The Cream of Society

The earth has been rotating ceaselessly. It has also been hurtling through space, escaping and yet drawn in by the sun, moving at over a thousand miles an hour. Sitting at our desks, on the topsoil, we have been relatively still, and our cells have oxidized a little more, ageing as we breathe.

I'm listening to Carnatic music. I wonder how many who pause in their routines wish they could appreciate it, know its mathematics, at least to shake their heads and pat their laps at a kacheri.

I remember an evening in Bombay two years ago, on Marine Drive. Couples had gathered by the sea, innumerable, all the way from Chowpatty's gleam of sand in the purpleness to Nariman Point's lighted windows, holding hands in the one place where Bombay allows you to be. And the noxious waters of the sea were before me, splashing and retreating, music for their warm, whispery trysts.

Andy, ~M and I were sitting there, three gentlemen on a Sunday evening. We'd watched a play, a montage of narratives and tableaus drawn from Wallace Stevens's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, and Andy was enraptured when a bird-like flute was woven into a sequence of dark, shifting, stage-movements, sa-ri-ga-ri-ga-ri-sa, sa-ri-ga-ri-ga-ri-sa, sa-ri-ga-ri-ga-ri-sa...

And so the conversation after the play turned to music. And Andy proceeded to sing Thyagaraja's Endaro Mahaanubhavulu. I might have heard the song somewhere before, but by the time I was in my teens I'd cynically dismissed most devotional songs I 'd come across as scatty arrays of 'I salute X and I salute Y and Z too and I salute...'.

Now Andy had an interesting interpretation while he translated the lyrics, and it's something that I took a liking to and would like to build on. When Thyagaraja begins with a flourish of vandanamus (salutations), perhaps folding his hands to the people in court- all lined up in gold, the who's who, the men who decide, the best and most majestic, the page 3, the product-endorsers- he's actually being sarky. They would in all probability have assumed, picking their teeth, that they were the mahaanubhaavulu (great people) starring in the show. No, my glittering brothers, millions have preceded you, among them those who sought and shared and left behind libraries of work for others to explore, students and masters of the craft I'm learning, whom I humbly acknowledge now. What is an army of thousands , a treasury of millions and more, if you do not care for the nuances of a raga, for perfection of rhythm, intricacy of expression? What is the gilt-edged life worth, if you do not have the heart of a lotus, and kindness and wisdom? What’s a world cup that brings in record revenue if you're blind to the immense grace of well-played cover drives, the loops and drifting dips of a pure, slow left-arm spinner? That is paramaananda, those are the true mahaanubhaavulu.

And while I'm listening to M.S Subbalakshmi's rendition, a voice paid to chime with excitement pops up: 'Congratulations! You have won two free ipod nanos...' I frantically look for the pop-up to close it, cut it off, but it prevails. It's from the website that allows me to play the song in streaming, and is a sponsor's noise.

Software at a Streetlight

A generation of good boys worked as engineers for public sectors, churning out axles, motors and telephones. Now their children, without the bell-bottoms, are devoting themselves to debugging code for American clients.

Indian programmers might end up in project management within about ten years of going past that toll-booth, the engineering college. You're not a programmer for ever; it's just the bramhachari stage. The more meta your work, the further it is from actual work, the whiter your collar. And if you're not a genuine geek, you might look for shortcuts and return from a B-school to evade programming. I'm a business analyst in a software company. My work is about work- place that in square brackets and raise it to three. I've always wondered what the point is.

Programmers in the U.S are usually older. I work with two: one's forty-something, another's sixty-something. They like programming. And- contrary to the Indian perception that Americans aren't good at analytics- they're very good at it. They like to sit back, look at their work, and beam like bakers high on fresh bread.

Programmers who love their jobs are interesting people. Zed, for instance- the fortyish chap- is a Star Wars devotee. And that's how I get my work done. I patiently gape with wide eyes and raised eyebrows when he crosses light-beam-swords and tells me how Yoda says this and Jedi Master does that. He bellows in his cubicle, a rusky larynx ripping the skies, prophesying doom. I'm not particularly moved- so much dishoom-dishoom- but if I listen long enough he'll work on what I need him to, and come up with something slick in half a day, so I can say in my next conference call that the project's on track, without swallowing. Zed is also addicted to eating ice-cubes.

Jose, ("HO-say") sixty-plus, is half-man, half-unfightable-bull, and the only photograph of his I've seen had him holding up a martyred marlin as large as me on a yacht. He's Venezuelan and is baiting trout as I type. Talks like an iron beam. I have to weigh each word when I call him up and ask for some tweaking of code: "Now first, Kaushik young man," his voice says. "Let's put this down so e-ver-y-bod-y is clear. Okay. Now. V-e-r-y carefully. Are we talking about inbound. Or outbound. Or both?" I feel like a boy in the headmaster's room.

One thing I've learned is that when you're working on software projects and don't know a thing about software, you have to come up with all sorts of contorted devices just to stay afloat. With Jose, we hit a dead end yesterday. No Way he'd agree for one more interface. And he can say so- because he's the only chap who knows what he's doing. So we sat grumpily. Then my boss had one aerated buster of an idea- appeal to his manhood.

We called him up and did that. "Now Jose, that was just something we mentioned in passing. I think we're stuck- and we'll just tell the Channels Team that we can't do it. It certainly looks impossible for you to program."

Ho gaya! Aaiythu guru! Jose looked it up on his own, without telling us, and came up with a smart interface that blends six kinds of data into a single, finger-snapping click. Just like that. Extra-curricular activity.

The two programmers also turn into home theatre systems from time to time. "Like you just import it in the database, and Pppthhhlllfffff it gets sorted just like you want it...yeah" "The program doesn't mind if you use integers. But you can't have duplicate- it'll just go Aeeeennk and laugh at you...yeah".

Zed wears a crumpled collared tee over a crumpled collarless tee. And he sits there like that in his cubicle, stubbled and balding, grinding ice-cubes in his mouth, with an egg-shaped head that glints in the mid-day sun. A sketch-poster of Yoda, flaring ears and all, is right beside him. "Go Yoda! Go Yoda!" is his hand-scribbled caption.

Another thing about software- apart from gentlemen as these- is that it's about detail. You can't tell a program to Just Do It. Remember, it all reduces to circuitry and signals. One step before that is an army of zeroes and ones, low voltage and high voltage. Everything, even the President's name and what we do with it, is reduced to that.

Take this teacup. Drink. How facile! But explain that to a circuit in a box. What's a teacup? What is drinking? So you teach it what a teacup is. Then you teach it to see. Then to find an object. Then to connect The Teacup with what it knows of A Teacup. No assumptions are possible. Every single detail is a must.

The mind crackles with code when we open windows, comb our hair, hesitate at gates. And in some of my daily missions- like foraging for a lone sock's partner, always bloody missing when I'm late- I probably do millions of things without knowing it: signals, encryption, algorithms boarded like trains; if, then, seek, erase, action, no, panic, Ah! phew! found; wear, scoot...

It's not that we can replace the mind with the artificial. But software gives a fellow some idea of how much detail there is in common events in our world; in how the baby's got its nose, in the branching of stems, the mating of turtles; in the cat's recognition of your face and its decision to ignore you today.

Tongues, Thresholds, Trees

There is the familiar, which can stifle you, and the unfamiliar, which can confound you. And between them is this threshold of wavering, charmed recognition. A foreign language brings that up so well.

My own language- as I speak it at home- brings to me all the slimy tentacles of subscribing to a setup. Kannada at home was only for the day-to-day; you knew the names of vegetables and temple-flowers and the word for 'mattress'. I couldn't say 'slimy tentacles', even if I knew the words; it's easier for me to say, "the fan's not working". But in English, not because it's a better language but simply because it's different, one could think differently.

Spanish is all around me here in San Francisco. I murmur Don Pablo:

Oh invádeme con tu boca abrasadora,
Indágame, si quieres, con tus ojos nocturnos

(Oh, invade me with your scalding mouth,
Peer into me, if you wish, with your nocturnal eyes)

It would be awkward to say this in my own language. I'd see my mother's meek and worried face and my father's tongue tasting bile around his canines. I suppose we all think of a scalding mouth, and some of us, like Neruda, can say it as we are- and others must turn to the foreign.

(Aside: This particular sonnet of Neruda's, though, is not so much about the scalding mouth, but that even that, all of desire and red-pepper-lust, even the woman's noctunal eyes, can be kept aside for the music and form of the crafted word, the name of the woman as a little crucible of all of the world's beauty: 'Matilde')

The maples are bare, wearing brown spiked seeds, elegant and mysterious, like quiet gypsies standing by themselves, waiting for April. The oaks too are bare; I see them, great and old and unfamiliar and yet known from the words of dead writers, branching before me like a monster's scream.

But one must return to Banyan trees and Neem, to one's own personal epics.

Voices in the Water

What does it mean, to have a voice? If only one lived in slower times: with lambs on meadows, buffaloes to race on, temple-bells to ring. There is no song now. Only a tree outside the window, a world in a single view. The lines that are living are from times that are dead.

Some lines turn you to a morning of birds, happy-teary calls that draw you out:

'Hey mister tambourine-man, play a song for me,
In a jingle-jangle morning I come following you'

Where is my tambourine-man?

I might employ the Chembur Naka dhobi. Silver-maned, teeth all deep vermillion. He greets me with the heartland's call, bringing the dust of the Indo-Gangetic plain, the blend of betel and word, the true masticating dexterity.

'Arre bohini nahin doge ka?' Arre O Koseeeek!'

But I am south Indian. What would I know of a heartland-dhobi except his name and his bicycle? There is the streetside bully right in my place, the street where I grew, in bonda-coffee Bangalore, who once said:

'Eating cake? Fellow, I'll tell your grandfather'.

What panic he caused is a whole story. Actually, he said, 'Son, I'll tell your grandfather' but it doesn't translate. I'm too lazy to explain that he doesn't have to be my father to start a sentence with 'son', it's a different kind of son, it's a multi-purpose word. And 'son' doesn't have the lungi-wrapping trisyllabalic timbre of the original 'magane'. I should write it in Kannada. But I can't since I don't know the script and can write no sentences other than those of conversation. What comes before and after what people say? Who else then, if not that vile street-bully?

'Take me dissapearing through the smoke-rings of my mind'

Time for a midnight bath. Hot water. It rings an ever-ready bell like a schoolboy jumping with a finger raised:

'The hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four'.

Sigh. different time again. Maybe one could write authentically about pornography. But where is the song?

Hot water. Rising in the bath. Turn a knob, make a lever list. Rising, rising, hot water turning to prehistoric lake. What if an ocean started heating? What would the great sea-creatures do? I see them slowing down, duller and duller, in an uneasy, collective silence, shark and seal, whale and krill. Krill. Krill. That's a word with a little tune. A plank of wood, a forward thrust of heavy, solid saw. Krill, krill, a mob with biscuits in its throat, full of downward thumbs.

The head is submerged. Water all around, parting on my forehead, light-headed, urgent, populous, full of street-activity. This is the real soundtrack of our lives. Not Vivaldi. Sounds like these. A flush. A rubbing of bone in the blind woods of the backbone. These are our real soundtrack. Play them when men and women part, play the gulping of coffee in the gullet. A swirling of soap. This cologne-scented body will decay and be nibbled at, and the music shall be something like this. Gumble gumble. Giddying rumbling poo. Sashay; sputtering grumble. Ping.

......

'The Primordial Sound'

What a beautiful Bhairav to begin one's day with. How petty the details of the day are. I feel like a pilgrim in a lost and timeless temple, overwhelmed by incense and tulsi, drenched in the waters of the Bhagirathi. Close your door if you ever get up early in the morning, and open the windows, feel the fresh baby breath of the day, and let the notes assume the air. Mallikarjun Mansur:

http://www.sawf.org/audio/bhairav/mm_bhairav.ram

ref: sawf.org/music

Cities, Stories, Strangers

Sometimes, to realise that nothing matters, we need to be at 38500 ft.

Chennai, warm and traffic-clogged, was an archive. And Singapore, weepy-weathered, rainwater tearing in white flames on the tarmac behind a 747's thrust, was lost beneath an ocean's breath of spume. And Tokyo, cloudy, sniffing like a geisha with a great white handkerchief, its lights too frail, its megalopolis spike too small on the heaving blue and green of the great Pacific, shrank to a point, and dwindled away.

Like eerie tanks in a fallen town, captured ghostly white in a negative, clouds gleamed in the twilight, the thousand miles of them. Below them were more clouds: armies, scattered, shredded, flimsy, mountainous, all still, absolutely still. And like fireflies winking by wildebeest herds at night, the aircraft's winglights blinked by the dark sihouettes. And the world's great cities were too small to be seen.

What plays in my mind? A voice from thirty years ago, dipping smooth as whiskey, sad and beautiful, the bare and outstretched arms of a face with curly hair, a body assumed by needle-marks.

Where the little girls in the hollywood bungalows....

Los Angeles came, warm with the Californian sun, its days as long as its distances, its freeways ripping the air. My cab swerves right, and we're shooting past the world on the Interstate 405 at ninety miles an hour. Orange County, here it lies, spread out like a board game, automobiles moving in assembly.

Are you a lucky little lady in the City of Light
Or just another lost angel...City of Night

It's eerie to be the only person walking the streets. Cars cascade. For company, I have the pedestrian icon that appears on the traffic lights, when I push the button to cross.

At the corner, sometimes, near a colony of planted ducks at a pool stands a ragged black man, twice my height, in mouldy clothes, carrying a cardboard banner: HOMELESS JOBLESS HUNGRY. No, but he's not a black man, you can't say that here. A man, just a man, bespectacled, balding, like a maimed dog on an Indian street, we don't know what colour or race. But he's of the same colour as others who wait like that, and they wait at corners, hunched with heavy stares.

I walk past him. California, fertile and booming, accelerates.

I shift. Costa Mesa, where an anglo-Indian hotel manager holds forth on Calcutta, on Bengali friends who sneaked into his place for a bottle, on fussy shrewd American customers who need to be shown their place. Garden Grove, with mommies pushing prams where babies inspect the world, chins up, little heads still as the wheels go over the pavement.

Mexicans everywhere, old men in straw hats getting on the wrong bus, young men who remove boxes from vans, stern-faced, stone-faced aunties who sit glumly on buses, and curly-haired morning women in slim cotton skirts, chubby as tomatoes, ready for the day.

What accent is this, this cab driver's? Some tucked-away European country? Then a mist envelops me in the cab. The music, sarangi, tanpura trailing behind, the tabla cantering with it. He couldn't be Indian. Ah. Afghanistan. He's Afghan, over six feet tall, built like a warrior horse. Of Kashmiri ancestry, Farsi-speaking. He's been to Delhi. But your music, he says. His companion on the streets of Orange County, in the lengths and turns of that repetitive board game. Your music, he says again, is so beautiful...

He fumbles with his cassette-collection. Lata Mangeshkar. Guide. Mughal-e-Azam. Ustad Vilayat Khan. Pandit Jasraj. When he speaks of Ustad Bismillah Khan, the cab slows down, his voice lowers, and he looks behind at us. The shehnai, once you've acquired a taste for it, is very like the human voice, it sings for us in lines that need no lyrics. The sarangi too. I tell him that. He nods. And he knows about Benares.

I pause on my way to work, to pick up maple leaves. What a beautiful tree, its droppings like plums, deep and taut maroon. Above the avenues, the instant food and smart retail, little swifts burst in flight, exploding and closing in, their hearts faster than mine, their bellies the size of my toe, their wings like little black sickles.

City of Night,
City of Night, City of Night, woo, c'mon

Beatles pause at intersections, waiting for the lights to change. It's summer. At the feet, at the ankles of pines, pansies wait like schoolgirls, their velvet faces scrubbed by mother pansies, their costumes blue and yellow.

On the weekend, Americans are buying things, filling up bins with packaged goods, with beasts converted to cubes and strips, and trees converted to branded sprays, their calories on count, their bellies filled with esters, their crude oil turned to gasoline, to gas, to be burned and filled at stations. If it ran out of fuel, what would this country do? If you took their shelves away, where would they go?

Never saw a woman... So alone, so alone
So alone, so alone

Raag Bageshree plays in my hotel room. I twist the blinds open. A girl in tight shorts is taking something out of a car's rear. Time to plan workflows, application modules, documentation of deviations and user-shadowing.

Drivin' down your freeways
Midnite alleys roam

Another Afghan cabbie tells me that if America carries on like this, there will be more trouble. He slows down, looks back and tells me that Karzai is a puppet. Are you a Pashtun, I ask. Yes, he's a Pashtun. From Kabul. You people say Pathan for that, right, in India? Yes, we say Pathan. When was the last time everything was peaceful and people lived their lives, in his country? Till 1970, he says. Before the Russian invasion, then? Yes. You could walk anywhere, it was totally safe, even with money, anything, and people trusted people, and it was a beautiful country.

As I worry about having read or written nothing meaningful in the last few months, and about my project's service-level agreements, and about what I'm going to say when Monday comes, I think of little lives all over the world, someone in Moscow on a park bench, vodka on his breath and something on his mind, some farmer in Telengana worrying about rains, some tortoise in Sicily slipping while trying to mate, some bespectacled ragged man where MacArthur meets Fairview in Santa Ana, watching the world go by, everthing unreal except himself, the pangs within, the soggy lettered cardboard, everything else like walls in a video game, moving as the cursor moves.

We move on, little eddies in larger winds, each with pangs, each with a story.