Ab ki baar...

And a close favourite:

Seeing there is no place left for reason or humanity.

Source

the abuse of anger

What an abusive privilege it is to show anger by yelling at an employee. A sign of authority, a show of ego, an utter masturbation of frustrations which have nothing to do with the real matter at hand. Raising one's voice is quite as hurtful as raising one's hand. What is pain? Is it just the red sting after a slap?

My office is a modest 2BHK apartment in a residential building. There are usually about six people in office. An employee had decided to resign and sent an email about it to my boss today about it. Soon after, she was called into the room where he usually sits, and asked to shut the door. He expressed his shock and anger at her in such a loud voice, it boomed throughout our tiny office like a sudden explosion. It wasn't a solitary exclamation, it was an onslaught. Very soon, it became physically painful to not intervene. I am still ashamed at not going inside the room and asking him to shut the fuck up.

Hearing someone being shouted at in an extremely loud voice is akin to hearing someone's tortured cries of pain. It is frightening. It crumples your insides and you fear for their sanity and unconsciously your own. It is a physical assault, a blow that you cannot quantify, like a relentless, invisible, punching fist. 

It makes you frustrated for being in a working environment where laptops and people are so closely located to each other that it is impossible to have a solitary bad day or a freewheeling gchat with a friend. 

Working in a small company creates the watery illusion of belonging to a family. It's hard to escape this illusion. When the sink floods, you run down to call the building's plumber. When there's a full-day power cut, you pack your laptops and head to your boss's house. You all fit around one table for lunch. You know what to order for breakfast for her at Trichy, Tirunelveli, Erode, Kochi and Vellore respectively. You industriously spring-clean the office the morning of Saraswati Pooja even though you don't really give a shit about Saraswati Pooja. You steal your colleague's favourite chair and try not to laugh as he searches, annoyed, for a chair with just the right height. You take your sick colleague to hospital and force her to go home after the check-up. You tease your boss mercilessly when you spy a hickey on his neck. You carry an extra spectacle case because you know she will definitely forget hers on your trip tonight. You scold people for not putting their shoes in the right place or cleaning up after making maggi. It's not a 'cool' thing to do - it happens because you work with an average of six people in a 2BHK apartment six days a week, 8 hours a day.  

If you are someone's boss, no matter what the size of your company, I believe you do not have the right to shout at your employee. I don't care if you know more about her personal life than other bosses would care to. I don't care if you've offered her help and advice beyond your professional capacity as her senior. You cannot, cannot raise your voice at her, challenge her character, deride her friends and family, dismiss her personal choices. You cannot try to extract information from her roomie behind her back. 

I'm sorry, S. I should have stood up for you the moment he began to hit you with his voice. I should have asked him to fuck off when he approached me for information. I'm sorry I let you down.

If you happen to work in a small office or department, don't let the friendly environment dilute your outrage. Even if he is a great boss, a caring mentor, an interested colleague - if he shouts at you in a manner that hurts, frightens or threatens you, let him know. It is a terrible, burning violation of your self and there is no justification for it.  

Katie Makkai - Pretty

note to self 1.0

- research more stories for children which suits their context better. Do not tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Ever. Again.

- find stories you believe in.

- explore more stories written by authors you like. Because that's how you bumped into Mahasweta Devi's Ek-kori's Dream and this

- don't rely on spontaneity every time.

- children usually don't play games when it comes to affection or admiration. If they like you, they will happily let you know. So do your job and stop asking them to keep quiet.

 - throw Enid Blyton in the dust bin along with moral stories. Work hard on finding/developing alternatives.

- stop reading stories with an imagined child-reader in mind. Do you like it? Would you want to share it?That is what matters. Let them decide for themselves. Even if they are six years old.

- engage with their sarcasm, if you receive it. Don't shut them out, don't make it an ego issue.

- if they want to play antakshari, go ahead and join them. Since when did storytelling become Compulsory Attendance?

- don't be afraid to say, "I don't know." To the kids, to yourself.

- don't be afraid of a noisy class. A silent class isn't always an indication of interest.

- ask lots of questions to them, but be careful when they ask you for answers.

- strictly avoid being self-righteous when discussing women's rights. Strictly avoid being patronising when they say something preposterous (eg. female infanticide doesn't exist any more). The difference between being patronising and being surprised is not a thin one.

- never forget what you were like when you were a kid. (ref: previous point)

- learn to let go of nostalgia when it becomes suffocating.

- put your heart on your sleeve, but don't shield the kids if you are disappointed by them.

- don't shield the kids, period.

- if you haven't prepared properly, let them know. Face their disappointment, don't hurry them off to an activity.

- be kind.

happiness is a warm gun (the beatles seem to have a song for almost everything, sometimes)

source

klpd

One thing I frequently experience is a frustration with words, terms and phrases when discussing sex with friends. I often feel lost. I can see she and I both feel it, but we just can't seem to put it to words.

Of course, it goes without saying that if I read a lot more than I am right now, I'd definitely have more words to my disposal. But what I've increasingly come to realise is that a lot of experiences are already predefined; their sentences, adjectives, words claimed by androcentric passengers in the travel of language.

Say, for instance, having sex with someone. Why is it not sex when I have had the time of my life, but it hasn't been penetrative? Does it really matter? Must he nail me? How on earth will my girlfriends and I make do with that pale milk phrase, 'making out'?

I have always intensely disliked that phrase. It captures nothing; it could mean children play-acting, a young girl striking out on her own in a new city, pressing out spaghetti strings from the machine. Why could 'making out' not be any of these instead?

And then, bases. How powerfully they staircase a dip into the ocean. Why must his shirt be unbuttoned, her bra unhooked? What of all those beautiful places in between; the smouldering, the pauses, the suddenness, the crackling cigarette or was it the friction of your corduroys?

I wish I knew hindi better, I'm certain that we have much more fulfilling ways to talk about our experiences, sensations, feelings without having to rely on cheap American imports. 

Writing without a point, because it's hard to find one

It seems like it's time. Then again, making your goodbyes public means you must take them seriously. You can't write a suicide note and survive to tell the tale without feeling at least the tiniest bit embarrassed with yourself.

How interesting unfamiliarity is. I came back here and something in my eyes went 'really?'; this blog theme is possibly one of my favourites. It began to seem a shame to leave, without having written anything worth the possibilities this colour-combination and font texture invite in a person. Perhaps I will override my farewell and come gatecrashing back. I think this is entirely likely; having invested two paragraphs already to one thought, there is a definitive possibility that I will change my mind swiftly. (Never must one think one does not know oneself. There only remains the prickly question of honesty.)

For someone with an abysmal memory, to have and keep a journal is a way of keeping off the sand dunes of time for as long as possible. When you are putting things down, a part of the reason why you labour so much after adjectives and descriptions is desperation. This desperation is borne of all the moments of disappointments you and others have felt, of having let something go. Is forgetting something a choice? Perhaps repression is. But why would you forget this, and not that? Is there a mechanism at play, of which somehow, slyly, you are aware? Does your ego not suffer when you forget important things, or do you admire how it somehow endears you to your loved ones? Oh, you're a crafty thing, you are. There is nobody more cunning than the one who manufactures innocence.

Where have I digressed to? This is the problem with writing at night while listening to music which sounds so familiar that you feel like you're strumming every wailing chord yourself. A girl I know once told me how she had stopped talking on the phone at nights, because she'd wake up next morning and be a tad mortified at the languorous rubbish she'd been spinning last night. I've felt that sometimes. So much sharing makes you lose yourself a little. Then you run around on a wobbling heart, trying to gather your dark secrets again, trying to feel that old sense of slight contentment, that there are things you want to share sometimes, but something has made you suspend that feeling, till another secret, another little bit of you comes along. Or you blog about it all at night. Oh, what an irony pickle!

So let's not blame myself. Perhaps it's this house. We're shifting soon and going to a house on the seventh floor, on a building made by vanishing a jungle. It's a conflict, truly it is. I knew this jungle, what it looked like, what it felt like. It was our myth come true, it was our gory battlefield, it was our daylight horror tale. To this day, getting lost in a forest in the middle of the day is my favourite nightmare. It is a breathless, hand-on-my-heart frightening a prospect for me. And now when I walk towards school, my mind nodding in agreement to the sprawling landscape of nostalgia, my heart crushes at the sight of this building. My forest has disappeared, and in its place is a thing as alien as a dinosaur. Perhaps it is one.

I need to stop growing so old, if truth be told, because things change, and our conversations with the past need to undwell on how similar or dissimilar the present appears to be. For this very reason I keep counselling myself to not give up on Bombay. Have I given up on Bombay? All I can see is an invasive, unmindful, graceless kind of change-brain, knocking things up and plonking down strange creatures in their place, creatures which seem proud of themselves, but are, in fact, painfully awkward in their ambitiousness and fresh paint. They look down at the few old trees which have been left alone, and something seems very odd.

There are creatures, however, who do seem to have a kind of bloom in them. A run-down little two-room opposite IDC has been recreated as a creche for children of construction workers. It has friendly, although incomplete, cartoons all over its outer walls, and despite the nauseating off-white paint scheme, it seems quite inviting and at peace with where it stands. If double-decker buses and the pavement book-sellers leave, if L'Amour book-shop at Hiranandani is replaced with an Arabic bistro, if Taste of Kerala goes away, if Anmol near J B Nagar loses its grand entrance to a steel gate... Seawoods station has already been turned into a monster, and some of us have been reading with trepidation at what is about to happen at Panvel because of the new airport. It's difficult not to despair, I can almost hear myself singing mournfully, 'Back in the days when taxis were black-and-yellow...'. And on the other hand, I tell myself that attachments stunt your capacity to remember things with love.

Our loves seem recycled, sometimes new, but our fears, they seem to be the same old ones.     

Hymen 101, by Laci Green

I had no fucking idea! It's incredibly shocking to me, that despite having read, spoken, argued, participated in and discussed sex and sexuality, I had such a fundamental misunderstanding about my own body. What makes it worse is that I've also perpetuated this myth by talking about it, authoritatively, to my friends.

*sinking face*

She is one of my idols, as of this moment.

source

Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story

Via Mohit.

"Take these sunken eyes and learn to see.."

One standard reaction I would get from people when I told them about the Jnanapravaha course was, "I don't get Modern Art. It's just deliberately obscure", or "Modern Art is so elitist!", or "You have to be obscenely wealthy and educated abroad to be able to enjoy that kind of art", or my favourite: "One line, dot, or square across a large white canvas and that's that. A four year old could do that."

Aside: Now that I think of it, most people said "four year old..". Not five, not six, not two - people didn't even cash in on adolescent angst and presume most 16 year olds could make Modern Art. What is it with universally precocious four year olds?

Seagulls and Sails, by Jehangir Sabavala

The problem with a painting is that it is it's own context. You as a viewer must take the initiative to engage with it, struggle with its apparent obscurity, resist the ease of ignorance and indifference, learn the language, battle your inarticulacy, and most difficultly, consume your ego. The painting may or may not relate to your life or your experiences. It may not agree with your opinions on who should be a celebrated artist, who should not. It may even deeply offend you. But there is no denying the fact that it exists, and its self-sufficiency makes you feel lost and unsettled.

The gallery experience of art is something that troubles me a lot, specially because there is a politics underneath the floors and behind the walls, which is not clear but cannot possibly be unfelt while you are in the space.

My TIFR experience comes to mind. One of the projects I was involved in (it had a hand in changing my life - now that didn't sound too dramatic, did it?) was organising an exhibition of TIFR's incredibly exhaustive and exciting art collection. There were over 250 art works that our curator, Mortimer Chatterjee had to select and exhibit at the NGMA. Everything about this project was an electric experience - learning how restoration artists are actually the acrobats of the art world, how the right frame can do a three-sixty to the way you experience a painting. 

Our interactions with Mr. S, the gallery manager of NGMA were very problematic. It was difficult to communicate with him because there was an incredibly busy subtext underneath whatever he appeared to be saying. Greasy, translucent words would stream silently from his grey-black hair and thinly film our eyes. 

Instead of working with our curator on creating the story which would tie the selected works together, or compiling the essays and pictures of the exhibition catalogue (yes, people do read and publish art crit too! god bless y'all), or  taking care that the works were packed, transported, unpacked and hung/arranged properly with gentle, loving care, we were now required to fret about who had to be invited to the opening show, who would sit where, who would be invited for the dinner later and who wouldn't, who would get the flowers, who would give the flowers, who would cut the ribbon, how long would the Minister's tour of the show be (we couldn't possibly do the detailed two hour talk-walk with her, could we?). We even had to make sure certain people didn't bump into each other, because they had separately instructed us on who they got along with, and who they didn't.

It was degrading, reductive and humiliating. NGMA flexed its muscles because it knew we had nowhere else to exhibit TIFR's collection. The only other gallery large enough to house such a huge collection was Jehangir, which was booked for the next two years. 

I began wondering about the gallerial experience of art. Many professors and students were left stunned by the exhibition. These were paintings and sculptures they had walked among, waited for the lift by, discussed theories, politics and movies next to. Partly due to bad lighting, poor maintenance, a pitiable budget allocation and partly due to the kind of insulation which institutes of higher learning often develop about anything beyond their immediate academic concerns, these beautiful, provocative and  insightful pieces of art had become nothing more than show pieces or shadowy, dusty oblongs on corridor walls.

What a difference big, clean walls, considerate, gentle lighting and context can make! Many people came up to us and said that the exhibition had breathed new life into the paintings. It was tempting to believe that, but the truth was that it was a simple case of taking for granted things that are the closest to you, and also how much you cared about something. As long as Dr Bhabha was alive, he fought to keep aside 1% of TIFR's total budget for collecting and maintaining its art collection. He often paid for paintings or sculptures he wanted for TIFR out of his pocket (but then again, he was quite privileged financially), and his successor, Dr MGK Menon collected many *eyebrow-raising works for that time. 

Successive directors didn't quite know what to do. Dr Menon had left TIFR in 1975, and it was only two years ago that the previous director decided that the paintings and sculptures needed restoring. To date there's a tiny strong room opposite the Accounts section, which has paintings stacked together in their packings, not being displayed because, well, actually I don't really know. Nobody seemed to have an answer, but I suspect there wasn't a straightforward way to say, we don't care.

The exhibition changed the way many people at TIFR saw the art collection, even after the paintings and sculptures made their way back home from the gallery. There was no denying that the gallery, in its capacity of being a generous space to exhibit those works, had had a role in this change of heart and mind.

But there was a malevolent superficiality to the whole experience which I could not shake off. What the painting was saying to you, what you could see or hear from it mattered lesser than what they cost. The Husains were eagerly sought out, the Baburao Sadwelkars were ignored. Here I speak of the gallery manager and some of their staff. The power politics played by the art world and those who peopled it - in this particular situation - was disturbing. And this then reflected on to the people who came and saw the exhibition.

Art takes time. To spend an hour looking at a painting is difficult. The public gallery experience is one that encourages art at a trot. There are the paintings, the marvellous speaking works, the definite, independent, each with a Self it would be impossible to ignore, if... if..., it were possible to see it. I do not only mean the crowds and the guards and the low lights and the ropes, which make me think of freak shows, I mean the thick curtain of irrelevancies that screens the painting from the viewer. Increasingly, galleries have a habit of saying when they acquired a painting and how much it cost...

Millions! The viewer does not see the colours on the canvas, she sees the colour of money.

Is the painting famous? Yes! Think of all the people who have carefully spared one minute of their lives to stand in front of it.

Is the painting Authority? Does the guide-book tell us that it is a part of The Canon? If Yes, then half of the viewers will admire it on principle, while the other half will dismiss it on principle.

Who painted it? What do we know about his/her sexual practices and have we seen anything about them on the television? If not, the museums will likely have a video full of schoolboy facts and tabloid gossip.

Where is the tea-room/toilet/gift shop?

Where is the painting in any of this?

Experiencing paintings as moving pictures, out of context, disconnected, jostled, over-literary, with their endless accompanying explanations, over-crowded, one against the other, room on room, does not make it easy to fall in love. Love takes time. 

... the only way into the strange life of pictures is to expose yourself to as much contemporary art as you can until you find something, anything, that you will go back and back to see again...

- Art Objects, by Jeanette Winterson

I did much of what Winterson describes as "over-literary, with their endless accompanying explanations" throughout the two months our exhibition was on. Initially it was exciting to know and explain to strangers the what, how and why of a painting. And then it began to pale, because the explanations became larger than the paintings, and slowly made them entirely redundant in my mind. When I had repeated the story behind Husain winning the mural competition twenty times, I stopped looking at the mural. It was a pity, because before assuming the role of a 'tour guide', I would spend time alone, just with the paintings and sculptures, and try to listen to them instead.

Saying that Modern Art is obscure, elitist, or that enjoying it requires you to be wealthy and educated abroad, or that it can be done by a four year old, is like hiding under a tree because everyone in the forest says the sky is about to fall. Let a painting speak to you, sing to you. Touch a sculpture and experience it. Take off your blinkers and know that if you reach out sincerely, you will be met half way.

"I know."

What were to happen if we did have the ability to know everything about something? What if the possibility of knowing everything existed?

Say for instance, I know I need to get to Kanjur station quickly because a usual, I'm running late. It's 6:30 pm, and

the traffic is a mad, ravaging beast of screeching horns and savage wheels, a growling, yelling, vicious, anxious metallic beast, with its guts spilling out in all directions on the road, and

I know I'm going to get frustrated by the fact that the BMC/BEST has shifted the bus stop farther away from Main Gate, and built a road divider in between the lane going towards Kanjur/Eastern Express Highway, in an effort to create a separate lane for buses, but because bikers and company buses choke this lane, BEST buses usually take the other lane meant for everybody else, while I do an angry, dangerous dance from one lane to the other, and

I know that as a result of the frustration and lack of time, I'm going to hitch a bike-ride to Kanjur. 

It is so defeating to know everything. Surprises are lost. The kick you get out of doing something differently is lost. The exquisite angst of an existential crisis is lost, the overwhelming brightness and warmth of an epiphany is lost. The wonder at your abilities to do something you never imagined you could, is lost.

While reading the paper yesterday, I chanced upon an article by Jaron Lanier. He wrote a paper called One-Half of a Manifesto (2000), on opposing "cybernetic totalism". I quote Wiki -

At the end he warns that the biggest problem of any theory (esp. iedology) is not that it is false, "but when it claims to be the sole and utterly complete path to understanding life and reality." The impression of objective necessity paralyzes the ability of humans to walk out of or to fight the paradigm, and causes the self-fulfilling destiny, which spoils people.

Isn't it amazing that we don't know everything, yet here we are, living life, making mistakes, celebrating, waking up everyday?

'Sita Sings the Blues'

This film is one of my favourite animation films.

I've had tremendous problems with रामायण. It's possible that वाल्मीकि  wrote a रामायण very different from the one we read today. But its influence on our country and the psyche of our people has been tremendously powerful so I'm always grateful when people question, critically examine or even have a bit of fun with the story. Like Nina Paley does in Sita Sings the Blues. It's a delight to anybody who likes a twist, or jazz music, or films with interesting narratives. It's one of those films which you enjoy with your eyes, ears and mind as well.

PS: Youtube Movies, FTW!

सवाल

तुझसे नाराज़ नहीं, ज़िन्दगी 

हैरान हूँ मैं

तेरे मासूम सवालों से 

परेशान हूँ मैं 

 ~ गुलज़ार, तुझसे नाराज़ नहीं  (मासूम)

"It's like I have a beautiful, perfect doll in front of me. And I want to break it."

Photograph of a Smooth Talker

You make me wanderlust
I don't want to stay anymore, there are
Too many little islands I've made.

I send out little paperboats
Every time I feel unsettled, I set asail
A wobbling, fearful, mute thing.

They talk behind my back
Inch by quiet inch the delirious glitter of
My lies washes upon the shore.

"The only good fight there is."

Happiness

- Anirudh Singh Chohan

Few people who can accurately claim to know me can testify that I have tried my level best to reverse-engineer happiness. I’ve tried all the ways to conjure it out of nowhere, but haven’t quite made it happen. That said, I am not even close to give up trying.

This may be a stretch of my imagination or just a bad approximation of how it would feel to be truly happy, but I will try and articulate it in the best way I know. Times when hours seem to pass like seconds and one is in a pinpoint of focus. Times when the real and surreal coincide and you live in the moment. Those very times when, there is perfect silence inside and one is alone with the gods. And there is perfect laughter. It’s truly what I find to be the only thing worth working towards. The only good fight there is. I see people meander and fumble through life standing up for nothing, growing old, just getting by and it pains me to see that the world around me seems to be too caught up in the humdrum of ‘the typical’ to actually breathe for a minute.

That is the very challenge that life throws at you. The big question: How far will you go?

This could mean not sleeping for 4 days or freezing in the cold waiting for someone. This could mean losing your lover, relatives, friends or even your mind. It could mean not leaving your seat for hours forgetting day and night. And if history says something, it could mean mockery and derision. But the place where it drops you, all of this won’t matter.

So cheers to going the full way, or not going at all.

Source

"So he gave you freedom, but you also had to be independent."

Ludovico Einaudi - Divenire

"Headphones work. REALLY WELL. Might even answer some questions of yours."

8 - Gwrthodwyd

"I'm sorry, we regret to inform you
that you did not say please properly."

What, what do you mean? I said, "Please."

"Our laws are very strict. Please
read the letter carefully."

This letter doesn't say much.

"You must be familiar with our laws. Before
you say please, please read them."

Can you tell me what I said wrong?

"Read the letter. Our laws for pleasing
us are very strict."

5 - Melancholia

I walked into the river
with a line from a song.
I wore my black cape
and I put on a frown.

I can't deny I want my
happy ending.

The smoke curled slowly
in psychedelic gloom.
The first time went by
in sadness for Haroun.

He can't deny he wants my
happy ending.