Quietly Fades the Dada

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.