myriadmusings

Ghar bada weeraan rahta hai

2012-02-09T00:00:00.000-08:00

In memory of Mother...

Andhera hai har ek su
Ghar bada weeraan rahta hai..

Jo kamre the mere ghar mein
Woh ab tareek khaane hain
Siya konon mein ab jinke
Tumhari yaadon ke aaseb baste hain
Tumhari cheekhti, chillati yaadien sab
Samaat mein mere, ehsaas mein
Ek shor barpa karti rahti hain
Hamare darmiyan tum ab nahin lekin
Gumaan kyun hota hai har pal
Ke jaise tum khuda ki tarah hi
Maujood ho har su...

Bade bojhil hain ab din raat saare
Meri subhein, meri shaamien
Kabhi goya hua karti theen jo tum se
Tumhare saath hansti, khilkhilati, gungunati theen
Woh sab aundhe pade hain
Woh ab mayoos rahte hain
Jo tha ek mehrbaan, pursaan-e-haal unka
Woh is duniya se rukhsat ho gaya hai
Batao to
Kabhi aa paaogi tum
Pursish-e-ahwaal ki khaatir?

Kahin bistar pe pahron bilbilata hai
Woh katthai rang ka manoos sa takya
Sarhane jis ko rakh kar tum
Kai qiston mein chunti thi
Shab-e-bedaar mein kuch neend ke moti
Baghair uske
Tumhein kab neend aati thi
Woh takya poochta hai ab kahan ho tum?
Na jaane kaun si basti mein ab ke ghar liya tum ne
Jahaan na koi telephone hai, na post office hai
Zara bolo to
Us manoos takye ko
Bhala main kaise samjhaoon
Kahan ho tum?

Woh oode, gahre peele rang ka sofa
Ke jis pe baith kar pahron
Meri khaatir
Duaoon ke pulinde bandhti thi tum
Woh sofa saugwar hai ab
Bahut ghamgeen rahta hai...

Woh sab tasbeeh ke daane
Jo junbish se tumhari ungliyon ke
Badi harkat mein aate the
Larazte rahte the tareek raaton mein
Dhadakte rahte the din ke ujaale mein
Woh ab khamosh rahte hain
Taraste hain
Tumhari ungliyon ke
Woh anoothe sab ishaaron ko...

Drawing room ki deewar pe larzaan
Woh tik tik karne waali ek ghadi jis ne
Tumhare saath aksar taktaki baandhe
Hamari raah dekha karti thin der raaton ko
Woh ab bezaar rahti hai
Diya hai chod usne waqt ka daaman
Mujhe uske kisi neele se ek kaante mein
Tumhari nabz ka ehsaas hota hai
Bahut khamosh, saakit, munjamid
Thahra hua, bejaan...

Andhera hai har ek su
Ghar bada weeran rahta hai...

A 'sinking' feeling

2012-01-16T03:01:00.000-08:00

There you were

I saw
Entrenched in a corner

As if

You're ready to relinquish
Everything.
I don't remember
What I blabbered
You wouldn't recollect
What you muttered!
(Under the lip?)
Words weren't needed,
Gestures spoke.

There you are, again.
Away, far away, even though,
Close by.
No matter what I say
You wouldn't listen!
You wouldn't utter
Anything.
Not even through silence --
Something you've always been fond of.
Today, words aren't needed
And gestures stay mute.

Where will you go with all that
Thwarted, unsaid thoughts?
How long will you carry on,
Pulling along
The unbearable burden
Of stifled sobs and sighs
And rage and wrath
And the agony of angst
And gripe and grumble?
I dread, someday,

You'd burst open
And get scattered all over.

I want you to know
The very thought of it
Makes my heart sink!

"Meaning?"

2011-12-24T10:42:00.000-08:00

Long, long ago when we'd sit alone, the two of us, she’d wonder,
Often, aloud, as to what I had just said meant, her eyes so tender

Dilating, as she’d ask, “Matlab?,” looking at me, pleading.

Often, in pursuance of an old habit, I’d say things, their meaning eluding

Even to me, so I’d think over what I had just said, scratching my head,

I’d muster some answer, barely managing to find of that thought thread.

Long after those days, I have gone on to find life’s meaning with her.

And to this day, she continues to ask, “Matlab?”

And the meaning continues to meander along the edge..

And the meaning continues to drown in its own sea..

And the meaning continues to get lost…

Why must you look for sanity?

2011-12-07T22:31:00.000-08:00

Breathing in the bile and bliss, you drift through the days as if barely alive
Listless, so oblivious to your environs, no longer do you yearn to strive

The cohorts of a million causes pound the air you breathe all the time
Your eyes glaze over their inanities, their thoughts mundane and sublime

Oh! so often you feel you've either been left behind or gone just too far
Either the world has outpaced you or there's nobody where you are

Pray, why can't you bring yourself to be wily and cunning and mean?
Why mustn't you also fight for thy right, why must you always stay serene?

Look at the gall and guile people are proving all the time they possess
Why the hell do you refuse to, even though it's just in your eyes, regress?

Why must you be a prisoner of goodness? Why can't you sometimes be irate?
Why mustn't you also, frequently and unashamedly, hurt, abuse and intimidate?

Why must you think of others all the time? Why can't you think of yourself ever?
You gotta know the way the world works and, even, make it, for yourself, lever?

Why must you make so much of humility or politeness? These are virtues of the yore!
Why must you look for sanity in the mad world, though it's to a-sense-of-who-you're restore?

The Slough of Despond

2011-07-25T12:53:00.000-07:00

Alone, on a quiet afternoon, assaulted by the myriad apprehensions life throws your way
You see yourself turning into a pale shadow of your radiant self, seeing of hope little ray

The castles of your mystic aspirations tower over the empires of your mythic inertia and unrest
You struggle to retain some sanity, caught in the awful state of a real dystopia you truly detest

Pray, why do things go wrong? Why and how long should you be perilously caught in the rut?
Must not you press a little more hard, push open the doors to the worlds that have been shut?

The world, by and large, is fiercely cruel, its people would only show what they truly are worth
And yet, if you look around, you' ll find that of real good people there's really, really no dearth

A despondent heart, weary of everything around, yearns for newer habitats, newer hopes
Why do you linger in the slough of despond? To come out of it, there's got to be some ropes

A Gypsy's Song

2011-07-17T14:23:00.000-07:00

Torn, vexed, adrift, floating on things heart hankers after
Some company, some chatter, some songs, some laughter

Each heart has so much and yet contains emptiness of its own
Each man is many men and yet, deep within, terribly alone

Some ruptures, some raptures, resonate in the quiet sphere
A melancholy night stops for a moment to stand and stare

The night, voluptuous in its vitriol, never quite ceases to abuse
"Your epic estrangement with everything, loser, is of no use!"

Who art thou? What art thou? Why must you do what you do?
"Don't fret!" the mind instructs, "You're a gypsy drifting through!"

Cry, the beloved Tibet

2011-07-11T01:16:00.000-07:00

A version of this piece appeared in The Asian Age on July 11 here

IF NATIONS are narratives, Tibet's narrative is a narrative of pain: the pain caused in the wake of invasion, infiltration, usurpation and exploitation, and the disruption of its customs and traditions. At an exhibition of photographs, “Tibet: Then and Now”, currently on at the India International Centre in New Delhi, Tibet’s plaintive cry as a nation wrestling through the painful transformation of its history and culture ricochets through the basement gallery. The photographs, taken between 1914 and 2010, are vignettes of the Tibetan way of life that has all but disappeared or is fast disappearing.

As you walk into the gallery, a handout given to you at the reception declares: “It is not an anti-Chinese or a pro-Tibetan exhibition. This is the reality of the situation of Tibet and its people.” If you look closely, you observe that the reality of Tibet and its people is seeped in sorrow. The photographs were taken in Amdo, Kham and U-Tsang provinces of Tibet by French explorer Alexander David-Neel, former Tibetan government official Dudul N. Tsarong and Lobsang S. Taklha, the elder brother of the Dalai Lama.

In Section A (Tibet: Then), that compiles photographs taken between 1914-1957, Tibet’s past manifests itself in black and white portraits of its people: Farmers celebrate the first day of sowing crops by taking their “dzo” female yaks, decorated with colourful ornaments, to the fields; a Lhasa noble woman, donning a beautiful hat, stands with her attendants looking towards Kumbum Monastery in Amdo. Another haunting image of this period is that of the People’s Liberation Army holding a military parade, raising Chinese flags, in view of the Potala Palace, the chief residence of the Dalai Lama until the 14th Dalai Lama fled, along with about 80,000 refugees, to Dharamsala after the 1959 Chinese invasion. Ask any Tibetan of that generation, a diminishing breed, and they will tell you sordid stories of people's flight from villages, of monks and nuns being forced to do manual labour. Occupation comes with its own set of nightmares, anywhere in the world. And so it was in Tibet: Her sons and daughters were abused, imprisoned, tortured.

David-Neel was the first Western woman to enter Lhasa, the forbidden city. Being a Buddhist and spiritualist herself, she demonstrates deep empathy with her subjects that is evident in her compositions. From an opera troupe performing in the courtyard of a mansion in Lhasa, drogpa (nomads) in the Kokonor region of Amdo, a prayer ceremony in the courtyard of a monastery in Amdo, men and women threshing grain in a village courtyard in Amdo, a nomad lady in Kham wearing 'nambu,' an indigenous woolen cloth of Tibet to a Khampa couple outside their home in Dartsedo, she gives us a feel of the everyday life in Tibet. These snapshots provide a peek into Tibet's glorious past when it was free, when the greed and tyranny of its ambitious neighbour had not sullied it, changing the daily chore of almost every Tibetan. Monks and nuns were made commoners, toiling hard in fields for livelihoods. Monasteries w ere considered frivolous and shut. Everything came under the jaws of the dragon. Nomads were forced to relocate to new settlements such as the one built at Darcha in Western Tibet. There were restrictions on large gatherings, so the Tibetan Buddhists took shelter in remote areas to carry on with their innocuous mass meditation.
An enitre civilisation was being wiped out. And the world merely watched. More than fifty years on, it is still watching. Merely.

Section B (1979-80) is all about the Beijing visit of a five-member Tibetan delegation from Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile. Frame after agonising frame chronicles the fading away of Tibet’s traditional life and the destruction of its monasteries — Ganden, Tashi Lhunpo and Sakya, among many others — that were shelled during the “cultural revolution”.
Section C (2000-2010), which gives you glimpses of Tibet now, captures the ravages of the “modernisation” in Lhasa. They also tell several tales of exploitation of Tibet’s resources: Hillsides have been cleared in order to export timber to China and also to mine gold, uranium and zinc; a hydro-electric power at the sacred Yamdroke lake robs it of its pristine beauty even as China enjoys control of water supply; the otherwise useful rail link between Beijing and Lhasa is coupled with the threat of Tibet’s mineral resources being diverted.
Tibet today, it is evident, is not the Tibet it was. For the way it has changed, or made to change, Tibet has shed tears copiously, at seminars and conferences, at scattered demonstrations and feeble protests. If only the world was listening. Today, as Tibet is wilting under the occupation, it is also yearning for liberation. Perhaps, some day, it can breathe free. Perhaps.
The exhibition, which gets over on July 11, has been organised by the Bureau of the Dalai Lama, in association with the India International Centre and assembled by writer and activist Namgyal Taklha (widow of Lobsang S. Taklha) and her friend Jane Moore.

On Location

2011-06-27T03:26:00.000-07:00

Somewhere on a distant patch of earth
Among an amorphous knot of people —
Some of whom you would know
And some others would know you —
You’ve thrown yourself into filming,
Amidst shouts of lights, camera, action!
You breathe your work, I know you do
For it feels like forever since I last heard
Your voice, the clink of your laughter.
Here, time stands frozen in the corridor
I saw you last, lugging the Louis Vuitton,
Your resolute steps moving away and away
From me.
The departure lay barely a few minutes away.
But you were gone
Before you were gone.
For some parts of you
Lay in the distant land
Where you, soon enough, were to arrive.
Where your laughter would join somebody else's
Your words would breathe in unison with yet another.
Time stands frozen in the corridor
I saw you last
Nothing moves.
All is ecstatic.
In the stillness, your hands —
"nobody, not even the rain
has such small hands" —
Seem to wave at me.

"All the world is a patient"

2011-04-21T02:29:00.000-07:00

My mother doesn't know anything
About Nietsche or Kierkegaard
Or any of their illustrious ilk
But often, she spouts, to my delight
Such words of wisdom
That’d, invariably, put
The proponents of existentialism
To ignominious shame.

It's not been long since
I discovered the myriad frauds
Of the largest democracy’s
Corporate, fraudulent healthcare
And the lumbering pace
Of the "public" hospitals.

It’s not been long since
I wandered with her
In a spic-n-span medicity,
Imposing with its
State-of-the-art look
But where it's the money-minded
Murderers in the guise of doctors

It’s not been long
Since I woefully ran along
The stinking alleys of AIIMS
That so-called premier institute
That degrades, dehumanizes
India's ailing scrum — Leaving them
In the never-ending entrails of
Tests and reports,
To die, uncared for,
Of their particular ailment
And the agony of wait.

The other day, even as I,
Helped her climb the stairs,
She couldn’t take her eyes off
A rickety stretcher
That carried an old woman, spread-eagled —
Arms akimbo, legs asprawl, eyes aslant.
“All the world is a patient,” she said, my mother,
In a moment of great reckoning, it seemed,
Of all that ails the world today.
All the world is a patient!
A patient, indeed!

The Wanderer

2011-03-28T16:26:00.000-07:00

No sooner does it fit into any routine than it yearns for yet another
What does my wanting heart want after all how am I to know?
Restless, hopelessly edgy, and agitated, it scrounges for anchors
Unmoored, astray, the heart has destinations unknown on mind.
Torn, at times, it wanders into the alluring landscapes of longing
Finding little solace there, it moves on to world's other trappings
Losing itself, at times, in the bewildering world's inner charms
A thing of beauty, like you, the world is an immense joy to know!
And yet, and yet, it feels, almost always, that there's something amiss
What must that be when things on the surface seem to be all right?
An unknown flicker, as it were, keeps the consciousness quivering
A voice deep within keeps saying, "There awaits a world beyond."

What must the heart do with that extant flame burning, raging inside
When it doesn't quite know if it's the mere remains, or if it's intact?
What must the heart do of a lunatic voice ringing unabated in the head
When it doesn't quite know what it's that the voice wants it to do?
What rivers does it cross, what mighty tides does it fight against
When the rivers are lesser rivers, when the streams are lesser streams?
Isn't it the placid, unruffled feathers that make you most ruffled at times?
To fight against a thing mustn't you know what you're fighting against?

So, the wanting heart, goes on hurtling between here, there and nowhere
Like some runaway meteor, scaling its own heights, sinking into its own depths
Like some star on steroids, twinkling on the vast skies of its own creation.
It clings to some anchors on its way, and floats in spaces joyous and deep
Hovering over the horizon, when it chooses, or just meanders along the edge.

I don't know its course, what pattern must it take a shine to and when?
What territories it's most loathe to, on what turfs does it set itself free?
My heart, the wanderer, forever seeks newer grounds to bloom, to be!

The Silence

2011-03-21T15:36:00.000-07:00

It has been forever since I uttered a word, since I took words out for a walk
You look at me with tear-soaked (?) eyes and whisper, "For God's sake, talk!"

Word-weary, and world-weary, I've wandered in zones only known to me
All these days, I've seen something approaching and yet chosen not to see

You often laugh at my naivety, and make fun of my sheer lack of worldliness
"You either learn to corner people, or get used to seeing yourself in a mess"

You mock at what I think is my magnanimity, and frown at my friendliness
"Why can't you give yourself more to yourself, and to others less and less?"

The crucible of your queries is cruel, but leaves me with some food for thought
It makes me feel as if all my life, all I’ve done so far, have all been for naught

Must, then, I begin anew, wiping the slate of my rather erroneous life clean?
Must, then, I admit I’ve erred by being on the side of good, become mean?

You look at me with tear-soaked (?) eyes and whisper, "For God's sake, talk!"
And I keep mum, don’t say a word, thinking, "What if I err again when I talk?"

The Exiles in Love

2011-02-13T15:49:00.000-08:00

Living amidst the squalor of the concrete jungle, you had once got fed up and threatened

“I’ll soon be away from here, of my love affair with this city it is most definitely the end.”

I, too, harboured the same feeling, and knew only too well what you’d be going through

We were falling out of love with the city where we had once fallen in love — I and you.

“World class, my foot!” you’d hiss, as we’d dissect the language power chose to speak

Deep within I knew our chance to take in the city anymore was growing thin, too bleak.

Like me, you were not born here, came from somewhere else, but were fond of the city

Like mine, your attachment had taken roots, formed branches and leaves, become a tree.

We had our worlds here, didn’t we? If we were to go anywhere, what exactly we’d do?

A new life elsewhere was tempting, but to the city, our other self, we had got to stay true.

To quieten the tides of your disgust, I would lure you with visible trappings of success!

“One day you’ll belong here, and feel as if you have arrived, give your worries a recess!”

You’d quote Borges: “I come from so far away I don’t expect to arrive.” And I’d smile

I'd pull you into a hug, and shower kisses! You'd leap into my arms, and stay there for a while.

Would you promise?

2011-02-09T02:02:00.000-08:00

All these days, I’ve just been whiling away my time, seeking delight in things banal and weary

Taking shine to mundane stuff, taking trivialities a trifle too seriously, so with all things dreary

I have wandered, in vain, for years to find a voice that could anchor the myriad anxieties within

A voice to make sense of the world around, a voice amidst disparate roar, a voice amidst the din

For long I’ve struggled to find the right language, find the right words, the right tenor and tone

For long I’ve found myself lost in symbols of speech, for long I’ve been silent, silent like a stone

Words have often been taken away by someone or the other and I’ve often been left in the lurch

Words have often abandoned me, that too when I’ve found myself of that perfect word in search

Today, I’m mired in reticence, congealed in taciturnity, quietness has clipped all my wings

Today, I suffer with bouts of silence, and don’t quite know what and when and how to say things

Tomorrow, when I know how and when and what to speak, would you be around to listen to me?

Tomorrow, when I rise and shine, would you promise you won’t
let the sun go down on me?

The Tyranny of Time

2011-01-29T22:58:00.000-08:00

Variously deformed, variously distorted, variously destroyed
Time's tyranny finds many methods to suck the life out of you.
Ghoulish, fiendish, macabre, frightening in all its various forms
It threatens to scare, to defeat and to incite some fear in you
The purveyor of all things dreadful, it can only be what it is —
Whatever skin it adopts, it's cantankerous, churlish and vile.
What does it know of you, really? Does it know you at all?
An aberrant of another kind you're almost an anachronism
Insulated from most morbid of fears, not afraid of dark at all
Have lost so much so far, not afraid to lose anything anymore
"I'm not afraid of your fangs, claws and bloodthirsty eyes!"
Must you scream into its behemoth ears, unusually flapping?

Jaipurnama: Jaipur Literature Festival 2011

2011-01-23T02:25:00.000-08:00

An elegant lady, with her Gucci and Prada in place, who was walking beside me as I was on my way to Diggi Palace, tells rather excitedly to her friend, “You know I am dying to check out its store. I have to, have to buy some shoes.” Shoes? Didn’t you think it was a literature festival? But then the Jaipur Literature Festival, perhaps, is a festival with a difference. It’s about writers as much as it’s about those who have little or almost nothing to do with the written word. While it is, of course, a window to the ways of all sorts of writers --- the way they talk, the way they walk --- it is also about schmoozing, networking or just having a gala time even as raconteurs and storytellers tire of endlessly talking about their books, their writings and their places in the world. A major draw, far from what you would ever have imagined, happens to be what the elegant lady’s friend told her: “You know, what I like about the festival is that almost anyone who is someone is here,” as she set her eyes on a famous author she said she couldn’t recognize. The author in question was Kamila Shamsie, the well-known Pakistani writer who had a session with her mother, Muneeza Shamsie, on whether literature can subvert the national narrative.

The elegant lady’s conversation really set me thinking. What is it that makes the JLF really work? What is it that the show keeps getting bigger every year, drawing about 35,000 to 40,000 people (according to the organizers, though you have no ways of reaching any accurate figure) to its five-day-long celebration of literature? While it is good news for the organizers, it spells a chaos that spirals out of control. It is particularly crowded and chaotic this year. The interactivity quotient, the hallmark of a festival like this, has hit rock bottom. You kept losing yourself all the time. And grateful if you could find a corner where people were not jostling, where you were spared of the push and shove. The authors, who would ideally be open to informal conversations, were too hassled by the bursting-at-the-seams venue and were seen running to quieter zones for some moments of tranquility. The mela that the JLF has become might perhaps force it to look for another venue sometime soon. For, while it feels good to see Vikram Seth standing behind you in the long, long queue for food, it is not quite a good idea to stand for hours in a queue that knows no ending under a scorching sun. While some of the festival regulars I know left Jaipur on the very first day --- intimidated by the swelling, burgeoning crowd of gung-ho school kids and other young and old literary enthusiasts ---- finding themselves a little lost at the show, running far from the madding crowd. There was no ebbing the ire of the scribes, most of whom were made to stay at a hotel, 25 km away from the venue, on the Jaipur-Ajmer Road, giving them a glimpse of the JLF’s logistical nightmare.

A couple of weeks before the 2011 chapter of the JLF flagged off on January 21, a news magazine had opened a pandora’s box on the literary scene in India that, it suggested, was still beholden to the Raj. “If Jaipur matters as a festival, it is because of the writers from Britain it attracts,” it mentioned. William Dalrymple, the co-founder of the festival, was termed “the pompous arbiter of literary merit in India”. The open indictment of the festival, and its co-director, led to a flurry of reactions from authors, journalists and critics. Some said the writer of the piece had a point. After all, the Indian authors did hanker for the British approval, they argued. The festival regulars, among them many publishers, said Jaipur was much more than a British affair and argued that they had begun to plan their annual calendar keeping the festival in mind. Many book releases were timed in a way that their authors could make it to the festival. The piece, however, did not go down well with Dalrymple who accused the scribe of engaging in racism. “Does our liberal historian know what racism is,” wondered the magazine. If you have been following it, you would know how ugly it got after Dalrymple’s rejoinder coupled with the magazine’s response. Still others joined later to question whether Dalrymple was not giving credit where it was due for conceiving the festival and holding it successfully every year. Dalrymple has gone on an overdrive ever since, giving interviews to publications that matter and writing pieces on the festival in various national and international dailies and magazines, giving credit to anyone and everyone in a recent piece he wrote for Hindustan Times. JLF works, he reiterated, because “we are a lot of fun”. For many people, however, partaking of that fun came with a certain price this time round.

Many feared the controversy would cloud the festival this year, it remained a part of the private conversations between some authors and scribes who descended on the decked-up Diggi Palace, which had tents, buntings, festoons in place to keep its annual tryst with the literary moths and lights. “I think this is a shortcut to cheap and easy popularity,” said a member of the literati on condition of anonymity. Many wondered what such a reputed magazine would achieve with what they thought was a rather salacious piece.

The JLF, however, managed to stave off the issue that threatened to, or that is what we thought, dominate it. (And when the writer of the piece in the magazine made it to the festival on Sunday, the question on everyone's mind was whether he had accepted Dalrymple's offer to come to the festival where the latter would "buy" him a drink).

The $50,000 DSC South Asian Literature Prize, which was given to Pakistani-American author H.M. Naqvi for Home Boy, seems to have created a lot of excitement among the writers of the region.

The lure of the JLF, for many, is irresistible. There are authors from all corners of the world, writing in many languages: This year, it is Orhan Pamuk and J.M. Coetzee who are among its major draws.(Coetzee's reading session on Sunday was jampacked, even though it was not an interactive sesson, with Coetzee declaring that he did have opinions, but his opinions didn't matter that much to him). It is a festival where there are publishers and agents. Jaipur remains, even though it is not the perfect place to be, an arena where publishers strike deals with authors, promising debutants are poached upon by rival publications, agents sought, authors found. But all this happens as a sideshow. The primary pretension is about ideas on literature. In the coming years, the festival will have to ensure that it is not literature that becomes a sideshow. For if that happens, it will lose out on the serious lovers of literature who care more for substance than symbols.

Recourse

2011-01-15T03:38:00.000-08:00

It comes, the news of your ill-being, like a lightning, disastrously thunderous
Striking me with its swift, electrifying jolts, its dangerous, life-snatching bolts
I had been thinking, all the while, about you and your laughter rather lustrous
I had been thinking to give you a buzz and fill you in on someone who revolts
Both of us, and you had told me, many a time, how much you hated bitching
About people, who you would rather not want in your life, and couldn’t care
Less if they lived or they died. “I give a flying fuck,” you would say, twitching
Your nose. At such moments, I wouldn’t say anything but just stand and stare
At you. And that would make you really mad, and you’d say, “You are quite
Useless, actually. I don’t even know if you are listening or you’re lost, as ever,
In your own world. Like you so often do. Oh! how much I just hate the sight
Of you with that stupid expression, and with that grin that’s anything but clever.”
I’d keep quite, never ever could I say anything that could help calm thy nerves
My silence would infuriate you further and no matter what I had to say later
You would refuse to forgive, and we would not talk for days, “He deserves
this,” you’d say this to a friend who would intervene, your anger even greater.
But then, after many days, we’d patch up, and promise never to fight again
“I feel terrible when you do this, and you know that,” you’d say, “I’m sorry,”
I would hasten to add, “I understand. Next time, from doing it, I will abstain.”
Today, you are indisposed and you are far away, and though it does worry
Me a lot, I don’t quite know how to reach out to you, be there to converse!
I seek solace in familiar routes, my dear. Hence this quick recourse to verse!

Write Choice: Who will Read What in 2011

2011-01-06T10:05:00.000-08:00

For The Asian Age’s yearender pages, I was asked to speak to a few authors, asking them what they will read in 2011. Even though I wasn't quite excited by the idea, I must have contacted almost every author I thought could make for an interesting list. They, in no particular order, included: Aravind Adiga, Amitava Kumar, Kunal Basu, Tabish Khair, Indra Sinha, Taslima Nasreen, Amitav Ghosh, Mohammed Hanif, Chandrahas Choudhury, Advaita Kala, Anuja Chauhan, Manu Joseph, Tishani Doshi, Anjali Joseph, Namita Devidayal, Rajorshi Chakraborti, Mridula Koshy and perhaps one or two more. Almost all of them got back, with some excusing themselves for quite valid reasons. About one or two didn't. Among those who got back promptly were Amitava Kumar (he's quite a darling, isn't he?) and Chandrahas Choudhury. But I remain grateful to all of them for being a part of such a thing. Here is what they had to say:

Amitava Kumar: "I always felt that E.M. Foster is overrated. Frankly." Thus begins a recent clip on YouTube featuring Jonathan Franzen. He talks of Foster and Graham Greene, and asks, "What’s all the fuss about?" I’m eager to know what’s all the fuss about Franzen’s Freedom.

Even US President Barack Obama, with his many global responsibilities — responsibilities that involve making time-consuming, soul-devouring compromises with the immoral Republicans — appears to have read Freedom. I haven’t.
I have been busy reading older novels, books published maybe a year or even two years earlier, which have now been narrowed down to a handful for the $50,000 DSC Prize for fiction. The winner will be announced at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January. In any case, the work I’m doing on the jury is no excuse. I’m very much looking forward to the new year when I’ll read three recent novels that I’ve heard so much about: Franzen’s Freedom, of course; Emma Donoghue’s Room with its imaginative experiment in voice; and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, a novel comprised of smartly interlinked stories. I also have near my desk a pile of unread, older classics that friends have recommended to me, including Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One. So many books! The other day, to escape the freezing cold, I darted into a bookstore and, on an impulse, bought J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime. I can’t wait to read it, not only because the book was a finalist for the Booker Prize but, more important, because Coetzee is God.

Chandrahas Choudhury: I’m a great admirer of the Tamil writer Salma, whose novel The Hour Past Midnight is to my mind one of the most fulfilling books in all of Indian literature because of its technical prowess and empathy for human dilemmas. Zubaan, the publisher of her novel, is bringing out her poems in 2011 in a translation by Lakshmi Holmstrom. I’m looking forward to reading these.

The political thinker Tony Judt passed away earlier this year when still in his early sixties. His last book, A Grand Illusion?: An Essay on Europe comes out next year. The Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz is one of the greatest names in contemporary letters, and a new translation from the Arabic of his novel Love In The Rain comes out next April. The 15th-century poet Kabir is already well-served in English in translations by Vinay Dharwadker and Linda Hess. Now, in March, we’ll get to see what the Indian poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra makes of his work in Songs of Kabir (NYRB, March).

Advaita Kala: 2011 seems to be a great year for books. Forthcoming releases that have me excited are Ruskin Bond’s — Susanna’s Seven Husbands, along with the screenplay by Vishal Bharadwaj. I admire both the writer and director and look forward to reading it. Then there is

Krishna: A Journey Through the Lands and Legends of Krishna — a Jaico Book that describes various tourist places and the legends of Krishna that are associated with them.

I am also looking forward to Bunny Suraiya’s debut novel based in Kolkata as well as Amitav Ghosh’s volume two of his Ibis trilogy. Mukul Deva has his next, Tanzem, out in the early part of the year, getting the military action genre going. Also, Ratika Kapoor’s debut novel is out this year. Published by Hachette, it’s a great read.

And like every year since it’s been announced, I wait in earnest for Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Girl, but alas I am told there is yet another year to go.

Anjali Joseph: I’m looking forward to checking out a new translation by David Bellos of the French experimental writer Georges Perec’s The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise. This year I happened on a translation of his Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, a delightful little book that records his impressions of sitting in different cafes in the same square in Paris for three consecutive days, down to pigeons, buses, and passers-by.

I’m also very much looking forward to the release of the second volume of Samuel Beckett’s Letters, published by Cambridge University Press, the first volume of which both shed light on his reading and artistic preoccupations in the early part of his career and entertained. The debut novel I’m most excited about is Christie Watson’s Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, a beautifully-written tale of a young girl’s family life in rural Nigeria, and how oil politics come to impinge on that life. It’s definitely going to be one of the signal titles of 2011.

Manu Joseph: I am desperate to start The Tell-Tale Brain by V.S. Ramachandran. The book is about the mysterious aspects of the cerebral nervous system. It is inevitable that he would discuss
the nature of consciousness through the organ and that is always interesting though you know that in the end the author will not say anything conclusive about the matter. Good works of science non-fiction are often deeply philosophical and I am confident that I am going to like this book.

After this I want to read Makers of Modern India by Ram Chandra Guha.
Then I must move on to Monkey-Man by K.R. Usha and The Thing about Thugs by Tabish Khair. Their plots, from what I have read in their reviews, are very surprising.

I have to also read The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe for mildly comical personal reasons — I will be very relieved to know that its plot is not what I think it is. The last three books have been longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Then there is Ken Follet’s Fall of Giants. That one will be read, as usual, with envy. The way Follet makes his plot move is astonishing.

Tishani Doshi: There’s a few people I know who have books coming out next year, and I look forward to reading them all: Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis, Rahul Bhattacharya’s The Sly Company of

People Who Care, Javier Cercas’ The Anatomy of a Moment, Parag Khanna’s How to Run the World.

I’ve also heard really good things about Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, an advanced copy is already at my bedside. The highlight for me though will be Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, a memoir about ageing. If it’s anything like The Year of Magical Thinking, I may not need anything else for the rest of the year.

Namita Devidayal: I am really looking forward to Mohammed Hanif's next novel which is due to be published sometime in 2011. I have had the privilege of reading some early extracts and it sounds fabulous — in that same deadpan way as his A Case of Exploding Mangoes.

I am also looking forward to the second part of Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies trilogy. I also hope someone discovers an unpublished manuscript by the late Steig Larssen.

Mridula Koshy: I’m not the big reader of fiction I used to be. And when I pay attention, it is to the writers in India. Vivek Narayanan’s Universal Beach and Jeet Thayil’s English were really the beginning for me in terms of becoming a reader of poetry. I’ve heard Narayanan perform poems from his Submramanian series and am extremely curious about what else there is that I haven’t heard yet. I’ll find out when his new collection of poetry is released. Thayil has shifted to the novel: Narcopolis. I expect it will be the earthquake his poetry is.

Another writer I want to mention is Siddhartha Deb. The question of how we can write about places that haven’t figured in English language literature is one I ask myself in my writing. His novel, Surface, gave me a lot to work with. His Do You Know Who I Am? Stories of Wealth and Poverty from India is non-fiction so I am curious to see him make the shift from fiction.

Kishwar Desai wins Costa Book Awards

2011-01-05T02:10:00.000-08:00

Kishwar Desai has got a great moment to begin her new year with. Her debut novel, Witness the Night, has won the 2010 Costa Book Awards, one of UK’s prestigious literary prizes that recognises great writings from writers based in the UK and Ireland. A thrilled Desai, talking to me over the phone from Goa, said: "It feels wonderful to have been recognised. It’s a huge
encouragement." Desai has a reason to be thrilled as she is the only Indian woman writer so far who has got this award. Costa Book Awards, unlike the Man Asian Award, for which she was loglisted in 2009, is more open, with both Asians and non-Asians vying for the awards. But for any writer, any award spells recognition. So it is for Desai.

Published by HarperCollins, Witness the Night, which won in the First Novel Award category, is a mystery novel set in a small town and deals with the dark side of female foeticide in India. Desai will recieve the £5,000-prize at a ceremony in London on January 25.

The shortlist had a strong Asian flavour as also vying for the award in the same category were Nikesh Shukla (Coconut Unlimited), Aatish Taseer (The Temple-Goers) and Simon Thirsk (Not Quite White). The judges (Anita Rani, Anneka Rice and Mark Thornton) said of Witness the Night: "Desai pulls off a remarkable trick, transplanting a country house murder to modern-day India in a book that’s not afraid to tackle serious themes."

"We are living in disturbing times. And we got to have books to do with social issues. While hey must engage the reader and grab their attention, they must engage more with the realities around," said Desai, adding that she had a great sense of relief to use imagination while working on a book as she had dealt with objectivity all along as a journalist. "It was great to get into the emotional side of things. I felt a great sense of liberation as the characters could do anything. They were not restricted by anything," said Desai, adding that the book had a huge resonance as deals with real issues.

Desai said she wrote the novel with great passion and anger. "Maybe some of that anger shows in the book with which a lot of people can relate to, " she says. The novel has been a "process of learning" for Desai, who says she had a choice to write about something which was happening around. “There are many ways of killing a woman. You can kill a woman by taking away her confidence, her rights, her freedom. Having been a journalist, I feel a sense of responsibility towards the society. I couldn't do a whodunit. One can't write frivolous stuff and get away with it," she says.

Desai, who has worked in print and broadcast media as journalist, scriptwriter, TV anchor and pr-oducer, is also an Asian Age columnist. Darlingji: The True Love Story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt, her first non-fiction book, was published in 2007. Kishwar shuttles between London, Delhi and Goa. The novel has been turned into a series by HarperCollins and will see Desai pen more titles on the themes of actual social inequities.

Escape

2011-01-01T11:41:00.000-08:00

Not too long ago, wandering in some god-forsaken land, I had, by sheer chance or sheer accident
Hit upon a sublime shadow that, in turn, hit me with its sentience, and its readiness for sheer descent

Into any hell. I was struck by how it could, at any moment, prepare itself to ascend into any heaven
I was also struck by the way it'd go about almost everything, a duty or even its supposed dereliction

When our paths crossed, I knew, I just knew, that there was that something, finally, coming my way
All adrift seasons behind me, I hoped I could set sail, no longer would I have to keep getting astray

We began on a note so sombre, such melancholy the shadow had hid, in its dark and dreary edges
It tied me in its coarse and leathery sadness, and wrapped me around, entangling within its hedges

In the days that followed, insanely fleeting, we chased each other like hell, never ever had to give up
The dream of holding aloft beams and beacons, for each other, and to drink life from each other's cup

I had wandered, in vain, for years, to find somewhere that spark, that could set my adamant soul afire
And the shadow, with its silently tantalising contours, seemed to extinguish all my pent-up anger and ire

It knew the trick to turn the everyday stuff into something sublime, the quotidian into something magical
It took a deep interest in everything to do with life and love: an interest that I thought was just maniacal

We plucked a rose, we plucked a cherry, plumbing what seemed to me the bottomless pit of adoration
We thought the world of each other, and loved so much, it eventually became, it had to, our damnation

Not much later, the shadow, one fine morning, escaped, leaping into the widening swathes of darkness
Leaving me, once again, to think about things such as darkness and light, and my life's priorities reassess.

An Almost Made Up Poem

2010-12-25T14:06:00.000-08:00

(With apologies to Charles Bukowski)

I see you gazing at a tomb with shiny

blue eyes, no, your eyes are not shiny

they are luminous, and the tomb is in Delhi

where we met for the last time and

then we lost each other and never met again.

you used to fancy wacky ideas about

MEN AND WOMEN, all in upper case, and you

knew celebs and most of them

had a thing for you, and I’d tell you, it’s okay,

string along, make merry, I’m not “J”.

because we’re not an item. We had a fling once in

New York, a few days-long, but never loved, never

made out. So you hobnobbed with the celebs and wrote

about the celebs, and, of course, what you found out

was that the celebs were concerned only with

their celebrityhood ---- not the pretty young thing in bed

with them, who gives them that, and then awakens

in the morning to write upper case pieces about

MEN AND WOMEN. We know modern relationships’ vacuity, they’d

told us, but reading your pieces I wasn’ sure. maybe

it was the upper case. you were one of the

best female authors and I told the publishers,

editors, “her, print her, she’s a little wacky, but she’s

brilliant.” “there’s honesty in what she writes.” I loved you

like a man loves a woman he never gets to know, only

talks to on phone, sees as pictures in newspapers. I would have

loved you more if I had sat in my room reading a

book and listened to you breathe in bed

but that didn’t happen. I began to see less of you.

you were busy, you once said, and i almost angrily replied.

everyone is busy. End of the story. You said

you had a recurring dream about an old friend and

how he called out your name from the wilderness, trying

to reach out to you. You often wondered about that

dream and then I lost you. I asked around

but no one seemed to have any clue. Meanwhile, I found

someone whom I’ll love till the day I die. If I had loved you

I would probably have been unfair to you or you
to me. it was best like this.

Tyeb Mehta's grandson: A brush with fame

2010-12-16T12:21:00.000-08:00

For a 27-year-old, Ali Akbar Mehta, grandson of Tyeb Mehta, is remarkably sorted on matters of art. His show, “Displaced in Time and Space”, recently opened at the Triveni Kala Sangam in New Delhi as part of “Three New Voices: Dimensions in Time and Space”. The other two artists, whose works are on display at Triveni till December 20, are: Shally Mahajan, who gives expression to the “innermost impulses” that define her experiences as an artist in a series in mixed media, and Raj More, who draws on the ancient and modern facets of a metropolis like Delhi.

We met at the opening of the show on December 3 which saw many of senior Mehta’s friends and fellow artists trickling in, getting mightily impressed by junior Mehta’s strokes, losing themselves in his nude, muscular figures that, though inhabiting a different time and space, told a story of the familiar universal human quest, and condition. Mehta had to frequently excuse himself from our conversation as it was interrupted by an army of admirers — from celebrated artists, gallery owners, art historians to curators and random onlookers — who wanted to have an audience with the man who had mounted the three “infernos” (oil and acrylic on canvas) at the Art Heritage. His mother, Fatima Mehta, sat in a corner of the small room, occasionally waving at, rising to welcome, familiar faces. His younger brother, Raza Husain Mehta, received guests with a smile even as he went clicking around.

Despite the interruptions, however, we had a satisfying chat that gave me a peek, if not quite an insight, into his world, his works. And what a fascinating peek it was!
For a 27-year-old, Mehta is remarkably calm and composed. The restlessness of his spirit as an artist, mirrored in many of his works, didn’t find reflection in our conversation. He spoke softly and unaffectedly, not in the least bit giving off airs of an artist who has, by all accounts, arrived.
When we met, dusk had settled in. We sat on the amphitheatre stairs overlooking the Triveni Tea Terrace with its hustle of arty types catching up over a cuppa, facing Triveni’s characteristic beautiful stone lattices.
The three paintings on display, Mehta said, were part of a series on themes of violence and identity that explore our concept of hero. This exploration is a part of Mehta’s continuous preoccupation. “It is an exploration of the different facets of violence around us. It is an on-going process,” Mehta said.
That process might have something to do with the kind of sensibility he inherits. Grandson of a best-known painter whose works fetch crores, and son of filmmaker Ketan Mehta, while the young artist’s lineage evokes awe, it also puts a lot of “pressure” on him to deliver. “You are expected to do better each time you do something,” he said.

There is pressure, but Mehta doesn’t let that affect him. Though there might be some similarities in approach, attitude or ideology with his celebrated grandfather, Mehta’s experiences, exposures and interests have been different. He said he was continuously trying to arrive at a stage where he could see things independently, have his “own worldview”.
While he was struck by the grandeur, the mythic scale and the opulence of his grandfather’s works, Mehta said the kind of works Tyeb Mehta and his contemporaries, like F.N. Souza or S.H. Raza, came out with were products of “their age, their times”.
He said: “I want to break out from and go beyond the definitions that have been created.”
The artists of his grandfather’s generation painted to find answers to some of the questions they were faced with. Mehta said he was doing the same, but he had a different set of questions he pondered over in life.
Growing up in a household with an emphasis on reading, he realised it was important to find out your real “drive” in life. Since childhood, he knew that he had to find his own reason to chose a profession or calling. A roomful of people who drew, painted and philosophised made him realise that there was nothing better than being an artist. “You could feel naked without all of that,” he said.
Even as a child, Mehta wondered about the larger questions of life: Where and how did he fit into the world? What work could ultimately satisfy him?

Mehta got the answer to these questions much later in life. Trained in animation, he said he never wanted to be an artist. However, he wanted to combine what his painter grandfather and his filmamker father did, and become an animator. But when he enrolled into the J.J. School of Arts in Mumbai, he realised he never wanted to stop painting. He understood that he needed to prioritise and commit to either animation or painting. It had to be painting. “I’m primarily a painter,” he said.
As an artist, Mehta said he was still trying to define issues like displacement and identities. In general, he is still trying to learn how to “respond” to the world around him. And the media (oil/graphite/Chinese ink/acrylic on paper, digital media, drawing or a mix of all these) he chooses are “dictated” by the kind of paintings he makes. “Medium is never dictated by the artist,” he said.
Long after I saw Mehta’s paintings, his nude figures in a “nuetral” space, removed from any kind of social setting, grimacing in an state of visible pain, holding on to flagrant strands, haunted me.
In a note in the brochure, Mehta writes: “...We are in a liminal age, where human beings are seeking, haltingly, imperfectly, to transform and transcend themselves. All around us we see acts of heroism and despair that are symbolic of this process... My work seeks to explore this idea with the intention of transforming myth in the modern context, to re-examine and revaluate the relationship between man and his social environment that we take so much for granted. It is, for me, a personal engagement in trying to deal with the concept of the spiritual and the material; suffering and rapture; and through them the ideas of life and death; and to understand the mechanics of the rational and emotional desires that dominate our lives.”

Long after I met Mehta, some lines from his poem etched on the wall at the gallery (he’s a poet, too, and you can read some of his poems on his blog, The Meandering Mind) resonated in my head:
There is a churning, a tide
Within and without.
Embrace it, or escape it,
A liminal space — a crossroads of sorts.
Black on charcoal gray wash
Speckled with dull red, white and turquoise.
Gaseous, nebulous, haze whirls around me
Blurring my vision
Continuing to grasp, to grab at something...

For a 27-year-old, Mehta is a thought-provoking painter and a perceptive poet.

Once upon a December...

2010-12-12T15:26:00.000-08:00

Once upon a December
I saw the mercury
Dizzyingly dipping
Through your chapped cheeks
And almost frost-bitten nose.
Some carnival it was,
The memory reminds,
We sang and danced.

I knew not when
The lights went out.
A riot of deep blackness
An area of darkness
Was all the eyes saw.
Frozen, at once, thrown
Into a paralytic state
Of numbness.
The numbness of toes!
The numbness of tongues!
An accidental numbness!
A transcendental numbness!
Wondering, I wandered
Beyond the physical
State of frozen limbs.

When the heart leapt up
And words weaved
A symphony
You turned away:
The world has other joys
Than a jumble of words
Poorly put together
In the hope of redemption
Reconciliation, even.

The world has other joys.
Many, far too many.
It seems.

Wang Yu-Lin: An interview

2010-12-11T14:44:00.000-08:00

AS FILMMAKER Wang Yu-Lin tucked into his chicken sandwiches at the Vasant Continental hotel in New Delhi recently, he seemed to relish our conversation on Taiwanese cinema. The director was in the city to be a part of the Delhi International Arts Festival’s “Taiwan Focus: Iffi Kaleidoscope” which puts the spotlight on six films from Taiwan, including Seven Days in Heaven, co-directed by Yu-Lin.

The celebration of cinema from Taiwan, organised in association with the Taipei Economic and Cultural Centre (TECC), kickstarted at the Teen Murti Bhavan on December 5 and will be on till December 12. Another part of the Taiwanese package is Juliets. Co-directed by Hou Chi-Jan, Shen Ko-Shang and Chen Yu-Hsun, it is a collection of three narratives that reinterpret Shakespeare’s tragic heroine in the context of a modern Taiwan. A dark comedy, Juliets is an exploration into love, loss and longing and shows just how their contours change with the issues of disability, madness and homosexuality. Juliets will be screened on Saturday afternoon, followed by the screening of Hou Chi-Jan’s One Day, described by the Hollywood Reporter as “a poetic cruise into the subconscious” in which “the ‘dream’ spawns more dreams, opening up parallel worlds where memory crosses over with present and future, where thoughts and actions became indistinguishable.”

The two films to be screened on Sunday are: Lin Chih-Ju’s The Wall, a story of love and betrayal of ordinary people during a politically volatile Taiwan of the 1950s, and Leon Dai’s Can’t Live Without You, which is based on real life characters and tells the story of a father and his seven-year-old daughter painfully separated by red-tapism.

At the hotel, I was joined by Joy Yen of the TECC and Zhan Ting-Yi, Seven Days in Heaven’s producer, who chipped in at intervals as Yu-Lin mostly talked in Taiwanese. There were frequent pauses and much of what Yu-Lin said, I sensed, kept getting lost in translation. But the filmmaker surprised me towards the end of the hour-long interview when he burst into fluent English, leaving me wondering why he needed a translator by his side at all.

A rather succinct synopsis of Seven Days in Heaven, highlighted in the release Joy hands over to me before we settle down for the interview, reads: “A carnival-like funeral. After much tears and laughters. Finding the strength to rebuild the spirit.” The screen adaptation of a prize-winning short story by Taipei-based author Essay Liu, who also co-directs the film, Seven Days in Heaven is a dark comedy-drama on the funerary customs of Taiwan. Starring Wang Li-wen, Wu Peng-fong, Chen Cha-shiang and Tai Bo, it is the story of Mei, a young urban girl who returns to her village in central Taiwan for her father’s funeral. The film tracks how Mei, with her brother Da-zhi, is thrown into a cesspool of strangely obtuse customs which are part of the traditional seven-day mourning ritual in rural Taiwan. Joining them in their hour of grief are a hilarious Daoist priest, a professional “weeper” and a camcorder-wielding young fellow who goes on an overdrive, capturing every detail. They ensure that the funeral is not without its moments of fun. And some fun it is!
After the funeral, however, the girl has got to “seal the sorrow of her loss” and return to the rhythm of her life in a metropolis. Pain becomes the occasional episode in the general drama of the pursuit of happiness. Mei has to move on with her life. We all do.

According to Yu-Lin, the film broaches the “taboo topic” of death in rural Taiwan in a rather humorous way. Sorrow mingles with laughter, anguish with introspection. The superficiality of old customs runs parallel with the sense of consequential loss. “It’s a black comedy rooted in Taiwanese local tradition. It also gives a glimpse into the characteristic hospitality that is part of the Taiwanese countryside,” he said.

Yu-Lin’s other concern was to show the inherent niceness of the village folks. “People should be nice and polite. The film is more personal and artistic than dramatic,” he said, adding that it had the potential to make people laugh and cry at the same time. “Everyone can find an emotional connect. Everyone can think it is his/her story. Death is universal,” he said.

Seven Days in Heaven, said Yu-Lin, has a serious subject. But it doesn’t deal with it in a serious way. He said the film’s music — from Hava Nagila, a Jewish wedding song, to American and Spanish pop — will find connect with people across the globe. “Music doesn’t have boundaries of natioanlities. It is an important protocol in a film,” he said, adding he might have a bit of Indian music in his next film.

WE MOVE on to the evolution of cinema in Taiwan. It has been a long journey for cinema in the country since the first Taiwan-produced motion picture was released in February 1907. The watershed moments in the history of cinema in Taiwan that, in many ways, marked the beginning of a modern era in filmmaking in the country, were two “anthology-style” films: In Our Time, the four-part 1982 film co-directed by Chang Yi, Ko I-chen, Tao Te-chen and Edward Yang, and Sandwich Man, the three-part 1983 film, based on Huang Chun-ming short stories and co-directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tseng Chuang-hsiang and Wan Jen. These films, along with much that came out later in the ’80s, were rooted in realism and drew on the dramatic changes in society. They were part of the New Wave Cinema in Taiwan which made the world sit up and take note of its cinematic trends. International appreciation and acclaim only helped the cause of sensible and meaningful cinema in the country where yet another kind of cinematic revolution was underway. It was a revolution that saw the craft of filmmaking go hand in hand with commerce.

That revolution was in the form of Ang Lee who redefined the landscape of Taiwanese cinema in his first feature film, Pushing Hands, which was released in 1992. It captured the conflict between the traditional Chinese ideas of “Confucian relationships” and Western notion of individualism through the story of an elderly Chinese tai chi chuan teacher, who leaves Beijing to live with his son, daughter-in-law and grandson in New York City and finds himself painfully distanced from the daily rhythms of their lives. Lee went on to make his mark as a Mandarin-language filmmaker with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) which got its due recognition and reached the world audience after it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Other filmmakers of the period who have redefined the celluloid scene in Taiwan are: Chen Kuo-fu (School Girl, Treasure Island, The Peony Pavilion and The Personals), Hsu Hsiao-ming (Heartbreak Island, Homesick Eyes), Lin Cheng-sheng (A Drifting Life and Murmur of Youth) and Chang Tso-chi (Soul of a Demon, The Best of Times, Darkness and Light and When Love Comes).

Yu-Lin described the current stage of cinema in Taiwan as “New New Wave”. He says the new wave films were not very successful as they didn’t focus on market. In the last one decade, cinema in Taiwan has seen further flourishing as young and innovative filmmakers, like Niu Chen-zer (What Have I Done Wrong?), Tom Shu-yu Lin (Winds of September) and Yang Ya-che (Orz Boyz), who have introduced newer forms, methods and styles and won critical acclaim around the world.

According to Yu-Lin, another refreshing era in Taiwanese cinema began with Cape No 7 (2008), a romantic drama suffused with humour, written and directed by Wei Te-Sheng which brought the audience to theatres. Yu-Lin said after Cape No 7, more and more filmmakers are focusing on style and narrative. And it was style and narrative that was on Yu-Lin’s mind when he was shooting Seven Days in Heaven (the entire shooting was done in 16 days flat). “I was always thinking about what sort of images the audience want to see and what will they take back,” he said.

Asked about the subjects and themes in the contemporary Taiwanese cinema, Yu-Lin said gangster films, love and coming-of-age stories have failed to find favour. Films on social issues and historical narratives with a slice of nostalgia about the country’s traditional culture get great response. “The Taiwanese audience wants to see their own stories on the celluloid,” he said.

A fan of Jim Jarmusch, Wong Kar-wai, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorcese, Yu-Lin also loves watching Hindi films and enjoyed Wake Up Sid. “India’s diversity is best captured by its movies,” he said, adding that India had the right talents and the soft power and infrastructure to support the drive of young filmmakers to make different kind of cinema.

When it comes to Taiwanese cinema, which has managed to stave off the influence of Hong Kong and Hollywood and is increasingly coming into its own, there is a larger narrative of cinematic excellence waiting to unfold. And filmmakers like Yu-Lin are like the rising stars who will write that narrative in times to come. The world is all eyes.

S. Mitra Kalita: An interview

2010-12-10T14:32:00.000-08:00

“Home is a place you can always come back to,” writes S. Mitra Kalita in My Two Indias: A Journey to the Ends of Opportunity (HarperCollins), an exploration into the two divergent faces, and facets, of the country her parents left when they were 30. Interestingly, it was at 30 when Kalita made a “reverse journey” in 2006 when she came to India to work for a business newspaper (Mint). When Kalita arrived in New Delhi — with her artist husband, Nitin Mukul, and her two-year-old daughter, Naya — she was caught in the bubble of India’s booming, free-market economy. As she reported on the new economy, the other India — the India of the poor, the India of rising inequality — couldn’t escape her eyes.

In the book, she tries to reconcile the many faces of India that are so contrastly at odds with one other.
Kalita’s was a journey that enabled her to understand the bewildering country of her origin better. Her parents come from Assam and are now settled in the US. Though she was not born in India, she has always stayed attached to her roots. She sings Bhupen Hazarika’s songs and performs bihu every year. As does her daughter, Naya, now 6.

The book goes back and forth between the old and the new India — the India of her native village Sadiya and that of a metropolis like Delhi — as Kalita seeks to have a better perspective on the country’s economy, education, society and polity. Kalita writes in the epilogue: “With the benefit of hindsight and distance we could see merit in some parts of the Indian system.”

Kalita, who has earlier worked with the Washington Post, Newsday and the Associated Press, has written on immigration for years. She knows that people, actually, never leave. “They always say they leave for better opportunity, but the reality is there is always something else to it,” she says.
In 2008, opportunity called Kalita back to New York City where she is currently working with the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpts from an interview:

Q. At many levels, the book captures a very personal journey you made to India. What was the trigger for this journey?
A. My whole life I have wondered what it would have been like if my father never left. And that could one undo someone’s migration. I came as far I could to make the reverse journey. This also happened in the backdrop of my daughter turning two. As a parent, you hit a point where nothing forces you to question your values or challenge them like raising a child. So much of what my parents passed on to me came from their Indian villages. I wondered how on earth was I going to do that with a child that had no village to speak of. In many ways, I represented a typical American. I moved around quite a bit. Of course, the job brought me here. But there was always another side to it. There was also a desire to answer the question: What could have been if my father had never left?
I came to India, a country on the rise. While I was here, there began in the US the greatest recession in a generation. Because I wrote a lot about innovation in India, I believe that there is so much to learn from failures. Once I heard people speak of India in in terms I couldn’t imagine I will hear in my lifetime, there was a personal curiosity of just wanting to see what that looked like. The opportunity to cover the recession also worked as a drive.

Q. With what perspective did you approach India when you set out to write the book?
A. A lot of Westerners have written books about India. And there is no dearth of Westerners talking about the culture shock. I was pretty self-aware of many who have come before me and dissected India, perhaps through a similar lens. Where I bring the difference is two-fold: One, that I am an Indian-American. Two, my perspective on India was not of a Delhiite. I have great sympathy for the workers that managers curse. They come with no exposure into the workforce. Many of them are my cousins. Many of them probably could have been my parents. That is a perspective unique from some of the Westerners who write about the Indian economy. I also didn’t dwell on Delhi as a historical city that it is. Some of the beautiful books have been written about that. I didn’t think that was what I brought to the table. It was very ironical for someone who grew up in New York to articulate ways of an Indian village. I did that because I had lived so much of it through my upbringing. For a generation that grew up after liberalisation and in a much more urbanised India, it is a perspective that a lot of young journalists no longer have.

Q. On a lighter note, how soon did you realise that you had had enough of India?
A. I don’t think it was as jarring as that. I think that if somebody were to say, ‘Would you come back?’ and if there was a right opportunity, I wouldn’t turn that down. You never say never. The process, pretty climactic and evident in the book, was the process of gaining admissions for my daughter in a nursery school. Because education and workplace training was such an important part of my job, I focused a lot on how undergrads in colleges were not being prepared for the workplace. Little did I realise that so much of that preparation, the lack of which was actually stripping Indians of the ability to innovate and think outside the box, starts at the age of 3 or 4. That process was difficult to go through although, ultimately, we prevailed. Just like something works out for so many processes in India. Nonetheless, it left a bitter taste in my mouth and I wondered: Can anyone really make it here without someone putting in a word or giving a donation. Ultimately, what sent me back was a phone call for another job.

Q. Were you happy to have been able to refresh your perspectives on India as you made this journey?
A. I wrote about technology in India for years where I would always use the term leapfrogging. Little did I think that a journalist could leapfrog her career. You write about that for other people. But if I hadn’t come to India, there was no way I would have been in this position at the Wall Street Journal, a global newspaper. In the last five years alone, India has just exploded. I don’t think that my perspective of covering the recession would have been even possible had I not been through a booming economy. And for that alone I am intensely grateful to India. The other thing I am really grateful to the country is that it exposed a complacency within me that somehow good times will keep rolling.

Also, in a country where nine newspapers landed with a thud at my doorstep every morning, what better reminder could be of the role of journalists in the society. You have people hungry for information. It’s a real privilege that I was able to be a part of that. The other privilege was that Mint, that started as an experiment, was quite successful. There are a lot of reporters who have come through the newsroom and gone on to better things. When I started out, the paper didn’t even have a name and people in the US felt it was crazy for abandoning my job and joining a no-name newspaper in India. It’s nice to be able to have proven them wrong.

Q. Did you at all feel that this entailed some risks?
A. Of course, there was a risk. I knew journalists coming to the US from India who were told that their experience didn’t count for anything. Having worked with both the American and the Indian journalists now, I think that there is a lot that journalists in the US can learn from the hustle of Indian newsrooms, from their competition. For example, we started the newsroom from scratch which enabled us to integrate technology and staff in a way that the West is still trying to do. It’s quite a challenge.

Q. As a business journalist, how do you view the trajectory of India’s economic growth?
A. The trajectory of its growth is quite impressive if you look at where other global economies are right now. While it experienced a blip in the fall of 2008, it bounded pretty quickly. The real market and stock markets are still going very strong. It has really served as some kind of a bedrock with some stability in a world that is reeling from the recession. That’s commendable. A lot of what sent the world into recession — living with new means, being very comfortable with debt, lending being very free — shouldn’t be forgotten as India continues its ride. If you look at the real state bubble, there are still lessons to be drawn from what other countries have gone through. There has to be cautious optimism.

The other significant thing for India and China to bear in mind is that the US consumer has still not rebounded. Unemployment in the US is still very high. Even though the markets may say we are doing just fine, they are dependent on the strength of the US consumers. You can’t be a member of the global economy and say, ‘We are going to go on our own right now.’ It’s all integrated. Similarly, the US can’t decline jobs being outsourced to Bengaluru. India and China can also not just focus on their domestic market.
I don’t think I can be entirely celebratory. India has somewhat cautious approach to opening up. The recession, if anything, has forced the world to ask the same questions that India is going through: What is the role of the government in uplifting the people? In the US, it is a huge issue. Can we get ourselves out of this deficit? Whether we still have safety networks for individuals?

Q. You didn’t want this to be a ‘business book’, did you? Did you want it to be a memoir?
A. I didn’t set out to write it as a memoir. I actually think I am too young to have done that. And it’s not a family story. It’s very hard to write about India as an outsider without saying, ‘Look this is my perspective, but I am an outsider.’ It became the device not to have used that excuse every minute, perhaps replacing the apology to tell it like it is. There have been a lot of Indian economy books, but they are not always accessible. They are not something that people will pick up. We are so quickly in the midst of change that it’s hard to sit and examine what this has done to the daily rhythm of an Indian household.

Q. What is your idea of home?
A. I consider myself a product of many places. India, in its sense of home, is truly generous. I do feel like this is home. Delhi is home. Assam is home. The place we call home is representative of all the different walks we come from.

HAYWATCH

2010-12-03T03:03:00.000-08:00

The world came calling to Kerala to keep date with a conversation about the written word at the first edition of Hay Festival, an exuberant celebration of literature and life, held at the Kanakakunnu Palace in Thiruvananthapuram from November 12 to 14.

At the festival, Kerala became one with the word. And one with the world. Milling around in the sprawling premises of the historic palace for three days were authors divided by cultures, poets divided by languages, filmmakers divided by genres and people divided by ideologies. But what they had in common was the sheer love for literature, thirst for ideas, hunger for knowledge. And they all got an ample dose in the whirl of cerebral bohemianism associated with the Hay-on-Wye, that little town on the Welsh border that has sprung onto the world map for courting literary and cultural icons of our times.

MAN ON THE MOVE

Minutes after Peter Florence, the founder-director of Hay-on-Wye, walked out of the last session on the last day of the festival, I caught hold of him for what I thought would be a fleeting conversation. But when we settled down for an interview, Florence, visibly agog and upbeat upon the completion of Hay’s debut venture in India, betrayed no signs of rushing through the conversation. He couldn’t possibly have done that anyway, I later reasoned, for the festival itself was a conversation after all: A conversation on literature and life. In about 30 odd minutes, I discovered how Florence, a great conversationalist who floored one and all at his sessions with Simon Schama, Shashi Tharoor and Michelle Paver, could be an interviewer’s delight.

We were sitting in the authors’ green room, adjacent to the Palace Hall, where Schama was holding forth on Barack Obama the man and the "superhero" leader. People were buzzing in and around the hall. A stream of young men and women kept trickling in, trickling out. As we talked, we could hear their arguments, claps and whoops, cheer and chatter. Literature was thrumming in the air. Several steps below, at the Nishagandhi Amphitheatre, Irish folk-rock legend and activist Bob Geldof was strumming his guitar for a concert that would wind up the "Woodstock of the mind".
In a candid display of an incredible sense of joie de vivre, the very hallmark of Hay, Florence, a man of constant joy, described to me the power of literature and the philosophy behind the phenomenal movement called Hay which, in its first year at the Indian soil, was only testing (back)waters. Florence said he wanted to see whether it was possible to have a festival like Hay here, whether it had a future, if it might grow organically, if there was an audience for it. "The answer to all these things is yes," said a beaming Florence.

It was the third day of the festival director’s first India visit. And it already felt "absolutely like home." All thanks to Hay and the kind of crowds that it managed to draw. "It is the best you could have actually," he said, talking about the festival’s argumentative, contrary and pluralist strands. Argumentative and pluralist like India itself. In many ways, it was like planting the sapling of the celebration called Hay in India. Something which Florence has done in many, many countries. In Kerala, what struck him the most was the fact that people "just got in". They were inquisitive, demanding and absolutely generous in spirit. "We are in Kerala. It works," Florence said, rejoicing in Hay’s Kerala moment, exulting in its success.

The Kerala Hay Festival aimed at achieving three things: One, study climate change as broadly as possible. Two, address the idea of emerging democracies. Three, look at the Dravidian language and culture and "put it at the same stage as other better-known international cultures and give it the same status". Florence said what he had to bring to Kerala was some ideas, energy and structure. "But this has to become a Keralan festival," he said, adding that the festival was both local and global. Going "glocal", perhaps, is a magic mantra as much relevant in the literary world as it is elsewhere. Like Hay festivals elsewhere, Hay Kerala had a strong local identity. So while Vikram Seth or Sebastian Faulks were star attractions at the festival, no less starry, albeit in their own ambits, were Paul Zacharia or K. Satchidanandan.

Malayalam, said Florence, was a culture of 10-20 million ("who knows how many!") speakers. But chances were that there were some "damn fine writers" for whom being published in English was not the be-all and end-all. "The sheer majestic, Maximilious power of the English language doesn’t invalidate great writing in any of the Indian languages for which there are hundreds and millions of readers. And that is a huge exploration to go on," he said.

While for Florence, the entire world is literally a stage to ferment great ideas, it is the Commonwealth countries ("ethically and morally bewildering, the most bizarre, indefensible congregation of people") that is on his radar. The Commonwealth, he says, creates untold wealth of cultures and civilisations. While it makes us wonder about whatever the past might have been, it is the realities of the present that make us all "connected in various ways".

In the next few years, Florence will be interested in seeing how this festival will relate to (A) the rest of India and its multiplicity of languages, (B) the Arab World and (C) its neighbourhood. That’s the most incredibly fulfilling aspiration for Florence who is fascinated by a Mongol- Malay-Spanish-African-Welsh hybrid. "I’m floored by the idea that this might be place to have a look at all those things," he said.

Hay has tasted the beaches and the backwaters, but Florence feels it will take at least three years for the festival to find its connect. After five years, it will secure firm foothold. "What will happen in the first five years is unknown. We know that we need more loos. We know that we need to have more food on the site. What we don’t know is what will be the energy that the festival will release, some of the connections that will be made and where it feels it wants to go. However, what we do know is that we are going to find out," he said. If it’s the audience that makes a festival’s life, Hay already has a life of its own.

‘A PARTY FOR THE ENLIGHTENMENT’

At the root of Hay festivals all over the world is exchange of ideas. There is an element of the festival which happens on the stage. And there is another element which finds manifestation in the conversations between the writers and the media. And the latter, said Florence, was a crucial element of the festival.

Hay is not and will never be about one thing. Florence said he will be bored to tears if he had to do a poetry festival, for example. Much of Hay’s identity emanates from Florence’s personal philosophy: "I like mixing stuff. I like the energy that comes off people who do different things. I’m not good at high art. I am not that refined. I like rough stuff. I love synthesising. I also love extroversion. I like stuff that is bursting out. And I like difference."

It’s no wonder Hay is about many things: "We are not interested in purism. We are impurists. We are bastards. We are Mongols. We are mix and matches. I’d like it to be more like life. Yes, of course, we want literature, which is a great human art form and, in many ways, more accessible than art and more individuating than music. But that’s part of the conversation about science, life, education, civilisation, politics, love and death — all the things that we do. Hay is also about the other stuff we do: Drinking and shagging and hanging around the place. It’s about socilisation. It’s a way of being together."

According to Florence, in the dutifully connected world we live in, there is a yearning, a hunger to share what we know with people over a cup of coffee. It is absolute and increasing and more vaulable. It’s all about forming the human contact at some deep level.

When Florence goes on the proposed Africa tour — Cairo, Lagos, Cape Town — next year, it is this yearning to form meaningful and productive human contact that will play out in all its beauty. Ditto with the pan south Asian 39 literary project that he plans to launch to promote writing in the region.

After India, the other great culture Florence longs to have an opportunity to explore is Russia because "so many of the greatest novels and greatest poems have been written by Russian authors". He said Russian society was in a state of violent change, a state of transformation, although not revolutionary. It’s a phase that, history shows us, has yielded the richest response from writers. The turbulent times of Queen Elizabeth I in England witnessed the greatest achievement of literature than anywhere else. The 19th century in France gave us Gustave Flaubert and in Russia, the most extraordinary period of the country’s history, it gave us Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekov, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Alexander Pushkin. There was an incredible flowering of Czech literature between 1968-1989.

Florence was "willing to bet" that exactly the same rules applied in India: Bad times are good for writers. "The whole idea of what writers are for is called into question sometimes. But writers are individuals who are not obligated by economy as filmmakers or musicians are. They are completely free to respond as individuals," he said.

Florence, who had started the Hay festival with his father (Norman Florence) in 1988, said his father was wonderfully and naturally responsive and sympathetic to great writing. "He told me about literature more than any of my professors. We never agreed about anything though. And he was always right," he smiled and said.

Soon after they had started the festival with winnings from a poker game, they had a group of about 15 odd people. "Everybody had to rub in together. It was a family game," Florence said, who devised the festival by trying to answer a simple question: Who do you think will be the most interesting people to talk to? More than two decades later, it’s the same game. "It is infinitely rewarding. I feel like the luckiest, most extraordinarily advantaged person as I’ve spent my life talking and listening to some of the most brilliant people in the world," he said.

On a good day, Florence said, he feels like he is contributing to education. On a bad day, he feels it’s like an employment. Most of them are good days. Each time Florence fears he is becoming complacent, he does a reality check: "What we do isn’t life and death. I am no soldier, doctor or a teacher."

"If you ever write this," Florence told me, gesturing with his hands, "Put this in heavy inverted coma: It’s like having a party for the enlightenment. There is no greater gift than new ideas or good stories."

As Florence goes around the world "hanging out with the nicest bunch of mates I can possibly imagine," he gets to explore the world through its stories. It’s better than going to university. Or even better than "having to or pretending to be" an actor. But it also imposes an incredible humanity on him. "I know nothing. And I know that I know nothing. But I have a constant source of wonder as to how the same rule applies around the world. A rule that says people are happy to learn and share their stuff. They are happy to listen. I have learnt that this has the capacity to make people happy," he said.

Hay is a literary fever, but not quite a hysteria. Florence would rather have it small than make an spectacle out of it. In India, it appears he’s not aiming at turning it into a literary "show". He said: "We are not the IPL. We are not trying to sell stuff. We are not trying to fill stadia. It’s a small-scale, intimate thing."

Hay-on-Thiruvananthapuram might be small, but it could have profound ramifications with its resonances going way beyond what happened at a small hilltop in mid-November.

HAY, DEFINED

In that stimulating conversation on the last day of the festival, which I am glad I had, Florence defined Hay to me rather succinctly. Hay was all about idea, energy and exchange. It was about getting to know the world through stories. It was about the yearning to share. To talk. To listen. And the festival got its "kernel" (executive director Lyndy Cooke’s word) quite right.

Hay is also about bonhomie, unrestrained and generous, the spirit of which is so fabulously epitomised by its producer, Teamwork Productions’ MD Sanjoy K. Roy. Roy’s friendliness is contagious. Like he does every year at the Jaipur Literature Festival, he played the role of a host to perfection.

On the first day, while I was having lunch with fellow scribes and friends, four local Malayalis on the next table were trying to settle in to relish their fish curry and rice, when Roy happened to pass by. Smiling at them, he asked: "Are you all enjoying? Are you being looked after?" All of them smiled back at Roy. They mumbled: "Thank you."

I don’t know if Roy knew them personally. But even if he didn’t, the foursome must have felt like they belonged there. It was a small gesture. But it fits into Hay’s big picture of ideas and visions. A picture of literary and cultural camaraderie, creative cravings for company, food and fun.

Hay, in many ways, is about life. And any good literature, anywhere in the world, essentially deals with life. Aren’t books our window to many lives, many worlds, many cultures? Don’t they bring to us the beauty of different narratives, different times, different zeitgeists?

During the three days of debates and discussions (not to forget the charged, free flow of conversations in the lush, emerald green lawns over appams, carrot juice or red rice), I got my mind messed up with bright, bristling ideas that shape literature, culture, history and politics of diverse societies and nations. (Isn’t getting your mind messed up a step, albeit small, towards understanding big ideas and finding clarity and meaning in them?).

Soaking in the festival’s sights and sounds, tuning in to scintillating conversations while keeping my sense of wonder all the time, for three days I could feel that literature was beautiful, life was beautiful. I was glad I made it to Hay for it’s not very often that I get to see Vikram Seth breaking into a limerick or an impromptu hiaku while discussing the landscape of his novels and his love for taking a line out for a walk or Simon Schama talking about the A-Z of his picks from culture and current affairs from Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction to the crisis of democracy in America. It’s not often that I listen to Mexican novelist and essayist Jorge Volpi explaining that Latin American writing went beyond magic realism. It’s not often that I find myself in the midst of numbers, made to believe that they governed much of our lives: The session with British mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, whom I had the privilege to introduce at the festival, was a wonderful exploration into the number kingdom.

Yes, there were some authors snuggled within their ivory towers, but mostly, they mingled and were receptive.

Hay-on-Thiruvananthapuram was highbrow without having any highbrow pretensions. It was less sanctimonious and more inclusive. While the Kovalam literay festival, also a three-day affair at the same venue, remains insular even though running into its third edition, the Hay Festival had the no-holds-barred feel about it. And that explained why almost everyone flocked to the festival, from the elderly Malayali gentlemen with childlike inquisitiveness to school children, with the open minds of adults, vying with one another for a brush with their literaray heroes, getting their favourite titles signed by the respective writer.

On a personal, less relevant, note, Hay meant getting a bit sun-burnt and then soaked in the sudden rain and finding myself amidst the serene palm landscapes and sandy beaches, a welcome escape from the rough and tumble of life in a metro. There are memories of playing with the quicksand, walking barefoot on the beach, getting food for thought over banana upside down cake, seeking solace in sparkling red Shiraz, singing Geldof’s long-forgotten songs, watching an angry Sting, a surprise entry at Geldof's concert, sticking out his tongue at a TV journalist, discovering Matchbox Twenty through a new-found friend and spending some quality time with valued pals.

There is also a memory of writers of all hues divesting themselves, on the last night of the festival, of their clothes, getting down to the basics, sloshing around on the seashore, splashing into the waves. Becoming one with water, one with the waves.

Hay fever in Kerala is over. But I can still feel the surge of brilliant ideas on life and literature knocking about in my head. The writers who participated in the festival have returned to their worlds, but I can still sense the tingling rush of creative energy they collectively emitted coursing through my veins.

When the curtains came down on the festival in Thiruvananthapuram on November 14, it wasn’t quite the end for Hay Festival. It was only a beginning — the beginning of an engagement with stories and ideas that will scintillate the minds of people, year after year.

Hope

2010-12-01T22:42:00.000-08:00

If you seek a thing
But can't seem to find it
Never, never shall you despair
For sometimes it might
Take quite sometime, sometimes ages
For you to be there.

You must persevere
And persist, shouldn't
Ever think of giving up
For just when the
Darkest of hour ends
Day's light stirs it up!

Unstrung

2010-11-21T00:09:00.000-08:00

Knocked cold,
Knocked dead,
Words wobble down
The quavering alleys.
The night, as usual,
Wanders, in vain,
For its poison.
The night, in vain,
Wishes to sink into
Unknown depths.
The night, in vain,
Wants to scrape
The bottom of the ocean
Inside, deep inside
Again.

(Even if you cry
Your eyes out
How many picthers
Can you fill?)
Did you hear?
I heard
The world pass
By me.
In all its "glory"
And "splendour"
Did you hear?
I heard the sounds
Of schmoozing
Floating in the air
Right next to me:
Smug, slimy, unctuous
Words leaping at my ears.

I see your beaming face
Leaping across the
Divide, yes, the divide.
Your eager feet
Bounding over
Expensive tiles.
Leapfrogging, in one
Swift movement,
Into the hall of fame.

carpe diem

2010-10-29T14:13:00.000-07:00

Even as the night
Serenades the stars
And the moon,
Acting pricey,
Keeps playing
Hide and seek,
The darkness of
Insanely fleeting moments
Holds out a hope,
A promise.
Which you don't
Or can't see
But I do.

When you ask me
Anything.
I go stupidly blank.
Words keep trembling
On my lips
And you stare.
Keep staring at me.
I never know
What to say.
As words betray...

Words are only
Like the many vital things
That go missing
Whenever I need them.
The most.
The thoughts that desert me
When I gotta think them.
The lines that I must remember
For memory's sake.
And some against forgetting.
Some proper nouns
And some common
That I must share with you
But they keep
Deserting me
At the most opportune time,
Time after time.
Why does everything
To do with me keep
Getting scattered,
Lost?
Why can’t I gather?
Why can’t I hold
Together
The world around me?

Things have, for long,
Kept falling apart.
Tumbling out of control
Spiralling out of my hold.
It makes me wonder!
Some puppets we are,
Forever dancing to
Strings that are in
Someone else’s hands.

Life has been slipping by
And we haven't been,
You tell me,
Able to make time
For anything.
Anything, indeed!

Elsewhere,
The world
Continues to bloom
And wither.
Elsewhere,
People
Continue to use
And abuse
One another.
Elsewhere,
Hearts continue
to be won
And broken.
Elsewhere,
Some people
And ideas continue
To court controversies
And bask
In their bits
Of glory.
Elsewhere,
Reams are being written
About people like us.
Elsewhere,
Scores are being
Written off everyday.

“Our moment eludes,”
You tell me.
“When will it come?
Oh when? Oh! when? Oh! when?”
I see you agonise over it.
Every day, almost.
Every waking hour, almost.
I can feel your tension
Your turbulence.

But each time, you ask me
Anything about the future —
Mine or yours —
Each time you
Agonise over
our moment
I smile.
“It’s here, It’s here,
Can’t you see?
This is it, this is it,”
My words
Sound distant
Even to me.
And I feel
As if I have
Said too much
And yet,
A part of me feels,
I haven’t said enough.

“It’s in the now
Sieze it, sieze it.”

You hear me.
And, then, getting up,
You throw the book
You are reading
In my face.

When the night sings...

2010-10-24T15:45:00.000-07:00

The night
In its funereal silence
Seems to hide
Some long-forgotten melody.
It sings to me
Some ill-remembered lullaby.
That little tray
That embraces all ash
Smoulders away..
I burn!
And the embers..
Oh! the embers!
But the soul knows
How to strum itself.
It burns for a moment
And, then, moves on.

Someone who was,
Minutes ago,
Losing his religion —
"I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing..." —
Into my ear
Has moved on, too.

I have revelled in
The Carnival of Sorts
Of his Chronic Town.
I see him Stumble,
Gardening At Night.
I feel his Wanderlust.
I can see him
Feeling Gravity’s Pull.
I could hear his
Fables of Reconstruction
I could hear his
Eponymous Murmur.

When the voices,
Some voices,
Fall silent.
Then, the night
Finds its voice.
And sings to me...

When the discordant notes
Of an unsung life
Cease to play
Then, the night lumbers to me
And sings...

The night, sometimes,
Despairs.
There are times
When it feels
It has enough.
There are times
When it just plain
Gives up.
But very soon
It learns to
Hold on.
Move on.
And sings...

The night
Through its funereal silence
Sings to me...

"Perchance to dream..."

2010-10-21T15:43:00.000-07:00

As drinks flowed
And joyous chatter
Filled the air.
Your thoughts filled me.

You must have held me
Under your gaze forever
Or did you?
Did you sink into
A sea of stare,
Delve into my soul?
You must have observed
My studied silence.
Didn't you?
My measured words?
My calculated laughter?

When I would have stared
Blankly, stupidly
Or stifled the urge
To interrupt —
Which I was so
In the habit of doing,
And which you so hated —
You must have noticed.
Or did you?

I sat
As ever
In a corner —
Listless but content.
Orbiting around
The centre
Of my own being.
While seeing other beings
Constellate around me.

I sat, detached
As if I had
Relinquished
Everything else
To everyone else.
As if
My place in the world
Was everyone else's too.

They spoke.
About the places
Life had taken them to.
About the dreams
They had fulfilled.
They spoke about
Their capital, their worth.
Their homes, their hearth.

“What is life without
Material symbols of success,”
One said, rolling his Rolex.

I had no tall claims to make.
I had no great stories to tell.
I had no conquests to boast of.
Aloof, away, adrift
I sat in that corner
As if cowering under
The burden of my defeats
As if buried under
The swamp of my failures.

When they left,
I walked into the night
"To die, to sleep
To sleep, perchance to dream.."

Rajasthan International Folk Festival 2010

2010-10-20T07:12:00.000-07:00

If music is your thing and folk the flavour you revel in, you should be in Jodhpur from tomorrow. To get soaked in the sounds of music. To feel your soul get strum. For tomorrow, on October 21, the ramparts of the magnificent Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur, the Sun City, will bristle with musical notes of all hues in a colourful celebration of music. The 2010 chapter of the Rajasthan International Folk Festival (RIFF) will see both local and foreign artistes play to their own beat, weave soulful tunes to soothe the mind and the soul.

Jodhpur RIFF — which has Mick Jagger and Maharaja Gaj Singh II of Jodhpur as its patrons and UNESCO, Taj Hotels, Resorts and Palaces as its partners — is ranked among the top 25 international music festivals in the world and is running into its fourth year. Like earlier, the spotlight this year will be on the traditional folk music of Rajasthan and the collaborations between Indian and international groups. The five-day festival packs a melodious punch with its cocktail of roots and devotional music concerts and interactive folk sessions.
A joint initiative of the Jaipur Virasat Foundation and the Mehrangarh Museum Trust, the festival is scheduled to open with a traditional maand (folk music which was sung in the royal courts of Rajasthan) performance by Ali Mohammed (Shekawati), Pt. Chirenji Lal (Jaipur) and Banarasi ji (Jodhpur).

The magnificent fort will then reverberate with the sounds of traditional abhangs and thumri rendered by Hindustani classical maestro Dr Ashwini Raja Bhide-Deshpande who belongs to the khayal-based stylised singing gharana of Jaipur-Atrauli. She will sing traditional abhangs of saint poets, like Namdev.

According to Divya Bhatia, the festival director, RIFF’s beauty lies in the fact that it strikes a balance between its texture and its flavour. While its texture remains traditional and Rajasthani, its flavour (and resonance) is "truly contemporary and global".

We meet when Bhatia is in New Delhi for media interaction. The festival director, in his prolific and protracted career as an "arts professional", has juggled between many fields. His resume runs into five pages, enlisting his works in theatre, films and arts. With 10 years experience in online design and branding, he also freelances as a consulting Web specialist. Reacting to my hyperbolic observation ("Your CV reads like a novella"), he laughs: "I’m usually not in the habit of sending out my CV." Bhatia doesn’t need to. For the festival programmer, artistic consultant and producer is a venerable figure in the art and culture circuit in India and abroad.

The texture of the festival this year, he says, will be a combination of two factors: spiritual and percussive. "We are hoping to mix the devotional element with the tribal element. The texture depends a lot on the belief or the idea that in traditional cultures, the separation of spirituality from daily life is almost non-existent. Spirituality is part and parcel of the daily life," he says.
The festival will string together a rhapsody of different, little-heard instruments — from iktaara by the maand singers and bauls to rudra veena played by Bahauddin Dagar.

Bhatia says that the tradition of haveli sangeet (the temple music practised in Nathdwara in Rajasthan) has not just got to do with music. "There is an element of musicality which has got to do with a larger connection of life," he says. From the opening performance to the concluding one, which will see another musician from haveli sangeet perform, the entire spectrum is devotional.

Add to that the spell-binding, stirring performances by Pakistan’s Sufi rock band Mekaal Hasan and the genre-breaking sensations, Sona Mohapatra and Susheela Raman, and you have the promise of a soul-uplifting affair.

Talking about the lineup, Bhatia sounds upbeat. Each of the artiste in the festival complements its texture, its flavour. What Mohapatra, for instance, does is called desi soul. But most people don’t know where to locate her because she does "her own thing". She has earlier collaborated with Aussie rock band INXS, pop legend David Bowie and Kailash Kher. "She has something which is so organic in contemporary sangeet. What is that something? We can’t quite put a finger on it," says Bhatia.

Mohapatra, who sings Bulle Shah and Meera Bai, will perform at RIFF with three folk artists: Bhavanri Devi, Roshni and Suraiya, the bhopa-bhopi, lok geet and maand singers respectively. Her solo performance will see Mohapatra play along with her composer-producer-musician husband Ram Sampath.

The lineup, which will strum along magic and mysticism, also includes DJ Maga Bo from Brazil, the 16-member Warszawianka folk dance ensemble from Poland, Zawose Family from Tanzania and flamenco gypsy-jazz guitarist Augustin Carbonell "El Bola". The sheer virtuosity and range of these performers will take those present on an electrifying trip.
Maga Bo’s claim, says Bhatia, is: "My laptop is my folk instrument." His roots music have enchanted many. And at RIFF this enchantment is only set to find more takers.
If you have listened to percussion king Pete Lockett perform, you will find it hard to give RIFF a miss as Lockett will rustle up some magic with Rajasthani artistes and Latin harpist Diego Laverde.

All these acts may have music at their core, but you can’t separate spirituality from the performance. The texture is music. The focus is the celebration of music. But the kind of sense or feel you will get at RIFF will have to do with the richness of music which has a larger-than-life connection.

Bhatia says that the festival goes beyond the usual, "standard Sufi thing" which you witness at regular concerts. "That is being done a great deal. But the bhawna (emotion) is missing somewhere. Also, we wanted to avoid a Sufi label," he says.
The festival may be a coalition of many performances under one roof, but what you will get to see and feel will be a "non-performative element" that lies at the root of the certain tradition that these musical forms come from.

For most practitioners of these folk forms, what they do is not just performance. And, Bhatia says, he didn’t want to present them as mere performances. "The urban audience sees it as performance. But it’s actually devotion-cum-music. You can’t take music out from the devotional element," he says.

In a city like Mumbai (where Bhatia comes from), while an individual may have faith or belief, but unless you know where to look, it is quite "soulless" in the city. The texture of RIFF is such that people come out with a "feeling of soul". And while they are there, they experience such a thing as soul.

The redressal

2010-10-06T14:58:00.000-07:00

Even in its deep sleep
The night keeps
Rumbling to wakefulness,
To a life of its own.
Your eyes — half-shut, half open —
Stare at me
From different
Time and space.
Your gentle lashes linger
In sweet shadows
That tiptoe to me,
Ricocheting some memories
In the deep, black stillness.
I can feel your gossamer gaze
On the nimble, naked night.

I can't be dreaming
But if I say I'm up
I know
I'd be lying.
Half-asleep, half awake, then?
Like half-dead, half-alive?
Here, here, you see,
That desire to be
A bit of this
And also
A bit of that.
Half-this, half-that.
You'd know.
I know.

It was just
A short while ago
That I survived
A web of humans.
And the little tragedies
They unfold
In their own little ways.
Someone's asperity,
Yet another's ire
Someone's pugnacity,
Yet another's mire.
Some indiscipline,
Some indolence,
Some misconduct
Some benevolence
Some outright
Stupidity and abuse.
And some facetious —
and some malicious —
Utterances!
Ah! the joys of the agreeable, and
The trauma of the otherwise!

“Who did he think he was?”
“Who hired her for that job?”
I keep on stirring
My bile before you.
Who knows for how long!
For a moment, I almost
Want you to writhe in
The same furnace of anger
That I burn in.
But you are different.
We are different!
Or are we?

I can hear your words:
Mundane. Banal.
Trivial. Trite.
Everyday. Silly.
Commonplace
Uninspiring.

I can't help it, I swear.
My oozing out (your words)
Of love, respect
Or care or compassion
Doesn't help.
The world is as it is
And will always be
The same.
Life is beautiful, you see,
But the world, as Pinter
Whom you and I love, said,
Is hell.

“So what?”
I hear you ask.

No, no, nothing!
I wouldn't have bothered,
I swear,
About the world
Or anything.
But for the night
That stubbornly seeks
The redressal
Of all the day’s grievances.

Eyes

2010-09-27T23:42:00.000-07:00

Nibbling on crumbs of sleep
In remainder of night's pale light
Meditative, a bit pensive and deep
A pair of eyes looks into the night

Some shouts, murmurs and whispers
Resonate in the empty sphere
Some words, some thoughts and gestures
Are all in the now and here

The eyes are shut, but witness
Whatever that happens around
All moss, all mass, all mess
That continue to gain ground

The time has ticked away
The night begins to recede
A pair of eyes blinks to say
"I yearn to learn to secede".

Irada

2010-09-16T09:56:00.000-07:00

Ab mere lafz bhi rangon ki qaba pahnenge
Mere naghme bhi musarrat ki duhaayi denge
Mere geeton mein bhi goonjegi kayi shahnayi
Sur khushi ke meri nazmon mein sunaayi denge

Ab na honge kabhi bojhil mere qadmon ke naqoosh
Aankhein bezaar kabhi ab na nazar aayeingi
Mere atraaf ke nazzaron ki sab rangeeni
Mere alfaaz ke paikar mein utar jaayeingi

Ab niraasha ki koi beej na panpegi kahin
Qumqume jalte rahenge meri ashaayon ke
Ab kahin koi andhera na dasega mujhko
Ab diye jalte rahenge meri sab raahon ke

Meri saanson mein thirak uthega ab jashn-e-bahaar
Aur chalak uthega sab rang-e-chaman aankhon mein
Raqs karte na thakenge meri umeed ke paaon
Roshan, go zad pe hawaon ke, mashaal hathon mein

Zehn afsurda khayaalon ki siya raah se door
Dil bhi tareek andeshon ki jakad se aazaad
Dhadkanon mein koi bechaini na ab hogi nihaan
Aur ehsaas mein na koi udaasi aabaad

Meri hasrat, mere khawbon ka jahaan aur hi hai
Naummidi kabhi madoom na kar paye jise
Mere geeton, mere naghmon ka samaan aur hi hai
Koi tangi kabhi maghmoom na kar paye jise...

qaba: attire, musarrat: happiness, naqoosh: imprints, bezaar: indifferent, atraaf: surrounding, paikar: body, qumqume: candles, lights, jashn-e-bahaar: celebration of the spring, rang-e-chaman: colours of the garden, raqs: dance, zad pe hawaon ke: fighting against the wind, afsurda: desolate, siya: dark, nihaan: hidden, madoom: extinct, maghmoom: sad...

Before the dawn...

2010-09-06T14:25:00.000-07:00

The rooster, nestled in some corner,
Rests, unknown to wakefulness,
Unlike me.
Peace, it seems,
Has descended on mankind
In this part of the world.
At least.
Only, intermittently, broken by
Some voices, some sounds.
I've banished you away
From my thoughts
And set out to write
About things that matter.
Or just indulge in a few things
That don't.
Knowing, hoping, wishing, praying
That one day I'll find
What I seek.
That one day
What eludes me
Will embrace me.
Waking, I dream...

A distant door creaks.
A window winks at me
From the 10th floor.
The breeze brings to me
Some strange and familiar whiffs
That waft across,
Adrift in the air.
A moan, a sigh, a yawn
And some sounds of sleep
Still make themselves heard...

Waking, I dream..

Not long ago,
The night was privy to
Many sights and sounds:
Some cries, some crawls.
Some squeals of laughter,
A few sobs, and some
Drunken revelry.

Not long ago,
Many, ceasing their perpetual fight,
To keep walking —
Jostling, pushing, shoving —
Consigned themselves
To sleep.
An interim pause
In the race that knows
No stopping.
At least till
That last breath
Snatches you away.

But now, even as the dawn
Lies somewhere near,
Yearning to crack,
I see,
Somewhere over the horizon,
You walk through the rainbow..

Waking, I dream?

Cloudburst: Leh 2010

2010-09-04T04:08:00.000-07:00

I've looked on for far too long:
My eyes have begun to hurt now.
Ruins, ruins and some more ruins
Wherever I see.
Whenever I see.

My body is a knot of pain.
I can barely breathe
Or move.
All I can do is grope:
Slush, slush and some more slush.

Death burst forth
In millimeters.
Mudslides snatched
Several worlds away.
Mud is all that remains.
In the mud lies
All that I had
All that I was
All that I thought was mine
All whom I thought were mine.
In the debris,
A million dreams
A million visions.

The desert town
Is eerily deserted.
Not a word do I hear
No babies cry
No women laugh
No men banter.

Lying, drenched in the mud, dying
I've looked on for far too long
My eyes are hurting, but
Why don't they shut now?
What is there left to see?

Kalpana Swaminathan: An interview

2010-09-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

There is something immensly overpowering about Kalpana Swaminathan’s richly textured stories in Venus Crossing: Twelve Stories of Transit (Penguin Books, 2009) which has won the Vodafone Crossword Book Award 2009 in the fiction category, beating out Amit Chaudhuri’s The Immortals (Picador) and Mridula Koshy’s debut collection of stories If It Is Sweet (Tranquebar Press).

The stories in the collection, as the subtitle suggests, are about people (mostly women) in transit. It is about a few fleeting moments in a few individuals’ life when they happen to be on the brink of death, disaster or some tremendous transformation; the characters wilfully, and wistfully, negotitate the transit through these life-ending, life-altering moments, leaving behind a trail of engulfing emotions, forcing you to think about the exigencies of life and death — and many imponderable things in between — afresh.
Let’s begin at the beginning: “8 June 2004”, which sets the tone and tenor of the stories that follow, is integral to the collection. On June 8, 2004, the black dot of Venus defied the sun: "A black corruption in the white. Cinder in incandescence, the mote in the all-seeing eye."
The transit of Venus, the “renegade, wanton” Venus, crossing sun’s path in a fleeting moment of darkness and incandescence! Swaminathan says: “Think of the impossibility of that! Think of the nerve of that,” adding that the first seven pages prepare you for the book which is about “ordinary people and the nerve they summon up to counter imponderables”.
In Sister Thomas and Mister Gomes, the first story in the collection, you discover what is it like to spend a few days in the knowledge of the approaching death at a hospital and a human hand that tries its best to make that passage to death a little less painful, a little less lonely.
In A Prostitute’s Tale, you meet 42-year-old Shubhada, “who had never opened her legs to any man,” being described as a “prostitute”. Not in the literal sense of the word, though. “She is an emotional prostitute," proclaims one of Shubhada’s friends, Kokila, while bitching behind her back. Shubhada’s fault? She is a Good Samaritan who can’ bear to see, for example, a noisy set of school children getting themselves hurt on a moving train. Despite her being watchful to help avert any such tragedy, when a boy jumps to death, it’s she who, ironically, must bear the blame. Notwithstanding the fact that the boy’s own mother was on the same train.
In Incident At Abu Ghraib, Sukhi, a young girl, must hate her mother, Sakina, for blurting out before her friends that the experience of Lynndie England — the woman who is captured in some photographs pointing at a naked, masterbating man — is closer to her own experience. Sukhi hates her own mother for this, unaware of our own Abu Ghraibs — though of a different nature — that happened at a hospital where Sakina used to work. That was many, many years ago. But it had cast its shadow on Sakina forever.
Many of the other stories in the collection have similar disturbing strands — delving into the many ways life and love destroy us. Swaminathan’s felicity with language is phenomenal and you can’t help empathise with her characters in their hour of destruction and anguish.
The fate of these characters is something Swaminathan picks from lives around her. “Most of the stories in Venus Crossing are either observed or experienced. The people are all invented, but they convey what I have absorbed of life around me,” she says about these stories
which were written over 15 years, with none of them being close to their events. “To me, each of these stories is a novel. By this I mean the thought has completed trajectory, as it must in a novel,” she says.
While writing short stories is more immediate, and often reactive, Swaminathan says all good writing defies genre, and makes a permanent space for itself in the reader’s brain. “But a book has only one purpose: it must be read. To be read, it must be visible, and Indian publishing has vast stacks of invisible books,” says the author, who believes in change.
She says there’s a growing awareness among publishers that Indians writing in India do have something to say which Indians in India might, in fact, want to read, and form their own opinions. “I like to believe that, but then, like my favourite Spaniard, I always dare to dream the impossible dream,” she says.
Venus Crossing was also longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award, but couldn’t make it to the shortlist. Swaminathan says it’s always “heartening” to know someone has read your book. “The short story is a national institution, and every Indian language, including English,
has its celebrants. Sure, the Irish do it very well too, and it’s very generous of them to invite the world to participate,” she says.
Reading Venus Crossing, you get to know just how the unpredictble, the abrupt turns and bends in some people's life prove to be their nemesis, leaving their worlds topsy-turvy. Is Swaminathan fascinated by the idea of the unexpected and the myriad ways it has an impact on an individual’s life? "Yes, because I don’t think surviving is about endurance. Talk of survivors always irritates me by the passivity it implies," she says.
In the European narrative, says the author, the Indian ethos is fatalistic and passive, enduring helplessly, existing without hope. "I’ve never met an Indian like that and I’ve lived here all my life," she says.
Does the Indian narrative subsume the individual within her landscape? She says she disagrees with that view too. "The biological imperative is to escape pain. The individual survives by intelligent strategies to counter extinction. I’m interested in how the individual resists the pressures of the herd, peer pressures and also those of ‘tradition’, which is just a polite term for habit," she says.
Swaminathan, based in Mumbai, is a surgeon by profession. And very often the precision with which she writes is reflective of her profession. But then, she takes writing as her profession too. “I think all professions demand the same skills, and writing is as exacting as surgery. Like most people, I too carry the joys of one job into the other," she says.
Swaminathan is particularly happy about the Vodafone Crossword Award as it “honours English as an Indian language”. She says: “It’s also a great honour to be judged by the very people I write about, Indians in India, in the here and now.”
However, she says, it is more about reading than it is about winning. “There’s so much to celebrate in all these books, and I’m happy to see my book among them. Discovering a new writer is joyous and exciting," says the author, who has written extensively for children too.
She finds writing for children more enjoyable. “There are no brakes. You’re writing for the most demanding and also the most indulgent readers — they will be prepared to make the most incredible leaps of faith, but they also will unerringly spot a false note,” she says.
When she and Ishrat Syed (with whom she writes with the pseudonym Kalpish Ratna) wrote Nyagrodha, a rewrite of the first text of the Panchatantra, it was a tremendous experience challenging and transforming the writing on the wall. “We’ll always write for children because we love doing it , but publishing is quite another story,” she says.
Swaminathan's beautifully written first novel, Ambrosia for Afters, delved into the turbulence of growing up. You wonder if it had any personal parallel. How fascinated has Swaminathan been with fairytales? She says: “While the story has no personal parallel, the mileu is very familiar to me. Bandra in 1971 is as I remember it from my school days, and for added veracity, drawn heavily on the school syllabus. Fairytales, the retold version of myth, are spring-loaded with dread, a fact that children recognise. I thought it would be fun to use them to unravel the plot. The acknowledgement to the Brothers Grimm is a deep debt of gratitude.”
In Bougainvillea House, her other novel — a psychological thriller — she dealt with themes like adultery, sex and death. Did she also want to draw a doctor-detective parellel? Not quite. For Liaquat, she says, is a detective merely by chance. “He is a doctor through and through. When people talk of the doctor-patient relationship, it’s always from the patient’s perspective. Bougainvillea House explored the other side,” says Swaminathan, adding that literature demands that a doctor be either saint or monster, and she has always rebelled against that.
Swaminathan's latest novel and the third in detective Lalli series, Monochrome Madonna, is a part psychological thriller, part mystery. Swaminathan says Lalli’s just getting started. The first chapter of the next book appears at the end of Monochrome Madonna. “This one is going to be about the case that defined Lalli’s career. It’s called I Never Knew It Was You,” she says.
The Quarantine Papers, which she wrote with Ishrat (as Kalpish Ratna), explores the corrupting effects of hate on individuals. She says the choice of a love story to do this through was absolutely crucial. “There are several love stories in the book, but the overwhelming one is our own long-standing love affair with Bombay. The Quarantine Papers explored an aspect of the city that has almost been forgotten, its integral role in creating what we recognise today as modern medicine. December 6, 1992 and its aftermath wounded the city bitterly. For 16 years, we sought the right voice for our anguish, and found it finally in a love story. The similarity between the epidemic of hate and that of disease has its parallel in the city’s own memory. And in both cases, the target was the same: the faceless citizen. The truth of event is not to be read in archived statistics, but it is always palpable in the unspoken stories of destroyed lives,” she says.
This is an email interview. But when I speak to Swaminathan, briefly, over the phone for some clarification, she asks me: “Did you read the book?”
“Yes, I did. In fact, I was reading it only last night.”
“Good. Whether you like it or not, you must read it,” she says.
“And did you sleep after that?” she wants to know.
Yes, I fell asleep as I had been up for the last 24 hours. But, to put Swaminathan’s question in perspective, if you travel with the characters of Venus Crossing through their dark moments, sharing their pain, partaking of their grief, you will be hard put to sleep. For days on end.

A confession

2010-08-30T12:57:00.000-07:00

Setting foot on your soil
Brings me back to everything
That's calm and serene
And sublime in the world.
Outside,
The ravages have been
Disconcerting, devastating:
My wings keep getting clipped
My feathers keep getting ruffled.
Outside,
The disintegartion has been
Too grave, too deep!
Ah! this fast-paced corroding
Of the sum of my parts!
Ah! this mutilation of much
That once made me,
Held me together.
This erosion of
Everything that was me.
I've not been able to
Tell this to anyone
But I'll tell you:
In this nerve-wracking darkness
I've been amassing some threads of light
Preserving every ray,
Clutching on to every gleam
Every glint, every glimmer
Raring to savour every flash,
Every sparkle, every flicker.
But it's the incandescence
Of the beacon that's you
That I've soaked up the most!
You light me up!

Swara Bhaskar: An interview

2010-08-27T15:50:00.001-07:00

Glamour can be quite addictive. As Swara Bhaskar, whose film Madholal Keep Walking releases today, is beginning to discover. The actress, 25, is only three films old in the industry: her other two films are Pravesh Bharadwaj’s social documentary Niyati, her debut that got delayed and is set for a November release, and Aanand Rai’s romantic comedy Tanu Weds Manu which will hit screens in December this year. But, with these films, she has tasted Bollywood. And she only wants more. More and more.
You can smell her inexhaustible hunger for work when you meet her at her parents’ residence in Jawaharlal Nehru University. The actress, who has been living in Mumbai for about three years, is in New Delhi to promote her film.

She meets you at the entrance of her residence, after seeing off yet another scribe, with her father, C. Uday Bhaskar, a senior defence and strategic affairs analyst. Her mother, Ira Bhaskar, professor of cinema studies at JNU, makes a brief appearance later during the interview. Their house is nestled amidst luxuriant flora and you can hear the birdsong in the background. It’s pleasant outside, in the lawn, where we begin the conversation. Though there are signs that suggest it may rain: waves of clouds hover over us.
Swara is chirpy and vivacious. She perks up when she tells you about the films she has done as well those she wants to do. With childlike candour and honesty, she talks about her passage to 70mm which seems to have, in all earnest, just begun.
FOR THIS Miranda House graduate, it’s a journey that owes its genesis to the pre-satellite TV days when she binged on Chitrahaar on good old Doordarshan and started nursing a dream to emulate much of what the heroines of the yore did: Swirling around trees in the myriad song-and-dance sequences, catching the fancy of the viewers in an orgy of latkas and jhatkas. Over the years, as she went on to earn a Masters in sociology from JNU, she relentlessly nurtured her dream to be a part of the entertainment industry that, arguably, is the largest in the world.
Before her transition to films, she has done her bit in theatre, tele commercials and short films, some of them with Unicef and other NGOs. She did workshops with theatre veteran N.K. Sharma, founder artistic director of Act One, a theatre group. She was also associated with the JNU chapter of Indian People's Theatre Association (Ipta) and did two proscenium plays written by Uday Praskah and Bimal Mitra. “While theatre does give the essential grooming, when you come to films you have to understand that it is a very different medium,” she says. According to her, it takes a certain kind of stylisation to do films. “The camera!,” she sighs, “It can come so close to your body that if you change how you breathe, it will register. One has to be very conscious of the camera.” (As we talk, clouds are getting ominous. Thunder rumbles in the sky.)

SWARA ALSO trained in Bharatanatyam under the legendary Leela Samsons, no less. In short, she has done whatever it takes to be an actress, clambered on everything that is widely seen to be the stepping stone for a career in cinema. Swara’s is a journey that has now brought her on the threshold of a rapidly-changing celluloid world, where rules are being rewritten every day, where many young Turks are redefining the art and craft of filmmaking: Cinema, as we know it, is in a state of flux.

Former ad filmmaker Jai Tank, 36, who makes his directorial debut with Madholal Keep Walking, belongs to that group of young men and women who are raring to take the industry by storm, albeit not through the size of their film’s budget, but through the sheer power of creativity and the art of storytelling. Madholal Keep Walking, shot in Mumbai’s chawls and trains, features NSD alumnus and Bengali actor Subrat Dutta in the lead role and has made waves in the festival circuit worldwide: It fetched Dutta the Best Actor award at the Cairo International Film Festival.
The film, which has the tagline “A song of a common man”, tells the story of one Madholal Dubey (Subrat Datta) whose life falls apart in the wake of a train blast and who goes on to regain his belief in the goodness of the human spirit with the support of his wife Kamla (Neela Gokhle), daughters — Sudha (Swara Bhaskar) and Sumi (Varnita Aglawe) — and neighbour Anwar (Pranay Narayan).
It is perhaps significant that Swara, in the public eye, takes a stride before the camera with a film like Madholal Keep Walking: An ode to the undying spirit of Mumbai, the film is a lesson in overcoming insurmountable odds. And if it’s stardom you aim for, the odds stacked against you can be far too many.
When we talk, however, it’s not so much about odds as it is about her achievements. Her debut film Niyati is, akin to cinematographer-turned-director Sushil Rajpal’s Antardwand (Inner Conflict) which releases this week, based on groom abduction and forced marriage (pakadua byaah) in Bihar. Directed by Bharadwaj (whose June release Mr Singh and Mrs Mehta garnered a lukewarm response at the box office), it features Pawan Shankar (of Star One’s Siddhant fame) and Vineet Kumar (Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa, Makdee). It is from the stable of Phat Phish Films, the producers of Quick Gun Murugan.
“Groom capturing was a prevalent practice in north Bihar in the early 1990s. Many Bhumihar Brahmin families would identify a good groom and force him to marry their daughter as they couldn’t afford the dowry,” she says. Niyati is the story of two such people: Gauri (Bhaskar) and Shailendra (Shankar).
“It has a very interesting structure. There are many stories within one story,” she says. The film was shot in Bhopal and its surrounding villages.
Swara describes Gauri’s character as someone who doesn’t have a character. “It was an interesting character to play,” she says, adding that it was tough too as she couldn’t relate with her: “You don’t know that world at all. You don’t feel those thoughts at all. Playing Gauri was like having to question everything, even things that you know about yourself.”
The idea, she says, that somebody will force her to get married doesn’t exist even as an option for her. “That was like a real process for me. Also, what was challenging was to portray a character who can’t do very much in terms of action — she can’t hit anybody, she can’t even say certain things,” she says.

Madholal..., which is technically Swara’s second film, was ready by mid-2009 when it started doing the rounds of the festival circuits across the world. “What tends to happen with a lot of small-budget films that have newer people is that you can get it made, but it is difficult to find distributors who are willing to take them on,” she says. Thankfully, Madholal... has crossed that hurdle, largely owing to the worldwide acclaim that helped the film “sell” itself to the distributors. In the film, she says, she plays “an ordinary, simple kind of a girl”. She is very true to life. At some festivals, many youngsters told her that they could identify with her character: “It could be our story”.
The character Swara plays comes from an “ordinary” background, but is confident because she is educated. She is a “loving, responsible, goody-goody kind of a girl” secretly in love with her Muslim neighbour who is a little older than her. “Jai has kept the film very normal. He doesn’t try to exaggerate, dramatise or extra dramatise,” she says. (Thunder, again. But this time, with some rain. It’s beginning to drizzle.) NAYAB-RAJA’s music in Madholal..., she says, is also true to the kinds of sound you would hear in those areas. “If it’s a song on the train, then suddenly you don’t hear some fancy saxophone. So, the sounds are real to the atmosphere and the whole context of the film,” she says. Aslam Sabri’s qawwali, Khuda ke waste (which begins with the sound of a moving train), is her favourite track from the film. “It has such good energy,” she says.In her third film, Tanu Weds Manu, which also stars Kangana Ranaut and Madhavan, she plays the second lead, opposite Eijaz Khan, the popular TV actor. “My character keeps coming out in contrast with Kangana’s character,” she says.
(It’s pouring rain now. And we rush inside for the rest of the conversation).
“Tea? Coffee?” Her father asks. It’s the holy month of Ramzan. And I am fasting. And though I am tempted to have a steaming cup of tea, I can’t honour his offer.

WE GO back again. To where we began: Madholal Keep Walking. Did she jump at the script when she first heard it? “When I read the script after the audition, I realised there was something so genuine about it. It was so straight, it felt there was something right about it. There was an overwhelming honesty about the script. It’s not pretending to be anything greater, even as a film, than what you see. It’s the story of a simple man and his struggle with life which is a universal kind of a story,” she says.
Swara would have like Niyati to release first. “It would have made my life a lot more easier. (Laughs). I would have been talking to you a year ago. Or may be two years ago,” she says.
We talk about what seems to be the new wave in Hindi cinema. A lot of debutantes, many of whom are in their early 20s, have made forays into films with aplomb. “Some of it is very impressive. Which is why I think this is a good time for a film like Madholal... It comes at a time when films like Tere Bin Laden, Udaan, Peepli [Live] have all done well. Madholal... is like an urban Peepli [Live], not in terms of the story or anything, but just in terms of the fact that you are dealing with ordinary people leading ordinary lives, and showing the ordinariness of their lives and whatever happens to them,” she says.
Hindi cinema, says Swara, is definitely changing. “It is largely due to the audiences. Filmmakers and producers have realised that audience do watch different films. Multiplex has opened up that space. If films like Khosla Ka Ghosla, Bheja Fry, Dev D, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! didn’t run in multiplexes, there would have been no space for such films. You can’t make an ass of today’s audience. You can’t. There is a lot more awareness,” she says.
I ASK her if it is easier now for an outsider like her, with no godfather in the industry, to make a mark? “Definitely. There are more works being offered as there are more kinds of films being made. The fact that you don’t have a producer father or a boyfriend actor but still getting work is a proof that that space is available now,” she says.But, equally, what has also happened is that precisely because the space has opened, and there is corporatisation of the industry, and it is “cool” to be in the city, everyone is in Bombay: “Itni bheed! It’s teeming with people. It’s insane. Every time I go for auditions, I see people who were either two batches below or above me in school.”
Since Bollywood continues to churn one potboiler — run-of-the mill or otherwise — after another with staggering regularity, the major thrust is on marketing which seems to be the preoccupation of every filmmaker worth his salt. “It plays such a big role in films today that you start thinking about the marketing strategy even before the shooting starts. For big-budget films, it is easier. But for a film like Madholal..., it isn’t,” says the actress.
With more and more people making films, says Swara, there is work, but there is also competition. She hopes that after her films release, she will be in “a better position”, getting more roles, paid more money.
She says: “For a lot of young people who are really no one, so to speak, but are trying to make it independently, the fact they don’t have a value-added already is a bit of a disadvantage.”
If the “nondescript” actors of Madholal... have that disadvantage, it is offset by the big buzz around the film — its story, its international awards.
Talking about commerce vs creativity in cinema, she says: “At the end of the day, it’s all about art and creativity, but there is a very big aspect of market. It is not art for art’s sake. It can’t be like that. Let’s be practical. So, art for market’s sake? She laughs: “Not entirely, I hope! It’s important to strike the right balance. What’s market? It is the audience. It’s important to make films that can touch the audience. It doesn’t matter what you are doing in the film.”
WHAT ARE her priorities as an actor at this stage? She wants to get some commercial success. “I am dying for a bit of that success to come to me. I love commercial cinema. When I watched Chitrahaar, I hoped in my heart of hearts that one day I would like to be in those songs. I’ll be very frank. That’s what drives the reason I am in Bombay (she sticks to the city’s erstwhile, more decent, name),” she says.Her “desire” for glamour is rather seething. “Else, why would I be dying and struggling in Bombay? I am going to get the return. I think all artists want some kind of recognition. They are selfish creatures, all of them,” she says.
Beyond the sheen of glamour, she views stars as larger entities: “Indian actors give a complete kind of performance more than Hollywood actors. Everybody says that Hollywood has good, realistic actors. Sure, but how many Hollywood actors will be able to dance in the manner and with the ease and lack of inhibition with which our actors do? That says something about our performers. Look at SRK. I think that man is a fantastic all-round performer.”
Her argument is that there can be various “styles” of acting. After all, our cinema comes out of traditions like nautanki and bhand and jatra and Parsi theatre, which is a bit dramatic. “Even that (the complete entertainer’s performance) is a certain style of acting. I definitely want to be that complete performer.”
Another aspect, she says, is that as an actress, if you long for longevity, you have to break into commercial films. “You can also keep doing small-budget films, but I don’t know how long can one go on with just doing that. Also, for actresses, there is a certain age, a period, which is their most intense period. If you want to maximise those years, you should do as much as possible,” she says.
IN ALL the three films that she has done, Swara has got “plenty to do” as an actor. “That’s how I look at it. But, now, the aim for me would be to try and target a big-budget film with known actors. I am hoping that once these films release, that will begin to happen,” she says.
SWARA WAS floored by Eijaz Khan, who has romanced small screen for long, on the sets of Tanu Weds Manu: “He was very friendly, supportive and the most wonderful thing was that he would keep a lookout for me. He is a very experienced actor and knows his camera like the back of his hand. He is an actor who will take you on board, not caring much about his own space or camera. He shares it with you.”
Though he is big on TV, Swara says he has no tantrums, no airs. He was quite “phenomenal”. During the shoots, when she would sit with him, girls would walk up to her, asking her to get an autograph from him. “I don’t watch TV. I didn’t know he was such a big star,” she says.
Kangana was fantastic too and very, very helpful. “We had to play best friends. She is a lot of fun. Deepak Dobriyal (who also stars in Tanu Weds Manu) is a brilliant actor too. I am good friends with him. I learnt so much from him. I would ask him to teach me acting,” she says.
For Swara, “Bombay”, the city of dreams, is kind of addictive too: “You get a certain kind of high on the sets because of all the creative energies going around,” says the actress, who has signed an untitled project with Arjun Bagga (he has worked with Anurag Kashyap and Sanjay Gupta earlier). The shooting schedule for that film has not been fixed yet.
Swara’s friends often ask her if she is ever asked about casting couch. “Mujh se koi nahin poochta (No one ever asks me). I wonder if I am abnormal,” laughs the actress, whose dream list of directors include Vishal Bhardwaj, Sudhir Mishra, Madhur Bhandarkar Mani Ratnam and Aditya Chopra. Vishal Bhardwaj, Sudhir Mishra and Madhur Bhandarkar get special mention for their very “distinct female characters”.
And, of course, Mani Ratnam, for his craft that is “quite phenomenal”. If Raavan bombed, Swara says that, as an actress, her concern doesn’t lie there. She reiterates: “I am a selfish artist. I look at what does an actress get to do in a film. Who cares what happens to the rest of the film.”
Her priority, however, seems to be tilted more in favour of Aditya Chopra: “I loved even Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi. I thought he did something different in that film. I am really waiting for my chance to dance around trees.”
Before that happens, Swara, in a bid to stay in touch with theatre, is working on a dramatised reading of some poems of the legendary Punjabi poet, Avtar Singh Pash. The play, which links his poems with his politics and his life, will be directed by Ravinder Randhawa. “Theatre is the best way of working on your speech,” she says.
SWARA’S INTERESTS are many and varied. She reads. She loves to travel. She tries to watch more international cinema, but keeps coming back to Hindi films. She loves Hindustani classical music: Vocal, qawwali, Indian folk, et al, but old Hindi films’ songs remain her eternal favourite. She writes, too, and is trying to get one of her short stories collection out.
It’s been raining all this while and I can hear the pitter-patter of rain in her courtyard.

I step out into the rain, thinking whether I disappointed her by not asking anything about the casting couch. And also wondering that for Swara, who lives in the vortex of glamour, isn’t it only fair that she too wants her share of fame on the road to stardom?

For Gulzar, on his 75th Birthday

2010-08-18T02:26:00.000-07:00

Lafz lab pe mere raqsaan hain, mere dil mein kahin
Phootte rahte hain naghmon ke hazaaron chashme
Anginat geet dhadakte hain mere seenein mein
Jism-o-jaan padhte hain barbat ke hazaron kalme

Saaz saanson ka har ek lamha hai chede mujh mein
Koi lai, koi tarranum, koi dhun, koi lahan
Main hoon Gulzaar mera naghma hai eemaan mera
Lahlahaata hain kahin mujh mein ek Quraan-e-sukhan.

raqsaan: dancing, chashme: fountains, barbat: a kind of music,
tarrannum: singing, lahan: rhythm, Quraan-e-sukhan: Quraan of poetry.

Freedom! Freedom?

2010-08-15T16:04:00.000-07:00

I hate doing something just for the heck of it. Well, mostly. But when it's Independence Day — and also your birthday — and the sheer frenzy of “freedom” catches your eyes and ears everywhere, you DO think about freedom. Or let's say you find yourself thinking about freedom, willy-nilly. FREEdom. FreeDOM. I like the inherent music of the word. It's like a song unto itself. An idea, a state that's superior and exalted and uplifting and sublime. To be free, in many ways, is the ideal state of being. Enslavement is a curse. Freedom is a bliss, a boon. Freedom is the need of the soul. Freedom is the greatest glory. It lies at the root of a human being’s inner quests to find his self.
As you would have guessed by now, on August 15, when the colours of freedom floated around, I thought about freedom. Just for the heck of it. I scribbled a few lines here and there. And then dumped them. They didn't make any sense. They still don't. But, heck, I am writing them down just for the heck of it. I wouldn't have posted anything on this, I must admit though, if I hadn't read Time's interview with Jonathan Franzen. But more of this later.

If you have been observant, you would have noticed how August 15, every year, arrives enmeshed in terribly trite talks, empty speeches, twisted resolves. (And yes, it's one of the DRY days). Heck! I don't want this piece to sound like a rant. So leave it.

I have been grappling with freedom for a while now. What it takes to be free? Surely, freedom is not there for the heck of it. As a student, when we were taught Rousseau's Social Contract theory in the political science class in Aligarh Muslim University, I hated it, but had taken immense liking to his theory: “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.” Rousseau couldn't be more true.

Incidentally, Jonathan Franzen, whom Times has declared the “Great American Novelist” in its latest issue, has come out with a new novel, Freedom, which is an American novel, and yet a far cry from anything by Updike, Bellow and Mailer. Time's book critic, Lev Grossman, who interviews him, writes: “The word freedom echoes down the corridors of Freedom. It stalks the characters, cropping up in chance remarks, in song lyrics, engraved in buildings.”
At some point, Grossman quotes Franzen as saying: “... If we were going to be elevating freedom to the defining principle of what we're about as a culture and a nation, we ought to take a careful look at what freedom in practice brings.” I agree.
Towards the end of the piece, he says that his purpose on this earth seems to be to write novels. “I'm actually freer when I’m chained to a project: freer from guilt, anxiety, boredom, anger, purposelessness,” says Franzen. There, you have it. The secret to be free even when you're chained to something or the other. If that something or the other is what you really want to do with all your heart and mind and muscle, whoa! you can feel free.

To me, Franzen, at this stage, makes a lot of sense. And I'm not saying it just for the heck of it.

Fear

2010-08-14T22:44:00.000-07:00

My mother has tied
Several amulets
That keep kissing
Various parts of my body —
Shaking when I move
Shuddering when I run.
Each time, when I step out
In the besieged Valley
She ties across my arms
A thread she calls “Imam Zamin”
She offers “extra” hours to God
In the form of “nafil namaz,”
In addition to her five-times-a-day prayers,
For my safety I believe.
Each time, when I'm back home, unhurt
She clings to me, murmuring
Something in Arabic I don't understand.
She celebrates it
As if I've made her proud
By escaping the fury
Of some random bullet
By not getting killed,
Like several others do.
Each day.
By managing to be unscathed
Even as it's raining pellets
On people running pell-mell —
Chosing its targets deligently
And sometimes, even, missing the mark,
Felling a child that's peeping
Out of the window
Or a boy playing in the field
Or a little girl cavorting in the garden.
But never, never fired in vain.
Some fear plays out
In strange ways.

Distractions

2010-08-13T17:16:00.000-07:00

Worlds from afar
Close in on me
Deaths, killings, accidents,
Murder, rape, suicide
Beheadings, amputations
Chicanery, deceit, fraud —
Some ungodliness of gods!
Some inhumanity of humans! —
Wreak havoc on me.
I feel myself caught in
A cloudburst
Or a crossfire.
There must be something
That’s burning and raging
Inside. Always.
I’m choking all the time
And yet I chuckle,
I have to, for you.

When we talk
I tell you about — no, boast of —
My indifference.
“Listless, you see.
Detachment has its own bliss,”
I lie.
I tell you how
Being impervious to everything.
Helps.
“I’m immune to everything,
I just don’t feel
Anything,”
I brag.

But you have, it seems,
Scraped the truth
From the pores of my being.
Each time I get serious
You get me the greatest comedies,
And try to show me
The “lighter” side of life.
Each time I begin to think
I hear, “Honey, you need rest
You look so stressed.”
Each time I look around and despair
“Look at the brighter side,” you plead.
You have your ways and ways
To win the day.
You wash away all creases
Of concern
And nip in the bud
The darkest thoughts I harbour.
“You think too much,”
You smile.

As disasters happen —
keep happening —
And tragedies unfold “elsewhere”
I see myself
Sunk into a couch
Or burrowed into
A book.
Or just jotting down
Some random lines.
Or just sitting, transfixed,
As we watch TV —
Oh! what a mind-numbingly
Dumb exercise!

At intervals, you turn to me.
“Coetzee has begun to bore me
How can you stand him?
I don’t understand.”
“That young Pakistani thing
You told me about
Is no great shakes.”
“Honey, I must get you
A Damien Hirst on your birthday.”
“Oh, we have not been to Chikmagalur
How about on Nisha’s birthday?”
“We must visit that gallery
It’s just so, so different.”
“Darling, you have not seen these, my photos,
Don’t I look so adorable, so cute?”
“Your study is in such a mess
This weekend, I’ll help you
Put everything in order.”
“This nation is full of thugs
I feel I am being robbed
Each time I buy something.”
And sometimes, “What’s got into you
You ignore me these days.”
And, “Uff! you scare me
With your vacant stare.”

You go on and on....

I don't know when
I lose you.
All I think of now
Is just how
Far away, several worlds
Have come crashing down
Far away, several breathings
Have ceased forever.
Far away, several eyes
Will never dream again
Far away, several lips
Quiver for the last time.
Far away, several feet
Won't be there to tread the earth.
Far away, several souls
Are making their final passage
Into the unknown.

I don’t tell you anything
About the faraway tragedies.
And just smile, nod, answer.
Till the faraway touches us too
Life goes on....

Ek jehad aur...

2010-08-12T14:58:00.000-07:00

Lafzon ke tewar badal rahe, honton ki mithaas ab chinti hai
Khud meri khomoshi mujh mein ab akhri sansein ginti hai...
Ab is dharti pe yahaan wahaan insaan na sataye jayen kahin..
Apna ho lahoo ya ghairon ka ab khoon na bahaya jaye kahin..
Ab qatl no ho mazloomon ka, zalim na kahin aabad rahe
Apna ho chaman ya ghairon ka, gulshan na koi barbaad rahe...
Ab tang koi bhi haat na ho, nanga na rahe, bhooka na rahe
Apna ho khet ya ghairon ka, koi khet yahaan sookha na rahe
Mazhab ke jalte sholon pe na senke siyaasi roti koi
Ab ek ho sab insaan yahaan, taqdeer badi na choti koi..
Ab zaat pe na koi jhagda ho, firqon mein na kahin ab log baten
Ab kabhi kahin goli na chale, sadkon pe kahin ab bam na faten
Ismat na kahin looti jaye, maange na ujaadi jayen kahin
Maaon se koi beta na chhine, bahnein na rulayi jayen kahin
Hathiyaar uthana jisko pade majboor na koi itna ho
Saashan ke nashe me dhut ho jo maghroor na koi itna ho
Yeh ahle siyaasat se kah do khamosh na ab ham baithenge
Gar aman nahin woh de sakte, lafzon ke shole dahkenge....

Maatam

2010-08-11T00:58:00.000-07:00

Yeh kaisa shor hai barpa
Dilon ko cheer jaati si yeh kiski cheekh hai ghar mein
Yeh kiski chooriyaan tooti, yeh kiski khushk ankhein hain
Yeh siski kiski hai bolo, yahan sab ro rahen hain kyun
Khudara kuch kaho kyun sab ke sab maatam manaate ho
Yeh kaisi khamushi hai, kyun sabhi hain sog mein doobe
Yeh barah saal ka ladka yahaan chup chaap baitha kyun
Bilakta hai
Hua hai kya ise bolo
Yeh boodhi maan yahaan kyun apni chaati peet roti hai
Main unki sooni ankhon mein ajab si karb paata hoon
Bas ab dekha nahin jaata...
Yeh terah saal ki bachchi hai roti kyun
Yahaan pe khoon ke aansoo..

Main pichli baar jab aaya tha sara ghar farozan tha
Mujhe tum sab ne ankhon pe bithaya tha
Tabak maaz aur gushtaba meri khaatir parosa tha
Mujhe Dal le gaye the tum, Shikara pe ghumaya tha
Chinaron ke ghane, dhande se saaye mein
Bahut si batein ki hamne...

Magar yeh kya hua, kyunkar hua, kuch to batao tum
Tumhari hansti, gaati zindagi kisne ujaadi hai?

You are on the boil, again!!

2010-08-08T14:25:00.000-07:00

It pains me as you, Kashmir, are on the boil again
As blood flows on your street, in fear I recoil again

What are these faces trooping in to blotch your face?
Whose are these hands muddying your soil again?

I know the hurt you feel, the alienation that gnaws at you
I can see what simmers and causes the turmoil, again

As bullets hit your sons, your daughters bleed to death
The leaves of your beautiful chinars are set to roil again

The Dal can't flow unqiet forever, a voice within me says
Those who wish it that way, their bid you'll foil again!!!

Photo courtesy: Faheem Qadri

Main

2010-08-07T13:56:00.000-07:00

Main kya hoon harf lafaani?
"Manish azaad sailani"?
Main nuqta hoon ke paikar hoon?
Agar main hoon to kyunkar hoon?

Mere afkaar ki wuqaat bhala kya?
Mere ahsaas ka anjaam kaisa?
Mere lafzon ka haasil kya hai aakhir?
Takhayyul ka bhi kya maane hai mere?

Main kyun hoon, kaun hoon kya hoon?
Kahan hoon main?
Jahan hoon main wahan kyun hoon?

Main jaane kis safar pe hoon!
Milegi kya mujhe manzil?

Yaad

2010-08-06T03:02:00.000-07:00

Saaf, shaffaf, teri jheel si ankhon ki jhalak
Meri ankhon ke dareechon mein basi rahti hain
Rang ab bhi tere chehre ka wahi hai ke jo tha
Surkh honton ka bhi qayam hai abhi tak woh damak
Aisi khushboo teri zulfon mein dabi rahti hai
Yeh jo khul jayen to weerane muattar ho jayen
Regzaaron mein bhi yaklakht bahaar aa jaye
Tere alfaaz ki raunaq, teri aawaz ki dhun
Mujh mein jagmag hai, meri rooh ke pardon mein hai gum
Khamushi teri wahi dil ko dhukhane wali
Kitna dil-soz tha woh rooth ke jaana tera
Naam tha tera ya phir koi haseen naghma tha
Walehana jise dil toot ke gaana chaahe
Saaz aisa ke jo chid jaaye to roke na bane
Haal aisa ke jo aa jaaye to phir aa jaaye....

Rukhsat

2010-07-29T13:56:00.000-07:00

Gul hui shamyen jo kar deti thi roshan dil ko
Bujh gaye, jin se manawwar tha zehan,saare charaagh
Mit gaye saari umeedon ke ubharte se naqoosh
Ab woh zarre na rahe jin pe chale the ham tum
Ab meri fikr ka aur fun ka shanaasa na raha
Ab na woh baatien, na woh raat gaye tak jagna
Ab no woh saaz, na awaaz na woh naghme sabhi
Tum ne saanson ka shahar chod diya!

Lamhe

2010-07-25T04:43:00.000-07:00

Bhare barsaat ki bhadki hui rut mien
Andhere se mere maazi ke kuch dhundle hue lamhe
Meri palkon pe tip tip kar baraste hain

Woh sab lamhe
Ke jinki reshmi silwat
Muhar hai jism par mere

Woh kuch behooda lamhe, betuke lamhe
Ke jinki ungliyaan ham donon thaame
Saath chalte the
Meri aankho se tip tip kar baraste jaate yeh lamhe
Sunahre mausmon ka zikr mujh se ched dete hain

Bala ka zayeqa honton ka tha tere
Tabassum ki lakeeron ka bhi kuch andaaz tha apna
Bala ki guftgoo teri, bala ki khamushi teri
Bala thi tum, bala thi har adaa teri

Woh kuch betaab lamhe, besharam lamhe
Jo sarmaya hua karte the apne —
Woh bhi kya din the —
Tumhari saans ki har aanch jab hoti
Hamari saans ki indhan
Tumhare lams se aksar
Sulagti rooh thi meri
Jala karte the hum jis mein
Bala ki aag thi woh bhi

Woh kuch mafroor lamhe, begharaz lamhe
Tumhare waaste khushiyan chuna karta tha
Bazaron mein main aksar
Main coffe shop mein baitha
Tumhari raah taktaa tha
Kahaan thi tum?
Kaha tha theek sadhe aath pe aana…

Woh kuch beaql se lamhe,
Woh kuch beshakl se lamhe
Ke jin mein ham bade the
Apne qad se bhi
Main tum mein aur ko paata
Tum mujh mein aur ko paati
Meri duniya na tum pe khatm ho kar rah saki
Aur teri hi mujh pe
Bade hi hausle wale the hum donon

Woh kuch maghroor lamhe, beraham lamhe
Mere alfaaz ki talkhi
Tere honton ko kadwa kar gayi saali

Woh sab raahein
Kabhi jo apni khushboo mein simoye the
Jo sab sar-sabz the, shadaab the aur gaate rahte the
Woh ab weeran rahte hain…

Bhare barsaat ki bhadki hui rut mien
Andhere se mere maazi ke kuch dhundle hue lamhe
Meri palkon pe tip tip kar baraste hain...

The promise of a poem

2010-07-16T05:08:00.000-07:00

On your pulsating lips — almost always —
Dangles the promise of a poem:
An urge seizes me when I look at them
To my mind a word, a random line strays
Some fractured, disjointed lines
Yearn forever for completion —
Some get bottled up deep inside,
Some struggle to find expression.

An ancient promise

2010-07-15T04:09:00.000-07:00

Your words still ring in my ears:
"Will you write, poet laureate, a song for me
That when I read moves me to tears?"
That journey has rather been long for me:
Since I started writing, it's been years...

I decide to be a poet...

2010-07-04T13:49:00.000-07:00

In memory of Jorge Luis Borges

In the concrete expanse of the Millennium City
I discover that I have hit upon
The wildest of all dwellings
Save that, in a way, any dwelling can be wild.
Like the potter
Who shapes myriad pitchers
From clay or ceramics,
I shall write sculpted lines —
The prophet's revelations, some ennobling thought —
Give off the freshness and feel that is its
When raindrops perch on parched soil.
In simple words
I shall write, in the way I do, beautiful things:
I shall seek to hark back
To the great voice of Borges;
And many like him —
Rumi and Rilke and Lorca and Cavafy
For instance.
The dot that I am will be invincible.
If she lends them a look
My words will feel elevated;
If she leaves them aside
I will make a muse of my grief,
A full-bodied Muse to last for a lifetime.
I shall live by destroying myself.
I shall be the line I write and strike off
I shall be Moses who yearns
To see the eternal light
I shall be Khizr, wandering for truth,
Guiding many Moses on the righteous path.
I shall be a martyr who dies
Always, for a noble cause.
I will be the face that detests me
The hand that deserts me
The eye that loses me
I will be those lips that curse me
I will be the friends who
Love, hate or envy me — at once
Or one at a time.
I will be the scorn of those
Who will love to hate me
And write me off
With a wave of their hand.
With a twitch of their lip
With a furrow on their forehead.
I will live in it, surrounded by all sides,
And still, and still, see in the dark.
I will be a renegade — transcending all forms
A rebel with the worthiest cause.
English will give me the name, and India the soul.
Epiphanies, ecstasies, deconstructions, reconstructions
Will both sum up and explain my life
My words will be relived, resurrected
And in time I shall be Jorge Luis Borges.

The Everyday

2010-07-01T16:49:00.000-07:00

Everyday, emerging from the scrape of the rut,
Some phantoms ghostly and ghastly
Threaten to gobble up innocence
Itself: All paths, my paths.
All ways, my ways.
Wounding all ways to unwind.
There is never a moment I can just be
And you can just breathe.
There is never a moment
We can revel in
The sheer joy to be alive:
The sheer joy to see
The signs of life
In your laughter, unbridled.
There is never a moment
When I can stand —
Amidst the mayhem and madness —
And stare at you,
listening to the songs
That your eyes sing.
Ah! the looming spectre
Of the agonising everyday:
There's never a moment
To flit away
From its gnashing reality!

Some more haikus

2010-06-30T02:13:00.000-07:00

I look into them; in their depths lives
A lull that hides the lurking storm
Your eyes, my dear, are Kashmir!

I don't remember the outline
Of your face or your lips
Some defecit of memories!

I left you years ago, but still
You throb in every breath of mine
By disowning you, I've owned you.

What part of me can deny, O lord!
That you are around me, everywhere
So conspicuously present in your absence!

Mujh se pehli si muhabbat..

2010-06-29T23:27:00.000-07:00

In memory of Faiz Ahmad Faiz

"Mujh se pehli si muhabbat mere mehboob na maang"...

Mere khwaabeeda umangon ke fasaane mat ched
Hasraton ke meri sab band dareeche mat khol
Mere ehsaas ke shole jo bujhe hain na jalaa
Mere jazbaat ki khoyi hui aandhi ko na dhoondh

Meri afsurda jawaani ki tu qisse mat pooch
Muzmahil maazi ki tu mere tasaaveer na dekh
Ghamzada lamhon ki tu mere koi cheekh na sun
Meri bekhwaab si ankhon ka koi karb na chakh

Main teri baahon se ab door nikal aaya hoon
Main teri raahon se ab door nikal aaya hoon..

"Mujh se pehli si muhabbat mere mehboob na maang"

Stay away

2010-06-26T23:19:00.000-07:00

So many faces beckon to me, but I feel I had better stay away
It's not been long since you wrote to me in that letter: "stay away".

Every now and then why do I keep shutting the world on me?
Are there signs on the horizons that deter — "stay away"

You would have me believe I really mean the world to you
Who's it for whom you keep writing on Twitter, stay away?

"You are born free," a friend warned me the other day,
"But in the world everywhere there's a fetter, stay away."

I'm no longer interested in games you play, I choose to quit
Don't call out to me, just consider me a quitter, stay away

The body remembers...

2010-06-19T14:32:00.000-07:00

The beds may choose to forget but the body remembers
There was something about that slut the body remembers

How chronic it is to get irredeemably wasted,
To get caught in the daily rut, the body remembers

You snapped with a stroke many a string of years
What remained of the ties you cut, the body remembers

You broke me from within, but I didn't say a word
Though I've kept my mouth shut, the body remembers

Kashmir bleeds in me like a deep, festering wound
Whatever happens to its Dar and Bhat, the body remembers

Tonight

2010-06-17T13:21:00.000-07:00

In memory of Agha Shahid Ali

Stay away, o wandering spirits, I'm just a little restless tonight
Everything's devoid of meaning, everything's a little baseless tonight

Boredom hangs heavy, what's it that I keep craving for?
Why is it that all that surrounds seems a little tasteless tonight?

My moments are all accursed, I live under some black magic
I can overcome any odd, but I'm just a little helpless tonight

You stayed over for sometime, but now that you've left
Everything that was 'more' appears less 'n' less tonight

What happened to the streets we walked down, hand-in-hand?
Why is every lane of the past so traceless tonight?

It's He who created me, and it's He who sustains
I live as I die; the sea of his kindness is limitless tonight

I devour the contours of your kindness; you ask for nothing
The radiant expanse of your being is a little selfless tonight

Nothing that I watch, read or hear seems to distract
Bergman, Brecht and Bach — all seem so depthless tonight

Don't take pity on me; I'm not used to anyone's sympathy
I am very zany by nature, but just feel a little zestless tonight

Haikus\Trivenis

2010-06-16T04:50:00.000-07:00

It has been forever since I wrote to you
About my whereabouts, my well-being
You should also be anxious sometimes.

(Ek zamane se main ne tumhen
Main kahan aur kaisa hoon likha nahin
Thodi uljhan tumhen bhi to ho).

Touching all the layers of consciousness
Your thought is like a revelation
It is as if you too are a poem.

(Zehn ke saare pardon ko choota hua
Ek wahi ki tarah hai tumhara khayaal
Tum bhi goya koi nazm ho).

You inhabit each street of my dreams
And reflect in the mirror of each of my reality
There must be some soul string attached to you.

(Mere khwaabon ki har ek gali mein ho tum
Aur mere haqeeqat ke har aayeene mein tum hi
Rooh ka hi koi taar hai tum se uljha hua).

Five times a day, during prayers
Your name quivers on my lips
Just like God's.

(Paanch dafa meri namazon mein
Lab be rahta hai mere naam tera
Theek jaise rahe khuda ka naam).

I know all the ways through which
I can let all elements in me get scattered
My destruction alone is my construction.

(Mujh ko maloom hain woh tareeqe sabhi
Jin se main apne zarron ko bikhra sakoon
Meri takhreeb hi meri takhleeq hai).

Operation Green Hunt II

2010-06-14T06:47:00.000-07:00

Jang aisi ke jise jeetna namumkin hai......
Jang aisi ke har ek mod pe ho haar jahaan....

Aslahe itne ke larzaan hai zamin ka seena
Goliyan itni ke chhalni hai badan sehra ka
Kitni khamosh tamannaon ka khoon hota hai
Kitni bechain umeedon ka gala ghut ta hai
Kitni bewaaon ki mangein hain ujadti har roz
Kitni maaon se yahaan chhinte hain bachche unke
Bhayion se bahan aur bahan se bhai
Kitni berahmi se har roz chhine jaate hain
Kitni dehleez pe lutti hai haya ki ismat
Kitne mazloomon ka har gaam pe khoon hota hai
Kis qadar garm hai yeh qatl aur khoon ka manzar...

Aag bhadki hai woh ab jis ko bujhaye na bane
Dastaan aisi hai yeh jis ko sunaye na bane...

Jang aisi ke jise jeetna namumkin hai......
Jang aisi ke har ek mod pe ho haar jahaan.

namumkin: impossible, Aslahe: weapons, Larzaan: Shaking; Gaam: stage, Manzar: scene

Read Operation Green Hunt I here

The Sound of Silence

2010-06-11T06:45:00.000-07:00

No trees swing, no leaves rustle, no birds sing
It's so quiet there's no sound of a thing

I sit, quietly, adding to the tower of silence
Calmness — intense — hangs in the air: it's dense

You, too, are quiet, not a word do you utter
Have I got to say something that sends my heart aflutter

What a moment, I wonder, time perhaps stands still
My life's before my eyes, coursing in my veins such thrill!

This is the moment, this is it, I seem myself to say
It must be okay to tell her now, must it be okay?

I look at you, a picture of poise you are
Sitting in a dark corner, twinkling like a star

So far from me, and yet, and yet so near
"We can talk," your voice I seem to hear

"Sure...sure..we can," I somehow manage to stutter
Not weather, I tell myself, and try to think something better

I think and think and yet come out with nothing to say
My thoughts are all adrift, my words are all astray

The moon is all aglow in the sky, showering on us its light
I swear it wasn't so beautiful ever the way it is tonight

"It's late, I gotta go, let's leave now, get up!" you chirpily say
Every fibre of my being cries out: "Why must you go? Just stay!"

Random lines

2010-06-10T04:29:00.000-07:00

Ab jo mil baithe hain to baat nayi ho koyi
Baat aisi ho ke har baat nayi ho koi........

Dil se dil milne lage, jashn-e-mulaqat bhi ho
Phir se bichdon ko milane ki sayi ho koi.....

sayi: koshish

***********************

Seene mein ek dil hai ya toota hua sa kuch
Palkon pe ek khwaab ya toota hua sa kuch

Hai tere noor se hi kya roshan meri hayaat
Ankhon mein tera chehra ya toota hua sa kuch..

Some stupid haikus

2010-05-28T05:20:00.000-07:00

Rebel, sever, snap, relinquish
The words that made me
Have also unmade me.

It no longer retains the echo
Of your presence or your passage
My heart is an emptiness.

I revel in your expanse
You wander on my turf
We inhabit each other.

You speak to me
Even when you don't
Blame it on your eyes.

The other day, deep in prayer
I thought of you instead of God
Some infidelity! some sin!

A friend who loved the wind died
"Speed thrills," he'd often say
"So what if it kills".

It's so hot in Delhi, I fear
One of these days, I'd step out
And just melt, melt, melt away.

I was dying when you spoke
To me. And I live now.
Your words can heal.

I've left my yesterday behind
And today, it seems i've lived my life
You were an era.

You taught me how to dream
I dreamt many a dream, but you left
And didn't teach me how to undream.

Somewhere, over the horizon, you said
You get what you want, and left
I wanted you.

May you prosper in palaces
But it's in shanties that I have seen
More contented, cheerful faces.

You had me change
All my "wayward ways", and today
I don't even know who I am.

Dazed, I go about the daily rut
Listless, oblivious to bouquets or brickbats
Life can be quite a habit.

Now, they linger in your life, now, they go away
To live elsewhere, far away from you
Some people are like seasons.

You talk of killing your own people
For some patches of uncertain peace
Will you live if they die?

You cry when I laugh
And laugh when I cry
A friend indeed!

A "world-class city", Delhi keeps
Getting costlier for the poor, Ghalib,
The pauper poet, would be turning in his grave.

What's it that shines, wedged
Into the sky between the clouds
Is it you?

A sandstorm envelops me
In layers and layers of dust, and
I don't quite like what I'm made of.

I want to go far, far away, on
The endless sky of unceasing endeavour
And twinkle like a star.

It was pitch dark
And, suddenly, there was light
You smiled.

All eyes are yours, as
Are all lips, I see
You in everyone.

Somewhere, lives a poem...

2010-05-07T03:22:00.000-07:00

Somewhere, in your dimpled cheeks, lives a poem
Somewhere, along the nape of your neck, lives a poem

Somewhere, in the depths of your eyes, lives a poem
Somewhere, in the streaks of your hair, lives a poem

When you laugh at my jokes — silly and banal
Somewhere, in the pearls of your mouth, lives a poem

When you look at me, and then look away
Somewhere, in the flight of your eyes, lives a poem

Whey they call your name, it sounds like some music
Somewhere, in the trill of that sound, lives a poem

"When you call my name, it's like a little prayer"
Somewhere, in that little act of faith, lives a poem

When you walk with me, it's like a rite of passage
Somewhere, in that rite of passage, lives a poem

You ring in my ears like a long-forgotten chant
Somewhere, in the outline of its memory, lives a poem

"Your memory keeps getting in the way of my history"
Somewhere, in the collision of the two, lives a poem

"When you are far away, and beyond my reach
Somewhere, in the want of your company, lives a poem"

Your words reach out to me in the dead of night
Somewhere, in those wicked hours, lives a poem

When you shine on me from a frame on Facebook
Somewhere, in the riot of sepia, lives a poem

When your whispers breathe deep into my skin
Somewhere, in their sweet trail, lives a poem

Aatish Taseer: An interview

2010-04-28T10:29:00.000-07:00

If you read Aatish Taseer's first non-fiction, Stranger to History, you'd have waited and waited for his novel, The Temple-Goers. I had planned to do an interview with himm, post the launch of Stranger to History. But it never happened.

Taseer's first novel, The Temple-Goers, takes you to a Delhi that is grappling with issues of religion and class that define and shape the metropolis in myriad ways. At the heart of the novel is an assimilation of two different worlds: those of Aatish, the narrator and an aspiring writer, and Aakash, his trainer at a gym in the city. Through their friendship, Taseer shows the socio-economic and religious divides that come in the way of developing a cohesive national and cultural identity. “We’re making a world in India that is unwelcoming of the man coming up. It is a place in which, if he is to succeed, he must give up many things about himself — ideas of language, dress, customs and religion — and fall in line with a very shabby modern ideal, one that will leave him a smaller man than he was,” says the author, emphasising the need for human awakenings which can happen only when we, along with the new prosperity, have a “cultural and historical renewal”. For Aakash, Delhi is a “city of temples and gyms, of rich and poor people, of Bentleys and bicycles, of government flats and mansions, of hookers and heiresses”.

I happened to do this (email) interview with Taseer when he was in Mumbai in the last week of March. This was published in The Asian Age on April 14. It said "excerpts from an interview." The only question (and the answer) which couldnt make it to the print version was something related to his style and the storyline, humour as an interesting element of the narrative, and about the ways in which he deals with ideas of modernity and liberalism. Taseer's answer was: "I'm not sure I know how to answer the question." Later, when I got the answers, I laughed at myself for framing the question in such a convoluted way. Silly me!

Here are the excerpts (barring the one unanswered question; the rest are carried almost in toto — the publisher pleaded not to "change" his words, she also wondered if we could take it "in full", without chopping his words from here and there which we stupid scribes are so fond of doing!

Here is that interview:

Q: The Temple-Goers has some parallels with the real life. Does it also have some personal parallels?
A: Very few, in fact. There is a non-fictional cast, which falls away as the book progresses. And this is because it is, in part, a story about a writer finding his material, about him discovering how to write about the world he grew up in, a world that in many ways has been superseded by the changed city he returns to. But as his material clarifies, this non-fictional crust breaks to reveal a core that is pure invention.

Q: It is unusual that you have given the narrator your own name, isn’t it?
A: Less unusual than it seems. There have been others well before me who have used narrators like this. Think of Proust’s “Marcel,” for instance, or Manto’s “Manto Saab” These narrators, as with mine, have a reality that seems shared by the writer, but it is in the end a superficial likeness. It is there for a reason, but I don’t want to give too much away.

Q: The title is interesting, though the novel has less to do with religion. Did you want to explore the sacred?
A: No. I am always only interested in the attitudes and sense of self borne out of religion, not in faith itself. The “temple-goers” of course is a shorthand given the narrator by a character in the book. And it refers to a kind of person for whom the idea of India is very easy to apprehend, almost instinctive. It is not an idea of a nation state with fixed political boundaries, but of a land, and it is a very gentle and persuasive idea; it is bound to the actual physicality of India, to a geography made sacred, ritualised and re-enacted over and over again. This person, still with his religion, his language, his customs close around him, stands very far apart from the culturally denuded India I grew up in, where often a kind of boastful, national pride stood in for real learning and knowledge. Now, as you know from reading the book, its aim is not to put forward a romantic idea of the “temple-goers” and to run down the other India; that would simplify the picture too much; but yes, there is the pain of cultural and linguistic loss running through the book, and perhaps a longing for a wholeness that seems less and less possible.

Q: The novel shows the city in a state of flux, though many things are changing for the worse. Do some of these changes bother you?
A: I don’t think of it as a change for the worse, but yes, there are things that concern me. I feel, for instance, that we’re making a world in India that is unwelcoming of the man coming up. It is a place in which, if he is to succeed, he must give up many things about himself — ideas of language, dress, customs and religion — and fall in line with a very shabby modern ideal, one that will leave him a smaller man than he was. We speak a lot of pride and self-confidence these days, but what do these things mean when every day we force Indians to forsake those things that should naturally be the source of their pride and self-confidence? Instead of enshrining our culture and history at the heart of our new modernity, we have cast it out in favour of something far shallower; a very drab modernity. We can try and hide it with bogus words like “aspirational”, but we both know that these are really euphemisms for more tackiness and imitation. It is important not to forget that only tyrannies can survive on science and technology alone; free societies need something more; they need human awakenings. And for that to happen, there must be, along with the new prosperity, a cultural and historical renewal.

Q: The novel bristles with so much tension — social, sexual and, even, political. Was the mix essential for an engaging narrative?
A: I think it is as an aspect of the multiplicity of values, some old and decaying, some new and still forming, that have come into play in our cities. There is, at this present moment, an amazing level of particularity in each man’s idea of his self and worth. There are the old forces like language, region, caste and class. But these only give half the picture, for overlaying these things are a set of appealing, modern values that have changed the way we want to live, the kind of parents we want to be, the talent and hard work we wish to reward, the discriminations we want to prevent. All this makes for a special tension in which our deepest affiliations (and prejudices) come up against the reality of a society in which the old rules don’t fully apply and the new ones are yet to take firm shape. Aakash is a man made on the cusp of this change, a man who is many men to many people. But, in a sense, the city is full of men like Aakash, each an exquisite, highly particular configuration of different values. And the challenge is to bring into being a world where this vast spectrum of human possibility can find just fulfilment.

Q: Your first book, a non-fiction, was a personal journey. And your novel, too, is some sort of journey for the narrator. Do you feel at home in Delhi?
A: Very much so. I adore Delhi. And slowly, as it has become part of my writing, I find its life richer and more varied than ever before. I’m also enthralled by the changes to its landscape, the new lines of communication being slung across its expanse, and the people being thrown up by the change.

Q: Is it tough to deal with issues of identity and mixed parentage? How much has that difficulty shaped your sensibility?
A: Tough initially, but now easier and easier, almost a privilege. I feel that that initial confusion freed me from the desire or possibility of belonging to any one group. It helped make the world a bigger place. I do, in the deepest sense, feel Indian, but this is a very wide net and often, much to their annoyance, includes Pakistan.

Q: Could you tell me some of your early influences, both in fiction and non-fiction?
A: I started by admiring the simple and direct writing of V.S. Naipaul. That ideal of writing has remained very close to me. But quickly I felt I needed to find writers in whose worlds I could recognise subjects similar to my own. For this the Russian writers — Pushkin, Gogol and Tolstoy — and their times, made available to me through the biographies of Henri Troyat, have been a great inspiration. I have also looked to French writers like Balzac and Maupassant. The latter was an important influence on Manto, from whom I was able to learn more about how I might write about my own world. But to tell you the truth, for a long time it all felt like a great muddle, and it has only now begun to clarify by degrees. It will never be a straightforward picture; it will always feel, as with so many things today, like an inheritance pieced together from odds and ends. There is no easy tradition to inherit, but you make your way from writer to writer, gaining, one hopes, a surer sense of what works for you. And then there is the Sanskritic world, which, though it is yet to feed into my writing, has had perhaps the most profound effect on my view of what our literary past contains.

Not going anywhere? It's good! Or is it?

2010-04-25T15:41:00.000-07:00

"I have a blog which is not going anywhere," I said this to a blogger, a fellow journalist and and an author I interviewed recently. "It's OK. A blog doesn't need to go anywhere," she said. I take heart. Thank you, Annie. You are right. It doesn't need to. It can be about anything, everything. That's why it is a blog. Just a blog.

We live in a continuum. Everything around us is fluid. There is little room for stasis, status quo. Less so for rigid, straitjacketed compartments. I can't limit the space I have chosen for uninhibited, unrestrained, unfettered outpourings of expression. An expression that incorporates anything. And everything.

So, for once, I stop bothering about going anywhere, about arriving anywhere: I just go on, keep going, further and further — there's no looking back, no looking ahead. I go on writing whatever I can. Whenever I can. At these moments, when I have to evoke my helplessness (or uselessness) to do more of what I love doing, I think of Henry James: "We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

I work in the dark. I do what I can. I give what I have. My doubt is my passion and my passion is my task. The rest is the madness of art. For me, however, it doesn't stop here. There are more complicated, bizarre things to deal with: the voices in my head won't leave "the rest" to be the "madness of art". There is the madness of mind. And the body.

Sometimes, the deeply vague — and vaguely deep? — stirrings impinge on my moments. They are baying for my blood. And sweat. And toil. And tears. Tears? May be. Fierce stirrings. Lazy moments. Internecine battles. Blood. Gore. And later, greed, guilt: some more, alas! I didn't make much of more. Or make the most of more.

Life is full of paradoxes. And cruel ironies. It keeps throwing a lot at you, all the time. You learn to grin and bear. You don't try hard to make it a practice. It becomes a practice. You bear it. Like thousands of other things. Like some people jumping to conclusions and forming an opinion based on your identities. Like some people forever trying to keep themselves — their families, their friends — first and everyone else later. (Everyone does that. I must be demented to think differently). Like some people forever finding someone else to laugh at, criticise, make fun of. (So, must you be a fool if you are self-critical and laugh at yourself?) Like some people on the roads who drive a Mercedes, but must spit recklessly and litter with gay abandon. Like some people who don't know any other way different from their way... the list is long... I must stop here... you know what I mean...
As days slip by — weeks roll into months — even though I keep going somewhere or the other, I don't quite go anywhere; and in the same vein, though I keep posting something or the other, I have a feeling I don't quite post anything.

Not going anywhere. Not going anywhere.

Not intent on arriving. Not intent on arriving.

Did you say it's good? Is it?

43 Degree Celcius

2010-04-21T16:46:00.000-07:00

Do jhulaste badan pareshaan hain!!!
Un ki khaatir kahaan hai jaa-e-panaah?

Dhoop aisi ke aag ki baarish
Tapte sooraj se ug rahe shole
Kuch sulagta hua hai seene mein
Jism tandoor aur saans alaao!

Kuch pighalta hua sa hai har su
Zindagi mom ki tarah roshan
Kuch ubalta hua sa hai har su
Roz-o-shab khaulte se rahte hain

Zindagi chilchilati cheekh koi
Pyaas jaise ke shor ho barpa
Itni shiddat hai ab ke sooraj mein
Hashr ke din na jaane kya hogi...

Do jhulaste badan pe pairahan
Ab sharabor hain paseene mein
Unko saaye ki fikr hai aur phir
"Qarz-haye-junoon chukana hai"
Bojh sooraj ka bhi uthana hai...

The Japanese Wife and Kunal Basu

2010-04-18T10:13:00.000-07:00

I first saw Kunal Basu — and Aparna Sen — in flesh and blood at the Jaipur Literature Festival (January, 2008), when the duo were there to talk about the story behind the story and, of course, the film. When they got onto the stage in the imposing Darbar Hall, amidst a wave of applausefrom the audience, the first thing Sen wanted was some lights to be put off as they hurt her eyes. It was a great session as the two shared with the audience the hows and whys behind The Japanese Wife, a film by Sen based on a short story by Basu by the same name.
There was one small hiccup though: The AV equipment malfunctioned, denying us the sneak peeks into the film two years before it eventually released on April 9, having passed the censor board with U/A certificate. We did get to see some of the amazing scenes in bits and pieces.
When I met Basu, a couple of weeks back at the Taj Mansingh in New Delhi, Basu was at his candid best. He isan interviewer’s delight: Unlike some authors, he’s not intimidating, doesn’t beat around the bush and speaksslowly, in measured tone. He is patient and doesn’t mind if
your questions are vague and don't quite make any sense.
When we meet, I am a little late. When I reach the hotel and call him up, he shows no sign of irritation. "I’ll joinyou in a bit," he says, and barely a couple of minutes later, walks in. "Hi. I’m Kunal," he holds out his hands. When we sit down for a chat, he asks for Cappuccino. I settle for masala tea. I am still trying to frame some questions in my mind. There is so much I feel I could ask. I am also confused if I should stick to The Japanese Wife or ask anything and everything. Thankfully, I didn’t have to try too hard: He lent an amazing flow to our conversation. Basu, who teaches management science at the University of Oxford, is the author of three novels — The Opium Clerk (2001), The Miniaturist (2003) and Racists (2006) — and a book of short stories, The Japanese Wife (2008). I ask him about allhis works, besides some other related stuff. Basu tells me about his "promiscuous imagination", the "failed historian" in him and his fourth novel, The Yellow Emperor’s Cure. Set in China during the Boxer uprising (1898-1901), the novel is about a Portuguese doctor who goes to China to find a cure for syphilis.

Excerpts from the interview: (The edited version of this appeared in The Asian Age earlier):

Q. The film based on your story, The Japanese Wife, finally releases after a long wait. It’s the story of an unlikely romance and marriage between two people separated by cultures. What was the genesis of the story?
A. The most difficult thing for me to answer is why did I think of a particular story. I can be very cogent and say how I wrote it. A few decades ago, I was travelling in a village in Bengal with a friend of mine. We were having a very animated conversation when he suddenly pointed out
someone, saying, ‘That gentleman is married to a Japanese’. Now, in a city it’s not an unusual for an Indian man to have a foreign wife or an Indian woman to have a foreign husband. But you won’t expect that in a village inIndia. I said, ‘Oh! Really? That is a bit unusual.’ But after
that we didn’t have any further discussion about that man. But so strange is the human mind that a few decades later, when I was sitting in my study with a snowstorm outside, I
thought of the story and I wrote it. So, that’s the genesis of the story if I can go back in my own memory and point at it. But I had no clue it would come out in such a strange
way. I felt a bit sad killing Snehmoy though.

Q. Are you happy with the choice of characters?
A. This role called for a portrayal of a man who’s frighteningly shy, introverted. He is a village person, but, at the same time, has a strong inner core. For, a person who’s nervous and diffident wouldn’t take such a step of marrying somebody he’s never seen. And still be loyal to that marriage. Something which is strange about this man is that the other aspects of his characters are very ordinary. It is a difficult, complex and layered character to portray.
I saw Rahul for the first time when they were doing an acting workshop in Kolkata. At the Actors’ Studio, as soon as I saw him rehearsing a scene in which he goes to a
homeopathy doctor and tries to explain to the doctor that his wife is sick. The doctor asks, ‘But where is your wife?’ The doctor asks him detailed questions about the symptoms. But Snehmoy has never seen his wife. It’s hard for him to describe the symptoms. He’s trying to be as truthful as possible, trying to answer those questions. I stood at the back as we had not been introduced yet. I exclaimed, ‘Yes, that’s my Snehomy.’ I instinctively knew that that was my character. So, the choice of the actor for the character was absolutely right. Though I didn’t go to Japan for shooting, but the Japanese actress Chigusa
Takaku, who plays Miyage, has done a great job too.

Q. You were a child actor in two of Mrinal Sen’s films: Punascha (Over Again) and Abasheshe (And at Last).What memories do you have of those days?
A. What you do as a child - specially things you love doing -stay with you. I haven’t really talked about it at other places, but I’ll tell you what I remember of my child-actor days. I remember the dark, musky studio at Taliganj in Kolkata. In one of the films, Punascha, the hero was Soumitra Chatterjee, one of the big names in Bengali cinema then. I remember him wearing a dark suit and looking smashingly handsome. When Mrinal Sen came in, he introduced us, saying ‘This man is going to act in the same film with you.’ It was the whole smell of cinema, the sense of being on the set with lights et al that attracted me a lot.

Q. Would you think about acting now?
A. (Laughs) I have gray hair. No one is going to cast me. If you could find a confident director, who is not afraid to do so, pass on my name.

Q. All your novels are historical fiction. What is it about the genre that fascinates you?
A. India has a tremendous tradition of historical fiction.When I was growing up, I read the works of Bankim Chandra Chattayopadhyay, which were historical fiction on a grand scale. I was a romantic child and historical fiction appealed to me because it took me to another time and another place. In many ways, it became my favourite genre, even in fiction. I also read novels in other languages. I was very taken by their otherness - the other time, the other
place. It is no surprise to me that when I started writing I would gravitate towards historical fiction. Also, history was my favourite subject in school. I never studied the subject
in university, which I so regret. I tell friends that I am a failed historian which is why I write historical fiction.

Q. All your novels are so removed from each other in terms of the period you set them in.
A. It is because in my imagination, I’m promiscuous. I get bored if I stay with a particular period. After The Miniaturists was published, there was a strong view among people who follow my work in the publishing world — agents, publishers etc — that I should write another Mughal novel. I felt very sad when I finished The Miniaturists because I knew I’ll never allow myself to go back into that world again. I don’t want to write yet another Mughal
novel as much as I love the Mughal period. I had to move over to the Victorian period in Racists. Part of my writing is this journey of self-exploration. And I
don’t want to be stuck in one period.

Q. In your last novel, The Racists, while you wanted to explore the origins of racism in the 19th century Europe, did you also have its contemporary contours on your mind?
A. Racists is about the racial distinctions that science made between the Black and the White. You could equally apply the story to the distinction between the Chinese and the
Malay in Southeast Asia or between several castes or tribes or religions. In many ways, this is a story about prejudice. Prejudice, unfortunately, is timeless. Prejudice, unfortunately, cuts across geographies. So, although the story of Racists is set in a very specific context of racial
discrimination, it could equally be seen as other sorts of discriminations in other societies in other times. What really intrigued me when I was writing this novel was why are people drawn to other people who are similar — similar ethnically, religiously and by caste - and why do they move away from those who they see as dissimilar. Racists, in that context, is a very significant novel for me because I am troubled, as most contemporary citizens of the world should be, about prejudice. While writing that novel I understood more about the roots of prejudice.

Q. Tell me something about your next novel, The Yellow Emperor’s Cure.
A. It’s a novel about syphilis, a very dangerous disease which up to the ’30s of the 20th century was like HIV\AIDS. There was a lot of taboo and stigma around it as is the case with AIDS today. The novel is about exploring how different cultures — European and the Chinese -looked at the notions of health and sickness. It’s a story about a Portuguese doctor who goes to China to find a cure for syphilis in the 19th century.

Q. As a reader, what struck me about almost all your characters was that while they are ordinary, there is something incredibly extraordinary about them.
A. You have touched a very important point in my writing. I am excited by miracles that happen in the lives of ordinary people, people who never expect those miracles. A significant point, which cuts through from The Opium Clerk to my latest novel, is a series of accidents, miracles
and completely strange happenings that take place in the life of the ordinary people and how these happenings transform their lives or make them see themselves or the world around them in a different light. Inside all ordinary people are extraordinary worlds, worlds of our memories, dreams and nightmares. Hopefully, in my writing, I bring out those memories, dreams and nightmares in strange settings.

Q. As someone who was born and bred in Calcutta (now Kolkata), what intimacies do you share with the city?Living abroad, are you nostalgic about it?
A. I have lived abroad for close to 30 years now. But unlike a fair number of NRIs, I don’t miss the tea shop that I used to frequent while growing up. I don’t miss Calcutta in that sense. I miss myself in Calcutta. I miss the times when we used to plaster the walls of the university with political posters during the Emergency, the time when we used to go and stand for hours in queue to collect tickets to the international film festival, the times when we would go to
watch Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta 71 and keep arguing with friends till 2 o’clock in the morning. But obviously I have changed and Calcutta has changed. When I go there, it takes some effort to recreate that memory. It’s not small things that I miss. It is a city which is familiar because I
was born and raised there. If I ever turn blind, and I pray to god that I don’t, I think I can find my way in Calcutta.
I don’t have superficial nostalgia about Calcutta. I miss lots of places. I miss Delhi. I love Delhi. Of the 12 stories in The Japanese Wife, five have strong settings in Delhi. I never lived for a substantial period of time in the city, but I feel I miss it in many ways. I miss going to Hazrat
Nizamuddin to listen to qawwalis. One thing that I am currently doing and which is also connected to Calcutta is that I am writing a text for an album of extraordinary photographs of old Calcutta house and its inhabitants shot by Kushal Ray. I am going to be writing the text. Hopefully, it will not be the boring text to accompany those pictures. Hopefully, there will be fictional qualities embedded in my text.

The Cure: A Short Story

2010-04-04T14:48:00.000-07:00

It was not out of any concern for her failing health, or her flagging spirit, that I had, despite myself, volunteered to lend my services, accompanying her on the agonizing rounds of clinics, sitting through numerous sessions with bald, pot-bellied, middle-aged men with thick glasses through which they stared vacantly, sometimes at the stream of men and women — the sick and the suffering — who poured out their heart and bodies to them, but mostly at nothingness, some sort of emptiness that lurked in the air smelling of maladies and cures, some sort of void that loomed around the corner, redolent of urine, blood, medicines, chloroform odors. It was a seething desire to partake of, if there was any way to do so, her destruction, her disintegration. I wanted to roll my tongue around it, feel it, smell it. Did it taste like my own destruction? Did it reflect my own disintegration? (Or did it affect us differently?) What was it like facing the fear of being destructed, of being disintegrated, of being ravaged by disorders that took a toll on body and life?

I can say, with some degree of certitude, it was not out of any love. Or care. For loving, I had stopped. For caring, I had stopped. Something had hardened in me, something had died. Years ago.

***

In the last few years that I had known her, she had degenerated into a pool of sickness and diseases, of symptoms and prescriptions that caused much of the flamboyance I associated with her to flounder, turning her into a pale — sunken eyes, sunken cheeks — contrast of her previous fulsome, abundant self. She was on some sort of physical downhill from which she never seemed to recover.

***

On a melancholy summer evening I had run into her, after years, at a chemist’s shop, wearing some sort of frilly dress, precariously holding the paper bag bristling with medicines in one of her hands, clung to her mobile with the other. When I saw her, a part of me was frigid, frozen. While yet another ignited the old spark we once shared. “Mind your frigging business,” a part screamed. “Go ahead and ask after her,” the other part pleaded. I, of course, surrendered to the latter. For this story wouldn’t have happened if I had listened to the first.

Over Cappuccino (sans any sugar) she told me — in brief, short sentences — how she had found peace and happiness away from me, dating a graphic designer who worked in her office for about an year, shortly after we drifted apart, eventually marrying him in a simple ceremony where only the closest of friends were invited. The guy was a “jerk” though and left her for someone else. “Men are such bastards,” she said, tweaking bastards so much that, to my unbelieving ears (she had never used the word before), it sounded bassturds. The word echoed in my mind, playing and replaying itself back to me long after I left her: Bass turds, Bass turds.

“Some men can be such bastards,” I heard myself clarifying, hurt at the sweeping generalisation that involved my gender: Our egos are so fragile we often don’t realize we spend most waking hours nurturing them, nursing them. “Whatever,” she could still not let me have an upper hand in our conversation. Any conversation. Even now. The way she did. Years ago. Visibly miffed, she averted my stare, instead fixing her gaze on a young lad with lovely locks, who sat opposite us, strumming his guitar, sometimes stealing a quick, furtive glance in our direction — at her, in fact, I have no qualms in admitting. She was still beautiful.

Something brewed in her mind, but she managed to stay calm, not to lose her composure. She was good at it, she was still good at it: perhaps no amount of physical disarray can take away from you what you essentially are, perhaps no ailment is potent enough to make you weary of what you believe in, to make you weary of the way you run your life.

That evening, as I sprinted up the stairs of her apartment, I got a whiff of the loneliness that had become a part of her life. She didn’t have any child from her marriage to the “jerk” that lasted for less than a year, and she didn’t want to marry again. A teetotaler all her life, she had taken to excessive drinking now and I could see empty bottles of wine and beer neatly stacked up in her cellar, peeking into her drawing room that, with its set of expensive carpets and minimalist glass and wooden furniture, oozed an air of affluence. An array of coffeetable books — on anything and everything — lay on the centre table, in an obvious state of disuse as a thick blanket of dust hid their titles, their covers.

She had also become a chain smoker, smoking as if there was no tomorrow. And drugs — all sorts of them — were part of her daily diet. When she emptied the paper bag, I saw several sleeping pills tumbling out, along with many tablets I didn’t know why she must take.

When she changed into something else, urging me to make myself “comfortable”, I noticed how frighteningly frail she had become; it was as if she was shedding some flesh every day and will soon turn into a skeleton. I wouldn’t imagine that to have happened to her. I wouldn’t imagine that to have happened to anybody.

She took me to her study — after she gobbled down a handful of tablets, some of them she “so hated” but had to have them nevertheless, and I made myself a cup of tea — letting me in on her “refuge”, her “alternate world”, peopled by books, books and some more books. “They help me retain sanity, help me feel I belong. I don’t know what would I do without them. I don’t know what would I be without them,” she said, brushing her fingers through her hair.

She sank into a chair, randomly picking up some titles, reading some lines from them, and then, bored by the exercise soon, keeping them back in their places. Poetry ran in her blood; her mother was a well-known, award-winning poet. She wasn’t much of a prose person. Like me. Poetry came natural to her, she said. “I find prose to be immensely prosaic,” she had told me once. I had laughed. “Prose. Prosaic. Hmmm,” I didn’t know what to say, something that happened too often to me when I was with her. She definitely had a way with words and would often twist them, stitching up sentences in a way that made me laugh out loud. I wouldn’t, of course, say anything. I remember this one time I had to join her on her “retail therapy” spree, but was late by an hour as I had bumped into an old friend. “Why can’t you distance yourself from your wishy-washy, namby-pamby friends,” she had blurted out when I had explained the situation to her. “All they do is distract you. You realize you are not going anywhere with such arty-farty types as company,” she had smirked. Her portmanteaus, her neologisms always left me befuddled, amused.

As she recited Rilke, Rumi, Cummings and Cavafy — one after another — in her deep, staccato voice, I was on a familiar trip. Words have amazing powers to heal, no matter how old, or deep, the wounds are. And yet it is words that wound too. It was words that had wounded, years ago: “It’s over. Finished. You understand?”

“Over? Finished? I understand!”

***

It has been going on for years now: She reads to me, I read to her. Words come crowding into our world, swooping down on our senses, arresting our imagination. Words from writers near and far, alive and dead. Words that distract and destroy, and words that amuse and sustain. Words that redeem years of silences crucified, words that reclaim eons of emotions squandered, words that reinvent several eras of desire dissipated. Words afflict us, words liberate us. Words put us in chains, words set us free. Words set us apart, words bring us closer. Words kill us, words bring us to life.

Words are our succor and our sustenance. Our battles, our weapons, our turfs. Our continent, our country, our integrity, our freedom. It’s both a disease, and a cure: We’re both plagued and cured by words.

Who needs nationality, religion, identity, belonging? We have words.

When we read to each other, we feel we’re one again. United, for once, even though only by what plagues us. Me and she. I and her. Together, for once, even though weighed down by the words that we weave for each other. As in health once, years ago, so in ailment now, years later. As in the pink of vigour in our primes, so in the darkness of affliction in our twilight years.

A Wednesday

2010-03-31T23:43:00.000-07:00

A Wednesday. The last day of the month. Three months slip by. Amidst some underpinnings of unrest — and undertows of sleep — I manage to read a few poems by Cavafy. Here they are:

As much as you can
Even if you cannot shape your life as you want it,
at least try this
as much as you can; do not debase it
in excessive contact with the world,
in the excessive movements and talk.
Do not debase it by taking it,
dragging it often and exposing it
to the daily folly
of relationships and associations,
until it becomes burdensome as an alien life.

So much I gazed
So much I gazed --
So much I gazed on beauty,
that my vision is replete with it.
Contours of the body. Red lips. Voluptuous limbs.
Hair as if taken from greek statues;
always beautiful, even when uncombed,
and it falls, slightly, over white foreheads.
Faces of love, as my poetry
wanted them.... in the nights of my youth,
in my nights, secretly, met....

Finalities
Amid fear and suspicions,
with agitated mind and frightened eyes,
we melt and plan how to act
to avoid the certain
danger that so horribly threatens us.
And yet we err, this was not in our paths;
the messages were false
(or we did not hear, or fully understand them).
Another catastrophe, one we never imagined,
sudden, precipitous, falls upon us,
and unprepared -- there is no more time -- carries us off.

The Remains of the Day

2010-03-27T15:04:00.000-07:00

I'VE BEEN awake for a while now. Awake and agitated. It was yet another serene Saturday. And though well-spent, it has passed me by, stepped out of my orbit, into the great unknown. A day has passed, its remains linger. And as I write these lines, it is as if I am writing its epitaph. What images shall I pluck out of its remains? What picture of the day shall I draw for you? What virtues shall I ascribe to it, what feats, what achievements, what characteristics, what incidents? What change did it trigger? What chaos did it engender? What joy did it foist on me? What surprises did it throw at me? What pains did it endure? What pleasures did it share? What story of the day shall I let the world know? I don't quite know.

It has been over a week since I vowed to turn a new leaf, ventured into doing something meaningful, though even that's quite relative. But I remain hovering around nowhere; I haven't made much headway. As Saturday slides out of my clutch, I wince, noticing how there are reams to be read, volumes to devour, reels to watch, tapes to listen to. They all lie around in an agonising mish-mash of papers, DVDs, tomes and what not, a hodgepodge of different worlds, different voices, different visions. I look at them. And yet I don't. I dread the way some of them have been looking at me. I dread the way I have been sitting on them. Procrastination is a curse, I conclude. Curse the damn thing!!

In the week that has gone by, I have done some random reading, some random writing. Can't say that about talking; I am not much of a talker, despite Jeffrey Archer calling me one (Read an earlier interview with him here). I caught hold of Ian McEwan's Solar and Aatish Taseer’s The Temple-Goers. More about them later. A music fanatic, a dear friend, recommended Rage Against the Machine, a US rock band that wonderfully blends, well, everything, from hip hop to heavy metal, from punk to funk and alternative rock. I was struck by the political overtones of their songs. I have listened to just a couple of their numbers (Bullet in the Head from their 1992 album and Calm like a Bomb from their 1999 album, The Battle of Los Angeles), but I am already in love with them. It's a different kinda trip.

Sample Bullet in the Head:

I give a shout out to the living dead
Who stood and watched as the feds cold centralized
So serene on the screen
You were mesmerised
Cellular phones soundin' a death tone
Corporations cold
Turn ya to stone before ya realise
They load the clip in omnicolour
Said they pack the 9, they fire it at prime time
Sleeping gas, every home was like Alcatraz
And mutha fuckas lost their minds....

And Calm like a bomb:

I be walkin' god like a dog
My narrative fearless
My word war returns to burn
Like Baldwin home from Paris
Like Steel from a furnace
I was born landless
This is tha native son
Born of Zapata's guns
Stroll through tha shanties
And tha cities remains
Same bodies buried hungry
But with different last names
These vultures rob everything
Leave nothing but chains
Pick a point on tha globe
Yes tha pictures tha same
There's a bank
There's a church a myth and a hearse
A mall and a loan a child dead at birth
There's a widow pig parrot
A rebel to tame
A whitehooded judge
A syringe and a vein...

The week that's passing by also saw the release of Shyam Benegal's Well Done Abba, which lampoons and lambasts India's growth story, with a dash of irony. Two other films of the week, which I am very keen on watching are Mira Nair's Amelia and Rob Marshal's Nine. The former is about Amelia Earhart, the American aviator who "disappeared somewhere over the Pacific in 1937 while trying to become the first woman to fly around the globe" (Read the New York Times review here) and the latter is a sort of a remake of the Italian maverick filmmaker Frederico Fellini's "shimmering dream, circus and a magic act" of a film called 8½.

Talking of cinema, I have also been waiting to watch Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island. It's a psychological thriller set in an asylum for the insane in 1950's Boston. It's a story of a fragile federal marshal Teddy Daniels, played by who else but Leonardo DiCaprio (remember Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed?) and the hunt for a missing high security patient, a woman called Rachel, played by Emily Mortimer, who has drowned her two small sons and her beloved daughter in a country lake. Scorsese, 67, in an interview to the Sunday Times, has said that the film, relives the tragedy he witnessed when he was 8.

Scorsese, who received the lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes this year, has given us modern classics which are considered to be the gems of cinema: Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas. It made me sad when I read him saying, " I'm not optimistic about the future of serious filmmking," expressing his hope that filmmakers like Coen Brothers (I recently saw A Serious Man and looooved it), David Lynch (The Elephant Man, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, The Straight Story, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire) and Jim Jarmusch (Permanent Vacation, Night on Earth, Dead Man, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Broken Flower, The Limits of Control) get some financial support as he was worried about the lack of money available to "visionary filmmakers". The domination of "blockbusters" spells death for serious filmmaking. Scorsese has also said that Shutter Island owes a lot to John Huston's Let There Be Light, Otto Preminger's Laura and Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past.

More on these films, later.

Turning a new leaf

2010-03-19T03:08:00.000-07:00

On a torpid, torrid Friday noon, while I sit in my room, listening to the Beatles croon "words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup, they slither wildly as they slip away across the universe, pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my open mind, possessing and caressing me... Jai guru deva, om", something is gonna change the way I blog. I had a flash, an epiphany, a moment of afflatus, if you will. To stop meandering, being adrift, unmoored, astray. And also to make some sense — in more concrete and substantial ways — of what happens around. To document much that interests me. To write about stuff I am fascinated about, crazy about. I am going to have less and less of those stupid ramblings about random stuff, of a little bit of this, a little bit of that. About things that have no relevance for anyone, except perhaps me, in a weird, self-indulgent way. A new resolve courses through me. A new purpose. A new poise. A new spark.
A new intent. A new objective. There is only that much of yourself that you can allow to be adrift, even wasted. There is no way of retrieving the times lost. There is no way of undoing what has already bee done.
I have lost many precious moments to all kinds of mayhem, mental and material. Not any more.

Driving through Lodhi Road the other day, I saw yellow leaves falling across the black pitch. The road was carpeted with dead, dry leaves. The trees were bare. Some beginning to be so. I told a friend, who was with me then, how the falling of leaves made me sad. “Arre, why? It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Uff, you are way too poetic,” she said. And then added, “Don’t look at the trees. Look at the leaves. It is as if it’s raining yellow leaves.” She was right. It was beautiful. The trees, I noticed, were turning a new leaf. The old ones were falling off, the new ones just beginning to cling to the branches. A season had passed. Another was on its way. The trees — and the leaves — were only following the nature’s plan. A set course. A fixed pattern. Everything changes. Change — as they say — is the only constant. As time flies, we are changing all the time, every single moment. What I am now, I will not be tomorrow. Who I am now, I may not be tomorrow. What I love reading/listening to\watching today, I may start hating\loathing tomorrow. If some gods in the pantheons of world music, literature, movies or theatre are part of my world today, they can be out tomorrow, replaced by yet another string. What delights me today may bore me tomorrow. You get the drift?
Change lies at the very root of creation, life. What I see, what I listen to (or even just hear), what I notice, what I observe, what i think about, what i ponder over, is constantly changing, every single day, every single moment.
In my posts, beginning now, I want to capture these changes, show you how the change is creeping in, transforming my world, my eyes, my ears, my heart, my mind. I want to show how life itself is a series of changes, for better or for worse. I want change — in the spheres I am talking about, namely, books, art, music, films, theatre — to be the leitmotif and the catchphrase of my posts. I hope to make myriadmusings a chronicler of that change. A constant chronicler of sorts. Sometimes, only sometimes, I shall have my poetry. But even that will symbolise some change. Some transition. Some evolution. Of that I am pretty sure about. And want you to be the same. If you are reading this, I would like you to participate in this process — of noticing these changes and reacting to them. It can be immensely enriching.
As Beatles sing,
Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes,

They call me on and on across the universe,
Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box
They tumble blindly as they make their way
Across the universe
Jai guru deva, om,
I don’t sing along the bit, Nothing's gonna change my world.

As they croon,
Sounds of laughter shades of life are ringing
Through my opened ears inciting and inviting me
Limitless undying Love which shines around me like a
million suns, and calls me on and on
Across the universe
Jai guru deva, om...
I am pretty hopeful that something's gonna change my world...Here’s looking at you, change!

Colour me free

2010-03-01T13:28:00.000-08:00

A riot of colours splashed across the surface of our lives — exuberant, exquisite, elegant. We have painted several patches of joy, of pleasure, of revelry, of caring and sharing. Colours — vibrant, effervescent — pulsate in our veins, throb in our minds. The united colours of celebration float around, creating a rainbow of fun and frolic, of cavorting, capering and prancing. A dash of colours on the horizon, a splash of colours in the environs, a rainbow of hues on the mindscape. What floats around, drifts around, comes around, gliding in rings of streams, slushing, sploshing, swashing, spattering, splashing. Joys form puddles of their own, delight dabs the air we breathe in…
As the day wore on, it was colours on the earth, colours in the sky. Colours on you, colours on me. Colours on the roads, colours in streets. Colours here, colours there, colours everywhere. We inhabited a unique universe of colours: Violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. The world around us resembled a republic of colours: colours made all rules, they were, for a while, both the law-maker and the law-enforcer. They made us. They unmade us. They created us. They destroyed us. They drew us closer. They set us apart. They defined us. They refined us. They confined us. They made us one. They made us millions. This world, indeed, is one big stroke of someone’s hands, isn’t it? That eternal artist ensconced up above!
When the day drew to a close, that itch, that incredibly strange and yet painfully familiar itch, in the dead of night. I secede for what seems like forever. A lot happens around me, and yet nothing does. Wakeful hours, restive moments, ceaseless stirrings, endless ruminations. Never willing to stop! I wish there is no tomorrow. But it looks like there will be tomorrow. I can see it’s already becoming ‘today’.
The dead of night can be quite deadly, when sleep eludes, and the space around is shrunk so much that you yearn to breathe in another air, elsewhere. When there’s a conflict raging within, an itch urging you to give it a shape — concrete, fulsome, meaningful, substantial — you know little respite, little peace.
Nothing, not even music — haunting melodies, soul-stirring voices — helps restore peace, or tranquility. No one is of any help: neither Beethoven nor Billie Holiday nor Bhupen Hazarika; Neither Hendrix nor Leppard nor Morrison nor Marley (to mention the usual suspects behind the raging, seductive symphony of my new-found world — full of excitement, serendipity, ebullience and adventure.
For the last three days, I have been trying to find a separate peace of sorts, a truce with the forces raging several battles within. That truce eludes. Silence looms large, perched at all the possible corners around, peeking from the crevices of solitude. But silence, like appearances, can be quite deceptive. Is something within me waiting to explode? Is this era of silence a precursor to the noisy, boisterous age elsewhere? All I hear, all I think of, all I care about, all I feel for is a deafening cry for freedom, an idea for the colours of freedom (COLOUR ME FREE!!!!!!), from all bounds, all barriers, all chains, everything. A free-spirited mind wants to transcend all sorts of narrowness, of everything that binds, that restricts, that constricts. I begin to yearn for redemption as Marley croons his way to glory:
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our minds.
Have no fear for atomic energy,
'Cause none of them can stop the time…..
Won't you help to sing
These songs of freedom? -
'Cause all I ever had:
Redemption songs -
All I ever had:
Redemption songs:
These songs of freedom,
Songs of freedom.

Dayera

2010-02-28T21:03:00.000-08:00

Darmiyan dayera hai kya koi
Do ubalte hue seene mein dhadakte dil ke
Adkhuli bahon ke do khilte kanwal
Kitni bechaini se murjha ke bikhar jaate hain
Do sulagti hui saanson ki ajab si uljhan
Ghol deti hai fizaon mein chubhan aur ghutan
Do mahakti hui ankhon ki bahakti khushboo
Phir se ehsaas ke izhaar ki moorat maange
Kanpkapate hue honton pe sisakte armaan
Apne takmeel ki ham donon se soorat maange!

Darmiyan: In between. Dayera: circle. Ehsaas: Feeling.
Izhaar: Expression. Takmeel: fulfillment

An Absence

2010-02-20T22:48:00.000-08:00

A silhouette of a shadow — yours —
In the labyrinth
Of my waking hours.
Those eyes
Ah! those mind-numbingly
Beautiful eyes
Pierce through
The doorway of my dreams.
A soliloquy of sorts
(of sweet nothings?)
Reverberate
In my hearing.

Is it your name
Or some soulful music
That never ceases to enthrall
Enchant,ensnare?

Never before
Did an absence
Intrigue me so much
And strike me
With its presence!

When words run riot...

2010-02-14T12:19:00.000-08:00

When words run riot
They unnerve, unsettle
The castles of complacency
The rock-solid citadels
Of my hard-boiled procrastination.
The towering towers
Of my lengthening comfort zones.
A clamour they drump up —
Deafening, persistent, intense —
Dredging up many a distilled vision,
Ricocheting many a strand of thought —
Long-forgotten, consigned to the past
Like the face of a childhood flame,
Like the memory, in old age, of a kiss as a teen.

When words run riot
It erupts a battle within:
Moments meander. Time flies.
Why must you flounder? Awake, arise!
Sieze the moment. Shine on the sky.
Of the endless endeavours of thy life.
Don't delay, hurry up, why dither?
In a moment all that you see will wither
Away, into the great unknown
And never come back..

When words run riot
It drowns all your memory
Into a sea of symphonies
That they weave around me,
Egging me on to move forward:
"No one stops for a lost traveller!
Come on! Move on! Don't stop! Move on!"

When words run riot
They open unto me
The amazing vistas
Of their amazing worlds
Of such souls as
Rimbaud, Rumi and Rilke
And many, many, many more...

When words run riot
They take refuge
Deep within my soul
Urge me, beg me, beseech me:
Strum your heart's strings and sing —
There's a song in your soul—
Of love and other
Wonders of the world!

When words run riot
They leave me with
A burning, consuming, devastating desire
To sing
Of love and other
Wonders of the world!!!

Cartographies of Silence

2010-02-12T09:42:00.000-08:00

There is definitely something really special about American poet Adrienne Rich's poetry. When I read some of her poems, they made me feel poetry is all there is, all there should be. When you read Rich, poetry seems to acquire flesh and blood. It becomes a living entity, with a heart and mind of its own.I recently read her poem Cartographies of Silence. I wish I had written that poem. But then it has been written. It's a beautiful, beautiful poem.Silence — and its aesthetics, its anatomy — has always fascinated me the most. Perhaps, it is because there are many voices in me that have been silenced, almost forever. Or may be I see silence as a weapon, a potent tool to avoid all sorts of unnecessary verbal entanglements.My fascination with silence has also a lot to do with the fact that I have been a mute witness to some people's silence which has been incredibly eloquent. Languages can fail, silence doesn't.

Rich's poem is divided into 8 parts. Minutes after I read the poem, I saw myself working on my own Cartographies of Silence. The structure, and the first line, is the same. I pick up just one part and change Rich's words in order to create something new, something which reads like Rich's poem, but with a whole set of new meanings, new contexts. Here it is:

A conversation begins
With a sigh; and each
Breaker of the long-drawn pause peels
The discomfort off, the strangeness aside.

As if restless, as if rustling up
A course of its own.

A poem can begin
With a sigh. And drum ears up.

A conversation has other flaws
Dissipates, drifts to its own
Delinquent territory, can't drum ears
Up. Entangles our throat. Freezes itself.
Implies in its unrelenting pauses
The pleasure it's denied...

coup de foudre

2010-02-06T13:28:00.000-08:00

Separated by cultures
Paralysed by perceptions,
We breathe in
The same air of strangeness.
Awkwardly, fumbling with
Words of greetings:
A word for an emotion,
And yet another to hide it.
We stumble through
Alphabets, idioms, phrases —
The inscrutable symbols
Of inscrutable expressions!
Some of them lose all meaning
And some get a whole new one
For us, at least,
If not for the custodians
Of our langauges, cultures!

Mum,mystified by the surge within,
By the tide lapping up
Against the shores of our being.
Struck by the enigma of our arrival
Into each other's heart, and mind.
Puzzled by the sheer effortlessness,
The sheer ease with which
That ennobling of emotion
Takes shape and transcends
All barriers — man-made —
And changes everything forever!
Puzzled by the pace at which
Two cultures can travel, mingle,
And shed the differences
By which we allow ourselves
So often to be defined by...
Who needs words?
Or belonging, identity and the likes...
We are better off!

Having given up on words,
And the accoutrements of cultures,
or traditions and the likes...
We seek solace in silence,
And those comforting gestures,
Like the twitch
Of your eyes and lips.

We walk into the darkness
And become one with the night.

Jaipurnama: Part I

2010-01-30T08:29:00.000-08:00

There are writers and there are writers. At the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival, which concluded on January 25, I had an opportunity to chat with authors of all hues — some with shades of humility, others with hubris — milling around in the manicured lawns of the Diggi Palace, which has seen the festival take baby steps, and in its fifth year, outgrow itself a bit. I saw these authors jostle with the crowd for seats at well-attended sessions and saw them doing a little bit of pushing and shoving in the long queues for food. I heard them talk about their writing, speak of all that ails the world, of all that literature can do and of all that shapes literature itself, of the fastidiousness of faith and of the religion of love, of the poetry of prose and the power of poetry.
Even though it didn’t have many “stars”, the festival’s line-up, by all means, was stellar. It had Wole Soyinka, the first African author to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986. It had the celebrated Scottish writer Alexander McCall Smith (of the popular No.1 Ladies Detective Agency series fame) and the much-loved Irish writer Roddy Doyle — the bespectacled man from Monte Carlo with dancing, mischievous eyes, who took home the Booker Prize for Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha, the story of a 10-year-old Dubliner trying to describe, understand and misunderstand the world, in 1993 — Anne Enright (yet another Irish writer and Booker winner for The Gathering in 2007), Andrew O’ Hagan (he was the one who almost got standing ovation when he delivered his speech on the power of literature), Niall Ferguson, Hanif Kureishi, Roberto Calasso, Geoff Dyer (he had many female fans drool, as did Pakistani young writer Ali Sethi), Steve Coll, Stephen Frears and Lawrence Wright. From the home turf, there were veteran theatreperson Girish Karnad, Amit Chaudhuri, Amitava Kumar (who, I think, is the most sensible, sensitive and informed writer from among the current crop; we kept bumping into each other after an interview at the fest; he has this habit of addressing everyone as “boss” which I found is a reflection of the ease with which he meets everyone), poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Gulzar (I have written about him in earlier posts) and Vikram Chandra, certainly the most affable, the most grounded.
The sessions with Dalit writers and campaigners like Kancha Ilaiah and O.P. Valmiki may have been overshadowed by simultaneous sessions with better-known international authors, but they, along with other bhasha writers like Ashok Vajpeyi and K. Satchidanandan, lent the festival the richness and flavour of regional literature that the organisers of the festival aim at promoting alongside the best of writers writing in English.
The idea, even though not avowed, of any literary festival is to provide an interface with a set of people who write (they may not necessarily live off it) with another set of people who see the world — both imagined and real — through their favourite writers’ eyes. While the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival, a “literary show”, is increasingly losing its intimacy as it becomes bigger and bigger, it nevertheless has moments in which you can enjoy an audience with the authors you like, however brief and fleeting these moments may be.
I went to the festival to “know” the writers I admire, get a sense of their writing process and the several worlds they inhabit. Writers show the world to us in all its beauty and ugliness, splendour and sordidness. My mission was to get a sense of what makes some writers what they are, what makes them write what they write, the way they write.
I pick up two writers — Vikram Chandra and Hanif Kureishi — from as diverse a background as it could get, and yet they are linked, one albeit loosely, together by the city of Mumbai. Chandra divides his time between California and Mumbai; Kureishi, born and brought up in London, couldn’t be “more British”. While Mumbai —its people, its underbelly — comes alive in Chandra’s stories and novel, Kureishi’s father, Rafiushan Kureishi, was from Mumbai who left the city for England in 1947, married there and never came back. An aspiring writer, he made a “religion at home out of library books, discontent and literary ambition” and Kureishi writes about him in My Ear at his Heart: Reading My Father. When his father died Kureishi discovered the manuscript of his last novel An Indian Adolescence, parts of which were based in Bombay. In Buddha of Suburbia, which is based in London, Kureishi also draws on his father’s days in Bombay. Anwar, his Dad’s friend since the age of five, comes from Bombay.
Why I picked these two authors also had to do with the way the duo went about the business of attending the literary festival, holding forth on their life and writing and interacting with the press. While Chandra was the darling of the media, obliging everyone who approached him for an interview, an autograph or a photograph, Kureishi was through and through a “British”, who kept his upper lip rather stiff, wondering, thankfully towards the end of the festival, “What am I doing here?” He came to the festival, he said, because “I needed to get out of my house for some time”.
If Kureishi was inspired by his father, Chandra derives much inspiration from his mother, Kamna Chandra, who has written several plays and Hindi films (Prem Rog, 1942: A Love Story). Her influence is more evident in his epic, “anti-detective” second novel, Sacred Games, a thriller.
When you read Vikram Chandra, you surrender to his engaging, exuberant imagination. And in this lies his reputation as a superior storyteller, an accomplished stylist. When you meet Vikram Chandra, he floors you with his friendliness. Chandra is easy-going, unassuming and smiles often, a rare trait among critically-acclaimed writers, including Kureishi. I remembered the advice Lord Hanuman gives to Sanjay, a man trapped in the body of a monkey, in Chandra’s fabulous first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain: “Straightforwardness is the curse of your age, Sanjay. Be wily, be twisty, be elaborate.” While Chandra elaborates on his writing process and the subjects and themes of his novels and stories,
he is not “wily” and “twisty”. He is straightforward, yet another rare trait among good writers.
Chandra established how storytelling could be a conceit in Red Earth and Pouring Rain. When you ask him how did that come about, he says: “It emerged from childhood. I was always a kid with the thick glasses. As kids my age played in the ground, I used to make up stories in my head with dozens of sub-plots. As I grew older I became more and more conscious of the huge oral traditions and its value.” Red Earth... is half “psychological realism” with its other half being “fantastical”. “The idea of juxtaposing the two was really useful,” he says.
Chandra draws his characters from real life. And that makes his stories so rooted in reality. He may write about Bombay, but he doesn’t look at the city with a sense of nostalgia. Chandra is working on his next novel. But he tells you little of that. How long will it take? Seven years, as it did for Sacred Games? Chandra, who likes to work at his own pace, doesn’t know.

THE VOCATION of each writer, according to Hanif Kureishi, is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising. While Kureishi describes the world (tales of growing-up in London, racism and the immigrant experience) as he sees it, there is too much of his world — his father, his family, his ex-wife, his children — that gets in his way. His stories and novels have striking parallels with his own life and his family members, including his father who died in 1991, have often expressed their displeasure over family secrets (“Fabricated for the entertainment of the public for profit”, his sister, Yasmin, wrote in a letter to the Guardian), being “sold”. But Kureishi couldn’t care less. “The sort of writing you do comes out of your character and nature. You write from who you are and where you are. Writing comes from the wordspace in your head that is called subconscious,” said Kureishi.
As the 55-year-old brooding author walked around the venue, fending off people — fans, readers, journalists — I noticed his expressionless stare greet everyone, everything. “Perhaps it is the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there, of belonging and not, that makes me restless and easily bored,” the line from The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), his debut novel, came back to me. Cold and detached, Kureishi makes no effort to hide his conceit. A lady who approached him after his session with Amitava Kumar was asked to “read my books” before she could get around to speaking with him.
Kureishi carries with him a little irreverence and insouciance of Karim Amir, the funny, mixed-race boy from The Buddha of Suburbia. In the sessions at the fest, the author, who explores sex, families and middle age in his latest novel, Something To Tell You, talked about how he started as a pornography writer, using Antonio French as his pseudonym. “If you are writing pornography, it is good to have French in your name,” he quipped.
Kureishi, who had the opportunity to see Samuel Beckett during the rehearsals of his plays and calls him a “sound conductor”, also talked about theatre, “the most exciting thing to have happened to me”.
Kureishi takes his role of a playwright as seriously as that of a novelist, a short story writer or a screenplay-writer. His “version” of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre. His plays, Sleep With Me and When The Night Begins, have been the toast of the theatre circuit in London. In 2004, his play When the Night Begins was produced by the Hampstead Theatre.
Asked about race in his writing, he said: “I’m no longer interested in race. What I’m interested in is telling a story. What I want to learn is how to tell a story. If you tell it right, there is something about it that always works. I’m interested in economy, saying things in lesser space.”
The world, to Kureishi, seems to be very funny and tragic at the same time. “I just try to combine the two in my writing,” said Kureishi, adding that he doesn’t give a “f*** to reviews”. “All I care about is money,” he said.

Awareness, thou arrive...

2010-01-23T13:16:00.000-08:00

In the sordid loneliness of a depressing hotel room in Jaipur,I hear the occasional rumble of autos, the infrequent roar of bikes that wheeze past my window, shredding in some ways the tapestry of silence. It is well past midnight, but many lives still run on the road. Where do they come from? Where do they go? When they reach their destinations, do they really arrive? If they retire in their love nests, are they at home, at peace with themselves? What do they think about when they have nothing to think about? What do they do when they have nothing to do? Do some eyes await their arrival? Are some hands eager to hold their hands? Who do they talk to when they have no one to talk to? Where do they go when they have nowhere to go?

I think of all these. I think of everything. I think of nothing. I think of you. I think of me. Where's us?... Voices veer off. Words, like tears, well up. They soak the bedspread of expression. They trickle down the wicker of being. I see things. I hear things. Yet not a thing do I see. Not a thing do I hear. What do I hear when I hear? What do I see when I see? Why do I hear what I hear? Why do I see what I see?

I am confused.
I am restless.
I am listless.
I am sleepless.
I am helpless.

My confusion is the confusion of my age.
My restlessness is the restlessness of my age.
My listlessness is the listlessness of my age.
My sleeplessness is the sleeplessness of my age.
My helplessness is the helplessness of my age.

From these dark nights will a swathe of light burst forth one day...Awareness, thou arrive with stealth steps and keep me awake all night!!

A little bit of this, a little bit of that

2010-01-18T08:58:00.000-08:00

No, this has nothing to do with Michelle Branch's Game of Love.
It is actually about, well, a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
About 20 days into a new year, a new century, and I wake up now. Uffff! I am quite impossible!!I wake up only now, with the remnants of what I had initially thought would be the resolutions for the year gnawing at me, like the knots of hunger that course through the belly of the poor, hungry,homeless souls I see everyday while on my way to work or while running errands for my own material, physical, intellectual and social fulfilment. They seem to be screaming. In fact, they have been doing so ever since the euphoric crescendo of celebrations announced the arrival of a new year.But all these days, I have looked the other way, pretending not to have heard them, deluding myself that their feebleness would grow, they would stop, die down. But they don't. The voices in my head never leave me alone, wherever I go, whatever I do...
So what resolutions did I make for the year? Or better still, what were the things that I thought I could name them as resolutions. Nothing comes to my mind now. It is freezing outside. Everything is cold, frozen. Even as I try to think of those things, labouring to recollect, one part of my mind thinks aloud. And I wonder!
Why is it that when it's a few weeks into a new year, any new year, a corner of my mind keeps reciting — like the doggedness of a minister in the corridors of power who keeps repeating the “official line” with single-minded, lunatic persistence —"The best resolution is not to have any resolution".
About three weeks have passed me by. I feel it's been a while since my eyes saw these words in my diary: " A new year is upon me. A new century is upon me. But I hardly know what to make of them. Will they make me or unmake me? I have no ways of knowing if they do either!"
This indecisiveness, this uncertainty will be the death of me. Sometimes, when you want the best of both the worlds, you end up losing both the worlds! Am I losing a world? Does another world await me? Am I losing both the worlds? I have no ways of knowing.
With 2010, I enter the fourth year of scribbling the mindless rant, the random jottings that help me gather myself (inward,only in a superficial way) if not my thoughts. If not my thoughts, at least I can gather myself! But then there are so many things, a mish-mash of things, torn, broken and wasted, lying around me that I wonder how much will I gather! How much can I gather? Organisation, order elude. Disorganisation, disarray reign supreme. Routines scare. Patterns frighten. There seem to be more disruptions than eruptions. Of late. Anywhere. How do you redeem, reclaim, reinvent yourself when everything else seems to pull you in an opposite direction you know little about or have little idea of and, most importantly, have no control over? We don't happen to things. Things happen to us. All kinds of things!

I look at my blog posts. They are no measure of my professional or any kind of success (I do this for a purely, though creatively, selfish reason), but I would still like to see more of them. They satisfy me in a very strange way. In a way, few things do. These posts are like my lips and limbs. They are me.
I started this blog three years ago with nothing specific on my mind. It will, I had thought, give some outlet to my stupid ramblings. My thoughts that hardly anyone would give any thought to!And then, poetry and short stories happened. I followed the creative urges, which are no less vital than the primal urges, obeying each itch that I felt in my fingers with tremendous devotion, staying up for nights on end, waking up early, bleary-eyed, sleep-starved, but cautious to catch the onrush of expressions. And the posts kept adding up. I count:only 8 in 2007, 42 in 2008 and 69 in 2009.In 2010, I would like to see more. Just like a lover wants to see more of his beloved! More and more and more! I wanted to turn a new leaf with the new year,try to tread a different path. But what path is my path? What path will be my path?
I see people around me peddling everything, from ideas,images, inferences, influences, opinions, authorities to acquired tastes, likes and attitudes. The voices that fall on my ears are both sweet and sour, the faces that surround me are both pleasant and dour. And I am indifferent to either. It is as if I am there and yet I am not there. As if I have company, and yet away from it, away from all — away, far away! As if I am in the thickness of things and yet far from their peripheries! Detachment can have its own bliss! Methinks!
Though I am often in some kind of slumber or stupor (maybe)— deep, pervasive, numbing — I would still like to give myself some credit. At least, I allow myself to regret. At least I allow the pangs of the unfulfilled to fill me. And they do fill me. Like mad. They are mighty strong and recurring. Pangs of not having done this, not having done that.
Days merge into evenings and evenings into nights. And another day into another evening and another evening into another night. And yet another... into yet another...into yet another...And life goes on!

Sometimes...

2009-12-27T04:01:00.000-08:00

Sometimes,
You linger in my mind
Like a gushing memory...
Like a whiff on a spree...
Like a world in whirl...
Like a Sufi's swirl...

Sometimes,
Your remnants fill me —
The smell of your breath
(And the breadth of your smell),
Your hysteric histrionics
(And your histrionic hysteria),
The tinkle of your laughter,
The darkness of your pain.

Sometimes,
You ring in my ears,
Flash in my eyes,
Wobble in my feet.

Sometimes,
You heave in me
Like a bee in its hive.

Sometimes,
You sparkle in my joys,
And shine in my pain.

Sometimes,
You become
Every word that I utter
Every thought that I think
Everything that I do.
Sometimes,
The world is
A little piece of you.

Panaah

2009-12-17T03:32:00.000-08:00

Mere haqeer se lafzon ke motabar maane
Mere khyaal ke daman mein jalte, bujhte diye
Meri ana ka umadta hua Anasagar
Meri shinakht ke hisse, meri wafa ka samar
Meri hayaat ke safhe sabhi safed-o-sayaah
Mera tareeq, meri hasratein,mera ahsaas
Woh naghmgi jo meri zaat mein numayan hai
Woh meri fikr, mera hausla, meri koshish
Tassawuraat ki parchaayiaan mere saari
Mere hisaar mein phaila hua tamaam jahaan
Tumhi mein simte to shaayad mujhe panaah mile!

haqeer: trivial; motabar: sublime; ana:ego; shinakht: identity; samar: fruits; safhe: pages;tareeq: ways; naghmgi: rhythm; numayan: prominent; tassawwuraat: imaginations; hisaar: periphery;

Ek Nazm

2009-12-13T00:30:00.000-08:00

Raat tareek hai, lamhon ka safar jaari hai
Ek holnaak udaasi hai fiza mein uljhi
Waqt ne cheen liya jaise koi sarmaya
Bistar-e-dard ne agosh mein le rakha hai
Aur zakhmon pe mere gham ke fasurda faahe
Mustaqil dete hain purzor azeeyat ki azaan
Roke rakhe hai saba palkon par
Kaarwan-e-hayaat
Hasraten band dareechon se sada deti hain
Aur mauhoom umeedon ki sab bikhri kirchein
Jism-o-jaan mein mere paiwast hui jaati hain
Raat likthte nahin thakti hai udaasi ka fasoon
Aur guzarte hue yeh saare shikasta lamhe
Yakja hokar ke bana lete hain harfon ke hujoom...

tareek: dark, holnaak: tragic, sarmaya: treasure, agosh: embrace, fasurda: sad, mustaqil: constantly, azeeyat: torture, karwaan-e-hayaat: life's caravan, dareechon: gateways, mauhoom: frail, paiwast: seeping, fasoon: story, hujoom: groups

You

2009-12-10T00:55:00.001-08:00

From the realms of dream
You arrive
In the vaults of reality —
Chiseled, gracious, elegant.
Everything else fades
All brightness pales
You emerge
From the recesses of memory
In delicious frames
Like a beautiful poem
That gets itself written
In joyous stanzas!

An Escape

2009-12-08T00:52:00.000-08:00

I am my own text
And my own context
You are everything
I have run away from.

A Lover's Dilemma

2009-11-25T13:46:00.000-08:00

Despite the eagerness of the gathering piles
that make the lightness of being unbearable

Despite the eagerness of the moments
that pass by as you itch to sieze them

Despite the eagerness that those eyes
evince, and yet they turn to another

Despite the eagerness of those lips
that forever seem to say something

You yearn for someone, waiting in vain,
who doesn't even know your feelings for her.

ramblings....

2009-11-22T12:02:00.000-08:00

Eternally vague stirrings, again. The din of a thousand things. A constant whirr. A frenzied morning slips into an even more frenzied afternoon. Its mayhem merges into the evening's mess. As night serenades serenity,thoughts, concerns, worries, securities, insecurities, erupt. There is an upsurge...Two moving fingers create a rhythm that makes a melody of its own, resonating in the emptiness that surrounds...

Life, someone said, is an endless process of getting wasted. It could not seem to be more true to me than it does these days. Life, someone else said, is a process of becoming. I don't think it is anywhere closer to the truth if I were to apply it in my case. For I don't see myself inching anywhere closer to 'becoming'. On the contrary, I have often observed, I try, obtrusively, unobtrusively, knowingly, unknowingly,to avoid 'becoming' anything. But the downside of such a thing could be that you end up being nothing. Nothing seems to be a nice word, but that is something none of us would fancy being. Who will want to be nothing? We are always something or the other. Being nothing is as good as not being there, not existing. Will the world, which is ever eager to brandish its identity (or shall i say identities) ,prefer being nothing? I doubt. Just imagine who will take you seriously if you say you are nothing: You are neither this nor that , you are neither Muslim nor Hindu, neither Sikh nor Christian, neither Jew nor Zoroastrian, neither good nor bad, neither religious nor an atheist.
The world around you constantly forces you to be something or the other. If you are not this then you must be that. Needless to say, I have no respect for such things.
Why should you allow anything to define you? Why must you be something or the other. Indeed, why must you be anything? The argument I am trying to make here, though not quite succinctly, has its resonance, I believe, somewhere, but since I am still grappling with it, I can't quite trace it to any religious or philosophic tradition...I don't know. I just ramble on...For it has
been a while since I did that...In the days that have gone by verses filled some vacuums that i feel around...
All these days, I have been wildly scribbling, both for work or otherwise: and now that I think of them, words spring up from here and there...words from interviews and interactions, words I latched onto when they left others' lips, others' written worlds (I have been meaning to weave one of my own, but that is, like me, not going anyweher at the moment)...I ramble on...
Ideas sprout from the well of being...The other day, sitting with my diary, I realised another year was itching to exit. Another year is itching to arrive. An year gone. I am going to complete another year of getting wasted,getting nowhere. Itching to celebrate being nothing, am I? Well, not quite.
For even if you try being nothing, you become something, even if you try doing nothing, you end up doing something. While being adrift, you keep hitting somewhere. If you are on the go, you go through both hell, and heaven...Moments lurch at you, faces beckon. Heart aflutter, mind becomes a furnace. Things flare up and sometimes, fizzle out. Joy is fleeting. Sadness comes next. Hope, a necessary evil, is transient. Despair follows. A lot goes up in smoke...
I want to live some parts of my days in solitary confinement...alone...over the few weeks, have tried to revel in the sheer joy of the celluloid. Film after film. One after another. Can't list all. Here are a few:

1. Wongkar Wai's In the Mood For Love: I absooolutely love this film. What is it about? It's on infidelity. There is something about the way Wai handles the subject that makes you fall in love with this film. Silence, in the film, is a character. It speaks.

2. Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player: I don't think there is anything by Truffaut which I have not liked. The idea behind this one is: What you did yesterday stays with you today. Charlie Kohler, a pianist, learns it the hard way. I see it as a film about the need to be loved, loved unconditionally, and how sometimes we find ourselves in the vortex of situations, often of our own creation (owing to something we did in the past), that when they end, we realise it's the end of everything. But at the end of all our tragedies, we revel in the pursuits that redeem us. For Kohler, it is playing the piano. His world falls apart, but he is back at doing what he does best.

3. Ingmar Bergman's Summer Interlude and Summer With Monika : Bergman is my all-time favourite. Both of these are breathtakingly beautiful. The first one is about how 'first love never dies, but something dies with first love.' Maj-Britt Nilsson and Birger Malmsten are absolutely stunning as Marie and Henrik, respectively. Told in flashback, it documents how the duo's world, full of youthful exuberance, almost idyllic, comes to an end when Henrik falls off the cliff while they were vacationing in summer. Marie, a ballerina, eventually comes to terms with her loss and even makes a fresh beginning, but the memories of the summer interlude spent with Henrik never actually leaves her, his diary only sending her back in time to relive the moments that they spent together. I remember some bits of dialogues in the film: Here it is:

Marie: I'm never going to die. I'll get really old, but I'm not going to die.

Henry: I'm scared that I will tip over the edge into something black, something unknown. It's something I'm struck by now and again.

When Henrik dies, Marie's distant uncle, Erland, while teaching her to "protect oneself, build walls", physically exploits her.Here is one bit of their conversation:

Marie: Is there any meaning anywhere?

Uncle Erland: No, my girl, nothing means anything in the long run.

Marie: I don't believe God exists. And if he does, I hate him. And I'll never stop hating him. If he stood before me, I'd spit in his face. I will hate him for as long as I live. I won't forget. I will hate him till the day I die.

Uncle Erland: There's only one thing one can do: protect oneself, build walls. Protect oneself from the touch of misery. I'll help you. I'll help wall you up."

The wall grows around Marie. And in the end, she was not "protected", but "locked up".

Summer With Monika's idyllic island setting, its sensuousness ensnared me. I only wish I could get to watch all of Bergman's. Disappointed by Torrent, I am still hunting for some of his films. (If any of you know where to get them, please do tell me).

And yes, I also finished reading Sujit Saraf's The Confession of Sultana Daku, a fictional retelling of India's Robbing Hood. The language is lucid and it didn't take me long to finish. Another reason was an interview with Saraf. So I had to.
In days to come, I am preparing to read some more, watch some more, listen to some more...I continue to do all this, although I don't know why must I do all this!
But these are some things I love and enjoy doing. And that is reason enough! Ain't it?

Zindagi bhaagti si rahti hai...

2009-11-11T23:46:00.000-08:00

Der raaton ko bewajah yun hi
Shahr ki jaagti si sadkon pe
Zindagi bhaagti si rahti hai...

Dil mein toofan ek dabaye hue
Aur ankhon mein anginit sapne
Sapna man-chaahi cheez paane ka
Sapna duniya ko jeet laane ka
Sapna sachchayion ki fatah ka
Sapna ghurbat ki ghatti satah ka
Sapna khushiyon ka ghar basane ka
Sapna khwaabon ko sach banane ka...

So gayen hain makeen makaanon ke
Khamushi cheekhti hai ab har su
Shor khawhish ka soyi galiyon mein
Band hain saare ghar ke darwaaze
Koi khirki kahin nahin khulti
Koi bhi mehrbaan nahin milta
Zindagi ham-kalaam ho jisse
Do ghadi jis se koi baat kare...

Kitne gham hain jo isko khaate hain
Uljhanein kitni gham bhadate hain
Dard kuch apne, kuch paraye hain
Shakl pe iski dukh ke saaye hain
Dard ghairon ka, dard apnon ka
Dard kuch tootte se sapnon ka
Dard bebas,yateem bachchon ka
Dard bhookon ka aur nangon ka
Dard majboor, chup se honton ka
Dard mitti se door logon ka
Dard beghar ka, dard muflis ka
Dard na jaane aur kis kis ka...

Raat gahri hai aur sooni hai
Har taraf bolte hain sannate
Har taraf ek sakoot taari hai...

Zindagi jaagti hai subah tak
Bhaagte bhaagte kabhi thak kar
Yeh kahin ruk ke dam nahin leti
Kuch bhi ho dekhti nahin mudkar
Sirf aage ko badhti jaati hai...

Der raaton ko bewajah yun hi
Shahr ki jaggti si sadkon pe
Zindagi bhaagti si rahti hai...

some more lines...

2009-11-09T03:04:00.000-08:00

Udaas shaam ki tanhaayiyan mujhe de do
Tum apni zaat ki veeraniyan mujhe de do

Mata-e-loh-o-qalam cheen lo agar mujh se
Tum apne jazbon ki hairaniyaan mujhe de do

Mata-e-loh-o-qalam: the treasures of writing

Four lines

2009-11-07T12:39:00.000-08:00

Khwaab is tarah se tabeer ka chehra dhoonde
Jaise deewana koi shahr mein sehra dhoonde
Tum ne ek mod pe aawaz mujhe di thi kabhi
Waqt kab se hai usi mod pe thehra, dhoonde....

tabeer: fulfilment; sehra: woods, wilderness

Operation Green Hunt

2009-11-02T02:17:00.000-08:00

Hont khamosh hain, lafzon ke muhafiz chup hain
Ab ke woh jang chidi hai ki khuda khair kare

Ek taraf lais hai hathiyaron se faujein saari
Doosri or hain naadar, nihatthe, nange
Ek taraf zor hai taaqat ka, junoon sar pe sawaar
Doosri or qabeelon ki hai majrooh ana
Ek taraf zom hai, khudgarzi hai, tayyari hai
Doosri or gharibi hai aur laachaari hai
Ek taraf cheekh yeh “Hat jaao ijara hai mera”
Doosri or yeh ailaan “Zamin apni hai”

Jang aisi ke har ek fard ho dushman jaise
Kaun jaane kise kab goliyan chalni kar de
Jaan ab apni hatheli pe rakhe har koi

Chand taajir ke hawale hai watan ki mitti
Ho rahi hai yahan neelami hawa, paani ki
Chand taajir ke guroohon ki taraqqi ke liye
Ek jamhoor ne lalkara hai ab janta ko
Ab to jamhooriyat who tarz-e-hukoomat hai jahaan
Haq agar maange koi us ko mitaya jaaye

Ab paharon mein koi geet na gaaya jaaye
Per ke saaye mein ab koi musafir na ruke
Ab pahron mein har ek saans pe pahra hoga

Jang aisi ke ab dahkenge shole har su
Door jangal mein kahin khoob ujala hoga
Kaate jayenge kai insaan darakhton ki tarah
Khoon ke cheenton se rang jaayega sehra saara
Itni laashein ke har ek gaam pe hoga anbaar

Hont khamosh hain, lafzon ke muhafiz chup hain
Jang ab aisi chidi hai ke khuda khair kare…

Ghazal

2009-10-26T10:32:00.000-07:00

Nit naye roz fasaadat se dar lagta hai
Baat aisi hai ke har baat se dar lagta hai

Mujh se kya poochte ho, kya main bataoon tumko
Haal aisa hai ke haalaat se dar lagta hai

Zindagi qaid hai ek mod pe thehra hai jo waqt
Mujh ko ab apni hi aadaat se dar lagta hai

Mujh ko manzoor nahin rishton ki qeemat ho koi
In dinon pyaar ke saughaat se dar lagta hai

Tum se shikwa nahin tum ne na diya koi jawaab
Mujh ko ab apne sawalaat se dar lagta hai!

fasaadat: riots; aadaat: habits; saughaat: gifts; sawalaat: questions

Haasil

2009-10-23T06:56:00.000-07:00

Tum ne yeh khoob kaha hai ke milegi mujh ko
Meri manzil jo meri nazron se hai door kahin
Tum ne yeh khoob kaha hai ke mere khwaab sabhi
Toot sakte nahin, ho jayenge sab sach ek din
Tum ne yeh khoob kaha hai ke meri khamoshi
Naghmgi apni har ek or bikheregi zaroor
Tum ne yeh khoob kaha hai ke meri tahreerein
Saari duniya se hi manwayengi loha apna
Tum ne yeh khoob kaha hai ke mere ihsasaat
Shaksiyat meri nikharenge, sanwarenge mujhe
Mujh se na-ahl ko tumne kisi qabil jaana
Tera mashkoor hoon, tumne kisi layaq samjha
Haan magar itna hai, tanhaai mein baitha aksar
Sochta hoon ke ab in baton ka haasil kya hai!

Ghazal

2009-10-19T09:14:00.000-07:00

Iski gahraai dil-o-jaan mein ubalna chaahe
Dil kisi roz samandar ko nigalna chaahe

Iska maqsad hi hai taameer naye naqshon ki
Zehn daireena sabhi naqshe badalna chahe

Mere khwabon ki haqeeqat na agar mumkin ho
Meri ankhein mere chehre pe pighalna chaahe

Ab kahaan rang woh duniya ka raha tere baad
Dil kisi taur sahi phir se bahalna chaahe

Baat hi aisi thi kuch pichle dinon ki Anjum
Phir se man baagh mein yaadon ke tahalna chaahe

maqsad: aim; taameer: construction; Zehn: mind; Daireena: ancient; naqshe: sketches, drawings, scenes

Ghazal

2009-10-17T11:17:00.000-07:00

Aaj ki raat mere ghar ki nigahein roshan
Dil ho roshan to nazar aati hain rahein roshan

Jagmagate hue lamhon ki chamak tum se hai
Muskurao zara ho jayen fizaayen roshan

Jee mein aata hai ke bo daloon ujala har su
Jis pe dalein woh nazar us ko woh paayein roshan

Aao mil baitho kisi roz, kabhi yun bhi to ho
Teri bahon mein jo ho phir meri baahein roshan

Mushk ki tarah woh khushboo ka gharonda hai koi
Jis taraf jaye hai kar de hai hawayein roshan!

Ghazal

2009-10-16T02:16:00.000-07:00

Nargisi raat tere dar ka ujaala mange
Chaand se bheek meri rah ka sitara mange

Waqt ne aise jakad rakha hai sab par iske
Khwaab udne ke liye koi sahara mange

Mujh ko bahla na saki shahr ki chamkeeli fiza
Phir se nazren meri gaaon ka nazara mange

Tere mere the jo dukh dard woh ab apne hain
Ab to har pal mera bas saath tumhara mange

Thak gaya ladte hue lahron se ab to Anjum
Dil ka har taar samandar se kinaara mange!

Ek udaas lamha

2009-10-12T02:29:00.000-07:00

Aaj phir waqt ki deewar bahut larzan hai
Aaj phir dard ke paikar mein dhali jaati hai raat
Aaj nakaam umeedon ke ujadte hain naqoosh
Aur mange ke ujaalon ki chamak bujhti hai
Gham bhulane ko koi aur maseeha aaye!

larzan: shaking; paikar; body; naqoosh: imprint

Ghazal

2009-10-10T11:44:00.000-07:00

Aankh lag jaye to manzar na kahin kho jaye
Meri nazron se woh paikar na kahin kho jaye

Sirf is waaste hai bheed se wahshat mujh ko
Meri aawaz hi dab kar na kahin kho jaye

Sochta hoon tera chehra na ho auron jaisa
Yeh meri ankhon mein bas kar na kahin kho jaye

Itna jaaga hoon ke dar lagta hai Anjum mujh ko
Meri ankhon se hi bistar na kahin kho jaye.

manzar: sight; paikar: body; wahshat: fear, anxiety