one of my close friends recently 'encountered' a firang lady. i use the word firang deliberately. The incident involved the lady telling my friend and some other people how her wallet was pickpocketed. The mishap is fairly commonplace. Her discomfort was due to the fact that "of all the people....an AMERICAN stole her wallet!!!!" and her discomfort eventually became everybody else's toothache beacuse she just would not stop iterating the fact that it was " of all the people.....an AMERICAN!" the implications were clear. She woulnt have been surprised if the thief would have been Indian. Perhaps this is due to the fact that she is in India and hence an indigenious craftsman would have been more easily placed in the scenario. But this IS also, i feel, due to the remains of the white man's supiriority complex which peeps out of some keyholes sometimes.
The most vivid memory of such an experience personally is of the time when i happened to meet an American student, studying in the US to become a missionary, who had come to india with his yet new-girlfriend. Perhaps as a way of being faithful to his idea of 'grace' or because of his new girlfriend....the guy ended up paying more than twice the usual fare of rickshaw. The rickshaw-wallah and me both had yet bigger surprises in store . The rickshaw-wallah was stoned for a couple of seconds, as the guy blurted out heavily accented hindi and i was irritated out of my wits as i tried to explain to him that this 'geasture' actually would not transform him for life and what he really needed was education and counselling to make him understand the imporatnce of money and inturn education but he just kept on telling me how I didnt know what conditions these poeple lived in and how they needed money to send their kids to school.
'Grace' is what he called it and ignorant contentment of apparently changing the world is what i still refer to it as. My arguments of his 'gesture' ruining the everyday travelling expense dynamics of other middle class and lower midlle class people who had to tavel by richshaws everyday but couldnt afford paying double the prices...also didnt strike him as important as the 'gesture' of 'grace'.
Well so much so for the changing face of the world....universal brothethood and all that jazz.....but hey jazz was black also..........so there you go!

the problem really is......i am not a flower whose name most people would know. i am not exotic like the lily or the orchid. people wouldnt like to spend money to take beautiful long dark green stalks on which i ride gloriously with the wind. i am not sure if that's ll taht bad. i do not need to go through the torture of being cut at the knees and then left to silently turn into a leper in absket full of salt water. these humans seem to think that salt burns only on their wounds. who am i to tell them?

if they cant read whats written on every leaf. if they cant read the lines inscribed in each flower and leaf and the veins which carry life...not just nutrition but also the fate of all of us. of them. they have learnt indeed to turn a blind eye.

i know all the uses humans put us to. i just cant help wondering if i am ever to know when i am still in control of my destiny...what it is that i was blesssed this life for. but this is the beauty of life. nobody knows who is pulling the strings on which you ultimately trip to fall. and even if they did. how many of us could change it? the tiger lily really just likes to bask in teh sun. to see its shine mingling with the glow of sun afar. but it is torn apart and looks at the sun only through huge glass houses if it is not thrust into the cloistered offices.

dissapointing pakistan-i

Watching cultural sojourns on discovery is usually an interesting hour spent fruitfully. Or so i believed till about half n hour back. Saira khan’s Pakistan journey was a episode I was really looking forward too. having heard second- hand accounts of how the country was in good and bad ways so much like ours....culturally rich and vibrant with an added subtitle in Urdu on most of the billboards and street markers. I was looking forwards to the all night food market, the spices, the beautiful clothes, the wonderfully embroidered shoes, the beautiful mosques, the confluence of the old and the new, the beautiful valleys, the Sufi gatherings and more that I do not know.
Saira khan is an embodiment of, “angrez chale gaye...inko chod gaye”. She is a thoroughbred brit who reminds me of the feudal accounts of Asia and Africa that were written by Christian missionaries. Only they were not the natives (not usually) and they were largely hence ignorant of the cultural assumptions and practices of the natives. They could be called presumptuous fools who happened to have modern technology but what does one call a native who looks down upon her own culture and people, who shape her very person? Her discovery was no discovery but a journey to affirm what she had already thought Pakistan was. Going to the truck wallah’s roadside tea stall for the sole reason of invoking the glares of the truck drivers to prove that they are feudal can safely be termed feudal. It almost seemed like the report of a journalist trying to convince the world of the poor and denigrate country which needs necessarily to be pitied and funded. Feudal is the Pakistani equivalent for the Indian snake charmers and till the west decides to see better they will remain that.
The condition in Pakistan is perhaps as bad as she records but to show only one side of the culture and that too with a decided and detached superiority is going a bit too far.
Apart from everything else, the show was not particularly engaging because of the disengaged hosta s well as the itinerary. Pakistan is a beautiful place, i personally wish she could have done a better job at capturing that beauty.

this is as far as my adventurous spirit goes,
braving the winter rain,
to sit on the damp incandescent stone,
to sit and stare at you,
blow some mist from my frozen lips,
to cover you for a moment even,
braving the exposure,
of the two hippies,
sitting intimately,
are they lovers?
the glint sparkling on
the remnant of the cigrette stub,
is it a reflection of their eyes?
he gives me the words,
to describe, express, display,
(all mechanical words from a thesaurus)
what i wish to say to you,
through the last score of my life,
he gives me the succulent words,
the 'rustic' soul,
the blossom of the silver eyelids,
all incadescent through your shadow,
which shadow even,
is moonlight to the world,
i love even,
the dumbed freeze of my toes,
turned blue,
the chill of the night,
made worse by the damp which you inspire,
but i am thankful still,
as it tells me,
where its frozen now,
is also the moist life,
not dead yet.

arbit miscellany

There is a certain fear that is attached to your name. It gets tossed around by all the people who use it. Sometimes they like the sound of it and they just toss it around in their mouths...like a delicacy. It’s frightening. There is a sense of distortion that is intricately linked with the way it is perceived by people. It is mispronounced and bounced and taken to be something else in this infinite nexus of names and the person it carries within its image. Not its physical image so to say, but the person who gets formed according to the sound and style of the name. One tends to do that kind of judgemental exercise ever so often without realising it. it travels all through the BPO room when your call is transferred from one executive to another or when you lodge a complaint for the 13th time and your name forms this image of you which is not pleasant. You don’t want them to think on hearing your name that you are an unpleasant person but you still fear the obvious indifferent compartmentalisation. With your name you float around the room being tossed, sneered at and evaded. Is this all too surreal???? Or does it actually have something to do with the way you are present at this end of the phone as well as on the other?????
What exactly is one made up of????? All the things one tends to remember of all the days gone by in a daze???? Going everyday to conquer the world and end up fatigued in the fourth hour, dogged down by the perseverance of the bus conductor to reduce you to a piece of ticket. You aren’t even a name here but a mere 10 rupee note. I wonder if that’s what he sees me as. I always wondered how he ever could remember from all the people who had purchased their tickets and who hadn’t. If the memory is so exact what is he doing working as a mere conductor????? But that’s a question of sociology that I am not equipped to answer or even ponder at. Maybe he marks all those who’ve purchased the ticket with a 10 rupee note and all those who’ve not purchased it look just like themselves to him. So then there are those whose faces are the currency or the face of bapuji and then there are those who look just like their own selves.
I remember very queerly and distinctly the crackle of leaves under my feet. But that I always do hear, the sound is a bit disturbing because I am aware of the very last rites I am performing for these leaves which are already dead so no fault of mine there. The sound has a quality I cannot resist. Especially in the lonely walks it is a very tempting partner. For its company I think I wouldn’t mind walking for miles at ends. But I don’t do that, I only think I can. Then there is the camouflage of all the smells which haunt me, my eyes it seems are the only unconscious sense which works automatically without registering anything. The smell of samosas along the road to the metro station tells me somewhere in the cluster of trees is a small cardboard supported kerosene stove cooking samosas in the oil which as a result of its life of a couple of days has lost its golden shine and taken on rather the colour of coal....floating, simmering with waves dancing around the ladle. I meet this smell every day. So much so that it ceased to exist for me. There are so many other things which have gone out of existence for me simply because they been there for me to notice everyday without fail and my mind cannot cope with everything, things new as well as old. So it marvels everyday at the new and greets the old with a simple nod of the head which gesture too gradually stops and i forget it.

MY IDEA OF PATRIOTISM!!!!!!

I attended a talk by Shyam Benegal today at a Spic Macay event. His movie credentials and his intelligence ofcourse do not need my approval but his mention even otherwise alwayz reminds me of his movie- 'Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda'. What i personally find most interesting is that he picks up a text as complex as 'Suraj...' and transforms it into the masterpiece that he did. It enamours me even more so since it is based on an indian novel. The statement is not aesult of some engendered as well as blind cultural snobbery but a personal bias.
I am a great fan of Vishal Bharadwaj too. Only, i do not apreciate very much his insistance on shakespeare. His way of dealing with shakespeare is indeed very novel but why shakespeare???? Why not a Premchand???? Why not a Shrilal Shukl???? An intercultural transliteration is ofcours an interesting experiment in itself but, an inter-generation potrayal which then will ( in this case) become self-reflexive to a much greater degree than a shakespeare is or can be, is much more delectable for someone like me. Let shakespeare lie in his grave peacefully! This is like the frustaration i felt when i tried to comprehend (like so many others around me) why was shakespeare still stuck around like Nearly Headless Nick in the syllabus of english literature as a whole paper and just one paper which dealt with the enormous corpus of Indian Literature in the 20th century!!!! There was so much of our own culture and literature that was left unexplored!!!!
There are ofcourse many more movies like Pinjar which base themselves on indian literature, but as far as mainstream cinema is concerned, i cannot remember many. Then there is a movie like Jodha Akbar which does not even get right the dynamics or even more bas-ically the realtionship between the hero and his woman!
Not many people will know how, say Akbar and Salim were related but most will know the story of Othello thanks to Omkara. I am in no way opposed to the movie...its an excellent adaption( as if it needed my consent!) but seeing that the medium has such far-reaching effects, why not make a concious effort in the other direction??
How terrible is the fear of self-introspection???? A movie like Black Friday does not get released.....Parzania has'nt many takers! But i will in this post restrict myself to movies based on Indian Literature. Is this the effect of what is called mindless modernisation? Or is it simply the desperation to market ourselves as being globally active and aware. An average Indian teenager ( atleast in my knowledge) will know more about the Pearl Harbour attack than about the Naxal movement in the various parts of India or the impact of the two World Wars on India and on the Indian struggle( even my knowedge regarding this is quite scant!) . The ventures based on such themes are generally too pedagogical or moral or ethical or intellectually engaged to interst an average viewer. Mr Benegal said very interestingly, one cannot be global without being local and precise.
The construction of one's national identity can only take place if we can appropriate it through our own history. Tagore has a better way of saying the same thing.
It irks me that english is increasingly being established as the defining barrier between the enlightened and the rustic. Hindi is distant and archaic. It has been reduced to a school subject. A sentence in unadulterated hindi elicits a response akin to "are you studyin hindi literature???" A similar composition in english does'nt even make your pet lice crawl on your ear :)
Personally it seems to be a hypocritic issue to champion for somone like me being in the comfortable position of knowing just about enough english to escape being concious about it.
So for once i would like to use this space politically to further my propaganda of inducing everyone who even stumbles across this blog to read and discover our own literatures, not just hindi but other regional treasures too. Step out of the worn out and dragged-to-death mysticism of shakepeare and Rowling and Sherlock Holmes and explore alongside the likes of Shukl, Devkinandan Khatri (of Chandrakanta Santati fame) and Byomkesh Bakshi (the name of the writer escapes my memory just now! my apologies) . The effort is worth the pride and vise-versa :)

its all a number game

The recent mercedes ad has got me thinking (not that usually i need any instigation at all!) it is so very true...humans love making lists....and humans are obssesed about numbers...any way they can put order into the surrounding chaos....
666 is the devil's number....
7 the promises you make when you get married
7 (also) the number of dayz taken to create this world
3 the steps in which it can be measured

so on and so forth....the people who read much more and have better memories can give much better statistics
I am just amazed at how the implications of these numbers change
there was a time when being numbered was the greatest threat to a man's individuality...the newly-released-from-the clutches-of-colonialism individuality

People like Orwell based some very influential works like 1984 based on this very fear....it was ofcourse also about the commercial threat to America from the socialist ideals of Russia.....both claimed the same emancipation from man....
Atleast that is what an utterly ignorant by-stander like me fathoms....

Russia(by implication communism) sought to save the man from becoming machinized in the capitalist race and America( by implication capitalism) sought to emancipate man from the same face-lessness at the hands of the great equalizer-communism....we all know who won that race....
Russia is Russia no more...

The recent ad of IDEA is also similarly thought provoking.....to me atleast....
the whole village is turned into nothing but numbers.......the great equalizer.....the exception is ofcourse the sirji....anyone who's read 1984 will understand the hint....."THE BIG BRITHER IS WATCHING YOU"

It is smhow alrite once again to be confronted with a solution which once sparked off the like of james bond( noticed how most of the villians who get beaten up are Russians?? or even how simply the Englishman has the "right to kill") and the killer who never missed-Jackal!
the mass media can exploit public opinion very very strongly and can similarly create cultural as swell as global stereotypes of who is the saviour ; who is in the right and who is a sinner; who has the license to save the world....white or black...the passport alwayz tells you...it is the American who can fight either the Russuan or the Alien and save the sanctity of the world.

As Walter Banjamin said......"the works of art are recieved and valued on two different palnes" ,
here both of them have undergone a tremendous change in less than half a century.....hardly a speck as a period in history......

If the same ad would have been aired in america in the time of the cold war......welll god knows what would have happened....
The important thing is......this is not america and cold war is a thing of history books....whatever putin might suggest.