In keeping with the season, here's a list of things I'm thankful for - both big and small, meaningful and mundane.
1. Agatha Christies in a lamplit glow on chill, thunderous evenings.
2. Mangsho - cooked the Bong way, super-jhal, with lots of alu.
3. Places to go, places to see!
4. Peppermint tea
5. The sheer random luck of being alive, here, today.
6. S and S, my rocks, the people I turn to for comfort and succour, or just to talk, for never failing to yank me out of the blues. And for making me laugh, whether intentionally or un.
7. PG Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, Tolkien, A.A. Milne, Jack London, Michael Crichton, Ruskin Bond, Roald Dahl, Saki - not necessarily in that order.
8. Coffee. You are my lifeline.
9. The Internet. Viva!
10. My family, for supporting my wildest decisions, encouraging me to take the road less travelled, being there when I need them. They're still learning how not to ask the wrong question at the wrong time, but they'll get there!
11. Dogs. And, in particular, Baloo, the joyous, the curious, the ever young-at-heart.
12. Bookshops, music stores, coffeeshops, pubs.
13. Rationality.
14. Possibilities. :)
Friday, November 27, 2009
Thursday, November 05, 2009
Intermission
1. The Buddha walked into a pizza place and said, "Make me one with everything."
2. Why can't the Buddha vacuum in corners?
Because he has no attachments.
3. How did Darth Vader know what Luke was getting for Christmas?
Because he felt his presents.
4. An ethics question: If you cloned yourself, then took the clone up to the top of a tall building, stripped it, and pushed it off, would it be
a. Murder?
b. Suicide?
or c. Just another obscene clone fall?
2. Why can't the Buddha vacuum in corners?
Because he has no attachments.
3. How did Darth Vader know what Luke was getting for Christmas?
Because he felt his presents.
4. An ethics question: If you cloned yourself, then took the clone up to the top of a tall building, stripped it, and pushed it off, would it be
a. Murder?
b. Suicide?
or c. Just another obscene clone fall?
Monday, June 29, 2009
Calcutta - Kolkata
Being back in Kolkata is like walking in uber-slow-motion, neck-deep through molasses. Everything is so excruciatingly slow. Traffic inches along. People plod. Dust drips onto everything. The city sags in the April heat. Women sit in doorways near the local school, waiting for their children. Or plod, sweating flakes of talcum powder, to the local bank, where officials have, over years, mastered the art of making each transaction last decades. Customers wait, mute and uncomplaining. Everyone waits for everything. For CESC to deal with cable faults (apparently their monitoring systems don’t alert them to these – they find out only once irate customers start calling). For the cable company to deliver the channels it’s supposed to. For electricians, plumbers, carpenters, who arrive days after they were due. Because if you live in this city, you know the secret to survival here: acceptance of one central idea: "eikhaney tho erokom-i hoy" - this is the way things work here.
I didn't grow up in Kolkata, but in Calcutta, a less bonglicised, more cosmopolitan, livelier, more interesting scape. I went to the best school in the universe, had the coolest family on the planet, and spent all my time with the most fun friends ever, in this most astonishing of cities. Calcutta was the celebration of every festival - Diwali and Pujo, Christmas and Eid. Calcutta was the annual book fair, the Dover Lane music festival, English and vernacular theatre. Calcutta was Hari Prasad Chaurasia and Herbie Hancock, Kishore Kumar and Frank Sinatra. Calcutta was winter mornings at the zoo, and tea and contemplation in the monsoon. Calcutta was coffee houses and bars, jazz and blues, the enlightened, liberal left, a city of artists and writers, musicians and movement. Calcutta was the unquestioned cultural centre of the universe.
Of course, “this best of all possible worlds” perspective is easy to maintain in school, with relatively little direct interaction with the outside world. Through the last 14 years, as my connections with other cities have grown, and my time in Calcutta decreased, the fiction has been increasingly harder to maintain. Kolkata has steadily decayed, so that each time I turn around to take a look, it is just a little greyer, a little duller and more provincial, while cities I once abhorred as soul-less cultural vacuums – New Delhi springs to mind – have grown and greened and prospered. The Calcutta of my childhood has vanished, with neither bang nor whimper. Which makes me wonder, did it ever exist, except in my mind?
I left Calcutta in the summer of 1998. In 11 years, I’ve moved around a fair bit, and through it all, at some deeply-buried emotional core, I have always thought of it as “home” – the city I know so well that I could walk around blind-folded, the city I love so fiercely that it brings tears to my eyes. Then, earlier this year, I decided to take a sabbatical in Calcutta. Except that it was Kolkata. And it drove me up the effing wall.
It isn’t just the decay – after all, great cities decay and are reborn. Or the fact that pollution has actually caused weather change – Calcutta no longer sees the violent, refreshing norwesters for which I remember waiting excitedly. It’s so many things that I don’t even know where to begin. The steady un-greening of the city. The complete disdain for traffic rules by ALL SECs (justified by the entirely unreasonable explanation of “everyone does it, this is the only way to survive here”, and by the somewhat more offensive “you won’t understand, these foreign ideas don't work here"). The bottles, cans and plastic bags thrown carelessly from car windows onto streets. The apathy. The make-a-fast-buck mores on display in banners that urge ill-informed students who have failed class XII board exams to “save a year” by enrolling with some seedy college, unrecognized and unaccredited by anyone. The ludicrousness of a government that, attempting to ban the polluting, 2-stroke-engine auto-rickshaws, managed to “stop” only 60 of them, across the city, when autos remained running, in defiance of said rule.
But I think, more than all the physical manifestations, it is the perspective of Calcuttans that is the most worrying. In all civilizations comes a time when paths diverge around one word: change. Those that embrace change move on. Those that don’t, fall back. In Calcutta, change is a distinctly dirty word. Old is gold, none of your new-fangled rubbish for us, thank you very much. Couple with this, the peculiarly Calcuttan lip-curling sneer of disdain for other cities, supported by empty pride in the cultural achievements of previous generations. (And I cringe to think that I was once the poster-child for this kind of thinking.) The rallying cries of “Tagore” and “land reforms” (an achievement in itself, but subversive in the way it draws attention away from how little else has been achieved in three decades of uninterrupted rule by a single party) are alive and strong. And, worst of all, nobody seems to be interested in what goes on elsewhere. For too many people in Kolkata, so sure are they of their superiority that there is no elsewhere worth knowing about.
But all of Calcutta’s claims to fame are dead. Culture? Delhi has book fairs and music festivals. Bombay has Kala Ghoda. New York celebrates every damn thing on the planet. Cosmopolitanism? Count the non-Indian people in other cities, and then let’s talk. Industry? Sure, at one point in the dim past. But now, between the CPI(M) and the Trinamool Congress, any hope of real economic development in the next 30 years has been successfully scotched. Congratulations, West Bengal, you just shot yourself in the foot.
I am a product of a particular Calcutta space-time, and proud of it. I grew up in the most fantastic city in the world. But – and I begin to realize this only now – perhaps that city was fantastic because it was fantasy, a child’s view of a gentle jailer, a fond mother’s insistence that her criminal child is better than anyone else. And even as this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine, there’s no getting around it: Calcutta, your day is done.
I didn't grow up in Kolkata, but in Calcutta, a less bonglicised, more cosmopolitan, livelier, more interesting scape. I went to the best school in the universe, had the coolest family on the planet, and spent all my time with the most fun friends ever, in this most astonishing of cities. Calcutta was the celebration of every festival - Diwali and Pujo, Christmas and Eid. Calcutta was the annual book fair, the Dover Lane music festival, English and vernacular theatre. Calcutta was Hari Prasad Chaurasia and Herbie Hancock, Kishore Kumar and Frank Sinatra. Calcutta was winter mornings at the zoo, and tea and contemplation in the monsoon. Calcutta was coffee houses and bars, jazz and blues, the enlightened, liberal left, a city of artists and writers, musicians and movement. Calcutta was the unquestioned cultural centre of the universe.
Of course, “this best of all possible worlds” perspective is easy to maintain in school, with relatively little direct interaction with the outside world. Through the last 14 years, as my connections with other cities have grown, and my time in Calcutta decreased, the fiction has been increasingly harder to maintain. Kolkata has steadily decayed, so that each time I turn around to take a look, it is just a little greyer, a little duller and more provincial, while cities I once abhorred as soul-less cultural vacuums – New Delhi springs to mind – have grown and greened and prospered. The Calcutta of my childhood has vanished, with neither bang nor whimper. Which makes me wonder, did it ever exist, except in my mind?
I left Calcutta in the summer of 1998. In 11 years, I’ve moved around a fair bit, and through it all, at some deeply-buried emotional core, I have always thought of it as “home” – the city I know so well that I could walk around blind-folded, the city I love so fiercely that it brings tears to my eyes. Then, earlier this year, I decided to take a sabbatical in Calcutta. Except that it was Kolkata. And it drove me up the effing wall.
It isn’t just the decay – after all, great cities decay and are reborn. Or the fact that pollution has actually caused weather change – Calcutta no longer sees the violent, refreshing norwesters for which I remember waiting excitedly. It’s so many things that I don’t even know where to begin. The steady un-greening of the city. The complete disdain for traffic rules by ALL SECs (justified by the entirely unreasonable explanation of “everyone does it, this is the only way to survive here”, and by the somewhat more offensive “you won’t understand, these foreign ideas don't work here"). The bottles, cans and plastic bags thrown carelessly from car windows onto streets. The apathy. The make-a-fast-buck mores on display in banners that urge ill-informed students who have failed class XII board exams to “save a year” by enrolling with some seedy college, unrecognized and unaccredited by anyone. The ludicrousness of a government that, attempting to ban the polluting, 2-stroke-engine auto-rickshaws, managed to “stop” only 60 of them, across the city, when autos remained running, in defiance of said rule.
But I think, more than all the physical manifestations, it is the perspective of Calcuttans that is the most worrying. In all civilizations comes a time when paths diverge around one word: change. Those that embrace change move on. Those that don’t, fall back. In Calcutta, change is a distinctly dirty word. Old is gold, none of your new-fangled rubbish for us, thank you very much. Couple with this, the peculiarly Calcuttan lip-curling sneer of disdain for other cities, supported by empty pride in the cultural achievements of previous generations. (And I cringe to think that I was once the poster-child for this kind of thinking.) The rallying cries of “Tagore” and “land reforms” (an achievement in itself, but subversive in the way it draws attention away from how little else has been achieved in three decades of uninterrupted rule by a single party) are alive and strong. And, worst of all, nobody seems to be interested in what goes on elsewhere. For too many people in Kolkata, so sure are they of their superiority that there is no elsewhere worth knowing about.
But all of Calcutta’s claims to fame are dead. Culture? Delhi has book fairs and music festivals. Bombay has Kala Ghoda. New York celebrates every damn thing on the planet. Cosmopolitanism? Count the non-Indian people in other cities, and then let’s talk. Industry? Sure, at one point in the dim past. But now, between the CPI(M) and the Trinamool Congress, any hope of real economic development in the next 30 years has been successfully scotched. Congratulations, West Bengal, you just shot yourself in the foot.
I am a product of a particular Calcutta space-time, and proud of it. I grew up in the most fantastic city in the world. But – and I begin to realize this only now – perhaps that city was fantastic because it was fantasy, a child’s view of a gentle jailer, a fond mother’s insistence that her criminal child is better than anyone else. And even as this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine, there’s no getting around it: Calcutta, your day is done.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Baloo: 1996-2009
Baloo chose us.
We had heard about someone who had a litter of Labrador puppies she was desperate to find homes for, and persuaded ourselves that we would only go to see them, nothing more. There was no question of us bringing home another dog - Bagheera (our rather ferocious and uneven-tempered Boxer) wouldn't stand for it.
And then, as we walked in to a room, this one puppy, pushed around by all the others, toddled up to us, looked up and smiled - and just like that, the decision was made.
That was the summer of 1996. We've had 13 years with the happiest, smiley-est, gentlest, most joyful of beings. And now, suddenly, she's gone.
We try to focus on the fact that she lived a full and joyous life, that she didn't suffer much or for too long at the end, that she went peacefully, in her own bed, that she was our best beloved. But there's a hole in our lives, an ache in our hearts, and the world feels darker, full of tears and untamable grief.
RIP.
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Goodbye, Mr. Crichton
Over many years of reading, my taste in books has gone through distinct phases. At different periods of time, I have been addicted to thrillers, westerns, comic strips, biographies, math-and-science non-fiction, chick-lit, philosophy...
Regardless of literary phases, however, there are some books that I have been able to pick up and read over and over, anytime, anywhere. These are the books that have kept me up at night, engrossed and trapped in the story, no matter how many times I have read them before. These are the books that have traveled around with me wherever I've moved - a permanent piece of my baggage, an integral part of my sense of home.
Thank you, Michael Crichton, for all the great books - for Travels and Andromeda Strain and Terminal Man and Jurassic Park... but most of all, for Congo. For "Peter tickle tickle Amy, Amy good gorilla." For the book I've read about a hundred times since I was ten years old, each time without the two pages that our copy had lost (I've never read those two pages - I still have no idea what happens there, after twenty years of addiction to the story). For capturing my attention with the Mercator projection, changing my view of the world and firing my imagination.
Rest in peace.
Regardless of literary phases, however, there are some books that I have been able to pick up and read over and over, anytime, anywhere. These are the books that have kept me up at night, engrossed and trapped in the story, no matter how many times I have read them before. These are the books that have traveled around with me wherever I've moved - a permanent piece of my baggage, an integral part of my sense of home.
Thank you, Michael Crichton, for all the great books - for Travels and Andromeda Strain and Terminal Man and Jurassic Park... but most of all, for Congo. For "Peter tickle tickle Amy, Amy good gorilla." For the book I've read about a hundred times since I was ten years old, each time without the two pages that our copy had lost (I've never read those two pages - I still have no idea what happens there, after twenty years of addiction to the story). For capturing my attention with the Mercator projection, changing my view of the world and firing my imagination.
Rest in peace.
Hope
Scratch the earlier post - the people have spoken (with about 50% of the counting done). There is hope for the world yet.
Wooooo-hooooooo!
Wooooo-hooooooo!
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
In The Final Count...
It's a grey, glowering day in New Jersey as America goes to the polls to vote on the next four years. People across the country have been lining up since before dawn, in some places, waiting hours to exercise their vote. Arguing with election officials and volunteers at booths about their right to vote, waiting for their names to be found on the lists.
Meanwhile, some said analysts and journalists are writing articles like this one.
So in keeping with the story of the hour, and pushed to the end of my tether by this kind of writing, here's my take.
1. The US is the biggest debtor country in the world. Its economy has gone to pot, its financial system is falling apart thanks to at best negligent, at worst outright fraudulent rating of securities. Unemployment is on the rise. People are losing homes, jobs, healthcare.
2. The Iraq war has been a front for control of oil. Think about this for a moment: the invasion of a sovereign country for control of its resources. With the public being hoodwinked every step of the way.
3. And then kept in line, despite the systematic removal of individual freedoms, by an administration that thrives on fear and ringing cries of "never forget".
4. America's claim to moral superiority has been razed to the ground with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the invasion of Iraq, a sovereign nation (it was ludicrous to watch Cheney rebuke Russia for invading South Ossetia recently).
5. American "foreign policy" is a disgrace, the constant sabre-clanking with Iran and refusing to sit down across the table being just one example.
6. America uses more energy - and more oil - than any other country in the world. And yet, the US is not on board with international agreements re reducing carbon footprint, energy use, global warming impact, etc.
And yet, the issue to focus on, as per Peggy Noonan, is how Obama addresses abortion?
"You only want a medical practice to be rare when it isn't good. For Mr. Obama, whose mind tends, as intellectuals' minds do, toward the abstract, it all seems so . . . abstract. And cold. And rather suggestive of radical departures. "That's above my pay grade." Friend, that is your pay grade, that's where the presidency lives, in issues like that."
President Clinton once said that abortions need to be "safe, legal and rare". I agree on the first two points. Outlawing abortion will lead to a black market situation. Like the organ trade in Dirty Pretty Things, this would mean back rooms and coat hangers. (The same applies to prostitution: legalization empowers sex workers, gives them rights, protection, health.) On a side note, there is an interesting argument in Freakonomics, that talks the correlation between crime and unwanted babies - specifically, relating the drop in crime rates in the US to Roe V. Wade. It may not be provable, but it's a cogent, powerful argument, and a highly logical one.
In the final count, this is an issue that needs to be left to a woman and her doctor. And a decision that needs to be left to the woman. The government's involvement in issues of right and wrong should extend only to areas where there is a victim. Enough with the regulation of victimless crimes. Enough with stuffing one group's beliefs down the throats of another.
So what is the presidency about?
Enabling citizens to earn a better living. Building and maintaining strong, mutually beneficial trade and policy relationships with other countries and regimes. Creating opportunity and economic growth, reducing debt, showing fiscal prudence, creating necessary regulation and providing necessary oversight. Enabling access (in whatever way) to healthcare and education and sustainable livelihoods. Providing "common goods" - infrastructure, parks, clean air and water.
If I had a vote to cast in this election, it would have been Obama's without question. And this was true even before McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate - although that should have tipped the balance for any thinking person. I don't necessarily agree with Obama's policies on the economy - I'm all for the economic ideal of perfect competition. But I also see that an Obama presidency has the chance to make the world a slightly safer place. I like his foreign policy approach. I think it's high time America sat down at the negotiating table with other countries and sabre-clanking and fist-waving at the drop of a hat.
It is interesting that, in an era of nuclear proliferation, escalating terrorism and bloodshed, where no two warring parties will talk to each other, the potential leader of the only (but only just) super-power in the world is being evaluated by some people - people who matter, who are listened to, whose views are noted - not on his ability to impact the country's (and the world's) safety and peace, but on his approach to interfering with the personal domain of an individual.
Meanwhile, some said analysts and journalists are writing articles like this one.
So in keeping with the story of the hour, and pushed to the end of my tether by this kind of writing, here's my take.
1. The US is the biggest debtor country in the world. Its economy has gone to pot, its financial system is falling apart thanks to at best negligent, at worst outright fraudulent rating of securities. Unemployment is on the rise. People are losing homes, jobs, healthcare.
2. The Iraq war has been a front for control of oil. Think about this for a moment: the invasion of a sovereign country for control of its resources. With the public being hoodwinked every step of the way.
3. And then kept in line, despite the systematic removal of individual freedoms, by an administration that thrives on fear and ringing cries of "never forget".
4. America's claim to moral superiority has been razed to the ground with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the invasion of Iraq, a sovereign nation (it was ludicrous to watch Cheney rebuke Russia for invading South Ossetia recently).
5. American "foreign policy" is a disgrace, the constant sabre-clanking with Iran and refusing to sit down across the table being just one example.
6. America uses more energy - and more oil - than any other country in the world. And yet, the US is not on board with international agreements re reducing carbon footprint, energy use, global warming impact, etc.
And yet, the issue to focus on, as per Peggy Noonan, is how Obama addresses abortion?
"You only want a medical practice to be rare when it isn't good. For Mr. Obama, whose mind tends, as intellectuals' minds do, toward the abstract, it all seems so . . . abstract. And cold. And rather suggestive of radical departures. "That's above my pay grade." Friend, that is your pay grade, that's where the presidency lives, in issues like that."
President Clinton once said that abortions need to be "safe, legal and rare". I agree on the first two points. Outlawing abortion will lead to a black market situation. Like the organ trade in Dirty Pretty Things, this would mean back rooms and coat hangers. (The same applies to prostitution: legalization empowers sex workers, gives them rights, protection, health.) On a side note, there is an interesting argument in Freakonomics, that talks the correlation between crime and unwanted babies - specifically, relating the drop in crime rates in the US to Roe V. Wade. It may not be provable, but it's a cogent, powerful argument, and a highly logical one.
In the final count, this is an issue that needs to be left to a woman and her doctor. And a decision that needs to be left to the woman. The government's involvement in issues of right and wrong should extend only to areas where there is a victim. Enough with the regulation of victimless crimes. Enough with stuffing one group's beliefs down the throats of another.
So what is the presidency about?
Enabling citizens to earn a better living. Building and maintaining strong, mutually beneficial trade and policy relationships with other countries and regimes. Creating opportunity and economic growth, reducing debt, showing fiscal prudence, creating necessary regulation and providing necessary oversight. Enabling access (in whatever way) to healthcare and education and sustainable livelihoods. Providing "common goods" - infrastructure, parks, clean air and water.
If I had a vote to cast in this election, it would have been Obama's without question. And this was true even before McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate - although that should have tipped the balance for any thinking person. I don't necessarily agree with Obama's policies on the economy - I'm all for the economic ideal of perfect competition. But I also see that an Obama presidency has the chance to make the world a slightly safer place. I like his foreign policy approach. I think it's high time America sat down at the negotiating table with other countries and sabre-clanking and fist-waving at the drop of a hat.
It is interesting that, in an era of nuclear proliferation, escalating terrorism and bloodshed, where no two warring parties will talk to each other, the potential leader of the only (but only just) super-power in the world is being evaluated by some people - people who matter, who are listened to, whose views are noted - not on his ability to impact the country's (and the world's) safety and peace, but on his approach to interfering with the personal domain of an individual.
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