Once A Blue Moon

Going Places

2005-09-04T14:01:00.000+05:30

A friend just bought me a book. Though it is not a travelogue, it certainly has gone around the world. I’m talking about that well-known Indian literary export, the Kama Sutra.

What’s unusual about the copy I have ?

Well, the contents are Vatsyayana’s, an Indian, but this abbreviated version was penned by a Sophia Mortensen, a Brit I think. (The publishers are rather dishonest though, they’ve simply printed her name on the cover and not Vatsyayana’s). The publishers are from the U.K., the paper from China, and the book was bought at a second-hand bookstore in Johannesburg.

And I live in India, so the book has indeed gone places.

UNusual tales

2005-09-03T20:30:00.000+05:30

If you’re the kind who detests fairy tales where the princess is an ideal Aryan beauty who sits like an unfermented idli till the Prince (an ideal Aryan hero) arrives, do read this book by Manjula Padmanabhan : Unprincess.

It is a scathing but hilarious inversion of the usual fairy tale narrative -

From Princes who ‘heroically’ play Nintendo instead of dealing with a crisis, to Princesses who worry if they’ll have time to doll up before a life-threatening situation, this book has it all. Of course, the real heroes are ordinary girls and boys who happen to think beyond what they’ve been told to, and can therefore cope with giants and the like.

Apart from acidic observations on the fairy tale mode of narration, the set of 3 stories also question our notions of ‘beautiful’, ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’… ooh, they are fun.

And, the sweet chutney on the bhelpuri as far as I’m concerned, are the accompanying illustrations. Do get a copy for yourself, and even more important, make sure all the kids you know read it.

the ink cloth advertisement

2005-08-23T18:48:00.000+05:30

My friend’s mother told me about this experience that a friend of hers had, and since I’m going thro an uncreative patch, I shall tell you the same story. Besides, it deals with the impact of adverts, a favourite hobby-horse of mine –

The friend’s mother’s friend was once upon a time, cleaning out a cupboard full of odds and ends, when she found a bottle f ink. Meaning to throw it away, she placed it on the floor and continued with her spring-cleaning.

In her earnest pursuit of cobwebs and junk, she forgot about the bottle on the floor and knocked it over. The cap was loose, so the ink flowed out and formed a bright blue puddle on the floor. Not wanting to leave blue footprints all over the house, she called out to her son (about 6 or 7 years old then), and asked him to bring a cloth to wipe the ink off the floor.

The boy returned 5 mins later, brandishing a fresh sanitary napkin in his hand. The suitably horrified mother asked him where he had found that, and why he had brought that, and not an innocuous bit of cloth. The child innocently replied that he’d seen her keep these things in the bathroom cupboard, and that he knew it was for wiping off ink. He told her very seriously, that he’d seen it on T.V – that you can pour a glass of blue ink onto the pad, and it wouldn’t spill.

Maybe this triggered off the ‘Cloth is for curtains (and wiping ink)’ ad ? I wonder…

Cooking Up Haikus

2005-07-26T18:29:00.000+05:30

I’m feeling disgustingly virtuous cos I’ve been doing more than my usual share of housework for the past 2 weeks. And on Sunday, ambition reared its silly head - I decided to make soup for dinner. This, in spite of the fact that I was feeling terribly sleepy and in a mental state that could cope with the intricacies of mixing curd and rice only if given an instruction manual.
But, like I said, ambition reared its silly head. And soup it was. Or almost wasn’t, cos after cooking the veggies, I did something brilliant. Poured the stuff carefully into the mixie, covered it properly, and switched the mixie on. The hitch ?
After 5 mins, I discovered that I had been grimly hanging on to the to-be-mashed stuff which was on the kitchen counter, while the mixie whirred on container-less 2 feet away.
If only it was that the thought that counts, sigh.

Therefore this haiku I shall inflict on thee –

Mundane and constant,
Housework and cobwebs are dull -
They darken corners.

haiku

2005-07-17T12:55:00.000+05:30

Precision, and starch.
My handloom sari speaks of
Corporate values.

eggshell

2005-07-17T12:54:00.000+05:30

When your mind’s an empty
Eggshell,
Throw away the pen.
Cast off your writer’s hat;
Let the wind blow your fear
Away.
Let it ruffle your hair and,
Imagination
For all ideas start as insignificant;
Gentle ripples;
Paper boats in the literary sea.
Soak in the sun,
Doze under the tree
Of your previous work:
Who’d have dreamt that a seedling
Would cast shade over the gardener ?
Throw away the pen,
And paint on your eggshell –
There are many ways
Of telling a story.

a rilke poem

2005-07-16T21:47:00.000+05:30

I live my life in widening rings
which spread over earth and sky.
I may not ever complete the last one,
but that is what I will try.

I circle around God, the primordial tower,
and I circle ten thousand years long;
nd I still don't know if I'm a falcon, a storm,
or an unfinished song.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

'Undercurrents'

2005-07-12T19:01:00.000+05:30

After reading m’s essay on breasts (http://www.basicallyblah.blogspot.com/), I thought I’d add my 2 bit worth along the general lines of her essay.

Fashion influences us in far more insidious ways than we realise – it often dictates our sense of values as well. What’s fashionable is acceptable behaviour (because every other twit does it), and what’s unfashionable is unacceptable (how dare you be different?). The winds of fashion bend our ‘moral’ fibre like a reed, and they change direction just as often.
Take the case of underwear:
In my grandmother’s time (I’m 25 now), it was the cutting edge of fashionable behaviour to wear undies, esp bras. Like anything hot off the ramp, it was the last word in mod behaviour and scandalous attitood. Eyebrows were lifted & voices raised in many families where the woman was bold enough to wear a bra. (Is that the origin of the word ‘brassy’?) Some wannabes were firmly squashed by that time-worn comment “It’s not our culture”.

And now? When the back-to-nature look is fashionbale? Eyebrows are lifted & voices raised if you want to go about bra-less. And you will be told in no uncertain terms “It’s not our culture”.

Of course, the really farcical element in all this will be the way the others will judge your morality. If you belong to my pati’s era & you’d worn a bra – you’d be hussy. If you’re my age and u don’t wear a bra, you’re a loose woman (pardon the pun). Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

So tell me, is it Indian to bind your breasts or isn’t it? Should it be the individual woman’s decision - it’s her breasts after all, in spite of society’s proprietary attitude… or should we have a Ministry of Underwear Culture? Or a Moral (Underwear) Brigade?

Blow on, winds of change.

The scientist’s conscience

2005-07-12T18:17:00.000+05:30

Just read a book about Wolfgang Pauli, the man who was considered a theoretical genius even by other physicists who worked on Quantum Mechanics.
The book that I read was rather unusual because it was about Pauli’s interest in the realms of the mind – the subconscious, group consciousness and specifically, his interest in Carl Jung’s work. He met Jung several times, and they exchanged many letters about their respective fields because they felt that their subjects did overlap at some level. Moreover, Pauli was one of the many scientists who ran the rat race at Los Alamos during World War II – he was one of the many fathers of the Atom Bomb.

And like many other truly great minds of that period, he was haunted by a deep sense of failure and guilt after the devastation of Japan. Something that our science-is-glorious texts conveniently forget to mention. Pauli, Feynman, Bethe, Einstein, were all deeply troubled by the route physics had taken. The bomb shattered their old belief that scientific progress is enlightening. They were forced to concede that science is only as good as the men who wield it, and that men no matter how ‘great’ scientifically, have a long way to go spiritually.
Many of them suffered from severe depression, apart from the physical ill-effects of being exposed to radiation. Of course your physics teacher won’t tell you that.

Pauli’s letters to Jung clearly admit that though he may not believe in God, he definitely did feel that he had committed a great crime. At the professional level, in the excitement of harnessing the atom’s awesome energies, he hadn’t thought about the effect it would have on the real world & when he did, it was too late. It was criminal because as a scientist, a seeker of truth according to the oldest traditions of enquiry, he had failed: he had walked the path blindly.

And of course, there were his personal feelings as well. No man who contributes to the death of another can really rest. And these men were ordinary people in their personal lives – not trained assasins. So psychologically as well, they were ill-equipped to face the consequences of their actions. Moreover, given the fact that the govts, press and public treated them like heroes, it became even more traumatic – they couldn’t confess to an adoring audience that they felt like dirt (they wouldn’t have been allowed to). Neither could they personally come to terms with the blood on their hands. So they lived two lives, the glamourous public one and the guilt-ridden private one.
Not an enviable life, in spite of the Nobel Prize.

It would be wonderful if physics teachers took the trouble to tell their students the real story, instead of only the propaganda that gets printed in text books. This is where the real lessons lie. These moments of truth are the genuine milestones of scientific enquiry.
If you compare these physicists to Galileo, and the courage he had to resist the pressure to do blind science, it would seem that we are going downhill, even though we’ve come a long way.

an act of courage

2005-07-10T12:08:00.000+05:30

Sometime back, I’d been to S.Africa on holiday and I visited the Apartheid Museum near the Gold Reef City Centre. It was an unforgettable experience. Though I’m normally a bit of a cynic, some parts of the museum left searing impressions: maybe because I’m an Indian, and I can think if some parallel museums that we’d never have the courage to put up here, and maybe because I’m no fan of M.K. Gandhi.

The first thing that struck me, even as I was walking towards the museum, was the word on the last pillar – reconciliation. Much of our contemporary rhetoric, political and otherwise, has no space for that word. Old wounds must be constantly inflamed, and allowed to fester as proof of loyalty to various groups. Your infected wounds are your passport into certain realms, not your beliefs or your capabilities. An act of healing is often considered an act of treachery.

So, I was disarmed to see that word up there, in big bold letters, on the last pillar, like a stone banner. Moreover, it was their last word (on the subject perhaps).

Consistent with the structure was the way I left the museum – they have a heap of fist-sized pebbles to the right. And there’s a board there that explains that you may be deeply disturbed by what you have seen and perhaps re-lived, while going through the museum. But the aim of the museum is not to leave you feeling angry, or defensive; it is merely a reminder,to keep you aware and prevent a repetition.
So you are invited to perform a slightly modified version of an ancient Zulu custom – pick a stone up, spit out all your anger and negative feelings on it, and fling it away from you to the pile on your left. Release the emotional component of your experience, and leave with the awareness…

The entry is as striking as the exit – it feels like a slap on the face: The tickets you are given read Black, Non-white or White as the case may be. There are separate entry gates for Whites and the others. I went with a German friend who is a S.African citizen, so it was a rude shock for both of us. As we were wondering if we’d be confined to separate orbits throughout the visit, we met down a corridor and saw the brochure that said – “This is where apartheid belongs. In a museum.”
There are information boards, video clippings including the first ever T.V. interview with Mandela (by the BBC), description of parallel events on the world stage, and a photographic section that documents the everyday life of blacks under apartheid. I hadn’t realised that there were strong economic factors as well.
Like most museums, the flood of information overwhelms you, and you start skimming the sections, or simply walking past them. Apart from the usual visitor fatigue, my German/S.African friend also had to contend with a mixture of emotions – guilt about simply being a White (even though she went out of her way to make sure neither she nor her family did anything remotely racist), and confusion because her memories placed her in a grey zone – her own White community had found her strange and even unacceptable because she’d rebelled against their norms, the average Blacks on the road hadn’t known her and therefore had treated her with same suspicion and hostility that they felt towards any White. She’d been at the receiving end both ways. And there had also been the uncertainity that any mother feels, when a patriarchal society pressurises a woman to conform by equating her reluctance to toe their line, with her ‘failure’ as a mother.
Given this gamut of personal issues that made up her own memories of the past, I think it was an act of courage for her to have taken me there, and shared those memories with me. Just as I think the museum itself is an act of courage and resilience on the part of the African, whatever the skin colour – it takes guts to face your past, and not be a slave to your wounds, to heal yourself.
In all honesty, much as I love India’s cultural resilience, I for one, cannot imagine a similar situation in India – a museum dedicated to the partition, or to the Dalit struggle for example. It is ironic to think that Gandhi did a more effective job in S.Africa through his influence on Mandela, than he ever managed here.

stray thoughts

2005-07-10T10:15:00.000+05:30

much as i like the TTLB ladder, the biologist in me winces to se worms placed before crustaceans, marsupials after rodents and even more horrifyingly, insects come way before molluscs, fish and amphibians... didn't they study evolution in school ?

on second thoughts, that's a distinct possibility if they're from the US. and never mind, climbing a zigzag ladder does enliven things.

Ms. Smilla's Feeling For Snow

2005-07-09T17:59:00.000+05:30

Am reading a wonderful novel – Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow, by Peter Hoeg.
Originally written in Danish, it is an intriguing book about a lady who sets out to find out why a 6 year old boy who was terrified of heights was playing on the icy roof of a building, and what makes him jump off and kill himself.

Miss Smilla is the kind of character who warms the cockles of my feminist heart. She’s single, smart, resourceful and has a deliciously sardonic sense of humour. I just have to include some memorable lines from the book here:
(Description of a cop) ‘The other one reminded me of an ingrown nail. He was flat and hard and full of impatient irritation.’

‘To fit in with rest of the building, the intercom is made of anodized aluminium and shaped like a conch shell. Unfortunately, it has also absorbed the roar of the great oceans, which now drown out the conversation.’

‘[an area] contains Denmark’s most expensive apartments. 3 million kroner for 84 sq. m. But there’s also a brick wall 1.5m thick to beat your head against when yu’ve calculated the price per square metre. And beams of Pomeranian pine to hang yourself from if the wall doesn’t do the trick.’

‘….. there is a display of particularly memorable cream cakes that look as if they’ve been given a coat of hairspray, and will remain there for all eternity.’

‘I’m sorry if I give the impression that it’s only my mouth that’s rough. I do my best to be rough all over.’

Do read the book. It’s refreshing to read about Greenland and Denmark, with not even a whiff of an American or Brit hero muscling his way in. And there are some really interesting nuggets of info about snow and the Inuits woven into the story.

Bharatanatyam as constructive feminist rebellion.

2005-06-27T22:07:00.000+05:30

There are many of us women who have been cajoled and coerced into joining Carnatic music classes, or Bharatanatyam at some stage in our lives. We usually look back at it as a folly of youth – something you got pushed into by an adult, who firmly declared “It’s our culture and you must learn at least a little bit of it when you’re young.”
Groaning and reluctant, many of us may have endured the phase with a leaden face. Then during adolescence, it’d be the first casuality of the power to choose – it’d have been dropped like a brick, because it was traditional, stick-in-the-mud stuff: uncool and boringly conventional, like thair sadam.
Here’s the crunch: that’s a standard view of dance and music, from a conventionally
rebellious angle. Yep, it takes more than unthinking rejection to make a genuine rebel. And some rebels traced a flaming path based on what they chose to embrace rather than reject – like music and dance.

Much has been said about Rukmini Devi Arundale in he last year or so because Kalakshetra just celebrated her birth centenary. Given her background and the society she lived in, she was a rebel alright – the strange thing is that the most horrifying thing she did was to want to learn bharatanatyam.
At that point of time, society had forgotten that the original pursuit of art was to enable the commoner to experience the divine. Dance was simply entertainment provided to the male viewer, and the dancer (devadasi) occupied a vulnerable, marginal position in society. This state of affairs, combined with a virulent strain of Victorian prudery acquired from our colonial past, ensured that the art form itself fell into disrepute. Both devadasis and their dance were banned.
Fortunately, there were some who were so entrenched in their ways, that they refused to give up their identity. They continued to practice secretly and teach the next generation if they could. But dance (‘sadir’ as it was then called) was a dirty word.

Then came a remarkable man called E. Krishna Iyer. He felt that the art form as such was beautiful, and worth saving. So he persuaded a lady of devadasi descent to perform at the prestigious Madras Music Academy – she was the legendary Balasaraswati.
Rukmini Devi was so impressed by what she saw, that she too decided to revive the dying art. So she gathered the remaining exponents of the art form and founded the Kalakshetra to revive and propogate sadir. It soon became an art form that could hold its own in any perfoming space in the world. But first, in order to delink it from its ‘unacceptable’ past, particularly in order to win Indian societal approval, sadir was re-christened as Bharatanatyam in a historic meeting held at the Music Academy.

Contrary to what you might expect, this lead to an irreconcilable difference between Balasaraswati and Rukmini Devi. They held diametrically opposite views on the essence of dance: to the former, the sexual led to the spiritual whereas to the latter, dance had to be ‘sanitised’ in order to be acceptable and elevated - the sexual had no place.
Fortunately, the former was a brilliant dancer and held her own, so dancers today still have access to varied compositions and can move from the sexual to the spiritual : a complete psychic bridge exists.

It is this spectrum of attitudes that makes the medium of bharatanatyam impressive. It also bridges the chasm that divides the conventional, patriarchally acceptable narrative of relationships and the unconventional, feminist ones – there are compositions about wives and husbands, prostitutes and patrons, about faithful partners, and promiscuous ones where the lover may be faithful and the husband, a philanderer. All of them speak realistically of what it means to be a woman. It is this richness of content and space for the female narrative that makes bharatanatyam resonate for women - from the docilely conventional to the fiercely rebellious.

So learning those old-fashioned adavus may be just the first step in a culturally conscious act of feminist rebellion.

A 4 letter-ed shoe company.

2005-06-23T19:25:00.000+05:30

Was driving from the Gemini flyover towards Marina sometime in May when I saw this ‘aesthetic’ advert for sports shoes. A certain firang company, who deserves to be called a four letter word, and whose name incidentally is a 4letter word, had a huge hoarding along that road: it showed a young boy facing a wall. It looked like the boy was pissing against the wall, but of course maybe he had a curvature of the spine, may be he was admiring the dirt on the wall… whatever.

Tell me, would the same company urge its customers in Europe or the US to pee against walls or soil public spaces ?
Even better, look at its target audience - the kind of people who can afford to buy those branded shoes- educated and upwardly mobile, people like us in fact. Definitely the kind who can afford to have a toilet. Yet, the company could do no better than to tell you that pissing in public is a fashion statement. Isn’t that flattering ?

JLT (just like that)

2005-06-23T18:40:00.000+05:30

hey, i'm supposed to live up to my blog's name, and be erratic. not you !
where's my discerning audience that hangs on every word i utter ? on second thoughts, that's an unfortunate choice of words...
boo hoo, whither art thou ?

stray thoughts

2005-06-21T19:52:00.000+05:30

a little something for you regulars to meditate on :
how good a spy would a spider be ?

and another : what do praying mantis pray for ?

cloudy weather tends to fire my neurons in an unpredictable fashion - nope, that's not the 3rd thought for the day, but an explanation. of sorts.

Learning thro experiments

2005-06-20T18:51:00.000+05:30

In my saner moments, I teach a bunch of 8-9 year old kids (and drive them to the brink of insanity).
One of the driest lessons in their text book happens to be on plastics and the impossibility of getting rid of them in the permanent sense of the word. In order to prevent myself from involuntarily sleep-walking, and the kids from behaving like a bagful of fleas, I devised an experiment. Discussion of the method to be followed and the format of the report kept us all awake, and interested.

Three weeks later, it was time to read and assess the result of that somnolent brain-wave.
Before I tell you about my favourite ‘experimenter’, let me describe the experiment : First, the kids had to take 3 mud pots each, and fill it up with soil. They had to embed a tomato, a sheet of paper and a scrap of plastic each in a pot, and water it assiduously every day. At the end of 3 weeks, they had to write down what they observed with respect to the contents of each pot.
Most kids had written that the plastic remained unchanged, while the paper had became brown and crumbled. The tomato had either rotted (‘and was stinky’) or had sprouted.
And from this experiment, all kids except one, had learnt that plastics are non-biodegradable, whereas tomatoes and paper (organic matter) are biodegradable.

Now here comes the child who dared to be different : one child had written that her tomato plant had sprouted, the paper had crumbled and the plastic had remained the same. And therefore, in an impeccable burst of logic, she concluded that only things with seeds can grow !

You bet I gave her an A.

Rewriting the deathbed scene

2005-06-15T22:58:00.000+05:30

My mother’s uncle is in hospital. He’s 70 years old, and very ill – his lungs are coated with the nicotine that he has been imbibing well, if not wisely; he has trouble swallowing so he has been on drips for a month, and there’s a lump of tissue in his lung that’s pressing down on an artery and straining the heart. He’s hooked up to various coloured wires and gadgets, so he’s in pain and he knows his days are numbered.

But the script to what should have been a sad, serious visit went completely awry – all thanks to his amazing sense of humour, and yes, courage the way Hemingway described it: grace under fire. The first thing he told my mum was “Oh, so nice to see you. Have you brought a camera along ?” Before she could figure out what he meant, he went on “Look at these wires. Don’t I look like the hero of some movie after the villains got to him? I must be able to show my grandson what a hero I was.”

As my mother grinned weakly, his next question was “Have you seen my album?”
She thought he meant a genuine photo album, and readily asked to see it. Turned out that the peppy old man meant his fat medical file – scans, X rays et al. Before she could respond to this zany form of sick bed conversation, he apologized for showing her only the negatives (the X rays of course), and promised to have the pictures ready before her next visit.
Another twenty minutes of his company, and my mother was laughing till she had tears in her eyes. Like I said earlier, that’s grace – to be able to face life with a big, broad grin even when you know the chips are down. Someday, I’d like to die with that kind of panache. Three cheers for amma’s mama.

orange juice

2005-06-05T20:18:00.000+05:30

I decided to be erratic about writing, because after all, I’ve a name to live up to : once a blue moon, right ?
But I went out for dinner last night, and witnessed an amazing conversation that made me want to go tap-tap at the keyboard – My parents, sister and I decided to go to the club for dinner. It had been a long, hot day so my sis and I were really looking forward to a glass of cold fruit juice and we decided to order that first while we agonised and argued about what to eat.

Now in this club, for some strange reason, orange juice has alcoholic overtones – you can’t ask the regular fruit juice waiter for orange juice, you have to ask the bar waiter. We craftily let our father do the summoning because the bar waiter is firmly what used to be called ‘a man’s man’. So under the pretext of wanting a glass of beer, my father lured the waiter to our table and before he could scuttle away, we piped up with our demand for orange juice.
This is when things got interesting.

Bar-waiter: “Sorry sir, no orange juice in the bar”
Father: “But orange juice is usually available only from the bar… and we don’t mean the freshly squeezed orange juice.”
B.W. (firmly): “No sir, it is not available.”
Sis and I sigh in unison, but Dad doesn’t give up –
Father: “What about tetra-paks ? D’you have the Real orange?”
BW.: “No sir.”
Dad still doesn’t let go, and we’re all puzzled…
Father: “D’you have the juice that comes in a tin?” Mimes opening a can.
B.W. doggedly denies it.
Father: “Or in small bottles?”
We suspect that Something’s Afoot.
B.W. dolefully shakes his head.
Father: “What do you serve with vodka?”
B.W. thrown by sudden change in interrogation. Scratches head and as we wait with bated breath, says : “Orange juice”
Father, in a smooth voice: “Where does that orange juice come from? “
B.W. blurts out “In a can” before he can stop himself.
Father, in a very patient voice: “Then, I’d like 2 vodka with orange juice without the vodka please.”

And yes, we finally did get the vodka+orange juice-vodka, and it was good. Am waiting for my next outing when I can ask for whiskey+water-whiskey… life is beautiful !

A fruity proposition.

2005-05-10T14:52:00.000+05:30

It’s hot and humid now, perfect weather for orchids and nuts like me. So while everyone around me is wilting and whining abt the temp, I sing carefree songs (Raindrops keep falling on my head…) and add to their annoyance. Ah, these small cheap thrills !

The other day, someone cursed me for my indecent exuberance- “If you strut around in this heat, you’ll turn into a kathrika bajji” That set me thinking (and effectively halted my off-key version of Summer Holiday)- why do we say ‘sun-burnt’ for people who’ve been hanging out with Aditya-up-there for too long and ‘sun-kissed’ for fruits that do the same ?
Some people at least look good with a deep tan, and a big white smile, whereas most fruits left out in the sun by-pass the ripe stage and simply get over-ripe, and wobbly.
The more luscious (what a word!) a fruit, the worse it gets – a mango for example, will create a solid wall of smell to advertise its over-ripeness. Worse still, the skin will get folds and wrinkles, it’ll slowly ooze a sticky juice and eventually harden into a yellow resinous mass that reeks of organic chemistry experiments. But we still say ‘sun-kissed’… for tomatoes which anyway ooze at the slightest excuse, for apricots, grapes and any number of fruits that don’t take kindly to additional inputs of Vitamin D.

It is gross injustice – a lousy fruit earns glowing adjectives, while I get called a kathrika bajji (btw, I hate kathrikas, aubergines and eggplants). It is time to demand for Equal Access to Adjectives, time for us to rally together and join the Sun-Kissed-Not-Sun-Burnt movement. And instead of stink bombs, you could send fruit salad to those special few in your life … I hope I’m on your list.

Paper boats

2005-05-03T19:03:00.000+05:30

For D. so that he will keep writing :)

Try as I might,
My paper boats no longer float.
They bob limply,
And sink back into the deep
Green pool of my imagination.
Strange: green
Sprouts on land,
And stagnates on water.
I watch the soggy craft sink –
Not even a ripple,
To remember it by.
Till I hear my friend
Echo my unspoken thought –
“It’s gone …”
The boat or my skill ?
“Why don’t you make
A kite ?”
Why don’t I ?

Agriculture is infra dig

2005-05-02T11:30:00.000+05:30

For a country that has enjoyed flaunting its agrarian roots in the global forum we sure do take care of the farmers, don’t we ?
For one thing, apart from the occasional half-a-dozen lines in some vague corner of the paper, the print media does not think agriculture is a newsworthy topic. Never mind that the life of most Indians still directly revolves around fields (and the rest of us do eat).

P.Sainath is probably the only journalist who has bothered to spend time and effort in actually putting the picture of agrarian India together, and bringing it to our notice without any regard for our (hypocritical) sensibilities.
I’ve been reading his columns on and off for a few years now, and what is really surprising is how easily and comfortably the vested interests sit back and dictate terms to the rest of the country. We decide what a farmer somewhere in Pollachi should plant, and what constitutes development for an adivasi. When I say ‘we’ I’m flattering us. What I really mean is we-the-willing-slaves-of-the-World-Bank. The latest ‘development’ scheme is the Maharashtra’s new Water Bill.

With World Bank’s altruistic advice, the govt has decided to hike water taxes paid by the farmers so as to be able to recover the initial investment completely. They made sure that no one from the farming lobby was included, no commies either (since they love the Bank), and the bill was introduced in the last 10 mins, so that no one would have the time or the energy to really discuss it. Interesting ?
They also added a clause about the two child norm – to the extent that apart from paying a humongous water tax, the farmer would also have to pay a fine for having more than two children. Would you like to guess the possible social consequences such a callous scheme would have – for the children and the adults ?
Best of all, apart from not being consulted or involved at any stage of the Bill, the farmers haven’t been informed yet. They’ll hear about only when the tax-man comes knocking at the door. If they are angry and decide to protest, guess who will bear the brunt – the tax collector of course, not the brilliant babus who put the scheme together in the first place. Incidentally, many villages already do not receive irrigation water because they are too poor to pay even the subsidised rates.

This miserable model of supplying water has already been a resounding failure in South Africa and Latin America) . That hasn’t deterred the Bank or the govt. I guess after we figure it is disastrous, we can always ask the UN for billions in aid, and have another long party. Champagne, anyone ? Or water ?

The cream of society ?

2005-04-30T14:01:00.000+05:30

One of the nicest things about being a wanderer, is that I get to listen to different voices and different stories. Once while I was shuffling around some forest in the Western Ghats, I got to meet a bunch of adivasis – they were Kadars, literally the ‘forest people’.
They speak in a sing-song fashion, so even though many words in their dialect sound guttural and harsh, the overall tone of the language is rather oddly pleasant (like Bob Dylan and his discordant mouth-organ). And when they speak mainstreamese, they retain that sing-song diction.

Anyway, sitting there in the sunshine, with langurs calling from the canopy, even a conversation on Bata chappals would’ve seemed interesting. We exchanged slow comments on our places of origin, languages known, purpose for the day etc. Then they told me what animals were found in that area and cross-checked on what I had seen so far, gave me advice on the places that I should see. By that time we were all getting over our initial hesitations, and when we had finished criticizing tourists who threw trash around and blasted music, we had become friends.
We agreed on how beautiful the forest was, and they were quite pleased to hear me admit that the water in their stream was much clearer and sweeter than the water sold in the plastic bottles in a shop nearby.

I think the conversation took a turn when I remarked that I had seen a beautiful beetle the previous day. They were rather taken with my choice of adjective, and giggled at each other while listing out several other animals that they thought I might find ‘beautiful’, since obviously I had strange notions of beauty. Then one of the older women wanted to know if I would call them, as a tribe, beautiful ?
She seemed rather surprised when I promptly said yes, and pointed to the baby in the group. She and two other women discussed something in their dialect, and then this old lady told me, “But we are dark. We see these people from the plains, and they are so much more light-skinned than any of us. You yourself are fair. How can you call our black skin beautiful ?”
I felt bad. Is this what happens to communities that we try ‘to integrate into the mainstream’? Anyway, I gave them my brown/black is beautiful speech, and when I craftily reminded them that many dark things are valued, like dark honey and black tea (Kadar favourites), there were a couple of ‘maybe-she’s-talking-sense’ looks, and we parted with smiles.

But it left me feeling very thoughtful. Bad enough that we city-slickers fall for every gimmick that cosmetic companies throw at us, and let other people’s commercial idea
of beauty circumscribe our lives and our self-images (all this is in spite of our education and exposure to the world at large). Imagine mindlessly teaching the same yardsticks to other people. Can you imagine the effect this kind of what’s-natural-is-ugly school of thought will have on the dignity and culture of people like the Kadars?
Progress and happiness will be measured in terms of how many maladaptive clothes you wear, and nirvana is just a bleaching cream away. Now, where did I put my tranquillizers ?

Atchu-cho, vat to do ?

2005-04-28T14:42:00.000+05:30

I tried to stand on my own kal,
But the trials of fate
Carved, shaped, quartered my
Happiness, like an aruval;
Atchu-cho, vat to do ?

A lucrative business - a potti kadai -
I set up outside my gate,
But a meteor dropped out of the sky,
Flattened the shop like an adai;
Atchu-cho, vat to do ?

I decided to weave some pai,
(I was tired of facing an empty plate)
I sang about my wares in notes high,
Till they all told me to shut my vai;
Atchu-cho, vat to do ?

Boredom infests me like pane,
So I write verses that I hate.
If you read them often enough, why !
They may begin to seem as good as thane.
Atchu-cho, vat to do ?

Artistic science and scientific art.

2005-04-28T13:32:00.000+05:30

Somewhere along the way, we get the impression that there exists a definite boundary which separates science from art; that each is a distinct worldview and mergers are to be viewed with suspicion. The only obvious group that seems immune to this attitude are the science fiction writers. Barring them, I doubt if many of us realise just how often the two worlds trade ideas and add depth to each others’ works. So, this blog is going to jog your memory and mess up your mental filing cabinets.

In case you think physicists reading nothing but journals and particle accelerator reports, there’s conclusive evidence that some of them at least have read Lewis Carroll’s books - ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ & ‘Through the Looking Glasss’. Bits from these two are more often than not quoted by physicists to illustrate arcane and bizarre concepts. And Carroll’s work, popular as it may be, can hardly be considered ‘high’ literature ! Another author who seems to be known to the Quantum community is
James Joyce. The ‘quark’, a subatomic particle, was named after something out of Joyce’s ‘Finnegan’s Wake.’ Here’s the best part- the implications and the nature of Quantum Theory itself, gave many illustrious physicists spiritual indigestion, and they found their panacea in nothing less than the Upanishads.

Biologists are not far behind. A scientist named Van Valen named his theory on evolution after a Carrollian character – ‘The Red Queen Hypothesis’. Incidentally the concept of “You have to keep running just to stay in the same place”, is also used to explain the ideas of varying frames of reference, and the relativity of rest, motion and time in physics. The Fibonacci Sequence, is familiar to both biologists and mathematicians since it is found in the natural and numerical worlds. (The ammonite and nautilus shells are famous natural curves.)
And before the days of cameras and DNA ligases, biology was heavily dependent on people who could do attractive and accurate illustrations. This was crucial to the science of Taxonomy because people learnt to identify species based on the written descriptions and drawings. Further, in some cases, sub-species are recognizable only by difference in colour. So if you painted the bird a wrong blue, you’d be black-listed by hordes of biologists.

Among the wielders of the brush, Picasso’s famous Cubist art was also deeply influenced by the Theory of Relativity: the concept of time varying with place, and the influence of the position of the observer with reference to the observed (multiplicity of perspectives).
The Surrealist school of painting was influenced by the nature of dreams, their effect, and the relationship of symbols to reality. Sounds Freudian to you ? It should, because it was.
Another set of canvases, those of Bridget Riley, may remind you of the cognitive puzzles we’ve all done as kids – which line is longer, which dot is farther away, can you spot the hidden object and so on. Her work is called Optical Art, and is mesmerising.

The technology hat goes into the making of music would be an epic in itself, so I’ll skip it. But being a Pink Floyd fan myself, I must mention here that their album ‘Division Bell’ acknowledges the input of Douglas Adams and Stephen Hawking – a science fiction writer and hold your breath – a real, live, astrophysicist. Hawking’s voice features in one track – ‘Keep Talking’. The harmonic scale is itself of considerable interest to musicians, mathematicians and physicists – music, series, progressions and harmonic vibrations being some of the keywords.
Is your filing cabinet looking windswept ? Are all those envelopes jumbled up and on the floor? That’s good, because some amount of chaos is necessary for creative thinking. That’s one idea that both worldviews accept.

Of maamis and fractals.

2005-04-26T20:53:00.000+05:30

Recently, a science report in a newspaper caught my eye – a group of microbiologists in some univ in England had tested water samples that had been stored in copper pots (the old-fashioned “chombu” I guess) and other types of containers. They found that after a few days, water in the copper vessels showed a dramatic drop in bacterial counts (Escherichia coli to science buffs) as compared to other containers. So simple storing drinking water in a chombu could be an effective way of purifying it! Seems like the maamis of old knew a thing or two about microbiology.

This triggered off my current line of thought – I wonder if anyone has studied the effect of kolam drawing on cognitive or mathematical skills. The ability to perceive patterns is considered important because it helps a person identify, sort, compare, differentiate and juggle around with information. Further, people who have a natural feel for numbers have an instinctive sense of pattern – they know what the right answer should ‘look’ like. What does this have to do with doodling with rice flour?
Well, traditional kolams are often a join-the-dots affair: Given a fixed number of dots, what are the various ways in which you can space them out? What are the various combinations in which you can join all of them? Given a matrix of say, 5 x 5 dots, how many designs can you draw if you have to link all the dots? And so on…
I should think that this kind of activity would hone your ‘patterning skills’. But that’s just the beginning.

Ever heard of fractals? Fractals can be studied from different perspectives, and since my maths skills are non-existent, I’ll give you an example from biology. In many trees, the pattern in which the main trunk divides into huge branches is repeated in the way the huge branches divide into smaller ones, and smaller ones. Similarly, the pattern in which your arteries branch into smaller and smaller blood vessels till they form capillaries, is the same. So while the pattern remains the same, it is the scale that changes.

To go back to the kolams, take a good look at the next ‘padi kolam’ you see. It is made up of small units that are repeated over and over again in a particular fashion. What is really lovely is that you normally tend to think of the smaller pieces as squares or precise shapes like that. But there are set of what I call the ‘murukku’ padi kolams – here the smaller unit is just a single line that weaves its way around a set of dots in fabulously complex patterns. Very often this line will continue unbroken into the next set of dots (next small unit), so the big picture consists of complex contortions of just one single line ! Talk about running rings around people.
So what the maamis are doing is playing around with some very attractive fractals. Once you (or a maami) are proficient in drawing kolams, you’ll have also acquired the reverse skill – that of being able to simply look at a complicated kolam and break it down to its basic units. In other words, you’d be able to look at a big network and break it down to the fractals.

Is anyone out there shopping for a doctoral study topic?

The start of the day.

2005-04-26T20:01:00.000+05:30

She pushed open the door, and paused: a swimmer surveying the depths before the plunge. The sunlight cast sharp shadows and glinted off the granite counter. Light on dark. It drew broad yellow bands on her bare feet. The knives gleamed.

She rattled some spoons, pulled open a drawer- hands with tapered strength. The refridgerator hummed like a sleep-walker; babblers twittered outside. It was going to be a warm day.
She assembled them on the counter – spoons, a blue mug, sugar and a tin from the cupboard. Her competence filled the room. A flick of the wrist: a lit stove and a spent match. A saucepan of milk warming over the fire – blameless white, mud brown, humus brown. Sprinkling of sugar and the hint of a smile with the first waft of caffeine.

The syllabus.

2005-04-24T22:37:00.000+05:30

I went to a good college. On the academic front it was considered sound, both staff and students were expected to take their work seriously, and the college encouraged its students to think about life, the world, values etc. So you also acquired some sense of creativity and social responsibility as well.
That was the good part.

However, there was this one Prof ABC, whose classes were about as interesting as a week-old blob of chewing gum, so normally, people took notes just to keep themselves from falling into REM. One fine day, however, 10 mins into the zzzz …. lecturezzz… some of us snapped awake, and let our jaws fall open in a most inelegant fashion.
For, ABC was droning out notes on eugenics – yup the good old Nazi mantra.
I pinched my neighbour to see if she squealed - she did, so I wasn’t dreaming. ABC went on for another 5 mins about why Eugenics was a hot branch of applied genetics and its ‘advantages’. I just couldn’t take it any more, and asked her why we had to read the Nazi manifesto.

For, the ‘advantages’ that she was dictating included screening and aborting fetuses that may be born with any handicaps (because they are a drain on society’s limited resources), and of course the joyous prospect of choosing what qualities you’d like in your baby-to-be – including physical perfection and a high IQ. If that’s not a leaf out of the Nazi book, I’m a Barbie with hairy armpits.

To go back to the classroom – first the prof blinked and repeated herself (she thought I was off-track). When I explained the Aryan supremacy stuff, she blinked again and said :

1.This was the first time someone had objected to this chapter.
2. It was just part of the syllabus
3. She was not responsible for the syllabus
4. Why did I mind so much ? I shouldn’t think too deeply about these things
5. I can always choose to skip the questions from this part in the exam.

And I had to be content with that thoughtful response.

I did ask my classmates what they thought of the whole thing. Predictably, most of them had simply copied down her words of wisdom and were planning to mug it up for the exam. A few told me in clinching tones “But it’s part of the syllabus” like that was a mandate from heaven. A couple of the others, however, derived much cynical amusement from
The Prof’s complete ignorance of what her notes really meant.
The kind of scientists (people) we were all going to be.
What really hit us was the completely unquestioning photocopier kind of mind a ‘good’ student (or teacher for that matter) is expected to have. We even tried talking to some of the other profs in the dept and asking them to write to the demi-gods who dictate college syllabi – the profs thought we were nuts.

I dealt with my disappointment with education and my Prof in particular, by doing the only meaningful thing: I refused to draw diagrams with a sharp pencil.

Grief

2005-04-23T11:30:00.000+05:30

Broken shards of the skylight
Of my soul
fill my mouth.
Streaks
Of anguished light fill
My throat, ears, head;
Jagged glass
Pierces my composure,
Words refract the pain
Into howls, sobs,
A stark silence.
I grieve in the dark spaces.

Toast

2005-04-23T11:23:00.000+05:30

Charred at the horizon,
Burnt sienna and desolate,
Devoid of distractions - an
Unrelieved expanse.

Fiery as an ember, and
Unfit for the living,
Your heat singes my skin.
Hope shivers like a mirage;
Vapourous.

I stare helplessly;
The odour of charcoal
Blankets my senses as I
Contemplate my burnt toast.

a haiku

2005-04-23T11:21:00.000+05:30

Into my cupped palms:
Rhododendrons crimson red,
Drip gently their blood.

I wander’d lonely as a dowd…

2005-04-22T13:18:00.000+05:30

I wander’d lonely as a dowd,
Who knows not of ties and frills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
Around a man with dressing skills:
In candle light, or on the streets,
Where ever he went, he did please.

Cover’d with embroidery fine,
(Of which region I could not say)
His garments the colour of wine
Over the conversation did hold sway.
Sartorial sense I was sans;
In this alien group by chance.

Whatever the others may say,
Wearily, repeatedly,
I could not share their dismay
O’er my garments stained with tea.
Frequently their tempers grew hot -
But fashion’s dictates I had not sought.

For oft I match my pink tie
Printed with patterns skewed,
With clothes the colour of sky
And cuff-links that are multi-hued,
As others despair in tones shrill -
My heart in technicolour thrills.