Nostalgia, warts and all

We'll follow up the exclusion story some other time. For some time now, I have been feeling that the less we talk about exclusion, the better. And I have been feeling nostalgic, missing many people and many pasts. Am I getting old, or just bold enough to admit it in public? These things do not really matter, for I realize at the same time that I have never felt so bullish about myself. This lovely feeling that it does not matter comes at a price, often a rather steep one. I daresay I rather like it. Let's hear from Gurudeb:

Ache Dukkho Ache Mrityu, biraho dahana lage/tobuo shanti, tobu anonodo, tobu ananta jage/Tobu prana Nitya dhra, ase surjo Chandra tara/Basanta nikunje ase bichitro rage/ Taranga milaye jai, taranga uthe/Kusum Jhariya pade, Kusuma phute/ Nakhi Khya, nahi sesha, nahi nahi Doinyo Besha/sei Purnotaaro paye mono sthano Maange.

I am sorry, dear reader, if you are not a Bengali. Even otherwise you must be familiar with that famous verse of Ishoponishada--Purnamada Purnamidam....--which I am sure at least partly inspired Tagore when he had been working on this particular piece. You'll clrealy see much from the Geeta and various Upanishadas walking into the song in a rather seamless process. There is a wonderful collection of the Upanishadas by Dr. Radhakrishnan in English for you to begin with and to keep going back to, like many of us. Do listen to this Tagore song nonetheless, especially in Debabrata Biswas' voice. I have tremendous, boundless joy everytime I listen to this track, especially when I am down for one reason or another. No not the rapturous, orgasmic kind of eruptive joy, although that is no less significant, but a rather calm, accepting kind of a reassuring joy that I get to learn so much everyday. I do not know if I belive in God but I am grateful, and do hereby offer my shraddha (respects) to whoever or whatever it is that orders us all, one way or another. Interesting isn't it, the spelling in Sanskrit (and thereby Hindi and many oher Indian languages) for respect and funerary ceremonies (Shraddha again) is the same, that is, they are homonyms? It's only this exchange of place between aa and oo (as in the sound) that makes all the difference. Frankly, I do not think it is a matter of phonetics alone. It is only after you ceremonially get rid of your own self that you respect others. Trust me it is true. Try it and you'll realize. May Goddess Durga bless you all. May you all get what you really want.

PS-I hope you see, dear reader, that I am referring merely to the question of transcription, and not even moving as far up as translation. Fact is we cannot ever understand each other completely, but that is no reason why we should not try. Even a partial understanding is better than no understanding. Now if you were to suggest that no understanding is better than misunderstanding, I would listen and introspect and keep quiet. These verbal juggleries no longer move me that much for I firmly believe in communication. It's just that we have to work out the right medium. Such as silence.

security, insecurities, exclusions

In PVR Priya they think well dressed young women cannot be suicide bombers and modestly dressed slightly older young men can. The other day I went to watch this new movie there with my laptop bag slung on my shoulder. I was promptly advised to leave my bag out of the auditorium premises. Appreciting their keen attention to the security of the patrons, I asked them where they have the baggage counter where you deposit your bags for the duration of the show and get it back after you walk out of the auditorium. This is a common practice and a desirable one too. I am familar with it, especially when I visit libraries and shops of various descrirptions, institutions that put in place such mechanisms to keep kelptomanics at bay.

But I was wrong in this case. It is not kleptomaniacs but potential suicide bombers that these plush seats of entertainment worry about. Therefore, they just don't want your bags to be around in the first place. I was directed to a paan bidi shop nearby, the owner of which had been doing precisely what I expected the PVR authorities to do--keeping your bags for the duration of the show, at a price of course.

In other words, PVR authorities are devoted only to the secutiry of their own premises and and to yours too only when you are physically within their premises. The physical bit is taken very literally, for if you happen to carry a bag and a laptop, it will be assumed to be potential bomb and you will be forced to deposit it with that upwardly mobile paanwala. The uniformed secutiry men did not heed my repeated requests to subject the bag to a metal detector test and, if found harmless, let me carry it in. Only purse, they as well as their boss, an older young man like me but slightly better bulit and 'tie'd, said like robots, is allowed in. I will return to matters relating to their idea of purse later. In the meantime, I tried to reason, then demanded to meet the manager who I was told was too big a shot to meet an occassional oddball and then, proceeded to the ticket counter and asked for a refund since I was no longer in a mood to enjoy their hospitality. These sites of entertainment of course do not entertain any concept of refund. I was free to sell my ticket to any interested customer but the chap at the box office dismissive stared at me as if I was a beggar who has to bother about the measly sum of 75 Rs. His gaze having fixed me as a beggar of a certain kind, my middle class instincts prompted me to behave like one and and I went over to the paanwala and deposited my bag with him. No I was not carrying my laptop on that given morning.

It's here that the twist in the tale comes in. But I am going to bring that in tomorrow or whenever I am going to return gain.

A dear sound

Some sights and sounds stay with with you long after you have seen or heard them. They are rare and special and call for minute powers of observation. Birds' twitter, dews' diamond like glint on green grass, fan's whirr, ladies earrings' dangle, gusts of wild wind pregnant with rains with the coconut leaves swaying violently, shuffling pages of yellowing old books, cows burping after a fulfilling lunch--I suddenly find myself all eyes and ears. I will not enlarge this list any further for fear of losing my way in the beauty and simplicity of such small joys of life. Let's just admit I love to soak them all in. Today I just want to share with you a sound that I hold very dear, ones that make me feel things are alright with my world after all, notwithstanding my best efforts to turn them upside down.

There is this apartment block somewhere in South Delhi I have to visit at least once in virtually every week. I normally use gate numbe two possibly because this is the shortest distance to the apartment if you are walking in. a little up this way, on my right, there is an apartment where someone plays mandolin. I do not know s/he is, nor do I wish to. But everytime I walk past this place, by some starnge coincidence the anonymous mandolin player practices some haunting tune or the other. I have occassionally heard tabla and guitars too, and I suspect they probably are trying to set up a band or some such musical ensemble. But it's the robust sound of Mandolin that I always look forward to listening. Mandolin, as you would know, is not an Indian instrument and U.Srinivas is the only Indian who is known to have integrated it with the intricacies of Indian classical music. But of course, there must be many not so well known musicians experimenting with this instrument, including this anonymous friend of mine.

I am always drawn to the sound of mandolin, and I have no clue why. It may be because it is at the same time robust yet plaintive. This is also the reason why Salil Chowdhury's music appeals to me so much, this effortless tonal fluidity breaking down the traditional distinction between happy sounds and sad sounds. This is not the Wordsworthian dictum of sweetest songs telling of saddest thoughts. On the contrary, here is a sound that can be alternately read as wildly celebratory and equally, if not more, as arising from depths of utter despair. It is at once schizophrenic and non-dual, black and white, rapturous and remoreseful, or just plain two in one, if you will. Well, not really. I have always found so many shades of gray as well.

May the mysterious mandolin player go from strength to strength. I am so grateful that s/he is around. S/he turned so many bad days of mine into bright cheerful evenings, and lovely, dreamy nights, without knowing it herself of course. I guess that's what music does to you, soothe your tout nerves and put you to sleep when the world gets too much, and motivate you to wake up and have another go just when you would have thought you have been sleeping a tad too long.

Radhe Ka Pappu

I thought cross conncetions were a thing of the past,
and was rather unplesantly surprised on tuesday last,
when someone rang my mobile number,
wondering if I was not Pappu the plumber.

Myself Mr. Natwarlal, did you not know?
Thundered I, you cad, you *** now off you go,
I plumb the depths of human past, and read rusty files,
It's not for me to repair sick taps and scoop out slimy tiles.

The poor chap spoke in rustic Hindi and mumbled
something about him being Radhe the childhood friend,
I, the city slicker, paid him no heed, for stumbled
was my work in the middle, with too much to attend.

Later in the evening, from nowhere, radhe's vioce got hold
of my leisure, as if I was listening to appeals untold,
of a friend who's missing someone very close
and wants to talk to him, to chat, to propose....

That they become friends again as before,
that the distance that separates them,
melt with their warm hearts coming ashore,
that together they ignite tomorrow's flame.

Too naive, jerked I back to my senses, too maudlin,
Who's to account for the lost threads, the struggle, the din
of the city that Pappu would have survived alone, unaided?
Is he still around, his tender feelings not yet fully dead?

Who am I to judge? Radhe? Pappu? or both?
Ask I to myself, taking yet another oath,
not ever to play a role of someone else in vein
and cause myself some more avoidable pain, not again.

Resuming ramblings

Let's see how much or how little can be scribbled in fifteen minutes flat. Yeah a note ot two of on observing one's own self. Narcissistic most ceratinly but useful in very unexpected ways. Take for instance the find that placing your head on one side of the bed rather than the other helps get better sleep. Sounds easy? Yes all trial and error methods are.

In the mean time, for sake of silly rhyme

let's leave out the reasonable stuff

let's not pretend it's the greatest crime

to try to calm down and have a laugh.

Finsihed in eleven minutes flat, four minutes before my time is up. Like Gurubhai, time to claim some baniyahood for myself. Amazing there's hope yet. Redemption song yahoo!

Madhyamik and Nishiniloy

Good to be back from hibernation and all that. Let's start with a couple of things I spotted in the newspaper this morning. Today, I see, begins the Madhyamik (i.e.Secondary exams under West Bengal Board of Secondary Education) and in the two districts of Midnapore alone, over a lakh of examinees are taking the tests. If this is the statistic from two largish districts, even a conservative estimate would peg the total rather close to a million or more. Given that everyone who crosses the tenth standard has to necessarily undergo some form of standardized school leaving test or the other, I too, aeons ago, suffered this grand rite of academic passage. I did everything possible to escape, including divorcing my textbooks in the long run and embracing a formidable couple of physical maladies. However, my mother somehow made sure I sleepwalked through the ordeal, and the examiners were careless enough to award me pass marks.

I do not really believe these tests comprehensively establish one's academic competence or foretell her future propects, but they do test one's adaptability to a given system of evaluation. In hindsight, I believe this is eminently possible if one cares to try hard enough. But I refuse to pontificate further on such weighty issues for I have weightier issues to attend to. Question paper leaks, for instance, is one such and I have--tangentially speaking--had at least one close encounter with the phenonmenon. The following account is pretty accurate barring a chronological detail. My batchmates will work that out anyway, and it is of no great import to the rest.

The day before our English test, one of my friends accosted me to the house of one of his friends where I found quite an assembly my batchmates. These were all backbenchers, like me, who took great pleasure in taking studies for a ride. One of them, I was told, had procured from somewhere a particular newspaper report on the runaway elephants of the Dalma hills. I was called upon to decipher the contents of the piece in a manner intelligible to this bunch. They had been suggested that this particular passage would reappear in the question paper in the form of a compreension test. Comprehension tests carried close to twenty five marks, only five less than the minimum pass marks. In other words, if you scored full marks in that part of the question, you almost scraped through, with some guesswork thrown in for good measure here and there. I did as I was told. Frankly, I did not take the whole thing very seriously.

As it turned out, the passage indeed appeared in the question paper the next morning, albeit in a simpler form. In addition, there was a short essay on a family picnic which too formed part of last afternoon's inputs. Many of us, most if I remember correctly, thus crossed the river of 'English' fire, as it were.

Did we deserve to pass? Was it not unfair on the students who did not know that some of us knew? Was I right in being part of what, strictly speaking, was an unfair conspiracy? I have some tentative answers but honestly I am not very sure. To start with, I did not particularly need the help. Second, I did not solicit it either. Third, I was not averse to helping some of these boys who I knew would not take up serious academics anyway, but did need that pass certificate badly. Fourth, I deduced that we were just lucky and that surely many students benefit from similar leaks every year. Finally, I think all systems of evaluation are loaded in favour of some examinees by default and that is inevitable. In other words, some participants always begin with some special advantages, and it so happens purely by chance. This is true about every test in life in that we are all programmed to perform better in some tests and not in others. No standardized test can ever be so designed, in a manner of speaking. All tests, in other words, are about our capacity to adapt to their particular formats. Some of us adapt better, some do not, some wish to and yet others just let go. Life is never fair in an absolute sense, but it offers us all enough scope to try and overcome our limitations and be at par with the best, if only we choose to. Not so simple, though. Some structures are often irreversibly loaded against some participants and so on. I do not have any more defence to offer and I do not regret what I did.

Nishiniloy is ostensibly a new Bengali word coined by the copy editors of Anandabazar Patrika. I read it in today's edition of the Patrika, deployed as a Bengali synonym for pub. There was this editorial--ABP editorials always appear in purportedly Sadhu bhasha--deploring, correctly I may add, a fiat by some local politicians in the Salt Lake area of Calcutta to shut down swimming pools in residential areas because they thought ladies wearing swimsuits do not make for ideally dressed Bhartiya Nari. I greatly enjoyed the title of the piece--cultural dinosaurs--but my smooth progress along the piece was jarred by this new word Nishiniloy. The word was used as an adjective, describing the young girls of Mangalore roughed up a few weeks ago by some ruffians on the same pretext of reportedly sullying our great 'Indian' culture.

I want to dwell a bit more on this word. Now I am game for new coinages and I do appreciate one must not close one's mind to linguistic innovations but this one really beats me. I thought Nishi in Bengali meant night and Niloy a house. I would have thought their juxtaposition creates Dwanda Samas of the very literal sort, the kind that actually conjures up a meaning very far from the intended one. Nishiniloy would be far more proximate to a house of disrepute--a brothel, that is--than to a pub and is thus a linguistic incongruity of the first order. Wait a minute pal--I am not imputing any value to going to a brothel but only trying to clarify a common Bengali usage.

I remember reading a Sunday HT column by Indrajit Hazra the other day lamenting the lack of pub culture in India. He was not calling out for drunken orgies, but rather referring to the English paractice of the countryfolk-even cityfolk- gathering around the pub for a quiet drink and catching up of all sorts after a hard day's work, hanging out, as it were. I am only suggesting that Bengali language never had a word for pub precisely because the stuff did not quite exist in our imagination or practice. Paanshala or Madhushala do not quite fit the bill, for both willy nilly envisage drinking as an extraordinary practice--either as a vice, or virtue of a delivering kind. Shunrikhana--oops, could could you please find a more value-laden word?

I wonder why must we rush to Translate every single thing that comes our way. Pubbing, like drinking, dining, studying or earning money or falling (!?) in love or painting or singing or dancing, is neither a virtue nor a vice, unless one goes for an overkill. At any rate, it is ceratinly not the same as visiting sex workers. Why must the girls going into a pub for a fun evening be translated as Nishiniloygami Taruniborgo and not just Pubgami Taruniborgo? Do the average pubs boast of rooms for nightstay? Must all foreign words be purged from our Tatsama tongue in order to parade its Sanskrit roots? Ironical, isn't it, this falling back on a language whose name literally means the reformed?

Time will of course tell. I will look forward to following the development of this particular word, and my hunch is it will soon recede into disuse. I am afraid Bangla has more to fear from its overzealous adherents than from its perceived threats. To these great minds and hearts soldiering for the survival and prosperity of the Bengali language, I dedicate poet Shubho Dasgupta's 'Bankubabur Bangla Priti'--a little gem of a rhyme in chaste Bengali.

Politicians and Pakistan: we get what we deserve

It’s been a week since the most gruesome public tragedy in independent India. Amid the cacophony all around us two entities have received the maximum amount of collective condemnation: Pakistan and Politicians. Everyone seems to agree that politicians within and Pakistan without have ruined everything that is dear to us—politics, society, people, monuments, systems, institutions, conscience and all else that can be eroded and made dysfunctional. Interestingly both of them are out there, not within us. We seem to agree that all is right within us.

I beg to differ. Even children are taught that things happen on account of two kinds of causes: external and internal. Even if I am to admit that the two causes from outside have been correctly identified—and I do agree that they have been—I see absolutely no reflection on what happened to our internal defense mechanisms. I do not refer to the armed forces or police when I say defense. Rather it is to our own individual and collective vulnerabilities that I seek to address. Defeat, said Josephus Daniels centuries ago, never comes to a man until he admits it. And I sense a severe helplessness and desperation in the collective outpourings in the print and electronic media during the past week. Even the highlighting of tales of individual glory and sacrifices of individual soldiers and policemen cannot adequately camouflage the larger reality of our collective failure.

Righteous indignation won’t do, neither would all sorts of suggestions about preventive measures from non-experts of all hues. It is obvious that something fundamental has gone seriously wrong. Only a much more thoroughgoing multidisciplinary investigation will bring out the truth, not snap judgements based on instant ‘leaks’. Yes, many of us, both persons in positions of responsibility and common people, have made fatal mistakes. But what will blaming Pakistan and politicians achieve? Pakistani state is clearly incapable of reining in the ‘terrorists’ and our politicians will remain the same unless some of ‘us’ choose to forsake the comforts of middle class life and careers and take to active politics, like the few honest and sincere politicians who still offer hope and promise.

We suffer from cowardice, a mortal fear to lose whatever little we have. This fear of parting company with our little everythings will always pull us back from joining public life. Our best and the brightest will always go to the most secure and rewarding of careers, following a very rigorous academic preparation and training from institutions that tests their intellectual and mental abilities to the limits. Now when they work so hard, they will obviously seek the highest compensation in terms of good life and money, especially considering that that often put in 16-17 hours of professional labor every single working day. I have absolutely no issues when they demand safety for their life and property but I wonder whether they could spare some thought for the second rung minds entrusted with that very job. In other words, those who are entrusted with protecting our life and property are not, as a whole, the most suitable for the job and two, the most talented or suitable candidates do not opt for these jobs because they don’t pay. A friend forwarded me a sms last night comparing the Rs. 5 crores state award to a shooter when he won an Olympic gold with the measly five lakh to those shooters who laid down their lives to save others’. It is not a question of belittling the stellar contribution of Bindra, but one of our lopsided priorities. The state needs to know which job involves the maximum risk and needs to allocate compensation accordingly.

As for ordinary Indians, we have our heart at the right place but are always afraid that greater forces will fail us no matter how hard we try. I propose to illustrate this point with a personal anecdote. It happened shortly after I came to Delhi nearly three and a half years ago. I was still getting used to the ways of Delhi, where things happen in, well, strange, ways and success and failure is measured in ways that I have been still learning.

I live in one of the most secure corners of New Delhi, walled off from the din, blessed with abundant greens all around and fortified by the non stop patrolling of a few hundreds of private securitymen. Yet this is the place where it happened. During one June evening, as I was reading something in one of the library reading rooms, I thought I heard a muffled cry from a female voice. From the sound it appeared to come from the other end of the reading room. Now this reading room is large enough to contain nearly 100 or more readers and the sound must have been loud enough to travel to the back benches where I had been seating. When it came for the second time, I lifted my head but found everyone in the room perfectly at ease. I deduced the sound had been coming from outside and asked a few people sitting near me whether they heard it too. They said they did and advised me keep quiet and get back to reading.

But I failed to keep myself unmoved when I heard it the third time and rushed out of the l.ibrary, following the direction of the sound. It was completely dark but I found my way to the raised concrete slabs along the narrow passage between the canteen and some of the schools, to the point just beyond the outer wall of the reading room. I saw a girl whimpering before a boy who looked visibly angry.

I will not relate the details of the story on principle except what I did, that too in bare outlines. I did enough that evening to bring the matter to a peaceful conclusion for the time being. But the boy, who looked tall and muscular, came from outside and threatened me with dire consequences, somehow managed to insert within me a deep fear and insecurity from then on. I was new to the city, knew very few people except from my center, had a family back home and so on and so forth. You know the usual middle class existential worries.

It’s been three years, I know a lot more people in the city today and did little to brighten the face of my family in the meanwhile, as they say in Bengali. Yet since then I have stayed away from affairs where I perceive my own physical well being may be under any threat. You see the irony is I have actually taught myself to overestimate the strength of my perceived threats, as a matter of course. It’s the same mentality that makes us turn the other way when we spot someone lying on the streets in a pool of blood. I recall an incident last month in Calcutta, where a man suffered a heart attack in a busy thoroughfare and the thousands passing by the road did not bother to take him to the nearest hospital. Yet we all tut-tuted so much when we read it in the morning papers. I don’t know what I would have done if I had been there. I too am afraid of the police interrogation but I guess I would have tried. I donno really and can not vouch with certainty.

Here is my point about our collective vulnerability. Why are we so bothered today about so many deaths? My answer is because we can blame Pakistan and politicians. When it is our turn to save lives, we look the other way round but when it is out turn to blame external agencies we are all too eager to apportion blame. All of us are Mumbaikars today, scream opinion makers. You know what that actually means? That we are not Mumbaikars otherwise.

I do not believe in god that strongly nor in retribution but I say we deserved this. We deserved this because we do not care. The adman-lyricist Prasoon Joshi said as much in his poem Is Baar Nahi (Not this time) and I cannot thank TimesNow enough for airing such a moving response. Joshi says it’s time to preserve our anger, allow it to smolder and continue to remind us just how much we have let go and not exhaust it all out through unconsidered, instant bursts of indignation.

Pakistan cannot change or it’ll not survive. Politicians will not change as we will continue to prevent ourselves from joining politics because we know it’s a dirty profession. Will we change? Will we stop blaming others for our own miseries? No body can guarantee that such attacks will not recur. But we can ensure that the attackers pay. I do not have the competence to suggest how. But I can suggest ways to learn to value others’ lives a bit more. If we see any one suffering on the road, let us at least learn to cancel that life changing meeting that our bosses and partners have most kindly scheduled for us and take him to the nearest hospital. This mentality alone will take us towards devising more effective strategies against terrorist attacks. In other words, I submit that we cannot devise effective counter terrorism measures until and unless we value every life lost as our own. The state will offer some compensation in monetary terms to the families of the slain and well it might. But will the state offer any compensation to the family of that man whom none of us bothered to take to the hospital? Point is, when we kill, we blissfully turn the other way and move on. When they (P & P) murder, we explode in collective condemnation. Let’s face facts-in India some lives are more valuable than others and some deaths are more regretted than others. Let’s not convulse with rage on the state and politicians anymore please. Let’s first learn to deserve. We desire far too much.