2011
Some mistakes from 2010 were repeated. Some lessons were reinforced.
Finally left the city that I grew up in.
Fell sick.
Met a lot of unforgettable, amazing people.
Lost good friends.
Got over her death.
Learnt to live.
If you haven’t read this first, please do so. In it Pico Iyer expands on getting away from it all and incredible rush of things into our lives.
That joy of quiet is why I live where I live - at the edge of a village.
That joy of quiet is why I reach where I work just a little after 7.30 AM.
That joy of quiet is why I sometimes take the road by the lake back home.
That joy of quiet is why I am offline post 9 PM on almost every day.
That joy of quiet is why I wake up at 4 AM on certain weekends and drive 100km to eat breakfast at a mountain village.
That joy of quiet is why I take off in the afternoons and go sit on the platform in Tyakal and watch the sunset.
That joy of quiet is why I sit in the balcony at dusk reading my grandfather’s letters to my father.
That joy of quiet is why I fight for the window seat on the train.
That joy of quiet is why I will visit places like Theh Qalandar, Chak Pakhewala, Golehwala, Ib, Gobarsanda, Bahelia Buzurg, Gola Gokaranath, Parlakimidi this year.
That joy of quiet is what I cherish and live for.
"I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you’ll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you’ll make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind."
—
Here’s wishing all of you a great new year. Be safe. Have fun. Do good work.
Tintin
The hospital bed is a very dank one. No one has told me that recovering from a serious and life threatening urinary tract infection was going to involve me peeing almost uncontrollably. I am irritated beyond normal. Hungry. Thirsty.
1986.
My father swings into the tiny room and hands me a brown cover proudly stamped with “Shankar Book Bureau, Malleshwaram”. I ask him what it contains.
“Open it and see”, he twinkles.
I pick the book out and on top is “Herge” and “The Adventures of Tintin” and just below is a big yellow box with “Flight 714” set in wonderful type. Framing the background is a cave with large spikes through which a ragged bunch of people with guns have emerged. They look startled by the sight of two large stone statues. Tintin. Captain Haddock. Snowy. Dr. Krollspell. Laszlo Carreidas.
I open the first page. The top panel contains a gloriously detailed drawing of a Boeing 707.
“I keep telling you. We are in Java! Djakarta!”
“How very strange. I’d have sworn it was Djakarta.”
“This IS Djakarta, ten thousand thundering typhoons!”
“Rangoon? You must be joking.”
“Blistering barnacles! Djakarta! Djakarta! DJAKARTA!!! Can you listen to what I say?”
“Botany Bay?…Then why didn’t you say we’d arrived?”
I am laughing so hard that my mother has to tell me control it else my abdomen might split open.
I finish the book in an hour. Read it again. And again. And again.
Three days later I am out of the hospital. In possession of eight more Tintin books. “No, son, you can’t just fake illness and get to the hospital in hope that we’ll get you more books”, the mother points out as I am wheeled out.
Six months later, I have the entire collection.
*****
I recently watched the movie adaption of Tintin recently. As a good fan, I loved it the first time I saw it. The second time? Not so much. Did the non-stop action tire me out? Perhaps. Did the over the top rambunctiousness of Haddock put me off? Perhaps. I kept thinking about this until yesterday when this article came by my way.
Jessica Hendrix in the LA Review of Books writes a most beautiful piece on Herge, his comics and eventually the movie. Half way through piece is when I stopped and re-read. And re-read:
He was born 15, and supposedly stays that way, though it is hard to imagine he’s any age at all. He has no last name, no parentage and no past, no desires and no sexual identity. Even his appearance has little to say about him: his face is just a circle, with two black dots for eyes and a black, semi-circular wedge of mouth. He could be anyone, and frequently is: In The Broken Ear, the villains Alonso and Ramon see him disguised in every face they meet. His amorphousness also allows for virtue: by being nothing, he can be a kind of ideal.
Moneyball.
Even further down:
Then there are ways in which Tintin is simply incompatible with film, as his own creator realized. After seeing an animated version of The Temple of the Sun, Hergé wrote a young fan: “I don’t like Captain Haddock in the film. He doesn’t have the same voice as in the book.”
And in closing:
Look at his face as Hergé drew it: there’s such babyish clarity to those round, rosy cheeks, that thumb-like nose, the expressive parentheses of his eyebrows, and so much complexity, too. Like Barthes’ degree-zero of writing, Tintin is the nursery of a new language of line and shape, the very artificiality of which makes it possible to imagine something real. He’s almost nothing, and as long as he stays that way, he can be anything at all.
In three short paragraphs, my confusion and my own thoughts about the movie laid out clear.
*******
I pick up Flight 714 again and turn to a random page. Carreidas is angry about the loss of his hat. Haddock and Allan engage in words. Rastapopoulos is laughing rip-roaringly. In my head, I imagine their voices. I say it aloud, silently. I chuckle.
"When we die, these are the stories still on our lips. The stories we’ll only tell strangers, someplace private in the padded cell of midnight. These important stories, we rehearse them for years in our head but never tell. These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost."
— Chuck Palahniuk
Beyond the fields we know
“The source of all imagination is here in our fields, and Creation is beautiful enough for the furthest flights of the poets. What is called realism only falls far from these flights because it is too meticulously concerned with the detail of material; mere inventories of rocks are not poetry; but all the memories of crags and hills and meadows and woods and sky that lie in a sensitive spirit are materials for poetry, only waiting to be taken out, and to be laid before the eyes of such as care to perceive them”
A poignant take by Luke Dittrich in Esquire on Chuck Berry, his life, his career and the things taken away from him:
Here’s what happened to Chuck Berry after his ideas changed everything: He became famous, yes. He became a famous black man, touring around Mississippi and Alabama and Texas in the 1950s, playing concerts to theaters full of screaming white teenage girls. Is it any surprise what happened next? Is it any surprise that he had to take shelter from angry mobs in police stations after his concerts? Is it any surprise that his record company stiffed him for a big chunk of his songwriting royalties?
The first “English western” song that I recall my father playing for me on the National Panasonic cassette player was Maybellene. I had no clue who the artist was. Years later, I began listening to a version of this song by Paul Simon and incorrectly, in my head, credited him with writing it. But the more I listened to Paul Simon, the more it felt that this wasn’t his song.
Even some more years later, I went back to dingy store room in the creaking house in Triplicane and located the original Chuck Berry cassette. It had worn out and had fungus growing. Patiently for over three hours, I cleaned it up, re-spooled the tape and played it one last time.
"For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell."
— Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero
(Source: alinatsvor)
"Don’t be afraid. The darkness you’re in is no greater than the darkness inside your own body. They are two darknesses separated by a skin. I bet you’ve never thought of that. You carry a darkness about with you all the time and that doesn’t frighten you… My dear chap, you have to learn to live with the darkness outside just as you learned to live with the darkness inside."
— Jose Saramago (via L’ Yeux Verts)
I lost a friend today. A teacher too. He perhaps has had as much influence on me as my father. He’s taught me as many things on life, about life as much as my father.
He once told me that the greatest of teachers are story-tellers at heart. I refused to believe him for long, but now I do. He also told me that the best teachers are those that turn their students into teachers for the rest of their lives.
I am a story-teller and teacher now. I think he’ll be reasonably pleased with how I turned out.
Film
Father and I are at the edge of platform number 1 at Pachora station. It is just a little beyond noon and the sun is a December gold and warm. The signal turns green. The Gitanjali will soon come roaring down the track.
Father takes out the Zenit, winds the film, calibrates the light and notches down a exposure.
“Here, put the strap around your neck and hold the camera with a straight hand.”
“Ok, pa”
“Wait for the moment. Don’t press to early. The engine should cover half your viewfinder, then press.”
“But we will get only one shot?”
“Mostly, but we can try to get more”
I can now see the train, raising dust and blasting its horn without a care. My arms tighten. My wrists lock the heavy frame of the camera. My 5 year old muscles feel pain shooting up.
500 metres. The viewfinder is lined up.
Waiting. Waiting. The pain coming and going in waves. I almost give up.
And just then, the bright red/yellow locomotive enters the frame. 10%. 20%. 25%. 50%.
Click.
The mechanical thump of it. The squeaky sound of the cloth shutter opening and closing. The pain forgotten for an instant. Arms relax, wrist unlocks and the camera comes down from the eye.
There’s a satisfied grin on my face. And father’s.
“Can we please, please remove the film and see the picture?”
“No, no, son. Lots of pictures to be taken before I can remove the reel.”
So, it wasn’t until 3 months later at a dusty and dingy photo studio in Jalgaon did I get to see the fruits of my labour. Holding up the print, I relive every moment of that afternoon on platform number 1. The pain coming flooding back. The relief and that wide grin.
******
I’ve switched over to digital cameras completely these past few years. The convenience, portability and sheer ubiquity makes it easier, but I miss the process of taking pictures using film. The loading of a carefully considered roll of Fuji Velvia, the winding of the strip into place, the wonder of watching a movable aperture close and open and the finality of a shutter click. Every shot one framed was measured, carefully thought out. The photographer pitting his knowledge of light and shadow against the fickleness of film.
I yearn for the days when photographs were truer than they are today.
Going to School
Nalwar is an unforgiving place. Like much of Northern Karnataka, it is barren, rocky, almost devoid of trees and hot and dusty throughout the year. The only thing that grows here are enormous cement factories that seem to add buildings every time one passes by enroute to Pune or Bombay from the South.
It is also the place where a young boy, looking no more than 5 boards the train one bright morning. The fact that he’s in a reserved coach seems to make no difference. He is confident in his strides up and down the aisle, finally settling down on a seat opposite me. The elderly Gujarati lady who’s the rightful occupant fumes on her return from the toilet. But the young boy’s mournful yet eager eyes speak in a manner no one can respond to harshly. So, in the time honoured Indian Railways tradition, she ‘adjusts’.
For a full five minutes, everyone just watches the boy. I suspect that everyone has the same questions of him as I - what is his name? How old is he? Why is he going to school on an express train?
The rushing wind blows his tie clip away. I pick it up and hand it back. It seems to loosen the atmosphere a bit.
“Thank you, uncal”
“It’s ok, make sure you clip it properly now”
“Yes, yes ji”
“Accha, tell me. What is your name? How old are you? You seem way too young to be traveling alone”
“My name is Aamir. I am 5 and half, uncal. I have to go to school, no? How else will I go?”
“Oh, but where is your school? Don’t your parents worry about you when traveling?”
“My mother says I have to work hard to become a big person. So I go to far school in Wadi”, he stretches his hand in the direction of the place.
“My mother told my father gone to far place. He won’t come back soon. She told I have become big and then I can meet him. So I want to become big like him, work in cement factory and become big person.”
Everyone in the bay looks on incredulously. One lady seems to be tearing up, ruining her morning mascara.
“Accha, which class are you?”
“UKG, Section 2”
Before I ask him any more questions, a burly boy twice Aamir’s age comes by and asks him to come to the next coach where the rest of his friends are.
“Uncle, if TTE comes na, tell him we went off to the last coach”, the burly boy is clearly nervous. “Else if he finds us here, he’ll hit us. Last week he hit this fellow until his hand got a cut”, pointing to Aamir’s forearm.
******
I don’t see any of them until I get off to buy breakfast at Wadi. Aamir is running ahead of everyone else trying to get away from the TTE’s swinging palms. 20 meters down the platform, he slips and goes sprawling near a idli vendor who promptly raises his hand. Aamir scampers to an escape. Waiting for the rest of his friends, he dusts off the muck on his white shirt and straightens his bag.
I wave to him. He waves back, turns and jumps off onto the tracks.
His ambitions to be a big person in a cement factory have survived another train journey.
