Am in Chennai, close to the sea that i adore, basking in the warmth of sea air. My second home that I love and dislike. It's a deep love thickened by the heavenly joy the city gave me in my growing years. Its smells, its wide roads, the electric trains, the overnight train journeys we as sisters did with my mom by Madras Mail, the early morning rides from Park Station to Chromepet, the walk from the station through a crowded market meandering into neat suburbs...the image of a wooden-plank swing in the verandah of a home...they are memories that come back in flashes, calming my nerves in the worst of circumstances.
What's more! Am in the company of cousins I grew up with. Summers meant Madras. An unlikely getaway for a pleasant weather pampered Bangalorean. Sweltering heat and burning feet on those asphalted roads were enough to scare us off the city.
But somehow we always wanted to get back to Madras even if there was a week's break. To our grandma's home. Chromepet Thaathagaru, as we'd call our grandpa, was the man we dreaded the most. But it was Ammumma's house. Full of love. Full of cousins. Fighting elders. Mornings meant choco milk in that Bournvita cup or barley that Ammumma would travel with from the kitchen to portico to give to each cousin, cousins going in all the four directions around the house plucking flowers. Plucking flowers -- shell flowers, jasmine of about three or four varieties, hibiscus, red oleander, tulsi. If a bunch was busy plucking flowers, another was busy catching up with sports news in Indian Express, making plans to go to the beach, or temples closeby.
If the thatch-roofed verandah formed a centre of such activity in the mornings, the backyard was no less active. Cousins would take turns in feeding the chulha near the tulasi-kota in outside the rear-verandah with dried mango leaves, twigs and just about anything burnable that they could lay hands on. Then there were others who'd draw water from the well and pour into the brass, aluminium and plastic buckets. The thotti, a mini watertank was no less utilised -- it meant climbing on for a view of the tile-roofed home from its rear. It was probably the only kitchen around those days where cooking happened on charcoal embers, bathwater on a chulha (poyyi in Telugu) that we cousins loved to feed with dried leaves and twigs for fire from the compound every morning...it was ours for those few weeks, as we invaded every nook and corner with our wild glee. The sideyard of that big plot with a tile-roofed house with its mango, custard, jackfruit and curry leaf trees, was our favourite haunt on shady afternoons.
And we played games to our best of imagination. Plenty of them, in between fights, fisticuffs, happiness and love.
That was my grandma's house, where a cement apology for apartments stands today. That was my grandma's house, that I continue to visit in my dreams today, not just in summers but every season. I have not seen the apartments that have come up there. I probably never will.
Friday, 23 November 2007
Thursday, 22 November 2007
lovely moments mean from Sir with love
Had met him after about 11 months. My school Principal. M T S, as we'd fondly call him. Was unable to write about the last meeting around last Christmas. This time round, was doubly happy when my cousin and myself saw the joy on his face when he knocked at his door.
That cosy south indian chennai home replete with its backyard, windows that are about three decades old, red-oxide flooring, a portico, simple interior and a spacious traditional kitchen that would remind you of your grandparents' home! He retired over a decade ago. But am still surprised how he maintains that youthful demeanor, how his wife so quietly manages the show at home, and how nothing has changed since he left, except that he's made that effort to grow wiser while his hairs turn silvery by the day.
We chatted about many things in between chai and biscuits that aunty made. He has just returned from a visit to his son in the United States and full of joy. That glee on his son's face on a portrait snap, the pride in his smile for being able to see his son there, his explanation of logic behind wedding rituals...wish our conversation went on and on.
Sir has not changed a bit. And said after his return from the company of warm people in that country, he found happiness only today when my cousin and I called on him.
Reaching Sir's house has always been an adventure, it's the fourth trip that me has made with a family member, with just as much as an address that I can recall -- No 7, tagore street, vijayalakshmipuram... The first time was a disaster, he was not around after all the walking in hot sun with my ever so helpful dad,..the second time -- a short and cordial, but happy meeting, the third, a warm return after 10 years. I had been too quick at losing his numbers after our last visit though, a muddlehead that I am.
Today's meeting, the fourth one, has been the most happy visits of all...my arguments about the ifs and buts of wedding rituals, questioning him on reason behind ritual, logic and lack of it, the constant jibes me and cousin Ranji exchanged with him...exchanging numbers...and most of all, his loving words of advice. The warmth of the sunshine couple is what I will cherish always.
Am happy I left several other things behind for these few moments of joy...what more joy than meeting a teacher you so loved at school! Is there any match from the contentment you get when you touch his feet and he blesses you? Hoping he makes it to the wedding:)
That cosy south indian chennai home replete with its backyard, windows that are about three decades old, red-oxide flooring, a portico, simple interior and a spacious traditional kitchen that would remind you of your grandparents' home! He retired over a decade ago. But am still surprised how he maintains that youthful demeanor, how his wife so quietly manages the show at home, and how nothing has changed since he left, except that he's made that effort to grow wiser while his hairs turn silvery by the day.
We chatted about many things in between chai and biscuits that aunty made. He has just returned from a visit to his son in the United States and full of joy. That glee on his son's face on a portrait snap, the pride in his smile for being able to see his son there, his explanation of logic behind wedding rituals...wish our conversation went on and on.
Sir has not changed a bit. And said after his return from the company of warm people in that country, he found happiness only today when my cousin and I called on him.
Reaching Sir's house has always been an adventure, it's the fourth trip that me has made with a family member, with just as much as an address that I can recall -- No 7, tagore street, vijayalakshmipuram... The first time was a disaster, he was not around after all the walking in hot sun with my ever so helpful dad,..the second time -- a short and cordial, but happy meeting, the third, a warm return after 10 years. I had been too quick at losing his numbers after our last visit though, a muddlehead that I am.
Today's meeting, the fourth one, has been the most happy visits of all...my arguments about the ifs and buts of wedding rituals, questioning him on reason behind ritual, logic and lack of it, the constant jibes me and cousin Ranji exchanged with him...exchanging numbers...and most of all, his loving words of advice. The warmth of the sunshine couple is what I will cherish always.
Am happy I left several other things behind for these few moments of joy...what more joy than meeting a teacher you so loved at school! Is there any match from the contentment you get when you touch his feet and he blesses you? Hoping he makes it to the wedding:)
tears of parting
Am writing in after a good gap. But gathered enough in mindscape as the days rolled by. Have quit Tehelka. Hard, emotional, but inevitable. Have felt so much part of the family that it was hard to leave easily. A friend said recently, `love your job, not your company'. I would agree with that, not in my case though. How can you not miss what you made a home for nearly four years? How can you forget what you gleefully set up as part of the founding team, even if it were a branch office? How can you forget those moments of anxiety, pain, and constant prayer when you locked up a new office, worried about curtains not being there, windows being vulnerable to bulglary, computers needing safekeeping...? Those days of chaos when none of us knew where the paper was heading, those lonely moments when gossip of a daily newspaper did not form your day...it was all about Tehelka. Nothing else mattered.
Life, as I told my boss in my adieu note, revolved around work so far. Am hoping that marriage makes me work better in future. As they say, putting your foot on a new step means having to leave the previous one...the staircase is the same at the end of it all! Mails from my bosses did make me feel elated. I will continue to write...for that's me
Life, as I told my boss in my adieu note, revolved around work so far. Am hoping that marriage makes me work better in future. As they say, putting your foot on a new step means having to leave the previous one...the staircase is the same at the end of it all! Mails from my bosses did make me feel elated. I will continue to write...for that's me
Friday, 9 November 2007
does the West care to know more?
Have headed to the comp by default after watching the animated film on Mahabharata. Cartoon Network. Yesterday I watched an episode of its Krishna series. And liked it. Krishna -- the animated version is good, despite its shortcomings. It's characters look Indian. The saddest thing about Mahabharata animated, is that its makers did not care much about the research aspect. Athletic bodies of men that remind you of Hollywood heroes, pathetic costume sense -- check the skin-tight tops, lack of style, stark difference in body language, a Draupadi who looks like more manly and it only makes you want to look away. The game of dice becomes Snakes and Ladders in Mahabharata. Jungle huts stand over bamboo stilts (nothing wrong with it), but we thought bamboo stilt huts are found only in the North-East where constant flooding makes its demands on housing structures!
Indians have a different body language, a different sense of style, aesthetics and gait. What is more concerning, is that this is what the children are watching. Why are we clamping down a Western body language on them, and making them believe that's the thing?
What a contrast from the Sundays when life centered around Ramanand Sagar's Ramayan and B R Chopra's Mahabharat! They were not perfect, but were at least Indian enough to be watched by Indians. And we children still relate to them visually.
Indians have a different body language, a different sense of style, aesthetics and gait. What is more concerning, is that this is what the children are watching. Why are we clamping down a Western body language on them, and making them believe that's the thing?
What a contrast from the Sundays when life centered around Ramanand Sagar's Ramayan and B R Chopra's Mahabharat! They were not perfect, but were at least Indian enough to be watched by Indians. And we children still relate to them visually.
Thursday, 8 November 2007
on way to the altar
Forty days from now, I tie the knot. Get married. With my childhood friend who was always around in my life. But something happened. And we decided to go it together, chucking our inhibitions, fears of hurting our people's `sentiments' and even the fear of losing each other as friends.
Left to myself, I would have preferred living in. Yeah. My college peers will wonder if it was the same me when the hear this. They've known me as this conservative go-getter running in and out of the library and being mad about something or the other.
But it's true. With each passing year, I'm only growing to question everything around -- from why only the woman should wear a sign of being married, to why a human and God are forever addressed as `he'. Why not `she'?
Why on earth should the husband alone be the one you love the most? Why are you dubbed adulterous even if you as much as be friends with another man? Why is chastity forever the burden of a woman? Who invented this ritual called marriage that's become a caste-based racist business today? Why are we Indians clinging on to a system of caste we don't even know how old it is?
These are questions that run the mind of probably every woman. Just as it makes me wonder always why my male friends always prefer to vent their frustration by abusing women verbally. Or why the woman in any brahmin household still becomes a temporary untouchable for three days a month, deeming her `impure'. It doesn't matter that the same woman cannot give up work at her office however tired she is. It doesn't help that she's taking on work even when she's tired.
But for journalism, I would not have as much as channelised my inner fire. My energy would have been lost in simply reacting to everything men around me did.
`Why living in? When your parents have relented keeping their reservations aside?' people ask.
It's not people who I am questioning. It's the system that people have allowed to evolve over the years. It's the structure people refuse to break for something contemporary and something new.
It's their reluctance to allow something new. It's their perennial fear of `what others will say' that suffocates.
I read somewhere that in the vedic ages, it was kankanabandhanam, the bangle-knot that held significance. Apparently the boy and the girl were made to wear these as a sign of being married, for protection from evil, and so on.
While over the ages people conveniently converted this into a ritual part of the wedding ceremony in many communities, they've not made the effort to go back in history to find out the significance of the ritual.
Living in has its enormous disadvantages. It's a Western concept. But tell me, what was the purpose of marriage in the first place? Wasn't it about letting two people adjust to each other? Don't live-in couples too do the same? And are divorces not happening despite grand weddings that more often than not leave parents near bankrupt?
I'm heading to the altar with some optimism. Am also trying to shed inhibitions. But the questions remain.
Left to myself, I would have preferred living in. Yeah. My college peers will wonder if it was the same me when the hear this. They've known me as this conservative go-getter running in and out of the library and being mad about something or the other.
But it's true. With each passing year, I'm only growing to question everything around -- from why only the woman should wear a sign of being married, to why a human and God are forever addressed as `he'. Why not `she'?
Why on earth should the husband alone be the one you love the most? Why are you dubbed adulterous even if you as much as be friends with another man? Why is chastity forever the burden of a woman? Who invented this ritual called marriage that's become a caste-based racist business today? Why are we Indians clinging on to a system of caste we don't even know how old it is?
These are questions that run the mind of probably every woman. Just as it makes me wonder always why my male friends always prefer to vent their frustration by abusing women verbally. Or why the woman in any brahmin household still becomes a temporary untouchable for three days a month, deeming her `impure'. It doesn't matter that the same woman cannot give up work at her office however tired she is. It doesn't help that she's taking on work even when she's tired.
But for journalism, I would not have as much as channelised my inner fire. My energy would have been lost in simply reacting to everything men around me did.
`Why living in? When your parents have relented keeping their reservations aside?' people ask.
It's not people who I am questioning. It's the system that people have allowed to evolve over the years. It's the structure people refuse to break for something contemporary and something new.
It's their reluctance to allow something new. It's their perennial fear of `what others will say' that suffocates.
I read somewhere that in the vedic ages, it was kankanabandhanam, the bangle-knot that held significance. Apparently the boy and the girl were made to wear these as a sign of being married, for protection from evil, and so on.
While over the ages people conveniently converted this into a ritual part of the wedding ceremony in many communities, they've not made the effort to go back in history to find out the significance of the ritual.
Living in has its enormous disadvantages. It's a Western concept. But tell me, what was the purpose of marriage in the first place? Wasn't it about letting two people adjust to each other? Don't live-in couples too do the same? And are divorces not happening despite grand weddings that more often than not leave parents near bankrupt?
I'm heading to the altar with some optimism. Am also trying to shed inhibitions. But the questions remain.
breather this diwali
It was during high school that my sister and I somehow started developing a dislike to crackers. When neighbours lit the Lakshmi, bijli, or rockets, it was like we saw currency notes burn in the air.
Showers of light in the form of flower pots and sparklers are good. But sheer waste of precious money for shortlived joy.
Over 15 years on, it's diwali in Bangalore. And such a blessing not to hear those pathetic cracker noises like before. Is it a conscious decision by the city's millions of denizens not to indulge in vulgar display of wealth? Is it green Diwali?
Or just the case of cracker prices sky-rocketing by each passing year? Either ways, it's not just Bangalore's roads, but its millions who benefit, by getting to breathe easier.
Wonder why no one has thought of holding community or colony cracker shows in open playgrounds instead of spilling paper garbage on roads.
Showers of light in the form of flower pots and sparklers are good. But sheer waste of precious money for shortlived joy.
Over 15 years on, it's diwali in Bangalore. And such a blessing not to hear those pathetic cracker noises like before. Is it a conscious decision by the city's millions of denizens not to indulge in vulgar display of wealth? Is it green Diwali?
Or just the case of cracker prices sky-rocketing by each passing year? Either ways, it's not just Bangalore's roads, but its millions who benefit, by getting to breathe easier.
Wonder why no one has thought of holding community or colony cracker shows in open playgrounds instead of spilling paper garbage on roads.
from death called fear, to life
We stood at the moving staircase.
You and I.
It threatened to gobble me up as it moved.
You led me in, clasping my hand.
Like a mother held its child…
Time froze, and I stopped breathing.
We got off the escalator.
You and I.
I heaved deep sighs of relief.
You led me, my dear, from fear to ecstasy.
You breathed new life into me.
You and I.
It threatened to gobble me up as it moved.
You led me in, clasping my hand.
Like a mother held its child…
Time froze, and I stopped breathing.
We got off the escalator.
You and I.
I heaved deep sighs of relief.
You led me, my dear, from fear to ecstasy.
You breathed new life into me.
Wednesday, 7 November 2007
in anger you said you wanted me dead
in anger, you said you'd kill me
you were frustrated,
irked you could do little to belittle the rebel in me
you wondered aloud what was wrong with me
he said, sit with her, talk to her...
she'll tell you what's wrong
i didn't matter to you.
the ritual did
ritual that kept you from touching me.
you said you wouldn't come near me as you wanted to pray
Did your prayer matter to you more than that touch of love?
Did my ocean of tears not move you?
it brought forth my worst fears
that you wanted me dead before i was born.
It hurts all the more, because it was you who gave me life.
you were frustrated,
irked you could do little to belittle the rebel in me
you wondered aloud what was wrong with me
he said, sit with her, talk to her...
she'll tell you what's wrong
i didn't matter to you.
the ritual did
ritual that kept you from touching me.
you said you wouldn't come near me as you wanted to pray
Did your prayer matter to you more than that touch of love?
Did my ocean of tears not move you?
it brought forth my worst fears
that you wanted me dead before i was born.
It hurts all the more, because it was you who gave me life.
Monday, 5 November 2007
this is just a beginning
i stand by the sea, wondering what that big ocean is like. all i can see is the waves crashing around. all i feel is the wind blowing from that horizon...but i know there's life out there, so deep that a lifetime's too less...
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