M

My dream analyzer,
My word beader,
You shined like a thousand lambent moons and
Glowed my pupils into oblivion.
How do I even begin to console you,
My calm one,
When all I do is get angrier!

42?

It was recently brought to my attention that identity and questions of the like "Who am I and the meaning of it all?" hold a special place amongst existential conundrums. Not that prior to now I could not have fathomed most of the humanity being tortured by this elusive, mystical riddle. I am and have been completely aware that this is a very prevalent and legitimate question people ask themselves, probably with more frequency than highway travelers ask for restroom directions from 7-Eleven employees. Even the Paranoid Android has devoted much maniacal moroseness to the subjects of tantamount enigma. This time, though, it encompassed an allusion to a dear friend which led me to believe that I must be nuts to have gone so long without falling prey to my own bitch of a brain's manipulations regarding the meaning of it all.  This could be because I stopped listening to that little inside voice long back. (Now that I think of it, it explains a lot more). So I decided to pay my dues. 

Beyond the obvious address of name that my parents gave me, I have been called many other things. Some good, some bad, sometimes both by the same people (One person is doing that right now a few miles away. Yes, I know. You, be very afraid of the memory of my big eyes and soon-too-follow cold shoulder). Going further though, who?what?where? transcended from midnight gossip sessions to an uncomfortable, as-per-convenience self-interrogation. While I have mostly thought of myself as just a bona fide anxious coffee-drinker and a pure carnivore (till recently, when I decided to give vegetarianism a go), I have in the past year also been labelled cow-belt wandering Hindi speaker, a psycho, way-too-free a spirit, yadda yadda yadda. So I summarized the answers to some aforementioned FAQs to:

• Hindi
• Hindu
• Punjabi/Garhwali
• New Delhi, India (I like writing answers in points just like Mrs. George taught us)

THIS, apparently, is supposed to define me now. WTF!(Mrs. George said this was a bad thing to say). My dad and sister talk to each other in FRENCH. Frikkin French (Mrs. George is very pissed now). 

Ma has to coerce me to shower early on festivals (Sarees, I wear on my own to look pretty). I listen to her and do all of it now just because it is easier than arguing against the ritualistic bunkum. I have spent good six years of my precious teenage arguing, when I could have learned more profanities and faster. It was exhausting. And still my mom mutters the Gayatri Mantra under her breath while cooking. Apparently small intestines have an ability to digest blessings as well (okay, I agree, that is just sweet of her). 

And don't even get me started on that half-n-half thing that I am. Don't know any of the languages. Don't know one's culture and don't care for the other's. Even the Hindi-speaker labeler speaks better Punjabi than I do while teasing me for all that I am (or am supposedly defined by). I need my Garhwali Ma to interpret things while conversing with my Punjabi grandmother. Ain't that sad? 

New Delhi? Dilli. Dilli of big roads and manicured lawns, of Metro-rides and crazy traffic, of sweltering heat and freezing cold. I love Dilli for all that. But, I love it most for the food. But then, any good food would make me a turncoat and change loyalties. I do not even need 30 pieces of silver. (I wish food was a nation right now). Anyway, no one outside India is ever particularly interested in knowing what part I am from. Just India suffices. Always. Errr. Almost always.Yeah, I do meet a couple of people here and there who ask "Are you from Gujarat?" or "Do you speak Hindi or Tamil?". This is more out of equating all Indians to that one you know better, just like every time I meet someone from Iran I go "Oh, I have a Persian friend. She runs Marathons. You do too?". You get the drift?

So while this turned out to be a good exercise in moot-point making, I remain as blithely cavalier about my non-existent identity as always. I have been very mutable and will keep evolving, just like I hear the apes did. I can be yours. I can be you. But, I speak only in capacity. In reality, I would neither be of you nor you. I would rather be nothing.

I feel stupid and contagious

Just discovered a hauntingly beautiful version of  "Smells like Teen Spirit" by Scala and Kolacny Brothers choir.

http://www.scalachoir.com/en/music/videos/smellsliketeenspirit.htm

Not at all Nirvana-ish, but I guess Cobain would still approve.

Cold California Day In/Out

Coffee beans under the table-top (Bet they weren't fair-trade!)

Oh Suchi you are such an adorably lost kid, I want to take you home. Wait! I HAVE done that :) See you again, very soon. 

Bringing me up!

Him and I,

Of same blood and flesh

And cloned dimpled chins.

My own believer, with a twisted arm,

Who silently bade me farewell  

To cynicism.

Out of air

We told each other stories 

Closer with every word and every other period

Till we were breathing into the others' nostrils

With uncomfortable intimacy,

Of you and her

And him and me.

Listened too much

Eavesdropped a little

That we sit now gasping

Breathless.

I flip over to get my coffee

And you go back to your ideation. 

Clap!

So my polygamy evangelizing, compulsively flirtatious, free-for-all gyaan rendering close friend SRB is finally getting hitched. His response to my zillion questions about it: "Saand bandh raha hai". You think you are funny, Dude? Ha, in your face. Advice from Mama:

• Do not get any 4/5/7 year itch
• STOP talking about polygamy becoming the norm, especially with wifey around 
• Stop acting like you are too cool for marriage (We all know how much you want to hold on to her pallu/halter top and follow her around.)
• Do not follow any of your own relationship advice
• Stick with being an MBA and do not transgress onto the paths of becoming a spiritual guru (No matter how much more money it may get you.)

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Me

P.S. Congratulations and a BIG hug. And more advice when I remember more.

Insomnias

"When I am with you, we stay up all night
 When you are gone, I can't get to sleep!
 Praise God for these two insomnias
 And the difference between them."


(Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī as translated by Coleman Barks)

Another self-portrait experiment!

First time loose painting/portrait experiment. I am happy with the result :)

P.S.- I am not a narc, just need a new model with some time and proclivity to not get pissed if the picture didn't look like him/her. AM, listening?

11/01 8:36 am Pacific Time

चाह से जेब अभी भी उतनी ही भरी है जितनी सालों पहले थी.
निराशाओं से खेलते-खेलते हाथ इतना सूज गया है कि जेब में घुसता ही नहीं है.

Thank you DCE

For:

• preparing me for the worst as life is only easier than it ever was there
• convincing me that smoking/drinking/smoking up are not defining characteristics of people
• demonstrating that political correctness can go fuck itself in the ass
• being utterly sexist and treating women as second rate citizens 
• making me deal with government officers, horny men and condescending professors. Nothing else could have inculcated more patience in me.
• introducing me to the most amazing and the most unbearable people, all in one place
• being so very pretty during the monsoons
• fantastic canteen bhaiyyas and their custom prepared coffees
• denying us the most innocent of pleasures like climbing on to the terraces of the hostels
• being a big name in the education market. It helped for a little while.

Disclaimer: Most of the list is based on my own experience that may or may not be reflected in that of other students, although a lot of women would concur with it. The list may expand as and when I remember more, or bother to do so. 

Unwind

The day of a million butterflies

She becomes the same quiet, lost kid of 7 years. Joy merges with hollowness merges with sadness. The others are still new here. She wanders away from the sunny terrace into the cafe listening to amateurish thumping on the drums and desperate blowing of the flute. Omnipresence of musical instruments, great food and the most interesting people in cafes is most commonplace here. She had smoked with a British tantrik, played backgammon with a Swede and beaten him to win cheese-cakes, and learnt to knit from a French dreadlocked hippie girl over a plate of Rosti. On this day though, she is just looking at a book shelf where travelers picked a book from, and kept the one they just finished reading for others. 

Ah, Marcovaldo! Calvino's Marcovaldo! So elusive, so difficult to find a copy of in Delhi. She could never afford expensive fancy shmancy book-store books. Daryaganj patli gali Sunday book market was for her. Unaccounted running away to the hills without informing parents didn't help with the finances either. So, she feels the knot of desire in her heart. It is a used copy. She loves used copies with the yellowed pages turned on edges by previous readers. If one's lucky, they sometimes even leave tiny notes between pages. Alas, she does not have a book to keep back on the shelf. She's still reading the one she has in her jhola. Now the knot of guilt in the stomach. Book-readers' ethics are the only ones one must care for. But what is it about desire that makes one do things that one understands to be, if not wrong, then entirely not right either. She picks it up, carries it to the terrace and starts reading, sipping her ginger-lemon-honey with absolute nonchalance. The others want to leave now to trek to another cafe higher up on the mountain. The one you need to cross a waterfall to reach. She refuses to part with the book. She is, after all, the same 7 year old who would open up peanut packets to read if she could not find a book in immediate vicinity. It is also her father's favorite story to tell about her. Someone tells her it is alright to keep it for now. And she believes what she wants to and keeps her Marcovaldo in the jhola. 

{The hills: "It's been four and a half years since she was here last. She is indebted but hasn't returned.  She has gone further away to a different country, a different continent. Maybe next time she comes running to the hills, she'd put a book back in the shelf. Maybe her Kafka she carries everywhere. Kafka, she carried even that day."}

Pilgrimage

Credit for the last two words: James Douglas Morrison

Hesse ceiling of the shack

Gypsy King

Nightmare Series- Part 1

They say it means something. What, I don't know yet.

Lazy afternoon

He picks white dog-hair up from her black, crumpled dress and places it strand-by-strand on her bare arm, staring as it stands against her transparent skin showing off an ugly maze of blue-green veins. She concentrates on cross-hairs formed by the creases on his forehead and tries to calibrate her thoughts to his. Hours of dog-hair and thoughts later, nothing is left, and exhausted, they wait to be shredded into wisps of nothingness too, in the evening sun. 

You've come a long way, Baby!

He’s the wittiest man I know. He’s also the man I love the most. Against all hopes and wishes, I didn’t inherit his sense of funny. Instead genetic mutation ensured bounteous endowment of a sense of horror. Devoid of jocular of the “nava rasas” and inflicting the tragic one aplenty on myself, I don’t believe Bharata Muni would have been very proud of me. Fortunately for me, my dad is. Proud of me, and unembarrassed, unapologetic about my supposed sensitivity (that dismays my mom beyond comprehension) as he teases me to cry in return of an “atthanni” and has been doing it since I was, probably, ten. For the uninitiated, atthani/50 paisa is 1.14 cents in today’s value. Rate of devaluation notwithstanding, the price tag on the entertainment my weeping provides has been pretty constant. And THAT is what happens if no one in your family has ever even skimmed through an economics book, or if you shed tears and snot at the mere drop of the hat.
Hapless kids and absurd family fetishes aside, I am not in accord with extra-sensitive (euphemism for a crabby crybaby) bullcrap about me. I just can’t control my tears when I want to kill someone. No, no imminent psychopathy on the cards.
Mom wanted to buy me a t-shirt saying “I scare my own family”, except, I refuse to validate it. After all, I get my individualistic, independent streak from her, only it’s magnified a million times. What streak, you say? Now, almost everyone I know has some sort of a unique aberration- a birth-mark, an injury scar, something that is just their own. I have nothing; not a blemish, no scars, no freckles, not even a frikking big enough mole. So the “tiny” anomaly that had to be there, by the law of averages, turned up in my head. Twisted apperception and a persistent alexithymia. More twisted than the dreadlocks I wanted at the age of 19 and more persistent than my ability to find furniture in the dark using my pinky toe. It could also explain why I could not learn a new language while everyone in my family knows at least three. Sigh!! Compulsive nail-biting offers only temporary respite! Ego, Eros, assholes for boyfriends, Barbie-less childhood, angels for boyfriends, greatest friends ever, affinity to color, bitches I met, phobia of grey skies? Blame whatever. I do.

Mi Casa Es Su Casa?

I take your Gods 

And give you my Demons.

I always maintained it was a bad bargain.

It was started with a different state of mind and ended at a different one, and in came the question mark. O darned nefarious violets and virtuous scarlets!

Of Red Bindi And Kohled Eyes

Of smells of saunf and home

Of Ma

Reference Pictures

Only if I could draw her as pretty as she really is.

Of Dad

एड़ी से जुड़ी थी उसके

चार साल में समझ ना पाई थी |

सांझ के धुंधलके में

घसीटती जाती, संभल न पाई थी |

हल्की सी थी चढ़ बैठी काँधे पर

अपनी ही परछाई से डर कर |

इस बार जुड़ के पिता से

और उनकी परछाई से |

Yay for new stuff!

Oh! How I hate taking thou out of pretty packaging.

Oh! How I hate not getting my hands dirty by procrastinating.

P.S. New pictures of previous work with a better camera.

Non-painting Series-1

Refraining from calling it a painting. A 10-minute watercolor sketch it is.

I pine for thee. Hence, I paint thee!

Missing home is usually ensued by looking at photographs taken by friends or me of signature Delhi-ness. This is based loosely on a picture, taken by a dear friend Ankit, in Mehrauli Archaeological Park.

Tinkerbell size me!

I put myself in a washer and tumble dryer

On high heat and become a tenth of my size.

Wrung out and wrinkled 

I beseech them to carry me in their pockets one-by-one to you.

I ask one to dust me a little 

And iron my creases out before you take me and stretch me out again.

Alas, I am parched and flattened

As I lie on his table.

My planar existence is an oddity 

In your world of multiple dimensions. 

I hope he crumples me in a ball and

Not fold me with clean lines or leave me there with the window open.

P.S.- Cold War Kids song may have been in my head or maybe Calvin. Who knows?

The Clap Complex

He kept a strand of her hair

Wrapped around the refill of a ball-point.

They met as children with an air of adult sang froid.

Her hair fell below her hip then.

Times were simpler.

He liked to be her voice of reason.

She called him a bullshitter rubbing her skinned knees.

"Don't get convoluted.

Act selfish."

Did he think he was a good teacher?

He failed that course terribly himself.

A decade of acquaintance, love, acquaintance again later

Simpler times are an apparition.

When was he born, again?

She is amused that she still does not know.

They are adults with an air of childlike smugness now.

Her hair is above her shoulders

And she has her strand back.

Inters(j)ections

Walking across a street in Delhi is an ordeal. Bonne chance if you appear on the other side alive. People give you dirty stares if you land in front of their car and they have to stop for you, almost like they are doing you a favor. And you give a dirty stare back. In this country, on the other hand, people stop, wait for you to cross the road, and sometimes even pass on a smile. Freaky, eh? Funnily enough, I hate crossing roads here. It seems equivalent to performing for an audience who stands at the traffic signal, looking through the windscreens like you are on the television, measuring you up and waiting for that trip and fall. Uber entertaining an act, if I may say so myself. Like Jo from Little Women, I never know what to do with my limbs either, or even my face. Do you walk slow, fast, look down, look unaware?

In my city, people have no time for any of that. They jostle on their way to work or back or just anywhere. Everyone is more concerned about whether they are are going to be late for their appointments, if the other car is going to manage to swerve and miss the red light while they remain stuck in the synchronized pattern henceforth, or if the kids would still be awake by the time they do reach home. I know that a moment after I get the dirty stare from the unfortunate person who had to stop his car for me to cross the road, he will forget me. He does not give me more thought than he would to paramecium. And THAT is the most comforting thing about the dizziness-inducing, disillusion-fostering crowds of "Dilli", where everybody is a nobody and anonymity is so under-rated.  I miss it.

Time zones!

Detail

Broken Color

We run into each other
Yellow ochre and ultramarine on a watery palette.
Diffident of nefarious violets and virtuous scarlets
In maelstroms of sable and camel and fingers and gravity
And all we make is a dirty green.

Happy summer everyone!

Still getting used to the feel of brushes and paper (which isn't very good for water colors and gets crinkled) and color on fingers and everywhere else, and I need to learn to take photographs. At least it feels like home now. Just an attempt at killing the blues after work.


P.S. A special thanks to the person who sent me a real set of pro-colors when all I could find were kiddie colors in this tiny town. AND told me to get out of the bluesy mode. 

Difficult Woman

She is 99 years old.
So old and wrinkled and stretchy, you could fold her into a quarter of her size
And push her right through the hole in her earlobe.
She does not know her birthdate, because if she did she would have remembered.
Yet she knows she is 99.

Cheated out of the luxury
Of a banal life in a tough country, and a tough century.
Struggling against a freedom struggle to keep her man
How wrong did she feel?
He was kind, just loved his land a little too much.
Seemingly anachronistic in the era gone by,
How wronged did she feel?

Deracinated from the western homegrounds,
In a city of immigrants imbued with culture and politics,
Vestige of vulnerability was time-consuming.
She had kids to feed after all.

So she still wakes up at 4 in the morn
To read her epics.
She has documented the going away of offsprings and associates.
She did not, simply because she stayed.
They say she does not yield.
Aye, she's a tough one.
She was not privileged enough
To not be one.

Holding the brush for the first time in about 12 years. Academics pushed everything behind, like is true for almost everyone I know. 

Altered Egos

Bored to the bone! What was he thinking getting us here? I would have said ambition but he probably did not  remember the reason himself, and who was I to assume. He needed directions even to his own apartment sometimes. But 10 or 15 girls from an engineering college hostel for a FOOTBALL team. Seriously? "Sikri yaar, thudde maar rahi hai"- he said to me. She looked at me, made a face. WAY TOO MANY RULES!! In midst of the chaos (or strategy, who knows?) we were left behind. Or we may have drifted towards the boundary on our own. Next best thing we come up with? Run around the frikkin field. I HATE running. She loves it though. Poor Whappy/coach- "Yaar, khel lo na". Naahhh.. Sighted: cute guy running in the opposite direction. That's new. Good looking guys in our college were so fresh-off-the-cow-ribeye-rare. We enabled each other. But, we were subjected to whistling and hooting around the boys' hostel too. I don't think I would have ever indulged in Adam-teasing with anyone else. Second guy of the evening annoyed with us.

Time lapse start. Exams. Running away on birthdays. Inebriation. Silliness. Warden scoldings. Job-interviews. Break-ups. Last sutta in her balcony together. Jobs. Make-ups. Masters. Convergence from the two ends of a continent. Time lapse stop.

It is a small quiet studio apartment in the middle of a very noisy city. She hasn't spoken a word since yesterday making it even quieter. Then, we have never needed those ostentatious buggers between us anyway. But, she's all grown up now, or at least pretends to be. She tries to shake me into adulthood too. FU@#. No. No. No. "You have to get serious and leave the crazy bone aside"- she says. Scolding for me and another one-seventh over the email to quit our vice. Intervention planning with the other how-ever-many-sevenths. Who gets that concerned? She does. She knows more about me than anyone else. She probably knows me better than anyone else too. Do I get her as well? Bertolucci's Isabelle would have concurred: "Siamese twins joined at the head".

Erstwhile love!!

Dear Strong Belief,

I have been thinking about us for sometime now. We've been together since I can remember. But, this is not working out anymore. I feel tired.

Association with you only brought me trouble. With family, teachers, opinionated strangers, God. I still could not resist you ever. I hate to let you go. But, I can't be a believer anymore. I don't mean to say that I'd be a non-believer because it is as exasperating as you. 

I met Ambiguity sometime back. I thought I should let you know before you hear from someone else. We don't get each other much. Yet. But, it's an easier relationship. Lesser emotion, more stability. I hope you would understand. 

Love,

G.

Water - thicker than Blood?

Ismail Serageldin, in 1995, said – “the wars of the next century will be about water”.

Six billion strong world with a perpetually growing demand for water, involved inequities, emergence of more powerful nations, Laissez-faire capitalistic markets, bigger stock of armaments; do not a pretty picture they paint. Add to that a bit of Climate Change and a dash of low adaptability and Voila! - Recipe for “Water Wars”. A bulk of literature describes water as a cause of severe political tension and armed wars between states, extrapolating the same into frequent future events. Except, verisimilitude of water wars may only be a myth subscribed to by fatalistic ecological advocates, probably because that seems to be the only way general populace would care.

Wars have several reasons and objectives. Water may act as a tool or a target but is seldom a primary cause for a transboundary war. Not to say that water (or the lack of it) does not trigger any violence at all. It has, and can cause intense political instability and acute violence at sub-national level. Political instability in Bangladesh, for example, has been ascribed to environmental degradation caused by diversion of the Ganges waters by India. Ironically, environmental refugees from Bangladesh also found refuge in the same liable state. The earliest recorded inter-state water conflict known is the dispute over exploitation of Tigris boundary channels between Lagash andUmma in 2500 BCE. Hence, the last and only water war happened about 4500 years ago. On the other hand, 3600 treaties for cooperation on international water have been signed historically. So, the plausibility of future water wars cannot be projected from a non-existent history. What other factors can dictate this likelihood?

Strategically, an upstream riparian has no reason to wage war.  Downstream riparian state, to launch an armed offence, would have to be a stronger state. Even then, the upstream state has an advantage as it can antagonize the downstream state by diminishing quantity/quality of its outflow. Moreover, one of the states has to be a non-democracy as democracies do not go to war against each other, thus limiting the sites for the so-called international water wars. Economically speaking, full-scale warfare is tremendously expensive. As noted by an Israeli  Defense Forces analyst (upon being asked if water was accounted for while planning Lebanon’s invasion) for the price of one week’s fighting, five desalination plants can be built. Hence, water wars are neither strategically logical, hydrographically effective, nor economically feasible. Water has in fact, contrary to common perceptions, been a binding factor between otherwise hostile states. Indus Water Treaty has survived 3 wars between India and Pakistan; Iraq gave Kuwait water “in brotherhood” without compensation; and in one of the more interesting agreements between Iran and erstwhile USSR, exists a clause for cooperation on indentifying corpses found in shared waters. Water dispute resolution, as non-dramatic as it seems, will continue to be our best answer.