coincidentials...

Finger prints and soggy letters

2011-09-26T12:19:00.008+05:30

It feels surreal that time can be compacted through mental space despite physical distances. You wake up in Delhi and go to bed in Mumbai. Its been a year, it feels like ages, yet it feels like just yesterday , that I was here. The city seems to have turned timeless, like a constant frame through which people come and go like ants. The heart of Mumbai lies in the contrived domestic space which becomes the starting point for extrusions and explosions , that make the outside of the city the site of such an infusion of energy.

The Gateway lies desolate. It doesn’t hog the light it deserves. Somehow, it seems like its grown aged and no longer interested in bearing mast for its city. The swarms of middle class Sunday crowd seem parasitic to the place. Each little world, a closed decadent cuccoon, trapped within the boundaries of the camera lens, which seems to be the sole witness and jury to the fact of their existence.They try to break free by riding on silver painted neon lit horse carriages. Try to escape the ground that they are so wary of, yet, the ride is momentary in its effect. The horses always bring them back to the same point where they started.

She gets lost in the city. Her feet always need to move. Never on a standstill, they are automatically drawn towards the sea. Marine drive is Mumbai’s threshold into dreamspace. It marks an edge to a human constrained living and an extended threshold into the infinite sea beyond. It is the stage where the city distances itself from you and offers itself for your insatiate gaze. The urban proscenium sells the city to its customers who come willingly to be hypnotized by this edge.

Shards of memory are strewn all over the city like little horcruxes. Figments of images, clinging onto crumbling concrete. The cellotaped apartments , seem to have lost the will to renew. The concrete dark and old , weeps and cries all over the suburbs. The patched up cracks on the dilapidated apartments grow like algae, like ugly magnifications of the dark thorns tucked within the minds of the domestic beings within.

I find myself taller, larger. The city is a child, looking up at me , tugging at the hem of my shirt,leaving behind grimy finger prints and soggy letters.

Mumbai, August 2011

Remembering My dearest Ajju

2011-09-12T00:11:00.005+05:30

( I am reposting this writeup i had written two years ago , having added a few more memories to the picture. Happy Birthday to my dearest Ajju ) That afternoon comes back to me , when I went and sat by him on his bed and had a nap in his lap as his soft wrinkled hands patted my head. That vacation , I had got my walkman player, and Ajju’s favourite Marathi natya sangeeth cassettes, which he used to listen to , from earphones. Every time, the earphone fell out of an ear, he used to call out, ‘Gonti!..” and I used to run to him and plug him back into his musical world. This was the first vacation I was spending in Gokarna alone. Having waved goodbye to papa , who left me with dear little grandma and grandpa, tears streamed down my eyes, as we sat in the verandah and darkness fell. Ajju would love listening to bhajans I sang. My voice choked as I sang ‘dehi dehi sharade, gnyaanam dehi sarvade’, but soon it was fine, and I no longer felt frightened. Except now and then, when I came across a dark threatening corner or lightless room in the vast house, especially after sunset. I had never felt happier to greet the morning and the sun, as I did then.

It was the last vacation I could spend with Ajju, because, on the November 14^th early at two in the morning, we all had to say goodbye to Ajju. That year we (the family) stayed back after the funeral ceremonies , during karthik poornima. And we went to the Deepotsava that happens every year in the Kotiteertha, the sacred tank.

It was magical as hundreds of lamps reflected in the water along with a bright moon who seemed lost in all the celebration, and fireworks lit up the sky effusive with joy. It seemed a fitting goodbye to our dear grandpa. Last week, when I was back in Gokarna on my usual visit, I stayed back an extra day hoping to catch the Deepotsava on karthik poornima. But it is never like that first time, is it? However hard one tries to re-live past moments, it is never the same. Each time is a new time.

When I was there this time , I dug into the shelf in the study, which was full of books ( as is any shelf in our house) ; but this one almirah had a special taboo attached to it. Once long ago, I had ventured to open this very cupboard, and to my horror, there a was a tiny rat inside which ran right up my arm and jumping off my shoulder, scurried away victoriously! I was in a state of hysteria , as I ran and locked myself in my room and refused to come out , till the maid came and consoled me saying that she had taken care of it and it was safe to come out now. Later , the poor creature was a subject of my sympathy and I even wrote a small verse on it.

So, well, after mustering courage , I opened it this time . Happy to see no moving tails or black beings inside. I found a whole range of books on culture, Leninism, Marxism, and the likes, which were from the local library. And each of them had markings in pencil , made by Ajju when he found certain passages or points which were notable. And after long I felt I was in touch with him. I was reading the same passages, that he had read many years ago, and wondering what thoughts must have arisen in his mind then. The very awareness of this idea gave me an immense sense of peace. The signs one leaves behind, signs that remind us of a healthy living thinking mind, signs that give you solace when you need it, signs that give hope when you are in despair. Finding those books, inspired a new zeal , a new feeling of awareness and a bright feeling of joy at the very prospect of discovering things that are waiting to be .

One summer vacation , we had a digital camcorder with us. So I decided to record an interview with Ajju. I was in the sixth grade, a shy girl who wouldn’t talk. So , my father prompted me . I reluctantly asked . The question was ‘Do you still think there is no God?’ and I vaguely remember him giving an amused smile. I was amused at the unlikely moment , as these words tumbled out of my mouth, although fed by my father; perhaps, his curiosity found a voice in me. For me, then, Ajju came closest to the divine. And with his presence, there was always a ubiquitous sense of spiritual stability. He would sit out there on his easy chair, in the verandah and absorb us into him. More than a few times, with us children playing cricket in the courtyard, hitting bouncers now and then, he sportingly absorbed and ducked away tennis balls, too , which would bounce across his easy chair!

I hear him tapping my head with his tender frail hands , slender long fingers, saying ‘gontipor toh’ ( ‘that’s my little gonti’) , and tapping on the harmonium keys with nonchalant confidence. I hear his stories in his grainy voice. Every afternoon, I would sit adamantly in front of him , sinking into one of the easy chairs , my legs and hands dangling out like crab limbs, and waiting for him to start. And he would start, ‘Once upon a time , there was a king ( a raaaya )..’ ; always a raaya , with the occasional fisherman or farmer He was like a perennial fountain of stories for me. From him , I knew why the sea was salty, because a princess in some faraway castle had cried her heart out and her tears had turned into the ocean.

He would tell me to concentrate only on the subjects I like in school, saying the rest will take care of themselves. Once, he had told me how minds are like good conductors and bad conductors, some minds take time to grasp knowledge, but have a great capacity to retain once learnt, while some others grasp quickly but let go of the knowledge as quickly. And that had put me into a very troubled state of dilemma , later that day , as to which kind I belonged to.

I have memories of him walking up and down our front yard , in our old house , which still had its katanjan ( wooden trellises) and the tiled roof that let into the mysteriously dark kitchen a snatch of a morning ray through a glazed gap. Up and down the frontyard smelling of freshly shining cowdung, he walked, his walking stick, making a graceful gate of tip tap , in tune with his feet. This was when he no longer went out to the beach to take his legendary walking trail all the way up to Rudrapaada. I have heard from people, he would walk for phenomenal distances; he would walk everywhere, and that he would walk and read a book in his hand at the same time! I like to think that I’ve got the taste of walking and reading from him.

Another random summer memory is when we had just reached Gokarna after a long bus journey from Mumbai( since we lived there then). My brother and me were very small. Before entering the house, we spotted Pashupathi, the neighbourhood boy, who was few years elder to my brother and his good friend, sitting on the katte next door. Excitedly , my brother waved and greeted him. Instead, Pashupathi just turned his back to us and went into his house. That perplexed me and my brother. Like an offended pampered child, I went and told this to Ajju. Instead of consoling me, he asked me to be patient, and give the boy some time to come around. We had come from the city, and maybe he felt left out seeing us. I hadn’t quite understood, why, Ajju had taken his side then. Now looking back, I see. Every time, we ‘city kids’ , hopped in for vacationing, there would be a phase of diffidence that Pashupathi, would be overcome with , perhaps arising from the fact that he lived in a small town. And then, after a few days, once he sensed that nothing had changed, and we were all still the same, he would get back to playing with us like usual. I feel grateful that Ajju took his side, that day. Pashupathi has grown up now, and comes everyday to our house to read the morning newspaper and now and then teach my grandma how to press the numbers in her mobile phone.

All the letters he wrote to us, me and my brother, are safe with me . Spontaneous limericks on us and advise on how we should read a lot , learn music, not fight, study well, and not worry much about subjects I dint like. In every letter, he never failed to say a little sorry for his handwriting, which he considered illegible. His handwriting in fact was like a mysterious codec to me , evolving in its own speed and design to become a script that could be read by a select few. Now I see my father’s writing follows the same trend. The explanation he gives is that the mind thinks faster than the hand’s capacity to catch up.

I have known my grandfather as a grand daughter , but there is also the need to know him completely through his mind, through his ideas, through his writings. He seems an ocean. I am yet to learn to swim so I could delve into it. Remembering and missing my dearest Ajju , as he completes a hundred years of multitude.

Ilkal reverie (contd..)

2011-08-13T23:48:00.010+05:30

I ascend the Badami cave cluster in awe, confronted by the overwhelming rock faces flanking the steep uphill path. Cave number one, almost on the sly, slides in front of my eyes the charming and oblivious dancing Shiva. Shiva with his eighteen arms , creating a halo of rhythm around him, with his waist sveltely tilted into a Tribhangi dancing to his own music ( therefore called Natesha ) seems to be gazing into infinity. Though human in scale, his upright chin automatically turns the gazing mortal into a reverent onlooker.

The Badami rock cut monuments are a mix of Shaivite , Vaishnavite, Jain and Buddhist cave shrines. One grapples with the seductive and vibrant imagery of Shiva and his consort Parvati in one cave, while the next is subtle and restrained in its depictions of the ensemble of the Vaishnavite family with all his avatars and their amusing tales. While Varaha cant stop gazing at Bhoodevi, the damsel he has just rescued from distress, a stubborn and stout Trivikrama , acrobatically conquers the three lokas with his exaggeratedly raised leg. Vishnu resting on his serpant bed , with uncut finger nails , looks despondent without his consort Lakshmi around to massage his feet. Meanwhile the shrines in the shadowed depths of these caves, lie empty and bare, haunted with an absence of human touch, now that the shrine image probably, lies in the timeless vacuum of some decrepit museum a hundred miles away.

The sinuous and resplendent life of these caves lies in the myriad accomplice figures around the main images. The gandharvas , the mithunas, the gaNas , the mythical ani-morphs , the glimpses of wall paintings inside the caves , enforce the space with both , a historicity , and a mythical timelessness , that turn these caves into a phantasmagoria.

Chalukyan damsels in their most vulnerable and endearing moments, adorn the brackets of the pillared verandah of the caves. Their towering head gear seems to balance out their weightless and fragile waists , yet their slender long legs seem to carry them with a diva like elegance. While these damsels are lost in their solitary self-consumed indulgences, the mithuna couples on the other hand , revel in subtle moments of each other’s companionship. While one tries to help an inebriated lady to her feet, another stands firm and couth, allowing his lady to rest herself completely on his arms. They seem to be the ultimate ideal image of companionship and would perhaps seem incomplete without each other’s vulnerable presence. What is other worldly about them is that despite each other’s proximity, their gazes never meet. They seem to look beyond each other, into spatial and thoughtful tangents, and thereby never seem to materialize the moment into a mortal image by looking directly into each other’s eyes.

This amorous life of the bracket world aloft makes one raise his head in dreamy awe and look up at this mythical magic world like a child being told enticing stories. While the comical dwarves , the gaNas , add frivolity and a sense of festive celebration to the imagery, the alert and wide eyed mythical stags , antelopes and leogryphs on the brackets , brighten the narrative of the caves with an element of magic.

The warm red sandstone glistens under human touch. Rain and the wind seem to seek refuge from themselves amidst the deep shadows of these caves. Little girls in red ribbons manage to reach out and just about touch the navel of the dancing Shiva , as he has no choice but oblige to the soft inquisitive hands. The sweeper lady , rests her broom next to the Dwarpala’s trident , wiping her brow with the crimson border of her Ilkal saree. The idle guide sits resting his back against a pillar in one of the caves’ verandahs, placing his handkerchief on the floor so that his crisp white pant doesn’t get soiled. He takes a moment to look up at the Chalukyan damsel, and his mind rewinds to a hazy image of that shy girl in school, who always used to sit next to the window in the classroom, tying and untying her braided hair. His reverie is broken. A car honks in the distance as a family trickles out for yet another historic rendezvous with Badami. He is up on his feet , ready for his next round.

Stories are always waiting to be told.

Stones speak.

All you have to do is listen.

Ilkal reverie

2011-07-22T23:53:00.008+05:30

When your eyes wake up to grey skies sifting a melancholic whiff in the air, and the air smells of familiar strangers, is that how journeys begin?

A watercolor landscape greets me. The painter must have left his wet brushes on the fields. I’m in the land of black soil, where trees are rare and sharp like unshaven bristles. As my morning begins in company of these bearded fields, I sense the air of a masculine landscape.

A land which amuses you pleasantly with the sight of men, and not the women, carting pots of water home from the nearest water hole; plastic , fluorescent green yellow orange pots. The infusion of colour by these pots is electric. The Ilkal woman tinges the masculinity of the land with her robust frame. Her gait is sturdy, her saree pallu drawn confidently over her head and the deep vermillion borders of the drape defining the energetic feminine in the rural landscape.

Not far behind though are the bulls. The bulls with their colourfully decorated horns, seem like an integral life force of the homes. Desi bred and lean in frame , they strut their stuff with pencil points of horns adorned with delicately pointed bronze caps and flashy ribbons flying from their tips, just like the flying scarf of the typical Bollywood heroine of the 60’s ,as she rides her bicycle. Their eyes are wise, deep and intent on talking. Every village I pass by, I learn a new secret from these bulls. A bull from the last town just told me how bad the lady of his house cooks. The bull beside the town’s temple square is eaves dropping on the old men who sit under the peepal tree to discuss their domestic woes. Quite distinctly, the Aihole bulls have an archaic gait, their eyes scanning the tourists in a been-there-done-that manner.

The houses resembling the Maharashtrian vernacular style , complete the idyllic setting of the Indian rural landscape . With front pillared porticoes where tired farmers rest on sultry afternoons, the squarish frames of these houses, punctured with miniature windows ( so small that they seem elusive as if not letting through untold secrets)make for an elevational landscape. The barren dark North Karnataka land comes to life through little spurts of intense lively colours , in turbans, baskets , pots and decorated bullocks. Beautiful little exotic birds of assorted shades, light up the electric lines along the road to Aihole. Perched on electric lines, these birds seem to have embraced the lines of industry into the countryside with nonchalance. Makes me wonder how these electric lines have been naturalized into the green by the birds.

The soil changes shades and hues as the road takes new turns and bends. I wonder what is that point on land when the soil decides that it’s time to change its nature? Why do I always never find that line of transition? From black to grey to brown to red to black again, the soil has quite some mood swings in this part of the country.

Shor in the city has turned into melody outside of it. The landscape makes music change colours too. The road turns into a dreamline, where songs move in and out of the reveries one is lost in as one sees his/her own reflections in the window pane, mingle with the world passing by.

The highway has trucks , many form Himachal Pradesh and Haryana. Colorful and confused they seem to be in a hurry to run away from this setup. Each truck , a capsule of the what the middle class stands, carrying , pots and pans, fridges and washing machines, microwaves and double beds, almirahs with full lengths mirrors and little teacups wrapped in the previous month’s Times of India. Like closed chapters of the middle class , they move away from sight, like missiles sent into oblivion by their families; an attempt at erasure from present, an attempt to write a new future.

The aging stones of Aihole and Pattadkallu glisten in the first rains of a rare monsoon. The wet stone glistens gleefully as Chalukyan damsels bend forth to set right their hairpins in the mirrors of the rain water puddles on the sills of the rock temples.

Badami has caves , monkeys and unassuming majesty. That evening spent at Agasthyateertha is a moment paused and captured in my mind frame. The large pond edged with the mass of caved rocky outcrop is overlooked by a temple named Bhootnath and receding steps edging the other side.

The heavy skies finally spill over. The onset of rain begins with the rich green water of the lake shivering in goosepimples as it is caressed by the drizzle. Rippling seductively in the breeze , the lake flirts amorously with the rain. Looming large , watching over , are solitary sturdy boulders.

The space enshrines vast expanses and sudden silences. It embraces and lets go in one breath. To get to this vastness , however , I have to wind through small lanes of the town where homes huddle close to each other as if to re-assure each other of their presence ; each home with a door , each door like a frame, framing the lady of the house in her Ilkal saree pulled over her head and gazing out at the outside world from within her secure shelter. There is a direct connect between the lane and the home . Badami has the warmth of a heartfelt conversation.

Sheltered under the aging stones of the Bhootnath temple, it is an eternal moment watching the rain fall on the water around me . My thoughts are adrift , caught in the winds, sheltered under rocky shadows , gazing at the water dripping from the wet rocky ledges into the pool that has formed on the stone sill. In the distance, monkeys chatter. Little umbrellas are no match for this symphonic romance between sky and earth.

And out of this magical evening, emerges a small cotton wisp, floating down along the edge of the high overlooking cliff. The sky has decided to take the leap, to plunge forth , only to be lifted up by an unbearable lightness of the free fall. It is the birth of the waterfall. Slow and steady it trickles down, soon, growing into a robust fall. The ‘MeN basadi’ ( wax town) is finally melting in the monsoon mélange.

As it rains , the mithuna couples up in the caves are lost in each others’ eyes . Huddled in the assurance of the stone around them , they shiver as the rain water seeps up into their embrace, infusing a renewed romance into their eternal moment.

Aihole, Pattadakallu, Badami , Bijapura

june 27th , 2011.

Between friends and enemy , the stranger...

2011-05-31T11:22:00.004+05:30

Wriggly toes,

My feet in warm sand

I find a stranger’s trail

Footsteps, keen and deep,

Etched with moist tears of the sea ,

Glass bottles and mossy bread crumbs.

I walk by this new absence.

The feet seem large,

But the strides match.

Not for long.

Between friends and enemy

The stranger.

The waves have claimed

A momentary companion.

They’ve spared me.

Maybe next time,

I will follow.

One bus ride away...

2011-05-07T02:48:00.009+05:30

Amongst eclectic travelers , I have a ticket to ride to the land of the Lama , to get my first glimpse of snow peaks. Behind me two foreigners introduce themselves as writers , amidst talks of meditation, vipasana, teaching village children and discovering India. In front of me, a boy and a girl are lost in each other’s eyes, as a red Ferrari cap keeps juggling off his head to hers. On my side, a group of four students probably doing their Phd’s from JNU , are discussing some ecological policy issues, while somewhere at the back, an old retired army man with his wife are on visiting rounds.

At day break, the pahadi landscape is dotted with red turrets of devi mandirs, sparrows and monkeys, softened white pebble beds and streams, as the bus winds up hills to Dharamshala. The bus to Naddi, is all orange inside. The driver has light eyes and sharp Afghan features, and waits long enough to fill the little bus to the brim before taking off. Among towering boys and homely women, a little schoolgirl climbs in. It is tragic that she has to go to school in a bus filled with holidaying tourists. She has navy blue ribbons in her double braided hair and a look of breathless anxiety on her face. She is tossed and shuffled around near the engine seat of the driver, by huge women in matching knitted sweaters and thick spectacles. She coyly gives in, making place for all the big people around her. She steadily and passively scans every being on the bus, till she has to get off at her stop. I realize that the big women around her, are her teachers, who also get off and make their way to the local school where the bell is just about to ring. As I see winding uphill pathways, I am reminded of Kiarostami’s landscape in ‘Where is my friend’s home?’. Now and then the hills peep out and register their greetings.

Three streets and a junction make up Mcleodganj, the buzz town near Dharamshala. The place does not claim any paths to enlightenment. It seems to have very plainly and readily accepted its role as a hustle zone for spiritual wanderers, searchers and tourists. Its economy is from the traveler. The cafes, food joints, cake shops, and souvenir stalls lining the streets, with wrinkled Tibetan faces, wanderlust hipsters, and maroon clad monks and nuns, turn Little Lhasa into a colorful feluda of textures.

Dalai Lama seems to like yellow windows. The Tantric Buddhas around me effuse with colourful energy, emotion and colour. They are at the same time grotesque and enticing. Twenty one Green Taras stare at you like seductresses beyond your power. The intricate lines from the wall paintings have a life of their own, as a bunch of high school children on excursion, fill the space with their giggles and happy chatter.

The shingles on the roofs of the houses, here, shine and glimmer in the sun, just like the snow peaks in the light of dusk. The flat slabs lie on top of each other ever so re-assuringly and with a confidence that they won’t slide down. They are now a cheerful grey, now a greenish blue, now a dull hue , just like the moods of a day. The Bhagsunag waterfall is a little more than a trickle. The rocks are spotted with maroon, as monks have a little time out in the name of a water ritual.

That evening there is a candle light march, as the monks set out in circles around the main square, in protest of the arrest of fellow Tibetan monks. It is a moment of mixed feelings. One can’t help but feel a certain sense of helplessness and uncertainty, a sad sense of calm in their faces. Suddenly their place in the big scheme of things makes this scene seem a vain moment. They seem too tiny, too fragile, too transient before the mountains looming large all around them. The timelessness of the landscape seems to mute and evaporate the tangible voices of the valley.

Meanwhile, the US president Barrack Obama claims the death of the most powerful threat to the world, Osama, and thereby, turns the world into a spectator of yet another ridiculous unrealistically real event. The glimpses I catch of the ‘world’, now and then, on television screens, in cafes and antique handicraft shops, put my mind in a haze of confusion. So many different worlds existing side by side, parallel, tangentially, intersecting only at moments like these, yet never really part of each other, the conundrum that so many clashing realms could produce, makes me want to retreat into my shell, close my doors certain worlds, and open certain select windows. But one cannot sit in a one windowed closet for long. The breeze has to cross through, and doors have all to be opened before long. Otherwise, the sound of the silence inside can turn more lethal than noise itself.

There is a certain morose joy in the way the people wrap up their shops at sundown. The hustle of the day slowly dies to a deafening silence of abandonment. Few cafes are still abuzz with picture perfect characters , who seem to have been sitting in the same chair reading the same page of the same book since morning, having become subjects of many trigger happy tourist with cameras.

I am an outsider to this place, and I make no attempts at appropriation. I cannot turn the monks into subjects of characterization. They seem to represent a unified whole, embodying a unanimous sentiment and voice. I promise many of the shopkeepers, that I would return the tomorrow, but, then I will never really find my way back to them tomorrow.

Under my new found mango umbrella, I find a new found embrace, a warm hug on a chilly day. By the third day the auto drivers, the bus drivers, the café owners have turned into known faces and names. Waiting at the bus stop for the Naddi bus, I see an old Tibetan woman with her grandson. The boy has a green toy truck in his hands and the grandmother seems lost in him, carrying him around her shoulders and waving at the grandfather who is waiting at the bus stop. I decide to get myself a Tibetan dress stitched, the next time I come here.

Naddi is like the little village from Majidi’s ‘The Color of Paradise’ . The hills look lofty from here. They beckon ever more strongly. Sipping on hot chai, I serenade the peaks, scale the slopes with my eyes and in two hours, mentally scour the whole range. Sitting on the road side curb, watching people turn into vanishing dots, an sense of power assumes you, the high point providing me a panoptical position.

On a lazy afternoon , lying under tall cedars and pine trees, I drift into a reveries and float with an ‘unbearable lightness of being’. The afternoon is unreal. Time seems to have gone amiss. Yellow petals ring with unsung notes of silent hills.

The lightness will soon need an anchor.

Sooner or later, there will always be a bus waiting to take you away.

Dharamshala/Mcleodganj/Satobari . May5th 2011.

Tangerine

2011-04-29T04:19:00.004+05:30

(Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind)

Tangerine,

Can you hear the tambourine,

As you flame up the night,

When sea waves crash across

Memories in sand?

This is it, it's going to be gone soon.

I know.

What do we do?

Enjoy it.

Like green meadows

You run into wilderness,

Your red burns the forest,

Singeing dry leaves,

And crumpled letters,

Beneath our feet.

Last night you were

The blue moon,

The ocean swelled in your eyes,

And teased the sand

Sticking to your brow,

Don’t stir, lest you wake,

The waves are at your behest.

When you stood on that far edge

Of the breaking line

Between dusk and dawn

What colour were your hands,

As you bent into the ocean

Caressed the waves,

And turned the sea into purple desire..

Through your hair

Let me run my fingers

On my hands,

Let me get some colour,

I will meet you once upon a dream,

Memories seem too old today,

You are not a concept,

Tangerine.

2011-04-22T22:36:00.004+05:30

Ecstatic moss.

Nostalgic moss.

Misty memoirs

out of thin air

and in moist eyes,

Green grows

Dew drops off fingertips

a copper gaze melts

a lilting hip twists

gentle and firm,

the ages go by

second by second

patina pines

for that final touch

that will breathe

her to life.

in these moist moments,

green glows.

crumbling kites

2011-04-17T14:27:00.009+05:30

There was a pink moon,

that other night , which stole her seconds away.

Tick tick went the watch on her wrist.

But time wouldn’t budge.

Where had it gone?

The staleness of stagnation, she could sniff.

The hopeless drifter was

caught in the doldrums.

No wind to drift away into.

The sun came once that night,

to knock the pink dew off the moon’s cheeks.

And down it fell.

Like crumbling paper after

a hundred and seven kites got stuck

on the lone tamarind tree on that crater.

As the sun blew ,

crepe paper floated , flew, and settled down,

like a myriad magic carpets,

on the roadside curb,

on the edges of vulnerable minds,

and on a footpath that now crunched

with the sound of the crumpled pink,

torn hearts and worn out soles.

She walks.

She always does.

Along this vulnerable edge,

balancing on the yellow and black curb stones,

hands unconsciously reaching out,

fingers stretching out

like antennae trying desperately

to catch a signal,

hovering in the air, so clear and elusive.

A lost footing.

A crunch onto the crisp carpet,

her toes are now tickled by torn edges,

teased by the grass blades .

Hagard old brown petals ,

shorn of their rouge and youth,

cut into her skin,

like old empty vestiges of Broadway divas,

now orphaned and hurting.

The soles come off ,

bare foot, she trots,

crunching and stepping over

every oncoming hope of salvage.

The pink will destroy her.

Consume her.

Expurgate her.

her fingers now bleed pink.

As she touches the dew drop on her eyelid,

the sky splashes into rose and ice candy

The sun sets in her eyes,

a Monet storm raging through them.

And she hums, strumming a long lost tune ,

Across the two hundred miles of kite strings

that lie in between her and a few lonely kites ,

crumbling by the day, fading in pink,

Left behind ,

because they wouldn’t let go of the tamarind tree,

So easily .

2011-04-11T23:05:00.001+05:30

Sitting on the sideline

Yellow stripes on mind,

Tarmac and gravel

Crunch under my hand,

There is no time that can measure me now,

Into the wild,

I go.

Each step I take

I get higher on land,

Each bow I break,

Sinks me deeper in sand,

Tangled in branches

In rapids I row

Humming birds and red shoes

See me go by

Into the wild

I go.

2011-04-09T18:38:00.004+05:30

From Jantar Mantar to India Gate on the 8^th of April, 2011

As I woke up early Friday morning, I was engulfed by an anxious anticipation; an anticipation of something I had decided last night just before going to bed. That I would go to Jantar Mantar the next day. Considering how crowds can turn intimidating and lose their sanity in a matter of seconds, the act of going to the heart of it, did not sink in till I was actually on the way, on the Friday afternoon, when next to me came and sat an old man, who had brought along with him three young impressionable boys, who seemed to be from a small UP town. As one of the young boys asked the bus conductor to tell them when the stop to Jantar Mantar arrived, I felt re-assured. I was not alone. Slowly, as people climbed into the bus, stop after stop, I liked to think that all of them were co travelers to the same destination. For me, all roads, on that Friday afternoon, led to Jantar mantar.

‘Hamare Uncle ji humein le jaa rahe hain, udhar muft mein paani dilayenge .Kyun uncle ji!’, they said.

‘Ye Sheila dixit ka ghar hai’, they said.

‘Kiska ghar hai?.. padho…Hanumantaaya… haan wohi.. MLA honge.. idhar sare bade ministers rehte hain’, they said.

‘India Gate’, they said, as they gave each other contented smiles.

Everything outside seemed very normal. My whimsical expectation of seeing signs of protests and marches, or slogans, were dampened; the city was carrying about its normal business, like a quintessential professional. My voyeuristic impulse as a spectator of a possible spectacle was thrashed. As I hopped off the bus at the red signal on Janpath, I stole curious glances around me at possible fellows. Apart from the very mild traffic congestion that seemed plausible on any average working day, there were no jarring signs of security personnel with intimidating rifles, or volatile clusters of people . I took the left at the red light, that would lead me to Anna Hazareji , now on his fourth day of an indefinite fast for the cause of India Against Corruption.

I saw middle aged women, mothers and aunties, in sneakers and caps, with bottles of Bisleri , strolling back and forth on the road. Slowly there were parked cars, and groups of people , trickling into the Hazare vortex . A yellow Delhi police barricade marked the site of entry into the place of protest, right opposite Jantar Mantar, which seemed dead and redundant in such a volatile context. I entered and was overwhelmed.

Here was a sea of people. An ocean. Yet a very sane ocean. Without any streaks of violent vandalistic vendetta , the people who had come to see Anna Hazare, the ex-army official now, a social activist, on his sangharsh , knew the depth of the cause they had come for. Many of them, I am sure, would have had to deal with corruption at close quarters, at several points in their lives, and carried an earnest cause for concern. Many others, like me, college students, and young blood, who were equally earnestly invested in the cause through their conscience and a baggage free a-historical perspective of this nationwide movement. A movement which they wanted to embrace into their own personal histories and re-enforce their own voice as citizens of a very vulnerably amusing nation.

Anna tum sangharsh karo, hum tumhaare sath hain!

Cried the ocean in lilting waves.

I suddenly felt the urge to want to be taller than the rest, having no idea which way I was going, I simply nudged my way in. Sliding myself through the ocean, overcoming one person at a time, at times, feeling myself surrounded by good humored middle aged men, telling me ‘Is taraf aao beti, aap andar jake baith jao, bohot bheed hai’ , at times, finding myself cordoned off at points of no return, where I was absolutely at a loss as to which was the way to get myself to the heart of Anna’s audience, I somehow, ended up in the area, where people were sitting since morning, listening, chanting songs, cheering, encoring to ‘bharat mata ki jai’ and ‘vande mataram’ , and ‘jo bole so nihaal’ .I was finally a part of the nation come together. I could see I was among bank employees, government clerks, NGO workers in crisp cotton sarees and round red bindis, engineers and software professionals with their Iphones and Facebook constantly archiving the moment to virtual memory, home makers and their 12 year old daughters in pink hair clips, impressionable and warm blooded college students , and hundreds of small town boys, like the ones I met in the bus, all had come here, many , not knowing their place in this scheme of events, yet, wanting to be part of it , wanting to sign on a page of history , their presence and solidarity.

As I recovered from the thrust into this overwhelming event that engulfed me, I noticed how, there was this unstated assumed role that everybody had taken upon themselves, and an amusing traffic pattern of the people, had emerged, as a constant flux of floating visitors moved in front of the makeshift dais, where Anna ji sat, to get his ‘darshan’. The more static audience sat in front. Rimmed on the periphery by more standing people, and finally edged by a thick line of fire of media and television crew, with their cameras aimed to shoot, and their reporters, like dispatched satellites, speaking from dispersed corners of the crowd, seemed like lost lonely men and women, speaking to everybody yet nobody, and constantly on guard to measure the pulse of event. If you saw reporters shift base, automatically, a cluster of people would turn their heads that way. If one spotted a lady reporter with heavy make-up, touching up her face for the ‘citizen journalist byte’ of the day, naturally, for few moments, Anna’s cause would take the backseat, and the amusing glamour of the TV performance would hold sway. The crowd responded like mercury to its surrounding. It was this mercurial power of people, that had, over the past few days, taken up the simple yet strong rooted cause of India against corruption, and proliferated it into a national mitosis.

I saw Anna Hazare, medium built, lean, in a white muslin cotton kurta pyjama, and pleasantly calm and smiling, but without his trademark Gandhi topi. He was standing at one corner of the dais, hands clasped at the back, looking curious and pleased. A black clad street play group had just infused thunderous encores and a man with a pony tail, with a saffron kurta, was playing the electric guitar and singing Bollywood bhajans! Now and then, the slogans turned sinister, as groups would shout ‘Bhrashtachariyon ko phaansi do’ or ‘Sonia Gandhi nikammi hai’ ; those few odd moments which made me cringe and want to mute the crowd rather than see the apparently sane crowd suddenly lose its temperament in a weak moment. On the fringes of the concentrated crowd, were the mobile and vibrant moving clusters of independent slogans and flag wavers, common men turned into performers, their shirts turning into canvases for signatures and an odd family now and then posing as a family banner for people to click their picture! Anisha had joined me by then, and I felt no longer a lone crusader.

What was conspicuous to us two wide eyed JNUites was the stark absence of a JNU voice in this whole issue. On campus, JNU was sleeping, JNU was watching Saas bahu serials on Colors tv, JNU was playing cricket on the field, JNU was feeding dogs, JNU was sipping chai with an eerie nonchalance , and Anna Hazare was conspicuously absent in the voice of JNU. The question still haunts me. My reasoning led me to wonder if JNU found this issue too banal, too grass root level, too ‘non-intellectual’ to be dappled in? Why were there no posters, no leaflets, no talks on this issue? Why did the parties not find any enterprise in this cause? I missed the JNU voice at Jantar Mantar that day, and I wish, we were more in number for that sake. But I was content, Anisha was with me. After having tried several ‘view’ points from which we could see Anna ji, we were tired of peering above a million necks and standing tip toed. So I took a Kulfi-falooda break. Kulfi, with slimy worm like falooda turned pink by Rooafza ; topped by a sprinkling of guilt ridden conscience of eating in the vicinity of fasting satyagrahis!

It was time to march. Anna was giving his press conference, and things seemed to be looking up. The deadlock with the government seemed to be opening up in his favor. My job seemed to be done. I had given him my salaam, on behalf of all my folks back home, and now with a candle in hand, I decided to take the walk all the way to India Gate. But little did I know that half the crowd there had decided to do the same. So I found myself walking at brisk pace, with a sea of people that swarmed the roads, firmly yet very peacefully. Their pace was elusive. At times I was either too fast, or at times too slow.

What was appreciable was the nature of the march. They chanted slogans, encored, but all in goodwill. The roads seemed to make way for the sea. The cars stopped. The traffic police cheered and let the sea march. The security guards were there, not to restrict but to allow these people to exercise their freedom of expression. The police facilitated by rerouting traffic. It was a wonderful moment of collective jubilation of the wonder of the democracy that we are. The state did not, for once, curb and disrupt the flow. The state seemed to be listening.

with the others. Somebody had pointed out ‘Why do people light candles? Be it mourning or jubilation?’ I would like to think that it is the power and hope of light, in its more primal, innocent form, a small flame, that turns the space and therefore the idea it inhabits, sacrosanct.

As we took our place under a crescent moon , the monument seemed to benevolently accommodate its fiery and energetic people doing seemingly funny things in its shelter, all in the cause of an ‘idea’ of the ‘people’ , everything revolving within man’s sphere, watching him embracing the space around him to help him inscribe his own history, in hope of a solace that he will feel remembered as part of it, forever trying to give himself an irrational hope of the impossibility of death and evanescence.

It was time for coffee. The old man who came with his flaming kettle, asked for the plate and spoon we had been clanking the night with. He seemed happy. He had earned plate to eat from that night , like many others, who would find more spoons, dented steel plates and half burnt candles that they could take home and light. The sea had stormed the India Gate grounds and gone. Families with their 8 year olds trickled back to normal pace, the moongphali chana wala got back to his place, children started crying for balloons, and the family cameras and camera phones where back to clicking memoirs of the monument of the capital. It was calm again and the heat of the evening made way for a cooling breeze. Anisha and me had a subtle smile of self pride written on our faces. ‘The deadlock is over, Anna is to end the fast tomorrow at 10 am’ we heard from the news.

We were in a flux of the 21^st century awakening, or so I would like to think. The corruption that had been seeping into the system, and corroding the foundations of the Indian machinery, seemed to be finally on everybody’s mind. It is just the beginning. But it is evident. People have become aware, and have taken the effort to express this awareness as a whole. And I have hope that this active awareness, instrumentalises and proliferates in the social conscience as a way of life.

I went home, having participated in my first peaceful and victorious protest , and a utopian vision of a 21^st century Dandi march that had just taken place on the real and the virtual roads of the country, and in my city. I heart this country.

s r a j a n a k a i k i n i .n e w d e l h i, a p r i l 9^th 2011

Dhobi Ghat , Address unknown

2011-01-23T22:54:00.006+05:30

Dhobi Ghat succeeds in yet another canvas of the Mumbai myth, and sensitively so. What shines in the film is the screen presence of Prateik, who plays Munna, the dhobi wala, and the interlinking thread weaving the various ‘shattered’ spaces of the realm of the film. Although the film seems to be about four lives that are tangled in the cobweb of the concrete jungle, it is more, in the distances, the imbalances and the pulsating equations between them that the film germinates. There is a very conscious effort towards an image building of the entire narrative, which begins , not against expectations, with the opening shots of construction workers and a city under process, almost in mental continuity to where we left Peepli Live. As the blue sky presents a stark ‘dhobi ghat’ in modest Arial font, the Bollywood mould is straightaway broken , with shaky continuous handheld camera shots introducing itself to a soaking Marine drive , where people come for fresh air and little street urchins readily dance to Mera piya ghar aaya for the camera . This is through the eyes of Yasmin (Kriti Malhotra), an absent presence throughout the film.

Arun , the painter, (Aamir Khan) is the stereotypical recluse artist who talks less, seems a misfit in the elite chic art world and has just moved into a new house, which gives him a view of the old city. But that is where , the stereotype ends and it ceases to matter even, because here are mere pawns of a larger checker board of an urbanscapewhich is constantly shuffling. Shai , a high society investment banker from New York, who is on a ‘sabbatical’ and not a holiday, as she points out , to click photographs in Mumbai, encounters two different beings on this graph of Mumbaihood . Munna ( Prateik) , is the common link between Shai and Arun, and yet, the link being only in terms of acquaintance and not any more. He is the dhobi boy who delivers each their laundry everyday. And through this daily narrative, equations emerge. All three equations work independently and uniquely. While there is a constant mystery about the recluse artist that keeps eluding Shai, a bond evolves between Munna and her, as he takes her to the dhobi ghat to photograph the dhobiwalas in action , in return for a favour that she click pictures of him for his acting portfolio. Yes, Munna dreams to act in the movies, and somehow this fact appears agreeable to us despite the trope of the ‘dreamy eyed Bombay immigrant with hopes to become a filmstar’ being an overused one. Kiran Rao uses the handheld camera shots from the Yasmin plot line, to make the film more ‘real’ in texture , more near in narration and encashes on the emotional memories that personal archival images produce. Yasmin , is present only through her videos that she had taken in order to send them to her brother. A newlywed girl who sees Mumbai as an outsider trying hard to make it her own city, Yasmin becomes intrinsically entwined into Arun’s mental and physical space.

The documentary style footage of Mumbai life that we see through Yasmin’s naive lens, and the crisp freeze frames of the ‘faces’ of Mumbai that we see through Shai’s probing lens , turn the film into, a larger statement of the film as a chronicle of the collage of Mumbai. Hence , one supposes ,the subtext of the film ‘Mumbai diaries’. The cinematography captures colours poetically , rich in texture and being partial many times to blue hues, which sets the rather laconic temperament of the film. These have the quality of a Walter Salles’ ( the director films like Central Station and Motorcycle Diaries) narrative mode of depicting faces of a landscape which themselves exude the character of the spaces they inhabit. And leading from that, it is imperative to highlight the music score composed by Gustavo Santaolalla , who has given life to films such as Motorcycle Diaries and Babel. Gustavo intelligently molds his guitar to the Indian lilt, and yet manages to hallmark poignant scenes with his universal notes. Strings don’t sound like strings anymore. They resound the voice of the characters. At points , the Yasmin narrative tends to lag a little , and could have been edited more tightly ; however, overall, the film clocks good time at 95 minutes ( with no intermission!). Not to forget, that, being an ‘uninterrupted’ movie itself is flashed across the posters as a USP of the film, and to ones distaste, the announcements in the multiplexes become a cue to rush to the popcorn stalls at the beginning of the film.

Dhobi ghat is about shifting realms, lives simultaneous in one moment of the city shuffling through different paradigms. Each is moving constantly in a desperate attempt to get somewhere, something or get away from something. And yet the city has its own way of creeping upon you and letting you know that, you need to chase your dream and give it your postal address . Otherwise even dreams get lost in this city of human labyrinths.

‘Zentropa’ rehashed

2010-11-08T23:49:00.002+05:30

(Film: Zentropa /1991/ Director : Lars von Trier )

Zentropa, a film by Danish director Lars von Trier, in 1991, could be called as cinema that has been created in the realm of intersections; intersections of space, time, histories, identities and crises. The film is on a superficial premise set in Germany Year Zero, 1945, post World War II, when Germany is getting back to its feet after its ruinous debacle in the war. However, if one is to inter-textually read Zentropa , then it is the story also of Europe in the 90’s and its impending crisis. Zentropa released a year after the Berlin wall came down, and a year before the Maastricht Treaty was signed by the European nations. It was a time of uncertainty for Europe as ‘Neo Nazism’ threatened to resurface and Europe , as an international identity, was facing an identity crisis. In this light, Zentropa, through its texturally layered form, addresses ‘Europa’, Europe in general and with a double edged sword, cuts back to 1945 Germany, with a historical premise.

Displaced Realms : the ‘interstitials’

The film’s existence occurs in a continuous ‘displacement’. This ‘displacement’ can be further explored. The main character , the American , Lee Kessler, is presented as a subject under hypnosis. The hypnotic non-diegetic voice over that begins the film, introduces a ‘lag’ between knowledge and action, which till the end is never reconciled as the subject ultimately dies. Kessler, who comes to Germany, to help it in its nation building process, becomes a guard in the railways. The ‘train’ again is used as a medium of displacement. Rosalind Galt in her essay points out that Leo is never directly in touch with the landscape of Zentropa, but constantly mediating it through the train ; he is constantly on the train. All those junctions where in fact he is on the ground, form the crucial cues in continuing his ensuing disconnection with everything , ultimately leading to him getting killed in the space of the ‘interstitial’ , the drowning train.

The sequence of Max Hartmann’s suicide, is a key grounding factor and also a lead/ premonition of where Kessler will ultimately end up. The character of Max Hartmann is shown to be or have been a Nazi sympathizer, and his daughter Katherine Hartmann, also, is a former member of the Werewolf terrorist group. This is the sequence where the crucial secret of Katherine’s identity, is revealed in the narrative, and the ominous implications of it , henceforth, are also hinted at. As Katherine asks Kessler to ‘show her some kindness’ as they are poised before a vast expanse of a miniature network of the railways on the German landscape, one is certainly given signs of a certain power relation inherent in the mise en scene. Here is a former Werewolf, toying with her American ‘puppet’ Kessler, and using the railways to her whim , ultimately , crushing it with her own weight ; (as the toy train falls off the disarrayed tracks, it is an ominous sign of the fate of the actual train in the film). Meanwhile, downstairs, her father in his state of despair and helplessness ( out of his Nazi connection) grotesquely cuts himself up to his death , in the bathtub. The heightened use of a singled out ‘red’ colour of the blood, fills the mise en scene with an infusion of violence latent within the characters. The characters in Zentropa are almost never directly in connection with their surrounding contexts, except in this sequence where the immediacy of blood is effectualised to the highest measure.

The ‘interstitial’ film form

Zentropa’s interstitiality is foregrounded by Lars von Trier, through the use of his filming techniques. He makes use of selective colour against black and white photography, uses the wide angled lens with the telephoto lens, 35mm with 70mm , makes use of back projection techniques , and a wide variety of contrasting camera angles. With this variegated palette of polarized ingredients of film form, von Trier , skillfully stitches it all up into a deeply layered, pan-temporal, textual narrative. By making use of the back projection technique he effectively disconnects his characters from their contexts, ( since the characters are shot in isolation and the backdrop in isolation). By using a selective chroma scheme, the effect achieved is not only that of surprise and shock for the viewer but also, it acts as a coding system, like markers that make the anticipatory sensibility in the viewer alert. The use of various layers of foreground and background, also allows von Trier to play with scales within the mise en scene. Thus the ‘razor’ in Max Hartmann’s hand and its impending violence gets exaggeratedly fore grounded when it is shown in a scale larger than real, against the bath tub. The whole idea of a comfort of ‘spatial depth’ that the audience enjoyed out of deep focus photography is completely destroyed and the film constantly disorients the viewer’s preconception of space.

The use of symphonic music and the melodramatic tinge to the dialogue delivery by Katherine Hartmann, allude to the director’s simultaneous citation of classical film form, post war history, and the contemporary context. There is a graphic textural quality to Zentropa which is at odds with the seemingly realist plot narrative that Zentropa tries to deal with. Yet, till the end, ‘identification’ with any specificity is the one thing the film stays far away from. This kind of a non-identifiable, non-existential film form is von Trier’s larger critique of its times, of the crisis of a national ( read personal) and an international ( read social) identity of Europe. A crisis that may or may not be reconciled with on the count of three.

One…Two…Three…….

Elaichi

2010-10-30T23:27:00.003+05:30

Petals, in my pages.

The scent of a scene.

The road is taking turns,

In misty expectation.

In the air wafts

Elaichi.

White blooms from northern land,

Why do they smell so?

On a winter’s day,

There is always chai,

Masala and Elaichi,

Standing in the middle of

Intersecting memories,

Floating petals, and

Wilting trees.

'New York Herald Tribune, New York Herald tribune'...

2010-10-21T20:32:00.006+05:30

How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? Yesterday, I caught one.

On the pavement of Champs Élysées. She was calling out to an invisible buyer, ‘New York Herald Tribune! New York Herald Tribune!’ Her lilting voice floated about in the air a few feet around her and vaporized into the afternoon sun. Her petite figure walked the pavement of Champs-Élysées like a daydream , calling out to sell the stories of the new world to grumpy Parisians on a Monday morning. Violins played a certain melody tinged with ennui. It was an ennui of a beautifully fatal lady, in trim trousers and a sweater with New York Herald Tribune written on it.

I sneak into her tiny apartment, and watch her proliferate.Her nape is her fortune. Her face is a myth. She flits and jumps across the bed, over my shoulders, and under the sheets. Her gramophone plays symphonies that turn her into Cleopatra, and her nose glistens in the sunbeams filtering in though the shades. Renoir immortally froze her, before she could turn around in restless boredom and make up a frown. She dons the mafia of the enigmatic bohemian. Her cigarette smells American. Her striped shirt is the scent of crisp newspaper.

She takes my dreaming hat, and grasps a reverie in the midst of a radio commentary. She cant shut her eyes hard enough to make everything turn black. The red plays around like the flame of her heart behind her eyelids. I sit here and gaze. It is all I can do. She stares back with competition. Who blinks first? She couldn’t care less. She is too busy making her way through Dylan Thomas and William Faulkner. Her head is up there, in the clouds. Breathless. Now I see it, now I don’t. She is Napoleon , now pinning me down with her telescope. Now hiding from the world by simply turning away.

You tell me to make you smile. And smile even before I begin. You ask for a reason , and then don’t even care for it. You close your eyes, and I lose you in an instant. You turn around to look, and ask why I look at you.

‘Between grief and nothing’ , did you choose grief?

What did you choose? Patricia, What did you choose?

Newspaper seller . Daydreamer. New Yorker in Paris.

la femme fatale, what did you choose?

The Swan and the Tomato

2010-09-22T23:02:00.003+05:30

photo courtesy: http://www.danceinisrael.com photographer: Marek Weis

‘With an apple I will astonish Paris’ said Paul Cezanne, the French Impressionist painter. Well, Idan Cohen certainly astonished Delhi, albeit with the tomato!

Red round things on the stage. What were they? Tomatoes. Luscious and orange red in the yellow spotlights of the stage. They would be far from being just limp fruits by the end of the two hours on stage.

Edan Cohen and Group from Israel performed the Swan Lake at the India Habitat Centre on the 2oth of this month. Being an interpretation in contemporary dance, the classical Ballet , that was Tchaikovsky’s 19^th century Swan Lake, transfigured before our eyes into a critically sublime modern day take on elemental questions of identity, beauty and control. Contrary and quite welcoming was that, here was a new , fresh and meditative reading of the Swan Lake, without succumbing to classicism in its original form, that was of the classical ballet with sculpted arched ballerinas striving towards an almost cruel perfection and the attempt of every being to become beautiful, from swan to human. Instead, Idan Cohen extracts the puppet strings of Swan Lake and embeds them so strongly into the present context, that it turns violent, grim and grey , from the humane to the animalistic.

There are only three dancers, Reut Levi, Rita Komisarchik and Daniel Gal who are continuously on the stage. And the performance juggles identities of the characters from the classical ballet, between these three bodies, each with their own symbolic markers, mixed with a grim disturbing undertone to it. At the beginning what looks like a prince who is having a birthday celebration, hinted by a child’s hat and a blowing whistle toy, slowly turns into a clown, with a red round nose. It is not coincidental that there are tomatoes on the stage after all. They become the critical clown-face of the beautiful, the sinful fruit of decadence, the toy, the tool of control, the blood of animalism, and eventually, a red sea that drowns the swans. The motif of this little fruit through its starkness on stage, as being the only prevailing element of stage design, evolves and grows on the dancers. The dancers enter the Swan lake as distinct individual identities, and emerge out of it stripped of paraphernal differences as a unified mass of mixed emotions, stripped of beautifications, and a violated rebellion of controlled selves.

Choreographed to the original composition with certain intermediate cuts, the movements we see on the stage are intense expressions emerging from the personality of each of the dancers. An element of control comes through strongly and may as well be a critique of the extreme severity of the ballerina’s physique and her training and at the constant attempt at sculpting and chiseling a body to achieve the bar of perfection. By creating motions resembling disembodied limbs and using the body as more of a dynamic tool of discord and turmoil, the dancers succeed to render this modern day Swan Lake, an unsettling, at times violent representation of the ambivalence of contemporary identity. The swan almost is the subaltern voice of the ‘self’. And as the first part ends with a methodical shedding (almost like a serpentine molting) away of the dancers external costumes, the voice of an internal struggle echoes against the silence of the classical orchestra. The second half opens to a visibly increased mass of red on the stage. The tomatoes are now more in number, and soon, they turn sinister as the dancers see hegemony inside their red and dance to crush them one by one, the smear looking like blood on their skin. Their movements turn primal and more animalistic , and finally, in a mass of entanglement , the sea of red consumes them.

The performance throws wide open the door to something new, fresh and brave, capped with a critical manner of sensitive contextual interpretation and a new language of expression. Idan Cohen’s reading of Swan Lake is a welcome gift to the seekers of the new like us. Thank you Idan.

Babel

2010-08-24T00:26:00.006+05:30

('Babel',2006,Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu , written by Guillermo Arriaga, Music by Gustavo Santaolalla )

A desert is where it begins. In the arid dryness of Morocco , two boys Yussef and Ahmed, herd their goats and shape out their own little freedoms in their entrapped vastness. However, life turns oblique, when events crisscross comfort zones and death intervenes. The cozy urban domesticity of a couple is displaced in time and space , fragments shorn across a desert of the unfamiliar.As Richard and Susan Jones (played by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchet) try hard to warm their cold relations in an ironic landscape, their tourist air conditioned bus, like a fragile bubble treading in the middle of nowhere, is punctured in an instant by death . Cate Blanchet finds herself , a victim of a bullet shot and a whole world around her comes crumbling down to its knees in its bid to fight against the ultimate leveler, death.

And the film cuts to Japan. With Manga comics,neon landscapes and stereotyped crowds, the texture of this urbanism is a stark contrast with the Moroccan landscape. Yet, the desert exists. It exists inside the mute girl, a frustration and famine of the loneliness of an urban lifestyle. The metropolis of the orient dances on the screen in montages of human vibrancy. And yet it is an oasis with its own mirages.

Meanwhile across continents , the American couple’s children, a son and a daughter are displaced from their familial place to a strange exotic land of the ‘dangerous’ Mexicanos, when their nanny, a Mexican migrant , has to attend her son’s wedding and cannot leave the kids behind alone. The fulcrum of this track is the little children and their vulnerability. As they are driven into the Mexico of the vibrant red , instinctive and earthy ,amidst another kind of people , they are dwarfed , intimidated and awed.

Mexico is shown like a red hot chilly, and made so tangible, it exudes the warmth and dust off the screen. At the wedding , the strange Mexican uncle (Gael Garcia Bernal) , in a game among the kids, twists a chicken by its neck and snaps its head off. This act has a jolting effect on the young boy. The grossness of the whole act is felt only by the tender boy, while the other children take it all as play. It is a fear psyche playing out of the civilisation's head.

Swapping back to the tourist bus of the desert, struggling between life and death is the Susan Jones . Amidst all the chaos, one people is not able to understand another people , and language steps in as the major hurdle of communication. The narrative at various levels, invokes Babel, the biblical tower of the confounded , through the reality of today.

With an assorted mixture of men and their peculiarities, the film has skillfully chosen assorted worlds and shattered their exclusivity by displacing their plots both in time, narrative, and juxtaposing textures. With a non – linear looped narrative, the film , gently yet in a pointed manner, unfolds and oscillates between the various plots. One could say that Innaritu takes a bullet that travels through the globe, and rips open people’s masks, prejudices and ideas.

‘Babel’ is a critique of the whole desperate human condition that has bound itself into language, created boundaries between each other, and then finds itself helpless with this disposition. Biblical literature talked about the tower of Babel, where the Yahweh is supposed to have confounded the language of the people , in order to destruct their monopoly over each other, and thus, no one could understand each other. The film, brings out the frustration that linguistic differences creates ; but the film has a further point to make, that there is an unsaid between man that needs no language and the same pulse runs through everyone.

“Jews and Christians say that man was created by God in his own image. And what that sentence clearly suggests is that there is some relationship between the nature of man and the nature of God ‘created in his own image’ . Islam says the opposite. Islam says that God has no human qualities. While Ibn Rush’d argued that language is a human quality and that God would be expected to speak God and not any human language.” Salman Rushdie says in a recent interview .

“To defend the freedom of language as a universal human right is justifiable not by appeal to this or that cultural tradition but simply to the biology of the beast.”

Innaritu in his film, streams forth a dialect of such a kind of universal language, the language of death. Death speaks to all, in the same tone, in the same voice and with a single meaning. It is also the one threat that makes man shed all his superficial discords, and deal with his core.

By mish mashing the timeline and plot narrative, Innaritu works with the fear that comes with de- familiarization. The unfamiliar territory that the children and their nanny ultimately find themselves in, brings them face to face with total desperation and lends the viewer into sharing it with the screen characters.

Babel, strips bare the human, and plays out an extremely intricate mesh of human bonds , the unspoken and the explicit, the fears, trusts , and insecurities of man, who has tried to make good his existence in his own little way. As the Mute Nude standing in the balcony of an apartment of a city dissolves into the multitude of many more apartments and many more windows, we know that , ultimately , we all speak human.

'The illusion of reality'

2010-08-16T23:46:00.009+05:30

(after reading the essay 'An aesthetic of reality' by Andre Bazin , 'What is cinema?' vol 2)

‘Inception’ – our latest nailing point at the question of reality verses the realm of the dream. Emerging out of a philosopher’s satchel, the word reality seems very fragile, quite devoid of the concrete solidity that it is attributed to.

To incept from the idea of the movie Inception(Directed by Christopher Nolan) , reality has got a heavy contender - The Dream. The dream catchers, delve into dreams within dreams within more dreams, fiddling with sub consciences of people , expanding in space and in time. Real time expands exponentially into dream time on screen and into reel time off screen. As the audience sits riveted, keeping track of the tight paced events, one always wants to keep track of which is the real and which is the dream. The fact remains that his two and half hours inside that dark cinema hall, is probably the most real of all the realities he is trying to grapple with. End credits roll. The totem is still spinning in the viewers mind. Jump cut. He (the viewer) comes crashing into an existence outside of the cinema theatre ; another disconnected reality from the reality of the dark room. Squinting his eyes , he walks out into the sunny street. He then makes his way home, unknowingly intersecting into the realities of the hundreds of people around him in the city, and finally taking refuge into the notion of his own reality in his home.

This business of reality is really evasive. Just when we round up on one real thing , it slips and dissolves into another. And this evasiveness could be the food for all of cinema.

According to Andre Bazin, the acclaimed French film theorist, who speaks on the aesthetic of reality, “ Realism in art can only be achieved in one way – through artifice.” When an aesthetic aims at creating the ‘illusion of reality’ , this sets up a fundamental contradiction, both unacceptable and necessary.

“The ‘art’ of cinema lives off this contradiction. Reality is not to be taken quantitatively. The same event/object can be represented in various ways, either retaining or discarding various qualities, thus the initial reality has been substituted by an illusion of reality of complex abstraction, convention and authentic reality”, writes Bazin in his essay.

“Some measure of reality must always be sacrificed in the effort of achieving it.”

This close duel between reality and fiction brings me to mention Abbas Kiarostami’s 1989 film Close-up.

In his signature docu-fictional style of filming, Kiarostami takes a real situation and weaves the necessary frame around it to hold it tight. Sabzian ,a commoner , is so enamored by his idol film maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf that unknown to his psyche, he begins impersonating his idol and in the course of time, is tried in court for it. The director has filmed the trial as it happened. And this forms the narrative bed for the various connected , re-enacted events in the movie to elucidate.

“Close up is a key film in understanding Kiarostami’s fascination with cinema as a trompe l’oeil* medium, at the same time reality and illusion, creating uncertainty about what one sees with one’s own eyes . Film as a means of capturing reality both in ‘process’ and as reconstruction, is juxtaposed with a reality based on illusion and the suspension of disbelief” , writes Laura Mulvey in her article, ‘Kiarostami’s Uncertainty principle’.

(*Trompe l’oeil is French for ‘deceive the eye’. And referred to the style of painting wherein the painter created a likeness to reality in two dimension by making it appear three dimensional)

A precariously thin line lies between what is and what could be, given that, with our average aspiring minds, we tend to fill in the blanks of a statement, and always are eager to put the full stop point after a sentence.(Eisenstein took full advantage of this attribute.) An even thinner line exists between complete sense and complete absurdity. Try repeating a completely sensible word at random , such as say, ‘door’. After a few dozen times, your mind is sure to start detracting and abstracting the word till a stage comes when the word is a stranger to you. It is like a process of rediscovery through de-familiarization. When the familiar gets so familiar that you no longer see it as familiar.

The centre of gravity of reality topples heavily from dream to dream. From Familiarization to de-familiarization. Like the dodging doll ; however hard you hit it, it always tries to get back straight.

“You're waiting for a train, a train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you don't know for sure. But it doesn't matter”. The more we try to focus on the sense underlying this line from "Inception" , the less we understand.

It belongs to that haze , between the state of sleep and wakefulness , when your kin wakes up from a realm completely unavailable to you and smiles , a familiar stranger, trying to helplessly recall and pick up the strands of reality he had left behind as he fell asleep.

Cut to the scene towards the end in Inception , when the dream catchers slide back to the reality of the plane in which they are flying, one by one, each nodding and giving the faintest smile of recognition, as they establish their (apparently) real dimensions.

It all needs a little blurring of vision, an iota of myopia, a pinch of idealism, the ingredients of a daydreamer, to appreciate this haze.

Sweet Water Apples

2010-08-14T23:34:00.004+05:30

Often , the leaves of the sweet water apple tree found their way into his room, invariably alighting on his trigonometry textbook, which was left wide open on all days at all times by habit . As the leaves of the pages fluttered with leaves from the tree, Muni felt the sines , cosines and tangents fluttering through the room and magnetically funneling into his head, as he lay on his bed beside the window of his room.

Summer lethargy and a heavy humid stagnation infested this little room that Muni stayed in as a paying guest since the past four months. The trigonometry was a sidekick. He taught the land lady’s fourteen year old monster mathematics. While in the mornings, he went about this coastal town, trying to find a reason why he had come to the place at all.

Ever since the pat on his back given by his principle at college, for being an outstanding student of his batch on graduation day, Muni had been disgusted at his whole smug self and decided that he would do anything in life except make use of his graduation degree.

Sweet water apples . They came in pink and white. With pecks from the sparrows . Like kisses implanted specially for Muni. When Muni first came to this sleepy town, merely out of a random one fine morning whim rather than any logically aimed destination, he went straight to the 22^nd street off the temple complex where stood a pink bougainvillea bush arresting any passerby with its vanity. Behind this bush was the house where Muni was looking to be a paying guest. And behind the house was the pink water apple tree. Well, the pink was from the fruit which hung voluptuously from its high branches, virgin fruits kissed by the birds, and challenging Muni to come and consume them. Muni agreed to move in just for the tree, the room having gone completely out of his selection criteria. Luckily, his room on the first floor faced the backyard, and was in full uninterrupted view of his new beloved tree.

“Muni dada?”, the little landlady’s monster peered into the room with watery sparkling eyes. “Yesss , my lord!,” replied Muni, eyes still closed , not stirring from his bed. “Today, I fell in school while playing! And there was so much blood , that even my teacher was nice to me,” he was saying with victorious pride beaming in his voice. “ The teacher told me not to study today,” very quickly, and confidently, he uttered these last words, and waited to see the effect on Muni dada’s face.

Smiling on the sly, Muni half opened his eyes and peered down his bed at this little plaintiff. His nose had a little speck of soot on it, and he was standing on the threshold, his wounded thrust to the front so that there be no doubt about his claim. Here was Napoleon Bonaparte himself, asking Muni dada release from his trigonometry class, with the help of a hopeless claim. “Your teacher told you not to study?! Wow, I had never come across those kinds before!”, Muni said with mild pretence of amusement. “Okay, no class today”, so saying he gave the little Napoleon a wink and got up to look out of the window.

The smell of wet earth wafted up to his room as far somewhere, rain clouds shattered. Grey and pink was the palette of the landscape this evening. He peered back at his doorway and saw Napoleon still standing in the frame, looking unsure. He had been hit by the unseen circumstance that , though he was free from his torturous class, his other friends in the neighborhood were nevertheless slogging in their classes . So he was left with no one to play at the moment. Muni scanned this little figure, deep in his sudden crises, and at once understood.

“ Come inside. There’s no class, but we could play something , no? Want a water apple? ”

Napoleon's eyes widened into a grin. “Yes! Ok. I will climb the tree and throw them down. You pick them up!” So saying he ran downstairs . Muni hadn’t expected this. He was referring to the fruits in the bowl in his room. Nevertheless, a tree adventure seemed much more alluring.

An unequal duo, they seemed. Delicate little hands searching out the sweeter bird pecked fruits, little dusty feet dangling from fragile branches which had the complete trust of a boy. Standing below, stubby fingers and course nails picked up the fallen fruits from the fresh rain soaked soil. Slowly piling up in the vessel, each fruit, made its own little clink as it settled into a new found company of pink peers, hand -picked by their very trustworthy Napoleon.

Back in the room, happy in exhaustion and fruition, the team shook hands and sealed a silent bond in all its solemnity. The room glowed a tinge of pink twilight on that grey evening.

With a satisfied silence, Muni and Napoleon perched on top of the window sill , surrendering to sweet water apples, rain drops and that odd evening in the life of a man and a boy, where nothingness made them equal.

The Sarukkai effect / Summer school at MCPH Manipal

2010-07-03T00:44:00.002+05:30

Wide eyed I enter Manipal. The University town is shrouded in a thin sheet of rain and I see umbrellas dodging about over white lab coats. I am here for the Summer school of Philosophy and Humanities on the ‘Idea of Justice’. Sundar Sarukkai , the master mind of this school, is on his fresh new venture , a new post graduate degree in interdisciplinary Humanities at Manipal . I am here on self probation, with my antennae receptors , alert and ready to catch on to fresh piece of knowledge that comes floating by. Apprehensive about finding myself without a firm grounding in this field, I am immediately put to ease after my first encounter with Sundar Sarukkai. He makes sense. And when philosophy makes sense, I doubt if anyone can resist its pull.

The first session is on Ideas and concepts. I enter the class thinking I am ready to take the ‘Ideas and concepts’ of justice. Instead, I am faced with the question, What is an idea? And what is a concept? So obviously, I am now realizing , words are taken very seriously here! The discourse is tentative yet firm, extremely inquisitive yet firmly basic. There are no answers. Only questions. Sarukkai flings the word ‘justice’ about , bouncing it haywire, shaking it up, rattling it empty of its preconceptions, and beginning from the basics. Up there on the podium , he seems like a magician juggling very precariously with his oranges , yet with an innate charm. Ah, ‘innate’. The word is to be noted.

I am struck in my seat, paralyzed by the speed and clatter with which a million window shutters of my brain are opening up. I am reveling in the tickle of a new kind of confusion. The feeling that you are getting it , yet, you are not getting it, yet ,you feel sure you got it, when in fact , there is no way of getting it, is exhilarating. I have not understood something as a whole number, and this fractional non-understanding has motivated positively.

What is the meaning of justice? What is the synonym for it? Is the feeling of justice biologically or socially innate, if at all? Is it a personal concept or a social concept? Is justice a primal instinct or is it subordinated by ‘guilt’? Is justice the concept or is ‘Injustice’ the seed concept for justness to exist?

There is room for thought and reaction in class. Sarukkai flings sincere and inquisitive questions at us ; to which he seems to want the answers from us, and we feel responsible in some way, to get him out of his seemingly perplexed position of unknowing , only to find that he is probing us to probe more. He is trying to make us use our mental mechanisms in a novel way to think, and not telling us what to think. Unsettling, is the order of a Sarukkai class. Just when things seem to get ordinary, an exotic string of words are flung at you , which light sparks. So there comes up a question of, What is the Idea of a Chair? And What is the Concept of a chair? And then we go on to essentialise it into a ‘Chairhood’ that ultimately makes a chair a chair, a treehood that makes trees trees, a red(riding?)hood that makes red the red it is. Not to forget, the ‘theory-theory’ of the theory of concepts, and that a concept cannot have a definite definition except in terms of other concepts! So its all really a circle, pointing out successively only to lead back to itself. Back to square one, we could say, but it’s a square with a larger dimension now, and now it will take longer to get back to point A .We are in fact, getting ourselves a Kurukshetra built around us! Then there is Leibniz at point A, saying “Will we ever know, if the world doubles in the next instance?”

Will we?!

FA 2010 - FTII, Pune

2010-06-26T20:42:00.002+05:30

The Prabhat Bell calls for take.

Shot number 35 ! Film Appreciation 2010 ! Lights Camera Action ! Clap !

We are serenaded by the lilting and suave notes of our Pied piper , Suresh Chabria ji . With his magic lantern , he invites us into the powerful hypnosis that is Cinema. Synesthesia sets in. Our senses blur as the screen before our eyes lights up with Sergio Leone’s gunned outlaws, Kubrick’s waltzing spaceships, the inevitability of Apocalypse Now. Yes it is Apocalypse Now. An Apocalyptic dose of cinephilia.

Where is the Friend’s home? Kiarostami asks us on the first day, and we set out on a quest in search of our old friends, Films.( By the end of the course we pride in calling ourselves Foofs ; Friends of Old Films) We wind down the cobbled streets of time , and encounter our great grandfathers, the Lumiere Brothers, George Melies, D.W.Griffith and many more. We walk through the Narratives, past the Tableaux , up the hills of Montages, sail past illusory lakes.We enter the world of Sonimage, now Real , now fragmented, through Surreal waters, and ride the gales of wretched Realism .

Edvard Munch Screams through the Cabinet of Dr.Caligari, and we know the Germans have Expressed through their Metropolis! As the Bicycle thief rushes past us, and we are left stranded on the pavement watching Breathless, Pierrot the fool, catches us unawares and splashes the walls around us with colour! Swept away by the Wave of the French Nouveau, we land in midst of a Red Dessert, and find an oasis of metaphors, satires, the Blues of a trapped lady, the Reds of passion blood , the yellows of summer and sadness. We walk into the lush green fields of an Ozu landscape and find Seven Samurais waiting to attack us with an effusion of Kurosawa’s passing seasons.

Eventually, we enter the Noir streets of the city , chased by shadowed figures, dark alleys, gunshots and cornered by femme fatales. Now and then a train rumbles along , and dark smoke shrouds the immaculate conscience of the city, making the city a place of the anti-heroes and Helens. We waltz to a labrynthian city symphonies and take a high ride with Thelma and Louise.

Meanwhile, halfway across the world, three fathers ,V. Damle, V.Shantaram and S.Fatehlal sit under the wisdom tree of Indian Cinema and sound the Prabhat trumpet into history. In the distance, standing on top of the great Mount Melodrama, Nargis holds the cross on her shoulders, and questions her son, “Tujhe ma chahiye ya chaney?” This is the quintessential Indian emotiscape, the Indian Madonna who sheds rivers of blood to inundate fields of a Bharat who brackets his stories by proclaiming, “Mein Bharat hoon” while, somewhere in the dingy lanes of this Bharat , a cynical bard sings ‘Jinhe naaz hai hind par who kahaan hai?’ We are yet to get an answer to that question amidst throes of War and Peace In the Name of God.

We meet Bhai Miyaan and Bilaal, go in search of The other Song with Rasoolan bai, and marvel at the Great Indian School Show. The Digital Camera takes us a step too close to the human mindscape of Love sex and Dokha .

In the midst of it all it rains. The fancy umbrellas are out . The streets are sparkling wet in the early morning mist. The Chaplins, Mrinal Sens, Kurosawas, Toshiro Mifunes, Satyajit Rays and Ritwik Ghataks in FTII soak in the monsoon’s first showers and greet us with wizened visages as , we take our final walk down the FTII street, and meet again under the wisdom tree to sing songs of a new bond. We are the FA 2010.

2010-04-29T21:58:00.002+05:30

A scene from Akahige (Red Beard ,1965) - Akira Kurosawa

2010-03-21T23:42:00.002+05:30

Chobo, the little urchin thief , lies on the hospital bed , struggling for life , after consuming poison. Till yesterday he was chased away and cursed by the hospital nurses for stealing rice from the kitchen . Today, the nurses worry for him, as a mother for her dying child. An old myth of the hospital says that if all the kin of a dieing person called out his name into the well in the courtyard , the spirits would send him back from the otherworld. “ Chobo! Chobo! “ his little friend Otoyo ‘s screams echo from the well. Together , Otoyo and the nurses , bent upto their waists into the well, salty tears dripping into the well, call out, “ Chobo! Chobo!” tearing at their guts , as if their voices would lend life to the well. The sobbing screams pierce the silent air of death around. The water in the well ripples with Chobo’s final breath.

Louis Kahn in Ahmedsaa Badsaa's city

2010-03-04T23:54:00.005+05:30

Glittering city lights like neurons and cells spreading their connectors around. I enter IIM-A campus. Sodium lights reflect off lofty walls, all of brick and awe. I cant help feeling the excitement slivering through me. Sriram kaka takes me on a late night tour of Louis Kahn’s monastic campus, the Indian Institute of Management – Ahmedabad. It is shivering cold at 11 in the night and mist has descended over the brick fortress. Through the arches and student blocks with their heavy buttresses anchored to the ground, the bricks overwhelm one’s vision. In the almost ethereal walk at midnight, I suddenly run my hand over one of the walls, feeling brick and mortar in an attempt to make sure it is all real. The sudden slants of the brick arches and hooked lintels that defy the constricted massiveness of the built, take me by surprise. All at once, I am overcome with a sense of depression. I feel sad somehow, for the building. For the bricks that are stuck in there for eternity. For Louis Kahn himself, the outsider who came to this foreign land and sought to manifest and trap himself within the stoic bricks of India. I can almost feel that intensity of nothingness in those humungous circular punctures on the walls. With exotic migratory species of birds filling the midnight air of IIM with a morbidity of their screams, IIM falls asleep brick by brick.

The morning is almost shaken from its slumber by the hair raising chirping and rattle of what seems like a battalion of birds in the campus. House number 413.M.S.Sriram has peacocks in the garden. I go on another round of the brick fortress. This time it appears quite harmless and vulnerably exposed (literally) in the bare open. We maneuver through the great Louis Kahn court which looks like a great grand father whose grandchildren have not yet woken up. Walking past empty classrooms awaiting their designated students(quiet literally as each desk has the students name plate on it! ) the great Vikram Sarabhai Library ‘s circular arch looks ready to engulf the entire place like an enormous black hole. A mango tree gives the Harvard steps at the entrance a human touch, while an enormous Stanford ramp extends an invitation into the belly of the bricks. Meandering through the hostel blocks, I feel small, as moons of windows loom large above me giving glimpses into the life inside. While Kahn’s bricks make the old campus, Bimal Patel ‘s exposed concrete makes the new campus. I like the relief of the lightness of grey after an overdose of heavy brown bricks. Although in places there is the indecisiveness of a modernist, the new campus tries to balance well.

The Forum ( my reason for visiting Ahmedabad) is at Cept university. The place looks worn, active and full of sand. Having had some godlike image in my mind after having heard so much about CEPT as “the place” for architecture, I am left confused with mixed reactions. Well, that is always the case with having images and then seeing them shatter with reality. The great North Lawn, the mound where all beings lie down, looks inconspicuous and subtle. A pair of parrots hover up on the tree by the lawn. For the next two days, I spot them at the same spot, frolicking among architecture students, cement, bricks , panel discussions and rolls of paper.

Sabarmati is elusive. Only once, I get a complete picture of her, as I stand amidst the Ravivaar market, Ahmedabad’s 150 year old legacy, surrounded by cot makers, lamb traders and rising silt. Sabarmati Ashram , molded by Correa into an architect’s subject, stands across the river. I can imagine it once , as a lone standing hut amidst the sand across the river while the old city was only on this bank. Now the new city has engulfed land beyond the other bank and expanded around this little ashram mercilessly.

The blue windows of the old city are closed shut as I wander through them in the chilly morning of the Sunday. The labyrinth of pols and ols, take me into a cocooned city hidden underneath the bustling glazing of the new city. As we are taken through Ahmedsaa Badsaa’s city, where once upon a time even rabbits would chase away dogs , our guide in a peacock blue kurta churns out interesting tales of the place. Sculpted for life, a gujarati poet sits on the porch of his own house, stuck on a pillow with a book in his lap for eternity. Such a pity that , while hundreds of tourists gape with hungry lenses and goggled eyes, he himself is not able to turn back and look at his own house, which has undergone a facelift over the years!

Ahmedsaa ‘s secular city looks helpless under the weight of so many people. The old city quite literally apart from the new with Sabarmati cutting across. A multitude of exposed concrete, brick, modernist architectural jargon and a much publicized architectural following lies one side, while on the other bank subtle, aged , fading yet full of life, the old city tries silently to save itself behind blue doors.

An Odomos sunset

2010-02-06T22:05:00.005+05:30

An Odomos sunset,

A swim

A guitar,

Shoe strings

Music in the sand

A past left behind,

A cigarette stub in hand

Sea salt

Biscuits for breakfast

In anonymous land.

Oh Scarlett Oh Hara!

2010-01-13T20:04:00.003+05:30

The name is not just a name, it is a symbol. 'Oh scarlet oh hara !' Margaret Mitchell was not playing around the weak hearted when she envisioned and gave life to this character that has ever since been immortalized by a staggeringly vivid performance by Vivien Leigh , the legendary British actress. The book of course, is the classic tale of a civilization ‘Gone With the Wind’ with Scarlett O’Hara at the centre of it all, the eye of the whirlpool in which she sucks in all people who ever matter to her and who eventually succumb to her ubiquity.

Vivien Leigh proved as the only person who could have take on this character so perfectly, and her own persona has beyond doubt added to the screen image of this masterpiece. Quite contrary to the defeatist little coy dancer, Myra, that Vivien plays in Waterloo Bridge, this remarkable character by the name of Scarlett O Hara is a conceited optimist, a go – getter who has so much energy and life that no room would be unaffected in her presence. She exudes herself into all surrounding things and quite without her knowledge, all things bend towards her, just like a field of sunflowers towards the sun. And just when one starts to think she could be the most remarkable person, Margaret Mitchell goes on to ruin every little reputation that could form in our minds by making her such a faulty and marred character, full of follies, fury and conceit, that she edges on being an object of hatred. Here is a selfish robust girl who cares about no-one but herself, many a times quite unknowingly. We watch with helplessness as she steers her life ruinously and recklessly all for someone, she has so naively talked herself into loving; the unattainable and married Ashley Wilkes. It doesn’t come as a surprise that every man she lays her eyes upon, is undoubtedly affected and appears as a helpless weakling before her.

Scarlett’s never say die spirit, takes her through the roughest times as we see a childish little schoolgirl transforming into a hard hearted, strong, and a ruthlessly matter-of-fact lady. She survives her war, hunger, and public detest. And she has no one but herself to give all the credit for it. It is a cruel portrayal the survival of the fittest, and fitting enough she turns into the predator and not the prey. From dancing in public as a widow, to acting as a midwife in times of riots, to plowing her own fields and doing business with the enemies to raise money, to riding her own horse carriage when it was considered unacceptable for ladies to even ride alone in public, there is nothing that she does not do to keep the promise she made to herself at during the hardest time of her life, ‘ that she would never go hungry again’.

Of course the whole world would topple on one side with such a strong unchecked force. So along comes Rhett Butler, the anti-hero, the deserter who is as conceited , as selfish and as hot blooded as Scarlett, but with more years behind him and with shrewd wisdom that is good enough to check Scarlet’s rampage. Only a diamond cuts a diamond; “sirf loha lohe ko kaat saktha hai”, as Thakur says in the Bollywood classic, Sholay. So Butler is the unlikely antimatter to our O’Hara matter. It is a welcome surprise that we are not in for any predictable romance blooming between them, but a peculiar love hate bond, which leaves each of them bitterer than the last.

Yet, after three marriages and a child, she is still a robust child, who wants to get back her 18” waist. She says she was never meant to be the marrying kind. She naively confesses that she can frankly love nobody else but herself. One could only affectionately laugh at this little child’s admission of her weakness and say ‘my poor girl, it took so much to get you to know yourself, but there, you’ve finally realized!’

It is a bitter sweet admiration between Scarlett and her readers. You never know when you start loving her, and the next moment she’d do something, you would absolutely hate her for. She is a living flesh and blood conjugation of our minds and aspirations, so real, that reality seems fake before her. Red as wine and warm as the sunshine on cotton fields, she is a true toast to life and a tribute to man, flawed and imperfect and beautiful.

The Last Waltz

2010-01-09T19:37:00.004+05:30

(photograph: Jozef Krajko. Source www.1x.com)

The Last Waltz

Standing on the window ledge of the 33rd floor,

She wonders why the traffic

Below is unusually still.

Yesterday's tequila glass

Still clinking in her ears,

She edges inch by inch

On high heels.

A black suede waltz

On the 33rd floor

On the 17th day of the 3rd month.

The music of the taxis,

Ringing like an orchestra,

All awaiting the lady in red,

To make the first move.

One step in front.

One step back.

Two to the right, one to the left.

Back and front.

Aaand let go.

Down on the pavement,

Beside a yellow cab,

A man in a tuxedo,

in black suede shoes,

and Elvis burns,

Heels clicked in attention,

And lips curled in,

Waits.

Up on the 33rd ledge,

She gets ready for the free fall,

Into the waltz of a lifetime.

When death visited

2009-12-23T15:16:00.005+05:30

At the break of dawn,

The mullah rises up,

And calls on to allah,

From the minaret top.

An unexpected visitor,

Knocks at the gate of

A house on the 22^nd cross.

A widow sobs like a newborn,

As the silent gate-crasher

Makes his presence felt.

Infiltrating into neighbours’ dreams

Each one isolated in his own fear,

No- one dares to wake up and share.

The unassuaged cry

For a thing lost forever.

An animal’s cry

That invokes the deepest hidden silences

Of turbulent storms.

Like a release of locusts,

Everything bursting forth

Through her cords.

A scream for relief

From the ascending conundrum

That runs a havoc in the mind,

With an inimitable inevitability.

As the muezzin’s cry shrinks

Before the widow’s unleashed sorrow,

Little sisters in the next house,

Cover their ears under the pillow,

Trying to shut out a bad dream.

Everyone is alone

In that hour of fear.

Death is a lonesome affair,

A reminder of lonely liberation.

Orange pillow

2009-12-23T15:01:00.005+05:30

Orange pillow

Pillow fights

Distant trains

Silent cries

Orange pillow

Yellow sunflowers

Soaking tears

On lonely nights

Orange pillow

Must have heard

Distant screams

And hurtful sighs

A silent listener,

Soft and light,

On the orange pillow,

Rest your head,

For a peaceful sleep

And a restful night.

In between songs

2009-12-22T15:56:00.003+05:30

I slept to Ennio Morricone,

And woke up to Gustavo Santaolalla ,

What was in between,

I do not need to know.

In Sync

2009-12-10T12:27:00.003+05:30

Sit alone in the dark and notice yourself suddenly fall silent. The dark heavy silence envelopes around you and me in a vicarious mercurial fashion . Slowly, noises of awareness start creeping into the dark mass. All objects seem more solid than at other times. All voices seem peculiarly unfamiliar. A desperate run for the candle stick is made from all directions, like it was the most heroic act expected to be done at the moment. ‘A change of paradigm’, a self conceited architect would say. All the noise, all the trash, and the chaos of light, just like jargon, weigh heavy in such dark moments ; suspended mid-air, ready to crash down anytime. Blindness and silence – when juxtaposed with each other, seem such a perfect match. An erasure of vision equals an erasure of sound. Only the music remains , one that deserves a listening. Footsteps tap on the ears in rhythmic beats, in sync with your heart beat. A sync of time and feelings. A sync of synchronous butterflies swimming in symmetric seas to a Mozart staccato. When the lights are out , synchronization takes over.

Standing at the centre of the dance floor , shiny disco lights in rhythm to the DJ’s groove, I feel the warm breathing of wriggly bodies, the complete sync of bodies in a mass, a singular entity in a sea of togetherness. There is an enigmatic duality in the discotheque’s role of connecting you with people and at the same time disconnecting you on a personal level. But everything happens in sync. Like the physics experiment in school on resonance, when you blow into one bottle, and can hear the whistle in the adjacent bottle.

A truck rumbles on the highway and the window pane of a house two lanes away shivers. The truck driver is whistling the latest song, ‘Haley paatre! haley kabbanaa ! haley paper kanahoi..’. He is going to catch the new Vijay starrer flick, Junglee after delivering his truck load of sand. The sand in the truck was dug out from the river bank, where a little boy sits plopping stones into the water , watching the sun dissolve in ripples and thinking about his elder brother who has left him there and still not returned. Two lanes away from the highway, the resonating window pane looks into the room of a teenager deep in sleep and dreaming of drowning in the same sea, wave after wave after wave. As he wakes up to the tremor, the truck driver’s song, the little ripples in the pond ,the waves in his dreams, are all in sync. At one moment in the same link , in different paradigms.

When Cinderella left behind her glass slipper at the stroke of midnight, it was the last figment of her enchanted state. After the 24 hours of being a princess , she went back to her normal self, the chariot back into pumpkin, the horses back to mice, the robe to rags and the lonely glass slipper vanished with her enchanted 24 hours. But the slipper she left behind, remained a reality; a metaphor of her parallel paradigm. The glass slipper lies now on the drafting table of an architecture student. She gazes at it every now and then, and transports herself into Cinderella’s time. Only this glass slipper, with its swooping sole rising high up to a towering heel , perched precariously yet touching lightly upon the surface , stands like a crystal clear negation of all things around, solid and dark. In sync with its ground, the glass slipper beckons to shed her opaqueness and synchronize with the beat of life around her, like water ready to ripple in sync with the breeze.

Remembering My dearest Ajju

2009-11-13T18:02:00.003+05:30

That afternoon comes back to me , when I went and sat by him on his bed and had a nap in his lap as his soft wrinkled hands patted my head. That vacation , I had got my walkman player, and ajju’s favourite Marathi natya sangeeth cassettes, which he used to listen to , from earphones. Every time, the earphone fell out of an ear, he used to call out, ‘Gonti!..” and I used to run to him and plug him back into his musical world. This was the first vacation I was spending in Gokarna alone, as we sat in the verandah and darkness fell.Having waved goodbye to my father, who left me with dear little grandma and grandpa, tears streamed down my eyes, as I sang bhajans for ajju.. My voice choked as I sang ‘dehi dehi sharade.gnyaanam dehi sarvade’, but soon it was fine, and I no longer felt frightened. Except now and then, when I came across a dark threatening corner or lightless room in the vast house, especially after sunset. I had never felt happier to greet the morning and the sun, as I did then.

It was the last vacation I could spend with ajju, because, on the November 14^th early at two in the morning, we all had to say goodbye to ajju. That year we (the family) stayed back after the funeral ceremonies , during karthik poornima. And we went to the Deepotsava that happens every year in the Kotiteertha, the sacred tank.

It was magical as hundreds of lights reflected in the water along with a bright moon who seemed lost in all the celebration, and fireworks lit up the sky effusive with joy. It seemed a fitting goodbye to our dear grandpa. Last week, when I was back in Gokarna on my usual visit, I stayed back an extra day hoping to catch the Deepotsava on karthik poornima. But it is never like that first time, is it? How much ever one tries to re-live past moments, it is never the same. Each time is a new time.

When I was there this time , I dug into the shelf in the study, which was full of books ( as is any shelf in our house) ; but this one almirah had a special taboo attached to it. Once long ago, I had ventured to open this very cupboard, and to my horror, there a was a tiny rat inside which ran right up my arm and jumping off my shoulder, scurried away victoriously ! I was a state of hysteria , as I ran and locked myself in my room and refused to come out , till the maid came and consoled me that she had taken care of it and it was safe to come out now. Later , though the poor creature was a subject of my sympathy and I even wrote a small verse on it.

All the letters he wrote to us, me and my brother, are safe with me . Spontaneous limericks on us and advise on how we should read a lot , learn music, not fight, study well, and not worry much about subjects I dint like. In every letter, he never failed to say a little sorry for his handwriting , which he considered illegible. His handwriting in fact was like a mysterious codec to me , evolving in its own speed and design to become a script that could be read by a select few. Now I see my father’s writing follows the same trend. The explanation he gives is that the mind thinks faster than the hand’s capacity to catch up.

Dil se re

2009-11-09T15:01:00.002+05:30

Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se ; the first time I watched it was, long years ago, when I was a primary schoolgirl in Mumbai. Dil se is a picture of me and my baby brother dancing like jumping jack Shahrukh Khan, on top of the double bed, which was our very own train top. ‘arey oyyy!... bhai sahib! Aap ke paas maachis hai?’ Manisha Koirala’s pristine freshness, as the thunder storm blows away the black shawl wrapped around the lady like the night itself was blown away to reveal light. “ek cup garam chai….” Rain drops plopping into two chai glasses in All India radio broadcaster Amar verma’s hands as her train chugs away.

‘Jinke sar ho o o , ishk ki chaaon, paaon ke neeche jannat hogi..

Chal Chaiyaa chaiyaa… I had the whole song memorized by heart, gulzar sahab’s urdu lafz and all, not even wondering what they meant. It all sounded too esoteric and mystic. Kalma wohi mera nagma wohi, taaveez banake pehen use , woh yaar hai jo emaan ki tarah. The afternoon comes back to me, when sitting in the living room of our tiny Mumbai flat, my brother and me religiously sang out the whole song , to papa, and had a victorious grin after we had finished.

So the enigmatic Koirala , like a fresh lily with dew drop on her nose listened glassy eyed, to the tinkling chai gilass from the ajnabee crooning over aakashvaani , awaaz de kaheen se. ‘woh jo doodh dhuli masoom kali…’

‘wooshki chaayeee..nahe haay’ smiles a beaten up hero. Lying on the stretcher, with swollen bruised lips , but as happy as a school boy , he tell his friend, ‘ushkeeee…. Shaaadi.. nahi hui hai…!’ And laughs.

Cascading through the white Ladhaki landscapes, two beings bask in illusive happiness of togetherness. ‘Main farsh pe sajde kartaa hoon, kuch hosh mein kuch behoshi se..’ Satrangi fakirs in lofty play of a veil blown by the wind ; a veil that at times conceals , at time reveals, at time is and at times exceeds love. ‘Ishk par zor nahi , hai yeh woh aatish ghalib…’

I loved every bit of it, do so even more today , because with it comes back that time of smallhood , those fleeting bubbles of joy , when sister watched her baby brother sitting in their verandah of their house by the beach and screaming into the sea breeze till happy exhaustion.. ‘Oooooo, ek soooraj niklaa tha…..’

Dil se ; from the heart . It is the essence of living , isn’t it ?

"The Unbearable lightness of Being"

2009-10-26T18:10:00.001+05:30

Violet

2009-10-23T18:48:00.005+05:30

Grapevine nail polish

Dripping from her glass

As fingers rap in rhythm

With her mascara lashes.

Scenes seem to change

with the bat of an eyelid,

Inking tears and memories

together into an esoteric wine.

Sitting at a table

where nobody waits,

Legs crossed,

Stilettoed high,

On hopes of blissful bewilderment,

She raises a toast

To violet moments.

2009-10-22T10:22:00.000+05:30

Floral scars

2009-09-19T12:39:00.002+05:30

Unsung notes hover from

A mad woman’s song .

She walks with a white cloud in her palms

Heavy moments inside.

Orange jasmines trapped in

The mud walls of her home.

Brittle petals and floral scars.

The dung polished floor wafts up

With orange acridity.

White marble glistens

Like a pale diffidence

Forced into a solid pretence of confidence.

Yamuna caresses it like a watchful governess

Trying her best to convert

The weak marbling into

A precipitated, curdled monument.

Lotuses , jasmines,

Tendrils and rubies

Capsized into the moments of curdling and age.

Symmetric symphonies in frieze.

As she walks into her muddy domesticity

Smelling of orange twilight and curd,

The jasmines are tender again,

Blooming forth from mud packed walls.

She picks them out

One by one from their walled captivity

And tucks them in her hair.

There on the banks of Yamuna,

The marble mausoleum

Stands naked.

The capsized rubies have conspired,

The emerald leaves have rebelled,

The flowers on walls

Have fallen like shattered glass.

Paused in space.

Hung in suspended action

Awaiting a bearer to walk by.

Makhmalbaf’s Silent Song

2009-09-15T15:00:00.005+05:30

Sokout ( the silence) , Iranian film maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s 2007 release, leaves one surrealistically floating in twilight hues. Through an intensely affectionate door, we walk into a little boy Khorshid’s dark world of sweet sounds , silent waters and crimson cherries, while his little friend Nadereh dances to dulcets with petalled petunia nails and a porcelain chastity so ethereal, that one fears for her fragile beauty.

While Khorshid tunes his master’s delroba, Nadereh prances with the cherries dangling on her ears and hands swaying to the waves of his untuned stringed notes. The effect of the scene is ephemeral. So are most of his other imageries in the film. Just when we think we know what we see, the moment turns into a surreal canvas where we no longer know. The beauty of the film lies in this shift in our state of mind where we move from a bourgeois information seeking state to the state where we no longer feel the need to know or be informed. We simply surrender to its experiential spell.

Replete with metaphors , the film takes on a poetic liberty typical of Makhmalbaf.Perceiving a world through blind Khorshid’s ears, the movie captures sound in its most beautiful visual form. Sights that we see, he hears.Little Khorshid , however, hears only sweet sounds.. be it losing his way in the market following a folk singer, or teaching pretty schoolgirls poetry from their own textbooks. So he is made to stuff cotton in his ears, lest he be distracted on the bus and lose his way . Silence for Khorshid , sounds like the lapping waters of the stream where his mother catches fish for a living.

With childlike naïve optimism and with a brazen outlook of an observer of life , the director takes us through a rich canvas of light, colour and texture, and turns them all into sounds for the boy. The boy lives in poverty. He works to support his lonely mother. They face eviction at the hands of their landlord. Time , as always, is cruel in running faster in the face of such situations. These are factual stains of their lives. And the director leaves them untouched with a dignified silence. What he does is to show us the beauty, the wonder, the love and the innocence of purity. The affectionate love of the director towards this boy is embodied in the tone in which Khorshid's mother calls out to him every single time,'Khorshid... Khorsheed jaan!'

Khorshid needs only his sounds, his music and Beethoven’s fifth symphony to make him feel complete . Nadereh , needs only her mirror to make her a queen at the banks of the stream. The street singer needs only his instrument to play out his loneliness for him. Makhmalbaf needs only this silent song , to make us hear the sound and colour of silence.

Gora

2009-09-04T11:20:00.000+05:30

Gora , by Rabindranath Tagore , stands as a vast discourse by Tagore for a society which is highly aware and sensitized towards a higher spiritual goal, that surpasses a mere individualistic cocooned frame of life. Tagore, talks through his key characters of the book, and evolves a story of two households that symbolize two schools of thought and religion of Colonised India in the 19^th century. The intellectual and ideological turmoil of the Brahmo Samaj and the Hindu Samaj sets the stage for the story, of seemingly normal middle class families which transcends its mediocrity through its highly evolved and critical characters. Binoy and Gora are the two indispensable friends, who’s bond is very beautifully elaborated by Tagore through the story, being sensitive to many little details of typical human nature , be it their follies, faults, their shortcomings or their morality. In fact, Gora emerges before us, not as a flawless protagonist but as a case – study of man’s many dilemmas in his struggle to realize the essence of his existence. He is the symbol for the constant , undeterred anguished struggle that every human conscience undertakes at some point of his or her life , to place himself in the bigger scheme of things, to define his locus within societal co-ordinates.

However, the stimuli to the actions in the story are its heroines, Sucharita and Lolita. Having been brought up in a Brahmo household, and encouraged to freely discuss personal opinions,(as opposed to the traditional Hindu woman of those times) , these step – sisters are the igniting spirits of the story , who by entering into the heroes’ lives brew up a storm between principles of the head and logic of the heart.

What strikes about this work, is the immense consciousness of the theme. In today’s times, a book based on one ultra patriotic soul urging his fellow men and women to act in a way, as to keep in mind, always, the higher goal of a united ‘Bharatvarsha’ , may seem highly improbable. Yet, the theme stands its ground, speaking from the pre- independence days to this very generation of today. The ringing notes of an individual’s awareness of life as it unfolds in terms of events, of self and of those connected to him, turn into an intense personal churning.

Gora , gradually , succumbs to the trap of an extreme individual identity. Unknowingly , he limits his vision into conventional shackles.His desperate urge towards societal acceptance and an idealistic vision of an efficient social machinery, leads him to embrace dogmatism blindly. He is victimized by himself. However, with the fact of his birth and origin being shattered, that he is in fact of a British parentage and only raised in a Hindu household , Gora is liberated in his state of non-identity. To be one and to be all. Not belonging to any set of beliefs but to be a maker of one’s own.

Gora , is an intense journey. It raises so many questions in your head, answerable and unanswerable, that once through, one cannot but be a changed mind ; in outlook as well as in conscience.

june rains , gokarna #6

2009-06-23T10:43:00.001+05:30

8^th june

The feeling of homecoming is overwhelming and I cant stop the smile on my face.As the bus crosses the Sanikatte salt pans, I know, I am in my territory. I surprise ajji with my early arrival. Well, it so happens that she always seems surprised. I see an older, ajji, little weak and frail in movement, but with a content and energetic mien. I have to make my own tea this time after being asked reluctantly by ajji if I can. I succeed only after I have my initials hiccups with the gas knob, and not before ajji has to walk all the way in , a little irksome at my incompetence at the simplest act of making tea.

Time melts here , from one moment to the next and before you know it, it is either lunchtime or teatime or dinner time.(although I must admit, dinner time comes a little slower than the rest). It is calm after a heavy downpour of rains yesterday and the town seems to be in calm slumber. I make my routine trip upto Maneshwara. Quiet and ever lashing, the sea is still there. The beach is still awaiting consumption by the July monsoons. The tiny people are there, screaming at the sheer joy of being in the sea. As always, their voices travel much louder and clearer over the long distance compared to the scale of their sizes from the distance. Everything seems just the same.

Once back, Protima Bedi’s memoirs “timepass” makes me wonder if its an appropriate book for the landscape around me. Scandalous, overtly cathartic and immensely indulgent, the book seems some different alien mind zone from the mind zone of small seaside pilgrim town that is my native town. Nevertheless, I manage to finish the entire reading within the next day, partly out of the fact that it is fast reading and has some juicy insight, and partly because I want it to be out of my way , so that I wont be left disturbed by the dichotomy of the world inside the book and that around me and can enjoy my home.

Up on Ramateertha, the mineral water spring is gushing with monsoon effervescence. Clad in just towels, some pilgrims are bathing free and without a care. I avoid looking , and proceed up to the concrete deck, that for once seems to be the only concrete creation in the town that seems to make sense in serving a purpose. There is a magical spectacle in the sky, as it turns dark and stormy as the rain clouds charge towards me. One has the rare privilege at sea to see the rain clouds bring the menace slowly from the distance; so the element of timing ones run to a shelter offers some excitement and gameplay. That is exactly what I do; wait till the point where the rain curtain is just few kms away.. and then make a dash for home – some sort of mental race with the rain.

Don’t we all do it? Race with the sunrays through the window, race with the seconds hand of the clock, race with the street dog who doesn’t really care ; mental races.

The following morning, I wake up at 5 am and watch a full bloom moon shedding its beautiful moon rays onto the sea waves. The sea gleams silver, ethereal and unearthly.

It is more of the light falling all around that is mesmerizing than the tiny shiny dot itself.

It is like the Midas touch. Moon rays turn everything they touch to ether. I go back to sleep with ethereal dreams.

9^th june

My early morning walking circuit takes me up the hill to Maneshwara, across the hill to Ramteertha, and down the hill to the beach. A foreigner dressed in a yellow cotton shirt and an orange dhoti is sitting at Maneshwara, puffing a cigarette and watching the sea. He looks at me in my boyish red capris walking up the steps, and give me a perplexed smile. Perhaps , he expected a more stereotyped Indian in the setup. I have half the mind to ask him , whether they had the audacity to smoke in their churches too.

I carry on. It is just the beginning of monsoon, so all around the yellow grass has just turned lush green , but not grown long enough for snakes to play hide and seek in them. Therefore, I can walk without being scared of being bitten by a snake and dying in obscurity. The super tall network signal pole (or is it the lightening conductor pole?), stands tall perfectly balanced with its radial chords holding it down , like a captive hero in a movie. There was a feast of tiny cute green birds perched on this pole net, flocks of them, the last time I saw. Watchable yet, unreachable. This time it is barren. There are none of the green wonders to see , only those hidden chirps from the forest , with their own symphony making the silence of the acacia forest a happy silence and not the silence of a graveyard.

As I climb down to the beach, I realize how, everytime, the waves and the sand manage to surprise you. Yet, the surprise is shortlived. Soon , I am a part of it all and no longer a distant object. With sand in my hems and bag pockets, I decide to drop in to check if the little wise one, Chaya and her little devil sister Chaitra are at home.

As I peep in from the porch, out the head pop, one in a frock (as she has not yet got her new school uniform) and the other in her navy blue school dress, getting ready for school. I am reminded of that feeling that comes with morning and school . the little churning in the stomach even if you know you have finished your homework. That feeling of leaving your workbook at home or , wearing the wrong uniform on the wrong day.

They are the same. They haven’t changed. Not even in size. I am quite relieved inside. I have always dreaded coming back to odd grown up freaks turned out of the kids I left behind. They feed me good breakfast and send me home with a nice big jackfruit from their garden.

They have promised they will come after school , in the evening. I will wait.

I have just finished reading “timepass”. It is a thunderous book and sure to leave any reader a little dazed. It walks the thin line , at the heavy risk of sounding very exhibitionistic and repetitive. The core, the sentiments and the essence of the book is very familiar, appealing to my sensibility and quite amusing. The only thing that beyond my rational understanding is her need for the indispensable male company. I like the letters she writes to her son Siddharth, who later committed suicide away from home. The letters contain the sensitivity and sense that feels so right and positive and parental.

10^th june

It is the most pleasant morning. I wake to the voice of my moon; it is music to my ears and resounds long after. The beach is breezy and afloat with my joy.

In my red capris, I get the wild thought of a bull coming charging towards me and tossing me by its horns! Such filmi thoughts cross my mind often.

Two letchers on the beach jeer and smile. I stare back indignantly and the shameless jerk smiles! Now, I am the stupid one to have given such impudence even some notice; shouldn’t have. The beach is infested with such pests. I move on.

Walks on the beach are inherently set to an inherent rhythm of a stroll with necessary pauses and waits. They are far from the fitness regimen workouts with nike shoes on. I find myself smiling so many times. I wish one could telepathically connect. The waves seen from up Bharatgudi hypnotize one into a pin drop stance. Each waves with its white foam trail carries along my palpitating breath and lulls it into a slow rhyme of a steady nothingness. A marine blue kingfisher wakes me up in its flight. It is time to get back to real time.

11^th june

Chaitra comes home, hopping in her anklets in her new frock. It is her sister’s birthday, and I am called to go for a small simple cake cutting ceremony. The birthday girl is in a salwar kameez, busy with her dupatta. On the beach we play ice and water. I run like a child. I don’t seem so bad at the game after all. Spoorthi’s dogs come and join us. One is Raja , the old guy, the other is Pinky, the doe eyed furry tailed daughter of his, and the other is Gunda , her new found goy friend. I hear, that Raja is not on barking terms with his wife, Rani anymore. Sad , indeed.

Chaitra is a funny kid. She suffers a little from the over-shadowed syndrome. Always in comparison with her bright talented sister, she seems complexed about her lack of talent. But she is the caring endearing one, who shares her chocolates with all, clings on to you and plays the wannabe big sister. While Spoorthi and Chaya dance and sing perfectly, she watches on silently, thinking hard ,as to what she can do to impress me. ultimately, she recites an English poem for me. Charming. The little bunch is an immense package of pure joy.

13^th june.

As I pack my bags and sit in the verandah in the dusky sunshine of the evening, all I do is soak in every detail around me. Every little movement, every distant sound, every inch of the canvas before me, and every breath of my dear ajji ; as I leave her alone, sitting in the verandah under the newly repaired incandescent street light , waving back at me.

june rains , gokarna #5

2009-06-17T22:13:00.000+05:30

june rains , gokarna #4

2009-06-17T22:08:00.003+05:30

Pattern language.

Waves in a constant race

Of frothing patterns

And splashing cisterns.

As water, salt and air bubbles

Salivate at the beach front,

They leave behind patterns

In the sand.

Lately I see patterns in me.

On my skin, in my breath.

As waves heave and crash within.

A bovine herd crosses

The beach.

The pattern of their hoof prints

Makes it simpler,

To pass the time.

june rains , gokarna #3

2009-06-17T22:06:00.000+05:30

Kotiteertha is being drained dry.

It seems they want to clean it.

Of what? Of sins?

A million thousand sins must

Be afloat in the tank water.

A water pump , most probably,

Would not want to mess its machine

With this sinful business.

Maybe a sin or two, distilled out

And got stuck into the gear box.

A crystallized sin,

Deposited into one of

Its pipes perhaps.

A layer that reforms,

Every time you scrape it off.

Maybe then, a thoughtful boy,

Chancing upon a precipitated sin,

Bottles it up and

Sells it for 20 Rupees.

Sin on sale !

Are there any buyers?

june rains , gokarna #2

2009-06-17T22:03:00.001+05:30

Standing tip toe

On the edge of the rock,

She is an experiment in physics.

Bernauli’s theorem,

Venturi’s law,

Eddy’s currents

Boyle’s laws.

All seem hard at work in

Balancing this girl in her

moment if action.

She is the only link

Between the storm above

And the earth below.

All around is void,

Vacuumed and paused

Spectators to this tension

That seems infinite.

june rains , gokarna #1

2009-06-17T22:00:00.001+05:30

A battalion of clouds, they seemed to me. Starting out as a stripe in the sky, they gradually transform into a menacing dark shade. Floating above , with their blackness engulfing the sea straight from the horizon, they charge forward , and the curtain falls.

Like a see- through black lace dress , enticing sunrays in its pleats, the rain curtain is dragged along , scoring the sea- face with their heavy anchors; like a stubborn child dragged home from play , the clouds carry their rain children home.

I know it is coming. I can see it. Yet I sit here , waiting. The wait for something which is in your sight is restless yet exciting, because what you see keeps changing from one moment to the next, although the object itself has remained the same.

I see it first as an identifiable object. The horizon, the clouds on top, the canvas in between.

But as they slowly approach me, boundaries of my frame blur and the object melts into an experience. It cannot be dissected into components; something that comes whole and passes on as a whole. I have been sitting here for timeless moments, waiting for the taste of a rain drop.

2009-05-08T10:05:00.002+05:30

amrita shergill.

The lady with gumption.

2009-03-28T11:12:00.004+05:30

Kate Winslet strikes hard in Revolutionary Road. Her Oscar win as lead actress in BBC film production directed by her husband Sam Mendes seems vindicated. The ironical depth of the film's title itself stands for the essense of the movie's storyline."Revolutionary road", has a deeper truth in it beyond being the name of the street on which the Wheeler family (Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet and their two children) try hard to live out the happy middle class life; it symbolises the revolutionary path that they never took.

The story revolves around a close knit weave of details of a series of subtleties of family life and seemingly minor issues that in reality bore into our lives and before we know it, leave us as mere empty shells, mere pretences. With its intense script and dialogues that edge on the idealistic , the film takes us into it slowly and in steps.It takes refuge in the small thoughts in an average person's head and elevates it to its rightfully deserving contemplation, through the medium of Mrs. Wheeler,who is the crux of the film.

The small thoughts, the little ideas in your head ; that make you day dream , give you the escape door to fantasy land, are an indispensible dosage require to live. I dream of going to Paris . Yes , it is a cliche, a whimsical fantasy , image driven and very eluding. the thing that incurs sniggers from your fellow mates. Nevertheless , my thoughts are my own.

So when the Wheelers decide one fine day, (actually it is Mrs. Wheeler who decides) to move to Paris in the hope of 'living' again as the 'special' couple they had always considered themselves to be, I couldnt help but feel like getting into the tv screen and hugging her! She is the strong woman, the one who values every thought in her head, the one who believes that one must be able to do what one always wanted to do. She wants to do things, get things happening, and cant stand wasting away into a mechanical existence. I like her !

In front of her, Mr. Wheeler seems faded, jaded, a person who is trying too hard at the wrong things and has lost himself in the process. He is the cliched and rubbed over concept of the middle aged family man who has taught himself to think that his teenage ambitions were mere fantasies.In one of their numerous high voltage arguments she says " You need guts to live the way you want to live and you dont have it!" , which more or less rounds him up.

The most intense anti-climax is the morning after their most distrubing fight. Kate winslet stuns with her acting, and Mrs. Wheeler stuns her viewers by appearing in the kitchen smiling and dressed tip -toe like the ideal housewife and asks her husband "Good morning! would you like scrambled eggs or fries eggs for breakfast?" It is the most tense and yet visualy the most calm sequence of the film with the apparently happy Wheeler couple having their daily breakfast together. She seems so old and wisened while he still seems satisfied to enjoy this make believe pretence of happiness. it is an unmatched pair of great zeal and timid acceptance.

What entails is, of course again, another cruel irony .You could watch for yourself.

Though she lives in the wrong time for herself, perhaps the time needs people like her to get some gumption back into living.

The kabootar khana

2009-02-24T10:11:00.000+05:30

The kabootar khaana buzzes

At the junction with

Pigeons willfully

Caging themselves in

The hope of being fed.

In hope of being

Revered

As the plump businessman’s

Ticket to salvation.

To vindicate his salivation.

A thirsty tongue

Lapping up gold and diamonds

And stubby fingers

Caressing pigeon feed.

The railings of the the khaana,

Once a rusty red,

Now gleam white in pigeon poop.

(Ambassadors of peace ,

Who decided on the poor pigeons?

Now they fly on roof tops

Of the Taj Hotel with black soot

Choking their nostrils,

Blackening their glistening green-blue manes

Now they must wear ear plugs

If they have to nestle on the top

Along with gunshots and grenade shrapnel.)

The air smells of damp feathers ,

Grey stench and the smell of stained peace.

(Masakalli , sits on the terrace parapet

The white pigeon has its wings clipped.

Vain in white, it sits in Chandni Chowk

Far from black soot, gunshots and freedom)

It is a free cage

Just like the maikhaana.

Where he comes,

To cage himself

And relish the anticipation

Of unchained freedom.

Did you see that?

Right there,

The street urchin crosses the street,

With a handful of stolen grains

And takes flight with

The well fed birds.

What went wrong with Delhi 6?

2009-02-21T22:53:00.000+05:30

Delhi 6, entered , with hopes, promises of delight and of course, Masakalli and her white freshness perched on top of Bittoo’s head. Something got lost , however, while R.K.Mehra tried materializing metaphors. From being a “Burger-chaap” centric plot ,
It has took a wrong detour to becoming a Monkey Chaap danth manjan that’s a little too ruddy to chew.
The black monkey, we understand , has been conceived as the dark, wild, animal within each of us who acts on no rhyme or reason. Yes , we understand that personifications, metaphors, messages must drive the movie , but , in Delhi 6 , theres been either an oversimplification of things or a ridiculity of taking some aspects over seriously that leads to a shoddy climax.
When the victimized Monkey man is shot in the end, and in deep agony Bittoo lets out a scream , whats more heartbreaking, is to hear the audience laugh out in amusement at the melodrama unfolding in jerks before them, in , what was supposed to be a new age contemporary urban edged film.
The rustic theme, the fresh sounds , the feel good start, are mired by jerky transitions, an over dosage of ‘ yeh hai India’ sequences.
It all seems to take confused montages into an even more 90’s style climaxes where all the cast is crammed into the frame , and all the loops(if any) are tied up one by one, in sequence, like the abrupt closing of various files. And the audience is left in the seat after ‘the end’ trying to digest, ‘What? That’s it? And was that heaven by any chance? Give me a break!’
The song though never fails to give you a good morning smile!
Ay Masakalli masakalli, tu matakali matakali…

Measurement of time , units of life

2009-01-02T19:42:00.000+05:30

The new year buzz just zoomed past the last corner. Two days are up already. What has changed? 2008 + 0001 = 2009 . so in all the four-lined notebooks of school children , the excitement of writing a 09 in the date on the top left hand margin , instead of 08 , is about as far as it goes for the kids. Well, when in school all I remember was that I felt like something significant had happened somewhere somehow , but never could reckon what exactly , except for the change of the dates and exams coming nearer.

I wonder how orphaned or unaccounted for , we all would feel if this unit of measuring our life with time was absent altogether, which trickles down to the very absence of the basic ticking of seconds, milleseconds,nanoseconds….

May be we would all feel so lumpy and massive in our existence like a huge porridge sploch, formless and misshapen as opposed to this lean, sorted out , categorized and sequential noodle living that we have today.

To add a year to your life may mean a lot more to the middle aged adult population of the world.(its too trivial to notice when we are in school or college, when our homeworks , tests and our classroom crush seem like the ultimate driving force of life!)

So imagine the several thousand billions of the aging adult population all over the globe adding up an extra unit of worry , expectations , schedules and responsibilities along with the new year. What you get is an additional indissoluble , emotionally loaded layer right above the skin of the last year, and the one before that. Quite a suffocating global scenario isn’t it? Like global warming was not enough, I’m guessing we wouldn’t want a global aging phenomenon…

Years seem to be good measuring tapes. These timelines that help us look at our life graphically and make us aware of the full impact of our living till date..we may end up with loads of junk , each with its own sentimental attachments, but junk it all is.

I saw ghajini this week, and its original, memento(a 2001 Hollywood flick) last week. Psychologically thrilling as they were, the very nature of the amnesia, the 15 minute short term memory loss leaves me quite stunned. It is such a modular existence, where 15 minutes are relived from the same start point of nought and with the same ending of nought but what fills them up is what he has lived. The irony being that it will be measured only by people around him. While he still conceives his living at point zero. The very thought leads to quite chilling and unnerving tangents.

So we continue to measure more of time with our tapes and keep changing dates on our diaries. Waiting for one moment when time will freeze and all we know that we live solely by the sound of our heartbeats.

2009.. come on in..

The ridiculous and the sublime?

2008-12-16T23:57:00.002+05:30

There is this phrase that goes, referring to certain situations,- the ridiculous and the sublime ; hinting at what’s mundane in any bourgeois life and what actually passes by as another moment in an ocean of momentous actions . However , it is only in retrospect, that we generally frame and glorify , mystify and demystify the moment or event. In retrospect, everything plays with a delay, of lets say for expression sake, 5 seconds. Every act plays out like a scene and those who can see well , amuse themselves of the frivolity that passes them by. Like many wise men say, one has to laugh it all away. Like Chaplin did with his stark satire, like the quadriplegic Ramon in the movie ‘The sea inside’ has learnt to cry by smiling. Even the gravest moment can, in fact, be turned upside down to seem like the most absurd and ironical comical situation. That is the wonderful machine the human mind has made itself to be. The mix and match of the ridiculous and the sublime create a delicious mocktail for us to savour.

For instance , the movie ‘Little miss sunshine’ and ‘Jerry Maguire’ are full of such satires of bourgeois life. Little miss sunshine evolves around a mediocre middle class Albuquerque based American family with an apparently assertive father who always counsels about winners and leaders. Then there comes the moment when the little one of the house is short listed for a beauty pageant , he makes the painful decision of agreeing to it against his personal disinclination. Their journey takes its bizarre turns and twists of idiosyncrasies and black humour; what with a drug abusive grandfather, a gay suicidal uncle , a teenage rebel who has stopped talking for good, and the father with an obsessive compulsive winner’s disorder along with their defunct lime coloured van which needs to be pushed around all the way.

Whether it is the girl dedicating her stripper ‘s dance number on stage to her granddad who is in the trunk of their car (dead);or whether it is the moment when the son walks out in the middle of their journey and only comes back after a little hug from his sister, the movie has brilliant moments of sublimity suspended unseemingly into the middle class routine.

Jerry Maguire with its popular hero, Tom Cruise plays on a more Hollywoodish note , with a corporate set up but nevertheless weighs down with similar ridiculities not to ignore the faithful golden fish flipper who remains faithful till the end.

While , in this case, the situations play out on a guilt-free platter for the ordinary viewer to sit back , watch and laugh, in the former case the viewer feels a tad guilty beforehe can laugh at any of the situations because he knows very well, how the situation may feel in all its actualities.

There is a scene in the recent Bollywood flick ‘Fashion’ , where a cocaine addict super-model Shonali (played by Kangana Ranaut ) is hit in the face by her abusive boyfriend. All that she retaliates with, in that moment of frustration , is that, she has a show the next day! So simplified has today’s urban working logic become that such ridiculous moments also have gained a certain credibility to an extent that the ordinary spectator can be easily gullible to them.

In a way , I believe , it is a good exercise, now and then , to look at the world upside down, and know what colour and what brand of ‘andar’ wear does the world wear.

But then of course, who would want to risk their social image? So we keep sublimating the ridiculous and ridiculing the sublime and the show goes on.

2008-12-02T09:44:00.002+05:30

we stand strong

defiant and undeterred.

'an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind'

-Bapuji

today

2008-11-28T12:37:00.001+05:30

Let us all join minds and think collectively to fight and reinstate the sane human mind.

To nurture warmth and compassion in young minds like yours and mine who have been wrongly misled into anti – social brainwashing,who now vicariously provoke the masses now and again, to continually be in the line of fire and hate.

Hoping to see Mumbai healing soon.

I salute the commandos and security forces for letting us sleep tonight.

Impressions of an island

2008-11-22T19:44:00.004+05:30

As part of a collaborative architectural workshop, I was part of the Triloka programme involving students from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka , Muenster University,Germany and R.V.School of Architecture, India.Thus I got an opportunity to glimpse the beautiful Sri Lankan landscape as part of 12 Indian students who went to the island for the 2007 workshop. Here are some first hand impressions of the fortnight I spent there.

The flight Air Lanka took just over an hour to reach destination. Hence it hardly felt like an international trip. The flight was cramped with food that was not so great. Since it was our first international flight, Rachana , Harshavardhini and me , the youngest trio of the lot seemed to be the most excited about the take off! Seated in the middle aisle , I couldn’t help envying those who had got the window seat. But soon after take off, I wriggled out of my seat and politely but demandingly asked Naveen if I could sit at the window for some time. He, unwillingly, complied. The most unearthly experience of watching the Indian map in real scale overwhelmed me. As we drifted away from the east coast, I watched the crisp lines where land ended and the ocean began, glistening in the sun and looking like a slimy reptilian wriggling underneath. The air hostesses looked reptilian too,with their green skimpily designed versions of the Sri Lankan saree.

The “foreign land bubble” burst at the Bandaranayake Airport. We landed into the typical warm humid suffocation that I’m welcomed with in Mumbai or my native place Gokarn on the coast. Only this air seemed to hover with lot more humidity. After the long procedures to get us legally into the new land, with our luggage and visas and immigration, we sat outside by the luggage trolleys at the entrance portico, waiting for our host who apparently had got lost! It was a whole two or more hours before the representative from University of Moratuwa arrived with the minibus and whisked us away as quickly as he had come.

All along the journey from the airport to Mt. Lavinia where we were accommodated, I glimpsed an old Goan colonial ambience out of the window with the women in lovely skirts and umbrellas.The small town architecture being very similar or rather the same as our tiled lean to roof houses.

The initial food forays in the island proved disastrous for us both pallet wise and money wise. Only later I was made to know that we chose to eat at a wrong place most probably!What struck me also was that while having lunch, three ambulances zoomed by in a row silencing every ongoing activity around.With red , blue, green coloured rikshaws, old ladies in lovely skirts and frilly native sarees, and the sea forming a constant backdrop, it only felt like an extended realization of India.

Only, here there was a statue of Lord Buddha at every road junction, a welcome relief compared to our incongruous circle ganapatees or political emblems. We could spot orange and maroon clad Buddhist monks in the buses, at the stations and completely blending with the people around.Our cottage , Ratna Inn, was an adorable domestic guest house with good old Uncle Perera and his cook as the caretakers.

In the evenings , our individual explorations through the streets around , took us to the usual malls , boutiques and superstores. I personally found the apparels there quite reasonable , especially the lovely simple skirts and bought myself one!These forays were tinged with several humorous incidents, including one where one of the students fell into an open sewer while walking on the dark pavement! And ended up changing into pyjamas in one of the stores! And there was another where we thought some thing was an eatable in a shop and it turned out to be only an exhibit made out of wood!The beach was a few minutes walk away .The railway track was laid right alongside . So everytime a train passed we could feel the sand beneath vibrate.

This train track laid all along the coast upto Galle in the south seemed to be, a wonderful journey with the sea. But we did not get a chance to get on the train ride.

The symposium on Green Buildings followed by the workshop , went on for four days with student teams from the countries working on certain architectural projects conceptually keeping the overall green building concept in mind. I would not really term it as a complete success work wise, as it is with all short themed workshops, but we made really good friends with our fellow Sri Lankan students and to an extent the German students. The ice breaking moment was when during the tea-break on the first day, the host students made us all play interactive, and otherwise childish games. So after the break we could see every nationality sitting with the other as opposed to the grouping of before the break! The second thing we had to make an effort was to remember the names!They sounded so sweet yet, of course, quite different. To mention a few of them, Lahiroo, Tharinda, Chalendra, Chamara, Chalana, Dananjaya and so on.. among the girls, Sayurika, rasika, Erendi and others…In general I surmised that the SL students were masters in hand skills, sketching and emotionally driven by the design, while the German students were more technologically driven into their design approach using more computers and poor in hand skills. We Indians , I feel are stuck somewhere in between where we are emotionally driven but at the same time, dapple little into every other field and in turn end up with a collage of ideas some deep and many not so deep. So much for the workshop.

The Sunday trip

On a Sunday, the Indian and SL students arranged a bus trip visit to most of Geoffrey Bawa’s designed hotels along the Galle coast.

Pitstop1:The Blue Waters .. sheets of still water at the entrance porch. Pergolas and reflections into the water. The pebble pools. Flat Clean lines. Receding elevational profile. The infinity pool. The jackfruit leaf embossed onto the concrete pavers.

Pitstop2: Bewis Bawa’s Garden House. Geoffrey Bawa’s big brother. Interweaving paths and puzzling patterns. Lots of books. White walls and black oxide flooring. Many antiques and motifs.

Pitstop3: Triton hotel, Ahungalla Heritage. The porous entrance portico that frames the infinity pool. The old time steel elevator exposed in the foyer.

Pitstop4 : to drink coconut water by the road side at Paraliya. We saw just plinth level remnants of tsunami devastated homes along the coast. Our SL friends told us that the waves of the Tsunami rose higher than the lamp posts and uprooted the railway track along the coast.

Pitstop5: the lighthouse hotel , Galle. The fortress ambience. Portuguese bunkers.Waiters in checked sarongs. The spiraling atrium after the entrance woth the fortress warrior sculptures. The landscaping on the other side facing the sea reminisces of the steps of Machu pichu.

Pitstop6: Fort Galle and the lighthouse at Galle.The Dutch Reformed Church ; the infant child ‘s tomb and that of the Bengal infantry colonel who died of cholera on the shipment from Trincomalee . Moses explains the advent the Muslim population to the area. We hear children singing in the mosque nearby. Typical Dutch whiteness everywhere.

Pitstop7: Unawatuna Beach ,the 9^th best beach in the world. The turquoise blue ocean water contently swaying with no waves. The sea is full of corals and I pick one as a souvenir. It starts raining. The rain glistening as dots on the sea surface gives the wonderful light overwhelming feeling. I stand in the rain with my pink umbrella doing little to keep me dry.

End of the day.. all wet happy and exhausted.!

Poye day is observed every full moon day when the whole island goes for a day long siesta ,people spend the day resting, gathering along and in general giving work a break. It’s a wonderful reminder for each of us to look up and watch the beauty of the night.

The political situation and unrest could be sensed when we went to Colombo city where all along the Galle face, we could see armed gunmen and army trucks. We were warned by our SL mates to not click pictures in the city as it could be snatched away by the soldiers for security reasons. Only here and in one place in Galle , could I see a Soldier’s statue replace the Buddha at road junctions. It poignantly spoke about the change of the general feeling among the people about the ongoing war.

We further toured the island with the official worskshop participants to many iconic places including Anuradhapura in the North, Sigiriya, Dambulla, Kandalama, Kandy and so on. These were the places that truely stand to represent the history and evolution of the land, its culture and forming inspirational models for the new age thinkers and designers and space makers.. including Geoffrey Bawa who is highly revered by many in the land.. (while i have also come across people who describe him as selfish!).While the details into each of these could get cumbersome I would sum it up as a revealing and educative sojourn ,which only strengthened the emotional ties with our new friends.

I believe that any journey besides externally enriching to the senses always enriches internal ties and leaves emotional figments of memories that propels one to go further from there.What I took from this small sinhala dweepa is warmth, grace and humility.The old movie songs we all sang together in the same tune but different languages, always ring in these ears .

Deewana hua baadal..

Suprabhatam

2008-11-06T20:20:00.002+05:30

reflections on watching an archival documentary on the legend of Carnatic music, M.S.Subbalakshmi.

A voice with the naughty twinkle in its cords. A small child throwing tantrums at every octave. That is the agility with which she sings. M.S.Subbalaxmi. with the springing curls of greying hair, she smiles with the mellowing touch of honey dripping gently. A nascent newborn gleams beneath the face constantly . the lips cant wait to enthrall listeners with its deep nurtured musical treasure.The nose studs gleam in the sunshine of her voice like divine materialisations of her mind. There is a stubbornness in her notes, a commanding velocity that interweave you and me into into its adventures; up high scaling the moon, rising over the valleys of slumbering lives, delving into the depths of curiosity, we sail ,fly, run, skip , hop and jump with her , bedazzled by the onslaught of yet another surprise package of musical jigsaws. Black kohl eyes widen to inhale the minutest gift life has to offer.With a sincerity that frames every picture of her, M.S lives on, stubborn in her renditions.

She is the first , the youngest child in house who wakes up before anyone else and declares

"Suprabhatam', its time to rise"

Paper boats

2008-10-12T21:29:00.000+05:30

Day by day I float my paper boats one by one down the running
stream.

In big black letters I write my name on them and the name of the
village where I live.

I hope that someone in some strange land will find them and know
who I am.

I load my little boats with shiuli flowers from our
garden, and hope that these blooms of the dawn will be carried
safely to land in the night.

I launch my paper boats and look up into the sky and see the
little clouds setting their white bulging sails.

I know not what playmate of mine in the sky sends them down the
air to race with my boats!

When night comes I bury my face in my arms and dream that my
paper boats float on and on under the midnight stars.

The fairies of sleep are sailing in them, and the lading is their
baskets full of dreams.

- Rabindranath Tagore

Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead

2008-10-06T21:51:00.001+05:30

Home they brought her warrior dead:
She nor swooned, nor uttered cry:
All her maidens, watching, said,
‘She must weep or she will die.’

Then they praised him, soft and low,
Called him worthy to be loved,
Truest friend and noblest foe;
Yet she neither spoke nor moved.

Stole a maiden from her place,
Lightly to the warrior stepped,
Took the face-cloth from the face;
Yet she neither moved nor wept.

Rose a nurse of ninety years,
Set his child upon her knee—
Like summer tempest came her tears—
‘Sweet my child, I live for thee.’

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Peace to pieces

2008-10-02T16:52:00.001+05:30

The ironies of a day devoted to nonviolence on the birthday of dear Bapu, Gandhi Jayanthi . They cut down the beautiful tall coconut tree grove in our college campus to ‘clear’ the site for another telecommunications department. The justification .. a renowned architect will be designing it! So tell me, who has all the more responsibility to say ‘no, wait don’t raze them down, we’ll take care of them.?’. The architect again.

They were age old coconut palms.. I am sure, much before the campus came into being. And I couldn’t believe my eyes , as I saw the tall ones fall to the ground, stripped of their grace by a neat chop and slice of the running blade. It was the first time I saw a tree being chopped . And believe me it felt nothing short of witnessing a mass execution in the public. There were the librarians who had left their desks to come out in the open to see them. The old staff members winced and shrugged the shame away, while the new staff members reveled in this new human quest.

It reminds me of a poem we studied in school that had sent shivers down my spine with its heavy satire..

How to kill a tree

by Gieve Patel

It takes much time to kill a tree,
Not a simple jab of the knife
Will do it. It has grown
Slowly consuming the earth,
Rising out of it, feeding
Upon its crust, absorbing
Years of sunlight, air, water,
And out of its leprous hide
Sprouting leaves.

So hack and chop
But this alone won't do it.
Not so much pain will do it.
The bleeding bark will heal
And from close to the ground
Will rise curled green twigs,
Miniature boughs
Which if unchecked will expand again
To former size.

No,
The root is to be pulled out-
Out of the anchoring earth;
It is to be roped, tied,
And pulled out-snapped out
Or pulled out entirely,
Out from the earth-cave,
And the strength of the tree exposed,
The source, white and wet,
The most sensitive, hidden
For years inside the earth.

Then the matter
Of scorching and choking
In sun and air,
Browning, hardening,
Twisting, withering,

And then it is done.

Today a thousands sms’s will fly here and there , emulating ahimsa and the likes. For that moment when the person forwards the message, he may feel a hint of being part of larger peaceful collective .Then again, he is back to his daily cribs and his daily worries. It is ultimately a lone journey .Each man to his own. It is ultimately a lonely world. A loner has no right to take another’s right to his own piece of earth , sky, sun and water.

firefly

2008-09-19T19:10:00.002+05:30

A lighter gone dry

The flint is fatigued

Click click..

The flame cant be seen

He tries to catch

A drop of the flame

Cupped tight in his palms

The flame flutters

It doesn't singe

If let free..

It would rather sing

In fear of douzing it

The boy wont let go

But little does he know

The fire cant fly

Anymore....

fly by

2008-09-13T20:27:00.000+05:30

Think spaces

2008-09-10T21:29:00.003+05:30

Our current design project deals with a very busy highly commercial and at the same time a very personal space , the Jayanagar 4th block shopping complex site. Each student in the studio has come up with various propositions as to what the space lacks or needs and what needs to be done for that(considering that the existing built does not exist).
I am proposing the idea of a 'think space' as an intellectually stimulating culural magnet for south bangalore.A place which makes use of the intellectual and mental resources of the multitude of people already coming to the area (who otherwise just shop, eat some 'chaat' and go back as passively as they came!).
Now comes the task of identifying various the behavioural patterns ..
When does a person use his mind or 'think' in the active mode?..
A student travelling in a bus to college everyday invariably goes into daydream reveries gazing out of the window.. A husband waiting outside the operation theatre has his thoughts doing tripple shifts! The retired men and women sitting on park benches may be calculating how many hours of their life they can remember anymore..the passive thinking and the active thinking.
A pause in a hectic routine, like a scene in slow motion, where you can fill in 'more' time into time.

I am still groping from one string to another . Trying to grasp what a think space could need or would give. I would appreciate your comments . It may help me out...

aap ki farmaaish

2008-09-09T10:12:00.001+05:30

Yeh hai aakaashvani vanijya prasaar kendra.. aur aap sun rahe hain..
Aaj ki farmaish..
Is Karyakram mein aap sab ka swagaath hai..

Pesh hai yeh geet ..
Jiski.. farmaish ki hai..

Jabalpur se banti , pintu, choti, chintu aur pinki
Sialkot se talwar singh, avtar singh aur dimpy
Dhobi talao se shepudkar aur unke bete prasad aur prafull
Ramgarh se gabbar singh , samba aur kaalia
Jhansi se lakshmibai
Mumbai se kallu mama, bhiku mhaatre aur bhau
Ranjhore se jai singh rathore aur savitri singh rathore
Bhatinda se geet aur meet
Jhumri talaiyya se shuklaben, kantaben, arun bhai aur chimpu
Aur Kusaha se kosi rani aur unki maathaji.

Leejiye pesh hai..
Aap ki farmaaish........................................................................

2008-09-09T09:35:00.001+05:30

A tear drop on the edge

Of her eye as she wakes up.

A salty scream

Straight out of her dream.

No more taste in them

Wake up now.

the blue chappals

2008-09-01T18:16:00.003+05:30

A peacock feather was stuck in the right strap of a pair of blue chappals of the girl.
The blue chappals lay outside the wedding hall. It was her brother’s wedding day. A large air conditioned hall booked by the bride’s father stood poised on the main street on a dusty sultry May afternoon , like a class bully striving for his teacher’s attention.
There was nothing much left to do for the girl but to sit in the front row , on one of those milky cream coloured plastic chairs, and wait for the entire ordeal to get over with. Her brother; she had long lost to anger and bitterness. To be present today ,was a mere necessity , an obligation. It was her blue chappals that she was more worried about. They lay outside, orphaned and helpless amidst huge monstrous suede dons and taunting shiny silvery step sisters with endless straps starting and ending at unassuming points. Hers was the only one of the ‘blue’ kind. A simple flat sole that still held the weighted impressions of her soul and two straps that challenged anybody to wear it with the same delicacy like she did.
It was her first independently decided choice, after hours of deep discussion with her friend , scanning up and down a local shopping complex. The blue chappals she adored so much that she wouldn’t wear it fearing it would wear out too soon.
It will wear out one day, silly girl, but try telling that to her.
Their maid had dressed up specially for her chotu baba’s wedding . The maid’s daughter had come too, with her new born boy, who seemed to seal her fate to a resigned life of servitude with a smile. Although the same age as the bridegroom’s sister( who was , as you can guess, nicknamed, choti baby) this young mother had wrinkles on her palms and feet. Each wrinkle yearning to be filled up ,like hunger graphs of the third word etched onto her skin.She hated everything about the ‘choti baby’ that her mother adored her for. But she always smiled it away. That was then ; before her boy was born. Her boy now seemed to take all of her smiles for himself. His radiance irked her, his tantrums angered her, his baby tricks irritated her. To look at him , forced her to look at herself and she dint like one bit of what she saw.
The ceremonial chores having been done, she had to take leave of the wedding crowd. She had to be home before her husband. She smiled and congratulated the ‘choti baby’ for the ‘chotu baba’ and quickly sneaked a scan from top to toe. Silly girl. One day she will have a little one like mine. Will she still be smiling then? Though she knew the answer she consoled herself with a wretched forced ignorance.
Outside the wedding hall , her torn brown sandals lay two pairs away from the blue chappals. Clean and plain, they smiled at her . She smiled back.
She looked around to see if any body was watching.
Shifting two paces to her side.. she slipped in her feet , as gently as Cinderella into her glass slippers, right foot first , then the left.
Bending down , she removed the peacock feather stuck into the right strap and deftly stuck it onto her brown sandal.
It was just a temporary borrowing . She would return it some day.
But today the blue chappals were hers.
They had made her smile.
The owner would understand.
She was sure of it.

Footprints on my shirt

2008-08-30T19:50:00.001+05:30

Footprints on my shirt
Shoe size number 2
It s clean
You haven’t walked yet
You haven’t talked yet
What is this strange song
You sing to no one and to all

You are small.
With tiny feet
But my shoes will fit you
All you have to do
Is
Don’t grow up.

The convenience of the unclear

2008-08-27T10:42:00.000+05:30

I have short sight. Hence there was a point while growing up when I thought , what I saw was how everything actually existed. Hazy, blurred, distant and harmless. Too bad that reality strikes, you are given spectacles, and forced to see harsh lines, clear boundaries and piercing views.
Being an architecture student, when a design is in its process I realize that it is the most beautiful and the most potent ,when the lines are still not clear and when one is at a point where we play hide and seek with glimpses of ‘what will be’ in the ‘what is’ .This then generally drags forward into the realization of the design where the ‘what will be’ starts fading out before the ‘what is’. That I feel is the dead end!
Van Gogh s skies are an infinity of a collective haze. A homogenous haze constituting a myriad of tiny clear and real brush strokes. It seems as though the strokes exude a force that gel into the canvas , wholly yet fragmented. This smudging of life , this unclearness of the seen can take one on fantastic tangents.
An alaap can very beautifully mould the words or the bol around it and within it so that what we hear is not words in notes. We hear unchained melody . I have a personal favourite tape of Veena Sahasrabudhe s Bhopal todi raag sung in concert in London. It melts so beautifully with the morning , waking you up gently from the confusion of your dreamy slumber as it progresses from a warm vagueness into the freshness of the day..
A cynic may call it the convenience of the unclear. I have no argument against it. But then I revel in this convenience; To take off the glasses and see the world as a blur of visions , as a painting, fueled by a palette of sounds!

sleep

2008-08-27T09:38:00.000+05:30

The bus moans and reluctantly halts. Warm with the breath of its seething crowd , I board.
It is my routine on a normal college going day.

Inside the bus , the man woman barrier has some how meandered . Through the sticky fabrics , I ooze through . My temporary destination – that seat right behind the driver and that relief of a rod to rest my head on so I can see the full road ahead.

Too bad that seat is occupied . A boy and a lady. But I still have my road ahead : much preferred to oily hair braids or high decibel gossip.

Two stops further a seat beckons. The lady has boarded off. The boy has not. Puzzled I sit beside the boy who looks out of the window.

Now my eyes see. See a dark boy of six or seven or eight in orange shirt and orange shorts. A set of black stripes and peeling fabric. He is so small and so morphed that he cannot reach the back rest of the seat. It seems like a disproportionate task to balance as his head droops against the glass and legs dangle from the seat. His eyes are fighting a struggle – a losing battle with his eyelids. When at last the battle is lost he turns around and startles me. With his back resting against the window sill and legs tucked up he glances once at me and unphased droops back into a drugged reverie. My sluggish smile meets his closed eyes.

In his sleep he nudges me with his hand : just once seems enough as I shift at his command. As his legs stretch themselves – I see a gaping septic wound on his knee. His limbs are rusty with dust and gashed. Hands clutch nothing but a tiny bundled yellow plastic bag with some clothes in .

“So much sleep that it seems drug induced ?”
“Mustn’t have slept last night.”
“Who has bought his ticket? Why does not the conductor ask ?”
“ Hmmm ….”
“ And that awful gaping wound ”

------ no answer strikes me.
I question and I answer and I stop at a dead end.

His utterly helpless head bobs to and fro : mouth agape as his dreams feed him. The wound shows no sign of healing or medication. Festering and septic it eludes me.

“Has he been beaten ? Could it be just a normal bruise he got while playing ?”
“ A runaway child working in the outskirts? “
“ A child going to his mother, labouring at some quarry ?”

The lady in front gives me that incredulous flat smile that I can never return. The middle aged woman beside her is hardly aware of her fellow travelers and is buried in her newspaper. I wish I could be her but the sight beside me is too much to take.
One tiny weakling drowning in sleep travels all alone to a destination unknown as women all around -college going, office going, home bound and unbound , merely stand and suffer the intensity of the boy’s sound sleep.
There are some fifty odd mothers born for him on that 9 am bus on that Thursday . I feel the responsibility too. As each bus-stop renews its set of ‘mothers’ and ‘sisters’ , I wonder if I will get down at his destination or mine.

Concrete cries..

2008-08-22T21:19:00.000+05:30

The first step into the newly paved street assures of a firmness of the masses. There exists a fine line between the event of being and the event of the transcending. We live like we are meant to. Do we question what causes our being here at this place ad time to be of so much importance. Is it so important at all that the definition of existence should be pivoted around me or you or for that matter any body at all.
Where were we when time paused once to take note of its trail of aspiring catchers, expiring aspires and exasperated non catchers. Time catchers in a constant race to overtake. To win to lose to want to win but always in the league of those considered.
Considered to be present absent or expected for some special time and appointment.
What if you dissolve yourself into the crowd and become everyone yet not one. With heartbeats of the whole breed instructing the remixed music of the mind.
Hands , fingers and feet clicking to an unsung rhythm of the concrete jungle like the graphic equalizer of an ever changing countdown. Counting down to the first one from the last millionth. The first one to go to school, the first one to ride a bullet, the first one t scream at the minaret , the first one to drop out of std 5, the first one to stand in line for water , the first one to walk out of her marriage ,the first one to beat and cry .. cry .. cry is what the grey walls do, cry is what the dolls within do .The grey mist reddens sore eyes of the spurned lover and the sea thirsts for the salt of warm tears. Drops of vanity flood the deep rooted hate-city lying underneath the teeming bustle of the happy-city.

Opinionated

2008-08-21T08:13:00.001+05:30

There is the Act of growing up that we all are aspiring to learn. To get interested in ways of life and to get disinterested in many others. We develop likings . acceptable. But we develop even more ‘dislikes’. Do we know enough, to know that some things , rather, many things should not be liked by us? I do not know any thing at all. Hence I cannot decide why I cant like something. When did our minds start conniving on planned territorial maps? Today there is the young college goer who reads the “money matters” page in the newspaper and discards the rest as if undeserving of print status.
How one transforms from an innocent face to a triple chinned mannequin has a direct link with the time graph of mental regress.
I am assuming we shall have to therefore , maintain , the valves of our mind, to keep them free and functioning . they get clogged somewhere down the lane . I guess we ll need to oil them back to working state. To be rude is a basic case of a one way valve in the mind which sadly cannot budge from its habit. Just oil it and you may possibly realize the flip side has you stamped bang on it! Valvular freedom -the circulation of the mind. Seems to be a nice concept . Help me out . Have you seen the mind?