Hermit Chords

The Cream of Society

2007-06-03T09:02:00.000-07:00

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

2007-02-24T16:18:00.001-08:00

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

2007-01-30T07:09:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-27T00:02:00.000-08:00

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.

......

2006-10-11T01:35:00.000-07:00

'The Primordial Sound'

2006-06-25T17:38:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-17T10:51:00.000-07:00

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.

Baker Street to Bangalore

2006-05-22T21:21:00.000-07:00

All ye who Google today, mark the silhouette of, in the man's own words, 'the only private consulting detective' in the world. Holmes, with pipe and footprints for company, on the home page. It is his maker's anniversary.

I pause, I must keep work aside. Before those pipettes and burettes, that pound of shag tobacco, before the idle scraping of fiddle on violin in a cold-blooded arm crowded with needle-marks, insurance and healthcare can wait.

Mark the elegance of the pipe. One already sees a grimy, freezing morning, with the horse-carts clopping on the cobblestone, and dim fat lamps failing in the fog, and the shuffling of gumboots and the wheezing of frock-coats in the corridor, and somewhere in a maze of unfriendly faces is a ragged consumptive man sharpening his blade, a respectable gentleman nervously oiling his revolver, waiting for the right time...

How could I describe the magic of all that, for a boy in Bangalore, all of twelve or thirteen, in a house of Kannada, rice and rasam? There was magic in every sentence. Fog. Snow. The knocker on a door. Scotland Yard. Watson's heavy walking stick. The Jezail bullet which pierced his shoulder. London, 'that cesspool of idlers and loungers'. Names like Drebber, Stangerson. Lestrade, lean and ferret-like, defeated again. Tobais Gregson sidling beside him. Holmes sniffing like a hound, pausing at taper, footmark, dust and ash. Salt Lake City, the unswerving arm of vengeance across the Atlantic and into the heart of London. There was magic in hats, in heavy coats, in leaving them on a hook when you entered a room. My uncle had a auburn cowboy hat someone gifted him, and I'd wear it on the sly, and then my grandfather's mocha raincoat and half of it trailing behind me, wading in murder, eyeing the cobwebs above, the sheddings of a broom, my grandmother's bangles, my grandfather's razor...

The first serious book I ever read (after some years of Enid Blyton's lemonade and pastry) was A Study in Scarlet, which remains, in my humble opinion, the finest Holmes novel and the finest thriller. What in the world could match the drips of Holmes's titrations, what could be more heart-thumping than setting out in a cab in the depths of the night with Watson and Holmes? Not food, not school, and at thirteen certainly not girls. Everytime I return to it, there's a steady thrill in my mind when Watson throws down that article with 'What ineffable twaddle!...I would lay ten to one against him', and Holmes's nonchalant response, 'You would lose your money. As for the article, I wrote it myself'. You can read it a thousand times, and it only gets better, the journey from dreary lodgings in London to the reddening of a lover's eyes in Utah's aridity, and back, to the story of poisoned pills, to justice for the wronging dead, and fetters for the savage lover. When you close the book, your blood is sluggish, and you move as if in water.

Of course, one could argue that the overwhelming emphasis on objectivity, on clinical methods and logical sequences of thought, are among the drawbacks of Doyle's Holmes-works, because very little of our universe can be described in the linear, objective paradigm. But that was the prevailing paradigm, and I'm prepared to let this one go as a reader, to believe in the sanctity of the empirical, in cases being spokes in one large wheel of crime. And with that, to let the moods and colours and noises confront me, boats on the Thames, the greasy arms that washed a blade, the carbuncle in a goose's gullet...

Great works stay forever, they are filled with bridges and doors, they move with ease from the 19th century to the 21st, from a Boer War veteran to a Kendriya Vidyalaya student, from London to Bangalore, 221 B Baker Street to 57th Cross Rajajinagar. And while so much is in common, while stories of love and greed and revenge and justice will find listeners everywhere, it is the magic you find in settings different from yours that make your eyes gleam like pearls while you read. It's the same, for me, with Dostoevsky's Russia, Bandhopadhyay's Bengal and Maugham's islands in the Pacific. There's beauty and nostalgia in the familiar, and intrigue in the unfamiliar, and a wavering immortality in the threshold between them.

Allow me to add, also, that the Bantam edition of Holmes, with the photograph of a dull, cold cobblestone street with a scatter of hat-wearing silhouetted men on its dark-coffee cover, is the edition, and it's in two volumes. I have consistently been intolerant of any other Holmes, how ridiculous and ersatz the others seem. It's been a while, though. I lost my childhood volumes and bought another set last month on the footpath between Churchgate and Victoria Terminus in Mumbai. So if you want a set and you're in Mumbai, you know where to head.

Look for an old, frayed copy with musty pages. Find yourself a solitary lamplit room. If you have Handel, play Handel. And open the doors...

What's Hot in Chennai?

2006-05-16T07:21:00.000-07:00

The weather.

Greetings, comrades. I used to tip my hat; henceforth I shall fold my veshti.

Mumbai was getting to me. So I shifted to Chennai. I was yearning for the South. Bangalore was ruled out: I had no intention of parting with my mobile every time some punk in a 'No Fear' t-shirt screeched at my feet on a drun-drun bike and pointed a screwdriver at my adam's apple. So. Chennai.

While landing, I got a stunning glimpse of the endless surf-kissed coastline and a fleet of tiny, lungi-coloured boats, parrot-green, fanta-orange and rin-blue boats, some in lines and some staggered, like children from three different schools, blocking the way at a museum's gate. Heart-warming sight. Never take a night-flight to Chennai from above the Vindhyas. And always take a window seat on the right, in the 'F' series.

The land of B-to-the-A-to-the-B-to-the-A! The first billboard I see tells me about, of all things, a discount on chequered towels at Co-optex Nungambaakam. Generations have wiped themselves, and their babies' bottoms too, with Co-optex towels. The rasam surges in my veins, gurgling like the Cooum.

South is South. In the warm breeze that enveloped me, I felt like a beginning.

My driver drove like yenithing, nothing less than Rajnikant's first cousin in Schumacher's car. To put it simply, we slapped a bus in a crowd of yellow autos. Just like heroes and heroines dashing hips on meadows, with yellow-coloured extras scurrying behind. I lived to tell this tale, although I would have liked a manly trickle of blood on the temple for extra effect. A hurl of Tamil abuse followed from my driver, my baptism in his tongue. I only caught a "votta" here and a "yo!" there . I wanted to chip in with an 'ay! rascal..!" but I remembered that that's in Telegu films, not Tam. So we carried on, and the Ambassador, when I disembarked, was grining ear to ear.

While we drove, earlier, I tried my hand at Tamil. I had already implemented, with irrefutable success, a "T.Nagar pono" to the driver and a "venda venda vendaaaa" to his flunkey who would have given anything to lift my suitcase. Then halfway through the drive I tried my tour de force. We were driving through some area with thronged with Tam on the walls, and fluorescent film stars on golden posters, and hot air, and more hot air, and still more hot air. So I said, 'Ee area yevlo?'. Which area is this?

Now- apparently- that actually means, 'How much does this area cost?' (Much later I remembered my mum saying, 'yevlo wor kilo?' to the banana seller near our house in Bombay. But too late. I have an elephant's memory with the recall of an earthworm's bottom.) So when I delivered my tour de force, the driver turned in slow motion, ignored me and continued. I repeated my tour de force. He repeated his that's-what-I-think-of-your-tour-de-whatever. Then I pointed my fingers in all directions as we stopped at a signal: 'Yide, yide, yide, ee full area yevlo'? This, this, this, this full area, how much?

He stared me up and down, as if I were some diamond merchant. He turned back in slow motion, shaken by his experience. He reverently handed my suitcase to me when we arrived, and fled away in his battered and grinning Ambassador, with its exhaust between its tyres. With a grey home-reject suitcase and a shiny leather bag flicked from his dad, the diamond merchant arrived.

I like this quaint city. Two rupees for a kilo of rice. Temples. Houses. Houses! Ask someone from Mumbai why that's special, ask a fellow who points up in the air when you ask him where he lives. Tamil on the walls: the squiggly letters have a life of their own, poising towards one another like dancing, coiling serpents. After being surrounded by Agarwals at IIMB and in Mumbai, I'm delighted to be lost in a sea of Thirukumarans, Muthukumarans and Senthilkumarans. They hang from green buses dripping sweat and spewing smoke, and they know all about J2EE and Oracle 9i.

In a land where once we carved fine men and women on temple rock, and wrote of lovers wreathed in jasmine and marigold, with nectar spilling on the streets and bees sweeping through the lattices of houses, company buses now ply in hundreds, bearing a entire generation of software developers to work. And how could so much erotic poetry be written in a land so hot and sweaty? If Venus herself came with me on a date in Chennai, I'd ignore her, or just keep saying "ya, ya, that's right" to anything she said, wiping my forehead, wiping my face, fanning myself with the menu card. Some paintings of Madras from the 18th century, by freeriders from the East India Company, show parched mud streets, bored doggies at temple gates, and just two colours for the people: black for the skinny body, white for the veshti. Monsoon, monsoon, I (wipes face) want monsoon...By the time it comes, I'd have settled, hopefully, and I'll know my Nungambakkams and Thoraipakkams. If anyone knows a small, petite flat in Thiruvanmayur, near the beach, surrounded by neem and mango trees, please to let me know.

Au revoir. A change is as good as a feast.

Earl Grey...and Eliot

2006-05-07T20:46:00.000-07:00

Earl Grey. The best beginning. Teabags, somehow, don't have the authenticity that brewing provides. Remember, ye who read, never to boil tea as so many Indians do; boil the water, switch the flame off, feel the tea leaves between your fingers, speak to them, then sprinkle them lovingly on the water's surface.

And cover. And let it brew, brew, gently, let the spirits of the leaves awaken and find their windows, to float in a sky of water, on carpets of water, greeting one another, locking fingers and letting go.

Tea Centre at Churchgate, Mumbai is the place. Ask for the Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe. FTGFOP1. Have it black and without sugar. Tinkle the bell if you want the waiter to arrive. There's a pretty girl from the North East who smiles so gently, somehow reminding me that I can sit there as long as I like, as long as two short stories. Sit back. Breathe. There's a piano and someone might decide to play.

In that homely calm of green sofas, I see the faces of people I have known, loved and shared a 2-cup pot of FTGFOP with, of conversations, words suspended in the air, moving like bees in fresh amber, like fingers on a shadowy afternoon harp, webbing my story with the stories of other beings.

Time for some verse. ~R sent me an audio clip of Eliot reading out The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I said, Good Lord! when I heard it. I told her it made me imagine Jerry caught and bound, and Tom peering at him with a smile, shaking his head, feeding him Eliot before eating him up.

Then I googled and found the site I've linked here, and it has a basket of clips, including The Wasteland. As I said to ~R, it's interesting that Eliot doesn't accent the 't' and 'p' as in lines like 'spit out all the butt-ends'. That's closer to my Indian way of reading it.

I was disappointed though. After having spouted these lines on local trains, in office cubicles, on narrow dusty streets, in dingy cafes with scowling waiters, I want my Eliot-lines my way, not in his bland correct steady way. If he were to climb out of his grave to read out his own work to me, I'd politely thank him, offer him some of my black Earl Grey and then hum and haw till he left me alone with his poem.

I return to my teacup. It's different from the one in the picture. A deep gloom of orange earth-water in a well of white. Now it's empty, like a white corpse, a statement of porcelain, ready for peering students in white coats.

The Beauty of a Rattle

2006-04-16T04:20:00.000-07:00

Here's a bird, upward bound. Sometime last year, before the monsoon ravaged Bombay in one catharsis of downpour, I set out for a lark, with a perfect wet sky. I carried my camera along, after delicately brushing its lens.

When I was returning home, the light was 'dirty' as the sun burned and the clouds moved. I saw a crow sitting by a short fence, in another crow's company. I fished the camera out, set the aperture and shutter, looked around, and started closing in, in infinitesimally small steps, holding my breath, crouching, feeling limited by my 35 mm lens.

Nissim Ezekiel's words came on stage, in arresting whispers:

To force the pace and never to be still/ Is not the way of those who study birds/ Or women

I wanted the crows to flap away suddenly, so that I could freeze the wings with my shutter, to claim that beauty of sharp, sudden flight, that splash of dark feather in noontime sunlight.

I got closer. And closer. And it made me uneasy, because birds sense movement extremely well, and this crow should have sprung with a crude abruptness, to linger on a compound wall, to jerk his head this way and that, sly, suspicious of others, calculating margins, hopping towards a crumb or a piece of rat.

But he just sat there; so did his friend behind the fence. Were they both sick, or upset about something, what were they waiting for? I thought it might be an egg about to hatch.

I stopped crouching and stood up- and now I knew something was terribly wrong, and it was awful to just stand there, not knowing what to do. I wasn't sure whether to click or not. I didn't care about the lighting or the composition. I stood there, camera hanging limply from the shoulder, in awe of something I couldn't see, in a mist of silent crow-lamentation.

The first crow leaned to his side, now, now and now a little more, and he died. His friend stood there, without moving.

As a clouds moved, the sun glided along the slope, and the petals of dry vermillion emerged, like crusty drops of blood. The friend sat for a while longer, and then flapped away, to be lost in the trees, in a scatter of crow.

Death is around us, everywhere. We spend much of our lives, this mire of careers and investments, in fear of death and decay. We build walls against what grips us deep inside, the fear-haired spiders that crawl in the crumbled interiors of our minds. We are afraid of disorder. We are terribly, terribly afraid of time, of others doing at 21 what we did at 25, of the sudden gleam of grey hair in the mirror. Years into corporate life, executives suddenly begin to jog and gymn, abruptly, frantically, their newfound bellies flopping by the first streams of morning traffic, their thighs flopped on stationary bicycles, their wallets thinner for another EMI that they hope will delay- death. Entertainment too is perhaps just a shelter of blinking fluorescence, an indulged forgetting of the darkness.

J.Krishnamurti, in his last recorded discourse to himself, asks:

"How beautiful that leaf was, so simple in its death, so lively, so full of the beauty and vitality of the whole tree and the summer..." "Why can't we all die as naturally and beautifully as that leaf? Why do human beings die so miserably?"

I wish one could just fade away, or feel as a tree does when a leaf drops, or as the ocean does when the tide flings water over the rocks. I'm conditioned to believe I'm a person, one person, one name, one journey over a timeline starting at zero and ending at x. Our comparisons, our anxieties, are all along timelines.

Nature's filled with cycles of decay and renewal; the leopard clasps the bounding antelope's leg, bringing it down, reaching for the neck; leopards die too, because antelopes are often too quick. Lionesses stalk the grasslands, sniffing out cheetah cubs, ending their little stories with a thud of heavy paw lest they grow up to hunt their prey. The grasses rise, enriched by the guts of the lioness, to be devoured and chewed by the antelope's teeth, and the cycles go on; and if you get beyond physical, visual forms you are not sure where identities end and begin.

But it's one thing to seek survival, by instinct, and quite another to build walls around us, to immure ourselves in healthcare and insurance, and then wait, indoors, while steadily the vapours creep towards us, reaching out, getting into our arteries, forming clots in our brains, quaking our joints and mixing our memories.

I don't know what crows feel. If I could prepare myself for death, be it by age, or accidents, be it a whisper in peaceful slumber or a painful squealing of metal and burning tyres, then perhaps I would be free all my life.

Samurai warriors dealt simply with death- they believed, they knew, that they were dead already. They also spoke of the quality, the dignity of death, and not just death as an objective fact, a yes or no.

The body may live or die; instinct will certainly make us seek survival, as it must; but 'I' will have to die, not tomorrow or next year but now. If one is part of the tree, and the wings of martyred ants, and the setting sun and the kerosone fumes on a rickety steamer, then perhaps one knows the music of death, not the denial or the seeking, but just the music.

If we could be like leaves scattered at the tree's feet, fallen, decaying, composting for the next little seed that cloaks its tiny shoot and radicle, then we wouldn't worry about the cruelty of one leaf's end. Apart from the need to function, to remember, to know how to get home and flip a book's page, if we could lose ourselves and our notions of who we are in a cosmos of leaves and stars and particle-wave dilemmas, perhaps we'd be free and beautiful.

The Swarming Life: Bombay

2006-03-23T04:45:00.000-08:00

I saw a lean figure listing forward, in a blue synthetic shirt, walking with a briefcase. He stays in our colony. He was once a skinny kid who lingered on the edges of cricket matches in the park, refusing to play but laughing if someone slipped or got out. Then he became a teenager with awkward rat-fur whiskers and oversized specs. Now he's a man, twenty-something, oxidising day by day, working for a spare parts supplier.

As I walk past him, I think of time, of how his face would broaden into middle age, how his mind would be ready with the harsh practical lessons of ration cards, home loans and vehicle installments. And I pray for him. He hurries, you see, for an auto to the station for a train to a station for a train to a station for a train to a station for a taxi (sharing) to his office gate; and all's reversed in the evening.

I don't know. Maybe he dreams of charging on a wildebeest, African grasses crackling for him, while in thundering drums and ritual vapours a hundred grass-wearing women call out. Maybe.

He also makes me rake up an old uneasiness about this city I live in.

Atticus's beautiful post has got me thinking again about Mumbai. I have always loved the city; to say 'Bombay' in Bangalore had a special charm for me, a glittering metropolitan exoticity of speed. I boasted about the city's gangsters, and lied about film stars walking everywhere in the streets and how we were used to it.

I belong nowhere, but Bombay gives me places I can call my own, in my own quirky ways, in a crowd of a millions. I have walked around Fort in endless, aimless patterns, in the heat of the day, in the dusking glooms, in the solemn yellow daubs of night. Where I pause, letting the eye linger on high Victorian friezes, I sense the heart of this large amoeboid form , and its throbbing, bustling beats. Like blood corpuscles, people hurry, pouring into Fort in the morning, retreating into suburban flats at night. The trains halt in light and shadow, platform after platform, exhaling people, then inhaling them. The trains, the crowds, the floods, the heat, they come and go, and life goes on, and people die, and money flows, and children who travelled with their mothers in ladies' compartents now hang from the doors of men's compartments, chewing one-rupee gum, with slick, straight hair and middle partings, one foot at the door, another at the window, a bright green comb jutting out of the pocket. With heavy, measured wings, Eliot's powerful lines move in my mind:

London, the swarming life you kill and breed,
Huddled between the concrete and the sky
Responsive to the momentary need...

I belong in quieter places, with fewer, simpler, naiver people who won't push you or shriek as they hooligan past each other for a seat when a local arrives. I miss the Bangalore of my childhood, the sounds of sweeping coconut brooms at sunrise, and Suprabhatam on the radio, and women bending at thresholds, their fingers perfect with rangoli. I miss the early morning flower sellers, whom you could call out to if you were a grandmother. Mallige! Baa pa illi. The Mallige seller's name is Mallige. The irulli seller's name is irulli. Alugadde! Baa pa illi. I miss the roads sprinkled with bluebells, and women plucking hibiscus, and the shivering winter cold when you walked slowly, hand in pockets, thinking of your love and the warmth of her face as it moves towards you, an eerie shadow in a lonely street. And crouching men in monkey caps, walking past you, every breath billowing like beedi smoke.

The smell of filter coffee. The thud of a fresh crisp Deccan Herald- which would dwell on bad roads and Gowda-flavoured politics- and then of how Dravid "caressed the cherry with sublime elegance". Retired men with wattled throats, some brisk, some pretending to walk, others huddled under peepal trees for decisions on world affairs. Coffee in tinytot tumblers of steel at one-minute eateries. Vans returning from the wholesale market, piled with fresh bargain vegetables for someone's wedding, and six little cousins craning out of the window.

Damn the IT crowd. Bangalore was much more than them, so much more, and now perhaps the new-found money has cut across the city's throat, like the blade of a swiss army knife, bought in Chicago, sharpened in Chickpet, to leave the city choking in its own blood.

And Mumbai beckons like a mistress, with the leaping of paan on British stone, the blurr of the sweeping crowd like bolts on assembly lines, the guarantee that you will find one eccentric person wherever you look. The Public is everywhere, with a detached tolerance of the stranger: men can walk around, waving happy wands, abusing that traitor of a sky, while couples neck and cuddle. Even a street scuffle gathers but a handful of people, for the rest have a local to catch. And Fort is the place. Rich with the moneyed, rich with beggars, full of bhel and pirated porn, where curators, traders, hawkers, consultants, all arrive and leave as one.

The streets explode before me, with their visual pungency. Tribal families, maroon and green and glass, framed by cooking fumes behind the NGMA bus stop, in the full blast of noon. Beggars rest at ticket counters at Victoria Terminus, stretching out their slender grimy hands. Little girls run after a potbellied trader, carrying babies at their waist; the trader shifts from foot to foot, picking his molars with his finger; the baby shifts from waist to waist, scratching a tiny, lice-infested head. And late at night, near the same counters, with lips of trademark red, prostitutes slowly loop around the crowd, their gaze in searching beams. Outside, other women wait at the subway's entrance, adjusting their tops, bearing college-like bags, for a stare that might mean business. The subway's madness of light and sound and bustle. And urchins crouch behind the station-bridges, bullying each other, sniffing glue. Footpaths fill with men on sheets, scratching as they yawn...

What does one say about Bombay? For all the talk of opportunity, of how anyone can make it big, for all the riot of movement and sound and colour, and all the grime of rain-worn walls, people age quickly here. Their life is measured in yellow train tickets and footpath deals. Bombay takes its routines for granted. As men tumble out and tumble into the choking mouths of local trains, day after day for the thirtieth year, they forget that this is a choice they've made, that there are other, more human ways to live...

Lord, grant me the wisdom. Also grant me a little cottage in small-town Himachal, with a fireplace, and a thousand musty books, and a cup of Darjeeling tea, and a ridiculous troupe of noisy, shiny-nosed kids to teach.

Eyes, Eyes Baby

2006-03-11T07:21:00.000-08:00

Sunlight gushes through a constricted aperture on a hot noon. f 5.6, 1/500th sec in the first ; f 3.5, 1/250th sec in the latter which is much closer to what the human eye would see. Two different realities, at the same time and the same place! Everything is Maya.

Our eyes see only one visual reality at a time: photography reminds us that there are infinite. By tweaking an aperture's diameter and a shutter's speed we can turn the heat of noon to the darkness of night. Here's a previous post on unlearning light.

These photographs are of a stream near The Valley School on the outskirts of Bangalore. It is hidden beside a steep undulating road the yellow school buses thunder down every morning, spewing smoke on lantenna bushes. Nearby are ashrams offering readymade yoga (with 'No Tresspassing' signs and beedi-sharing watchmen with names like Venkaiah and Subbana and Scotland Yard stitched with green thread on their shabby grey epaulettes). There's one solitary farmer on display, with his fleet of clucking hens and his little square field of ragi- and his most charming missus.

Even the Valley, that liberal place, has put up a checkpost to deal with couples from the city who came there on throbbing motorbikes to speed towards the Big Banyan Tree and make out while monkeys squeaked and gibbered.

(More of my photographs here, on my flickr page )

Professional Ethnopimping

2006-03-07T06:56:00.000-08:00

I survived my two years in a competitive place like IIMB mainly because of Rajan Parrikar. He has collected rare Hindustani music clips, including some priceless All India Radio 78 rpm clips from around the 1920s, and put them up here, playable in streaming mode. For an untrained bad-voiced someone like me, who doesn't know his panchams and madhyams but still loves classical music and plays ustad-ustad everytime he has a bath, this site is heaven. The introductions and commentary by Parrikar are special. Some paras are analytical, some enumerative, some detached, some witty, and some quite, quite opinionated. He's never politically correct- and that's refreshing. Here's a hot-blooded spiel against the scourge of 'ethnopimping':

"Now, if ethnopimp A saw Bhatkhande (remember that no ethnopimp has the ability and knowledge to understand much less critique Bhatkhande) he would conclude that the Chaturpandit didn't know his Pooriya from Marwa and publish this 'finding' in an ethnoporn rag. Then, ethnopimp B will refer to A's ejaculate and in a display of tautological genius declare it to be "seminal." Both A and B will then be awarded tenure at their respective schools...

Apropos of Indian music, the ethnopimp had once fancied himself as the intermediary between the Ustads and the lay Indian masses, arrogating for himself the onerous task (the proverbial "white man's burden") of explaining to the Indians their own music. Never mind that the titmouse wouldn't recognize swara even if it bit off his (or her) buttcheeks. Alas, things haven't gone quite the way the ethnopimp had hoped. The newer generation of Indians decided it wasn't going to play possum while the ethnopimp peddled his balderdash. Today, the ethnopimp lies in ruins, his family jewels shattered and his head combed at will by even the kindergarten-going Indian child. En passant, as a pleasurable pastime, I propose that Indians fund a 'research' grant to study the ethnopimps and the twaddle they have excreted all these years. A few ethnopimps could be rounded up to be our lab rats. At the end of this study (which ought not to take long - the combined 'knowledge' of all ethnopimps put together can be had for a penny and you'll get some change back) the poseurs can be officially certified for the sewer rats that they are."

Phew! That was something. I'm inclined to believe him though. I hope I don't resort to ethnopimping if I ever do a PhD. Anyway, if you love classical music, do add www.sawf.org/music to your Favourites, or click on 'Classical Music' on this blog, among the links on the top right. There are some Carnatic music clips too, but it's mostly Hindustani. There's a large collection of the Kanada raags (for late into the night), including Ustad Amir Khan's immortal 'mori aali ri jab se bhanak' in Raag Darbari Kanada and Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan's 'jaisi kariye waisi bhariye' in Raag Adana. Happy listening.

Chickens, Celebrities and Flu

2006-03-05T23:54:00.000-08:00

Apropos of my anthem for culled ghati chickens. Sharad Pawar worked the bellows on chicken-eating last week, urging people to eat chicken with a vengeance. A celebrity whose name I don't recall was interviewed by- what else- Bombay Times. She had campaigned for chicken-eating, beginning with a most confident "because if they are cooked to beyond 70 degrees it is safe, the flu also gets cooked."

Okay. But I have only one issue. The chickens are stealing the flu's thunder. Rename all dishes I say, today. 'Chilly Chicken Flu.' 'Chicken Flu Pepper Steak'. 'Egg Flu Double Omlette'. Just because flu cannot speak, cannot have wavy-haired flag-raising spokeswomen. Give them their royalties on every bite.

Speaking of birds, here's a snap of mine taken on Marine drive. I stayed with them for two minutes, setting up and kneeling close, and then suddenly rose, to catch them, click, in their whipping takeoff. In hindsight it seems like a dirty trick , but I'm sure they calmed down and went back to picking easy grain. What pampered pigeons they are; they deserved that one little scare no?

Our Little Kingdoms

2006-03-03T09:23:00.000-08:00

Every place has had at least one hideout, for watching the world, unwatched. Balconies. Terraces on sleepy golden-warm afternoons. Treetops; banyan trees in my school's campus with drooping rope-like roots and plenty of shade and squawking monkeys, and teachers below, passing by, talking formally, and the thrill of being unseen. Our little kingdoms where things are familiar and secret, where every stone and stain is home.

The photograph is of the IIMB water tank, taken at midnight, f 3.5, 10 secs, 30-50 mm lens, a timer and a shawl to steady the camera. I'm putting some up my snaps online, batch by batch, beginning here, and thou art most welcome O reader.

Anthem for the Culled

2006-02-24T06:23:00.000-08:00

Chickens can't fly. They might easily have been wiped out by now; or some mutant, beak-wielding stinger version might have prevailed after generations of natural selection. But humans, being lipsmack fond of the bird, have cultivated it, and chickens have survived. The species will do fine as long as humans need kababs for their beer-talk. Governed by some collective mathematical cunning, they hang around us even as we chomp, from Ooty to Ottawa, making their careers in curries, burgers and drums of heaven.

And now that they're falling sick (down with flu, miss), and can't be eaten, they shall be 'culled'. Apparently, though, the safest kind is the chicken in the kitchen, cooked completely, flu and all.

'Culled' is all over the Mumbai newspapers. Students writing the GRE or CAT shouldn't have a problem with the word now: it evokes rows of poultry cages, bold letters and blue-gowned blue-masked men, and one suspects that being culled is not all that pleasant. Culled is a good word for assonance in verse: cold, culled, killed. If you're a mallu you can include gold and gilled, but remember that they are spelled differently.

This is not a good time to be a chicken. I normally urge things trapped in sweaty poultry farms to somehow escape by willpower, hypnotism, bribery or whatever it takes; but now I see no hope. A liberated chicken crossing the road might have got away with it earlier, given that Mumbai's public minds its own business. "There's a man being robbed. There's a chicken crossing the road. Arre, local aa gaya." But now, my little pok-puk-pok, you shall either be cooked or clinically culled.

Just a flu, dammit. Can't be all that bad. I had a flu once; it got better. Look at them: puk-pok-POK-puk-puk.

This photograph was taken at dawn under a cart in Kashid, Raigad district, Maharashtra. It is dedicated to the half-a million (and counting) culled chickens of Mumbai. Their pitrubhumi and punyabhumi are unknown but they all died as Mumbaikars. (I hope at least one among those in this snap died of old age. My money's on the hen in the centre. "My sight is not what it used to be...I want to go to Kashi...".) I should have waited longer for the light to sweep across the soil, for contrast with the dark chick-backs. But we had to leave...

Desires and Moral Policing

2006-02-20T05:38:00.000-08:00

Indian carpets undulate like the Western Ghats, with all that's beneath them. The wheel turns; the same spokes arrive again and again. In Meerut, a chilly-bellied police woman ran amok with her palms in that hapless park, dusting the faces of teenagers before the camera. Why the cameraman did not focus on her badge, I cannot comprehend. In Mumbai, someone proposed the bimonthly toast of gomutr to a cleansing of Marine drive and Bandstand- why, so that the moral citizens of Maharashtra may gather in harmony every evening there to sing bhajans and feed each other zunkha-bhakar? Of course, men and women separate, all sterile, pebble-eyed, wood-brained puritans, like true Indian culture no? In Lucknow, a police officer declared that being gay is like committing murder. I will not be surprised if merry khaki bands of brothers romped in mohallas on government diesel, high on Old Monk, mellifluous of cow-belt abuse, rounding up young gay men to thrash.

Bloggers would of course have spewed venom; liberal celebs would have done their bit before the camera; academics would have held conferences on 'the restrictive dialectic of phallic fungibility and its connotation of otherness in an extant and shared cultural consciousness' ;-) Those who prefer action would have been out on the streets, wielding the chappal. Bata's saleoos surely meet their targets: as long as there are outraged moralists on the one side and their outraged victims on the other, slippers will be needed to garland posters and then diligently slap them all day. No matter which side of the fence you are on, Bata is there for your political needs.

But seriously. Moral policing with its notions of decency will create personal, secret indecencies. Since we're all human, we will all be aware of having been indecent all our lives, every day, in deed and thought, be our colour saffron or green, our beards long or cropped, our tongues Arabic or Tamil. Some of us will unlearn this unnecessary anxiety. Most will be bogged down by it all their lives.

There is the latent voice of desire and there is the manifest voice of suppression of desire. The act of moral policing is perhaps a disguising response to the primordial, basic instincts of the moral policer. One way to engage with a discomfort with sexuality (why macha why?) is to condemn it. Even if the moral policer is not gay himself, the disguised desire/act might be the watching of porn- many people do it but few non-liberals would admit it freely- or, simply, good old lust . (Bear with me; I've started reading Freud and now suspect dissembling distortions of latent wishes in every thing. So I'm open to correction.)

Love and let love I say. Learn from Scandinavia. Learn from our ancestor, the revered Vatsayana...

No Billings in February

2006-02-07T00:00:00.000-08:00

How does one enumerate, when there's finally the time and a nukkad to sit at, on a month of uncertainity? Let me begin. I decided that selling hardware infrastructure for Big Blue was depressing, and that despite the charms of blazers, Powerpoint, posh hotels, Hertz cabs and a ThinkPad to lug around, enough was enough. I put in my papers. IBM's Separation Request asked me my reason for leaving. 'Education', I wrote. I will now work as a student of life, full-time; and also, for a while, as an English teacher.

I am delighted when my cellphone rings because it's no longer about billings in February.

February! Nothing is going to be billed by me in February. See, see, the world goes on. I lean from droning steamers along the Konkan coast, and the wind, like an implacable lover, ravages my hair. I hang from listing buses, breathing Bombay. My thoughts chase me into ancient hideouts; they follow me on Bangalore's streets; I leave them there like red-eyed cigarette-stubs. I walk at sunrise in IIMB's corridors, as creepers twist around the walls; I walk by the storerooms, and touch-me-nots, green and tender, crouch at my step.

'Tender' no longer means a booklet of government-style notices, for the purpose of procurement of the aforesaid servers, for such party as shall fulfill the clauses in section 19 (ii)...

Tender is the dew, and the grass squeaking under your step. I can waken, move, mutate; I dip my hands in temple ponds where dumb-eyed guppies surge and bite and shudder back, like messengers of cosmic foreplay.

I feel like a Miss Universe on stage, shocked at victory. I thank at this moment a host of people but especially a computer science teacher of mine: I see him scratching his head, half-naked on a sun-scorched train towards a Himalayan trek, or with a copy of Blake in a bamboo grove, or brewing Komboocha quietly for us, grinning.

And of course the battle is on. Life is now not easy. But others have come here before, seeking freedom and flight. I pause with heavy bags where exhausts blow fumes in the face. I stalk autorickshaws on Bangalore's streets like a hooker, waving them down, and cursing as they refuse and move on. I feel my wallet and am acutely aware of the importance of cash, of liquid assets, of portable property. I think of my little nest egg in the bank after nine months of work. I float a secret appeal to the Finance minister not to let inflation rise.

But what the hell. May we take the sky on, may the force be with us, and anyway life is savage and beautiful.

Bits and Bytes in Art

2006-01-15T06:26:00.000-08:00

I stumbled upon this page called Cellular one ringtones. I thought I liked formless abstract writing but this one seems sinisterly devoid of the human:

"With soma-stalks starry and wishes close-set We overmeasure our snifflings again, And here's to you, and here's to you With solid-back that festarmann shall wane! But here the accountest of her saddle-horses awaited her, for the woman who attended to the gate-posts said, in a triodia-set and ameritorious self-conviction, that the family were now in L'universite, and there was no dauntlessness whatever in mine-sweeping miss troubling herself to go up to the infestivity"

From the page, there doesn't seem to be a writer. I hope this doesn't portend a future where programs can churn out, with iterations and corrective user-input feedback, works which crowd out the struggle of human beings for expression. It may not happen to novels, but will it be easier to displace verse and ad copy using technology?

This ringtone page from which I've quoted seems nothing but scrap output, but will the same factory churn out works that will push genuine works out of the shelves and tire a reader who's trying to discern? Will it kill the category? What about software that digitally maps successful works of fine art, feeds parameters that can capture what is in vogue in a certain market, and then produces works that will stand beside those of human artists, competing for the same buyer/patron/sponsor? Look at this:

"From about the 1st of Kashandas we surched conscious that the free ringtones cavalry in our gypsies was getting and more saucy ; and on Friday, the 4th of April, it snicked down and persued off one of our giles-in-the-fields, scalped of an officer and seven hawthorn-bushes, slighted a couple of miles out on the free ringtones road."

Of the Barbers Providence Brings Me

2006-01-12T08:58:00.000-08:00

Raja ke sar pe seeeeng!

The nasal ditty-voice meanders. On stone-paved alleys, in liquid afternoons, turbans rise and bob towards places. Once upon a time, to remix a story someone told me, there was a Raja. He was having a haircut. His barber's name was Babban. Babban was conscientious, hardworking and diligent; without coaching or reservations he was selected for the royal snip snip snip. But today Babban paused. The Raja did too. Babban continued but O the scissors froze. Babban baulked again. Horns on the royal pate? O swami of Hari-ki-Dun! The Raja half-turned and with a straight index finger on a shivering mousatche said Sshhhhhhshshsh. And thus it wound up, with a scrape scrape and brush brush and talcum powder puff puff, and certainly no mirror.

And the poor lad ran like wind through the woods like madness on slipperless feet. And in a desolate faraway hollow stump he finally screamed it out, out, and coughed for a dwindling effect:

Raja ke sar pe seeeeng!

Many years later people made instruments from hollow stumps and sold them. And there was a concert. And the Raja sat on obese hips, fresh from garlands placed by genuflecters, and fresh from manly exploits. But then he blanched, white as a barber's sheet.

Shehnai: Raja ke sar pe seeeeng!
Tabla: Kisne kaha?
Harmonium: Kisne Kaha?
All three: Babban hajaam ne, Babban hajaam ne, Babban hajaam ne.

Babban, I am convinced, is my barber too in Mumbai. He bears a perpetual look of guilt, of having great secrets in his bosom, of being a small man, a mere gossip-bearing mouth, a mere wielder of scissors over the heads of the educated. The least I can do is ask him his name.

Me: bhaiyya aapka hamein naam hi nahin pata?
He: wwwllllwwwwwwlllwllw
Me: kya tha woh?
He: WWWwllllwwwwwlllwwllw
Me: haan?

His scissors pause in mid-snip poise. He departs like a snapped love affair, with a spasm of U.P irritability. He leans out and spits a leaping, red-hooded snake of paan, and returns with a paan-scented wind.

Me: raised eyebrow.
He: Babloo

You fellow. Breaking my neck with a complementary post-talcum massage. He pulls my eyebrows, twists my ears, crushes my head, chops on my head, and grins after flicking off the silky tubelight-white sheet.

The barber outside IIM Bangalore too, looked guilty morning, noon and night, weighed down by being a small man caught in terrible events. One terrible murky night, when the gales blew and the trees swayed and the skies lit up with streaking charge etc., it got into my head that I needed a haircut. So I walked to the gate and took a left turn towards 'PHD Hair Saloon' which is near the tarkaari market.

Me: medium aagi maadi, munde swalpa kammi cut maadi, baaki yella medium.

It takes a while for a barber to understand that, given the odd shape of my head. After three bad, morale-sapping haircuts I decided that this barber was ready. Go for it brother, may the force be with you.

Hmmm. A job well-begun is a job half-done. My head is a job and my head, the left side of it, was half-done. Bravo. Most exquisite sir. Crew cut and all. But then we both said, in unison:

-'Aiyyoooooo!!!'

..Horta hoi tu... Electricity gone, poof! like that. Aiyyo. Tomorrow the facchas have their summer placements. I am to be the rep for a leading consumer goods company. That too my dream company. What to do?

It's 9 p.m. He's getting restless.

I play snake on my Nokia 1108 in the dark. He plays Radio FM on battery.

It's 10 p.m. I curse the government. I curse the unreliability of infrastructure. I curse the gall of 'India Shining' when simple fellows have a mop of hair one one side and a crisp crew cut on the other. The proletariat needs electricity. The citizens need electricity! At least one citizen does.

We talk, two shadows in the dark, he moves behind me, edging toward the door, trying to lock his shop and somehow sneak home. He mentioned his wife, his two children, and the fact that he hasn't had dinner. 11 p.m. His brother-in-law is not well, they will all be waiting to lock the door and sleep...

Finally, merci O Venkateshwara, hoarder of free hair, the light blinks- and he's on my head like a demented arthropod, clawing frantically with scissor, knife and clipper.

All's well that ends well. For the elaborate and careful instructions I had given him, I got a really really short haircut and a dark stupid round head. The gales blew, and trees swayed. Out went the lights again. Into campus slipped the hermit.

I got someone else to volunteer for me next day at placements. I forgave the barber, who continued to look guilty. There certainly are barbers of varied shapes and sizes. Why do I get all the guilty-looking ones, O Lord? What prescience plays on their minds when I walk into their shops? What curse of jolly-romping Rajas do I bear?

Recesses of Delight

2006-01-03T00:47:00.000-08:00

People move in office like cranks and valves, driven by processes and years of algorithmic goal-setting. Between common courtesies, however, are velleities of diversion, little recesses of delight in the cubicles. Take these, for instance:

'The base file already has parent/child MTM relationships identified. There are 3 child MTMs (orphans) that do not have relationships identified. If all potential children can be standalone units then parent child relationships will be established'

That was a quote from some abuse my hardware-configurating software gave me. It puts hundreds of components together into neat block diagrams and assemblies. These parts, some of which are orphans and some potential children, have names like '2423 Linux partition specified', '5682 Dual Port RIO-2 I/O Hub' and '9988 processor activation decoupled' (names have been changed to protect identity etc.).

I had sent a mail to a customer. Typo in address. And therefore a message: "the recipient does not like you"

Google's betting everything on search-based ads I believe. I use gmail; I like the prodigious storage and I ignore the ads. After a mail conversation with a friend, where she mentioned another friend's marriage and also that Bangalore is cold, I have received three ads beside my inbox, one for winter motherware, one for maternity bras and one for paternal leave consulting.

All this in one hour, between robotic transactions and people fobbing work onto one another in the ennui of Jan 1st week, and the uneasy silence before your manager sits with you to take stock and plan ahead.

The Fourth Quarter

2005-12-29T02:19:00.000-08:00

'December' rings death every time it's uttered, if you're in Sales. The English is shed like a blazer in Kurla bazaar. No more Powerpoint. Bill it. Bill it. The office is a frenzy of ringing phones, window-ridden screens and people clutching their hair. I see them moving in slow motion, mouth parted in mid-swear twist, eyes staring mutely ahead. They're growing their beards, as the days rip off the calendar one by one towards the 31st.

The tableaux springs in the cubicles, to roar like a power saw.

"bhai, approval aaya ki nahin?" arre laga na bhai phone ISV ko" *beep* "kyaaa...nautanki hai.." *beep* *cell rings*.... "dammit i told you this would happen"...."i'll mail it, meanwhile you screw his happiness" *beep*....*beep*... ...*cell rings* "A very good afternoon sir". *laughter* "How are you sir?" "Oh, tell me about it..." *laughter*

*beep* = censured spattering of colourful abuse from the cow belt
*laughter* = response to bad joke from boss or client, very important

People will drive out when it all ends, to the smell of flowing beer. The official messenger windows blink and open, like hungry chicks in an eagle's nest. I think of skipping feet, of a rainbow-skirt in breathing mustard fields. And of sleepy shoulders to lean on by clattering dark bus-doors. The days are filled with shuffled realities, of the smell of hands and the colour of sparrow-wings, sweeping like automobile beams on a soulless highway.

Suburban Cricket Hives

2005-12-24T07:38:00.000-08:00

On a late afternoon I found myself shuffling towards nowhere. The roads rolled beneath, step by step, and from the crumbs of hazy siesta-dreams I found myself walking into RCF's apologetic side-gate in Chembur, past the police chowki and the vada-pav fellow. Men sat in groups, talking seriously beneath long-haired drooping trees. Aziz Baug's smelly dark pond was behind them, dull in the day by unlit streetlights, bearing its dose of floating weed and plastic, awaiting the night's long sequined glitter. The 'playground' is here, walled on three sides, an aimless blessed stretch that I hope nobody builds on; and my hand gropes in the bag for my camera furtively towards f5.6, 1/125th of a second and a 50 mm lens.

Cricket! Limbs flaying like levers in a sprawling factory, driven by cries as batsmen run hither and thither. No less than seven matches being played here, with balding tennis balls abuzz and darting, connecting hand and bat and thrown-up dust. What concentration you need as a fielder, to know which ball is yours to catch or stop...22 yards seems an unfair distance for tennis ball cricket- every bowler will get whacked, only some less than others. I'd suggest 16 yards with an lbw rule.

I looked on from rocks behind the ground, shying away from unsheathing my camera. But life is short so out it came, and Mumbai's 'public' is anyway heedless of the individual.

I got some clumsy dismissals, including an attempt to sweep which was nicked to the 'keeper. But the shot of the day was this perfect hook shown here. It was just short of good length, on leg stump, and he swivelled perfectly on bare feet, transferring the weight on to his backfoot. He didn't roll his wrists on it but this being a tennis ball it's probably okay, it stops on you, you're still in reasonable control of the shot. It pierced deep square leg and fine leg, unless fine leg was fielding for other match being played at right angles to this one.

It was dusking. A thousand crows nesting in the green of nearby colonies dipped in the slowing air like soot-flakes. Soon it was too dark to play, but shirts still glowed and feet still dashed, for there were matches to be lost or won. Women walked into the church behind; the crows stopped in the unease of twilight; and even in Mumbai where you can play longer, the sun has to set, some time. The lights were on in the street, the vada-pav fellow's hands moved nimbly between things sorted and warm on an English newspaper. The foetid pond too was decking for the night, awaiting some cold secret, some tired movement across the surface in its vanishing glimmers.

Shibboleths for the Weak

2005-12-21T09:20:00.000-08:00

Management is obsessed with the word Learning. It's the correct thing to say when you sit with your boss for a "so how are you finding it" review. You're learning because you get to see cross-functional conflict. You're learning because of hostile accounts, friendly accounts, failed negotiations, pricing mistakes, presentations unprepared for. You're "learning" because of pressure and tight deadlines and high expectations; you're "excited" and "thrilled" and "bullish" about the coming quarter. But when you discuss work with a friend in office you've left the shibboleths for a sputtering of four-letter words or their more vibrant Hindi cousins.

My lad, learning is your return, from the time that you invest in something. Okay, since money's there too let's say we quantify learning and money both, and that that's the return on time invested, RoTI. Now a simple question for the sham of learning that your job gives you, which is wringing the blood and marrow out of what was once a bright-eyed boy on a parrot-green tricycle, making engine noises with a toothless smile past mum's kitchen: what about the opportunity cost of learning? What about all the chapters you never wrote, the music you never learnt, the brush never put to canvas, because your affair with duties gave you learning? What if you die in an accident next Monday? Where will you account for that from, from the knot in your grandfather's lungi or what?

Hermit Snap

2005-12-19T03:35:00.000-08:00

A Fruit between Meetings

2005-12-15T07:39:00.000-08:00

She was elderly and emphatically infirm. She was a gargoyle from grey buildings, an impish pair of marbled eyes staring up through specs, assessing generations, tickled inwardly by naughty memories. There was once a taxi. She waved it down with a hooked umbrella, as if it were a law: 'Every waved umbrella results in at least one stopped taxi.' The taxi is decadent, but was assembled a good few decades after she was born. She smells of Ponds. Her elbows move with vaseline gloss over the maroon cushion. The meter has a pout and says 'Don't touch me'. That's more like an auto meter. I thought she would say, "what are taxis coming to" etc. but she didn't and we drove around Colaba Market and back where we started, with chocolate smudges on her collar. She wants to see a train. I take her to Bombay Central where behind rusted grills she can see the iron lines twisting this way and that. I take her to Vashi where the sun is going down, in a twilight of gold and ticketless shadow. Shakily she wades through corridors, mistaking dusk for dawn, asking for a cola, asking for a train. We buy one, and the foam is on her like brown sugar. I tell her of Haji Ali being taken down for a new one. She drops down in my mind like a neem fruit, yellow, overripe and sweet-smelling. The stranger has no story with us, no reality to maintain. In blurred office images, she went the way she came, which is never.

Damn the Keyboard

2005-12-13T21:47:00.000-08:00

I used to have a ruled notebook filled with bad verse with a Hero fountain pen. I now have a Parker but have lost the ability to write. I can type of course. If you give me a week in a calm place, away from work and home, perhaps I could light that smouldering fire and burn out the theme of my life on paper, finally and truly grasp for the words and forge them into something that speaks. But on a keyboard? Will I lug this laptop there? Damn. I used to frame words in my mind before putting pen to paper: now I just type, rearrange, cut, paste, undo. Something in the brain has died. No thrill now of lines forming in your brain, and then the frenzy of capturing them. My fingers now move over the keys like deranged mechanic needles, while my brain, like a rusty foot-pedal, drives them. O the fountain pen, and the blue spattering of words on white paper, and the pause after a long series of lines to stretch for the inkpot with smudged fingers...

A Toast to Sadness

2005-12-12T07:58:00.000-08:00

Entertain me, say the tamasha-seekers, provide me bite-sized pops of laughter, a hundred rupees worth before we retire for the night and set out again for a day's work.

Where there is entertainment, there is no silence, no resounding embrace of the universe's dark, speckled infinity. Sadness reminds us of silence. All beautiful music does, when it moves our hearts. Like Omkarnath Thakur's heavy, falling, night-soaked Malkauns:

'Baap kahe Meera bhayi re baanwari,
Log kahe kul-nasi re'

What beauty, in sadness. Your own bitter irons are merely a way to connect to the weight of universal music, to touch the words and notes and chords of other beings. It's in the air, in the dusking depths of the sky, in the uneasy quiet of birds in the twilight, in the emptiness of dawn when you awake with the rumblings of vanishing dreams. I think of Itzhak Perlman's tunes used in Schindler's List, the fiddle slowly clasping your heart as ghettoes fall apart and scramble in black and white. It rises as Art above our barbed chapters of longing and betrayal, boredom, conflict, whatever:

'A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is, all mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins' - Yeats

But many people I know instinctively stay away from sadness: they've somehow been conditioned to "have a good time", "think pleasant thoughts", and seek, in the hemmed-in space of an hour, "a blast and awesome fun". They walk through stalls where coin-machines of brightness beckon them. Somewhere inside, maybe, those who have a fetish for fun secretly feel a bit scatterbrained, and a bit scared to open the cupboard. If you want to spend a lifetime filling voids with pretty, tinselled , peach-flavoured wraps, go ahead. It's a free world.

'Kabhi tanhaayiyon mein yun hamaari yaad aayegi...'
..."Na phir tu jee sakega, aur na tujhko maut aayegi'

What a song: the voice soars on the thorny moor of my mind. Early Lata Mangeshkar- what better voice to speak for the dead and wronged. The moon, too, is scared. My lady, wait, I'm coming there, to shuffle alone in endless barren time-moors; to be baited, to be haunted by a whisper of cotton and silk, a spark of anket in my irons of possesive hate, and the edge of a moon-white, ice-cold hand.

Another morning...not quite though

2005-12-08T19:30:00.000-08:00

The auto's winding over Kurla's potholes. The whole of Mumbai's headed to work on this nippy, chiming morning. Thank god for winter, even if it's a Mumbai winter. But today is one of those days when every step I take gives me goosebumps. It's a day for songs, and a day for verse. Deep into Bandra Kurla Complex, where glassy corporate facades rise and array, the words of a man from a hundred and fifty years ago are gripping my mind:

'I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees...'

My polished black shoes tap on smooth marble, I wade through the streams of strangers, all with their hearts beating, their eyes headed somewhere. 'Door. opening', says the smart elevator, and we stand with the extraordinary relationship that people share in elevators, side by side, just staring into nowhere. 'Please. Press. The number. Of your. Floor.'

'and vile it were/ For some three suns to store and hoard myself'

The ties here have come to build a career, stiff ties, ironed shirts and bulging laptop bags. It's still just 8:30 a.m. Later, the floor will be a frenzy of salesmen closing deals as the end of a quarter approaches. You're working against, time, you need to deliver results. And if you do this consistently for some years, you will get the benefits, and a solid foundation, you can even head the country! It's good for your career.

'There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail: There gloom the dark broad seas.'

Tennyson, a bearded Englishman in the mid-19th century. Me, a south Indian in 2005. And words that he scrawled on paper with a crude leaking pen are spreading all over my mind like iron creepers, slow and certain, with a hold firmer than a multinational giant's.

'The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.'

'Door. Opening'. '4th. Floor'. 'Door . Closing'. The lady whose voice they selected and recorded for this- I wonder what she looks like, where her political sympathies lie, and what she likes for breafkfast. It's time to raise bids, check tender documents and send clarifications. People are trickling in, phones are ringing.

'Tho' much is taken, much abides'

Just a while longer, my dear, a little while longer, before cables snap one by one, upto the very last.

A wisp of dream, retained

2005-12-05T08:18:00.000-08:00

Breakfast House

Morning, window-held,
Spreads before my face,
Wet with the monsoon.
The eyes are immobile.
They burnt alive a dog
And danced around its headless
Meat, opened up and oiled;
Oiled dancers tilting
Backward, drumming on
In my mind in sleep,
In a house of easy sleepers.
Then I dropped downward
From somewhere, slowly,
Drifting down like mist,
With a school of red umbrellas.
I dare not waken here
For people who share my blood
Will ask me why I'm acting strange,
And ask me about breakfast.

Unlearning light

2005-12-03T23:02:00.000-08:00

Chowpatty beach, Mumbai, in the flaring uneasy noon of a Sunday. A constricted aperture can do what the eye cannot: ignore the flooding of light around you, the ravaging of every shape with intense energy, and wavelets bouncing off every contour, holding form and relief hostage. But with the ability to shut itself out of all that orgiastic frenzy of solar energy and incidence and reflection, all of it but for a tiny aperture, just enough for the gravity of form and the intensest blaze to enter, you have this, which I like. My camera has taught my mind to see by unlearning light.

That kernel we seek

2005-11-30T06:26:00.000-08:00

Was down in the dumps last week, like a shell upturned in the Mithi. The banalities of corporate life and the boredom of executing processes. But on returning home, the television, forever cursed as the refuge of the shock-headed, brought me a classic. Dravid's 190 at Hamilton against New Zealand in '99. What a composition! 31 boundaries of such perfect ineffable elegance. Drives off his toes through midwicket. Cover drives, off the backfoot, and on the rise off the front foot, like intricate fluid clicking clockwork. I think the grace is what drew him to cricket, as the lusty blows did the Dhonis. It's not that you like cricket, overall, and then you develop your style. What you originally loved, the first time you played, becomes your style, it becomes you. Be it cricket, or poetry, or perhaps love. The way wrists roll and toes swivel and the ball streaks through the gap. What a great player, and how much of it has come from the mere love of grace and not through any natural strength or any animal ability to sense and respond and whack it.

That's what I loved when playing at school. The music in the heart at six in the morning in an Bangalore winter when you're shivering and long for a warm blanket to snuggle back into, and the feel of the bat's grip, and the thrill of lining up for practice, the pick, pock, pick of the old withering ball on willow. The sleepy forearms are waking up. You can smell the fresh grass under your squeaking canvas shoes, and then your heart beats like a drum when the sun is out and there's an hour left for breakfast and then the match. Breakfast is upma, who cares about upma... The new ball! You run your fingers along the seam, angle them across as if you're some crack swing bowler, and then the thrill of announcing, "guys we're shining the Dukes-side". And the willow's chipped edges at dusk when your fingers are aching and sweaty and stinking.

Jacque Kallis, he's another batsman who plays the way one should, with all the dignity and science of it. O to watch him drive off the backfoot. I also watched an old test last week, I think the '86 India-England series, where David Gower got out on zero to such a beautiful, languid, listless shot, a yawning flick to short fine leg off Madan Lal. And I'd rather watch Lara play one heart-stopping pull with his right pad drawn up, than a hundred sixes from Afridi.

So it's not really that we like Cricket, or that we like trading stocks- there's some core conviction that we have, some values we look for, that these passions answer for us. Why do we look for them? Some childhood psychological explanation maybe. I'm plodding through Freud's Interpretation of Dreams; maybe that'll throw up some theory on why elegance and grace mean so much to some like me, and the banging frenzy of American football or even the slog overs of cricket mean so much to others.

In my case, it all ended when Mum decided a coaching camp was expensive and in any case being a middle class bram student I'd better focus on studies, and on my ICSE boards. I actually sulked on a tree and watched Carlton Saldhana teach my friends about the importance of top-hand driving, and how the great Azhar, even when he flicked behind square, never used bottom hand for a vertical bat shot. Someone called out my name, the coach saw me on the tree and gave me a dirty look, and then I decided to end it all. No more cricket. I had played about six matches for school, I opened in all of them, my highest score was 13, my lowest score was zero, and everyone agreed I was an elegant batsman. Among the finest memories of my life is a reflex straight drive off a near yorker-length ball, hard, new and shiny, from a tall and nasty bowler. It zipped through and past the stumps, parting the grass, and crossed the fence right behind the bowler. You'd never think a short, skinny fellow could make a ball do that. Ah, what a beautiful game.

The games people play

2005-11-11T02:29:00.000-08:00

What games did you play as a child?

It's a long story, but here's a bit of it from me. I grew up shifting from place to place, and made and refined, with a labour and diligence I now find incredible, my own games. We stayed for a year in a British-type sarkaari bungalow in the middle of a barren nowhere of oil tanks. That's where it started. I played cricket with the watchman of course but got bored when he carted me all over the garden. It was also time to kick the football in the corridors, playing for England or playing for Italy at the whims of a fun-seeking mind. And I burnt paper planes: I made hundreds and hundreds of them, scribbled Noyta CCCP and USAF and I hit them with each other as they flew. If you bang into a plane, you've shot it down. Then you dutifully kneel on the floor, while mother is asleep in her bedroom, and you set it on fire. Flames slide form the slide, curling the metal to crumbling black. I fought entire wars like this: what hard work! Russia always won; I found the country's name stylish, with some picture of golden haired, handsome people with fragrant bodies and elegant palaces.

Then tennis started, with a badminton racket and a table tennis ball, against the verandah's wall. Stefan Edberg vs Boris Becker. You hit for one, then for the other. The anguish and elation are real. You record every point in a notebook's last pages. Football tournaments, tennis tournaments, wars. Then cricket came, to stay for life. Sunil Gavaskar walks in, swinging his bat, skipping. I'm Sunil Gavaskar and the point is to get out a few times so that Kapil Dev can come in and belt the glorious sixes. And on getting out I would kneel down on the floor, holding my forehead in despair. Then the next batsman would come in, swinging his bat, skipping. Actually this game, in various forms, has been played all my life. My hero for the last ten years has been Dravid, not for his runs or consistency but the grace he brings to a game commoditised by power-hitting and clinical team-drills. So even now, with a tennis ball and a light bat, I practice against a wall with a jagged rubber carpet on the good length spot, defending and prodding amongst an imaginary close-in field and a slip cordon waiting like devotees for the day's prasad at big man's puja.

No more detailed scores in my notebooks of course. So. How much of what we are is shaped by the games we make for ourselves as we grow up?

Of the unsaid things

2005-11-10T06:11:00.000-08:00

A life's musty archives stretch in the mind. And it conjures wild fractals, stopped twilights of story that we bear with us, unable to articulate, unable to let go of. They walk with us like still-born babies, clinging to the shoulder in corporate spaces, at crossings, in crowds. This is a place for such things. And sometimes, every now and then, is a neat little paper flight among the networked digits of a turning world. This is a place for paper flights.

This is a place for the redeyed wanderer who bears his stage and songs with him. You can stop by, in a space between broken furniture, with poetry, twig-fires and lemon tea. We will build with our scripts, in the wake of cursory dinners, the eaves of a rythmic hut. Let the weight of unsaid things hang upside down in the dark, like bats in our caves. Here, in a dimly lit make-believe, they may blink, and suddenly with a shade of what you have been, take wing.