Tainted

And then we proved ourselves
Better than our hearts
Fie upon them!
Erecting walls
To keep the good away from the bad

We mixed them together
And eked out
A civil society
And enough unrest
To engage us
Millenium after millenium

Transference

She stroked the photograph
Lying in her bed
Her love, transmitted
Through a two-dimensional surface
To a weary cheek in another continent

The Alcoholic's World

Who needs a sun
When you have
A bottle as a consort

It is night when she empties
And day when she greets
With luscious lips
And a full body

Emotional Aachaar

Where there is a television and a remote control in an Indian household, there is an audience transfixed on the great stories of our time – the Hindi television serials. My mother is no different, and with her visiting us at our American cable infested household, we were brought onboard to the mystical land too. From 8.30 in the night to 10.30 in the night for the past two months, Suhana and Naitik, Akshara and Shakti, Durjan Singh and Pratigya have flooded through the pixels of my television. I have the pairings wrong, but such is the overarching and confusing impact of these melodramas (which are anything but mellow), that there is no defense. This concept is not alien to me. I had explored this landscape a few years back when I suggested that Ekta Kapoor be made president. Some things have remained the same and some have changed in the past five years. Here’s my take on it.

Serial Titles
It has become an almost golden rule that a serial be named after a Hindi film song. ‘Tere Liye’, ‘Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai’, ‘Sasooral Genda Phool’ are examples. My simple question for those who bother to compose new songs as the title songs for these serials: Why?

Impoverished Nation?
You will never get the impression if you look at the women in the serial. They go to sleep dressed like they are going to a wedding. They show up in a wedding like they are royals about to donate alms to the poor. Who would have thought that TV actresses could lead the way in setting fashion trends?

Dropping eves
No serial would progress if someone was not eavesdropping. Almost every important discovery in every serial is made by the simple act of someone hiding behind the door and hearing a conversation between two people who clearly don’t know the concept of closed doors.

Mahila Mukti ya Mahila Shoshan
The more progressive India gets, the more regressive the serials get. In one of the serials (Pratigya), there is a message that runs at the bottom stating that the serial makers oppose any and all forms of atrocities against women. If you take your eyes off that and look up, you’ll see the women in the serial being treated as dirt.

Gujarati is the new Punjabi
As the default family in Hindi movies are Punjabis, so the default family in television serial is Gujarati. The serials are set in Baroda and Ahmedabad and characters with the surnames Shah and Patels abound. Oh, and there are the characters who have a “sa” tagged at the end as a mark of respect. I wish at least one character was named Hansa. Imagine “Hansasa”. Africans would have been proud.

Special Effects
No more camera panning through shots from the left, top, bottom, and right everytime a character has realized that his wife is cheating on him. The cameraman must be as thankful as the audience is, as the directors have decided that the only special effect worth continuing with is slow motion. I can see the point of that. Less work for the cameraman and more screen time consumed while doing nothing

Disappear, Reappear and Duplicates
The theme of people disappearing and reappearing is popular. Those presumed dead show up alive as someone else. There are those presumed alive who are actually duplicates of those now dead. A lot of energy is spent in trying to figure out if you are who you claim you are. The methods vary from a sophisticated DNA test to a crude questioning of old facts. Can’t accuse them of having a lack of drama.

Employment Discharge
The women never seem to work outside the house, the men disappear for hours but don’t seem to work much either. The palaces they live in seem to be sustained on a mixture of huge inheritance and oxygen. If a lawyer, as one of the characters is, can live in a house the size of the Aga Khan Palace, then he clearly must be the best of his kind.

My parents will head back to India soon and I will be left with the hard decision of whether to continue or not to continue with the Indian channels. Is a serial called ‘Kya Karen, Kya Na Karen’ being made somewhere?

Bulldozer

I watch
The slaughter of the moments
As the hand mercilessly
Ticks over
With unfailing regularity
Running over the hapless
Lines on the clock.
Barely will they rise
Before they get eclipsed again

Apotheosis

Did we ever give our Gods a choice?
Or were they elevated by force,
Once we removed
the deadweight of human frailty?

The Completion Conundrum

Off all the pits and falls
One endures
It is the snake at 98
that hits you the hardest

Miranda’s Right

The car screeched to a halt
Five feet too far
For the comfort of the law

The cop sauntered by
Aviator sunglasses firmly in place
Hands gently caressing the butt of a gun

"License and registration, Ma’am"
The polite inquiry shot through
The tainted windows of the old car

Miranda kept her gaze down firmly
Hoping to hide the betrayal of her pigments
Writ on her dark-brown, weathered, lonely face

It must be the distortions caused by the Phoenix heat
That sins multiply for the chosen few
And a right goes only thus far

Aur Yeh Lagaa Sixer!

The title notwithstanding, this is neither a post about cricket nor is it about pencils. It has been six years since I started this blog. I have been posting a celebratory note practically every year for the past two-three years on this day; mostly because it is a pleasant surprise. It is like a miracle - you might believe in them, but don't really expect one to happen for you.

This is also the chance I take to thank those who have stuck with me on the journey. Lately, the number is down to a trickle, sufficient to ensure that this isn't a monologue. Thank you for your support, feedback and criticism. I have also heard rumours of a great many silent readers visiting this space. If you are reading this, please accept a note of acknowledgment. It would be good to hear from you on occasion.

There is still wind in the sails. Onwards then!

Death By Batting

You don’t know what a sigh of relief is unless you have had one now that you have realized that the ongoing test match between India and Sri Lanka just ended. In five days of relentless onslaught by batsmen, only 17 wickets fell. Not a single session was dominated by the bowling side, though there was only a small point in the match where Sri Lanka could have gotten through to India, but then Tendulkar the immaculate accumulator stepped up to the plate. Cricinfo ran a good stats article today about the batting averages of Asian batsmen within and outside Asia. Not surprisingly, only Tendulkar has an average of 50 both inside and outside the sub-continent. Players like Jayawardene confirm their stature as subcontinental batting bullies. Jayawardene in a classic case. In this test match, he broke Don Bradman’s record for most number of centuries in a particular location. This was his 10th or 11th century at the SSC. Ask yourself: how valuable is this record if this is the regular fashion in which this pitch plays? In fact, Sri Lanka has a simple plan – win the toss, rack up a big score, and hope the score induces enough pressure that the team chasing cracks for them to win. This happened in the first test match, where Malinga and Murali (with Malinga in particular) exerted the pressure and got through to India. What is remarkable is that Sri Lanka seems to win the tosses with regularly frequency! Maybe Dhoni should skip batting practice and do some practice to ensure he calls the toss right :)

This match brought back memories of test matches in Sri Lanka in the early 90s. Sri Lanka consciously prepared home tracks with the objective of ‘not losing’. Winning would have been a bonus. Batsmen racked up huge scores at that time (and of course, India was on the receiving end on several occasions), including the highest test score of all time. But it made for terrible test cricket, with no hope of a result in sight. Sub-continental pitches are notorious for being batsmen-oriented, but statistics highlight the attitude of teams in play. Sri Lanka and matches played in Sri Lanka have the highest percentage in terms of number of draws for matches played.

Harsha Bhogle’s article today talks about how curators are burying bowlers with these kind of pitches. That is spot on. I’d like to add that they are burying the spectators and the game too. Test cricket has enough going for it to thrive, but you need to get the bowlers back in the equation. The ongoing matches in England are a case in point. Australia is due in India in October for two test matches. The Ashes hype aside, this particular match-up has been consistently produced good cricket for a few years now. I hope the pitches for these matches are sporting enough to have a chance for a result. That’s the least that can be done. And oh, no more India-Sri Lanka matches please!

Migrated Decade

It has been ten years to the day since I made my move from the Orient to the Occident. The day I would board my first international flight with one of my closest friends as we headed to the land of Uncle Sam under the guise of getting higher education. The day I would acquire my FOB (Fresh off the boat) status. (It never made sense to me, unless boat is a metaphorical representation for an airplane.) The day I would journey in the footsteps of other immigrants who left a known world to pursue an unknown dream. Leaving behind family and friends (yes, yes, a girlfriend too), my city, my country, my identity in pursuit of an unknown adventure, with a nebulous idea of what lay ahead. Ten years is perhaps a short time to call the adventure complete. Ten years is perhaps a long enough time to judge how the adventure is going.

From finishing my studies that I thought would be hard to finding a job that I thought would be easy, from getting married to the aforementioned girlfriend to being a father of a lovely little boy, from possessing unbridled curiosity to maturing – in age, looks and hopefully wisdom too, from sharing a love-hate relationship with my country to sharing a love-hate relationship with this country, from vacillating between the need to go back to the need to stay here, from the successful exploration of one’s abilities to the lonesome discovery of one’s inadequacies, from pursuing old passions to exploring new ones, from slowly shying away from people I was close to only to discover some others that I might never part away from, from finding a comfort point in life only to determine that you can never really get comfortable, the last decade has been a lifetime within a lifetime.

The tale of immigrants is so similar to others and in its minutiae, so different as well. We fly out of our homes with two bags of belongings, and two decades of experiences. The destiny we shape is often uncontrollable even though we may think we are our own masters, but we forge a new sense of identity each day of our passing lives in a foreign land. Perhaps the new identity entails always treating yourself as a displaced entity in a foreign world, or perhaps it sees itself as expanding our horizons in a global village. Decade after decade goes, and just like the start of the previous one, I wouldn’t hazard an accurate guess on how the next one will go. For the moment though, I will celebrate ten years gone by, a life not derailed, an adventure developing as we speak, a story not yet complete.

Slumber

The television and the dragonfly
Joust through the night
The dragonfly: with a constant hum
The television: with constant light

The arbitrator sat through all of this
Eyelids closed, breath heavy
As the remote lay in his right hand
With a finger on ‘Mute’

Beacon of Liberty

Captured this photograph from the Staten Island Ferry last weekend. Got lucky with the time of the evening. I thought I might share this here since it has been a while since I have uploaded any pictures.

Tourist

I was in New York City in the recent past. Walking on foot like a dutiful tourist, to places I was told are the heart of the place. I walked around looking not at the sights with which I was already familiar. I walked around looking at the hands and feet and visages inhabiting the place. Walking around in seemingly Brownian motion, each one of those pairs of hands and feet were guided by a pair of eyes to a fixed location. It struck me then that I like cities with histories. Not recent settlements like Seattle, which are a century old, but places where generations have trodden and made the place their own. A city is a new shiny firmament built on ruins. A city is a ruin waiting to give way to a new path. The rubble is lost, but the myths are never buried. They are carried through across generations. The stones and pathways and the buildings each guide its latest inhabitant to live within this newly created environment. Without the knowledge of its denizens, it creeps into their language and lifestyle and accidents and successes and instills a sense of pride as a long lasting scar. I did not see New York City the way the brochures intended me to. I saw it spread thin and luminous and lonely, on those faces, carried by a pair of hands and feet to their destinations.

Stasis

The tap was dripping water with the comprehension of one who possesses a sense of rhythm. The laya was vilambit, Arun would have said. Arun knew all about rhythms. Arun knew a lot about everything. Arun would have surely said that, and much more. But Arun hadn’t said anything for the past year, thought Vishruti, sitting crouched at the other end of the bathtub, watching the tap release water with unerring accuracy. Tulips smiled at her, mockingly, through the photo frame across the wall. Her neatly stacked array of shampoos, promising her vibrant, bouncy, radiant hair teased her from their vantage point on the edge of the bathtub. Her hair, tousled, tangled, fell over her shoulder and covered her right hand. Her eyes, swollen, empty, soulless, stared into the vast emptiness in front of her. The answering machine was pretending to be her ears, taking in the pleas of her parents to call back, trying their perfunctory daily call in the hope that she would pick it up. They were worried, especially today. A year since Arun’s death. A year since a promise of a lifetime together was broken. All that was left behind was a life derailed, and a woman, trapped in the amber of an unfulfilled pledge. “Is there such a thing as too much love?”, she wondered, catching a glimpse of herself as she lowered the shiny new blade to her wrist.

Father's Day

I saw you tiptoeing around the house with a glint in your eye. Was it for the mischief you have done or intend to do? I would never know. I saw the edges of your lips curl into a satisfying smile. Was it from something that made you happy or some joy you are going to bring about? I could never guess. To decipher it would require me to make an objective observation. From the moment you opened your eyes to every occasion you call me “Pappa” in those dulcet tones, you have robbed me of any objectivity I could possess.

Here I am: your old man. Brown-eyed, fair-skinned, receding hair, bespectacled, chastened.
Here you are: my son. Brown-eyed, fair-skinned, silky hair, wobbly, animated.

We meet in the middle: two worlds residing under the same roof, two lives colliding and intertwining in a curious mix of head and heart, genes and emotions, love and admiration.

You are an eighteen month young boy. Young enough to wear your emotions on your sleeve, with not a deception in sight, not a shred of malice, not a bias in place. Young enough to laugh with your mouth wide open with the sparkle of teeth matching the unbounded sounds of rapturous merriment. Young enough to dance with unbridled joy at a song, admiring the strains of melody as they fill the space around you.

You have grown eighteen months old now. Old enough to look straight into my eyes and speak a thousand words without a sound. Old enough to invent new games and draft people into playing them. Old enough to have a curiosity that questions the humdrum existence of everyone and everything. Old enough to let me have the pleasure of teaching you something. Everything.

I have grown eighteen months wiser now. Wise enough to wake up each morning with the knowledge that the best lessons in life come with responsibility. Wise enough to know that a study in flailing arms can teach you all about surviving. Wise enough to laugh and worry to my heart’s content about the smallest and biggest things related to you.

I have grown several years younger too. Young enough to learn a new language that you put together. Young enough to let go, even for moments, of my biases and inhibitions. Young enough to be a boy, even if the slight traces of grey in my hair dictate otherwise. Young enough to know what it feels like to be a child. Young enough, to learn.

So, there we are; parent and child, guide and student, brothers in arms, rogues in merriment, father and son. The other day, I saw you trying to slide your foot into my shoe. I am sure you weren’t looking for symbolism like your old man was. I am sure you weren’t trying to bridge the gap between our worlds, trying to see what it would be like to be me.

I am sure you didn’t see me playing with your shoes either. Happy Father’s Day, my son.

Customer Service

Dear Sir,

We apologize profusely
But the volcano obtusely

Kept throwing up ash
Preventing our mad dash

Your order is on hold
And can’t be foretold

How long it will take
So for your sake

Please refer to this manual
Very descriptive, very visual

Refer to page thirty-nine
“The use of a hammer to break a spine”

Your ordered assassin is running late
But if you absolutely cannot wait

We hope to help you proceed ahead
Anything to make sure your spouse is dead.

Yours sincerely,
Hitmen Inc.

Synopsis

Lived, Loved, Lost, Lived, Loved
Is it your life's story?
A little rearrangement
And it well could be.

Double Negative

She was called a Rose
Once. In Error.

When the note passed
In Chemistry class
Reached the wrong Shruti

She smiled through her braces
Surprisingly unsurprised
And looked over
To thank her admirer

Justice on earth
Manifested itself
As she glanced
Through her heavy set glasses
At the wrong Vinay.

Burn After Reading

Four little flickers were seen in a distance. They were the embers of a dying night. They were like the first sparks of fire that would turn on the cauldron that was the sun. They were four little glimmers suspended in mid-air, forming an arc, as they travelled in a parabolic motion. The flickers weren’t without company. They had owners. The banished gathered around in the dying cold waving those flickers. Was that a sign of protest or a sign of surrender? Were they mourning their loss of right to burn away where they wanted, when they wanted or was that a sign of defiance? The faceless vigilantes were burning their lungs and lighting up the universe. Smoke hung around them with muted admiration. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the congregation came to an end. The lights went out, one after another. Dawn engulfed them, and robbed them of their masks. Heads hung in shame (or thought), a wry grin to boot, and a throaty cough to enunciate, the newspaper men headed back to their truck. The world was going up in flames. At least their fire has been put out.