library(>4km) and the library is disappointing. Every seventh row of tiles is missing on one side of Chetpet Bridge.

It is easy to steal pens from Barrista but cheaper to buy one from outside and drink cheap coffee too. Dont ask for the other perks though!!

Thuvarankurichi:
A political loudspeaker will always drown out a religious one.

Madurai:
They always pour sambar on dosas.

Mudukulathur:
Asking for a glass more of water makes some people wince more than asking for an acre of land would.

Some people really do useful work.

Singarayapuram/Pedhanandhal:
When some villagers ask someone to get 'purer' and 'better' water for drinking(purer than what they themselves use), it is only more yellow than city-dweller piss-yellow.

Venniravaikkal:
It is not easy for everyone to decide what the balance is on Rs.200 when Rs.179 is due.

Maruthagam:
Not everyone might have heard of what Gandhi did.

The rest, of course, is silence.

3 weeks notice

2007-04-25T20:14:00.000-07:00

Been three weeks now since I landed and it has been an up-and-down thing till now for me back here. India, as is to be expected, is loud, crowded, polluted, hot, sweaty, unpredictable and all that, but it is also indescribably endearing and comforting. Something about habit and the ease of finding something to do I guess.

A number of journeys, by bus, train and car, and also a few by auto and on foot, and still there is much more to see, obviously. Different places have been eye-openers in different ways. Bangalore with its near ultra-modern, by Indian standards of course, cosmopolitanism, in its nerve centres and hip places, and the backwaters town look of its backstreets and alleys, has in itself been a revelation. (I have had a coffee for Rs.100 and also an entire meal for Rs.10 - go figure!)Pathetic the absence of enough English markers but pretty neat in terms of arrangement - the parks, the places to see, the simple city structure and the neatly folded Eicher maps - though the universal cry is for infrastructure. Chennai has been good too but not much in the form of exploration yet - that will come by-the-bye.

Met loads of people too, all interesting, all with a story to tell, all the time. From the suave smoothness and intellectual acumen of IIM professors to the dynamism of people closer to my age who want to be, and are already, the happening people, to the local autowallah and watchman, watching bemused as the world they hadn't heard of except in stories from beyond the seas, scarcely credible, takes shape in front of their eyes. The languages that roll smoothly from the different tongues, the accents, the tones and the stories they tell, the sweat that oozes from out of some pores and the whiff of an imported cologne from others, the simple aspirations and the grand ambitions that crowd all those busily knotted foreheads, all this and more - a hundred years, they say rightly, will not be enough.

The rest, of course, in detail, later.

Landed Gently

2007-04-06T21:18:00.000-07:00

Spring, I guess, is never a good time to be saying goodbye..

... but still, limping, I crossed half the world and now am Home!

First impressions:

Was quite nonchalant for sometime but the heat got to me and I found layers of clothing really is not such a good idea.
Air India food is good - whoever thought of providing a good meal for the 1h20m flight from Mumbai to Chennai I wonder - but, as a friend warned earlier, is prone to turn weak stomachs.
A 6 hour train journey actually takes 6 hours even if the distance is only a couple hundred miles.
Air conditioning is not essential but then sweat is unavoidable.
There is not a big difference between Bangalore and Chennai in the night and one has to actually be at MG Road to see the land of milk and honey.
Going for the seat belt because you took the front seat in a car is typical "newly-returned" behavior.

To finish with a really unpalatable joke I came up with, sitting bored in the aircraft:

Quarantine Officer to plane passengers: Sorry people, you will have to wait 4 hours more until we are absolutely sure who caused this inconvenience.
About 200 voices: No way. This is ridiculous.
Then, after a few minutes, one brave man, bold, courageous stands up and says, "Officer, let these people go. It is not their fault - they are innocent. I farted."
The officer stunned, 2 seconds the camera pans and a few tears are seen and then another guy, "No, I farted," then another, "I farted" and so on and on until all 200 or so have used the f-word. The officer calmly says, "Alright guys, since you all did, anyway, you all will have to be quarantined so just shut up and stay where you are."
(For those who really want to know what the point is, look up Spartacus(the movie) and watch the last scene. For the others, just another one of those really meaningless jokes)

Ok then, lets see how things go. Will keep this blogspot occupied. Ciao.

Patchy really

2007-03-29T12:22:00.000-07:00

Zombies are getting it on in the open street these days. I mean you just need Viagra right and not enough flesh in the right places is not too much an issue. But the thing is once the car piston goes into overdrive, the engine and the rest of it all better keep up. Plus of course it is too boring to keep doing the same stuff again and again for those whitecoat types - cancer, AIDS, the rhinovirus - will the list ever end? So Procter takes a Gamble and voila here's the Plan A- or the Night Before Patch or whatever else they call it - Intrinsa - how imaginative. The New York subway has to wait a while but the Brits are getting all worked up and all that already. A few minor details by the way, nothing personal really:

http://www.brokennewz.com/displaystory.asp_Q_storyid_E_1171sexpatch
Too much probing to be done eh? Call the plumbers hon, lets see what they can do!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6495211.stm
Complex Reasons indeed!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3044514.stm
Politicians - no representation without ahem! And of course the Iron Lady had a fairly decent set of whiskers!!

http://www.sptimes.com/2004/10/20/Worldandnation/Hormone_patch_boosts_.shtml
The 'libido lag' was especially funny - reminded me of the Doomsday gap in Strangelove :)

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/tm_headline=sex-patch-for-girls&method=full&objectid=18809092&siteid=89520-name_page.html
It was only 50 year old geysers till now but the thing is getting hotter! But of course only with the husband and not during Lent, remember Phil Hodson's good words.

On a seriouser note, word on the the sex drive thing is really getting around and since it obviously is not enough for the few grunts and the groans and the satisfied moans and the snores and sweet sleep every third day, friskiness has to come from the pharmacy. Viagra then and Intrinsa but what about the 'issues' guys? Any hope down that aisle? And on a side note, aphrodisiacs need not be shipped all the way from Africa any more I hope - elephants have only two tusks these days.

a link and a movie

2007-03-05T14:47:00.000-08:00

http://www.rediff.com/news/2007/mar/05inter.htm

Interesting.. and I really ought to add links to other arguments with respect to this issue but well.. the thing to note here is that correct logic is not required to arrive at a correct solution - something I have noted for sometime.. and that long conversations about nothing really is not the exclusive domain of grad students!

By the way, saw Amazing Grace, the movie on a beautiful hymn.. was reasonably well-made though a little too saccharine in parts surely for my tongue.. the atrocity of commercial cinema usurping a key period in British parliamentary and world history into a mere 1-D movie rankles a bit.. i sorely missed people like Paine and Burke of those times - guest entries would have sufficed for me.. and pitt and fox became mere caricatures.. fox calling napoleon heroic in parliament and not a murmur of protest - blasphemy.. overall just inspiring enough though a dose of laudanum at times would not be bad.. the issue of course makes it an important movie to watch.. and for all you who believe religion can throw up only crackpots, wilberforce was of the useful kind..

A couple of links

2007-03-02T15:19:00.000-08:00

hmmm...

http://www.slate.com/id/2160963?nav=tap3
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/06/26/wmid26.xml

Honestly I don't know what to make of such things.

Trailers and movies

2007-02-27T02:56:00.000-08:00

I just realized this while making coffee at 5:30 in the morning to start off an early day: it is easier to make a good trailer for a bad movie than it is to make one for a good movie. The whole point is that those who make trailers are professionals and production values are always on the rise and it is obvious that there will be at least 2 minutes' worth of watchable material in every movie. Given that the trailer length is just about the same, the job of the trailer-maker is vastly simplified if the movie has not much more than that amount of watchable runtime - in that case he just needs to be a good editor snipping off precisely those good scenes to whet the audience's appetite. When the movie is significantly better, the purpose of the trailer is to present a good idea of the movie through a few scenes and this involves vastly more creative work.

What started off this train of thought? A couple of couple of hours spent at the movies in Chicago. The object was to visit the temple at Aurora for the good south Indian food available there and, that accomplished, we trooped to AMC-30, where Indian movies are screened, to catch Eklavya, the latest Vidhu Vinod Chopra-Amitabh offering. How many movies are they each involved in? Munnabhai-3, Cheeni Kam, Taalismaan apart from Eklavya and others. Anyway, it seemed a lot when we were watching the trailers.

The movie was a good 2 hours after we reached the theatre and so we actually settled in to watch Bridge to Terabithia in the meanwhile. A good movie and fantasy seems the killer genre these days but it left something to be desired. Of course that is what all good movies are about - to show us that better movies are possible. Entertaining nevertheless and well-made given the limited scope the story provides; though, as a friend remarked, not advisable for those who want to watch a 'fun' movie to pass the time as the movie dabbles equally in tragedy and fantasy/comedy. Aside: Zoey Deschanel has killer eyes and a killer bod - if only the sounds she makes from that nice throat of hers were more palatable!

The next movie on the double bill was Eklavya and, after the never-ending sequence of trailers - Cheeni Kam and the Ash-starring, feminism-spouting adaptation of a real-life story seem more than watchable, and Munnabhai seems risible enough, while Taalismaan reeks of Chandrakantha-meet-Tolkien a little too much and the slick silver and gray scenes in the trailer reminded me of nothing more than the pathetic Raiders of the last couple of seasons - the movie started off brilliantly. The initial scenes were just incredibly good, even with the rather lame rendering of Sonnet 18 by Boman Irani, the overdone hysterics of Raima Sen and the rather provocatively simple letter that Amitabh intones. Sharmila proves she is not the siren of the past any more with her wrinkled and puffed up cheeks pouting for Eklavya, and the murder that no doubt will out sets the ball rolling nicely.

The story to me seemed a rehash of some n tragedies of the past but the whole first part of the movie is worth watching for the beautiful cinematography. The colours and the contrasts and the racy scenes, the three little blackbirds on Vidya Balan's neck - the third movie of hers I am watching in the last couple of weeks but surely she was much more beautiful/attractive(!) in Parineeta than in all the rest of her offerings(!) - the almost glaucous eyes of the almost blind Amitabh, the furnishings and the lighting, Saif's somber mincing of his rather staid lines, a hundred other small things all to my liking. The movie itself develops out of control slowly like a child on a sugar-high and degenerates into the trademark meaningless dialogue-spouting nonsense we have come to expect of Amitabh movies, subsiding slowly into restful sleep - talk of crescendos and diminuendos - but on the whole, a movie well worth the 1h45m watch - when did I last see an English and a Hindi movie one after another, each competing for shorter runtime, I wonder. The flaws are numerous but I have realised that women with large eyes do not play madwomen in fear well - witness Jyothika's attempts in Chandramukhi and Raima's here. When their eyes widen if fear or anguish or general hysteria, it becomes rather painful to watch the whites of their eyes occupy a disproportionately huge fraction of face-space! Also, Saif might want to set his watch running the next time he sports a Rolex - it seemed to show 12:45 in each scene it exposed itself to the public view.

A long drive back home after midnight is not ideal in the Midwest cold and dark after an exerting day but all ends well and all is well, except that it is 6:30 and dark and I have an 8 o' clock class.

Whispers of Mortality

2007-02-15T21:03:00.000-08:00

Dulce et decorum, the old man sneers in my ear
As I sit waiting at my window for the rain to stop:
She will not come today either.

Their faces stare soot-blackened with fear,
Asking when the next war will start and where,
So they can get out of miserable here.
A few quivering cigarettes in cupped, corroded palms
Trying to light themselves afire - we are all friends here.
That, there, was a school we all went to when we had the mind to -
Now we need to, each day.
Metal flying wheezes like an old consumptive.
I have never seen you alone, they say to me,
Where is your brother, your friend?

The bus stops every other mile and people get on
Walking on stilts, sweating happiness that makes him retch.
They stare politely at the withered stump and shake heads.
Jingle bells, jingle bells, he begins to hum, offending,
And they move off without shaking his disgusting hand.
The ruins are colourful today, he muses,
The sun becomes here; ours was a darker land.
Mother, mother, he cries, why did you bother?
They wouldn't let me play at pitch and toss again.
Head unbowed, bloody fool, go to your brother -
He will laugh heartily at your pain.
When the dust clears, he gets down in the middle of somewhere
Waiting for the doves to fly away before he can limp slowly home.

When proud man stoops to charity,
He mouths some utter inanity,
And sneaks away before his thanks
Can soil his wounded humanity.
Gun to temple, he blows to bits his pride,
And crawls back home simpering,
Happy to have lost the infernal hide
That kept him man from winter to spring.

Amor vincit omnia, he cries in my deaf ear
As I lie waiting in my bed for the darkness to lift:
She will not come tonight either.

Words - III

2007-01-25T11:55:00.000-08:00

The ineluctable immediacy of the transient on the one hand and the inveterate ineffability of the eternal on the other - these are our essential concerns. Do we feed the starving child with the bread that our wallet buys out of the cornershop or do we teach him to fish and fend for himself? Do we succumb to the moment? Does it matter?

A woman was carrying her infant and a jungle of beads and trinkets, trying to interest a hundred tired, devout pilgrims to buy her child his breakfast milk. Car after car, person after person, could but ignore the steady stream of jabbering piteousness she could manage. The object was clear, and the price, but there is a hauteur in man that allows for kindness only in a known tongue. Besides the beads and trinkets were just as unpalatable as the woman and her child. But she wouldn't take charity - she was not begging. Would it hurt to take something from her and throw it away later? Lower the windows and ignore her!

Things can be kept simple - we all want everything simple; we do not like the effort that is demanded of us. Maybe it is a sign of the times when we hold the world in a grain of sand and spend an eternity in an hour that we cannot see heaven in a wild flower; maybe it is all the inherited fatigue of a thousand years of drudgery; maybe it is just wisdom. Forgive me, O lord, I know not what I do.

Under the Bridge

2007-01-22T15:46:00.000-08:00

Gently resplendent she floats upstream
Dreaming so sweetly her enchanted dream.
And we on the banks of the magical stream
In awe worship her.

Sweetly reclining on silken smooth waves
She conjures up visions that every man craves.
And we simple souls forever her slaves
In awe worship her.

Smiling most heavenly she glides softly through
Leaving in her wake a faint ripple or two.
And we holding to our eternal faith true
With love worship her.

On a Bridge, In Thought

2007-01-22T12:39:00.000-08:00

Three simple things:
A pound of unadulterated flesh - or two -
Pounding; A pensive mass of swirling green and maroon and blue,
Leaning; A distance, unyielding, gray, dark and red
Extending. Then there is the water
Foaming, Frothing, Rushing and Swirling,
Leaping over stones and bubbles and untouched sweet places,
Flowing. The green trees hiss gentle into the wind,
Swaying, softly, white in the midday sun
Streaming, Singing, Shading the enchanted eyes,
Soothing. The bridge leads itself over the river,
Longing; Looking towards the untouched shore,
Sighing; Finding in its own uninterrupted Silence its
Meaning.

Words - II

2007-01-20T17:02:00.000-08:00

I think I try to worry myself to sadness all the time. I worry about spilt milk and the cat that snuck in through the window I forgot to latch; I castigate myself for forgetting the keys in the car and for my burnt toast. I even worry that I might be worrying myself to high blood pressure and a cardiac arrest. And the result of all this worrying is that I feel sad and depressed instead of being jolly and carefree. Most days dawn quite okay for me but the moment the first thought enters my brain, any thought at all, whether momentous and dealing with the direction my life is heading in or trivial and concerning merely the movie I saw the day before, immediately I sense a tightening in the stomach as I find something to worry about; to feel sad about. The poor girl whose flowers no one buys in the movie or the general mess that is any prospect, any outlook into the future in a murky world, both bother me and sadden me. Pathetic some might say and pitiful others may opine but I have to live with it, this morbid, depressing natural character of mine. Today, though, I am happy - I saw her face even if she does not know I exist; today I cannot feel sad however hard I try. Funny the way we float sometimes on thin air, funny the feeling that is atleast in part frivolous and mad. But that is man, I guess, flawed, funny and merely a visitor in transit determined to enjoy his visit to a beautiful place sometimes or worrying over his lost luggage in other cases.

Words

2007-01-19T20:37:00.000-08:00

What does a good day feel like? A little warm feeling gushing up from the inside, choking up the late lunch in the intestinal tract maybe? Or maybe a funny fever that eats up the bad blood that muddies the clear tracks that we carefully laid through the mazes in our addled brain? Eleemosynary instincts need to be obeyed but more so the essential urge to the stupefaction of the senses and if that should hurt another, the prerogative is merely misplaced. Not our fault entirely; not our mistake one whit. Let the dead bury the dead, I say. We go to bury the living.

There is a providence that guides us, they say, and fold their arms across their chest, watching the sparrow fall and the child starve. There is a fate that is decreed to all and there is the mead that only the victors will partake of. There is a lot that our sciences don't understand but we all know the winner takes all. Is it possible to give to the many while denying the few indeed?

Africa is not just a far-off land, marked in black in the atlas of our childhoods. The neighbourhood slum did not always overflow with the refuse of our middle-class mentalities. There is hope even when there is nothing to hope for sometimes and then life is created. It is not easy to give but atleast it is easy to rant about it.

A Commentary

2007-01-14T07:55:00.000-08:00

"To be, or not to be..."

Choice makes man imperfect, my friends say. Give a donkey two piles of hay and he'll die starving before he can decide which he should eat first, Buridan says. Funny how this is reflected in so many of our everyday activities. A restaurant menu and a shopping mall's collection and a presidential election, for example. But we don't like not having choice either for all the obloquy we heap on choice. It is a complicated thing, this life of ours. And I don't pretend to understand. It is just that it would be easier if someone told us exactly what we had to do but they sat only on the advisory committee and not on a decision-making board. If the choice were offered to us, we can always choose not to be at all on the committee. But that is illegal if you don't succeed in getting out quick enough.

"...ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come"

My friends sometimes snore in their sleep. I think this indicates they are having a good, dreamless sleep. I wish I snored too. I don't. And I dream the most painful dreams sometimes. They are not nightmares but they are frightening. And then they wake me up at all odd hours of the night. If only I knew I wouldn't be rudely jolted awake by some painful nightmare, I wouldn't mind sleeping. As it is, I need to coax myself into sleep every night. It is a bitter, ironic, painful thing. But what can I do? I still am hoping to get the 'X marks the spot' dream so I can get rich.

"The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office..."

I am not a big fan of the institution of marriage. The social strictures are too much a strain. It is even more complicated when the Immigration Office is involved. A friend had to go to great lengths to prove his love for a woman to the Officer, who wouldn't accept they were married. Then the whole thing got delayed on some technicalities even though he had a plane to catch. Finally, when the visa did come it was pretty peremptory in tone. It is a commentary on the human social culture, I think. Human association below the seriously physical layer is bound to be a problem. In fact the list of wrongs owing to all the elaborate setup perpetrated ostensibly for man's good can be extended indefinitely and I sometimes just want to shoot myself rather than go through with the whole mess.

"...conscience does make cowards of us all"

I think I am too squeamish when it comes to doing what I want. It just does not do in this world and time. Only children and cowards can afford to stand by and watch with mouths agape while men, real men would toil. There is always something or the other that tries to hold us back, the truth even sometimes; but progress is not something we can compromise. There is only one way - ahead, and if we become all too worried about mythical creatures like the Winged Mortal Destructor, we will just stay put in our suburbian homes watching nonsense TV and reading maudlin poetry. What is needed now is action and not conscientious objectors who would ruin the whole show. All this he explained to me. But I ran away when he brought out his fiery red book with the obscene pictures in it.

"...Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd"

Madness has a natural claim over me, I think. I am not sure but it has been a while now since last I looked in the mirror. I fear what I will see. A shaggy beard and a head of unkempt, unruly, disheveled hair maybe. Sunken eyes and a shallow countenance. But that does not matter. What matters more is that I have forgotten to beg. That is more important. Everybody begs or needs to beg once in a while to remain sane. It requires courage to beg of other beggars and yet we find lots of people who do it. They beg and grovel and sometimes we don't even know they were begging and groveling. It has all been refined over time. Then there are those who, cowardly, beg in their private chambers, of imaginary beings. They cannot beg with a straight face or stand manly in the face of their weakness but have to go down on their knees and beg with averted face. There are other beggars even more deluded who use the wrong formulas, who beg the way they command, hoping nobody recognized them for what they were. They often beg of people who would not give, who would not condescend even to acknowledge their pitiable submission and they break themselves. But all these beggars remain sane. Begging keeps them sane. And I have forgotten how to beg and so I cannot beg. But I have always been forgetful and unassuming and so I think I was made for madness. I can only hope someone else goes down on their knees and begs for me to restore my sanity. But that of course is selfish of me.

An unknown place

2007-01-13T08:23:00.000-08:00

The railway line snakes along slowly, sneaking through the wild undergrowth typical of the area, dry, dull and dying. In a pleasanter clime, the rails would seem cold and lifeless, but here, they glimmer an almost hellish brown under the fierce everyday sun. The sleepers, sturdy, creosoted, rest complacent, waking every few days to a thunder that rumbles along impatient, subsiding into a distant silence, deep, dreary and deathly. Every year teams of engineers arrive to look at the bolts and the nuts that hold together this fragile, this sturdy mass of metal and wood. Then they too leave as they arrived, silent, brooding, happy, passing along the tracks, testing it mile by mile.

Of life, there is not much around: this was never a cradle that lulled an ancient child in its bosom to look up to the stars. Not enough water, the experts would say. And yet there is a village a little distance from the railway line. A village of little men, toiling at a tenuous life, trying to make something out of all the wild brush and sleepy nothingness that abounds. A little village unknown to the modern cartographers, that turns up a blot on Google Earth and Yahoo Maps: nothing here signifies. And yet there is life here.

Twenty little shacks, or maybe twenty-three, these are the scattered homesteads of the people here. Men, women and children, I mean, of all ages, the young have started leaving though, for the town some miles distant, where there is more life and more shacks on a grander scale. Each day, the people who remain find food in the scorching sun. Each day they save the water that they carry from the town each week. Each day they live as their fathers did, and before them their fathers: barely. But of course there were more people then and there will be fewer soon. Is it easier with fewer people or more, the thin, reedy man struggling to get his wild rabbit skinned, wonders when he has the time to. Is it better to bother cooking the rabbit to just eating it raw, he wonders when he is still skinning the rabbit.

There is life here still and there will still be life. There are the kids who will learn to live. There are the elders who will teach them. There is the town just beyond where things may be got and things given. There is a whole world conspiring to keep them alive. There is above all, a special Providence at work in all this, defying augury and protecting the meek. Let us visit a happier place in the meantime.

a dialogue

2007-01-08T08:41:00.000-08:00

Radio Talk Show Host(R): Hello, everybody! Welcome to our show. We'll be taking calls and.. what do you know we already have a caller.. Hello, Sir! How are you doing?
General Dude(D): Hello! This is J here from M. I am doing good. How about you?
R: Great! I am doing great! So J, tell me, how do you like our show?
D: I love it. I listen to it everyday on my way back home.
R: Wonderful! But mind the traffic, huh! We don't want you causing accidents while you are learning about life, hahaha.
D: Hahahaha.
R: So tell me how is life? I hope it is smooth.
D: Its pretty good. But I have this problem with my wife. I know its not a big deal but it worries me sometimes.
R: I must think it is not a big deal, J. Tell me about it. Let us see if we can solve it together.
D: I am not complaining about her. I mean she has always been a great wife. But she has, you know, she thinks she is really smart and sometimes she acts like, you know, one of them geniuses or something, totally wacky and weird.
R: And what makes you think that?
D: I am not bitching man, but, and I know its all a woman's thing, you know them hormones and all and they act up every now and then you know, but she just flips out sometimes.
R: You mean she goes into a rage or something. How old is she, by the way, if you don't mind me asking?
D: Not at all man. She's 24. And its not rage man. Its just acting strange. Saying strange things.
R: Tell me more about it, J. What does she say? And how often does she get this way?
D: Once every few days, man. I dont know I havent kept track. Maybe I'll keep a diary from now on.
R: That might be a good idea, J. But what does she say?
D: Its like, when I enter the door, one moment she says the nicest darned things like "Hey, you Einstein, thanks for leaving me at the mall" and I'm like God I escaped the treatment after forgetting to pick her up. And then she flips out suddenly and calls me all kind of names. I mean I can understand she must be angry but why does she have to seem all sweet one moment and flip out the next. I mean, is it some kind of madness or something?
R: Oh my God!(laughing)Oh my!
D: Is it serious, man? Do you think its really bad? I don't want to say it, but is she mad or something? 'Coz I love her and all, man.
R: No, J. Its called sarcasm. She's being sarcastic, thats all. Nothing wrong with her.(laughing).
D: Whatever it is man, is this thing serious? I suppose its one of them women things so do I take her to the doc or what?
R: No, J. You don't take her to the doctor. And its not a woman thing. Tell me, how educated are you?
D: I only went to Junior High, man. Dropped out after that. So I dont know what this sarcasm thing is. But if its not a woman thing, does it spread or something like the flu? I sure dont want to catch it.
R: No, J. Sarcasm isn't a disease. It is just a way of expressing anger or annoyance by pretending to say a nice thing when you actually mean to hurt.
D: Yea, I get it man. But then why does it come only sudden sudden you know. She's all quite normal most of the time and then suddenly she wants to say this sarcasm thing. Is it like the periods or something, a woman thing?
R: No, J. It is used when people are really mad at you and don't want to yell or use bad words. It is just a way of showing you up, embarrassing you by pretending to be nice. And both men and women use it. It is not a woman's thing. Dude, you seriously need to learn a lot.
D: Whatever, man. I don't use it ever. I mean I say what I have to say and I don't do all this you know. She just is spoiled and keeps pointing out that she dropped out of college and not out of junior high you know.
R: Maybe she just wants you to sit down and have a talk with her, J. Tell her to speak straight. Tell her you don't get all her sarcasm. Tell her you love her and want her to be honest with you.
D: I tried that man. And she said thats my problem. I just dont get it. What the it is I have no idea man.
R: Well, J, I suppose you can work it out over time. Just remember that when a person is being sarcastic, they use signs like lifting their eyebrows or modifying their tone or small things like that to say they do not mean what they say. Often you have to do the opposite of what you think the words mean when such things happen.
D: Right man. I seen that. I guess you being the guru and all you can say easily when someone's lying or passing you shit. Anyways thanks man. I'll remember what you said.
R: No problem, J. And do try and sit down with your wife and tell her to be honest and direct with you. And take some classes in your community college if you can, man. It helps really, you know, education does.
D: Thanks, man. I'll remember what you said. Goodbye.
R: Goodbye, J. And have a pleasant life... And so we move on to our next caller.. Its from P... Hello sir! How have you been today?

A Capital Thing

2007-01-05T05:22:00.001-08:00

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster" - Nietzsche.

Executions come but rarely in our civilized world and not often does it involve a Saddam Hussein hanging by his neck. So it is but fair that we excuse all the hoopla that surrounded the day. CNN went to such lengths to cover the event and I am sure almost every network worth its salt anywhere in the world would have done its bit, that it all seemed for sometime a bit like the Letourneau marriage or something. I was not too interested; but the post-execution revelations that have surfaced all over the place have me really, really disturbed. Of course you can get the lowdown on all the uproar at bbc.co.uk or cnn.com.

I have never been one for capital punishment. It just doesn't make sense to me to arrogate to oneself the right to take life when we do not have the ability to create one. The debate is not so simply dismissed though, and I understand certain positions that the pro-capital punishment people take but I just prefer to lean to my own corner. Even if it is Saddam with his malice toward Kurds and kindness to none and all the Weapons of Mass Destruction he bought to fight the Iranians. But, even if this most reviled man of our times(of those caught) needs to be put away, it surely can be done without evoking the spirit of a medieval stoning or the stake or scenes from Braveheart and The Passion. Surely, a man, however evil and against the grain of popular and reasonable morality he has been, just because he is a man, deserves some dignity when the noose is being put around his neck. Shame on you, CNN and official witnesses, I want to say, but it is shame on us too. After all, CNN shows us what we want to see: the modern broadcast medium is just a mirror held up to the world. I am sure there is still the primitive urge for revenge in all of us and an offensive bloodthirstiness and Saddam's execution was just the right purge in quaint 18th century fashion. He is not the hungry Somali kid fooling around with a gun, whom we have to gun down with a tear in our eyes; he is not the Prince of darkness, a gentleman; he is not even the Marquis of A, we have to kill for our passion d'amour. Cheers to the guy! Down to hell! And save your prayers for when you are down there! And what now of the re-engineered Sunni-Shia split? What of the new breed of self-righteous, self-justifying mullas this whole episode has created? Outraged sentiments apart, did we really need to end the guy's pathetic life so pathetically? Mercy is over-rated but often so is revenge!

But, wait, there is this other guy in the funny turban now, let us get him.

An incident

2007-01-05T03:04:00.000-08:00

They stood there by the lamp-post, two faces, young, eager and full of light. The darkness seemed to bother her but he said, "Do you think you can manage?" and she bravely nodded slowly. He took something out from the pocket of his coat and told her, "Keep this with you. It will remind you of me." She again nodded. "I guess it is goodbye then," he leant in slowly. She was not sure if she wanted to do it but she couldn't help herself. The slap did not sting too much: her hennaed hands were so tender. "Selfish bastard," he heard the darkness wail.

Limericks - Old Style, New Style

2007-01-01T02:04:00.000-08:00

There was this guy
Who wanted to buy
A bottle of good whiskey on Xmas Eve.
But they wouldn't sell to those who believe
That happiness comes from on high.

I don't know why a ball
Is dropped from a tall
Building to mark New Year's dawn.
I guess it's easy to see its great fall
And then not worry about it at all.

There was a man
Who had a good plan
To become a millionaire in no time.
But it is not something that he or I can
So we content ourselves with just rhyme.

December 31, 2006.

2006-12-31T06:54:00.000-08:00

December 31 - a day to ring out the old and what a day it is turning out to be. I have been awake all 10 hours of the Gregorian day and I am yet to see any sign of the sun. The sky is a dull aluminum gray and it has been raining almost continuously though not heavily all morning. A good sign of the year that has been in my life: I mean fitting sign, of course. The windowpanes are clearing up in the water but there is none of the romantic pittle-pattle that one always reads of in novels. Only a dull sound every now and then signifying nothing. Still it is soothing, this depressing gray scene with the desolate trees, leafless and birdless. I hear a faint sound of twittering - maybe some birds have come back from their winter homes, knowing there will be no snow this year. It must be a pretty hard time for the birds, I imagine; what with all the trouble of migrating thousands of miles, there has been no real snow and now, a week after Christmas, the only sign of the gloomy winter is the sunless sky; it has not even been too cold, just a late fall kind of finger-freezing, nose-reddening, but essentially bearable, cold. People are getting along fine though. It will be much easier for them to stand 6 hours in Times Square waiting for the ball to fall. Closer home, there is not much life in my place, the university grounds are deserted for the holidays and the town has never been too lively anyway. The McDonald's opposite my window has been doing steady business all day. Cars of all hues and shapes, waiting patiently by the red sign to order, and collecting their bags, at the counter, like Oliver Twist and co. getting their miserable lunches; only these Macs will be eaten with relish. I have been alone the last few days in my big house, locked in actually and haven't stepped an inch outside the last couple of days. Food has been the grub I cooked 2 days back, rationed slowly, and I think it will last me 3-4 days more. It must seem obvious that I sleep a lot but there has been very little sleep surprisingly. To add to my nocturnalist woes, I have now become an insomniac. The time, though, I have spent fruitfully. A couple of movies and a few games were inevitable but I have been reading and writing quite a bit. Academic work mostly but have also spent time on Orhan Pamuk and Ellman's Joyce. Pamuk is quite pedestrian in The White Castle but more about him when I am done with his complete oeuvre. Ellman's Joyce has been totally good, however. As a general rule, I do not like biographies but Joyce is special and I wanted to understand his life so I could appreciate his art better. Pure gold this biography though I suspect it might not be the best written, even among those about Joyce. I have also been spending some time on puzzles to stimulate my sleeping brain cells. Wonderful these things but I dont know how long I can keep up that activity. I wonder what the waste management guy must be thinking of me: lights on at 5am and working at my desk. Surely someone in the world will have charitable thoughts about me. Or maybe he knows too that it is just one of those nerdy losers who cannot get out of their rooms for f***'s sake. Forgive the vituperation but sometimes loneliness gets to me. Solitude I do not mind though as it has been a strangely placid few days, the last ones that I have been alone. Unaccountably the rain has stopped now and I will too but is it not better sometimes if there were no stops? The rest is tomorrow.

A Confession

2006-12-23T22:56:00.000-08:00

For those few of you who have been reading my posts, I have a confession to make. Not that it is something that has escaped your observation but merely to ease my own conscience: most of what I write is tripe. It is not to say that there is very little of honesty in what I have written but art by its very nature is mendacious and I have merely kept with the tradition and have experimented ceaselessly for effect and for fun. Most of my writings are stylistic eperiments and this is reflected in the arrangement of the pieces, a constant juxtaposition of seemingly incongruous ideas. This would be too little for me, though, and I have laboured to introduce in each piece stylistic variations. Again, merely interchanging one transparent style for another over the course of a work is not something particularly novel, and so I have mixed in flaws, absurdities and contradictions, both stylistic and contentual. And so these writings have been the presentation of a variety of styles content to be receptacles of the mere parsimonious contents that I have chosen to convey in them. The scatter-logical aspects and the innuendoes in what I have written best be as they are now: beneath the surface. The Book of the Winds was a major experiment I have been working on, some 500 pages of variations with simplistic themes but I have lost the patience that I had assumed rashly I would possess to complete it: it was to ooze a strange allusive style with the contents flawed, in both obvious and subtle ways. Now I do not think I can continue with it; but I doubt this will matter much or to many.

Before I continue on with my experiments, it will be useful to make a manifesto of my creed:

Art is mendacity. Its source is a truth, its product a lie; and its pupose, though, possibly, the elucidation of a truth, is, oftener, merely a self-serving expression of beauty.

The purpose of the artist is to confront a hard, cold truth and to produce a lie, an expression of the truth in a direct or a twisted manner. The lie may be prior or posterior to the truth or to the artist; the artist may be prior or posterior to the truth. The only constants are the confrontation and the alchemical production.

The purpose of the reader is to confront the lie and to get to the truth. The lie could be a straightforward representation of the truth but still is a lie insofar as it is not the truth.

Truth has no purpose. It just is.

To speak unphilosophically of it, in writing, the artist tries to express, through himself, an idea, a truth. When this expression is straightforward, in that, for the reader, understanding immediately follows perception, the art is simple and there is merely a giving of alms. When the expression is a challenge to the reader, in the process of attaining to the truth through an interpretation, there occurs an exchange as reader and artist meet somewhere in the middle, forcing them to conront new truths.

More unphilosophically, in the primitive novel, for example, the story is all-important and style is merely a vehicle, an accident. The purpose is merely narration. In a more refined novel, the style is given a greater role and the reader is challenged to understand. Taken to an extreme, however, when style becomes all-important, the novel forgets itself and becomes an experiment in linguistics or mathematics.

Anyway, this was supposed to follow the previous instalment of The Book of the Winds:

Interlude

"But grandfather, surely this is no interesting story that you are telling me! I mean it is so slow and so not fun! I think I will just go and play with the bears," little Ronda piped to Beron. The silver-haired Beron laughed and replied, "Of course it is not fun. It is not supposed to be. You wanted to grow up, not I; and this is the kind of story that grown-ups are told." "But grandfather, I thought being grown-up was fun. And I don't mind the story terribly except that nothing much happens in it," Ronda complained. "Oh a lot of things do happen in the story, my child. Only it is not all told. Grown-ups aren't like children. They don't want to be told everything directly. They like finding things out for themselves," Beron replied. "I like finding things for myself grandfather. Remember the little harp that you hid under the mistletoe in the front garden. I found it out myself," Ronda proudly reminded him. "Yes. And this is just like that. Only here you do not know you are looking for a harp. Much like life. Only a lot easier. If only people kept looking for things in books and left the world to itself. But what will be will be," and Beron put the pipe that smouldered near the bookstand back in his mouth, piping away another of his sad dreams. After a while, he called Ronda back to his side, "Come child, let us go on with the story and listen carefully now. Learn to hear more than what I tell you and to understand more than what you hear and see and you will be fine. And tie the loose ends of your pigtails by yourself like a little woman. You wouldn't want me to do it for you now, would you?"

The Book of the Winds

2006-11-09T14:00:00.000-08:00

Chapter 2
Whither the Winding Road

Phaeron and his companions for the evening reached the hamlet that was Balric's village just after dusk. People were returning from their diurnal occupations and, soon word spread of a royal stranger, a prince perhaps, walking with Balric to his place. There were gawkers aplenty and Phaeron soon felt uncomfortable under the shifty glances they bestowed on him. I have my sword, he thought, but what can I do against so many? I only hope they know their duty to the Emperor.

Of course he need not have worried: those who would slit throats rarely look their victims in the face. It was a short walk to the blacksmith's house through the neat rows of thatched houses that seemed to him to belong to an earlier and more barbarous age. He was surprised to see very little greenery in the hamlet situated in the heart of the great forests - nature had yielded to the destroying hands of a crude civilization and it would require culture and luxury to bring back the trees and birds and tamed nature to where they had been displaced from. The house was built adjacent to Balric's forge and Phaeron's horse was tethered to a short stump outside it. He saw little of the forge but it seemed so insignificant compared to the great fires that roared all day in the great Alley of the Smiths in the capital. What little work the village provided sufficed for Balric, for the villagers grew their own vegetables and hunted their own meat. Money was not a necessity in this remote hamlet, life and death persisted in spite of it.

The house was not a big affair either but Phaeron felt much safer within the confines of its walls away from prying eyes. The women soon occupied themselves with dinner and Balric attended to his forge, leaving Phaeron to amuse himself as best as he could. There was not much of notice in the dank, dirty, ill-furnished place and Phaeron was tired. He had no wish too to step outside into the chill air where there might still lurk a curious, hardy, imbecile soul or two. In the matter of minutes, he fell asleep, oblivious to the clanging of the pans and pots in the kitchen and the sound of the hammer on the anvil.

It is not an easy task to fall asleep on an uncomfortable stool and the physical discomfort disturbed Phaeron's dreams. He saw strange, wonderful things, frightening visions of dragons spewing fire over his home and blood and gore in the grand royal gardens in the capital. The princess, beautiful and elegant generally, was fighting a grim battle with a knight in black armour over the prostrate body of the king's, even as Phaeron rushed in headlong to save her. There was the Prime Mnister too, who seemed to be smirking even as blow after blow fell over his son's brows. And then the scroll he was carrying even now, appeared out of nowhere and its words were blazoned over the city walls in hues of blood: "Fear the wrath of the swift sword that waits not for slow justice; the Council of the Fifty is ready to meet." Strange words, words from a legend long forgotten, but what about the scroll, was it safe?

And he woke up with a start to see Amara looking curiously at him. Her eyes twinkled merrily even as she traipsed away blushing fairy-like to attend to some imaginary chore. Flit on cheering angel, nurse and balm to a bitter heart's dreams, he mused over her vanished form. It has been long now since I felt such fair hope, long since I wanted to be happy. There is but little left of youth in my heart but a long ways to go before my shoulders will tire of the burdens people will impose on them. This scroll, ah the scroll, it is safe now, I did not ask for it and I do not know what it means to me. But there is Amara now, kneading the dough and stirring the pot and I feel a stirring in my own heart.

Night had come swiftly while he slept, and, after a simple dinner of bread, broth and a jug of light beer, attended by the inquisitive questions Meara posed of life in the capital and the Far East, they all retired - the host family preferring to lie on the ground in the outer room, resigning to Phaeron the privacy and comfort of the inner bedroom. Inspite of the short nap he had had only a couple of hours earlier, Phaeron soon fell into a dreamless sleep but it was not destined to last long.

In the middle of the night, a shrill piercing sound woke him: the cry of a damsel, Amara maybe, in distress. Even as he tried to collect his senses, he saw that the house was ablaze and there was a clangor of arms outside, men and women shouting, and children and girls screaming. Balric, he realised as he crossed out into the courtyard with drawn sword, was already outside, hacking at the attackers with might and main. A dreadful little scene unfolded to Phaeron as he saw a sizeable number of horsemen, slowly and surely pushing the villagers back, breaking their resistance to pieces with their trained swordsmanship. He joined the small band of defenders but they could do little even as small bands of the attackers broke away to loot what they could from the burning houses. Just as Phaeron felt they should all be cut down mercilessly, a gruff voice from among the leaders shouted an order for retreat and the horsemen left just as suddenly as they had come.

Seeing the battle was over, the men ran to put out the fires that threatened to destroy the entire hamlet. Women and children were already busy throwing pails of water over the burning thatches, and dragging out of the conflagration the few articles of value that they possessed. Phaeron remembered the scroll and ran into the room he had slept in but it had been ransacked. He understood that this was no random attack and that the horsemen had come for the scroll. His horse too had escaped in the melee, shod in Balric's new shoe. Embittered and angry, he found that Balric and Meara had lost more than he had: the horsemen had kidnapped their daughter.

In less than an hour, the fire was put out and there was calm once more in the smouldering remains of the village. The men and women gathered near Balric's place and there was a general wailing and railing as people tried to come to terms with the dreadful and unprovoked assault on their peaceful lives. "Who were they," Phaeron asked Balric, even as they wiped the blood and sweat off their face after the heavy toil, "And what were they after?" He was not about to mention the scroll to him but he needed to get to them and retrieve the scroll by any means possible. "I dont know, milord," replied Balric, evasively, "I have heard of the robber-lords of the Northern Mountains, who pillage the villages around the Great Forest. But what they would want here, I have no idea." "Oh we knew, Balric, when the lordly stranger came among us that trouble was sure to follow. Dont ye know these are after the royal tribe - they have sworn dread oaths to kill anyone from the royal family," muttered one of the young men. "Shut up you Oric, master fool and village jester, this is no place nor time for your bitterness," retorted Balric, "I have lost more than you have but I wouldn't snivel like a girl." "Be strong all you want, man, but mark my words: this is not the end of our troubles," said Oric,darkly, "There is not going to be much happiness or peace from today." "Forget his words, milord, he has ideas above his station," Balric said to Phaeron loudly. He then addressed the general assembly, "Men and women, we haven't seen battle and death for some time now but that doesn't make us children. We have fought before and now I think we need to fight again. Let us get ready with our swords and axes and shields and helmets. I have been your leader for so long but now I have to leave. So I suggest you take Groth as your leader - he is wise and brave and will serve you well. In the meantime, I will find my daughter and return to you as soon as I can." Many in the assembly cheered and accepted Groth as leader but they also cried out, "But we will come with you Balric in your search, you shall not go alone," upon which Groth spoke up, "Men and women, I will be your leader while Balric goes after his daughter's kidnappers. I hear your love for Balric but we cannot all go with him. So I propose we send two of our best men with him on this hunt. What say you to this, Balric?" Balric replied, "Two men away from the village makes it two men less secure but I know I cannot do it alone either so I accept your proposal. But who will they be?" As Groth started, "Our best man is Oric, of course and the other man will be..", Phaeron interrupted and said, "I will go with Balric. They have taken something from me too that does not belong to them and I need to get it back for myself. We three can be traveling companions till we get to the bandits and then Balric and Oric will return to you with Amara while I will set off on my way." Balric was reluctant to take the stranger and nobleman with him to the heart of the bandit strongholds but Groth saw the point and it was immediately resolved upon. The villagers decided to give the little they could save from the fire by way of provision to Balric and his companions for the next day. They would have to hunt for themselves as they went deeper into the Great Forests to the foothills of the Northern Mountains.

At dawn, the three men, Balric with his sharp axe, Oric with his singing bow and swift sword, and Phaeron, trained swordsman and royal aide and messenger, set out towards the Northern Mountains on the three best horses the villagers could provide. They went along the same old road Phaeron had crossed with Balric and his family but now he had a purpose more immediate. What it was, he was not sure: was it the scroll or was it Amara that he was after? But now he wanted to get somewhere for a reason all his own, and when they reached the place where the Royal Highway forked, one road leading to the Northern Mountains and the other to the Western Outposts, he looked forward to going along the path he had heard was full of lawless bands of wild men, armed against any royal interference. Deep within the forests, on the long winding road that lay at his feet, inside some bandit stronghold, were Amara and the scroll and he needed to get there fast so he could complete his mission to the West and return to the capital. Or maybe that was not the reason for his hurry.

The Book of the Winds

2006-10-20T16:47:00.000-07:00

Prologue:

The smoke always clears slowly. It does not hurry for the historian in haste who wishes to record what the moment after a great victory looked like; defeats of course do not matter - only the victors record their battles. And, on the fateful day when a hundred thousand and more perished on the Great Plain, the smoke loitered, picking its way daintily through holes sewed in the blue hearts of dead men, seeping out red and yellow and ugly grey. It smelled of gunpowder - not the nice, clean, fun smell that attends a fireworks celebration, that brings to mind picnic blankets and family outings; but the poor, dirty, grimy smell of a charwoman at a munitions factory waiting for the certain news of a lover's death, a most uncomfortable smell. But the smoke was comforting too in a sense - the survivors saw in its insane shapes the forms of departed friends; dying men saw their families bidding them goodbye or welcome; and, in irritating the eyes of those who were too ashamed to cry, it gave an excuse for tears on the field of manful toil. And it was almost tangible.

But, as with all things, the smoke passed too and bared a hundred thousand entrails and groans to the naked, hungry eye and ear, eager to record for posterity the particular deaths of an anonymous hundred thousand in the cause of great words and great men. How many pitiful lives have been lost in the name of all that is holy and uplifting in the human condition? How many men have toiled bitter sweat and tears for what is most sweet in man's thoughts? How many cries and groans and terrible deeds that laughter and happiness and goodness be more than mere words? But soft now, there groans a man in pain.

------
Book 1
The Council Meets

Chapter 1
A Village in the Horizon

His cloak billowed out wildly behind him as he rode the horse hard into the wind. Evidently in a great hurry, the green colour of his cloak and the imperial diadem on the horse's forehead intimated that this was a royal messenger on an urgent errand. The few hardy men who still walked the dangerous forest road muttered harshly under their breath but gave way with a grudging salute. The man on the horse noticed the sullenness but he had been seeing it all these four days as he travelled out of the capital into the countryside. There seemed to be an increase in discontent with distance from the capital, he mused, an interesting observation worth some serious consideration; but he had his assignment now and it seemed to gain in importance as he approached his destination. The border forts were not too far off and it was imperative that he reach the capital of the province by nightfall - travelling through the outer regions, especially the wild forests, had become unsafe even for the king's messengers in these dangerous times.

But as luck would have it, just as he turned past a narrow bend giving both his thoughts and his horse free rein, his horse stumbled, stuttered and fell in a heap on the road. He was not hurt in the accident, thank god for the small blessings, but his horse had lost a shoe on his leg. He tried riding him without the shoe but the horse started limping after a while. With no choice now but to find the nearest village or hamlet, any place where he could get a horse or a ride to the capital of the province, he started walking down the road, in much more haste than would have helped the poor horse's unshod leg. An hour or so before dusk, would there be bandits around soon, he wondered, would he have to fight for his life or merely for the little gold and that precious scroll he had, so important to the fate of the kingdom, of so little meaning to petty thieves? I will find out soon enough, he decided, but this wretched luck that has been following me ever since that fateful day, when, instead of being selected to the General's guard, I was asked to become the Prime Minister's attendant, this whole foul fortune is still running its course in my life. I wonder if I'll ever be rid of it.

An hour's walk had not brought him much hope and it was almost dusk. The road was deserted and even the occassional straggler who seemed to him a bandit in his filthy rags, leading an old mare or leaning on his wretchedly crooked staff, even the hardiest of these were no more seen in the path that seemed to stretch deep into the forest with no end in sight. For the first time in his life, he saw the forest as an extension of the city or maybe the origin of it; a place men could live and work and walk in, and not merely a place one passed through and had to tolerate only because it was too difficult to destroy altogether. It was like a garden on a larger scale with the trees and bushes and the occassional bird and animal, untamed but not violent. It was also a shelter protecting him from the emptiness that would have dismayed his already depressed spirits. The road assured him that man had been here, and the forest, that there were things beyond and behind all this, that he was not alone. The forest was also particularly interesting that evening when he wanted a rather diaphanous solitude - he wanted to be left alone but not feel his loneliness; or, rather, he wanted a reason to be alert and ready for conversation but only on his own terms, when he wanted it. The rumours had made him edgy and he did not know what message he was carrying now, what it would mean to the country in what was rapidly becoming a fragile future; he knew, of course, that it was important but he did not know where he stood in the whole situation - he had set out to become a soldier and now he was a Minister's page.

Just as he was sinking into a deep reverie, the sound of a cart hobbling along the road behind him jolted him out of it and, soon enough he found himself facing a boisterous peasant taking his family home on a battered ruin of a cart driven by a miserable old nag. The man seemed to want to pass him in a hurry, having evidently seen and known him for who he was, but was forced to stop when the authority of the green cloak and the diadem on the horse asserted themselves in a rather rude gesture to halt. The wife seemed not to have noticed and started grumbling from the back of the cart while the girl, tired of her mother's company, hopped down to see what had caused the interruption. He was struck by her beauty immediately, not a wonderful pretty thing of gold and blue and flimsy lace, but a soft, radiant, healthy nature that was girl and woman at the same time. The cartman at once began apologizing and explaining his hurry, "Bandits around you see, so we were hurrying up. No offence, milord, at your service always". But he had no ears nor eyes for this man. "Phaeron," he said, "page to the Esteemed Prime Minister and member of the Royal Guard, at your service," and performed for the girl one of his most expansive court-bows. "Balric, milord, blacksmith and ...," the man started saying when the girl started laughing uncontrollably, causing great confusion to both the cartman and Phaeron. Balric was dismayed beyond words but his wife stepped in, and pinching the girl hard, introduced herself, "Meara, wife of Balric, milord and this is Amara, our daughter. She is young and bold, don't you mind her, sir, she hasn't seen noblemen except those that strut about on the stage for tuppence. Is there anything we could do for you, noble master?" Phaeron was mortified by the girl's laughter but it was rather musical and made her look even prettier, bringing the red to her cold cheeks and tears to her deep blue eyes. Hard for a man not to like even if he was the cause of the mirth. "Peasants of the outer provinces, I am on my way to Pandor on a royal mission. I was to get there before nightfall but my horse took a fall and has lost a shoe. Direct me to the nearest village where I can borrow a horse and proceed on my way and I will reward you well". The girl was about to burst out laughing again but the mother intervened and said, "Of course, master, we will take you to our village. It is not far from here and my husband is the blacksmith - he will do his best for you and get you going early tomorrow. If you don't mind, you can also stay at our humble inn and eat our bread this night". "Very well, lead on. And I promise your husband will be well-paid for his efforts".

They walked for the better part of an hour and the sun had almost set. Phaeron was getting impatient but there was nothing he could do. The sky was becoming a deep orange and the road was beginning to get wider. They started up a short climb where the woods seemed to part around the road when Amara exclaimed, "The village! the village!" and jumped out of the cart, running up the road. Phaeron watched as the orange danced off her hair and face and the happy smile that spread across her face as she got to the top and shouted, "The village, Father, we are home finally." Balric and Meara exchanged a look of happiness and Phaeron felt a little uncomfortable - they seemed to be too simple and too happy at things too small. Did they not know there were greater things than merely getting home? Were they still children to believe in such bromides as the 'sweet home'? Were they innocent or merely ignorant of the big world outside of their humdrum existence? But Amara was taking his breath away and he knew these people would not understand. The three of them slowly made their way up to Amara and stood silently with her, gazing at the small clearing in the woods where a small village was visible with smoke from the chimneys and little boys playing around. "There she lies," said Balric, "That is home and a lot more, sir". "Yes, a lot more indeed," muttered Phaeron but little did he know how much more.

KANK - Never Say Bye-Bye

2006-10-14T23:50:00.000-07:00

I was planning to write a long review of Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna studded with long and funny-sounding words. I wanted to, really. Only the movie wasted more than 3 hours of my time and all I can say now, in appreciation of it, is that it sucks big time. For the benefit of posterity, however, I will attempt a short sketch of it, in the manner of the high school essay of old that so often is seen in the film review columns of the newspapers, and try to purge myself of all that the movie might have imbued me with.

Karan Johar is a marvellous director and I am sure he makes no bones about it either. I even distinctly remember reading that he has a personal philosophy and original opinions on love and marriage. An intellectual no doubt and it shows in his work. I also seem to have heard that he has a penchant for the dramatic and an exceptional skill wielding the megaphone. An artist of the highest order and it shows in this, his work. In fact so many things are evident on the most perfunctory viewing of the movie that it makes me wonder why he decided to show his abilities over a much longer timeframe. A conundrum but nothing compared to what is on offer from Dev and Maya and Ria(or is it Rhea or Riya) and Rishi and the rest of 'em all.

The movie starts off originally enough with SRK landing a $5million contract in the MLS and Rani trying her best not to spout out the title-line in an intricate dialogue sequence filled with the most sentimental nothings culminating in the title song. Dev(SRK) and Maya(Rani) part ways as friends, one loses his leg and the other her shot at holy Mohabbat and of course fate has to intervene but that is only 4 years and a short flashforward later. By then, the characters are well-etched - Rani likes vacuuming, AB Sr. likes some form of light bondage, AB Jr. does not shave often, Priety powders herself pale, Kiron Kher is very conscious of her big butt and SRK is a terrible football coach. Add fate now gently, taking care not to spill too much of it on AB Sr's garish attire, and there is confusion leading to reconcilement leading to friendship between SRK and Rani. By the way I did mention their names, right? It is so easy to get confused as there is too much name-calling and too many people around all the time.

A wise man once said a man and a woman can never be friends and Sooraj Barjatya stole it for Maine Pyar Kiya. No wonder Rani and SRK decide to rent a hotel room. As for me, I have no idea they have anything in common except a liking for the colour blue, which seems a random afterthought for a dialogue and song sequence - I never saw them wear blue in the movie till then - and a confused attitude towards their marriage - the other partners seem to want the respective marriages to survive but these two seem to be exclusively worried about saving it from themselves for the sake of the other two who do not understand that the marriages are failing but these two are concerned they might be causing it. If you are confused by now, time for the intermission but oh! that came before the hotel room was rented and after a few deliciously inane dialogues were spouted.

Anyway, the point KJ is trying to put across is something beyond such trivial concerns so we wont stick to the merely chronological either. So let us hurry ahead and see the marriages fail and then some. There are scenes added purely for completeness' sake - the idea seems to have been to make as stupid and unpalatable a movie possible and the product approaches its objectives closely. Witness the scene where Priety walks by Rani without seeing her only for Rani to get back by passing her without seeing her and then Rani turns back and neither see each other and all this of course while crossing a road in downtown New York. The subtle exchanges between the 2 AB's and the misunderstandings would do Iago proud, as roses are scattered and what-not. Suffice it to say it is all as well-done as the poor director's goose that gets cooked all this long while but don't tell him that!

And the ending is of course sublime and bold - Priety slaps SRK, AB dirties his house, the older guy dies, Rani leaves for Philly, 3 years pass, things change, old hurts mend, sacrifices are made and accepted as a matter of course, more dialogues that seem to have nothing really to do with the movie(like "Zindagi mein Mohabbat aur Maut dono bin bulaye mehmaan hote hain" - "Both Love and Death are uninvited guests in life") and then the grand finale where SRK hugs a Sardar on a park bench and goes to prison for 15 days for coming out too soon off of an Amtrak train when the Laws of Physics and Common Sense seem to remonstrate. Then, just so those who prefer the healthy, bracing dosage of the Hindi tele-serial to the frivolously rational whatever-else do not feel it all ended too soon, there is some more uninteresting stuff but to deal with it here is well nigh impossible.

And so the movie ends and those of us who were fortunate enough to learn the massage trick and the naughty tips to keep our spouses happy; those lucky few who did not miss the 'Sexy Sam' in the background; those who really, really understood the deep insights into love and marriage and parenthood and life and quantum physics; indeed all those who saw the movie for what it is, are left with that magnificent feeling that such an experience comes but once in a lifetime; that if one were left with nothing else but just this one would learn what manly toil is; that if KJ did nothing else in his life after this, still one would be grateful to him. All that and the rest.

But of course we need to end with THE line - so Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna!

Stuff

2006-10-12T21:28:00.000-07:00

One fundamental question: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when? Rabbi Hillel says it all and says it well.

If I am ambitious I want more and am not contented; if I am not ambitious I will never be the man I could be. Which is the more pathetic life - an unambitious drudgery or ambitious and eternal discontent?

Which is the more dangerous - power without responsibility or responsibility without power? The first brings the worst out of us while the other drives the best of us into despair.

If I do not discriminate based on colour am I blind? If I do not discriminate based on language am I deaf? If I do not discriminate based on religion am I godless? If I do not discriminate based on nationality am I poor in geography? If I do not discriminate am I not a fool? But what would I rather be - a fool who cannot discriminate or a clever knave of a fundamentalist?

What is the half-life of a modern secret? What is the half-life a modern truth? What is the meaning of a modern lie? What is the purpose of modern facts? Nobody seems to have a private life any more. Nobody seems sure of anything any more(except the Republicans and the fundamentalists). Everybody seems to be conspiring - for what they don't know. Everybody seems to own a dictionary and an encyclopedia.

Mysticism is not the answer; Formalism is not the answer; Idealism is not the answer; Realism is not the answer; Pessimism is not the answer; Empiricism is not the answer; Existentialism is not the answer; Philosophy is not the answer; Science is not the answer; Religion is not the answer; Contentment is not the answer; Ambition is not the answer; Happiness is not the answer; Despair is not the answer; Atleast nothing is answer enough; But what is the question, do we know that any more? Does it matter?

(Somewhere in between, always something in between, or maybe not that)

(I have elucidated for myself for now a principle of the almost arbitrary)

Tell me someday, if you can, what patriotism means; tell me also what affection is. What is love? What are those long words that we remember from the dictionary when we see a boatload of wretched black men transported whipped and bound across choppy seas by guys with handlebar moustaches? What is that lump of meat clogging the pipes when everyone rises to say "I am Spartacus"? What do the words that men give their lives for mean? What is the cold hand that drives men across continents to die in unfriendly shores for things they don't see, for men who don't care for them, for promises they haven't heard and are not meant for them anyway? And when you have explained all this to me, tell me why, if you would.

Pipe Dream

2006-10-11T15:53:00.000-07:00

What is a pipe dream? Is it one of those that gives you a fright
Where you wake up and scream in the middle of the night
Because you felt too happy and something didn't feel right?
Or maybe it is a waking dream - the kind where you see
A well-remembered face in a place where you want to be
But know it is only someone else on TV.
Or the pestilential want that makes for having
When the having is too difficult and, too hard, the knowing.
Or the dreams of old men smoking stale pipes
And remembering all they didn't do and other silly gripes.
Or maybe it is just what the butterfly sees
When it has slept just long enough and flies out of its sheath
To face butterfly nets and hungry bees, pollen-less flowers and unbending trees
Just so it can a take a fresh, happy, free breath.

A Daily Life

2006-09-25T23:53:00.001-07:00

It had been a bad day. It was meant to be, from the beginning, what with the early morning appointment with the agent, and the afternoon class, and the headmaster's insistence on our talking that particular day about my performance these last few months in his precious little, backwoods country, primary school. And all this just the day after I had decided to tell my mother I was moving out and setting up my own place and the arguments and the long weeping harangue that followed. That I had just broken up with my longtime girlfriend and was in no state of mind to think, let alone act, intelligently seemed completely lost on one and all, as they insisted in their most impressively scholarly tones, Carpe Diem. Carpe Diem indeed! I had duly woken up late in the mess that was my friend's apartment, having moved in with my toothbrush and briefcase late the previous night, the alarm clock a long-discarded luxury in his blissfully unworkmanlike existence which needed not the least bit of the hurried step or the simplest creasing of the wrinkled forehead with worry and anxiety. Breakfast has always been a weakness and when I had to skip it to reach the agent's office only an hour late, the rumble in my stomach was merely aggravated by the incompetence of a man of professed good taste, indeed of such a disposition as to claim to be the arbiter to the mass that is the people in matters literary, and yet of such dullness as to make grey seem the most vivid of colours on a winter afternoon when the sun has mixed the slush with the snow and has hidden himself behind the passing cloud that does not pass; and he decided to irritate me with the most obtuse questions that have through all recorded history been left best unanswered by all who claim to any intelligence whatsoever. I ventured, given the befuddled state that my mind was in, to remonstrate and retorted in as educated a manner as was possible at that instant and the result was that I was thrown out most decorously after an hour's worth of nothing done. The time, having already inched towards that period, when I am in the habit of having a second and much more elaborate meal than breakfast, I decided to put the troubles of the last hour behind me and attacked the cafeteria attached to the school(the school being but ten minutes' walk from the agent's, I made that trip all too easily). As fortune would have it, the cafeteria was closed for the day and, the only person I could have hoped to avoid in the cafeteria, given the private lunches he was accustomed to having in the comfort of his own office, the headmaster, most heartily beamed at me in the middle of his serious conversation with the cook, and with all the subtlety of an ox working a sledgehammer, informed me of the pleasure with which he would evaluate(negatively - that was given) my performance in the last few months at the meeting he had scheduled that evening. Heaven forbid any child should have to sit in class when a hungry, angry, hurt, confused, bitter, desperate man, recently wounded when still smarting under old wounds, is designated the teacher. Heaven forbid doubly that such a man should have a conscience and have to teach a class of the most unruly and rambunctious bumpkins who have been selected from the wealthiest set of family fools in the county to torture to death penniless schoolmasters dreaming of discharging social obligations in all manner of saccharine asininity. And then the meeting and still the hunger. I couldn't take it much longer. This was stuff that breaks the backs of giants. So I resigned at the first comical outburst that the headmaster had practised all week long in front of the mirror, calculating on impressing and intimidating me. Little did he know I was broken already. And I limped out to the lake by the woods and grabbed my handful of grass and sat by the shore. Waiting. Of course nothing happened. Except for a little girl who came around the big brown tree, crying in that most cheering way children cry when they are merely confused at the big bad world they haven't yet understood completely, innocent with doe-eyes wide and red, dragging her little doll in the tall grass. Her nose she had lost to her friend who had run away home with it and she had to be home soon and she could not go home without her nose - her mother had always warned her not to lose anything or she would not let her play any more. Children, I thought, and placed a piece of my nose on her face, taking her to the lake to prove she had a nose now too, for she wouldn't be satisfied with touching it - it had always felt so, even when the boy had taken her nose away. Children and fools and fool headmasters; agents who did not know and people who did not care or understand; friends who did not have to go through what I had to everyday and yet ventured to advise; hunger and necessity and the trials of a nature never kind to one who was beaten and knew it; pain and the lack of release; indecision; insufficiency; doubt; a hundred other things that made a man bitter and desperate and angry and contemptible and sad. And then the girl smiled and said, "You are the awesomest" and kissed me and ran away smiling gaily. And I felt happy.

Random Thoughts

2006-09-18T20:59:00.000-07:00

Existence is presence in Space and Time(apart from other possible dimensions); existence out of Space and Time has to be explained in the abstract or the as yet absent - which is sometimes called non-existence.

Sole causes and effects are not possible(are not observed).

Everything cannot be known; everything cannot be understood; everything cannot be expressed. Everything cannot be experienced.

Everything does not matter.

The present is; the rest we dont know about.

There are children and adults; men and women; humans and beasts; animals and plants; life and things.

Children dont know; they dont understand; they dont feel; they dont care. Children stop being children and become adults to do these things.

Adults dont learn; they become children to learn. They know, understand, express, feel and take responsibility.

Men stand up, hit one another, and take hits; women dont see the point in fighting.

Beasts survive and become human when they create a world for themselves in their piece of the earth; humans create (private and social)worlds and live in them and become beasts when they have to survive.

Animals move; plants are transplanted.

Life leads; things are led.

---Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must remain silent/There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy

Ummmm..

2006-09-15T14:31:00.000-07:00

Sevvai kizhamai. Saayangalam 7 mani. Sadharanama mega serial paakara neram aana innikku mattum Pavanandhiar theru Sivan koil'la peria paattimaarkootam. Avangavanga marumagalgaliyum kootindu nalla peran porakkanumnu vendudhal. Navagrahatha suthi oru pathu-irubadhu ponnunga oorvalam. Vaaravaaram nadakkaradhu dhaan. Aana ovvoru ezhettu maasamum oru gumbal varum, andha gedu mudivula oru rendu peria archana nadakkum, gumbal kalanjidum. Appuram vera oru maamiyar-marumagal gumbal adutha ezhettu maasathukku. Aana 8 mani pola, ellarum kilambi ponadhukkappuram, pakkathu therulerndhu Pankajam maamiyum ava marumagal Padmavum varuvanga. Archanai panna maami pova, Padma navagrahatha suthuva. 81 thadava suthinadhukkappuram moonji sulichunde Pankajam maami edhavadhu nachunu sollitu Padmava kootindu pova. Idhu ippo 4 varushama nadandhudu varudhu. Padmavum mudinjadhellam paani paathachu, onnum sari padala. Pankajam maamikkum porumai koranjunde irukku. Innikku paiyan kitta mudiva onnu sollidanumnu vechindirukka. Rendu perum edho avan officela partykku porangalam. Vandha udane oru kai paathudalam evvalavu mani aanalum sari.

Enna appadi oru chance kadaikkala Pankajam maamikku. Annikku 9 manikku kilambi Padmavum ava purushanum avan office New Year's Eve partykku ponavanga veetukku nera varave illa. Sumaar 2 manikku phone adichudhu. General Hospital. Edho sambavam nadandhu avanga rendu perum admit ayirukkangalam. Ore padhattam maamikku. Enna aacho enna nadakkumo theriyala. Pakkathu veetu paiyana kootindu ore ottama auto eri kalambitta. Nalla vela romba peria vibareetham onnum nadakkala. Edho murattu pasanga vazhimarichu miratti irukkanga paiyan mayangi vizhunduttan. Adha paathu Padmavum bayandu mayangi irukka. Summa vidama pasanga rendu perukkum naalanju adi pottirukkanga anga inga. Dress ellam ore ratham aana uyirukku, udambukku oru prachanaiyum illanu doctor sollitaru. Verum kattu pottu, rendu vaaram crutches'la nadandha sari ayidum. Panam, nagai ponadhukkum, scooter ponadhukkum avvalavu kashtappada mudiyuma andha nerathula - uyir thappi irukke? Edho aanadhu nalladhukkunu maamiyum avanga rendu perum thirumbi veetukku vandhuttanga. Andha sambavam Pankajam maamiyoda plan'a konjam thalli pottudhu - ippadi oru accident nadandhu konjam naal'laye raakshasiyaatum marumagala veratta mudiyadhe. Adhanala thirumbi ovvoru sevvaikizhamaiyum adhe programme thaan 8 mani saayangalam aana.

Aana poruthadhum nalladha pochu. 2 maasam kazhichu Padma nalla news kondu vandhu kudutha. Pankajam maami vendudhal niraiverinadhukkaga oru peria archanai nadathi oru peria donationum kudutha kovilukku. Appothulerndhu 8 mani aana Pankajam maami nimmadhiya serial paaka okkandhuduva. 10 maasam aanadhukkappuram dhaan therinjadhu kuzhandhai maaniramnu, Pankajam maami, Padma, rendu per veetulaiyum ellarum nalla sevappu. Kuzhandhai azhudhudha, Pankajam maami azhudhala, Padma azhudalanu theriyala, aana annikku maternity ward Room 23ukkullerndhu mattum mudhalla alaral sathamum, appuram vimmal sathamum muzhu raathiriyum kettunde irundhudhu.

An Elevator Story

2006-09-15T14:15:00.000-07:00

One of the best stories I have been in :) -

I go to the library to get some books, step out at the wrong floor so have to take the elevator again. A couple of minutes' wait and the elevator door opens, only to show me it is packed with 5 other people(and it is supposed to hold something like 4 if they are real close and don't have problems with intruders in their private space). I am of half a mind to desist and take another ride up but the people inside gesture for me to come on in and share the little space there is(Oh I love thee Notre Dame already!). The girl next to me politely asks where I have to go and we find that someone else is getting off on the 9th floor. So we settle in for the all-so-short ride and the old man with the collar(to the uninitiated, this means he is one of the initiated - a priest) to my left, who seems eerily familiar, starts talking across me to the couple to my right about how someone in the Vatican stole his work and how, to this day, one can compare the thesis this Vatican guy wrote with what our man had published earlier, obviously the latter half of a conversation that I had interrupted with my rude, discomfiting entrance. The couple are like "Oh really.. So the world goes" and all those cliched clucks of the tongue that express both sympathy and disapproval. Then, as the 9th floor comes up(or should it be down) and I start walking out, I hear the last 2 classic exchanges - "So are you a professor or something here? Do you have any position here?" ask the couple, and the cleric answers "Oh I was President of this University once. I am Theodore Hesburgh. This library is named after me."

No wonder he looked familiar!!!

The Old Man and the City

2006-08-25T09:00:00.000-07:00

I am a college student trying to make sense of life in the big city. The whole place is a big, beautiful mess and getting around is one of the worst and best parts of my daily life. I have been here sometime now and still I manage to get lost every once in a while. And it is during these times that I have had the most fun ever in my life. Bumping into strange alleys with exotic shops and houses, meeting new people and long-lost friends and getting to know about life first-hand from the street and its noises directly.

It was during one of these rambles that I met Uncle P. I did not recognize him at first; he looked so old and decrepit and I had never seen that miserable look in his face - he was always smiling and happy and had a twinkle in his eye in the old times when I was still just a kid. He would tell us stories, all beautiful, and recite poems too and do all kinds of fun and crazy things. I and my cousins and all our friends just used to love Uncle P and waited for him eagerly at the doorstep every summer morning as he came down the long country lane from his cottage. No one ever knew who he was or what he did, not even his name, but every summer he would rent the cottage and he would spend everyday with us, fishing, swimming, biking, apple-picking and other stuff.

But now he seemed very tired and it looked like he was carrying a heavy burden. I started talking to him and told him about all the wonderful days he had given me. I had come to college to become intelligent and wise like him and I told him I wanted to be a writer too and write the kind of stories and poems that he had written all those days ago. He listened patiently and after a long time, smiled a little and took me by hand to a grimy window. "Listen, kid. I dont know who you are any more. But that dump is where I live now. This is my sooty, grimy life and this is all I have got. When I was younger, I had a muse and I could tell stories and write poetry. Then, one day, the muse left me and I felt sad. So I wrote more and harder and furiously, seeking sublimation. I thought I will get over all my sorrows that way. But now I am older and know I will never be any less sadder or write anything worth reading any more. I am happy you found what I wrote good and I am happy there is someone in this world who remembers me when I was not like this. But the truth is I am just done and I dont want anything any more. You take care of yourself and be happy. Never try to fall into sorrow and break yourself. Now get going and forget I ever was," he said.

I was pained a bit and sad and tried to talk him into writing something for me. But he just waved the idea away. When I said, "Maybe I will come tomorrow and see if you feel better and will write something," he just replied, "Kid, maybe you will find me better tomorrow but just hope I wont be here tomorrow. That is all I want now - that are no more tomorrows for me. I find today too difficult already." And with that he walked past me into his sad room and shut the door. And I knew he had thanked me already.

Note to self

2006-08-25T08:00:00.000-07:00

I have been wanting to say something profound for quite sometime now but dont know exactly what I can say. Everything seems already to have been said and I have nothing more to add. Except maybe this:

This is the one comforting thought to the man in misery -
When tomorrow's sorrow comes to find me, I will not be.

Or is this taken too already?

On a dark night in the woods by a lake

2006-08-24T20:28:00.000-07:00

I am bored now so let us try something for fun. Let us walk around the woods in the dark and try to get to the lake. Let us make up a story for ourselves as we go along. There has to be a hero in it and a heroine and we will add a few other characters. There will be a lot of incidents, some funny, some sad, but all interesting, and our hero and heroine will experience most of these. We will place them in some place in some time and we will decide that they have certain names. Or maybe we won't name them. But still we will have to describe them. The hero has to be a tall, fair and handsome guy who steals the heart of every damsel in the vicinity. He is strong and brave and intelligent and knows a lot of things others do not. He can sing, dance and maybe we will use him in some romantic situations with the heroine where he will woo her with the most beautiful song ever sung. And he will write it too. Mind the branches.

The heroine is the prettiest lass ever of course and she is also humble and quiet and intelligent and brave. She knows sewing but can ride a horse with gusto too and sings to the birds in the most dulcet tones imaginable. Of course our hero heard her sing in the woods and lost his heart to the voice before he even saw her face. But that is a different episode and we still aren't done with our characters. So let us add the treacherous uncle who takes care of our heroine and covets the riches her parents left her. He hasn't told her all this yet but there is a magic seal on the treasure chest that only the heroine can break when she is 21. So let us make her a few days short of her 21st birthday. There are wild animals around so stick to the path.

Then there is our hero's evil stepmother who wants to get his father's kingdom for her stupid son, who is good at heart but a total nincompoop and numbskull. The father is old and weak and so our son decides to ease his burden by walking away from the kingdom and living an adventure for himself. That is how he comes to the forest and hears the heroine sing. While he is hunting. Or maybe he is just trying to get to the lake to watch the river flow. His friend is with him too. A good friend, loyal and devoted to the hero and also brave and intelligent and with a hundred other virtues. Only a bit hot-tempered so the uncle better watch out. But of course the uncle has his foolish but brawny henchmen who wield the hammer and the axe. Don't go too far out or we will lose each other.

So the hero meets the heroine and they fall in love naturally. They sing and dance and pick flowers and talk and tell each other wonderful stories and blush and kiss and do all the thousand nothings that is normal in these times. Then there is the rain. Though it is glorious and summer, there is a mild thunderstorm and these two have to find shelter in a cave. There they find the ancient witch, a good one, but with only one tooth and dark and grey and wizened and wise and ugly and frightening. She tells the hero and heroine of the story of the heroine's father who was the original king and who had been killed by the heroine's uncle, who was not her uncle actually but a wizard after a scroll in the treasure chest that will show him the way to great things. The hero's father, the general has taken care of the kingdom and good care too but he is a weak man in policy and short-sighted and without glasses too so he can't see clearly and so the wizard's sister has been able to kill the hero's pretty, good and loyal mother and marry his father. These bushes are thorny and dense - take care - but the lake is near.

So the hero and heroine come to know all the truth but they decide to wait the few days - two? three? - till it is time for the Uncle to bring out the chest so the the heroine can open it. The hero's friend will take care of the two henchmen and the hero will take out the wizard using the magic the witch has brewed for him. It all goes well until the wizard brings the chest out and sees the hero's friend disposing of his henchmen. He casts a spell that immobilizes the princess and kills the hero's friend. The hero tries to fight him but is wounded in his heart and so the wizard makes good his escape. The chest lies there and near it the frozen princess and fallen at her feet is the poor hero of ours with bleeding heart and broken spirit. And in time the forest swallows up the place and in the time of the great flood, it is cut off from the mainland and becomes an island in the lake. There it is now, the lake and the strange landmass in the centre of it. It has been a while but atleast the story kept us going. Now that we are tired enough, let us go back and catch some sleep. But no more stories on the way. I have run out of ideas.

The Miserability Coefficient: A Mathematical Theory of Misery

2006-08-24T13:56:00.000-07:00

After great thought and deep research I have decided to finally publish my insights into the as yet unexplored field of human misery from a mathematical standpoint. While there have been quite a few books and articles on misery[Sophocles-Hugo, Burton-Beckett etc], there has been a painfully inadequate mathematical development of the subject and this has been felt a pressing need[XYZ Grad Student's life and a million others]. This work will attempt, in the restricted space allowed it, to demonstrate, first that misery needs to be quantified, second that it can be measured and, third that this field is ripe for the publication of a few hundred graduate theses.

Human misery is a well-understood and well-observed phenomenon. Human history documents that the world was begun in misery[Big Bang]. As the world developed and man started finding his voice, it was the cry that came most naturally to him. Even literature began with the tragedy[Greece, Valmiki's shloka]. In fact, a famous poet went to the extent of saying good literature dealt with human misery exclusively[Shelley-Ode to a Skylark]. So the first question that bothers any self-respecting grad student scraping away at the edges of existence is, "How well is the Science of Misery understood? How mature is the mathematics in the area? And how easy is it to publish papers in this field?" Well that was three questions but we have already said the questioner is a grad student. Anyway, the answers to the questions are quite obvious to any unbiased onlooker. Misery has never been studied scientifically, the mathematics is as mature as a teenager with pimples falling for the first girl with a dimple and it is just as easy to publish papers in the field as it was for Einstein to walk away with the cake in Relativity.

Given these answers, it would seem insisting too much on too small a point when we say we still have to justify our claim that misery needs to be quantified; but we still intend to do it given it is our first big result. So, misery's importance has been established and now we find ourselves faced with the task of trying to distinguish between the various forms of misery[Burton - Anatomy of Melancholy]. Pain has its own units[Dols] and we know pain is but a very dilute form of misery and all pains are included within the big superset Misery. And anybody knows how irritating it is when, in the midst oif a deep depression, we find someone else who claims he is even more depressed. A measure will alleviate the need for all this and to measure misery, we need to quantify it. Thus follows the first thing to be proved -
MISERY NEEDS TO BE QUANTIFIED

Now, any rational person worth his salt knows that it is never enough to show the need for a thing but, more importantly, we need to show that the need can be fulfilled, not partially or in full measure, but atleast substantially[Nehru]. And given all the literature that math has afforded us over the course of its existence, we know that a measure is defined only on certain things and that we have to be careful what we measure or the cup may overflow[Lebesgue et al with apologies to the Bible]. So, can misery be measured? At first sight, it seems a very daunting task - trying to measure misery. Everybody always claims he is more miserable than anybody else whenever he is in the mood to say so. There even exist some who believe misery is the sole cause and bedrock of our existence, and as such pervades us all, making it an immeasurable quantity, which we partake of every now and then[Cioran, Schopenhauer et al]. But, a closer examination using the most subtle glass of Common Sense, that we have managed to grind successfully after 25 years of constant and unflagging perseverance, has shown that the view hitherto held is flawed as it overlooks quite a few distinctive features that make up the sum of misery. For example, consider the washerwoman[Gandhi - the movie of course] who has to bend down and strike the white cloth on the jagged slab of stone in a polluted river - that is a miserable job blow by blow. On the other hand, imagine a grad student sitting up past 3-4am and hard at work on his laptop, all alone, with no possibility of ever getting to see the sun that beats down on the sweating washerwoman ever, nor ever to be seen by a Gandhi as he squats nearby admiring her whatever, just imagine and you can see that the misery levels are vastly different. This is a rather good analogy, but to be mathematically rigorous, we still need to show that the measure exists on the field of real numbers and that it satisfies a host of conditions[Vague Math Literature]. This, I assure you, has been done, and will shortly be submitted to a prestigious journal. So we will skip the troublesome details and go on to define the measure of misery - the miserability coefficient - while we take for granted that the second part of the paper is established too -
MISERY CAN BE MEASURED

The miserability coefficient that we propose is a simple measure that maps human misery to the reals(chuckle at the pun). After all, most miserable people only imagine their miseries while misery is thrust upon others. The coefficient is defined thus -

The miserability coefficient, denoted by :(, is the sum derivative of all the distillable pain that can be obtained by imagining the worst possible outcome to the most enjoyable event, in the mind. The amount of pain itself is calculated as the logarithm of the squared pain added to a miserability constant that is given to all men at their birth and changes with time according to environment, character, experience etc. Its unit is pains and can take all possible values from the negative infinity to positive infinity, the more negative pains one has the happier one is, with -infinity corresponding to infinite bliss and +infinity corresponding to total despair[Milton's Devil].

The miserability coefficient can be easily measured for simple scenarios and we calculate some. The miserability coefficient of God(if he exists) is -infinity and that of the Devil(again if he exists) is +infinity[any amount of religious literature]. The :( of a grad student typically hovers from between -5(if the said person is hazaar over-enthu) to about +1786.23(this is the highest recorded but is no upper bound and increases with the number of years one spends on research). The Buddha had a :( of +50 pains after seeing four random guys but brought it down to -1234234525.232 after sitting under a Bodhi tree somewhere(the treatment of this subject is an open problem - how to optimally adjust the :( of people). Almost anybody's :( can be calculated quite easily given the past history and all details of their lives and this is left for future papers in the field by enterprising grad students. Further studies will be published shortly.

In conclusion, we note that we have justified our first and second claims and the third claim has been self-justified by the wealth of open problems still left in the field like - How to determine the miserability constant? How to find the happiness coefficient? What is the maximum/minimum achievable :( given a particular set of incidents in one's life? How can the :( be optimally changed to suit one's mood? etc etc. We intend to work on these problems and, for now, accept the thanks of a large community of people for having thrown open a whole exciting field of research and amusement.

2006-08-24T13:01:00.000-07:00

kattrukkoduthap paadathai maRandhuvitta aasiriyarpol
sattre ayarndhEn maattraan puNsirippukkaaLaanEn
nEttriravu veedhiyilE enai kaNdu anjiyavan
indrennai kaNdELanam seigindraan sagikkavillai.
munbE naan kaNdadhuNdu ulagathaar irakkathai
vendraaradi munveezhvar thammadhippai kaattudhaRkku
pinbondru vidhi seivar thiNdaadum kaalathil
sendraarai maRandhiduvOm indruLLAr mattroruvar.
ippozhudhum thayangugindrEn ivarmun naan selvadhaRkku
vazhi ondrum vERillai immakkaL enkulathaar
eppozhudho thaaivayittril seidhuvitta uRavadhanaal
pazhi sollitthirindhaalum ivarpOlthaam vaazhgindrEn.

--Shyam.

Sila nErangaLil sila sindhanaigaL

2006-08-23T14:58:00.000-07:00

Thanitthirundha nAtkalai nAn ninaithukkoNdEn
Ninaithu thaNindhirundha vEdhanaiyai thooNdi vittEn.
Varutthathin sigaramthanai therindhu koNdEn
Varum sarithirathin Edugalil idam vagikka
MaRutthu vaitha uNmaigalai meeNdum uNardhen.

KaNdadhu thAn kanavo alladhu
KANbathu thAn verum bramaiyo
En kaNmunnAl niRkkum avvadivam poiyo
Aiyo nAn pithan thAno illai
Ivvulagam enai tholaittha iruLkAdo.

Tholaithooram senRimmaNNil kuruthi sindhi uyir vaLarthu
Tholaindhu maRaindhu piRamAndhar kaNNukkettA veezhvarindhu
Migudhi enum pulithol pOrtthi
Sirippendra sAmbal poosi
Vetki sadaiviritthu
UyirthAndavam Ada Ayatham AnEn.

KeL en maname
Ini kalangAdhe
SenRadhu, senRu maraindhadhu,
Ini meendum vaaraadhu.
Varuvadhu, varavillai,
KaN Paaradhadhu, poruL puriyaadhadhu.
Iruppadhu iraadhu, Meendum varaadhu.
Indre uNmai iruppadhe uNmai
MaRandhuvidu matravatrai.

--Shyam.

PS : Finding typesetting in Tamil difficult - hence the very arbitrary use of English letters to denote Tamil equivalents - will be helpful if someone can tell me the conventional substitutions for Tamil letters in the English alphabet.

Occam's Razor

2006-08-13T10:46:00.000-07:00

Occam's razor is a thorn in my flesh. I sometimes get pained with the beautiful and simple statement of intent that the razor is: "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity." Most of science and philosophy swears by it and it has really worked wonders in clearing up thought through history. When confused, with many possible hypotheses to explain a set of facts, pare away those that rely on excessive external entities and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth! Basically, it is a whole philosophy, this principle of parsimony - a refusal to believe there can be wastefulness - which has become an aesthetic and ethical theory as well, saying what is wasteful is ugly or bad. Anyway, this has worked beautifully in both information-complete and information-limited systems where we might or might not know everything that is to be known(there are exceptions as there always are but very few on the margin). All that has to be absolutely known is that the system to be analyzed is complete - that there is nothing else that will come in like a deus ex machina and cause radical changes like, for example, a teeny-weeny new fact. This, of course, is a direct consequence of the chaotic nature of life/complex systems, which are highly sensitive to initial conditions and can be affected to a large extent by small disturbances(butterfly effects!). Take the case of Newton's theory of light - it was nice and explained a lot of things until diffraction was observed and suddenly it was no good. And the wave theory(which was actually the older one) went the same way after photoelectric emission and Planck came along. Anyway, the point is, the razor is good when we know what to cut - just throw away the entrails - but if the butcher should reveal a new piece of breast-meat hidden near the leg, what do we do? get a whole new chicken? Scientists and philosophers have embraced the principle so very happily in spite of this basic robustness problem with the principle. Acceptedly the problem arises not internally but as a result of external factors and new data, which can again be carved into a new theory using the same razor. But the fact is we need a more robust principle and, for example, not believe in the superfluity of god just because we have very few facts and invoke William of Ockham vehemently and learnedly!

A Sonnet from the Bosnian, Or: A Study in EBB

2006-08-11T15:01:00.000-07:00

Not to love thee were sin and blasphemy,
Yet Love finds me reluctant minister;
For of aught I can in troth deliver,
I find nought that would be happy to thee.
Still writest thou of Love and Poetry,
When knowest thou my worth? but consider:
What faded leaves lie here, yellow, bitter;
Still lurest me thou to thy heav'nly tree?
But I begin to falter, my Heart's weak;
Nor God helps me who wrought me so frail
That, when commencest thy dear Love to speak,
I feel awed and pitiful Love makes me quail.
So, take me, if thou wilt, thy vassal meek,
And teach me sweet Love in loving detail.

--Shyam.

A Study in Shakespeare

2006-08-07T23:22:00.000-07:00

Shall I call thee fair but surely 'tis a lie
For treats't me thou fair maiden most unfair;
Nor could I call thee apple of mine eye
For absent art thou therefrom through foul and fair.
Or if names name thee false what of my eyes
That see nor beauty nor grace to applaud?
Or my ears that hear no music sweet thy lies?
Or my mind that cannot thy golden image defraud?
Or maybe thou mov'st not in so bleak my ken
But in stronger hearts I see not thy heavenly trace;
Or if thou shouldst feel thyself beyond all men
I see no Gods fight ov'r thy angel-face.
And if thou shouldst think that I love thee yet
Let Love be called blind and I thy forsaken pet.

--Shyam.

hmm.. life.. hmm..

2006-08-07T15:39:00.000-07:00

I am getting used to life. Slowly. To cars passing outside my window in the narrow stretch of road that I can see between McDonald's and the Hacienda. To the cars that queue up below my window to order drive-throughs from McD's. To the Waste Management people coming at 4-5 in the morning and making a ruckus just beyond the fence that I can see below my window. To the morning light glaring at me at 11 in the morning and doing what the alarm I set in my cellphone couldn't do - wake me up. To checking mail every now and then and browsing through cricinfo, soccernet, atptennis, espn, cnn and an assortment of news sites. To reading the blogposts of a few friends and commenting on them sometimes. To orkutting ceaselessly, well, not really, but still spending enough time on it checking on the profiles and scrapbooks of lots of people I have no idea about. To having a bowl of cereals at 1-2 in the afternoon for breakfast and then lunch at 3-4 - rice and dhal and curd or maybe a sandwich or two. To the occassional games on my gamecube and the documentaries on History. To going to school late in the afternoon and holding conference calls with my advisor, discussing my research. To coming back early in the evening and calling up people to play football(soccer ye tainted by the greenback!). To getting back late in the night and cooling down with a glass of gatorade or cold water. To eating dinner often after 12 in the night and sometimes at 3-4 in the morning. To sleeping late in the night/early in the morning after a couple more hours of browsing. And then the next day again. I am getting used to life. Slowly.

pOptimism

2006-08-02T20:14:00.000-07:00

It is never too dark for the sun to shine through some small clearing in the dense jungle. Never too late for the cock to crow the new dawn after an Arctic night. Everything in its own time and everything even if not when expected, will happen as it has to, as it always has. And even if the siren does not sound when the train enters the tunnel, the little blue light at the end of it will show the way to where we all need to go.

The rest is peace.

a Dream (in platitudes)

2006-07-30T15:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had a dream. Yes, I too had a dream. And it was beautiful and it was glorious. It was fucking stupendous for a simple dream. I was walking alone by a lake. The moon was out and all things shone bright. The ripples were calm and the trees just sighed; in the gentle breeze everything was right. Then over the water I saw someone. Floating on it and walking near. Dressed in white, the apparition moved like an angel dove in the summer sky. And a golden finger pointed to me and a silver voice called me by name. I was drawn in by intangible hands. And lifted over the baby waves. When I reached her, I saw her smile. The smile of an infant: a happy, heartwarming, a mysterious smile. I fell in love at first sight, dont blame me. I lost my heart at first sight, dont chide me. She smiled and smiled and I learnt to sigh. A hundred years we stood side by side. Then the devil appeared and whispered in my ear: Talk to her and make her yours. The lady with the dawn disappears when a hundred years of love's morbid fears have brought no word to her fawn-like ears. Ah! fool I was to take advice from wily serpent bred in vice. I opened my mouth and stammered out the uncouth syllables of an ungodly lout. A hundred times I heard myself say, a hundred times I heard myself bray(what it was I cannot say). And when I stopped for breath I saw her move. She glided from my side and soon there was darkness where she stood. The trees closed round and the lake boiled with horrible sounds like hell's turmoil. I tried to call her but no words came from the mouth that had sole cause to blame. And she smiled and smiled and soon was gone. While I started drowning in despond. A hundred years I drowned and drowned and in time I learnt that what goes, comes round. What a fucking idea I say! But of course tomorrow's another day.

Every single paisa counts

2006-07-28T20:49:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, in a small village by the river Kandara, there lived an old merchant with his young wife. The merchant was very pious and had done great sacrifices of cows and horses throughout his life. His wife was also a deeply religious woman who spent her time in serving her husband and praying at the temple. The couple were blessed with lots of riches and the comforts of life but they had a nagging worry: they did not have a child.

The old man looked at this misfortune with his worldly-wise eyes and decided that God had chosen not to bless him with a son. He knew all his good deeds and material wealth would go to waste without a good son but he accepted his fate patiently and lived without complaints. But his wife could not be as placid as he was. She was a woman after all and yearned to become a mother. So she prayed endlessly to the Gods to grant her the single boon of motherhood in return for everything that she possessed.

Years went by and still the prayers went unanswered. The woman had given up hope herself when, one day, the great Guruji appeared in the village. He was known far and wide as a very learned and holy man who had chosen to become an ascetic at a very young age. He had travelled across the blessed Bharatavarsha several times on foot and had cured millions of people of their diseases - bodily, mental and spiritual. The woman considered this arrival a sign of good things to come and persuaded her husband to take her to him.

The Guruji was sitting on a blanket under the banyan tree as was his wont every time he went to a village. A large group of villagers had gathered round him and were listening to his advice. When the merchant and his wife reached the tree, the Guruji smiled strangely at them and said to his audience, "Now I am going to tell you a story. It is the story of a young man who lived in a village not far from here. I want you all to listen to it carefully and when I finish, you should leave for your houses without speaking another word. Close your doors and windows and sleep, and when you wake up tomorrow morning, your world will be entirely different." And he nodded once affably at the puzzled merchant and began his story.

"Not very many years ago, beside this very same river, in a village not far from here, there lived an old merchant with his young wife. The merchant was very pious and had done great sacrifices of cows and horses throughout his life..." and so on and on and finally concluded "...and so Every single paisa counts"

"Now I want you all to leave," he said and laid himself down on the blanket he was sitting on and snored himself to sleep.

A Confession

2006-07-28T12:00:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make. Not too shocking as such things go but a pretty good one nevertheless. But first I want to talk about myself. I am seventeen, a boy, living in an obscure village in a small mudhut with my old mother and young sister. I work for my family, have been working the last five years, and was working for my father before that; but he died suddenly. It is not difficult work actually but it takes time to get used to it; and I get good money, enough even to go and drink spirits from the local store once a week. But I do not go often. It is bad my mother says and she nags me all the next day if I do go. There is very little else to do and the whole village, atleast the entire menfolk, gathers there and it is a nice feeling drowning out many bad feelings.

Anyway to get to my confession. I was thirteen when it happened. There is a huge well in the south-east corner of the village - I dont know why it is there. There used to be very little water and nobody used it except on special festival days when they believe they absolutely have to take a bath and then it is a very painful process getting the water out and cleaning up the entire village with what is at best mucky water; but it is there, has always been there. And when I was a kid older boys used to frighten me with tales of ghosts and demons and whatnot. I still believe in ghosts but I dont think it matters if I meet one - I know my life is already predestined.

But of course my confession. I was thirteen and father had just died. People said it was because he drunk too much, others thought a demon had stolen his will to live. I dont remember much about those days but there was continuous wailing for a couple of days in our hut and mother started wearing only white. I was frightened a bit but I had to be bold for my sister's sake, they said. Then, they burnt his body with a lot of wood and performed many ceremonies so he wouldnt wander as a ghost on earth. After a few days, mother said I couldnt work in father's shop any more and I had to start to work with my cousins.

I am drifting off from my confession. So when I was thirteen, about the time when father had just died, near the well in the south-east corner of the village which was supposedly haunted but mostly was dry, one dark night, I was walking alone. I did not go walking alone in the night those days but that one time I was feeling really bad and did not know what to do. Our village is too small and I did not want to cross its boundaries - that usually brings bad luck they say. So when I had walked long enough, without really looking where I was going, I ended up near the well. I was a little scared but I just decided to be a man, as they said I was, now that father was dead. And I kept walking, and just to show the well I wasnt afraid, I went near it.

Just around that time I felt the need to relieve myself. I had been walking around for quite sometime and fear was working on me too. I saw around for some tree or ditch nearby and then it struck me - there was a huge well below my feet and if it lacked one thing it absolutely required, that was water. And I decided to relieve myself in the well. Well it isnt a very big thing when you are a child you know but you learn things only slowly in this world. And so after doing what I had done I was very happy and tripped my way back home and slept soundly. One of the last few nights I would ever get a moment's rest.

Nothing seemed wrong then. The next few days were exactly similar to the previous few days, only a little hotter; but we were used to such spells. But when the rainy season came but no rains, people started getting worried. And then the year passed and the next year came round and still there was no water. The priest was asked for his rain charms and a hundred gods were prayed to but not a drop. And every single year till this date it has gone on. Only the well has water all the time these days but the people find it strange that it should have a salty taste. Nobody is sure if it is a curse or a miracle. But I know I cannot sleep too much any more. I dont go near the south-east corner unless I really have to.

And that is my confession.

a day in the life

2006-07-25T20:43:00.000-07:00

A middling moon I see out of my window
Growing shadows on its fair surface
Long, short, long, short
Swish, swish goes her skirt
And I stop my lunar dreams.

What is it, I wonder, that keeps me up
Till the light is back where it all began
Yesterday in the early dawn?
It must not be long now before
I can go back to my morning dreams.

In the middle of the day a couple of sun-rays
Sneak past my barricaded window waking me up
To start another day from where I left off
Losing a few breaths, a few minutes of my life
Every hour to the unforgiving Hour.

And then it is evening and there is no time
To remember the day that is still today
What is gone, is gone
And there is some more to come before I see
The pock-marked moon and her elegant stride.

-Shyam

Twenty Two Steps

2006-05-07T02:44:00.000-07:00

Twenty-two steps. Up and down. Each a foot high, and long enough for five people to stand on comfortably next to each other. Made with the solid granite quarried in the outer districts - built to last. Sharp, jagged corners here and there but in most places well-rounded. Hot in summer, cool in winter; slippery when it rains. Crows and pigeons - lots of them - wait on these all summer, flying away when men and women walk up or down. Leading up to the one place I now dread to go - the Department of XYZ. Twenty-two days in these last three months, and each day twice, I have climbed these steps; now I know them all intimately. Still my application rests, waiting to be seen, to be sent across the room, about the Office, over it to the higher-ups and, then, taking the same mysterious route, back to me, hopefully, with the one signature that it requires below all the hundreds of meaningless words in those dusty, sweat-wetted sheets, words that will attain their final meaning in making me the sole owner of a few puny acres in the outskirts, where I will dig out more of this granite, root it out, so I can feed my family a few crumbs a day till my son gets to sit in this same Office to receive my neighbour's son in his long, tiresome pilgrimage to the centre of meaninglessness. And I could have been saved all the trouble if my father had had the twenty-two rupees that he was asked to pay as expeditionary charge twenty-two years ago - now I have the twenty-two rupees but the bribes are not so small any more.

Chronicles of the Great War, Or: How We are all Had, Then Forgotten, and Then Had Again

2006-05-03T00:57:00.000-07:00

"Show me, O Muse! the great things that be
In the inmost caverns of bottomless thine sea
Where hidest thou from me what I most yearn to see -
Thee!"
"The answer, mate, is Forty-two"
"What, pray?"
"Shut the f*** up and let me sleep"

---------

The times are hard when people have to look back to the past for Hope and all that can inspire is buried in the cavernous deeps of Myth and Legend; much more so when they have to do it on empty stomachs and on the orders of their masters. But the Great War was not myth nor legend nor were the great kings and soldiers who fought in it mere figments of a master-storyteller's imagination. They were more real indeed than what we are now in these pitiful times and they will be too when we give way to others who may be no better than us. What is myth and legend is what has survived of that Truth in its countless retellings, as a shroud well-used is worn away in time and bears merely the superficial imprints of a hundred masters it cloaked. But as every image of the Sol partakes atleast in part of its heat and light and perfection, each myth and legend though no more than story, contains the essence that is the Universal Truth of the Great War, its Causes and Consequences, shaping the World as we know it today. All this being merely apologous with respect to the present treatment of the great subject matter, in a word, to end with all prology and, To get on with the story,

In his thirteenth year after assuming Supreme Control of the Great Zones(Mandalas in some ancient tongues), the Great King was faced with a terrible question - that ancient problem in Philosophy: How to achieve Maximum Gain with Minimum Risk. It was trying enough to manufacture gain when needs and desires were greater than the means most people possessed; but to avoid risk - that was just about impossible. This of course is inconceivable today when we have the Great Machines and the Great Mechanics but we talk not of Today but of the Lost Times and, To understand this History, one needs to understand the world the Great King and his people(and also those who were not his people) lived in. For it is easy to forget that these were not the same people we are today nor was their world the same; their culture and their economics was different and so were their actions based on their particular beliefs and ideas. But, of course, little is known about it all and so we will continue inspite of all who dissent and split hairs. For it is easy to forget that these were people too and related to us not merely in their being Men but, even more intimately, for they made us and shaped us, both causally and creatively.

Anyways, the Great King had this problem and so he summoned his people from out everywhere and decided to tell them to bugger off to the different lands that were about and around and outside of his control where people lived who cared no two hoots for him and get them all to accept that what they were doing was all wrong and to give him what little they had and get from him nothing so his people could have more in the sense that they could have something atleast from these other folks and he could get them to thank him for having brought in something from the cold where no man had cared to venture before and if these people decided not to come in all quiet and hands tied or up or whichever way was good, he could bring them his fire and brimstone and all of that and let them have it real bad and then his people will be happy for they have a great leader.

Now these folks were pretty smart and knew which way was which and said to our King's people they would not come unless they got something in return like all those other people who had come in earlier to be subjects and get something more out of it than merely being called Citizens of the Great Free Zones or whatever and this made our King go all purple, then white, then blue, finally red and he said they were all a pack of thieves and liars and robbers and what-not, which upset some of these people, who were really liars and robbers and what-else-not and they went to War.

The Great War began. It was bad at first. Lots of people were killed. Then fewer people were left. So not many were killed. There were Heroes on all sides. And many villains. The Great Zones were hit hard. The outer lands were hit even harder. People started praying again. They started trusting in Science again. And built up Laboratories to the Gods. Where they shredded pigs and cheese. It helped them understand. They made better weapons to kill more effectively. They made Laws once more and followed them. And learnt new meanings of words and so Languages multiplied. New books were written so moths and bookworms multiplied. New Colleges were built and so many things multiplied. And there was plenty again. Not many people left though.

The King saw all this. He was happy for sometime, then sad. Things were not going either way. His problem was not getting solved. But he was a good King. He wanted his people to be happy. Atleast when he forgot that that was not what he wanted. He also had a bad memory and some bad teeth. And so soon he forgot his problem and saw that his people were happy. The other people were happy too sometimes. The Great War was making things multiply. There were fewer sad people everywhere. Nobody wanted to kill his neighbour or riot on Sundays. And he was becoming very famous. So he led his people on and fought a long long War. Nobody knows how long it lasted.

But as all things do, it came to an end - hopefully. And we all know the answer to the riddle - the fox burying his grandmother under the holly bush.

Of Taxes and Toothaches

2006-04-03T14:56:00.001-07:00

Nothing like a good toothache to teach a true sense of perspective. And I have been in enough pain the last few days to understand that tax cuts should not be given to the ICC for the Champions Trophy thing that they hold every now and then for fat bonuses. The GoI of course refused to give 100% tax cuts twice earlier and the venues were changed but this time they have relented and the tournament is all set to start October 7 later this year in India. I dont mind having to watch 22 matches in 21 days but it sure irks me that a monstrosity like the ICC should deem itself worthy of being awarded tax-free revenues of something like a few hundred crores or whatever the final figure is bound to be.

And it brings up related incidents where sportsmen and celebrities walk away with their millions in their pockets because they have "brought fame to the country": Sachin's Ferrari and Bandra flat and a host of other such things. I accept that these people bring pride to the country and make their countrymen believe in whatever needs to believed in according to their party line. They also offer free propaganda and advertising services for the government by doing what they do in the eyes of the world audience. But the pay and the patronage should have bounds surely and we have to consider that atleast some of them do not need either at an advanced stage in their careers where they can easily maintain themselves in luxury. I am not suggesting that we tax them inordinately but atleast get what is due by law or a percentage of it to show people like me that fame does not mean never having to pay for lunch. The other side of the question is all visible to me and I know poor Sachin can't expect to earn his millions the 50 years of his life after he retires nor did he have to spend little to get to where he is but there is the rub, I say. Prasanna languishes somewhere forgotten, Sania struggles and finally finds sponsors; and how much of all the money that flows goes to help needy sportspeople if not the general needy?

To return to the point of the post, lateral and direct employment benefits, the government hopes, will far outweigh the cost of letting the ICC and the BCCI do their thing but it sure can get some more from the taxes and avoid being held up to ransom by an inconsequential world(busy)body. And anyways I think it a travesty to let people get away with such an awful lot of money under the excuse, "This is a very important tournament, generating a lot of revenue which is being used for the development of the game in associate member countries and elsewhere. We have distributed over 100 million dollars from this tournament's revenues from 2002 onwards". Ouch!

New York City

2006-03-28T23:37:00.000-08:00

I did not know I liked large, fast, cosmopolitan American cities until I visited New York City last weekend. Went to meet up with a few hostelmates from my undergrad years and enjoyed almost every moment of the two days I spent in and around the city. The trip was planned in the thirteenth hour and, on the appointed day, I duly overslept, paining the cabman who had simply driven away by the time I came out 15 minutes late. A roommate thankfully took us(me and a friend, Krishnan) to the airport; but in Detroit I missed the connecting flight, ambling along peacefully and expecting Krishnan to hold the plane up for me. And, after spoiling the afternoon plans my friends had by landing a few hours late, I made sure there was more tearing of hairs as I got off the Metro on 33rd Street, Queens, instead of 33rd, Manhattan, where we were supposed to meet. Funny how there never can be enough logic and organization for some people who just don't get it. But it was quite some fun for me as I got to see the 'real' New York, moving around in buses and the subway, watching schoolchildren and grandmothers and people of all kinds of description and dress and nationality and what-not going their daily way, helping each other where they could. Nice to see the self-organizing behaviour that seemed somehow to create order in spite of all the chaos that promised to take over any moment. There was always some commotion, restlessness, lots of life and a fire truck to be seen every five minutes and much of this I had missed as an Indian living in a quiet, neat, backwoods town in the Midwest the last couple of years.

Anyways, the little time we had that evening, we spent in Times Square, lugging about our luggage, entering sundry shops and clicking away to glory on a camera borrowed from a friend, all typical 'Desi' activities. Dinner was at Dosa Hut, a nice place in Little India, New Jersey and off to Edison, NJ, for the night. The next day was spent in visits to Mme Tussaud's, the Rockefeller Center, Central Park and lunch at Saravana Bhavan. Also managed to squeeze in some time to lose some money in Atlantic City casinos, and eat dinner standing at a Domino's pizzadeliveria. One more day to go and that was used up in seeing Brooklyn Bridge, Wall Street, a botched visit to the Statue of Liberty(yes I went to NYC and didnt see the Lady with the Torch) and some random rambling. Met some friends of a friend for dinner and by the time we had walked a few blocks, it was time to get back as we all had flights to catch early Monday morning. The return back was peaceful except for the curious propeller-driven excuse of a plane that took us from Detroit to South Bend. It was a thing to behold from the ages, complete with an airhostess who refused to let people exchange seats because 'everything was computer-generated and it was critical that we sit in our appointed places'. Wish there were more like her.

It was nice to get away for a while and the loud and anonymous sights and sounds from a million people busily engaged in ignoring one another were very comforting. There was private space aplenty and enough solitude without loneliness and the possibility of drifting in and out of time every now and then. Mechanical life at its glorious freaking best, coupled with the expanse and calm reassurance of Central Park and the Hudson shoreline; bright brilliant signboards contrasting every third block with a quiet roomy museum or gallery or just a simple alley where few people walked. A city I would love to live in for a few months at least but not now - now back to work.

Juvenilia

2006-03-16T22:23:00.000-08:00

It is a good thing we have each our own definitions of who a fool is; each man's genius is someone else's fool.

It is not necessary to assume that others judge us all the time just because they do.

God is not an infeasible hypothesis; He is just an expensive one.

Happiness and Sorrow: twin pricks destroying the mellow bubble of Life.

A lot of fun can be had on a full stomach and full pockets.

Two words, a smile, a kiss, two sighs, a few moans and an eternity of groans.

Art affords the ordinary person pleasure without the pangs and pain without the hurt.

Thomas Aquinas proved that God cannot make a man an ass.

Science for centuries has been about the removing of fleas from a dog's back.

It is not allowed to die of small-pox in this century; AIDS is OK.

The world will go berserk one person at a time.

Read this, this and this for people who inspired this post.

The Land of the Hippo

2006-03-10T23:18:00.000-08:00

Prologue:
Two words - that is all I have for you. I am surprised I can manage even those after all that has happened. Not that I blame you but you should have known how it would hurt me. And it did hurt a lot. At least initially when I was still blind. I mean blind to the things of the world. Anyway it is all in the past now. The present is all I have. And the two words that I have for you.

The Argument:
The hippo lives in bloats. It spans a few decades and weighs a few tonnes metric. Though ponderous heavy, it runs fast on land, floating or propelling on water faster than man can. It uses blood sweat for protection against the sun and was mistaken for the horse by the Greeks. Later it was found to be kin of the pig whereas recent studies make a whale of it. Wars threaten extinction of the hippo but conservationists have found hippos that bond well with 100 year-old tortoises.

The Fable:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a Wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great Fall
And all the King's Horses
And all the King's Men
Did not look Humpty Dumpty in the eye again.

Epilogue:
I switched on the TV at the right moment. There was this piece about Jay Bennish, a Colorado high school social studies teacher. He had been discussing Bush's State of the Union address in class and had claimed that America was the most violent nation on earth. He had also likened Bush's statements to some of Adolf Hitler's. A student in the class Sean, clandestinely taped 20 minutes of what he calls 'all this rant' on his MP3 player and released it to authorities through his father. School authorities moved in swiftly and are now investigating if Bennish actually crossed the 'line' in the lecture. The incident has sparked a furious debate over academic freedom and differences between conservatives and liberals is beginning to show markedly. People claim it is just one of many incidents that have been sparked by the Bush administration's fear-and-alarm tactics post-9/11. Academics are afraid the overarching fear for security is cutting into First Amendment rights as much as it is placing curbs on the providing of any meaningful education to children. There seems to be no clear decision possible in the current scenario where terror attacks seem to have subsided but fear of more such attacks has increased beyond all reasonable proportions. I, for one, do not intend to fly just before Christmas out of JFK or OHare.

Questions:
Q. What are the two words?
Q. What is a hippo? How much does it weigh?
Q. Why and how did Humpty Dumpty climb the wall?
Q. When did Bush give the Union address? What MP3 player did Sean use to tape Bennish's lecture?

An imitation of Donne

2006-02-27T11:00:00.000-08:00

Each man is an island, entire in himself; each man is a whole, wrought alone. In thought and deed, man does employ acquaintance; but in the entirety of his life he has but few shared moments. Whom we call a friend today becomes an acquaintance tomorrow and is forgotten the next day and a new friend comes and knocks at our hearts' doors: so little of permanence exists in our relations. As two bells that ring for the faithful at the same time, not by design or art but out of mere probability, two hearts resonate together for a while; the next day ask not if one tolled before the other - that no man knows. And if you belong to some community, desire not that it last forever, for that never may be given to things of man; ask instead that you may enjoy the company the little way it lasts and then walk your own way to your own home.

Rang de Basanti

2006-02-26T23:22:00.000-08:00

Watched Rang de Basanti in Chicago this past weekend. A good movie to watch with decent performances from all involved. The story is typical of the Yuva Bharat Jagran theme that seems to be a solid formula for success the last few years and, apart from a few minor blemishes, plays its way neatly to the end. Tight tanktops, Aamir Khan, patriotic pilots, sacrificing mothers, apathetic and fun-loving youth, fiery and innocent patriot, college atmosphere, Delhi, Bhagat Singh and the revolutionary drama in the backlights, tight tanktops - pretty much all anyone could ask for to start a neo-Patriotic movie. I even shed my usual weekly quota of 30 teardrops all in one sitting and am not too sad about it. Just that it all had to come to an end.

It is a movie that raises questions and that is always one good thing about any movie. Only the questions that this movie raised shamed and frightened me. And the one question that has remained with me is: Why are such movies made? And the only answer I could come up with is something that Aristotle talked about all those long years ago: To provide a catharsis of feeling. In more understandable terms: So I can go about the next whole week without shedding any tears for the thousands who will die in India of the same irrational causes that they died of last week; so I can earn my comfortable living in a land a few thousand miles away and attempt to bridge the gap by attending Bhangra Dances every third Friday night instead of the usual disco; so I can wipe off the debt I owe certain individuals and institutions back home by calling India 'Home' and sending a few dollars every other month and purge myself of pity and kindness; so I don't feel bad about myself for doing all this and feel good that I sympathise with the patriotic and the good who throng theaters in Chicago and New York to watch the premiere.

Of course all this does not mean the folks back home are not without their share of patriotic feeling. They drive the production of these movies after all. And what do they do? They feel happy they did not go to America; they feel satisfied and smug knowing they are contributing to the growth of a resplendent India by the mere fact of their six-figure salaries; they feel their struggles and woes are what makes them Indian: their Indianness in the face of adversity and their perseverance inspite of their Indianness. Solid lumps of popcorn gets stuck in their throats and that is true feeling; the Cokes they drank in the interval leaks out of their eyes and that is true feeling; an indignation rises up at the people cracking obscene jokes near them and that is true feeling. What is not true feeling indeed?

Are we to believe that there is no patriotism except that engendered by rhetoric? Are we to believe that a few hours of big-screen entertainment will make better people of our youth? What history do I know? Who was Bhagat Singh? Or Azad? Or Bismil or Ashfaq? What did it mean to them: this idea called freedom, all this talk of revolution? What was India in their eyes? What have I done that I shake my head in appreciation and wonder at what the actors do?

In every sense of the word, RdB is a very necessary movie, no mistaking that; but the question is about how it is perceived, how ingested in the age we live in. When a country starts hating itself, it destroys itself; but when it starts loving itself too much, it forgets itself. RdB is an offering at the altar of a country that loves itself so much it does not know that the apathy of its children is the harbinger of skepticism or, worse, hatred; a country that believes every passion expended for her sake is an expression of love; a country that is yet to realize the fact that if last year was Bhagat Singh at Bollywood, next year will be the Rani of Jhansi. And India is happy with her youth, with people like me, who merely write and talk and spout nonsense. Right she is to be happy for she has forgotten herself but there still are the millions who need to be fed and clothed and brought to the theatre to watch RdB and others of its ilk.

Questions abound and one way of answering them is to turn the other way; another is to try and make the best out of every situation. So I will try and learn what it is Bhagat Singh attempted to do; learn what the characters in RdB mean to me and to that nebulous, glorious thing I call my country India. And then to act on what I have learnt and that before it is too late. There are people who have appreciated the movie better than I could and who took more out of watching it than I have and I hope I will learn what it means to empathise with people who find purpose in life greater than personal profit.

All in all a movie worth the watch.

Can a blind man paint?

2006-02-26T23:08:00.000-08:00

Can a blind man paint?

Yes he can: Painting is the act of imprinting on paper

No he cannot: Painting is the re-presentation of a visual sensation on paper

Yes he can: Painting is order in space, time and colour

No he cannot: Painting is the expression of ideas perceived through sight presented for analysis to the visual imagination

Yes he can: Painting is the communication of ideas using colour and 2D space as medium and the eye as receptor

Can a blind man paint?
What is Painting?
What is Music? Poetry? Language? Life?

Memories

2006-02-22T01:23:00.000-08:00

It rained yesterday.
I was away most of the day
Watching myself in the murky shade
Of a thousand leaves that had refused to fade
Inspite of autumn's grim facade
And I missed the falling rain.

It rained again today.
I slept away most of the day
Dreaming of rain and a gentle breeze
Of the bearing away of a thousand dead leaves
That yesterday had made me grieve
And miss the falling rain.

-Shyam.

Laws: Prescriptive and Proscriptive

2006-02-05T22:10:00.000-08:00

Laws and lawmaking is an interesting(and exhausting) subject of study. Not surprising given the variety of ideas as to the nature of public association people have held over time. There have been hundreds and hundreds of legal systems, each in a different time and place practised as the "true" and perfect system by thousands of people. Thorough analysis needing a Montesquieu to come by, a simplistic picture can always be drawn: the major systems can all be classified under two heads - the "Prescriptive" systems and the "Proscriptive" systems. As the name suggests, Prescriptive systems tend to list out all the possible things that can be done legally. They are the manuals the television company prints out so you know what exactly can be done with the black box on your table. Most ancient laws, being in essence laws derived from religion, including the Hindu Smrithis, the Hebrew Torah, the Islamic Koran, all fall into this category; while modern examples include the Fascist and Communist Constitutions, which are similar to the religious books in that their purpose is to exalt a demigod in the form of the State or the Dictator. Proscriptive Laws, on the other hand, are not mere rulebooks or manuals but serve an altogether different function. Their purpose is more cautionary than hortatory and they tend to serve like the maps a pioneer uses in his exploration of new land: marking off whirlpools and quagmires while leaving large tracts blank and open to investigation. Modern laws, on the whole, tend to be proscriptive rather than prescriptive, given that it is unrealistic to make a codebook for all the variety of human experience in modern life; ancient republican laws, secular and mercantile aspects of medieval justice and most practical private transactions belong to the class of Proscriptive laws where certain acts are forbidden under penalty whereas any others may be chosen freely unless they are themselves forbidden as the system evolves. The development of Science and the spread of a questioning and agnostic intelligence has ensured that Proscriptive Law seems obviously rational whereas there are pros and cons to both. The biggest advantage that Prescriptive Law has over its Proscriptive counterpart is that it is comprehensive. It is extremely simple and complete. This is also is its biggest disadvantage as there are only so many things that are possible. On the other hand, the Judge cannot possibly err and there can be no controversies once the system as a whole is accepted. X has to do Y and if he does anything else he is punished. The punishment itself might depend on what he does actually but really it is that simple. There is no need to change the books except, if necessary, to add or modify the penalties for specific acts. Proscriptive Laws, on the other hand, are very general and nebulous. If X does Y, he is punished but what if he does Z? The potentialities of man being practically boundless, there is constant need for revision and updating of the rulebooks. Subjectivity becomes key and decision-making abilities in the Judge are tested severely as he effectively becomes Lawmaker or his accessory(in the other system, there was need for just one Just and Able Lawmaker). This idea is inherently logical in a democratic system where the Law is made by the people and it is absurd to expect an unchanging Law to be accepted over succeeding generations along with unending progress. New situations do and will demand new regulations and any imaginative Prescriptive Lawmaker will be hard put to provide for everything. There are thus things to be said for and against both systems in their simple elemental forms. In practice, however, any system is bound to be an admixture of both philosophies, the dominant element merely serving to help in classification and giving an indication of the tendencies of the judge and the judiciary. These dominant elements are what jar and clash in the march of time as progress brings in new problems to be solved and a necessity for uniformity is recognized as part of the new global community. Details can always be modified and adjusted to suit new discoveries within a system but an international law will have to address the fundamental difference in philosophy between, for example, predominantly Prescriptive Islamic Laws and the predominantly Proscriptive Western ideas of Democracy. This is a problem that needs to be solved before integration can be achieved across cultural legal boundaries.

An Ode to Pain

2005-12-12T23:09:00.000-08:00

It was a glorious world a long time ago. There were summers and springs and colours falling gently in a soothing breeze. There were smiling faces and happy thoughts and loads of cheerful things to talk about. There were merry sounds circling in the wind; but of course that was a long long time ago. Now there is only a perpetual winter and no warmth even to relieve the pain of a dead, cold monotony. But atleast the wall does not move. It is a thing of white layered over with the ashes of a hundred memories. A projector into the past and the future. A reminder of things that blur in the brain, of all the nothingness that awaits in the future. A brick wall. A wall of burnt clay. And I can stare at it and know I still am, as it is. Not much more to do now.

I am alive. I eat, breathe, sleep, shit and do all those vulgar things that make up everyday life. Or is it the daily death. And I breed maggots near the window too where the sun glances in occassionally. Of course I was not always like this. I used to believe too in movement and the frustration of hopes. I used to run and jump and conjure ideas to change the world. I remember vividly picking up my first yellow banana peel lying on the gray, cold cobblestones in a far away city and dumping it into a cold, gray dustbin on the busy corner so nobody slipped on it in their hurry to get to where they were going. It was a Sunday and I think now it was odd there were no carnivals that day. Sundays seem to remind me now of carnivals when people danced merry jigs on the streets and traipsed home jolly. But maybe I do not have a good memory. Or they just stayed in to rest from their Creations.

There were rats where I live now. Rats. Now I. Living off the refuse of the daily drones. And before the rats, there was a nightclub where people used to dance Friday nights and Saturdays too. Shows how things change. The worm that eats the king that eats the fish that eats the worm. Full circle. Men in between so things go their sweet way in a hurry. The rats were chased off of course when I still had the mind to. Now I just sit and stare.

Someone once told me I was destined for great things. He made me what I am. Not that he knew I would end up this way but still. Maybe I should just get up now and walk away. Only I have forgotten how to. Not to walk but to walk away. He taught me that too. You just don't walk away from things. You take them on. And I am still fighting the good fight, am I not? Waiting. Sitting. Refusing to walk out through the tempting door that brings in voices every now and then, voices that make me want to shout out loud sometimes, "Help" maybe, or "Save yourselves". There is no knowing what I would shout. Not when I know I will not.

I see her face often these days. A pity. I couldn't when she was near and now she will never be here. To see what I see. Those eyes in the first days were always lighted with some pretty fire. And her hands used to dance. Strange ways hands have of calling you near and pushing you away. And then slowly the light died from the eyes and the hands couldn't move any more. They could not even hold mine for support as she fell away. But there was no time then as there is now. Let the lost bury the lost. It was a time to strive, to seek and to find. And now I find her here. Strange.

Words too come to mind. Pretty poems and pointless rhymes. And the Moonlight Sonata blaring from the icecream vendor's moving cart. Painted red and blue with shades of white and gold, he used to be a favorite after school. After playtime. Before homework. I went to his funeral too. By chance. Was on the grounds for a friend's and they brought him in. Recognized the Beethoven and couldn't stop crying for a while. Red eyes. Good after a friend's funeral. Leaves an impression of trustworthiness.

The lizards on the wall make funny sounds. Not like the ones back home. They used to hide from mother. Came out only when it was really dark and I the only one to spot them. Mother was always one for order. The lizards their due and the milkman his. Cried a lot when I went off to college. Cost her a lot of second jobs. And early breakfasts. She was always there to see me off. To school, to college, to work. Had to see her off myself when the complications came. Heart troubles they said. A fist's worth of a life's pain.

Father took it pretty well considering. He had second jobs too and sometimes a third. Never was around long enough to see movies with. Friends are for seeing movies with. Fathers bring in the money to get popcorn and tickets. There were sounds at night of doors opening and the wood creaking but not much to recall from the early days. Later, he used to hold hands with Mother when the train was leaving, waving after it was out of sight. But he is out of sight now. Has been a long time since I did not see him.

There were a lot of friends in school and lots more in college. Fun to spend time and money with. Laze around, fool around, do fun things with, and then it is time to leave. Some stayed but not many. I still talked to them until it was time to move up or down - depends on who was on which elevator. And a few of them will come too if I send out invitations to my own funeral. Have to do it and see how many do come. Like Mark Twain or Huck Finn.

Then work. Lots of it. More than anything else. The great race and the big dreams. Offices all shiny and money crisp like cardboard or plastic. Thing you buy things with to do things with. Had lots of it in my time and lots of them too. Now no place to keep them. So dumped it all outside a friend's house. Might be of help to him. No use to me any more.

I came here quite by accident. Don't remember exactly when or how but I do remember not looking for this place. One of those things that strike your fancy at first sight. Draw you in and you don't want to leave. A symbol. Of what you are, what you have been, what you want to be. An old, failing place where worms breed. Eating away slowly what was once a nightclub, a dump. A memory of things that have been. I don't have much now, don't see much, don't eat much and consequently don't shit much. But I am alive. And there is the wall. In front of me. All the time.

Questions

2005-12-01T02:49:00.000-08:00

Two questions keep plaguing me: What has life given me that I did not pry out of unreluctant hands for myself? What have I done for myself that was not given me by helping hands and friendly hearts? The first makes me despair of life, making me the centre(and everything) of my world, erasing all meaning out of life; the second makes me despair of ever doing anything that could not have been done by anybody else in the same position. Every so often I feel glad of having accomplished something and then I realise that either I merely am a parasite feeding off others, or horribly worse, it is all merely another short respite from a meaningless trudge towards the top of a hill knowing the rock will roll down any minute. The life of Sisyphus on one hand and that of a swaddled baby on the other. Which do I choose for my greater glory? What ring of thorns do I devise for myself to get out of all this holy mess? Who will I forgive and by whom forgiven? That makes more questions but they do not plague me.

Encyclopedia Satyrica Vol 33: Tragedy to Travesty

2005-10-11T01:24:00.000-07:00

Just figured this one out: When people talk of a tragedy, what they actually mean is that things did not go as they expected; or, more strongly, what happened was completely unexpected. Sounds more like the definition of a surprise or a mishap, but I guess the difference is one of degree and what we are ready to condone as a minor mishap is but the seed of what could have been a modern Rape of the Lock. What is good about my definition of a tragedy is that it is neat and carries all the way from the minor tragedies in the life mundane - as when the neighbour's cat frolics all over the patterned India tablecloth minutes before the guests arrive - to the more elaborate ones involving Denmark and something rotting in it.

No tragedy is expected except by the front-seat bore, who was force-fed Shakespeare while his brothers were out painting the town red, and takes it out on his bored-and-snoring neighbour with all the vengeance of an enthusiastic pedant. Nor is any forgiven for the inconvenience it causes mice and men whose plans go all awry. The only sensible difference is in perception of, and reaction to them. The simple tragedies are almost all similar and involve, in their resolution, merely the shaking of the head and muttered disbelief; the complex ones, like unhappy families, are each tragedies in their own special way. Would have been much better had it been the other way - then every tsunami or earthquake would be handled professionally by men in white aprons and yellow batons.

Nothing can quite rubbish the amount of feeling that spouts out of the lachrymal glands of stone-faced men and powdered women when the earth quakes and indulges in postprandial eruptions - indeed they are all minor miracles, what with all the lack of exercise, in decades, of the delicate muscles that have atrophied past their expiry date - but is man so much the centre of his small microcosm that he is all that matters. Silly question that. Of course man is all that matters and whatever happens without man's consent is unacceptable. We will train ourselves to expect certain things like rain in the first week of Wimbledon and a quake every year in the Japanese archipelago but that does not mean we are fine with finding the neighbour's laundry in our basket or water bodies rising at will against our express instructions. We will label them all tragedies and file them in our drawers, wet ourselves in the right places according to the magnitude of the tragedy, console oursleves and others involved directly and indirectly, enquire after the families of friends who might have been forced to take part in the unfolding, take stock of market movements and our weatherbeaten lives, shrug, pray, perform, converse, and act, and so acting, add to our stock of life.

The Economics of Corruption

2005-09-03T22:09:00.000-07:00

Just wondering about the effects of corruption. The aim of money in society, it seems to me, is the redistribution of wealth, originally in the form of natural resources, among its members according to certain criteria. In the past physical might seems to have been the primary factor deciding property. Then it was innovation and cunning. Now intelligence and popularity are high on the list. Whatever be the criteria(and they change with time, which is to say they are arbitrary), if somebody is good(or bad?) enough to bend the rules of society in their favour, which is what corruption is essentially, the end of redistribution is achieved though according to a more radical means. People who are not entitled to much, as per the standard rules of society, get more than their fair share. The main problem is not that there is not enough for others or even that it goes against our sense of fairplay and rightness, but, more fundamentally, this creates an instability. The rules of organized society are undermined and the money, though in circulation, which is good in the immediate sense for the economic structure, works against itself. The rules of society give value to the means of exchange of resources within society - money - and now the value of these rules is brought down by money itself. In an anarchy money will lose much of its value and it is towards this form of arbitrariness that corruption leads. By making money all-important, corruption leads us on to a society where money is not important. This alone should make corruption bad. But, in another sense, corruption might just make us re-evaluate our ideals and principles, creating a new meaning and value for money. It was a corruption of the chivalric code of conduct that led to the upsurge of the mercantile class in the medieval period and now, all but the most dreamy-eyed, decidedly laugh down as absurd the ideas of Ivanhoe and his band of knights. Now, we have the software engineer and the Wall Street broker. We might just see corruption change our way of evaluating success and well-deserved prosperity.

Baasha-bashing?

2005-08-26T02:34:00.000-07:00

Another late night/early morning repeat movie. This time Baasha. Stylish and totally Rajnikanth-esque. One of my favourite scenes is the 'Unmaiya sonnen' - 'I told the truth' - dialogue, when the lecherous medical college owner takes back the indecent proposal he offers Rajni's sister, on coming to know that the auto-driver Manickam was the underworld don Baasha a few years before. The movie is littered with dialogues and snippets of populist messages. Not too bad an idea though, considering people whistled their happiness through more than a 100 days when the movie was released.

A few points. Of course the movie is silly and no point indicating isolated bloopers. But some tickle whatever makes you smile the wry one on lean days. The auto-driving population has to be humoured but parading a pregnant lady to convey a dubious message in the first song did not make much sense. Also noticed that old mothers in Tamil movie have to mouth the 'Nalla pasanga pa' dialogue, with an affectionate smile, at her breed of youngsters, atleast once a movie or we know the father made a wrong choice in his second bride. Near the climax, the Inspector calls for the control room to trace a call after the line gets cut (Purists will say the receiver is left dangling off the hook and so a trace is possible but whatever). The funny thing here is the attempt to be perfectly logical. And then of course the brother knows just whose records to look up after seeing Rajni pointing his index finger up against henchman Janakaraj's objections. The hand-kissing part in the Baasha scenes are awesome and what is with humble heroes bearing unjust blows with broad smiles? And the windshield-shattering-with-a-log idea to stop a car is surely borrowed from movies with more equestrian participation! One final note: Isn't 'Nee pesum Thamizh azhagu' - 'The tamil you speak is beautiful' - going way too overboard?

Kannathil Muthamittal

2005-08-20T03:46:00.000-07:00

Saw Kannathil Muthamittal again. It is, in my opinion, one of the best movies I have ever seen, possessing beauty in form and content. The music and the lyrics, the dialogues, the characters well-etched and portrayed, the direction and the editing, indeed just about everything is nice. A couple of thoughts are in order now that I have spent nearly 3 more hours on it, having seen the movie a few times already.

When Amudha runs away from school the first time, she is found in the Perambur Railway Station. Peculiar, Mani Ratnam's attachment to the railways and trains: quite a few of his movies include an important scene on a train or in a railway station. A few movies that come to mind immediately are: Agni Nakshathiram(the song), Dhalapathi(the child abandoned in a train), Nayakan(the girl asking Kamal about her mother), Dil Se(the song and the opening sequence), Alaipayuthe(lots of scenes), Thiruda Thiruda(the premise itself), AE(Meera Jasmine and Siddharth have scenes on trains), Kannathil Muthamittal(see above) etc. I do not think it is exhaustive and maybe I am taking a piece of coincidental observation too far but..

The central theme in the movie is expressed of course in the beautiful Vellai Pookal song(a song for peace to dawn in a world torn in pieces by conflict), with each of the other songs providing variations or minor themes. For example, Vidai Kodu catches the effects of social displacement; Kannathil Muthamittal, the love-hate relationship between the child and the parents; the short ditty when Madhavan and Simran open their hearts, the idealistic couple; the other two major songs are intros to Amudha's character and to Sri Lanka itself. All fine songs and beautiful sequences though the songs I have not named are not favourites of mine.

The script is also a mixed bag of many ideas. It raises issues about adoption, terrorism, war, idealism, adjustment etc. One thing that matters a lot these days is terrorism and that will be the subject of my next long post.

Small change

2005-08-02T23:48:00.000-07:00

He held up the rupee coin in the light of the dying streetlamp. The light that danced off the tarnished metal in the silent gloom made him flinch but he kept looking, eyes half-closed buddha-like. No, not in greed or in triumph but in wonder; that this was all one got for braving the merciless sun overhead and underfoot, running in rags passed as heirlooms from generation to generation, begging of glum men wandering lost in the park or at the railway station in words that made little sense. There was magic in it, he understood. And those who knew how to use it, when they had drained all the magic off it, threw it away to kids like him: worthless; but it helped live. One day, he told himself, I'll get a new coin, and then I will not need to run ever in the night when the police constable comes among us drunk, venting his fury on our bare bones; and I will throw the used coin on the face of that filthy rat from the opposite bank who stole from me the red car at the traffic signal yesterday.

He held up the rupee coin in the light of the dying streetlamp. He saw in the light that danced around the edges of the coin, the laughter of the young girl in the coffeeshop. Frayed and bright, nervous, waiting to please, so sure yet so unsure. This was what she too was worth, to be held in his hand against the light. Protecting him from the light and her eyes from the ugly leer. The coin in his hand gave him the right to say so. Hadn't he earned it, with the sweat of his brow and with the work of his hands? This, finally, was the meaning of life: to hold in one's hand one's worth, honest and hard-earned, and if it be slippery, to hold it firm and feel happy in the glow of possession.

He held up the rupee coin in the light of the dying streetlamp. Not much in it, this piece of metal that sold itself, bought itself. Besides he had the job now and his new set of credit cards. The coin clattered away into a gutter, leaving in its tinkling wake the sound of a wasted silence.

Lines without tails - 2

2005-08-02T05:40:00.000-07:00

It was always the same old thing, the routine never changed, flat, dull and boring. Today he will take the subway.

Lines without tails - 1

2005-08-02T05:31:00.000-07:00

Round and round they went, hand in hand, smiling, happy, winking every now and then. And then the rain started.

Darknight

2005-07-25T21:40:00.000-07:00

I have walked down these alleys before. Each corner has known me at the midnight hour, alone and brooding, hands in pockets, head bowed, deep in thought, trudging from home or towards. A solitary streetlamp illuminates some and some are dark but that does not mean much. Light is essential when people are around or the threat of them. In silence, one finds darkness the better companion. The mind is free to ignore objects that arrest its flight, bringing it down to earth, making it the slave of ponderous, transitory phrases. What in the brightness of the noon-sun gleams, glitters, causes the eye to waver, in darkness ceases to exist, swallowed up in the oblivion to which all things unseen by human eye are condemned. This state of affairs I prefer in my midnight rambles, far from the madding press of people and things in the daily world. Aimless, the senses silenced, the mind wanders at will as do the feet, looking for nothing and finding it near the edge of existence. Yet not all who wander are lost; but come back in time to where they left from, refreshed from encounters with remoteness. I return too to the cycle that bred me, that feeds me, that will throw me away, in time, for something better; and I want to return too. For the absence of meaning tires as much as too much of it does. A night is only so long and, at daybreak, I have to take my place in the ranks. I will not be missed but I cannot have my hands in my pockets nor head bowed when the sun finds me. It ill affords me to let go the dire moment that separates me from non-existence and I do not. Dark alleys are better visited when it is dark.

Hillel - If not now, when?

2005-07-23T03:15:00.000-07:00

Sprawled on the rock, he puffed breath after breath of dense nicotine smoke into the stale air. A gloom as of centuries of neglect enveloped the two grizzled men as what was left of life fled into the darkness obscuring the work of an army of ambitious hands. Not much to be done now, he said, shaking his head. Very little, corrected his friend. Very little, yes, not much; only a few more months and then back to where it had all begun. Hopefully. Decaying in dignified desperation, he called it. Vegetating in the stillness of meaninglessness. A play in seven acts winding down and not much to cheer for. Not that there had not been cheerful moments but still. One always tends to ask for more. The work, his friend said, is not done yet. Yes, the work. Always the work. One can never get too far away from it. So they got up, dusting their bottoms, freeing themselves from the oppression of the rock that overlooked the sea waiting for the mountain to crumble as wave after wave crashed, hoping its way through what was to become sea, what had been sea, what was now land, and a few more hoots into the desert air that had learnt to remove itself from the haunts of men, ungrateful wretches, puffing away what was good, what was bad, desecrating, despoiling what was theirs, what was never theirs, and then, a blank nothingness settling in as sweetness corrupted itself cloying, a few more puffs now and then off to work. The midnight siren is muffled but is heard more readily. Old men dotting the flat no-land of the beach, dotty, into their dotage, doing deeds unnecessary, in the desert light, dry, dead, disappearing. But is it midnight yet? When stars twinkle out the life of men, slurring their pure light in the beams of man-eyes, stressing last syllables strong, sparking out life, sparkling with life. The wife will know, when he returns at day, of the time she waited, waiting at turn of the clock to where it had been already. And the child will know too who slept with monsters under the bed, no magic for him, no none, he was at the beach then. Tired. Sweating. Cold and shivering. Back limping to a bed that is warm in the light of a noisy sun. Only a few more months of this. Hopefully.

The Road

2005-07-15T00:36:00.000-07:00

The night was long, dark and dreary. Not much light about and the way was not one he was accustomed to. Every now and then he would stumble, catch himself and curse; every now and then he would see something that lightened the heavy mood that hung about him. Will-o'the-wisps sometimes or sometimes a flower lingering on, at the edge of the trodden path, after the last human eye had passed over it, unmolesting, into the darkness that beckoned. Not an easy task on the brightest of days, this was turning out to be really difficult in the unrelenting, heavy gloom. And all this all alone! Of course there were others on the road but they were all either much slower or much faster than he was. All contact was a mere brush. A few words and a little time. Then pass on as polite as can. Nobody to travel the whole long road with. Difficult under the circumstances! Really very difficult!

But he had to keep to the path. Hadn't he been warned? Hadn't they told him of all that lay lurking in the murk ready to snap up the unwary or the adventurous? Not that anybody knew what exactly lurked but there were some who had heard of people who weren't heard of after crossing into the unlighted realm. Not much light on the road for that matter, just enough to know if one was on it or not. And the insects. Ah! the insects that buzzed fables of a Land beyond the darkness, beyond the confines of the road. So much trouble keeping them off one in the darkness.

Some kept to the road because it was easier; some because it was the more difficult proposition. One could always despair and wander off while it took all the reserves of the human intelligence to keep to it. Or it is always easy to make one's own the nightmares of the old, or was it the young, and the unimaginative, or was it the imaginative, learnt in the cradle. One never will know what exactly made him keep to the path. There were more stones on the path now, assuredly, than there were before. And if only there were some light one could catch sight of every now and then. Something to stick fast to. A thought, even a hallucination. But then how was one ever to know one had not wandered from the road? Where will the mind stop that has let itself roam free? Where will the questions end and where the answers begin? It wasn't easy. No; even if there were people who seemed to do it easily. People always did go on this road every night. And only by night as if nobody knew what it was to take the road by day. Or maybe people did that too and only were not heard of after.

And the heavy burden. It bit into one's shoulder long before the end seemed near. For sometimes one felt the end nearing. With trepidation sometimes and sometimes with joy too. But it wasn't an inerrant faculty driving the thought. Often it was just a thin blue reed of light, the kind that wavers for an instant showing everything in its macabre glow, and vanishing into the black of the night when it is done mocking the burden-carriers. Yes, that was what they were: burden-carriers. Doomed to an existence not of their asking, not of their choosing. Born into a free servitude where all was allowed as long as one stuck to the road.

And those who returned from the beyond had temples sometimes too. But the apotheosis was a strange affair. There was a general stoning and only a few survived that to be condemned forever to a worship in stagnating stasis by the mass. And they never spoke of what lay in the beyond, or weren't listened to maybe. Anyway the prodigals were not of the people any more. They were below them or above depending on where they stood. And sometimes it did not matter. They did not matter.

It was all tiring and he wilted. A few more steps and he knew he would be done. But then the insects flew away, and when there was no more temptation, he was at last free to be tempted. And he stepped off the road. To be never heard of! What a notion! What bliss to rub one's back when one felt like it! But to run away when the end was near! Or was it? A few steps only and then maybe he could turn back to the road. Or could he? Did it matter any more after a journey so long and painful? But should it not, for that very reason? Anyway, he went his way and so another was lost to the road. But another night dawns and another traveller, wearied and confounded, lost in sense and intellect, numbed with his heavy burden walks this way. The night again is long, dark and dreary.

Journalism and the Free Society

2005-07-07T00:28:00.000-07:00

In a free society, everybody is allowed everything. But, of course, we are not all good nor charitable. Hence the need for a watchdog that restricts social freedoms by taking some to itself. The three branches of government have been the traditional watchdogs, but increasingly, especially in this information age, the media is taking up the role too. So there is bound to be a problem, as there is with the police, as to what the ideal freedom-restriction ratio is: always a moot point how much freedom is allowed the watchdog. Only, in the case of journalists, the freedom they take away from people is the freedom to prosecute wrongdoers-by-law, offering them anonymity for information. Judgement comes into play and sometimes you use small fry to catch big fish. In this context, this judgement on the journalists who refused to divulge their sources in the matter of the leak of a CIA agent's identity is bound to raise some hackles. While the law has to be upheld, as indicated in the NYT Chairman's statement, there ought to be some kind of federal shield legislation to let the Fourth Estate function independently. It is all in the grey and Gopalan's interviews with Veerappan were exasperating agreed, but I feel we ought to sacrifice some rights to those who keep us informed(I am not talking of the papparazzi of course). And just when Deep Throat came into the open to remind people of the golden days of journalism(although that was by the way), Judith Miller's stand in court assures us its not just all papparazzi values in journalism now.

Dreams..Promises: Spring

2005-07-06T22:59:00.000-07:00

I dreamt today of tomorrow's flower
Waiting to spring on my wearied eyes
A fresh memory of a promise stale.
The air and the earth stir with notions of her:
All awash with light, life, relenting to kiss
With grudging grace a nature's fool.

The roses drip their thorny red
And my heart gathers up her lies all true.
She is not here but I wait in hope
For tomorrow's treacherous flower to bloom.

(She lied to me, with dimpled smile
And, lying, loved me, as I her.
But now I lie here alone, and she elsewhere.)

--Shyam.

Cold, Dead: Winter

2005-07-04T01:06:00.000-07:00

Death comes swirling in fairy forms
And dark white bright masses swamp the sun.
No light, no life, all hard and cold, stone and snow:
No heart hers that sold mine to the howling winds.
The passing cars splash slush; nothing moves
Except to wound, to smart, to shiver its rusted bones.

Rugged barks, naked, drooping in the withering storm,
Stand monuments to despair; and I learn to freeze
What she wove into my dreams with her cruel charms.
Dead, dying, ready to die, I bear my coffin in my heart.

(I warmed her eye and fed her heart
And she let me bask in her summer love.
But now all is cold and dead, where is she?)

--Shyam.

Too much out o'the sun

2005-07-03T20:36:00.000-07:00

Summer has been around quite a while now but nothing much done to savour the sun before the Notre Dame winter creeps in. Bound to my work, I haven't had much time to move around except for the odd couple of days off. Tennis has been a welcome respite each day and I have come to consider the two hours of sweat and slow dehydration the highlights of my daily schedule.

I seriously am missing home, Indian movies, cricket and loafing around in the Madras summer with friends. Missing the NatWest Series final hurt and am crying over not being able to watch what promises to be the most competitive Ashes in a long time. Federer though made my day today. Woke up late due to my chronic inability to understand timezones and TV schedules, so had to rub my eyes hard before I could register the statistics of the first 2 sets: 33 winners and 3 unforced errors for Federer. Of course the women's final provided enough entertainment so the men's final could be about class and the distance between the best and the rest in grass-court tennis.

Also watched a couple of movies the last couple of weeks: The War of the Worlds and Anniyan. The War of the Worlds was disappointing to say the least. The movie aside, what is with our portrayals of aliens? I hope alien science fiction writers don't imagine me as being slimy and green and oozing slush in their novels. The other movie was better but somehow Vikram seemed to have overdone all his parts. And of course there was not much in the story line to speak of. Anyways that was perhaps the one break from the monotony of my sad life as a grad student the last couple of weeks. Hope things change soon and I get to do something real and actual before the summer leaves start falling off leading into the next semester.

Lonely Times: Fall

2005-06-29T14:01:00.000-07:00

I know of a place near my house
Where colours dance on leaves floating in the wind.
The tall trees though are proud and silent
Bearing her absence with dignity.
They were not always so: in summer they laughed with her
But now she comes no more.

The roads are full of forgotten leaves:
Trampling over them to reach my home
I think of her; of the brown waves that danced
Their dainty way into my miserable heart.

(It was beautiful to fall for her
I was full of her and she, of me.
But now I am lonely, where is she?)

--Shyam.

Holy Monopoly

2005-06-28T15:16:00.000-07:00

Picutre a monopoly board with squares marked Jerusalem, Vaikuntham, Paathalam, Jahannu, Jannat, Earth, Limbo etc. And picture a game with an invisible opponent with invisible dice where you move to where you are asked to, when you are asked to. Picture too that Jail is the most probable position you might end up at in simple Monopoly, and here, you have nothing but Earth that you know anything of. If it doesn't frighten you, okay; but if it does, Welcome to the Holy Monopoly, Or: How I learned to stop worrying and listen to the Voice of Religion.

I have always been confused about religion. There are people who claim it releases our latent potentialities and others who say its just an opiate for the masses. I was even troubled when I decided I was an agnostic and discovered Yann Martel roaring against the "hypocrisy" of agnostics. Religion is a difficult and thorny issue and I don't even want to start on my views on it; suffice to say, I persist in my agnosticism without affiliations to any religion, borrowing sometimes from the mystics, sometimes from the scholastics, for my ideas; and lean heavily on the Hindu Vaishnavism of my parents' for form. And while I doubt that religion (any religion at all) can be useful(forget necessity), I think people who believe otherwise have the right to persist in their ways(folly or otherwise). But whether this includes even those who indulge in publishing fatwas and carrying them out, burning up kids inside cars because their fathers preach another creed, condemning people they dont like to death on the Cross, burning alive people they don't trust etc etc, I leave to each person's conscience and understanding. The more important thing to note is that religion has always controlled social responses even where secular law purports to hold sway. I was horrified after reading this news article on rediff.com yesterday. Not just that religion controls all life, denying the heart while claiming for it reasons that the head does not understand; worse, people are ready to suffer for it even when they get nothing in return. Perhaps conformism is 'useful' to live in society; perhaps there is another world. But what price will we pay for our beliefs in this world? Does it not matter at all? Then why all the hooplah about a better world and a better life on earth?

Semper Fi: Summer

2005-06-27T14:24:00.000-07:00

She's not here and oh the difference to me!

A thirst it sometimes takes me now
To remember summer thoughts of her:
Her eyes dripping the cool blue of happiness
Into my parched heart.
I see her now in every long womanleg
Striding from me; why did she have to go?

Ice cold this desert heart of mine
I left her cool breeze a year behind.
Summer nights I now spend sweating on my sheets
Wondering what happened to immortality.

(A breeze, she came, then left, blowing off
The candle I held to her face.
And now it is dark, where is she?)

--Shyam.

Tags and Itches

2005-06-21T06:00:00.000-07:00

A new day and a new tag, or more poetically, in German, "Neuer Tag, neues 'tag'". Again by arethusa. And this is a real tough one :-).

Three Names I go By
Shyam
Shyamu
Shyami ... this was easy

Three Screen Names
shyam_iitm
madatadam
shyam

Three Physical Things I Like about myself
My arms
My legs
My eyes(?) ... this was a really difficult question

Three Physical Things I dont like about myself
My tummy :-)
My nose - its an Indian map if u know what I mean
My ears - elephants have winnows for ears not men

Three Parts of my Heritage
Madras
Notre Dame
Kumbakonam (my mother says so)

Three Things that scare me
Nothing scares me really though some things frighten me at times.. Anyways 3 of these:

Life & Relationships (read People & Society :-))
A purposeless life
Not doing/getting what I am supposed/want to do/get & the possibility of there being no point anyways

Three things I want in a relationship
Fun - lots of it
Honesty & Understanding/Empathy - helps :-)
A middle ground - neither too close as to smother nor too far as to be indistinguishable from someone else

Three physical things about the opposite sex that appeal to me

A beautiful face
The Goldilocks figure (neither too tall nor too short, neither too fat nor too slim etc)
A nice smile

Three Things I want to do badly right now
Go Home and read a nice book (im at work now :-()
Get away to India/Europe for a long vacation
Put my head in a sack and hide myself (u know why)

Three Places I want to go on vacation
The Highlands and most of Britain
Italy - esp Rome, Florence and Venice
Paris

Three Things to do before I die
Resolve all the problems I have/face (would hate to die saying, "Houston we have a problem")
Read all that is written & understand all that is said (yeah right)
Experience all I can... and of course the usual help as many as I can

Three of my everyday essentials
My computer
Books
Tennis/Food/Sleep - really guys none of the 3 is an everyday essential though tennis would come close

Three Things I am wearing right now
Three huh... would hv been tough if I were at home :P
My watch
Old jeans
Torn slippers... i'll leave out the other items of clothing and my poonal :)

Three Reasons I am posting this
I am a masochist
I am a good liar
I love high adrenaline stuff & bungee-jumping :-)

Of course I have taken out the stuff Shy herself took out. Also I can't think of anybody to tag and continue this. But if anybody who reads this would like to, why dont u just drop me a line and i'll edit this post:)

Too Many Books ....

2005-06-16T02:54:00.000-07:00

So what happened is arethusa, you know, tagged me, and here I am, all tagged and confused. I have to say something about books and all that you know. And I like books and, really, a lot of books too. And they also like me you know. And so, here you see, these are some things I want to say about

1. Books I own:
Books are Absolutely Indispensable. I could almost say I have lived more of my time with books than with people. And so I have a few books though the library and the net have always been the prime sources for my reading material. This is the list of books that I cherish most among the ones I own:
Ulysses & Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Joyce, The Portable Nietzsche, Dialogues of Plato, Complete Poems of Donne, Complete Works of Shakespeare, The Rubaiyat, The Portable Milton, The Stranger by Camus, Moby Dick and The Bhagavad Gita.

2. Books I recently bought:
I keep buying books on and off. When the eBay bug bites me usually. In the last month or two, these are the books I bought: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson and The Tragedies of Shakespeare.

3. Books I am reading now:
Books for light reading I finish off quickly and in that section I am reading 'India Wins Freedom' by Maulana Azad and Jane Eyre. Some books I read slowly, and in this section I am reading 'A Kierkegaard Anthology', Buber's 'I and Thou', some Schopenhauer, assorted stuff on Indian History and some Aristotle. There are a few books, however, that I read and re-read often and again, sometimes in parts and sometimes in the whole. In this section are Joyce, Milton, Donne, Shakespeare, the Gita and Cioran.

4. My Favorites:
This should take a long time. I usually read as much for the author as for the book. So most favs will be authors rather than books.

Literature: Joyce - The Dubliners and The Portrait are by themselves guarantee to fame and the 2 most unreadably bold wonderful books ever are also his. Ulysses, my all-time fav. Shakespeare- enough has been said about him. Dostoevsky - Haunting. And Beautiful. Hardy, Dickens - Beautiful. And Haunting. Huxley, Orwell - Nice. Sometimes Daunting. Rushdie, Marquez - Magical. Realism. India. Latin America. Hot! Also for poetry, Donne, the Sufis, Dickinson, the Romantics, some Browning, TS Eliot and some snatches from the moderns. Others - Pride&Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, much of Scott and Wodehouse - fun and perennial favs for lighter reading.

Fantasy/Sci-Fi: Robert Jordan - The Wheel of Time turns! Tolkien - He didnt write only LOTR! Douglas Adams - In Parts. Asimov - Theres too much I havent read but really good. AC Clarke - Of Course.

Philosophy: Plato - kickstarting Science and Philosophy as we know it, and open and sublime as we don't know how(with the eternal crowd-puller The Gadfly). Hume - No miracles here! Kant - Just cant read him. Schopenhauer - For the sheer weight of his studied Pessimism. Kierkegaard - Positive Religious Existentialism - I am searching too for "an idea that I could live and die for". Nietzsche- no one writes more lyrical philospohy - not even his mentor Plato. Cioran- Worthy successor to Nietzsche. I can just see the little blue light at the end of the tunnel too.(Plus he was insomniac when young :-)). Russell - Philiosophy for the layman. Math and Logic for the Scientist. And Literature for the Nobel Committee. Camus, Sartre - Lit/Phil - take ur pick. But they should be going out of fashion now, no?!. Every now and then, pick up Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius or the Gita for comfort.

I am sure I have missed a few but thats the way it is. And of course, I tag Cue, Sudheer and Varath to post on their fav books etc.

Madras Pettai Wiki

2005-06-14T05:15:00.000-07:00

The wikipedia has been around too long for me to talk much about it. But this one has really been illuminating. For all those who have been exposed to the colourful & pure pettai baashai of singaara chennai.

A Hard Night's Day

2005-06-13T03:32:00.000-07:00

As the sun starts reaching out, feeling around, with its first tentative rays, the empty blue sky stolen off a Renaissance artist's canvas, I am tempted to say with Theoden, "And so it begins." Another night has passed me by and I am still trying to configure the SuSE installed on my computer to perform at its best. And all the work that I have neglected the last couple of days glares at me from a corner, promising, with a malignant smile, headaches for days to come. But it has been nice and I have had fun tweaking my notebook and learning to write shell scripts and other silly things. Not to forget enjoying a special screening of Amadeus at 4am, sparing no thought for the other three poor souls who inhabit my house and, unlike me, sleep during the night.

As a movie, Amadeus is quite a treat. I had seen the second half of the movie before and wanted to see the whole movie. The colour of late 18th century Vienna and the music of Mozart: what more can a movie ask for? The actors have done their parts well too and no wonder the movie won so many Oscars(though Titanic has made the awards largely meaningless). Anyways, good company for 3 hours(nearly) though the version I saw seemed to me edited.

Also spent some time on the Advani controversy. It seems funny to me that there should be an argument at all whether Jinnah was 'communal'. He wanted a Muslim 'quam' and that by definition makes him communal. The word 'communal' has been mauled so badly that it has become a petty gaali now. But Israel is 'communal' and most of the countries in the Middle-East are theocratic and we have no problems maintaining good relations with them. So why does it matter only so close to home? It is an ugly thing and I wouldn't want it sneaking into my home but a foreign state is welcome to do what it wills as long as it doesn't (interfere with)/(tend to affect) my stuff. That, I know everyone knows, is the core principle of sovereignity of nations. And, if you do steal my toothbrush, it doesn't make sense for me to just yell at you,"You lousy St.Patrick's School ruffian". Strong typecasting is useful only in so many scenarios and international relations, I think, is not one of them.

On the other hand, if at all we need to consider Jinnah's career, let us place him on par with the other leaders of the Freedom Struggle, and, for every Chauri Chaura that we excuse, strike off a Lahore or a Punjab on his side. Not to absolve him of his short-sightedness but to understand that he was a man with limitations as was every person who extracted his/her pound of salt. And since the history of our freedom struggle is too close by us to analyse it critically, without bias, let us instead ask other, more important questions regarding our future relations with our estranged cousin Pakistan. A couple of good reads in rediff.com were satisfying but the question lingers. And so the show does go on, it seems, in India. Oh, by the way, it was 'Hindustan' last I heard.

It has been a long, dark tea-time for me, this vacation from reality, this day of darkness, but now that it is getting lighter and brighter, I must sneak back into my coffin, so adios all and auf wiedersehen.

Off the line musings on online friendships

2005-06-09T21:48:00.000-07:00

Man, says the sage, is a social animal and Agent Smith assures us he is a virus. Both ideas seem agreeable and we often see man aspiring towards that characteristic peculiar to a virus, 'immortality in culture'. Another aspect both man and the virus share is the tendency to cluster close together, creating unforeseaable affinities. 'Friends', my friends, is the name of the game, and making and keeping as many as you can is what it is all about.

In my schooldays, friendships were made only in playgrounds and backyards. Sure there was an occassional friend made out of a fellow-sufferer at the dentist's, but the more modern innovation of the penpal was something one in his real senses just frowned at. A friend, by definition, is someone who is there for you, someone you share the details of your life with; and a letter can get only so far in real life unlike in movies. The friend across the seas, a person after your own nature, someone to lean on in times of trouble and the first to rejoice on a happy occassion, was only a mythical beast the lonely had dreamed up. But all this was destined to change with the arrival of the internet and yahoo, among other things. Myth became legend, then history, and finally seeped into everyday life, as messengers carrying friendship-tokens became ubiquitous and smiles and tears alike were simulated and the mythical beast realised in a jumble of wires and machines. And people were hooked.

It was not entirely surprising given the near universal reach of the internet; but what beggars belief is the number of adherents the internet has found in all classes and ages. Kids who can't spell 'connectivity', and grandfathers who obstinately refused to give in to modern innovations like the vacuum cleaner or the washing machine, were alike into it and the net just grew wider and wider. The internet itself is a much huger proposition, but friendship got a new meaning within this context. People found new 'thingies' like the yahoo messenger and hotmail to make friends with and get to speed with others they had lost touch with. And it was a boon for all those who couldn't get to know their neighbours better as it was easy as a click to add another friend.

The latest craze, at least in circles I move in, are the make-a-pal-online sites like orkut, which are exclusively devoted to friend-making. These sites allow people to get to know others and keep tabs on what is happening with one's friends and acquaintances. They also foster in some people a new fever for number-of-friends and promote vicarious relationships where login-name and login-name share intimacies. The trouble, and this without malice aforethought I say, is that this new development weakens as much as it strengthens our friend-making abilities. For an old-timer like me, it is economical to have a few friends to offload my emotional surplus on(and receive that of others), but as the numbers grow bigger, it becomes difficult to maintain and cherish an unseen friend(though I indeed have many valuable friends because of the internet).

It is hard, I say again, not impossible; and often a flesh-and-blood friendship seems more 'real'. This is reflected in the logically sequent occurrence of online friends attempting to meet in real-life and continue from where they left off in the world wide web: a consummation, so to say, of the ritual began online, miles away from each other. Here the friendship-sites play to their strength as facilitators and catalysts to friendship. They function as forums where like-minded people meet and get to know each other - friendship is facilitated as people are encouraged by initial exchanges to meet and understand one another. And then a friendship is supposed to have begun; at least so it says in my ancient handbook.

Where the economics of money and time hinders an actual meeting, of course, these sites are the ultimate sanctuary. They open up vistas that are hidden deep in the mad superstructure of our world and connect people who cannot afford a 'real' friendship. They redefine friendship and make people like me sit up and notice that we inhabit a changing world: a world where the old dog has to learn new tricks. And in learning to adapt ourselves, we learn too that life takes its meaning through change.

Anyways, it is a fun thing and new(read cool). After the bubble burst, something had to come out of it all and I guess this is one direction that it was always predictable the net would take. Let what comes next try to be as successful.

PS : As a technical aside, I have been wondering if these sites actually tend to work towards their own destruction. Promoting the creation of a fully-connected set of friends, the records in the site databases must tend to grow as the square of the number of users if everyone tries to become everyone else's friend. This is only vaguely possible but a super-linear growth in space required to connect everybody seems a distinct possibilty. And I suppose the designers of these sites will have only a linear growth in space with users for reasons of economics, which means there has to come a point in time when there are more records to handle and not enough space. (A friend says space-constraints are no longer critical in the computing world, but I persist, as space and time constraints are interlinked and the scenario I predict is bound to occur as an asymptote with high probability).

Who said only cockroaches are nocturnal?

2005-06-09T03:01:00.000-07:00

It is official now: I have become completely nocturnal these days and no joking. There were forebodings of my predilection for the darker half of the diurnal span even in my high-school days; but never has it been so regular nor persistent. It is a rare sun these days that finds me asleep when it rises, or awake when it is at its zenith. And, very often, when I have some work to do in the day, my body-clock adjusts itself so that I revert back to my nightly life as efficiently as possible. A party animal's body I possess maybe, or maybe an ascetic's, but neither shoe fits me anyways. And the best I can hope for is that I possess a certain(unrealized) greatness of character(though most people who know me would discount the possibility), for Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita,

yaa nishaa sarvabhootanaam tasyaam jaagarti samyamee|
yasyaam jaagrati bhootaani saa nishaa pashyatho muneh||

which, in the vulgar tongue, translates to "The sage(who controls his whole being) is awake when it is night to all creatures; and when all creatures are awake, then is it night to the sage who sees(understands all)."

Pretty neat huh! Only I hope I can withstand the pressure that my father says I am burdening my body with, not letting it lead a normal life :-).

Mackinac Island - II

2005-06-07T23:04:00.000-07:00

The next day we woke up bright and early around 7am, which meant we were missing the earliest ferry to the Island. After a light breakfast that the motel provided and a few snaps of the lake in the early morning sun, we got out of the motel to catch the ferry at 9. There are quite a few companies offering ferry services for $18 or so the round-trip. The ferryboat was quite cool as they had an observation deck high up, standing on which we got a spectacular view of the lake and small humps of islands dotting it all round. Snap-time again and we braved a light drizzle, cold air and swarms of insects to admire the small infinity in space and time that the lake in its calm expansiveness portrayed.

It took us about 20 minutes to reach the Island and even as we landed there was this cabby with a Lincoln-beard on a 3-horse carriage. Talk of a quaint island! And there weren't any motor vehicles on the island and the only means of transport was the horse-carriage or the bicycle. Maps are freely available at the Tourist Information Center and the lady manning the desk was quite helpful as she pointed out a few of her favorite spots and marked a route for us to take.

Bicycles are as easy to obtain as fudge on the island and come in as many flavors; we got the 7-geared cycles that sit low and have a basket attached to the handle-bar, making you feel like a spinster going to church on Sunday. Anyways we pedalled out of the docks with a plan of going along the Shoreline Road to either Arch Rock or Fort Mackinac. The houses on the road were quaint(did I use the word again?) and the shoreline simply breathtaking. There is an old forlorn lighthouse standing out a small distance out to sea and a few projections of land jutting out of the lake on all sides. And if we but ignore the small piece of land we were standing on, borrowed from the lake in some prehistoric period when man was still learning to balance himself on two legs in a remote corner in Africa, a sense of the all-swallowing nature of water and its wilfulness teaches us the first lessons in futility. But it is beautiful too with its green and blue and the haze that settles every now and then, sometimes obscuring, at other times revealing, the content of our dreams.

The road leading to the Fort and Arch Rock is a real strain and leads up a steep hill. An elderly gentleman living in the island offered that it became harder each passing year and we weren't making much more headway than him. Then an alley of colonial or late 19th century houses with mock columns and colonnades and spacious patios looking towards the sea(). Trails crisscross the whole island and after an eyeful of the pretty houses and the far-out sea, it was getting late so we hit a few that seemed to take us to the Fort quicker.

Going is tough in this stretch as the road and the trails go up and down. But we reached Skull Cave in one piece without much adventure. This Cave is where an English fur-trader is supposed to have hidden when the Indian Wars erupted in the Island. There is not much to it as the Skull seems to have been chipped away by time and the elements and we climbed a few flights of rough wooden stairs to reach Fort Holmes. The Fort is a rough stockaded enclosure that the English wrested from and held against the American troops in the War of 1812. Not much but enough to provide some fun to kids playing Indians and Cowboys with plastic darts and guns. The place affords yet another view of a vast portion of the lake and a plaque provided us with the history of the Lake Algonquin and the breaking of the land and the surfacing of these islands. Indians native to these parts won't agree but we heard their story only when we got to Arch Rock, where some great God had breathed life into the world.

Fort Mackinac is only a little way from Skull Cave and Fort Holmes. It is grand though no castle but the entry fee was forbidding enough at $10 or so for us to witness a demonstration of the firing of a real cannon and a guided tour of the rooms where the quartermasters hid their young girls. Cycle back and we reach Arch Rock: I had assumed all this time that it was 'Arch' as in 'First' as some God is supposed to have created life here. But as all deductions from internal evidence go, it is superficial and a rock in the shape of a huge arch a hundred or two feet high loomed up in our sights. More pictures and more sea and more awe and then back to the Main Road for lunch.

Lunch was pizza again for me and a few glasses of wine and we basked in the afternoon sun on the lakefront. Then fudge-shopping and fudge-eating on the green meadows with a few more snaps of some old bloke in bronze hiding our view of the whitewashed fort entrance. A few calm minutes, fudge in mouth, grass under feet, brooding over the lake splashing its waters in disquieting calm, and back to business. This time we take the shoreline road going the other way round the island and a few minutes into it, stop at a stretch of pebbly beach, tossing stones into the lake and feeling the cold wash up from afar on waves. There is a Devil's Kitchen here too and a few charred boulders hanging on. Some fine words written about this being an ancient burial ground and a keynote in the geographical history of the area; we pass on.

Trails again and I run into the forest in search of the source of a brook. After a few falls and a few more snaps(we really took only snaps of ourselves all the time), we decide that trails are fun. So, after reaching the British Landing Point, where they have a cannon pointing at the lake for no apparent reason, we decided to split up, with Srinath and Mahesh taking the shoreline Road while I, Ganti and Sheetal plotted our way through Swamp Trail and Tranquil Bluff and what-else-not, promising to meet the others at the Tourist Information Center.

This was supposed to be fun but we found out soon that Swamp Trail actually led us through a swamp and we got through brambles and missed trail junctions and after huffing and puffing through the best part of an hour reached a beautiful avenue. The Grand Hotel is situated here and there are a few mansions too but mostly it is meadows and quaint(not again!) roads that transported us downhill at breakneck speeds and earned for us the snorts of disapproving horses. There is a museum on our way and a roadsign indicates a blacksmith working nearby but it was getting dark and we hurried past cabs and bikes moving peacefully, gawking at unearthly sights, and so back to the crowds on Main Street. The cycles are duly handed over and some sludge and cola partaken of. The crowd seems to have swelled and there are lots of Indians(the Asian kind), apparently on honeymoons or a quiet vacation and with the least disturbance, we return on a ferryboat back to Mackinaw City.

It was already 8pm by now and so we decided to stay back and start off early for home the next day. Before crashing, however, we went across to St.Ignace on the Mackinac Bridge, the third longest bridge in the world, passing on our way the historic Fort Michilimackinac, founded in 1715. There was also a beach for celebrities to frolic on but time, as they say, was dear.

St.Ignace itself was a boring, sleepy town and costly too compared to our motel of last night. A dinner of subs in St.Ignace and we hastened back to Mackinaw City. Other places were either costlier or rooms were not available so we went back to our cheap motel spending another $49 on a night's rent.

Not much to plan for the next day and a long road home with me as the navigator. I plot a way through some 'scenic routes' but all we get is a county jailhouse and lots of biker babes. Anyways Detroit is only a few hours away and we all have fun on the road, each in his own way. Detroit itself, we don't get to see much of as it is dark by the time we reach Sheetal's hotel and we book a ticket from Toledo, Ohio to Notre Dame on Amtrak. A light dinner at Chili's and a failed attempt to visit a nightclub, and it is time to start off for the Toledo railway station. Its about an hour and a half's drive from Warren, Sheetal's place, but only 35 minutes from downtown Detroit, and a few missed turns don't matter as the train is only at 4:50 in the morning.

Toledo seems like an interesting town with a nice bridge across a river and a fine skyline. There seems to have been some problem in the area as we pass quite a few police cars on our way to the railway station. But the cops are helpful and we reach the station at around 4am. The train is late as usual but Sheetal takes his leave and we curl up for a light nap.

Finally, around 5:30am, the train chugs in and we are home by 8. We take a cab home and then its back home again. A fine vacation it has been and a long break from the drudgery that is life in research but everything can wait as we take a long, peaceful day of rest and sleep.

Mackinac Island - 1

2005-06-06T15:24:00.000-07:00

I have always been accused of being a sedentary creature and have borne out its truth too, often enough. So when summer came around and I was still home not venturing into the beautiful days that were dawning in and around Notre Dame, not many were surprised. Work is good and sleep better and all comforts are available inside my small room north of campus so why bother? Anyway, I was quite contented with occassional glimpses of the sun from my bedroom window until the Wanderlust gripped me when Sheetal Kiran, a friend from India, who had come to Detroit on official business, visited us in his SUV and suggested we take a road-trip to some nice place in Michigan for the Memorial Day long weekend.

I and three other friends at Notre Dame, Ganti, Mahesh and Srinath, were quite happy to accept the offer but none of us had a license nor were confident of driving an SUV. But Sheetal said he could drive on the whole trip by himself and we set about planning the trip. After initial discussions we settled on Grand Rapids and Mackinac Island but people were uncomfortable about spending too much time away from research(yeah right!). Finally we decided to just pass through the town of Grand Rapids on our way to Mackinac Island, stay overnight at Mackinaw City in the mainland, take a ferry the next day to the Island itself and see how things went from there.

Packing for the trip was minimal and we were ready to start early the next afternoon. Ganti volunteered to be the navigator and I just lay back on the backseat of the SUV for a contented sleep. We had a DVD player on board and had picked up our Lord of the Rings DVDs but everyone tired of seeing it for the nth time. My Simon&Garfunkel CDs were also not agreeable to some and we fell back upon the default Indian film music CD everyone was OK with.

Mackinac Island is near the northern border of Michigan with Canada and Notre Dame is very close to the Indiana-Michigan border. The entire distance, as the crow flies, to use a favourite expression of Mahesh's, was about 300 miles. We could have done the trip in 6-7 hours flat but since Sheetal was to be the only driver, we decided to take it slow and rest every now and then in various cities. The first leg to Holland, MI, was north-westerly and we got really close to Lake Michigan's shoreline. After losing ourselves in Holland for quite sometime, trying to figure out the way to downtown Holland, we had a lunch of pizzas in what was advertised to be the best pizzeria in Michigan or something like that. The food was not really satisfying but we picked up some coffee and got out of Holland at about 2:30pm. The plan to pass through Grand Rapids was dropped as we were already looking at something like 10 or 11pm when we would hit Mackinaw City and we charted a new route direct to the City taking the State Highway at M-... and joining I-... near Lake City. Again we lost our way trying to get onto I-..., and went all across Holland. We ventured into some residential areas and there was quite some ogling of pretty girls and teasing of each other as we behaved like teenagers. I even suggested we continue along the road and hit Lake Michigan for a small beach-party in the afternoon but sanity prevailed and, inspite of and with the help of Srinath's constant interjections, we managed to hit the road to Mackinaw City.

The traffic on I-... was quite heavy with lots of people hitting the road for the long weekend and soon we were forced to a crawl. I was already feeling the effects of the sun and lunch, lying comfortably on the backseat with only Mahesh's laptop for company and dozed off. After an hour or so, I was woken up when we stopped at a gas station at Cedar Springs to fill gas and get some coffee. It might have been the lurching of the SUV or my disaffection towards travel but I had a big headache and dozed on and off till we reached Mackinaw City. The stop at the gas-station was short and when we had bought some goodies to munch, took to the road again.

The next stretch was perhaps the best in the whole trip as we got to see the Land of Lakes in all its glory in the late afternoon sun. The sky was a little overcast and there was a chill breeze but the beauty of a vast land, in long stretches untamed by man or shaped only so much as to reflect its natural beauty, took our breath away. A cool breeze and thankfully only intermittent traffic now and signs of civilization provided us all the opportunity to click away and enjoy "nature."

We stopped for a bit at Lake City after a few wrong turns and serendipitous visits to scenic inland lakes to stretch our legs and get some stuff. A few more clicks of us at the lakeshore and a few cans of Mountain Dew and a packet of potato chips and we were back on our way. It was near 8pm now and already getting dark and so we made some haste on this part of the journey. The only other stop was at a rest area very close to Mackinaw City, where there was an observation point high up and a stunning view across the land in the setting sun. And an hour after that we were in Mackinaw City.

Mackinaw City itself is a historical place with Fort Michilimackinac, a French/British post of old and a few other attractions. The Mackinac Bridge linking it to St.Ignace across Lake Huron is the third longest bridge in the world and we proposed to go across it once atleast for photos. But it was 10 by the time we reached Mackinaw City and so our first concern was for a place to stay the night and get some dinner. There was a cheap motel on the lakeside that offered breakfast in the morning and after unloading our stuff in the room, we went into the town.

Most shops were closed but there was an old-world charm to the place even without people. There was only pizza to be had and we decided to explore the place till pizza arrived. But all we did was have some fun in a video-games parlor and soon it was time for another round of unappetizing pizza. After the unsatisfying dinner, Ganti and Srinath decided to fold up at around 12 while the other 3 of us went on a walk that took us through the beach and into Mackinaw City, and after some useless observations concerning the number of tourists and the seasonal business of the few bed and breakfast places about the place, we headed back to sleep. The plan was to get up early and catch the 7:30 ferry to the Island but that is another story.

Cinderella Man

2005-06-05T01:20:00.000-07:00

Forget Rocky and Raging Bull. Forget Seabiscuit and Million Dollar Baby. Forget even the old Tamil flick with Prabhu in the lead whose name I have already forgotten. For if you don't, you might just not enjoy Cinderella Man, the latest inspirational movie directed by Ron Howard. The movie is a biopic on the 1920-30's boxer James J. Braddock, and has elements liberally sprinkled that might just want you to compare it with those other movies where the hero is a washed-up has-been, who holds firm to his principles and family and, just when everyone has forgotten him, pushes himself to the top against all odds and the best of the next generation.

Russell Crowe stars as the boxer, legendary for his right hook, and Renee Zellwegger is the typical homemaker of the 30's, quiet, loving, the mother of 3 kids and fearing for her husband's health in the ring. The movie starts off in 1928 with Braddock KOing his opponent and carrying a hefty wad of greenbills to his pretty wife. But disaster strikes soon and he is left with injuries to his right hand and heavy losses in failed speculations as the Depression rolls in. In 1933, we see him struggling to get work at the docks, and soon his boxing license revoked by the local commission chief Johnston, played well by Bruce Mcgill.

The times are harsh and the family finds it hard to get food and milk on the table. Electricity is lost to mounting unpaid arrears and Braddock finds himself all 'prayed up' as God seems to punch him hard and fast where it hurts. He is forced to apply for assistance from the government and even begs from his boxing associates but manages to keep his family together.

Here, luck favours him as his old manager Joe Gould(Paul Giamatti of Sideways fame) finds a bout that nobody is ready to take on at short notice and the Commission agrees for a single bout comeback. Everyone is agreed that he is in the ring to lose but, in spite of being starved and injured, he manages to KO Corn Griffin, and becomes an instant sensation. Joe persuades Johnston to let him take on the challengers for the heavyweight title and goes to the extent of selling off the last of his possessions to let Braddock practise. The gamble pays off and Braddock keeps winning and gets to fight Max Baer(Craig Bierko), a bear of a man, who has already killed 2 people in the ring, for the title. Baer is flamboyant and promises to kill him but our man holds his cool, and egged on by the millions down on their luck, who find a reason to cheer for one of their kind and to whom he is the 'Cinderella Man,' the living fairy tale, he manages to hold his own against Baer through fifteen gruelling rounds to emerge champion.

The movie is well-directed and though we know what to expect, there are a few surprises even in the real story. Paddy Considine, as Braddock's friend from the docks, who dies trying to organize and unionize Hooverville, manages to impress with a neat portrayal. As the manager, Paul Giamatti is impressive with his snappy comebacks that irritate Johnston and the scene where he lets Renee Zellwegger into his barely furnished apartment and explains his situation is great. And the church scene where Renee walks in and finds it filled with people praying for her husband and waiting for the live commentary to begin on the radio is amusing and touching.

The actors have done their job well and Russell Crowe must find it easy by now to do heroes who are quiet and manage to 'do the thing.' Renee Zellwegger plays the role of a loving wife who has to support her husband through a crisis, waiting patiently for her man to get them out of all the mess around her. The supporting cast too have played their parts and Bierko as Baer and McGill as Johnston are especially convincing in their roles.

The script is well-written and the direction and cinematography is superb. The boxing scenes are gory but manage to get you to the seat's edge as the boxers sway and hook and dance and jab through their bouts. The director manages to explore all the 'senti' he can but stops short of making it all mushy. The dialogues are crisp and the editing reminds one of 'The Gladiator' in parts as flashbacks and imagined sequences sometimes crowd Braddock's thoughts.

Overall, a nice movie to watch and inspirational too, if you go for that kind of fare. But, simply for the acting and the director's sticking to the real-life plot, its interesting. And, as the CNN reviewer points out, its a movie that symbolizes the 1930's when America had to pull itself up from a deep trench, and also for the current world where heroes who fight hard and honest are in short supply.

No French for Federer!!!

2005-06-03T13:34:00.000-07:00

It seemed like the Australian Open would be the only one to escape his grip this year but Roger Federer has lost in another Grand Slam semifinals and I am reminded of the English newspaper headline proclaiming the Don's failure, when in a tour match he fell after only a century. He has seemed as invincible as the great Don and as prolific in collecting records the past year that his defeats (this is only his 3rd this year) are so disappointing. Federer, seeking to fill the empty space in his trophy cabinet where a Paris souvenir should be, stumbled and fell today at the French Open, to the hard-hitting teenager from Mallorca, Rafael Nadal. It was like deja vu, as Federer, who had lost the Australian Open semis to birthday boy Safin, found in Nadal a spirited customer on clay on his 19th birthday. The 6-3,4-6,6-4,6-3 win meant Nadal entered the finals with the chance of being the first man in 23 years since the Swede Mats Wilander to win the French Open on debut. It also meant that the Federer Express had halted once again in the sluggish red clay of Paris and would have to wait a year before another attempt at a career slam.

I had put a night-out to watch the match, touted as the match of the season already, given the incredible form the two players have been in this year. Nadal was coming in on a 22 match streak with 5 clay titles and a 46-6 record, while Federer was on a 11 match, 28 set streak, with a 46-2 record. The previous meeting in Hamburg had been a close call for Federer, who was just two points away from losing the Masters Series Title, before he shifted gears and zoomed past a tired Nadal. The two men were also paired up nicely in their skills and strengths with booming forehands and lightning racket-speeds and were the most exciting players in the Tour.

Anyways I was quite excited about the match-up in spite of it being on the boring, slow clay when the beautiful, fast grass of Wimbledon was my favourite. NBC were telecasting the match at 10ET according to the TV schedule but I had no clue as to whether we were on ET or CT (yeah even after 2 years here :(). At 10 though(the correct time!), there was still the earlier semifinal going on owing to a 90 minute delay due to rain. This match (Davydenko vs Puerta) dragged on into the 5th set while I managed to catch a good half-hour's sleep and then the stage was set.

The very first point was awesome with Nadal hitting a looping forehand winner down the line on the slide to a lazy but precise Federer approach shot. It was as if the players had been on court for a couple of hours, both finding their groove so early. But that was only the beginning. From then on, the match oscillated between the sublime and the ridiculous with both players coming up with some beautiful shots and some outrageous errors. Federer was not his usual serving self, with only around 65% 1st serves in, in the first set, and was broken 4 times while Nadal himself was broken once. But after about 45 minutes of huffing and puffing interspersed with a few imperious forehand winners on either side, Nadal took the set 6-3.

Federer was expected to fight back and fight back he did, racing to a 5-1 lead in the second, with quite a few winners and a higher 1st serve pct of ~80. Nadal put up some resistance but it was too late and Federer took the set 6-4. Nadal seemed to have lost it in the middle of the set when a slight drizzle forced a short delay and Federer got his act together with 10 winners and fewer errors.

Now the contest was heating up and a fight-to-the-death was what the crowd had paid for. Honors were even with a break traded apiece until 5-4 when Nadal came up with a great defensive lob on the stretch that Federer could only bat down into play after some backpedaling, setting Nadal up for a great forehand after a couple of shots. Set: Nadal. Score: 2 sets to 1 Nadal.

It was all Nadal now and Federer was just fighting to stay in the match. It was getting dark and if Federer won the set, McEnroe predicted that the final set would be played tomorrow. Federer struggled to stay on serve with Nadal and was constantly looking at the chair umpire to get out of the darkening court. He had lost his serve completely with only about 20% 1st serves in and was trying his best to put up a decent fight. The crowd was now fully behind Nadal and a fan's heckling caused a momentary lapse in concentration as Federer double-faulted in the 8th game to give Nadal the crucial break. After that, it was all over and Nadal wrapped up the set in the next game on his 2nd matchpoint, to enter the finals, a strong contender for the crown against the unseeded Argentine Mariano Puerta.

I was disappointed that the projected heavyweight showdown turned out to be a damp squib as there was lots of spraying the ball around, especially by Federer who compensated for the 40-odd winners he hit with 40-odd unforced errors. Nadal was consistent most of the time, forcing Federer to hit 2 or 3 winners often to get one point: conceding nothing and playing for his life literally. Federer was unlucky too a few times when the ball clipped the net, once surprising him in his volley and a couple of times setting up Nadal for a winner. The match was scrappy and in the dog-fight-dog competition, Nadal proved more tenacious and deserved to be the winner. He is also bound to win the final against unsung Puerta, unless many planets go awfully out of orbit, and that will be one match I won't lose sleep for.

Appogiatura

2005-06-03T04:12:00.000-07:00

It is not easy to notice that I have mis-spelt the word "appoggiatura" in the title of the blog. If you are not into music theory or are not named Anurag Kashyap, chances are you don't know to spell the word. This word meaning "an embellishing note, usually one step above or below the note it precedes and indicated by a small note or special sign," was what finally decided the winner in the 78th Scripps Spelling Bee this year. The event was interesting as ever and provided for a lot of the suspense and nail-biting moments that a standard thriller does. And it threw up a very pertinent question at me: what is the point of these Spelling Bees anyway?

Granted the final 3 competitors were all of Indian origin, which made me feel proud and embark on another of my mera-bharat-mahan moods, I still felt a little queasy that 11 year-old kids like Samir Patel spend lots of their time trying to know how a word like 'Roscian,' which in all probability they wouldn't ever be hearing again in their lives, is spelt. Kids like him have special talents, agreed; but why test them on skills that are not really essential in life?

Don't jump on me saying how important good spelling is and how verbal skills are a good indicator of intellectual ability; what I am cribbing about here is the point to which people take the whole thing. And this leads to the more controversial question: is competition really good? For it is clear that the Bees go to these lengths only because there are people who can go these lengths.

People have different talents and want to display them to the world. In a media-oriented world where the ordinary man can get his 5 minutes of fame using his 'special' talents in any of the hundreds of talent hunts or reality shows quite easily, it often becomes a rat-race to the telephone trying to get into some show or the other. While I have nothing against the shows as such where they are concerned with the development and promotion of talent (which, incidentally, is an overused word nowadays in my opinion), they also give the common man a taste for the uncommon. What this means to the kid, whose father has always dreamed of being a rocket-scientist or cricket captain, is that, from an early age he/she is forced to try and be the best and grab all possible attention. Brats are created and worse, children who have rarely experienced the freedom that childhood offers. Even as I felt a wistful envy towards Swami and Friends when I was younger, I am afraid the next generation might not hear of him (except of course those whose fathers are into quizzing and literature).

Single-mindedness is, I believe, an attribute desirable among older people, if among any at all; and to make a kid do the whole hog from early morning painting classes to school to evening chess coaching to weekend football training and piano lessons with tuitions liberally spread all over, is simply not fair. The world can go round as fast as it wants to and seats in the IITs and Stanford and MIT get as rare as they can but a child's mind is more stunted by the mad urge to compete all the time. I would have liked to take piano lessons as a kid too but to apply evolution theory and to fit me up for survival anticipating this might just have killed the fun in it for me. And fun is all childhood is about: its fun to play, fun to learn new things, fun to do cool stuff and fun to grow up into a more mature life where you work hard and try and set out to realize your dreams.

Kids need to be encouraged and their talents brought out but to make it the focus of their entire life and make them celebrities too early might make them really brittle soon. I understand that the 3 Spelling Bee kids I started off with are having fun in their lives but the problem is that, in the driveway to Success, there are lots of other kids and not-so-kids-anymore and many of these are left broken and bruised by what they dont understand and a sobering influence is sometimes helpful where people are patted on the shoulder and told "You are doing great. Just try your best and have fun." Success is a dearly desired thing and working hard for it often exhilarating but it pays to remember that an OD of anything kills real fast and bad.

Anyways I am blogging fast and furious now hoping to kill time till 10am when the Federer-Nadal clash starts. Just salivating at the thought of watching two of the best players in the circuit pairing off once again. Bound to be a cracker if ever there was one!!

The Way I Write

2005-06-03T00:06:00.000-07:00

Following on the resolve to blog regularly, I next have to resolve on the style that I will use in the writing of my blogs (as also my general writing style) . This is an important aspect for me as content alone cannot suffice: I have promised myself to learn to use language; as I feel language is as much a process as it is a medium. What I write is important but the way I write it is not much less so: a good deal of time is wasted in writing and reading interesting stuff in an unilluminating manner.

In the course of my writing career, I am bound to explore diverse vistas and I know I oughtn't to prescribe to a uniform style for all occassions. This blog, and the one before it, being in the main reminders and pointers to myself, I have chosen to write in a didactic style, heavy, stilted and reeking of a Milton or a Carlyle ever so often. This style is odious to most but useful in situations where the ordered cadence of a sequence of sentences provides inspiration to the ordering of thoughts in the mind. Where I write about an incident or an amusing anecdote, I will assume a more bantering note designed to evoke participation in the merriment from the reader. Each occassion has as its prime concern a particular emotion or state of mind and my writing should reflect it in the highest degree possible; but in this blog I intend to provide general pointers to myself on the way I will carry my subject through.

I have to write spontaneously and extemporaneously often, as long thought may modify the pregnant impression an incident leaves in my mind - pregnant, for the impression achieves fruition only in expression. The style has to reflect the nature of the impression and convey much of my mood when I felt it. Words, malleable and suggestive in their import, and providing insight by means of their connection to certain phrases and occassions, will afford the reader burrowing into the warren of sentences I write, a certain pleasure, both on account of the industry and achievement of the reader and the use of language to suggest beyond the mere surface of things. Every now and then, even a slip is advisable, and, in hindsight, I will declare my errors to be volitional, and pass on as the brook that babbles on leaving stones unturned on its way to the ocean.

Flowery language has been my besetting sin and I will work on scrupulously avoiding the style that I have used in these last two blog, viz., embellishing little content with much adornment. I will paint on the canvas the virgin impression as I felt it and let the reader make of it what he will, myself paring my fingernails in the background and asserting every now and then an unvoiced assent or dissent at an independent interpretation. I will foist on the reader the burden of drawing conclusions as often as I can, and, even in the conclusions I seem to draw myself, often hide another possibilty. I will use the parchment I write on as a palimpsest, overlaying one idea over another and obscuring in the brightness of a conclusion a hidden and more luminous flame. I will portray but never caricature; illuminate but never delineate; assert but never to justify; and learn more than I venture to illustrate.

In all, I will learn to write so I may write to learn more than I know and achieve a synthesis in my writing of the thoughts, the perceptions and the acts that define my relation to the external world.

Why I Blog

2005-06-02T22:39:00.000-07:00

As I set myself down to serious blogging, I wonder what really makes me want to blog. I know this thought has been around since I wrote my first blog but now I have decided to frame for myself a manifesto, a creed, so to say, that I will follow through the rest of my blogging days as strictly as possible. A manifesto, of course, sounds grand and impressive but it is useful too, in the sense that I get a clear idea as to what I expect of myself through blogging; and, as a bonus, I get a nice, easy and well-set path to follow and fall back on all through the long journeys that I perceive myself as taking in the future.

This I believe to be important for I often wander along unknown alleys in my thoughts, and get lost in the mad jumble that arises out of an inability on my part to control and order the way my mind turns. Often ideas slip through my mind that I would like to set down on paper but they are pushed on and out of my mind by others too impatient to wait their turn. A well-defined manifesto and a conscientious setting-down of all I would like preserved of my thoughts is in order and hence this attempt.

I believe that nothing is new under the sun except perceptions. All the nice quotes one frames, all the marvellous ideas one hits upon are not original in the sense that they could not have been the quotes or the ideas of someone else in the past. As Emerson says, we hear reflected back to us our own thoughts in the mouth of genius, bold enough to publish them. What is new in every creative enterprise is not the potential of the creator but the actual, created object or idea. It is the venture itself that is new and not the possibility of it and so what needs to be recorded with great understanding is the realisation of a potential and not a wonder at its being possible. What is important and interesting is the phenomenon itself and what is new is our perception of it.

I believe that phenomena and their observations need to be recorded so they may be understood; and they need to be understood not so we may wonder at their beauty or felicity but that we may know that much is possible for each one of us and so set ourselves to the accomplishment of our potential. Every man is capable of certain things and though all may not have the same potential, all may realise their particular potential and so be rewarded by the accomplishment itself; every other reward is secondary. Man's purpose or destiny is not visible to him but he may strive to attain it and in thus striving, he is encouraged by the proofs of other such endeavours.

I believe that in the realisation of my potential, I need to learn and use language as a means to the expression of ideas that flow through me and suggest the possibility of my establishing an outpost in the dense thickets that surround the world around my perceptions. I need to find answers to questions that trouble me and I need to test the validity of the answers I come up with in the world I experience. To achieve this, I need to express my perceptions and frame my questions and answers in black and white and receive feedback from the world I conduct my conversations with.

I believe all social interaction is a great conversation tending in some sense towards the resolution of primal questions many are troubled with in the course of their existence. I believe the way to realise my potential is to participate in this conversation and record it and this I can achieve only by constantly rejuvenating my thoughts by observing them.

Finally, I believe blogging is ideal for me to reach my ends. A regular and spontaneous recording of my particular thoughts and a constant review of the opinions that others have regarding what interests me will be an easy and entertaining method of self-improvement.

And, of course, I can take out some of my frustrations and anger on my writing and freak out in a controlled manner(?!) :D.

Reality Bites

2005-05-31T22:19:00.000-07:00

The village always wore a colourful look in summer. Reds and bright greens and plastic bangles that showered the hundred hot hues of the midday sun were seen on every mud road by day. At night the lanterns were shaded with coloured paper and painted each street in their light: hence the names of the streets - Red Street, Blue Street and so on.

Electricity was not unheard of but not always available at the flipping of a switch and most other amenities that are taken for granted in a big city were not even luxuries here. There was a hospital that took in the sick and those wounded attending to their laborious tasks in the fields, the outlying mines or the household work; but it was ill-equipped and the villagers usually preferred country medicine. There was also a school that taught kids until they were old enough to work their fathers' trade or be married to some lusty young farmer or labourer. Sewage and drinking water both mingled at the local lake that was dry seven months a year on average. There were scores of troubles to be settled everyday and just three policemen and the trusted village elders, who lived in the adjacent town and met on weekends under the huge banyan tree, to resolve them. But life went on and except for the odd disorderly young man who went to the big city with his pockets full of dreams, people were contented with making kids, neighbourly gossip, monthly cinemas and the traditional festivals.

This year though there was unrest on an unheard of scale and the panchayats started meeting every other evening and the police station was full of bustling men and women who had landed in the village on big jeeps and vans from the city. A big filmmaker had heard of the village and had decided to base his next film in the colourful village. A host of top movie stars and 'extras' had come overnight with the panchayat chiefs and had persuaded the villagers gently to move out of their houses for a month so the shooting could be conducted in a smooth manner. The villagers were addicted to obedience and left with the few things they possessed on their backs to the tents outside the village that had been erected for them by the producer.

The first few days went by quickly as the villagers were treated to special dinners and special screenings of their favourite movies in the old cinema-tent. They also got to see their favourite idols in person and some were lucky enough to talk to them. The peculiarities of the movie-making business also awed them to an extent.

The director was one of those modern types who had studied abroad and wanted to make a movie steeped in reality. He was not one to be satisfied with sets and had persuaded his producer to rent the entire village for a month or two. He had also wanted a whole truckload of 'extras' for the villager parts and had conducted an audition all round the country to get the right people for the parts. The producer was the old fox who had made loads of money in real estate and hotels and had jumped into the film business at the right moment. He had a few hits behind him already and was now experimenting with serious cinema. He understood the workings of inner country villages and had obtained the whole village for the director for next to nothing.

Given the number of stars and the characters of the producer and the director, it was inevitable that fights should start and the days dragged on and the movie was nowhere near getting complete. People kept stepping on exposed nerves and whole days were lost to mysterious illnesses. The villagers were initially out of this all as they resumed their daily routine after the first few days of an embarrassing courtship. Slowly, however, the movie-makers started infiltrating the village camps. The extras came first, complaining to the womenfolk about how they were being treated and regaled them with accounts of stars getting it all from the director. The girls of the village were excited by tales of what this hero or that heroine did on their last birthdays, and the kids, whose school was being used to house the equipment, played with the kids who had come to play the parts of village urchins. City fashions moved in slowly as the womenfolk learnt to question what their husbands had done after work that day and asked the tired-out men to help with the cooking. The men too learnt to say big words like 'enlightenment', 'democracy', and smoke costly beedis with big brand names from the male extras who caught them on their way back from work for small talk. The 'stars' too came to the tents with the director and the producer to learn how village people behaved normally. They were of course gawked at and in spite of the director's strict orders and the producer's pleas that they continue with their routine work, large crowds of women and kids surrounded the entourage photographing them with their eyes.

After two months had passed the shooting was still not done and the extras were leaving in small groups. The producer was getting more and more anxious but the director assured him that he needed only a week and then a final 'surprise' scene which would make the film complete. The theme, he explained, of a village's slow urbanization leading to its losing the powerful roots of tradition due to the influx of foreign ideas unsuited for an undeveloped soil and the subsequent annihilation of the entire superstructures on which life in poverty is based, viz., need and immediate satisfaction, hope and resignation, had to be handled carefully. He assured him the climax was near and the final scene will be etched into the history of film-making. The producer was sceptical but he was satified with the promise of a week.

That week was the worst in the village's history. Nights were growing warmer and the children were crying more often as tempers frayed along the long lines of underclad villagers jostling each other to watch their favourite movie stars in action. The men had stopped working completely as soon as they heard the 'stars' were leaving in a week; and the women just kept badgering them for being irresponsible. The tents were now shabby and the rains were due very soon. A lot of mischief was happening that people did not really like and the 'extras' were no longer allowed near the tents. Old disputes were remembered when children fought for tops and the elders only egged termagants on. Blows that had not been seen and words that had not been heard were exchanged and panchayats were beginning to be shouted down. The farms were left to the winds and the mines had started recruiting men from other villages. Food was scarce and water rarely available. The one doctor in the old hospital had left the village when his warnings were not heeded by the villagers and the schoolmaster was anyway an old fart. The sick were left to their own devices and births and deaths were treated as irritants by the respective families. All emotions were tied up in their village houses where they had lived forever and which were now sanctified by the occupation of the filmstars. And so it went on for fifteen days, beyond what the director had promised the producer and beyond all that simple men from a simple village could bear.

On the sixteenth day from the director's promise, he started his last scene. He had brought in special technicians from the city a couple of days earlier and had made rubber dummies of all the actors in the film. Nobody knew what the final scene was supposed to be but the actors and villagers were all asked to keep some distance. Even the people in the film were bemused but the crowd of villagers thronging the outskirts of their village watched on in a mixture of agony and ecstasy as the final act unfolded. There were no sharp words now; they were beyond all that. Each man of the village hated every other man and the women didn't even care any more. The kids were now really urchins and could pull a few sly tricks. The panchayat chiefs were back from the city for today and had made a grand speech everyone had slept through, in the morning.

At noon, there was a roar from somewhere and the director was seen shooting from the top of a hillock some distance away. Dust was everywhere and as the spate of coughs ended and the dust cleared, the villagers heard an unfamiliar sound. Bulldozers were moving in and as they watched, their houses were demolished one by one. The school was lost to rubbish but when they saw their god in the temple losing his hold on eternity, they started running in. Just then the bulldozer stopped and the men in it ran away towards the other end of the city. There were lots of shouts and screams and in that moment all enmities of the past week were forgotten as the prospect of a collective loss loomed. People hugged each other and there were tears and smiles; there was wrath too but now they wanted to first get together. Then the earth rumbled and a deafening roar split the sky. A few more shocks followed and then smoke and fire and the debris of a ruined dream showered on those who had been living a moment ago. A few cries were heard by the stunned movie-people, who were still standing outside village limits on the director's orders, and then there was nothing. A small child grasping in her little arms the sooty doll with a disfigured nose mourned her untimely end as reality was summed up in a few edgy takes.

The movie opened to great applause and a new hero was seen in the director who took realism to great heights. People claimed they had heard of such a village in the north or the west or the south of the country and a few doubters claimed the movie could not have been made except by really slaughtering a whole village. Many awards were won and the director signed several autographs and a few new movies. People wrote in saying they were touched by the movie and as the final feather on its crown, the film won the National Award and was selected to be sent as the official representative at the Oscars. And the producer hanged himself a few days later.

Much is lost but much retained.

Road Trip

2005-05-31T00:09:00.000-07:00

Summer scents. Flowers and leaves floating on the wind. The wind knocking on reinforced glass. And the occassional stream. A few cars, trucks, motorbikes. Loud music and meaningless conversation. A long road with rest areas every tens of miles. Two kids staring out of a window passing into the past and future. Bright light. No end in sight. Troubled looks and green, black, red lines on maps. A destination. Food stops and stretched legs. Water bottles passed back and forth. Coke cans emptied and onto the road. Claustrophobic laughs and snores. Sleep. Home.

Pottering about diagonally

2005-05-25T00:38:00.000-07:00

Free Verse Now

You know the way smoke bends
When it comes out of a hidden chimney
Taking on forms of people you know
And talking to you in silent whispers
Conspiring with the setting day
And the beauty you have drunk to excess
It makes you think of forgotten days
When there were flowers by the road
And children playing on the streets
With tops and balls and all that
And there were pretty maidens getting back
From the well carrying their pitchers
It fogs your brain - the smoke i mean
And makes you think of those huge trees
With place to sit beneath and talk to your love
Of dreams that you knew would never come true
It makes you believe in forgotten vows
How you will build your home and buy a car
How you will go to the movies every weekend
And take your kids to Disneyland
And have fun at the beach every month
It makes real those dream-enchanted eyes
That looked with innocence as you waxed high
And declared you will love to the end of days
Those sweet tender lips that you so wanted to kiss
Those small firm breasts you ached to press
It makes real that half-feigned smile
That lighted on her lips when you brandished a stick
And waved it about destroying enemies of air
Killing destroying the wicked and being the good Hero
To her gentle Heroine sweet and coy
It makes real those tearful goodbyes
When you had to go from home in search of Life
And all those promises to keep and those locks of hair
Sweet remembrances of haylofts and caresses
Or are they dreams
And then the hard work the toil
It brings to mind the mindless days
When you went from sickness to sickness
A crumbling home to a cruel shop
Killing you slowly draining life out of you
Making you do things you didnt know you could
Bringing down the playhouses of children
Destroying their innocence
Making the barren world an image of yourself
Living unto death a machines life
And holding in one hand the ales stink
Making the rounds of a maddening world
And entering alleys that lead underground
Where smoke comes from chimneys too well hidden
To know what is real and what is in your dreams

The first blog is always the hardest

2004-09-18T06:40:00.000-07:00

It was just the other day I was looking for an excuse to while away time when this idea struck me: Why not start writing blogs? It had occured to me often to write down stuff going through my mind but a blog?!... i wasnt really sure... its such a drag getting to a particular site and typing in stuff at the excruciatingly slow speed of a word every 10 seconds when whole essays were flashing through my mind at light-speed... also who would really want to read someones blog unless they were asked to... and last of all how interested would people be in what went through my mind... the last was the key point - me, my, mine - all terms only I could understand completely and so whats the point... of course i might end up meeting a pretty girl(:-) who shared my interests(?!) but come on... anyways now that i have decided to write one no point talking pros and cons - lets get rocking baby yeah... but what on earth do i blog on?? on the right-handedness of cricket's most technically accomplished batsmen? on peyton manning throwing 3 touchdown passes in 4 minutes? on the distribution of primes? on the mating habits of the female Hydra? what a load of nonsense!!! indeed writing blogs is hard and the first the hardest of 'em all... its like u arent mad enough to believe u are making any sense nor sensible enough to let go this madness... the rubicon literally and the waters are boiling and deep... and hey look out theres the sirens belting out a beatles number... indeed the net/web was named aptly and here u r caught and u want to make a logbook of it! how romantic! but what a perverse delight it is to get oneself i'the sun and let the world take a good look - 'Here's a (wo)man who would talk'... anyways its still fun knowing someone out there might actually read what u write and maybe its good practice before publishing the first of your magna opera i guess and who knows what dreams may come...

What dreams may come

Quietly Fades the Dada

Berlin

Reality bites... and then chews you up

Forgotten springs

We The People

There will be time

The Argutentative Indian

Learnings

3 weeks notice

Landed Gently

Patchy really

a link and a movie

A couple of links

Trailers and movies

Whispers of Mortality

Words - III

Under the Bridge

On a Bridge, In Thought

Words - II

Words

A Commentary

An unknown place

a dialogue

A Capital Thing

An incident

Limericks - Old Style, New Style

December 31, 2006.

A Confession

The Book of the Winds

The Book of the Winds

KANK - Never Say Bye-Bye

Stuff

Pipe Dream

A Daily Life

Random Thoughts

Ummmm..

An Elevator Story

The Old Man and the City

Note to self

On a dark night in the woods by a lake

The Miserability Coefficient: A Mathematical Theory of Misery

Sila nErangaLil sila sindhanaigaL

Occam's Razor

A Sonnet from the Bosnian, Or: A Study in EBB

A Study in Shakespeare

hmm.. life.. hmm..

pOptimism

a Dream (in platitudes)

More Questions

Every single paisa counts

A Confession

a day in the life

Twenty Two Steps

Chronicles of the Great War, Or: How We are all Had, Then Forgotten, and Then Had Again

Of Taxes and Toothaches

New York City

Juvenilia

The Land of the Hippo

An imitation of Donne

Rang de Basanti

Can a blind man paint?

Memories

Laws: Prescriptive and Proscriptive

An Ode to Pain

Questions

Encyclopedia Satyrica Vol 33: Tragedy to Travesty

The Economics of Corruption

Baasha-bashing?

Kannathil Muthamittal

Small change

Lines without tails - 2

Lines without tails - 1

Darknight

Hillel - If not now, when?

The Road

Journalism and the Free Society

Dreams..Promises: Spring

Cold, Dead: Winter

Too much out o'the sun