Puri Subzi

“What are you reading?”, I ask. This only the second time I’ve seen her. I already...

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 20:00:28 +0530

“What are you reading?”, I ask. This only the second time I’ve seen her. I already like her. I am very nervous.

“Oh, some Conrad”, the voice confident and clear.

“Do you read much?”, she asks

“Oh, a lot. Mostly Tom Clancy shit though. Need to read more intelligent stuff”

Giggle

“I wish my brother would read more. I hate buying books just for myself. Dad & mom don’t like their money spent this way by just one child.”

“Anyway, do you mind if I read to you a few pages? I quite like doing things like this.”

********

And so we read to each other aloud. Different books. Different voices. All under the dimmed light of our bed rooms. It felt like a ritual. It felt sacred. It was. Her husky voice adding gravitas to the already tortured Flaubert. My tone-meandering utterances adding comic relief to an already funny John Mortimer. Her emerald eyes always shining. Always looking at the next sentence before the current one was finished. “You have a funny, flat nose in this light”, she said often.

“We should read aloud to our kids….someday…whenever that should happen”

“Yes, yes. We should start with A..B..C..D”

“You doofus”

********

Always an ice-cream and a smoke after the read. Strawberry and menthol.

I miss the dim light. The reading. The voice. Her.

Maps and compasses

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:58:26 +0530

Maps and compasses:

Seth Godin on the topic:

The compass, on the other hand, is more important then ever. If you don’t know which direction you’re going, how will you know when you’re off course?

And yet…

And yet we spend most of our time learning (or teaching) the map, yesterday’s map, while we’re anxious and afraid to spend any time at all calibrating our compass.

Sweep

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:10:19 +0530

The police constable’s boot goes straight for Seenu’s jaw.

*Thwack*

It’s a sickening sound and a quarter of the coach I am in turns around to see where it came from. I am 3 ft away from it.

There’s a howl of pain for an instant. Then silence. The rhythmic clack of steel on steel suddenly roars. Dies. And roars again.

“How dare you enter these coaches? Have I told you before not to come here?”, booms the constable.

“But aiyya, where else will I earn my money?”

“I don’t care. Get out of this coach now and this train at the next stop”, the boot swinging into position.

“That’s quite enough. I’ll make sure he leaves the coach at Hindupur”. The constable looks at me in disbelief for a second. Then storms off to the next coach.

Seenu, with one arm and two missing legs nods and says “Dhanyam, aiyya”. The bruise on his jaw

****

Outside, the landscape in stunning. Makalidurga and the hills surrounding it are the gateway to Bangalore. Small tomato farms are dotted around large vineyards that’ll soon yield some of the best wine in the country.

Seenu is back from cleaning the coach. His tool? The shirt that he presently dusts off against the wall, flicks a stubborn hairball from the collar and puts it back on. It’s tattered at the back. I give him a 10 rupee note.

“Thanks again aiyya for saving me”

“It’s OK. I did what I had to do. Inhuman to treat anything that way”

“I have to face this everyday. At least today I get one less slap and 20 rupees more in earning.”

He looks longingly at the stump of his arm.

“God gives and god takes away, no, saar? I was a bhel-puri seller earning 100 rupees a day on this route until 5 years ago. Now see.”

He flaps trouser legs where his calf and feet would have been.

“What happened?”

“I fell down just outside Penukonda while changing bogies. No one saw me go down, so when I became conscious again, I had to drag myself half a km to the level crossing gate. There after 2 hrs some ambulance came and took me to hospital, but too late to save my arm and legs. Doctor said some infection.”

“I was lucky train was slow else I would have died”, he looks at me wistfully.

“But sometimes I wish I was dead. What can a one armed person do in life saar? What can a one armed person do.”

Three more of his buddies join him. One guy has both his leg tethered like a head of cattle. Another has both arms missing.

Soon there is laughter and money counting. I hear one of them go “Treat, maamu, treat!”

****

Hindupur. Screeching halt. Seenu hauls himself off the coach and onto the platform. He looks around, turns and drags himself down the concrete. The constable is nowhere to be seen. The tattered shirt fluttering in the strong breeze.

That Father Lost

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:41:00 +0530

That Father Lost:

As one commenter notes, this sublime piece of writing is a meditation:

Two griefs: the first, the departure of him whom we had loved, demands suspension of our normal lives. The second, the departure of those with whom we had grieved, demands resumption.

Also: On fathers and loss.

"No one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without..."

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:48:45 +0530

“No one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don’t have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don’t have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or bought, or sold or read. That’s all I have to say on that subject.”

- Philip Pullman

"Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like..."

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:13:13 +0530

“Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map.”

- Alan Moore

"There’s no remaking reality. Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes."

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:58:00 +0530

“There’s no remaking reality. Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes.”

- Philip Roth

"That’s what so many people didn’t understand about life. The real world is the one within the walls..."

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:58:00 +0530

“That’s what so many people didn’t understand about life. The real world is the one within the walls of homes; the outside world, of careers and politics and money and fame, that was the fake world, where nothing lasted, and things were real only to the extent they harmed or helped people inside their homes.”

- Orson Scott Card

Benaras

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 09:49:19 +0530

Namit Arora shares his experience of visiting Varanasi in this lovely piece on 3QuarksDaily. Go read that.

My only visit to Varanasi was at the end of 2008. Accompanied by a friend, it was a stop on a 6000km pan-country journey whose purpose was somehow never defined, nor spoken about the minute the first train pulled out of the platform.

Getting off at Mughalsarai, we rented an incredibly nausea inducing taxi and were dropped off near Varanasi’s main railway station close to midnight. It was cold. Very cold. Three cows were sleeping on the main concourse. The familiar smell of diesel and shit was supplanted by fumes from rancid oil into which puris were being thrown in great quantities. We slept in the retiring room which had clearly seen better days. One cockroach was in a battle for its life against an equally determined lizard who seemed to relish the thought of a chunky dinner.

The next morning saw me trooping off the the ghats after a longish walk through narrow lanes that lead upto the river. One policeman asked if I was carrying a bomb in my backpack. I told him no. He seemed satisfied, adjusted his pants over a size 46 paunch and waved me on.

Every street seemed ancient. Looked ancient. Smelt ancient. Ghee, ash, milk and puris.

******

“300 rupees only, saab”, says Lakhan who wins my contract to ferry me around.

We head east first, towards the Harishchandra Ghat passing people who are drinking and sprinkling the same water a few others were washing clothes and peeing in a few meters upstream.

Even the floating Pepsi and Coke bottles take on an ancient air.

One pretty white lady in the adjacent boat is being hooted at by people on the banks. Her bra straps are showing.

At Harishchandra Ghat, three men kick some still burning ash into the river as another corpse arrives. Dogs go sniffing around. Other men mill about looking for scraps of jewelry. Cash is being exchanged among another set of men. One person looks longingly at the smoldering ash. One bangle is removed from the newly arrived corpse and handed over to thuggish looking guy.

Death is first and foremost an enterprise here.

We turn around and head west.

A boat croses our path. 3 people grieving intensely, holding an impossibly tiny body wrapped in white and goldenish cloth. One person doesn’t want to let go, but the two others take the bundle and dump it in unceremoniously. “Less than five years old child. Straight to heaven via the river”, murmurs Lakhan.

A group of six brothers are being led by a priest to perform the tarpan ceremony. Lakhan sneers, “25000 Rs for dead people not be reborn.”

Just before the Pashupathinath Ghat, a TV program is being recorded. The bearded saint is getting make up tips from the cameraman.

Japanese and German bakeries abound. One even doubles up as a boutique.

More pilgrims from the hinterland pour in. Shivering and all covered up, they would have spent most of their life savings to get here. Pushed and herded around like cattle for slaughter. One woman bends down, looks up at the sun, closes her eyes for ten seconds and sips the water. A piece of foam covered cloth floats by. She seems to be at peace.

Approach Manikarnika Ghat, the world’s busiest funeral place. I chuckle when I make a vague reference in my head to the British series ‘Allo ‘Allo and its undertaker Mr. Alphonse. His motto - swiftly and with style. No style here at Manikarnika. Just a manic endevour to burn bodies and move on. Logs of wood are stacked high. Traffic jam of corpses. The grief is palpable. It tangs the air.

100 meters down, kids play cricket.

The cycle remains undisturbed. Varanasi continues as before.

On the Rann of Kutch, a lonely flamingo feeds on the last few...

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:28:29 +0530

On the Rann of Kutch, a lonely flamingo feeds on the last few scraps of the day before heading home.

"When fear crawls out in the evenings from all four corners, when the winter storm raging outside..."

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 11:13:15 +0530

“When fear crawls out in the evenings from all four corners, when the winter storm raging outside tells you it is winter, and that it is difficult to live in the winter, when my soul trembles at the sight of distant fantasies, I shiver and say one word with every heartbeat, every pulse, every piece of my soul—liberation. In such moments it hardly matters where it is going to come from and who will bring it, so long as it’s faster and comes sooner. Doubts are growing in my soul. Quiet! Blessed be he who brings good news, no matter from where, no matter to where. Time, go ahead. Time, which carries liberation in its unknown tomorrow…maybe not for me, but for people like me. The result is certain. Down with any doubts. Everything comes to an end. Spring will come.”

- Elsa Binder, 30 January 1942, from Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (edited by Alexandra Zapruder)

Elsa Binder wrote eloquently and passionately about the destruction of the Jewish community in Stanislawow, Poland. Her diary was found in a ditch on the way to an execution site. Though it is likely she perished in the Holocaust, the date and circumstances of her death remain unknown.

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already..."

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 11:51:43 +0530

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities [ via Frank Chimero ]

2011

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:58:00 +0530

Some mistakes from 2010 were repeated. Some lessons were reinforced.

Finally left the city that I grew up in.

Some moves paid off.

Fell sick.

Traveled a great deal.

Met a lot of unforgettable, amazing people.

Lost good friends.

Got over her death.

Rediscovered music.

Learnt to live.

If you haven’t read this first, please do so. In it Pico Iyer expands on getting away from it...

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 10:57:44 +0530

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..."

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 15:26:14 +0530

“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.”

- Neil Gaiman

Here’s wishing all of you a great new year. Be safe. Have fun. Do good work.

Tintin

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 20:50:40 +0530

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,..."

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:40:16 +0530

“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...

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 11:30:25 +0530

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”

Lord Dunsany

Maybellene

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 08:28:39 +0530

Maybellene:

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..."

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:13:16 +0530

““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